digital emunction

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.

1/ From “Late and Soon,” Dan Chiasson’s review of Robert Hass and Mark Strand in this week’s New Yorker:

The zero-sum fluctuations of Hass’s material, some intellect followed by some feeling, coolness here, warmth there, at times become a formula—more a recipe for soup than soup—but at other times yield work that, exquisitely receptive to actual happiness, has opened up new territory for the personal poem.

2/ From “The Cat Went out for Good,” Charles Simic’s much-lamented review of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems:

The aesthetic theory—and there is always a theory behind such reductive views—may sound persuasive, but it was foolish on Creeley’s part to believe that it could ever validate a poem. If poetics were like cooking and one could write down a recipe for all of one’s future poems, that would be true. However, great cooks rarely bother to consult cookbooks.

2.5/ A bonus View, from Chiasson again:

Being a poet doesn’t help you cook a meal or bathe your three-year-old daughter…

Stepping shamelessly onto the path laid clear by the New Yorker, digital emunction is now welcoming entries for the first (and probably last) edition of the New York Times Photo Caption Contest. The photos of the day, by Jay Mallin and Caleb Jones, appeared on page A12 of today’s NYT.

Send your entries here. The best entries will be posted in this space and the winner will take home a prize of unutterable value.

1/ From the cover of the November 2007 Harper’s. Photo by David Graham:

2/ From “The Mission,” in the October 29, 2007 New Yorker. Illustration by Steve Brodner: