RAYMOND CARVER
In life, art, and even death, Raymond Carver’s double, mentor, and companion
soul was Anton Chekhov. Like Chekhov (1860-1904), whose grandfather bought
himself out of serfdom and whose father’s grocery shop went broke, Carver was a
child of the working poor. His father, Clevie Raymond Carver ("C.R."), rode the
rails from Arkansas to Washington state during the dust-bowl days of the 1930s.
C.R. became a saw filer in the lumber mills – and an alcoholic who was dead at
fifty-three. His wife, Ella Casey Carver, was no stranger to domestic violence,
and she supplemented the family income by working as a waitress and retail clerk.
Raymond Clevie Carver, nicknamed Junior, Frog, and Doc, was born on 25 May 1938
in Clatskanie, Oregon, a logging town of seven hundred on the Columbia river.
The family returned to Washington in 1941, and Carver grew up in Yakima, a hub
town of twenty thousand in "The Nation’s Fruit Bowl," the fertile valley east of
the Cascades.
Carver was a belated child of the Great Depression, and well into times of
postwar prosperity his house lacked an indoor toilet. His poem "Shiftless" (1986)
lays out the economics of his childhood: "The people who were better off than us
were comfortable . . . . / The ones worse off were sorry and didn’t work." Like
Chekhov, Carver knew intimately the marginal lives of hardship and squalor from
which he crafted luminous stories of empathy, endangerment, and hard-won
affirmation. "They’re my people," he said years later of the inarticulate
laborers and service workers who form his submerged population. "I could never
write down to them."
Before Chekhov, there were fables, tales, and sketches. But there were no short
stories, no "plotless" evocations of human subjectivity on the threshold of
perception. Chekhov created the modern story in the 1880s, partly out of
journalistic necessity, by fussing realistic detail and romantic lyricism. The
result was a lambent mode of fabulation that teases out the mysteries of "normal"
life. In stories such as "Misery" (1886), "Anyuta" (1886), and "The Kiss" (1887),
the Chekhovian moment, albeit half-grasped and fleeting, encapsulates a soul.
Chekhov’s restrained yet resonant manner became standard practice for twentieth-century
storytellers, including Carver’s American mentors Sherwood Anderson, Ernest
Hemingway, and John Cheever. By the late 1960s, however, nonmimetic, formally
experimental "superfiction" had become the favored mode of the literary avant-garde.
Realistic stories, like the "totalizing" novel, had been declared outmoded, if
not obsolete.
During these same years, in the backwaters of Washington and Northern California,
Raymond Carver had married at nineteen and fathered two children by the time he
was twenty. Juggling "crap jobs," fatherhood, and eventually "full-time drinking
as a serious pursuit," he eked out time to write. "Get in, get out. Don’t linger.
Go on," were the bywords of his life. Of necessity, they shaped his art. "I
needed to write something I could get some kind of payment from immediately," he
later said. "Hence, poems and stories."
Chekhov would have understood. At nineteen he had moved from provincial Taganrog
to Moscow and taken charge of his impecunious family. Although a full-time
medical student, "Papa Antosha" earned much-needed cash by writing dry-humored
sketches for mass-market weeklies. In a letter of 10 May 1886 he ticked off
guidelines for what small-minded critics a century later would call "minimal"
fiction: "(1) no politico-economico-social verbal effusions; (2) objectivity
throughout; (3) truth in the description of characters and things; (4) extreme
brevity; (5) audacity and originality-eschew clichés; (6) warm-heartedness."
Working under similar conditions of "unrelieved responsibility and permanent
distraction," Carver found Chekhov’s precepts congenial, and during the 1960s
and 1970s he reinvented short fiction along Chekhovian lines. In the process he
laid the groundwork for a realist revival in the 1980s. "In a literary sense,"
novelist Douglas Unger said shortly after Carver’s death, "his story exists as a
kind of model of the resurrection of the short story."
Few would dispute Carver’s claim that Chekhov was "the greatest short-story
writer who ever lived." Nor would many question Charles May’s judgment, voiced
in A Chekhov Companion (1985) that the most Chekhovian of contemporary writers
was Raymond Carver. As artists and as men, the two led parallel lives.
Tragically, the parallels converged during 1988, as Carver followed Chekhov in
succumbing, far too early, to an illness emblematic of his age. In Chekhov’s
case the malady was tuberculosis, which claimed his life at forty-four. In
Carver’s instance it was lung cancer. The writer who once described himself as "a
cigarette with a body attached to it" died on 2 August, two months past his
fiftieth birthday. Two years earlier novelist Robert Stone had called Carver "the
best American short-story writer since Hemingway." Speaking at Carver’s memorial
service in New York City on 22 September, he offered a higher compliment.
Borrowing a line from his own essay on Chekhov, Stone termed Carver "a hero of
perception."
Throughout his writing life, first in poems, later in essays, and always in his
fiction, Carver kept in contact with his Russian mentor. In the title poem of
his second book, Winter Insomnia (1970), for example, he called on Chekhov to
prescribe him "three drops of valerian, a glass / Of rose water-anything," to
calm his frazzled nerves. In an essay, "On Writing," collected in Fires (1983),
he praised the "simple clarity" of Chekhov’s moral awakenings: abrupt, often
negative epiphanies signaled by phrases such as "and suddenly everything became
clear to him." The same phrase appears, all but verbatim, in Carver’s story "The
Pheasant," collected in the same book.
Surely Carver’s boldest tribute to Chekhov came in "Errand," a prize-winning
story that also proved to be his last work of fiction. "Errand" begins in
biography, with an artfully telescoped account of Chekhov’s final months,
culminating in his drinking a glass of champagne minutes before dying in
Badenweiler, a spa in the Black Forest. The hard facts told, the story continues
as Chekhovian fiction. With mounting lyricism Carver recounts the "human
business" attendant upon Chekhov’s death. After a night long vigil Chekhov’s
widow instructs a young bellman to locate a proper mortician. Respectful if half-comprehending,
he listens as she outlines his errand. Before leaving, however, the young man
bends, discreetly, to retrieve the champagne bottle’s fallen cork. This gesture,
at once honorable and unremarked, brings the story to a faultless Chekhovian
close.
"Errand" appeared in the 1 June 1987 New Yorker. The following spring it won the
O. Henry Award and appeared in Prize Stories 1988. During the same period,
however, Carver’s life imitated his art – with fatal consequences. In September
he found himself spitting blood. In October two-thirds of his left lung was
removed. Over the next nine months, as Carver waged a brave but losing battle
against cancer, Chekhov became his ghostly double. "When hope is gone," he wrote
in his journal, "the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws." Chekhov too had
grasped at straws, boasting less than a month before his death that he was "beginning
to grow stout." By March 1988 the cancer had spread to Carver’s brain. Before
beginning radiation therapy, he wrote a meditation on Chekhov’s "Ward No. 6" (1892).
Explicating a patch of dialogue between the disaffected doctor, Andrey Yefinitch,
he noted how even in Chekhov’s godforsaken madhouse "a little voice in the soul"
arises, urging "belief of an admittedly fragile but insistent nature."
Carver’s fiftieth birthday was fast approaching, and in May he received a host
of accolades. These included a Brandeis University creative arts citation, an
honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Hartford, and induction
into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. It was also in May
that Where I’m Calling From, a collection of his new and selected stories, was
published by Atlantic Monthly Press. (Elephant, containing his seven latest
fictions, followed in England on 4 July.) Where I’m Calling From received
glowing notices from coast to coast, including front-page coverage in the New
York Times Book Review. More important, the retrospective occasion prompted
critics to reassess Carver’s career and reputation. Although widely acknowledged
as "one of the great short-story writers of our time," he had been tagged a "minimalist,"
a dismissive label untrue to the spirit of his work. Packed with thirty-seven
stories written over twenty-five years, Where I’m Calling From gave Carver’s so-called
minimalism the lie. "Carver has not been a minimalist but a precisionist," David
Lipsky wrote in the National Review (5 August 1988). Reviewers for the
Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Times Literary Supplement
concurred. "It goes without saying that Carver is a master," Roger K. Anderson
observed in the 19 June 1988 Houston Chronicle. "But now a new generosity of
spirit is unmistakable. Achieving this may be the keystone of his career – a new
level of tranquillity."
In June the cancer reappeared in Carver’s lungs. As he acknowledged in a poem
entitled "What the Doctor Said," the diagnosis was a death sentence. Given a
similar verdict, three years before his death Chekhov had responded by marrying
the actress Olga Knipper. (The wedding date, duly noted in "Errand," was 25 May,
Carver’s birthday." Outdoing his mentor in audacity, on 17 June Carver married
his companion and collaborator of the past ten years, the writer Tess Gallagher.
The wedding took place in Nevada, in the Heart of Reno Chapel, and Carver
described it with gusto as a "high tacky affair." True to the tragicomic
occasion, Gallagher went on to a three-day winning streak at roulette.
Returning to Port Angeles, Washington, their home of the past five years, Carver
and Gallagher hurried to assemble his last book of poetry, A New Path to the
Waterfall (1989). In this unusual collection, Carver’s verses speak in dialogue
with work by other poets – and with prose poems gleaned from Chekhov’s fiction.
Together, the two "companion souls" make a "last, most astounding trip" that
recapitulates a life lived prodigally but well. Reprinting a number of his early
poems, Carver recalls the heady but numbered days of his youthful marriage. He
revisits his parents’ kitchen, catching a glimpse of his father in an adulterous
embrace. Invoking Czeslaw Milosz’s "Return to Krakow in 1880," he questions the
value of his work: "To win? / To lose? / What for, if the world will forget us
anyway." In poems of searing candor, he struggles to say "what really happened"
to his loved ones and to him. Finally, in the closing pages, he confronts the "stupendous
grief" of his impending death. The life journey ends in the Chekhovian twilight
of "Afterglow," a portrait of the artist mugging for the camera, his cigarette
at a "jaunty slant." The book’s coda, "Late Fragment," voices Carver’s hard-won
self-acceptance:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
The manuscript completed, Carver and Gallagher made a fishing trip to Alaska and
planned a "dream visit" to Moscow. "I’ll get there before you," he joked while
in the hospital. "I’m traveling faster." Released into his wife’s care, Carver
spent the last afternoon of his life on the porch of his newly built house,
overlooking his roses. That evening he and Gallagher watched the movie Dark Eyes
(1987), Nikita Mikhalhov’s Chekhovian pastiche. At 6:20 the next morning Carver
died in his sleep. Without revealing the urgency of his condition, during the
last months of his life Carver told interviewers what he hoped might be his
epitaph. "I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be called than a writer," he
said, "unless it’s a poet. Short-story writer, poet, occasional essayist." After
family services on 4 August he was buried in the Ocean View Cemetery in Port
Angeles. The grave overlooks the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the deep blue channel
that Carver had plied in his boat and celebrated in three books of poetry, Where
Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985), Ultramarine (1986), and In a
Marine Light (1987). On Sunday, 7 August, the London Times combined a front-page
review of Elephant with a hastily drafted obituary. Raymond Carver had reveled "the
strangeness concealed behind the banal," affirmed "the individuality that
survives mass-produced goods and look-alike lifestyles," and extracted "a poetry
out of the prosaic," wrote Peter Kemp. The title of his article was "The
American Chekhov."
As his uncanny kinship with Chekhov suggested, there was about Raymond Carver an
abiding doubleness. "I really do feel I’ve had two different lives," he told the
Paris Review in 1983. The "line of demarcation" was 2 June 1977, the day that
after ten years of progressive alcoholism Carver had stopped drinking. The
changeover was, in his view, nothing short of miraculous. "Toward the end of my
drinking career I was completely out of control and in a very grave place," he
recalled. By his thirty-ninth year alcohol had shattered his health, his work,
and his family. (He and his first wife, the former Maryann Burk, separated in
the summer of 1978 and were divorced in October 1982.) What followed over the
next ten years was, in the words of a poem that appeared in the New Yorker a few
weeks after Carver’s death, "Pure gravy."
At a writers conference in Dallas in November 1977, Carver, still new to
sobriety, had met Tess Gallagher, a poet who like himself was a native of the
Pacific Northwest, the child of an alcoholic father, and a survivor of a broken
marriage. Nine months later the two met again in El Paso, where Carver was a
visiting distinguished writer at the University of Texas. After a Chekhovian
courtship, including a date during which Gallagher nervously tore an earring
through her lobe, the two became housemates. First in El Paso and Tucson; then
in Syracuse, New York (where both taught at Syracuse University); and finally in
Gallagher’s hometown of Port Angeles, Carver and Gallagher lived and worked
together. The two writers became each other’s first readers. When their books
appeared – some twenty-five between them over the next ten years – they became
each other’s dedicatees. Eventually, they became coauthors, sharing credit for
Dostoevsky: A Screenplay (1985). As mutual influences, each pointed the other in
new directions. Established as a poet, Gallagher produced a collection of
stories, The Lover of Horses (1986). Carver, who had made his mark in prose,
brought out book after book of verse and received Poetry magazine’s Levinson
Prize in 1985. "This second life had been very full, very rewarding," he told an
interviewer in 1986, "and for that I’ll be eternally grateful."
Carver’s gratitude spilled over from his life into his work, not only in poems
such as "For Tess" (1985) and "The Gift" (1986) but also in stories such as "Cathedral"
(1981), "If It Please You" (1981), and "A Small, Good Thing" (1982). During the
1980s his once spare, skeptical fiction became increasingly expansive and
affirmative – in Mona Simpson’s phrase, "more generous." In Fires he restored to
original length several of the stories he had shortened for his so-called "minimalist"
masterpiece, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). True to its
title, Cathedral (1983) explored the transcendental dimensions of everyday
experience, much in the manner of Chekhov’s quietly religious stories "Easter
Eve" (1886) and "The Student" (1894). Last came the new work in Where I’m
Calling From: seven stories written during the final years of Carver’s life.
Once again his work was changing. Stylistically, his fiction was growing longer
and looser, novelistic in the manner of Chekhov’s late works "The Lady with the
Dog" (1899) and "In The Ravine" (1900). The subject matter of his stories was
changing, too. "Now they deal not just with husband and wife domestic
relationships," he told Paris-based Frank in 1987, "but with family
relationships: son and mother, or father and children." Moreover, as Carver
noted in a posthumously published introduction to American Fiction 88, he had
grown less interested in conclusiveness than in "the tapestry of relationship
and event."
Through it all a certain doubleness persisted. "In this second life, this post-drinking
life, I still retain a certain sense of pessimism," Carver said, echoing the
speaker of his story "Intimacy" (1986), who likewise holds to "the dark view of
things." From 1984 to 1988 he and Gallagher both lived in Port Angeles, but they
shuttled between their two houses, his in a blue-collar neighborhood, hers in an
upscale development. The doubleness appeared as well in the faces Carver showed
the world. In the jacket photo on Ultramarine, he sports a shiny suit and looks
every inch the famous writer. On Where I’m Calling From, he hunches in a well-worn
leather jacket, his only ornament a black onyx ring. "There was always the
inside and / the outside," run the opening lines of a poem in his first book,
Near Klamath (1968). "Part of me wanted help," says one of his characters two
decades later. "But there was another part." From such persistent self-divisions,
Carver wrought an art of haunting ambiguity.
During what he later called his "bad Raymond days," Carver twice went bankrupt.
But he was efficient even in his prodigality. He packed two lives into the space
of less than one, insisting up to beyond his dying day that he was twice-born
and happy. "Don’t weep for me," the speaker of "Gravy" tells his friends, "I’m a
lucky man." Born into unpromising circumstances, Carver made a virtue of
necessity by following a pragmatic aesthetic set forth in his poem "Sunday Night."
(First published in 1967, it is included in A New Path to the Waterfall.) "Make
use of the things around you," the poet tells himself, noting the rain outside
his window, the cigarette between his fingers, and the sounds of a drunken woman
stumbling in the kitchen. "Put it all in, / Make use." Early on, Carver crossed
the "tell-is-as-you-see-it" poetics of William Carlos Williams with the
unblushing candor of Charles Cukowski. "You are not your characters," he told an
interviewer in 1978, "but your characters are you." In later years he repeated
Rainer Maria Rilke’s dictum, "Poetry is experience." Without symbolic fanfare or
confessional hysteria, he invested personal experience with mystic resonance. "If
this sounds / like the story of a life," he says in one of his poems, "okay."
Carver was the son of a craftsman, and his writerly development followed the
stages of a craftsman’s training. After moving his family from Yakima to
Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he
began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real
writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled
in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now
as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line
criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these
values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On
Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver
maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing.
"In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is
also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that
makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks
at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of
the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company,
concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned
storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver
declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s
communication."
First under Gardner, then under the mentorship of Professor Richard C. Day of
Humboldt State College, Carver began writing stories. The earliest of them,
revised and collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and Furious
Seasons and Other Stories (1977), show him testing his voice among the echoes of
his predecessors. His first published story, "The Furious Seasons" (Selection,
Winter 1960-1961), is a long-drawn experiment in Faulknerian polyphony. His next,
"The Father" (Toyon, Spring 1961), offers a tight-lipped Kafkian fable of fewer
than five hundred words. Like nearly every writer of his generation, Carver was
pulled into Hemingway’s orbit. In 1963, the year of his graduation from Humboldt
State, he vascillated between reverence and rebellion, publishing both a
workmanlike Hemingway imitation, "Pastoral" (Western Humanities Review, Winter
1963), and a deconstructive parody, "The Aficionados" (Toyon, Spring 1963.)
For Professor Day, the story that "marked" Carver as a writer was "The Hair." (First
published in the Spring 1963 Toyon, it is reprinted in Those Days [1987] a small-press
book of Carver’s early writings.) Here as in "The Father," Carver’s topic is a
young man’s identity undone by a seemingly harmless irritant. Over the course of
an outwardly normal workday, the hair caught between Dave’s teeth erodes his
composure, rendering him feverish by nightfall and leaving his wife nonplussed.
But whereas "The Father" is brisk and impersonal, given almost wholly in
dialogue, "The Hair" is leisurely and lyrical. Although Kafkaesque in its theme,
stylistically the story calls to mind Chekhov’s early accounts of normality
disrupted: "An Upheaval," for example, or "Panic Fears" (both 1886). Further
experiments in the Chekhovian lyrical/objective manner followed. A pair of
stories, "The Ducks" (first published as "The Night the Mill Boss Died,"
Carolina Quarterly, Fall 1964), trace the nightmarish "awakenings" of,
respectively, a stolid working man and a sensitive young woman, each of whom
sees feelingly the awful emptiness of routinized existence.
Carver had found his register. As Michael Koepf wrote in 1981, "There’s a
Chekhovian clarity to Ray Carver’s stories but a Kafkaesque sense that something
is terribly wrong behind the scenes." Nonetheless, throughout the 1960s Carver
practiced other modes and styles. He spent the academic year 1963-1964 at the
Iowa Writers Workshop. (Lack of funds prevented him from staying a second year
to complete his M.F.A. degree.) In 1966 he published in the December magazine a
long, Jamesian story, "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" that Martha Foley
included in The Best American Short Stories 1967. He flirted with classicism ("Poseidon
and Company," Toyon, Spring 1963) and with fantasy ("Bright Red Apples," Gato
Magazine, Summer 1967). He experimented with unreliable narrators, first-person
retrospection in the manner of Sherwood Anderson, and Hemingwayesque regionalism.
"It was important for me to be a writer from the West," Carver recalled of the
period that led up to the publication of his first book of poems, Near Klamath,
by the English Club of Sacramento State College in 1968. During the middle 1960s
he worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital and sat in on classes at
Sacramento State with a third mentor, poet Dennis Schmitz. What with his
appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of his
first book, with the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year. Moreover, in
the summer of 1967 Carver accepted his first white-collar job. Moving his family
from the California midlands to the San Francisco suburbs, he became a textbook
editor at Science Research Associates (SRA) in Palo Alto. Over the next several
years, Carver’s writing took on the coloration of his new milieu, becoming dryer
and more sophisticated. The change can be seen in "A Night Out" (December , 1970;
retitled "Signals" in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?), a black-humored
account of a feuding couple’s dinner at a glitzy restaurant. Fittingly, the
final story of Carver’s apprenticeship looks both backward and ahead. Published
in the Autumn 1970 issue of Western Humanities Review as "Cartwheels," it
chronicles a city-dweller’s abortive return to the hinterland of her youth.
Retitled "How About This?" in the obsessively interrogative Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please? (1976), it can also be counted the first work of his journey-man
period.
By 1970 Carver had gained control of his medium and defined his "obsessions" (he
disliked the word theme). Following the example of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan
Ilyich (1886), he had taken for his province unheroic lives, "most simple and
most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Drawing on Chekhov and Kafka, he had
focused on hypnagogic moments during which socially constituted identity totters.
His Jamesian donnee was marriage, in particular "a certain terrible kind of
domesticity" that he termed "dis-ease." Perhaps most important, in both poetry
and fiction he had tapped a vein of "menace." As Marc Chenetier notes, this "motherlode
of threat" runs beneath the polished surface of Carver’s middle work like a
seismic fault.
Carver’s apprenticeship ended abruptly in September 1970, when his job at SRA
was terminated. The upheaval proved to be fortunate. Thanks to severance pay,
unemployment benefits, and an NEA Discovery Award, for the first time in his
life he could write full-time. Over the next nine months, he produced more than
half the stories that went into Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? In the process,
he began to see himself as a writer. "I discovered that if I went to my desk
every day and applied myself I could seriously and steadily write stories," he
later said. Moreover, his fiction underwent a sea change. "Something happened
during that time in the writing, to the writing. It went underground and then it
came up again, and it was bathed in a new light for me. I was starting to chip
away, down to the image, then the figure itself."
It was also during this period that Carver became associated with the mentor of
his journey-man decade, Gordon Lish. Through the 1960s Carver had followed John
Gardner’s advice and published solely in "little" magazines: respected
quarterlies like December that paid in copies rather than cash. Lish, formerly
Carver’s Palo Alto neighbor, had in 1969 become fiction editor of Esquire,
perhaps the "slickest" of the large-circulation magazines that paid real money.
Breaking with precedent, Carver sent one of his new stories, "The Neighbors," to
Esquire. Lish accepted it, cut the title by a word and published "Neighbors" in
June 1971. It was a turning point.
"Neighbors" tells the tale of an outwardly average couple, Bill and Arlene
Miller, who gradually turn the apartment of their out-of-town neighbors, the
Stones, into a psychosexual rumpus room. Furtively at first, then with abandon,
the caretakers invade the Stones’ privacy: nipping from their liquor cabinet,
cross-dressing in their clothes, and unearthing snapshots that promise
voyeuristic thrills. Flushed and lusty, the Millers make what promises to be a
climatic visit to the Stones’ apartment – only to find that Arlene has locked
the key inside. Abruptly barred from their fallen paradise, husband and wife
huddle outside the door, feeling an ill wind.
Without being altogether different from Carver’s earlier fiction, "Neighbors"
exhibits a surer control of structure, style, and audience. Carver himself
allowed that it had "captured and essential sense of mystery or strangeness,"
which he attributed to the story’s polished style. "For it is a highly ‘stylized’
story if it is anything," he noted, "and it is this that helps give it its value."
Textual revisions in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? indicate that Carver
developed his style under Lish’s influence. "He had a wonderful eye, and eye as
good as John Gardner’s," Carver later said. But whereas Gardner had advised
Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five, Lish advocated a more
radical aesthetic: the "minimalist" conviction that less is more. "Gordon
believed that if you could say it in five words instead of fifteen, use five
words." Under Lish’s mentorship, Carver’s fiction grew leaner and more laconic,
iceberg-like in its hidden depths. His subject matter changed as well. Editor
Lish’s interests were "paralysis, death, family, home, the things people live
with, the violence that is in us," as well as "flight" from all of the above.
These concerns became obsessions of Carver’s journeyman stories, which appeared
not only in the glossy pages of Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar but also in a host
of respected quarterlies and annuals. Indeed, the titles of Lish’s Esquire
anthologies, The Secret Life of Our Times (1973) and All Our Secrets Are the
Same (1976), suggest a leitmotif of Carver’s middle work. "You’re told time and
again when you’re young to write about what you know," Carver later said, "and
what do you know better than your own secrets?" With rare exceptions, his
stories of this period end in devastating moments of exposure. "Are you there,
Arnold?" asks the wife of a character who has tangled his identity in a web of
his own masking. "You don’t sound like yourself."
Surely the high point of Carver’s journeyman years should have been the
appearance of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Published in March 1976 by
McGraw-Hill under its new Gordon Lish imprint, this collection of twenty-two
stories was targeted to introduce an "increasingly influential" writer to a
wider public. It succeeded admirably, bringing Carver a National Book Award
nomination in 1977, the same year that a second collection of his stories,
Furious Seasons
In life, art, and even death, Raymond Carver’s double, mentor, and companion
soul was Anton Chekhov. Like Chekhov (1860-1904), whose grandfather bought
himself out of serfdom and whose father’s grocery shop went broke, Carver was a
child of the working poor. His father, Clevie Raymond Carver ("C.R."), rode the
rails from Arkansas to Washington state during the dust-bowl days of the 1930s.
C.R. became a saw filer in the lumber mills – and an alcoholic who was dead at
fifty-three. His wife, Ella Casey Carver, was no stranger to domestic violence,
and she supplemented the family income by working as a waitress and retail clerk.
Raymond Clevie Carver, nicknamed Junior, Frog, and Doc, was born on 25 May 1938
in Clatskanie, Oregon, a logging town of seven hundred on the Columbia river.
The family returned to Washington in 1941, and Carver grew up in Yakima, a hub
town of twenty thousand in "The Nation’s Fruit Bowl," the fertile valley east of
the Cascades.
Carver was a belated child of the Great Depression, and well into times of
postwar prosperity his house lacked an indoor toilet. His poem "Shiftless" (1986)
lays out the economics of his childhood: "The people who were better off than us
were comfortable . . . . / The ones worse off were sorry and didn’t work." Like
Chekhov, Carver knew intimately the marginal lives of hardship and squalor from
which he crafted luminous stories of empathy, endangerment, and hard-won
affirmation. "They’re my people," he said years later of the inarticulate
laborers and service workers who form his submerged population. "I could never
write down to them."
Before Chekhov, there were fables, tales, and sketches. But there were no short
stories, no "plotless" evocations of human subjectivity on the threshold of
perception. Chekhov created the modern story in the 1880s, partly out of
journalistic necessity, by fussing realistic detail and romantic lyricism. The
result was a lambent mode of fabulation that teases out the mysteries of "normal"
life. In stories such as "Misery" (1886), "Anyuta" (1886), and "The Kiss" (1887),
the Chekhovian moment, albeit half-grasped and fleeting, encapsulates a soul.
Chekhov’s restrained yet resonant manner became standard practice for twentieth-century
storytellers, including Carver’s American mentors Sherwood Anderson, Ernest
Hemingway, and John Cheever. By the late 1960s, however, nonmimetic, formally
experimental "superfiction" had become the favored mode of the literary avant-garde.
Realistic stories, like the "totalizing" novel, had been declared outmoded, if
not obsolete.
During these same years, in the backwaters of Washington and Northern California,
Raymond Carver had married at nineteen and fathered two children by the time he
was twenty. Juggling "crap jobs," fatherhood, and eventually "full-time drinking
as a serious pursuit," he eked out time to write. "Get in, get out. Don’t linger.
Go on," were the bywords of his life. Of necessity, they shaped his art. "I
needed to write something I could get some kind of payment from immediately," he
later said. "Hence, poems and stories."
Chekhov would have understood. At nineteen he had moved from provincial Taganrog
to Moscow and taken charge of his impecunious family. Although a full-time
medical student, "Papa Antosha" earned much-needed cash by writing dry-humored
sketches for mass-market weeklies. In a letter of 10 May 1886 he ticked off
guidelines for what small-minded critics a century later would call "minimal"
fiction: "(1) no politico-economico-social verbal effusions; (2) objectivity
throughout; (3) truth in the description of characters and things; (4) extreme
brevity; (5) audacity and originality-eschew clichés; (6) warm-heartedness."
Working under similar conditions of "unrelieved responsibility and permanent
distraction," Carver found Chekhov’s precepts congenial, and during the 1960s
and 1970s he reinvented short fiction along Chekhovian lines. In the process he
laid the groundwork for a realist revival in the 1980s. "In a literary sense,"
novelist Douglas Unger said shortly after Carver’s death, "his story exists as a
kind of model of the resurrection of the short story."
Few would dispute Carver’s claim that Chekhov was "the greatest short-story
writer who ever lived." Nor would many question Charles May’s judgment, voiced
in A Chekhov Companion (1985) that the most Chekhovian of contemporary writers
was Raymond Carver. As artists and as men, the two led parallel lives.
Tragically, the parallels converged during 1988, as Carver followed Chekhov in
succumbing, far too early, to an illness emblematic of his age. In Chekhov’s
case the malady was tuberculosis, which claimed his life at forty-four. In
Carver’s instance it was lung cancer. The writer who once described himself as "a
cigarette with a body attached to it" died on 2 August, two months past his
fiftieth birthday. Two years earlier novelist Robert Stone had called Carver "the
best American short-story writer since Hemingway." Speaking at Carver’s memorial
service in New York City on 22 September, he offered a higher compliment.
Borrowing a line from his own essay on Chekhov, Stone termed Carver "a hero of
perception."
Throughout his writing life, first in poems, later in essays, and always in his
fiction, Carver kept in contact with his Russian mentor. In the title poem of
his second book, Winter Insomnia (1970), for example, he called on Chekhov to
prescribe him "three drops of valerian, a glass / Of rose water-anything," to
calm his frazzled nerves. In an essay, "On Writing," collected in Fires (1983),
he praised the "simple clarity" of Chekhov’s moral awakenings: abrupt, often
negative epiphanies signaled by phrases such as "and suddenly everything became
clear to him." The same phrase appears, all but verbatim, in Carver’s story "The
Pheasant," collected in the same book.
Surely Carver’s boldest tribute to Chekhov came in "Errand," a prize-winning
story that also proved to be his last work of fiction. "Errand" begins in
biography, with an artfully telescoped account of Chekhov’s final months,
culminating in his drinking a glass of champagne minutes before dying in
Badenweiler, a spa in the Black Forest. The hard facts told, the story continues
as Chekhovian fiction. With mounting lyricism Carver recounts the "human
business" attendant upon Chekhov’s death. After a night long vigil Chekhov’s
widow instructs a young bellman to locate a proper mortician. Respectful if half-comprehending,
he listens as she outlines his errand. Before leaving, however, the young man
bends, discreetly, to retrieve the champagne bottle’s fallen cork. This gesture,
at once honorable and unremarked, brings the story to a faultless Chekhovian
close.
"Errand" appeared in the 1 June 1987 New Yorker. The following spring it won the
O. Henry Award and appeared in Prize Stories 1988. During the same period,
however, Carver’s life imitated his art – with fatal consequences. In September
he found himself spitting blood. In October two-thirds of his left lung was
removed. Over the next nine months, as Carver waged a brave but losing battle
against cancer, Chekhov became his ghostly double. "When hope is gone," he wrote
in his journal, "the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws." Chekhov too had
grasped at straws, boasting less than a month before his death that he was "beginning
to grow stout." By March 1988 the cancer had spread to Carver’s brain. Before
beginning radiation therapy, he wrote a meditation on Chekhov’s "Ward No. 6" (1892).
Explicating a patch of dialogue between the disaffected doctor, Andrey Yefinitch,
he noted how even in Chekhov’s godforsaken madhouse "a little voice in the soul"
arises, urging "belief of an admittedly fragile but insistent nature."
Carver’s fiftieth birthday was fast approaching, and in May he received a host
of accolades. These included a Brandeis University creative arts citation, an
honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Hartford, and induction
into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. It was also in May
that Where I’m Calling From, a collection of his new and selected stories, was
published by Atlantic Monthly Press. (Elephant, containing his seven latest
fictions, followed in England on 4 July.) Where I’m Calling From received
glowing notices from coast to coast, including front-page coverage in the New
York Times Book Review. More important, the retrospective occasion prompted
critics to reassess Carver’s career and reputation. Although widely acknowledged
as "one of the great short-story writers of our time," he had been tagged a "minimalist,"
a dismissive label untrue to the spirit of his work. Packed with thirty-seven
stories written over twenty-five years, Where I’m Calling From gave Carver’s so-called
minimalism the lie. "Carver has not been a minimalist but a precisionist," David
Lipsky wrote in the National Review (5 August 1988). Reviewers for the
Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Times Literary Supplement
concurred. "It goes without saying that Carver is a master," Roger K. Anderson
observed in the 19 June 1988 Houston Chronicle. "But now a new generosity of
spirit is unmistakable. Achieving this may be the keystone of his career – a new
level of tranquillity."
In June the cancer reappeared in Carver’s lungs. As he acknowledged in a poem
entitled "What the Doctor Said," the diagnosis was a death sentence. Given a
similar verdict, three years before his death Chekhov had responded by marrying
the actress Olga Knipper. (The wedding date, duly noted in "Errand," was 25 May,
Carver’s birthday." Outdoing his mentor in audacity, on 17 June Carver married
his companion and collaborator of the past ten years, the writer Tess Gallagher.
The wedding took place in Nevada, in the Heart of Reno Chapel, and Carver
described it with gusto as a "high tacky affair." True to the tragicomic
occasion, Gallagher went on to a three-day winning streak at roulette.
Returning to Port Angeles, Washington, their home of the past five years, Carver
and Gallagher hurried to assemble his last book of poetry, A New Path to the
Waterfall (1989). In this unusual collection, Carver’s verses speak in dialogue
with work by other poets – and with prose poems gleaned from Chekhov’s fiction.
Together, the two "companion souls" make a "last, most astounding trip" that
recapitulates a life lived prodigally but well. Reprinting a number of his early
poems, Carver recalls the heady but numbered days of his youthful marriage. He
revisits his parents’ kitchen, catching a glimpse of his father in an adulterous
embrace. Invoking Czeslaw Milosz’s "Return to Krakow in 1880," he questions the
value of his work: "To win? / To lose? / What for, if the world will forget us
anyway." In poems of searing candor, he struggles to say "what really happened"
to his loved ones and to him. Finally, in the closing pages, he confronts the "stupendous
grief" of his impending death. The life journey ends in the Chekhovian twilight
of "Afterglow," a portrait of the artist mugging for the camera, his cigarette
at a "jaunty slant." The book’s coda, "Late Fragment," voices Carver’s hard-won
self-acceptance:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
The manuscript completed, Carver and Gallagher made a fishing trip to Alaska and
planned a "dream visit" to Moscow. "I’ll get there before you," he joked while
in the hospital. "I’m traveling faster." Released into his wife’s care, Carver
spent the last afternoon of his life on the porch of his newly built house,
overlooking his roses. That evening he and Gallagher watched the movie Dark Eyes
(1987), Nikita Mikhalhov’s Chekhovian pastiche. At 6:20 the next morning Carver
died in his sleep. Without revealing the urgency of his condition, during the
last months of his life Carver told interviewers what he hoped might be his
epitaph. "I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be called than a writer," he
said, "unless it’s a poet. Short-story writer, poet, occasional essayist." After
family services on 4 August he was buried in the Ocean View Cemetery in Port
Angeles. The grave overlooks the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the deep blue channel
that Carver had plied in his boat and celebrated in three books of poetry, Where
Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985), Ultramarine (1986), and In a
Marine Light (1987). On Sunday, 7 August, the London Times combined a front-page
review of Elephant with a hastily drafted obituary. Raymond Carver had reveled "the
strangeness concealed behind the banal," affirmed "the individuality that
survives mass-produced goods and look-alike lifestyles," and extracted "a poetry
out of the prosaic," wrote Peter Kemp. The title of his article was "The
American Chekhov."
As his uncanny kinship with Chekhov suggested, there was about Raymond Carver an
abiding doubleness. "I really do feel I’ve had two different lives," he told the
Paris Review in 1983. The "line of demarcation" was 2 June 1977, the day that
after ten years of progressive alcoholism Carver had stopped drinking. The
changeover was, in his view, nothing short of miraculous. "Toward the end of my
drinking career I was completely out of control and in a very grave place," he
recalled. By his thirty-ninth year alcohol had shattered his health, his work,
and his family. (He and his first wife, the former Maryann Burk, separated in
the summer of 1978 and were divorced in October 1982.) What followed over the
next ten years was, in the words of a poem that appeared in the New Yorker a few
weeks after Carver’s death, "Pure gravy."
At a writers conference in Dallas in November 1977, Carver, still new to
sobriety, had met Tess Gallagher, a poet who like himself was a native of the
Pacific Northwest, the child of an alcoholic father, and a survivor of a broken
marriage. Nine months later the two met again in El Paso, where Carver was a
visiting distinguished writer at the University of Texas. After a Chekhovian
courtship, including a date during which Gallagher nervously tore an earring
through her lobe, the two became housemates. First in El Paso and Tucson; then
in Syracuse, New York (where both taught at Syracuse University); and finally in
Gallagher’s hometown of Port Angeles, Carver and Gallagher lived and worked
together. The two writers became each other’s first readers. When their books
appeared – some twenty-five between them over the next ten years – they became
each other’s dedicatees. Eventually, they became coauthors, sharing credit for
Dostoevsky: A Screenplay (1985). As mutual influences, each pointed the other in
new directions. Established as a poet, Gallagher produced a collection of
stories, The Lover of Horses (1986). Carver, who had made his mark in prose,
brought out book after book of verse and received Poetry magazine’s Levinson
Prize in 1985. "This second life had been very full, very rewarding," he told an
interviewer in 1986, "and for that I’ll be eternally grateful."
Carver’s gratitude spilled over from his life into his work, not only in poems
such as "For Tess" (1985) and "The Gift" (1986) but also in stories such as "Cathedral"
(1981), "If It Please You" (1981), and "A Small, Good Thing" (1982). During the
1980s his once spare, skeptical fiction became increasingly expansive and
affirmative – in Mona Simpson’s phrase, "more generous." In Fires he restored to
original length several of the stories he had shortened for his so-called "minimalist"
masterpiece, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). True to its
title, Cathedral (1983) explored the transcendental dimensions of everyday
experience, much in the manner of Chekhov’s quietly religious stories "Easter
Eve" (1886) and "The Student" (1894). Last came the new work in Where I’m
Calling From: seven stories written during the final years of Carver’s life.
Once again his work was changing. Stylistically, his fiction was growing longer
and looser, novelistic in the manner of Chekhov’s late works "The Lady with the
Dog" (1899) and "In The Ravine" (1900). The subject matter of his stories was
changing, too. "Now they deal not just with husband and wife domestic
relationships," he told Paris-based Frank in 1987, "but with family
relationships: son and mother, or father and children." Moreover, as Carver
noted in a posthumously published introduction to American Fiction 88, he had
grown less interested in conclusiveness than in "the tapestry of relationship
and event."
Through it all a certain doubleness persisted. "In this second life, this post-drinking
life, I still retain a certain sense of pessimism," Carver said, echoing the
speaker of his story "Intimacy" (1986), who likewise holds to "the dark view of
things." From 1984 to 1988 he and Gallagher both lived in Port Angeles, but they
shuttled between their two houses, his in a blue-collar neighborhood, hers in an
upscale development. The doubleness appeared as well in the faces Carver showed
the world. In the jacket photo on Ultramarine, he sports a shiny suit and looks
every inch the famous writer. On Where I’m Calling From, he hunches in a well-worn
leather jacket, his only ornament a black onyx ring. "There was always the
inside and / the outside," run the opening lines of a poem in his first book,
Near Klamath (1968). "Part of me wanted help," says one of his characters two
decades later. "But there was another part." From such persistent self-divisions,
Carver wrought an art of haunting ambiguity.
During what he later called his "bad Raymond days," Carver twice went bankrupt.
But he was efficient even in his prodigality. He packed two lives into the space
of less than one, insisting up to beyond his dying day that he was twice-born
and happy. "Don’t weep for me," the speaker of "Gravy" tells his friends, "I’m a
lucky man." Born into unpromising circumstances, Carver made a virtue of
necessity by following a pragmatic aesthetic set forth in his poem "Sunday Night."
(First published in 1967, it is included in A New Path to the Waterfall.) "Make
use of the things around you," the poet tells himself, noting the rain outside
his window, the cigarette between his fingers, and the sounds of a drunken woman
stumbling in the kitchen. "Put it all in, / Make use." Early on, Carver crossed
the "tell-is-as-you-see-it" poetics of William Carlos Williams with the
unblushing candor of Charles Cukowski. "You are not your characters," he told an
interviewer in 1978, "but your characters are you." In later years he repeated
Rainer Maria Rilke’s dictum, "Poetry is experience." Without symbolic fanfare or
confessional hysteria, he invested personal experience with mystic resonance. "If
this sounds / like the story of a life," he says in one of his poems, "okay."
Carver was the son of a craftsman, and his writerly development followed the
stages of a craftsman’s training. After moving his family from Yakima to
Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he
began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real
writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled
in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now
as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line
criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these
values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On
Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver
maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing.
"In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is
also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that
makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks
at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of
the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company,
concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned
storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver
declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s
communication."
First under Gardner, then under the mentorship of Professor Richard C. Day of
Humboldt State College, Carver began writing stories. The earliest of them,
revised and collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and Furious
Seasons and Other Stories (1977), show him testing his voice among the echoes of
his predecessors. His first published story, "The Furious Seasons" (Selection,
Winter 1960-1961), is a long-drawn experiment in Faulknerian polyphony. His next,
"The Father" (Toyon, Spring 1961), offers a tight-lipped Kafkian fable of fewer
than five hundred words. Like nearly every writer of his generation, Carver was
pulled into Hemingway’s orbit. In 1963, the year of his graduation from Humboldt
State, he vascillated between reverence and rebellion, publishing both a
workmanlike Hemingway imitation, "Pastoral" (Western Humanities Review, Winter
1963), and a deconstructive parody, "The Aficionados" (Toyon, Spring 1963.)
For Professor Day, the story that "marked" Carver as a writer was "The Hair." (First
published in the Spring 1963 Toyon, it is reprinted in Those Days [1987] a small-press
book of Carver’s early writings.) Here as in "The Father," Carver’s topic is a
young man’s identity undone by a seemingly harmless irritant. Over the course of
an outwardly normal workday, the hair caught between Dave’s teeth erodes his
composure, rendering him feverish by nightfall and leaving his wife nonplussed.
But whereas "The Father" is brisk and impersonal, given almost wholly in
dialogue, "The Hair" is leisurely and lyrical. Although Kafkaesque in its theme,
stylistically the story calls to mind Chekhov’s early accounts of normality
disrupted: "An Upheaval," for example, or "Panic Fears" (both 1886). Further
experiments in the Chekhovian lyrical/objective manner followed. A pair of
stories, "The Ducks" (first published as "The Night the Mill Boss Died,"
Carolina Quarterly, Fall 1964), trace the nightmarish "awakenings" of,
respectively, a stolid working man and a sensitive young woman, each of whom
sees feelingly the awful emptiness of routinized existence.
Carver had found his register. As Michael Koepf wrote in 1981, "There’s a
Chekhovian clarity to Ray Carver’s stories but a Kafkaesque sense that something
is terribly wrong behind the scenes." Nonetheless, throughout the 1960s Carver
practiced other modes and styles. He spent the academic year 1963-1964 at the
Iowa Writers Workshop. (Lack of funds prevented him from staying a second year
to complete his M.F.A. degree.) In 1966 he published in the December magazine a
long, Jamesian story, "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" that Martha Foley
included in The Best American Short Stories 1967. He flirted with classicism ("Poseidon
and Company," Toyon, Spring 1963) and with fantasy ("Bright Red Apples," Gato
Magazine, Summer 1967). He experimented with unreliable narrators, first-person
retrospection in the manner of Sherwood Anderson, and Hemingwayesque regionalism.
"It was important for me to be a writer from the West," Carver recalled of the
period that led up to the publication of his first book of poems, Near Klamath,
by the English Club of Sacramento State College in 1968. During the middle 1960s
he worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital and sat in on classes at
Sacramento State with a third mentor, poet Dennis Schmitz. What with his
appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of his
first book, with the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year. Moreover, in
the summer of 1967 Carver accepted his first white-collar job. Moving his family
from the California midlands to the San Francisco suburbs, he became a textbook
editor at Science Research Associates (SRA) in Palo Alto. Over the next several
years, Carver’s writing took on the coloration of his new milieu, becoming dryer
and more sophisticated. The change can be seen in "A Night Out" (December , 1970;
retitled "Signals" in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?), a black-humored
account of a feuding couple’s dinner at a glitzy restaurant. Fittingly, the
final story of Carver’s apprenticeship looks both backward and ahead. Published
in the Autumn 1970 issue of Western Humanities Review as "Cartwheels," it
chronicles a city-dweller’s abortive return to the hinterland of her youth.
Retitled "How About This?" in the obsessively interrogative Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please? (1976), it can also be counted the first work of his journey-man
period.
By 1970 Carver had gained control of his medium and defined his "obsessions" (he
disliked the word theme). Following the example of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan
Ilyich (1886), he had taken for his province unheroic lives, "most simple and
most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Drawing on Chekhov and Kafka, he had
focused on hypnagogic moments during which socially constituted identity totters.
His Jamesian donnee was marriage, in particular "a certain terrible kind of
domesticity" that he termed "dis-ease." Perhaps most important, in both poetry
and fiction he had tapped a vein of "menace." As Marc Chenetier notes, this "motherlode
of threat" runs beneath the polished surface of Carver’s middle work like a
seismic fault.
Carver’s apprenticeship ended abruptly in September 1970, when his job at SRA
was terminated. The upheaval proved to be fortunate. Thanks to severance pay,
unemployment benefits, and an NEA Discovery Award, for the first time in his
life he could write full-time. Over the next nine months, he produced more than
half the stories that went into Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? In the process,
he began to see himself as a writer. "I discovered that if I went to my desk
every day and applied myself I could seriously and steadily write stories," he
later said. Moreover, his fiction underwent a sea change. "Something happened
during that time in the writing, to the writing. It went underground and then it
came up again, and it was bathed in a new light for me. I was starting to chip
away, down to the image, then the figure itself."
It was also during this period that Carver became associated with the mentor of
his journey-man decade, Gordon Lish. Through the 1960s Carver had followed John
Gardner’s advice and published solely in "little" magazines: respected
quarterlies like December that paid in copies rather than cash. Lish, formerly
Carver’s Palo Alto neighbor, had in 1969 become fiction editor of Esquire,
perhaps the "slickest" of the large-circulation magazines that paid real money.
Breaking with precedent, Carver sent one of his new stories, "The Neighbors," to
Esquire. Lish accepted it, cut the title by a word and published "Neighbors" in
June 1971. It was a turning point.
"Neighbors" tells the tale of an outwardly average couple, Bill and Arlene
Miller, who gradually turn the apartment of their out-of-town neighbors, the
Stones, into a psychosexual rumpus room. Furtively at first, then with abandon,
the caretakers invade the Stones’ privacy: nipping from their liquor cabinet,
cross-dressing in their clothes, and unearthing snapshots that promise
voyeuristic thrills. Flushed and lusty, the Millers make what promises to be a
climatic visit to the Stones’ apartment – only to find that Arlene has locked
the key inside. Abruptly barred from their fallen paradise, husband and wife
huddle outside the door, feeling an ill wind.
Without being altogether different from Carver’s earlier fiction, "Neighbors"
exhibits a surer control of structure, style, and audience. Carver himself
allowed that it had "captured and essential sense of mystery or strangeness,"
which he attributed to the story’s polished style. "For it is a highly ‘stylized’
story if it is anything," he noted, "and it is this that helps give it its value."
Textual revisions in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? indicate that Carver
developed his style under Lish’s influence. "He had a wonderful eye, and eye as
good as John Gardner’s," Carver later said. But whereas Gardner had advised
Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five, Lish advocated a more
radical aesthetic: the "minimalist" conviction that less is more. "Gordon
believed that if you could say it in five words instead of fifteen, use five
words." Under Lish’s mentorship, Carver’s fiction grew leaner and more laconic,
iceberg-like in its hidden depths. His subject matter changed as well. Editor
Lish’s interests were "paralysis, death, family, home, the things people live
with, the violence that is in us," as well as "flight" from all of the above.
These concerns became obsessions of Carver’s journeyman stories, which appeared
not only in the glossy pages of Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar but also in a host
of respected quarterlies and annuals. Indeed, the titles of Lish’s Esquire
anthologies, The Secret Life of Our Times (1973) and All Our Secrets Are the
Same (1976), suggest a leitmotif of Carver’s middle work. "You’re told time and
again when you’re young to write about what you know," Carver later said, "and
what do you know better than your own secrets?" With rare exceptions, his
stories of this period end in devastating moments of exposure. "Are you there,
Arnold?" asks the wife of a character who has tangled his identity in a web of
his own masking. "You don’t sound like yourself."
Surely the high point of Carver’s journeyman years should have been the
appearance of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Published in March 1976 by
McGraw-Hill under its new Gordon Lish imprint, this collection of twenty-two
stories was targeted to introduce an "increasingly influential" writer to a
wider public. It succeeded admirably, bringing Carver a National Book Award
nomination in 1977, the same year that a second collection of his stories,
Furious Seasons