Re-write, Revise, Repeat

. . . and the strange story of Raymond Carver & Gordon Lish

In a 1956 interview with The Paris Review, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the last page of his novel A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied with it. “The only kind of writing is re-writing” he declared, with the self-assertion of a man who once quipped that every writer should be equipped with an inbuilt bullshit detector, and then forgot his own advice.

Was Papa Hemingway counting? Did he number each draft? Or was he grasping a figure out of the air, possibly one inflated by the contents of a prolonged liquid lunch?

Ernest Hemingway at Finca Vigia,. Cuba, 1946. Photographer Unknown.

Anecdotes such as these are a tad problematic, especially when they are regurgitated ad nauseam (as I am doing now) but they do serve a purpose for the apprentice writer.

Bernard Malamud, according to a useful article by Tom Jenks in the much (and no doubt justifiably) maligned Narrative magazine, wrote “as many as fifty drafts of a story, and it’s reasonable to say that by the time he finished, he knew exactly what was in the story.“

Gustave Flaubert, that monastic, masochistic disciple of re-writing, announced, rather worryingly: “I love my work with a frenetic and perverted love, as the ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly.”

Ceaseless reformulation is at the core of the writer’s craft. Turning the sentences around again and again, picking them apart, you need to be a bit of an obsessive, a fanatic of the word.

Here’s a list of other eminent writers’ comments on the benefits of intensive revision (I’ve just noticed that all the authors cited here are male, but I’m pretty sure the rewards of revision are gender non-specific) :

‘Good writing is re-writing.’ Truman Capote

‘There is no such thing as good writing. Only good re-writing.’ Robert Graves

‘I have rewritten —often several times— every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.’ Vladimir Nabokov

‘Books aren’t written – they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.’ Michael Crichton

‘When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.’ Stephen King

‘More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.’ John Irving

An experiment in not-knowing

And why do we need to rewrite? Because the words we set down in our first draft — or first several drafts — are most often a stuttering beginning, a stumbling towards the as-yet undefined, or an experiment in not-knowing, as Donald Barthelme put it:

Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written, even though they’ve done a dozen. At best there’s a slender intuition, not much greater than an itch. The anxiety attached to this situation is not inconsiderable. ‘Nothing to paint and nothing to paint with,’ as Beckett says . . . The not-knowing is not simple, because it’s hedged about with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives . . .

So, accepting that there are many paths, but one must be taken, is a key to setting out. The French Nobel prizewinner Patrick Modiano says something similar, but adds that the crucial thing is to keep going:

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

Having established the need to keep going, even, at times when it feels as though you are drowning in the effluence of your own imaginings, do you revise as you go along, or whip off a shitty first draft and concentrate on editing it when you’ve finished?

Well, that’s up to you, but most of the writers I know do both things.

So much for general principles: Re-writing and revision are of crucial importance to the writing process.

But let’s look at an example of something a little different.

When the editor does the re-writing for you

Raymond Carver’s famously taut and lean stories — and the style of minimalism with which he became associated — were very much the result of harsh revision by his editor, Gordon Lish, perhaps at the expense of the original stories’ more florid impact.

Here is an example, taken from an article by Giles Harvey in the New York Review of Books (May 27th, 2010).

‘The two versions of “One More Thing” . . . reveal Lish’s editing at its most drastic and inspired. Maxine, the beleaguered wife of L.D., an alcoholic, returns home from work one evening to find him embroiled in an argument with their teenage daughter. After several volleys of abuse are exchanged, Maxine orders him to leave: “Tonight. This minute. Now” L.D. bundles some things together - including the only tube of toothpaste in the house - and then prepares to say goodbye. Here is the ending Carver originally wrote:’

L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm again and once more picked up the suitcase. “I just want to say one more thing, Maxine. Listen to me. Remember this,” he said. “I love you. I love you no matter what happens. I love you too Bea. I love you both.” He stood there at the door and felt his lips begin to tingle as he looked at them for what, he believed, might be the last time. “Good-bye,” he said.

“You call this love, L.D.?” Maxine said. She let go of Bea’s hand. She made a fist. Then she shook her head and jammed her hands into her coat pockets. She stared at him and then dropped her eyes to something on the floor near his shoes.

It came to him with a shock that he would remember this night and her like this. He was terrified to think that in the years ahead she might come to resemble a woman he couldn’t place, a mute figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of a lighted room with lowered eyes.

“Maxine!” he cried. “Maxine!”

“Is this what love is, L.D.?” she said, fixing her eyes on him. Her eyes were terrible and deep, and he held them as long as he could.

‘Like his protagonist, Carver doesn’t quite seem to know how to make an exit: his prose flails and stammers in its effort to wring as much excitement from the scene as possible. (“It came to him with a shock”, “He was terrified to think”), before petrifying into the mawkish tableau of the final sentence. It all seems rather un-Carveresque . . .’

Here is the version Gordon Lish suggested, after running a red line through all of the above:

L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase. He said, “I just want to say one more thing.” But then he could not think what it could possibly be.

‘Compared to this,’ Harvey writes, ‘the original climax has the weightless intensity of a soap opera (“Is this what love is, L.D?”), in which people broadcast their emotions to one another in stentorian italics. Carver had deployed an entire arsenal where in fact, as Lish shows, a well-placed sniper is all that is needed. It is not only funny and poignant that L.D. should find himself at a loss for words at such an instant. It also feels inevitable. Once we have read it for the first time, it’s difficult to imagine the story ending any other way (the same can surely not be said of the earlier draft). Of course, we think, a man who is not above stealing the toothpaste from his wife and daughter — Lish, by the way, has him steal the dental floss as well — would forget what to say. A lifetime of bungling, failure, humiliation, and deceit seems to be disclosed in a single moment.’

Now, some may complain about this degree of editorial intervention. And first among them we should include Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, who in 2009 published Carver’s stories from his breakthrough collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, as they were before Lish got his hands on them. This was the topic of an article by Claire Dederer in Seattle Met magazine, titled Regarding Tess.

Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher, Syracuse, NY, 1984. Photograph: Bob Adelman/Corbis

Gallagher’s decision caused outrage in certain quarters of the publishing world because, as Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon pointed out, the Lish-edited versions had been approved by Carver himself. Fisketjon, who had helped Carver compile his selected stories in the 1988 volume Where I’m Calling From, including those edited by Lish, wrote in The New York Times: “When we put together Where I’m Calling From, these were the stories that he handpicked from his work to live in posterity in the versions that he wanted them to live in. If that is not the end of the story, I don’t know what that would be.” He was dismissive of Gallagher’s plans to re-publish the original versions, adding: “I would rather dig my friend Ray Carver out of the ground.”

However, Gallagher makes a strong case for her decision to re-publish the original stories, and is backed up, at least in part, by Carver himself: an article in The Guardian points to a letter Carver wrote to Lish, pleading — convincingly — that his wish to pull out of their editorial arrangement “has to do with my sobriety and with my new-found (and fragile, I see) mental health and wellbeing." And: "I'll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line here.”

Ideally, one does one’s own editing, but if an editor comes up with a suggestion — such as Lish’s brilliant three-line cull cited above — it would be foolish not to take it, even if it makes you question your own sanity . . .

Then again, at what stage does your writing become a joint venture with an editor? And with the advent of AI, where does ‘I’ end and the cyborgian ‘we’ begin?

So, the moral of the story is that if you’re going to get down to any radical revision of your writing, best to get in there first and do it yourself, rather than leave it to your editor, or your literary executor (even if that is your spouse), or AI to go and complicate things for you.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. His books include The Color of a Dog Running Away, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, The Blue Tent and Ambassador of Nowhere. For many years he led the graduate programmes in Creative & Critical Writing at Cardiff University, Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.