Back to the beginning

Delivered in bow-tight, minimalist prose, he depicted in sharp, brutal detail the disenfranchised and the down-at-heel, lives that had been worn to the nub and relationships taken to the alcohol-sodden brink. These were stories of life, death and all the broken things in between.

A recovering alcoholic and on first-name terms with the gutter, Carver was writing about a world he knew intimately and every line hummed with the dispassionate precision and unfussy static of gospel truth. But all was not as it seemed. Another hand was at work in these stories and a pretty heavy-handed one at that. Gordon Lish, editor of Esquire Magazine, entered Carver’s writing life in the late ‘60s introducing the young author’s work into the lucrative glossy magazine market. Later, after Lish had moved to McGraw Hill, he published Carver’s first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? His editorial style was aggressive. Following the dictum of “use five words instead of 15”, he cut the stories for the breakthrough collection, shedding close to 50% of the text. Carver was devastated and pleaded with Lish not to proceed with the publication of the book, but to no avail. The resultant acclaim seemed to fully justify the editorial stance.

To anyone interested in the history of the short story, Beginners, finally allowed into print after decades of legal wrangling, ranks as one of the year’s most intriguing publications.

Not only is it a kind of alternate history, it also offers a greater insight into the craft and art of one of modern fiction’s most lauded figures. In righting a long-perceived wrong, Beginners leads us down the road not taken and lets us wonder what might have been.

A young couple, passing a houseful of belongings laid out on the lawn, the remnants of a marriage, mistakes it for a yard sale; a group of fishing buddies discovers the body of a murdered girl floating face-down in a river, but rather than ruin their weekend, they tether the body to a tree until they are ready to return to town; an armless photographer captures in Polaroid snaps the despair of a recently deserted husband; at an intimate drinks party, the depths and implications of love are laid bare; a boy is struck by a car and knocked into a coma on the morning of his eighth birthday, and, after a few days, dies, leaving his parents to find solace in the comforts of fresh bread. Plot-wise, the stories remain the same as the earlier collection, but plot is only a part of what these gems offer.

Opinions will vary as to which version works best. The stories in Beginners are presented as Carver had intended them, restoring the reams of slashed text, and, where necessary, the original titles. The uncut work adds new dimensions; there is greater development of characters, beautifully rendered tracts of dialogue, and narrative passages that enhance the plot. The stories become whole, yet an element of their mystery has been lost. Whether or not the mystery was what made these stories special in the first place is left for the reader to decide.