We all remember reading Raymond Carver, I suspect, if we have. I remember getting a (legally, no doubt) photocopied edition in a class freshman year at Duke with Brett Cox. I read "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" a few times, and then I bought a water-stained paperback. I didn't really read the works with what you would call pleasure, but more like fascination, the bird bewitched by the snake.
I like the Altman movies based on the books, too. I care very much for Carver, and when he sickened with cancer I was moved and sorry that he was gone.
The last few years have shown us that he was almost certainly Maxwell Perkinsed. Just as Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe, Gordon Lish appears to have radically altered Carver's original vision -- in the process, creating what was and is clearly great art, among the best short story work of the century, as valuable and moving as John Cheever or John O'Hara.
But if an author begs that work not be published, something is wrong. The partnership appears to have been tragically toxic, although history will focus on its negative and not its positive aspects. No matter what, it seems clear now that it was a partnership -- not sole authorship -- that resulted in Carver's great work. Works like "Beginnings" must be published, not as revisionism but as examination of the infinite complexity of human endeavor and its power to create lasting artistic value.