ABSTRACT
An earlier title of Carver’s first story in a high-paying, widely circulated magazine is “The Neighbors”; Esquire’s fiction editor, Gordon Lish, deleted the article. According to Carver, “John] Gardner said don’t use twenty-five words to say what you can say in fifteen. … Gordon believed that if you could say it in five words instead of fifteen, use five words” (Stull, “Life and Death” 181-82). Instrumental in Carver’s getting a book contract for Will You Please? with McGraw-Hill, where Lish took a job after leaving Esquire 1 Lish edited Will You Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the 1981 collection that thrust Carver to the forefront of serious contemporary American literature. According to Laura Heath, whose MA thesis examines Lish’s editing of Carver’s manuscripts, Lish went to “war” against “the decorative, the descriptive, [and] the explanatory” (20), cutting “characters’ thoughts” and “dialogue to a minimum” (25). Indefatigable, ruthless, but generally successful, Lish was undeniably indispensable in creating what is unique about What We Talk About, its radically compressed, highly elliptical style. Dominated by short paragraphs, shorter sentences, and white space, What We Talk About draws attention, even before a word is read, to what isn’t there.
