PORT ANGELES — Here in this work, the man who was Raymond Carver becomes clear.
So believes Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow, of Beginners, the story collection released, at long last, the way the writer wrote them.
Beginners, the original version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is cause for celebration tonight at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., where Gallagher will appear for a discussion and dramatic reading of Carver prose.
Admission is free to the 7 p.m. event, which will take place, appropriately, in the library’s Raymond Carver Room.
This ensemble of 17 stories, published this month by Vintage Books, is the fruit of the labors of William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, scholars who worked with the original Carver manuscripts at Indiana University’s Lilly Library.
There, they recovered the stories by transcribing the typewritten words beneath the changes made by Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish.
Publishers elsewhere in the world have released Beginners, but this Vintage Books edition is the first in Carver’s home country, the United States.
Knopf published Lish’s altered versions of these stories in 1981 under protest from Carver; the contract was signed and production already begun, Gallagher recalled, when the writer asked Lish to reconsider his drastic edits.
Carver’s letter to Lish in July 1980 is included in the new edition of Beginners.
The title story, for example, was cut in half. Its original name was “Beginners,” from a line uttered by one of the men in it: “It seems to me we’re just rank beginners at love.”
Lish gave it the title “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” under which it became famous.
Another story, “Pie,” was reduced by 29 percent and renamed “A Serious Talk.” Lish cut Carver’s story “Where Is Everyone?” by 78 percent and retitled it “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit.”
Lish changed names and endings in several more too.
Tonight at the library, local actors John Merton Marrs, who knew Carver, and Kathleen Balducci will give “Pie” a dramatic reading, and since Carver was a lover of this dessert, Marrs’ wife, Marie, plans on baking and handing out small pies to all in attendance.
Port Book and News of Port Angeles will have copies of Beginners available for sale. The paperback is priced at $15.
The original stories are longer, but to readers such as Marrs, they’ve no fat on them.
Carver’s prose is terse, “real natural,” he said.
Gallagher knew Carver as a man of empathy. Like her family, his people were working class, laboring in cotton fields and lumber mills. He wrote about the inner and outer lives of waitresses, factory workers, mechanics.
He noticed those who were otherwise invisible, Gallagher said.
Carver has been called the poet of the working class — and while he’s famous for his short stories, he penned 200 poems at the Sky House, the home he shared with Gallagher in Port Angeles.
He finished his poetry collection, A New Path to the Waterfall, shortly before his death, at age 50, from cancer in August 1988.
When Carver and Gallagher got together — they first lived in El Paso, Texas, before coming to the Northwest in 1979 — Carver had just ended a long misadventure with alcohol.
He was busy being reborn when he wrote the stories in Beginners.
Carver and Gallagher, herself a poet, essayist and fiction writer, worked side by side in those days.
Gallagher, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts awards and other honors, is author of many books, including her poetry collections Moon Crossing Bridge, Dear Ghosts and Midnight Lantern and fiction ensembles The Lover of Horses and At the Owl Woman Saloon.
But when she and Carver became a couple, Gallagher said, “we were both beginners then, you see.”
Over the past decade or so, there has been much discussion about Lish’s cutting and renaming of Carver’s work.
But “it’s not about that,” Gallagher said.
“It’s about finding those stories” as they sprang from Carver’s heart.
Gallagher recently brought a bouquet of mums to her late husband’s grave site at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, to celebrate Beginners.
“You cannot turn back history,” she said.
“You can make corrections, though.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
