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.