While it may be true that I’m neglecting this blog much like I will any future children, I just can’t resist linking to anything to do with Raymond Carver. And though I might love Carver’s writing – and I mean love like the taste of someone you’ve just fallen for – this great write-up by Stephen King in last week’s NYT Books section is wrenching. Carver was not only a horrible, violent, drunken husband, he was also completely overpowered by editor Gordon Lish, who we now know is responsible for the bare, stripped prose that Carver became known for. The most drastic change comes from the one story that has stuck with me the moment I read it in a damp, dark room in Western Ireland (it will spoil it though):

The contrast between “The Bath” (Lish-edited) and “A Small, Good Thing” (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son’s birthday, Scotty’s mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish’s baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death’s inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver’s version, the couple — who are actually characters instead of shadows — go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart.

It seems cheap for King to say that Carver’s story ‘has heart’, though. More to the point, it presents something redemptive in the face of a loss one never recovers from. And it does so with the three of them, quite literally, breaking apart warm, sweet bread. Though I frequently love the edited versions of Carver’s stories precisely because they feel so bleak, so devoid of neat, easy answers, this one seems a bit much. Anyway, good read.