The New Yorker’s special feature on Raymond Lush and Gordon Carver—sorry, Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish—is full of little surprises, but the main event is definitely the publication of “Beginners,” an unedited version of the story first published as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

Now the magazine has posted a comparison draft of the two versions at their website, which makes for an interesting case study in fiction editing. Here’s a sample (bold indicates Lish’s additions; erasures his deletions):

Mel Herb stopped talking. “Here,” he said, “let’s drink this cheapo gin the hell up. Let’s drink it up. Then we’re going to dinner, right? Terri and I know a new place. That’s where we’ll go, to this new place we know about. But we’re not going until we finish up this cut-rate, lousy gin. We’ll go when we finish this gin.”

Terri said, “We haven’t actually eaten there yet. But it looks good. From the outside, you know.”

“I like food,” Mel said. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d be a chef, you know? Right, Terri?” Mel said. “It’s called The Library,” Terri said. “You haven’t eaten there yet, have you?” she said, and Laura and I shook our heads. “It’s some place. They say it’s part of a new chain, but it’s not like a chain, if you know what I mean. They actually have bookshelves in there with real books on them. You can browse around after dinner and take a book out and bring it back the next time you come to eat. You won’t believe the food. And Herb’s reading Ivanhoe! He took it out when we were there last week. He just signed a card. Like in a real library.”

“I like Ivanhoe,” Herb said. “Ivanhoe’s great. If I had it to do over again, I’d study literature. Right now I’m having an identity crisis. Right, Terri?” Herb said. He laughed. He fingered twirled the ice in his glass. ¶ “I’ve been having an identity crisis for years. Terri knows. Terri can tell you. But let me say this. If I could come back again in a different life, a different time and all, you know what? I’d like to come back as a knight. You were pretty safe wearing all that armor. It was all right being a knight until gunpowder and muskets and twenty-two pistols came along.”

Second-guessing is, of course, the point of the exercise, though what the edits really show is that neither Lish nor Carver were infallible. For example, pushing the story away from the Library/Ivanhoe bit seems smart, but it’s a little disturbing to see Lish so insistent on declassing things (”let’s drink this cheapo gin the hell up”).

If this kind of thing strikes you as fun, there’s lot’s more to be had here.