Matt/Jim: I do agree. From the little I’ve read, that Carver-re-carved-by-Lish often reads better than Carver-uncut-tout-seul. But, it raises the LitCritical problem that for many years, college lecturers were teaching their students about Carver’s wonderfully tight, minimalist, Hemmingwavian narrative. What-if, as they say, Carver gets the Nobel Prize, and Lish claims his share? At which point does editorial interference, however skilled and needed, amount to a form of fraud on the reading public. We are used to sports stars’ ghost-written memoirs titled, e.g., David Beckham was talking to Ian McEwan [I made that up!]. But the paying Carver-fans were unaware of the collaborattion, as far as I know, until the posthumous leaks. Is it terribly old-fashioned and undeconstructed to want to associate written works with their real authors wherever possible.
PS: Are there any latter-day Thomas Bowdlers around willing to hose away the naughty bits from Lolita? Or have we already caught a glimpse of this with Kubrick’s movie, toned down against VN’s wishes?
SKB
On 30/03/2010 16:52, "Matthew Roth" <MRoth@MESSIAH.EDU> wrote:
Just a trifle I ran across while reading about the last days of Swift in Craik's "The Life of Jonathan Swift" (1894):
"Looking at himself in the glass, he was said to have exclaimed in pity, 'Poor old man!'."
I wonder if this provides the origin of Shade's variant line, "Poor old man Swift, poor --, poor Baudelaire." In which case, was John Shade also looking in the glass when he wrote that line?
On another topic, I found the idea Lish editing VN very amusing, though I agree with Jim Twiggs that Lish's Carver is almost always preferable to Carver's Carver.
Matt