This is a fascinating document.
Somewhere there is a line between editing and re-writing. (Yes, I have my own Red Pen Of Death, but it is necessarily reserved for the clearly wrong; everything else is marked in pencil for further discussion.) Wherever that line is, Gordon Lish seems to have crossed it. The story, as published, should really have been credited to "Gordon Lish writing as 'Raymond Carver'". What effect revelations like this have on Carver's reputation remain to be seen. For me, he remains in the pantheon, but nevertheless it will be difficult to re-read those early stories with the same sense of unalloyed pleasure. A seed of doubt has been sown. (Do we know who was responsible for the name change? "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", as a title, seemed to express Carver's writing in a nutshell. To find out it's not Carver at all would make for a very bad day.)
