ABSTRACT
Convinced he “simply couldn’t go on any farther in the direction” he “had been going,” Carver described “Cathedral,” the first story he wrote after What We Talk About’s publication, as “an ‘opening up’ process … in every sense” (McCaffery and Gregory 100-01). Carver acknowledged a change in his fiction, which he correlated “with the circumstances” of his life, “getting sober, and feeling more hope-feeling that there was life after alcohol-meeting and beginning to live with Tess Gallagher” (Alton 167). Undoubtedly, Carver’s stable life in the late 1970s and 1980s influenced his work. A more significant influence, however-at least on What We Talk About-was Gordon Lish’s editing, which, to a great extent, dragged Carver toward radical minimalism. Examining Lish’s papers at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, which include heavily annotated versions of WWTA stories, D. T. Max concludes that Lish “cut about half the original words” of the WWTA manuscript (37). The turn to radical compression, then, was as much if not more an extension of Lish’s artistic vision than Carver’s. Correlatively, despite the oft-quoted remark about “Cathedral” manifesting an “opening up,” Carver had previously written many stories in a more generous, less elliptical manner such as “Pastoral,” later revised as “The Cabin”; “Nobody Said Anything”; “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”; “Furious Seasons”; the long version of “So Much Water So Close to Home”; “Harry’s Death”; “Where Is Everyone?”; and “A Small, Good Thing”-though the final story listed here was not published until after What We Talk About’s publication.
