At Pinky’s Paperhaus—where Carolyn Kellogg also wondered why there was no byline on “Rough Crossings,” the recent essay in The New Yorker that introduced an exchange between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, and preceded Carver’s original draft for “Beginners”—Carver’s first wife, Maryann Burk Carver, posts a series of thoughts about her life and Carver’s, Lish’s editing, Carver’s writing process, and the intersection of all of the above. From her comments:

My seeing this site has made me aware of the extent of the response to the New Yorker piece, and the need perhaps to rebut some of it, much of which I already have done in my memoir. I talk about Ray’s early association with Gordon Lish and the good he did Ray as a publicist for him and his work in New York: The agents he introduced him to, and the other markets, besides Esquire, where he was Fiction Editor and published “Neighbors” and “What Is It?”, aka “Are These Actual Miles?”, (a title change I emphatically disagreed with, as the first reader and “editor” of Ray’s stories for over twenty years).

The question of who wrote the New Yorker intro, should that be haunting you, is still up in the air, but Carol Sklenicka, who writes in to say she’s working on a new biography of Carver, provides a plausible clarification that echoes that of fellow biographer Michael Hemmingson: “I checked with several people in New York, including Gary Fisketjon (Ray’s last editor, who is quoted in the New Yorker article) and was told that David Remnick, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, wrote the article. [That was also the understanding of NPR reporter David Gura. —Ed.] But it seems likely that William Stull, who edited the proposed book of stories with Tess Gallagher’s cooperation, provided the template for this unsigned piece.” Sklenicka concludes, sensibly: “The whole story of Carver’s life is complicated, as Kellogg points out, and I’m trying to get all of that into my book. It takes time and care.”

Still, why leave it unsigned? Since when does the modern The New Yorker use “templates” and not bylined writers? It’s too long a piece to be a generic introduction. Oh well, I’m sure there’s a long story we may never know. It didn’t put me off, in any case; I always like reading about complex writer-editor relationships, and I’m always interested in both Carver and Lish. That said, as you can see, it’s a daring decision to perpetuate a mystery among an already conspiracy-mad fan base!