It’s as a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer that Sklenicka’s book is invaluable, particularly after his career path crossed that of the editor Gordon Lish, the self-styled “Captain Fiction.” Any readers who doubt Lish’s baleful influence on the stories in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” are apt to think differently after reading Sklenicka’s eye-opening account of this difficult and ultimately poisonous relationship. Those still not convinced can read the corresponding stories in “Beginners,” now available in the sublimely portable and long-overdue “Raymond Carver: Collected Stories.”

In 1972, Lish changed the title of Car­ver’s second Esquire story — which he edited heavily — from “Are These Actual Miles?” (interesting and mysterious) to “What Is It?” (boring). When Carver, wild to be published in a major slick, decided to accept the changes, Maryann accused him “of being a whore, of selling out to the establishment.” John Gardner had once told Carver that line-editing was not negotiable. Carver may have accepted that — most writers willing to submit to the editing process do — but Lish’s changes were wide and deep. Car­ver argued that “a major magazine publication was worth the compromise.” Lish, who tried unsuccessfully to edit Leonard Gardner (who would go on to write “Fat City”) with a similarly heavy hand, got his way with Carver. It was a harbinger.

Was Gordon Lish a good editor? Undoubtedly. Curtis Johnson, a textbook editor who introduced Lish to Carver, claims that Lish had “infallible taste in fiction.” But, as Maryann feared, he was — in Ray Carver’s case, at least — much better at discovery than development. And with Carver, he got what he wanted. Perhaps he sensed an essential weakness at Carver’s core (“people-pleasing” is what recovering alcoholics call it). Perhaps it was the strangely elitist view he seems to have held of Carver’s writing, branding the characters “grossly inept” and speaking of “their blatant illiteracies, of which Carver himself was unaware.” This did not stop him from taking credit for Car­ver’s success; Lish is said to have bragged that Car­ver was “his creature,” and what appears on the back jacket of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”(1976), Car­ver’s first book of stories, is not Raymond Car­ver’s photograph but Gordon Lish’s name.

Image Raymond and Maryann Burke Carver and their two children on Rhodes in 1968. Credit... Courtesy Maryann Burke Carver

Sklenicka’s account of the changes in Carver’s third book of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981), is meticulous and heartbreaking. There were, she says, three versions: A, B and C. Version A was the manuscript Car­ver submitted. It was titled “So Much Water So Close to Home.” B was the manuscript Lish initially sent back. He changed the name of the story “Beginners” to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and that became the new title of the book. Although Carver was disturbed by this, he nonetheless signed a binding (and unagented) contract in 1980. Soon after, Version C — the version most readers know — arrived on Carver’s desk. The differences between B and C “astounded” him. “He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories,” Skle­nicka writes. “He had not expected . . . a meat cleaver.” Unsure of himself, Carver was only three years into sobriety after two decades of heavy drinking; his correspondence with Lish over the wholesale changes to his work alternated between groveling (“you are a wonder, a genius”) and outright begging for a return to Version B. It did no good. According to Tess Gallagher, Lish refused by telephone to restore the earlier version, and if Carver understood nothing else, he understood that Lish held the “power of publication access.”

This Hobson’s choice is the beating heart of “Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life.” Any writer might wonder what he’d do in such a case. Certainly I did; in 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading Sklenicka’s book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for “Carrie.” Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.

One needs only to scan the stories in “Beginners” and the ones in “What We Talk About” to see the most obvious change: the prose in “Beginners” consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue; in “What We Talk About,” there is so much white space that some of the stories (“After the Denim,” for instance) look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel. In many cases, the man who didn’t allow editors to change his own work gutted Carver’s, and on this subject Sklenicka voices an indignation she is either unwilling or unable to muster on Maryann’s behalf, calling Lish’s editing of Carver “a usurpation.” He imposed his own style on Carver’s stories, and the so-called minimalism with which Carver is credited was actually Lish’s deal. “Gordon . . . came to think that he knew everything,” Curtis Johnson says. “It became pernicious.”