Here is the voice of a man telling a story. The man is a doctor; the story is about one of his patients, an elderly rancher who along with his wife has barely survived a terrible car accident. Their names are Henry and Anna Gates. Because of their injuries, they have to recover in separate rooms, and Henry becomes severely depressed, even while knowing Anna is nearby and on the mend. When the doctor, Herb, visits him, Henry insists on telling him about his ranch outside Bend, Oregon, where he’s lived with Anna since their marriage in 1927:

Sometimes it’d be snowing outside and the temperature down below zero. The temperature really drops on you up there in January or February. But we’d listen to the records and dance in our stocking feet in the living room until we’d gone through all the records. And then I’d build up the fire and turn out the lights, all but one, and we’d go to bed. Some nights it’d be snowing, and it’d be so still outside you could hear the snow falling.

Viewed within a piece of contemporary fiction, the feeling of this passage is one of density, or richness: a density of detail and lived experience, and maybe a little too much sententiousness: Henry Gates here feels a little too wise and folksy for his own good. On the other hand, who would object to the haunting image of hearing the snow falling, the inner and outer quietness required for that kind of listening? In this case, it’s clear exactly who would: the story quoted here is Raymond Carver’s “Beginners,” which was intensely compressed by Carver’s editor, friend, and mentor Gordon Lish into “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” In the final story, Henry and Anna no longer have names, and their recovery is described by the doctor—now named Mel—in a single, offhand paragraph:

I’d get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly but it was because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes… I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.

What exactly is lost in this gesture of editing? Obviously, the density and richness of Henry Gates’s speech, and the governing metaphor of the audibly falling snow. Lish’s version, on the other hand, is much more sonically and structurally interesting: there’s the weird repetition of “holes,” making the injured man seem more material and less human, and then, in the next sentence, the odd repetitive construction, “that was what was.” This quality is often called “Carveresque,” but the historical record demonstrates...