raymond carver essay on writing

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Raymond Carver “On Writing”: Words of Advice for Poets, Short Story Writers, even Novelists

Before diving into my 2023 project of reading a short story a day from the Library of America’s Carver: Collected Stories , I read his brief essay “On Writing” and jotted some bon mots (French for ‘words that seem more important than others’). Of course, no one gives a damn about a writer’s opinions on writing until said writer has “made it.” I’ll give Ray that. Loved his collected poems, so why wouldn’t I respond in kind to what he is most famous for?

Without further ado, here are some Carver-isms for those plying the trade:

“This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.”

“Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. ‘Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.’ Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has ‘fundamental accuracy of statement’ going for him, he’s at least on the right track.

“I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: ‘…and suddenly everything became clear to him.’ I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all—what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation.

“I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say ‘No cheap tricks’ to a group of writing students. That should be on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to ‘No tricks.’ Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span.”

“Too often ‘experimentation’ is a license to be careless, silly, or imitative in the writing. Even worse, a license to try to brutalize or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that’s all—a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognizably human, a place of interest only to a few scientific specialists.

“It should be noted that real experiment in fiction is original, hard-earned and cause for rejoicing. But someone else’s way of looking at things—Barthelme’s, for instance—should not be chased after by other writers. It won’t work. There is only one Barthelme, and for another writer to try to appropriate Barthelme’s peculiar sensibility or mise en scene under the rubric of innovation is for the writer to mess around with chaos and disaster and, worse, self-deception.”

“It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me. I hate sloppy or haphazard writing whether it flies under the banner of experimentation or else is just clumsily rendered realism. In Isaac Babel’s wonderful short story, ‘Guy de Maupassant,’ the narrator has this to say about the writing of fiction: ‘No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.’ This too ought to go on a three-by-five.”

“If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some reason—if the words are in any way blurred—the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader’s own artistic sense will simply not be engaged. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing ‘weak specification.’”

“But if the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave.”

“I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it’s good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won’t be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.

“V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.’ First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we’re lucky—that word again—have even further consequences and meaning. The short story writer’s task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He’ll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things—like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes.”

A final interesting aside about this essay: Carver quotes Flannery O’Connor on how “she put together a short story whose ending she could not even guess at until she was there.” You often hear this about novelists who hate outlining in advance. They just write and let their characters provide directions as the novel progresses (a strategy called “pantsing” by practitioners of the trade).

Carver found O’Connor’s words liberating. He had considered it his own dark secret—how he’d start stories with a particular line he loved but without any real sense of where the story should go. That’s right. He often had no idea how the line would inform a story and a character’s truth about life. That nugget should reassure some writers out there. The ones who need a license to just go. Just write. Just see where it all leads because usually it leads SOMEwhere.

What, after all, is revision for? Once you get to the story’s Promised Land (read: the ending), you can go at it again, revising, ultimately editing for the precision of those periods and commas. You know. The stuff of Babel. The stuff you’d be proud to put your name to because any story or poem or novel worth writing is worth writing the right way.

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Alcohol, Emotion, and Tension in Raymond Carver’s Fiction

Sara kornfeld simpson.

Read the instructor’s introduction Read the writer’s comments and bio Download this essay

In “The Art of Evasion,” Leon Edel complains that Ernest Hemingway’s fiction evades emotion by featuring superficial characters who drink: “In Hemingway’s novels people order drinks—they are always ordering drinks—then they drink, then they order some more . . . it is a world of superficial action and almost wholly without reflection” (Edel 170). If Edel fails to recognize the deep emotional tension in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” where one of the characters reflects critically, “that’s all we do isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks” (211), then one can only imagine the qualms he would have with Raymond Carver’s stories. As Charles May notes in “‘Do You See What I’m Saying?’: The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver,” literary “critics often complain that there is no depth in Carver, that his stories are all surface detail” (49). A self-avowed “fan of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories” (“Fires” 19), Carver also saturates his stories with alcohol; his characters often consume inordinate amounts of alcohol and generally struggle with emotional expression. Do Carver’s inebriated and/or alcoholic characters drink to evade emotional connections? Is his fictional world superficial and devoid of tension?

Carver’s critical essays suggest a radically alternative approach to these issues. In “On Writing,” Carver insists that in a short story, “what creates tension . . . is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things” (17). This suggests that critics who respond solely to the characters’ consumption of alcohol to blunt or evade emotion on the “surface of things” miss much of the emotional tension created or revealed by alcohol underneath the “visible action” of the story. In the same essay, Carver notes, “I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories . . . There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent” (17). This essay will explore the many levels on which alcohol functions to enhance emotional expression and to create tension, a “sense of menace,” in four of Carver’s short stories. Analyzing the relationship between alcohol, emotion, and tension provides a key to the central conflict in these stories, for alcohol consumption is usually parallel and proportional to the rising action, leading to the stories’ most emotionally profound climaxes. Alcohol often acts as a social lubricant, creating emotional bonds among strangers or acquaintances, releasing the characters’ inhibitions and allowing them to reveal their deep fears and tensions in the stories they tell in their drunken state. Paradoxically, however, the characters’ loss of control while under the influence of alcohol can also menace or destroy emotional bonds, relationships, and even bodies and lives. The mysterious, inescapable, paradoxical power of alcohol pervades Raymond Carver’s fiction, shaping and complicating his characters’ identities, relationships, and lives.

In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” alcohol serves as a social lubricant that diminishes inhibitions, which allows hidden tensions and emotions to emerge. On the surface, this is a story of two couples drinking gin and talking about love by telling stories. As Charles May explains, through their stories the characters “encounter those most basic mysteries of human experience that cannot be explained by rational means” (40), including the intricate connection between love and violence. Mel’s wife, Terri, reveals that “the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her” (138). This inner story drives tension within the larger story by uncovering a hidden strain between Terri and Mel. Terri begs, “He did love me though Mel. Grant me that . . . he was willing to die for it” (140). After undergoing such trauma, she must cling to this view in order to cope. But Mel refuses her this, saying “I sure as hell wouldn’t call it love” (142); he too claims ownership of the story because Terri’s first husband had threatened his life several times. As Mel imbibes, he becomes less playful, less eager to reconcile their difference, and the tension mounts. Once intoxicated, Mel’s “concrete words” reflect a complete lack of inhibition, as he tells Terri to “just shut up for once in your life” (146). The tension between them is unmasked as alcohol mediates between their outer and inner lives, revealing the opposing emotions warring “just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface” of their complex relationship (“On Writing” 17).

As he drinks, Mel becomes more and more loquacious, gradually revealing his deep fears about the impermanence of love—and the permanence of death. At the beginning of the story, when he is sober, Mel insists that “real love is nothing less than spiritual love” (137), but later he asks, “What do any of us really know about love? . . . It seems to me we’re just beginners at love” (144). He now defines love as “physical” and “sentimental,” and no longer uses the word “spiritual;” he begins favoring cupiditas over caritas . Ultimately, the purpose of Mel’s monologue is to come to terms with the fleeting nature of love and life. Freed of all of his inhibitions by alcohol, Mel reveals his true, bleak, frightening perception of love: “if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory” (145). This concept of ephemeral love differs markedly from the permanence, profoundness, and eternal devotion associated with spiritual love, and is drawn forth from Mel as a result of his drunkenness. Although Mel insists that he is sober, that “I don’t have to be drunk to say what I think. I mean, we’re all just talking, right?” (145), he actually does need alcohol to say what he really thinks. As a result of his drunkenness, we are exposed to a tension within him as he struggles with his idealized and realistic concepts of love, as well as with the terror of impermanence and death.

Mel acknowledges his own confusion about love as he introduces the other story-within-the-story, but has great difficulty conveying the emotional meaning of this story because alcohol progressively blurs his speech and thought processes. Mel, a cardiologist, recounts an old couple’s struggle to survive after a drunk driver runs into their camper. He cannot finish his story because alcohol has robbed him of coherence. His language, the “concrete word,” becomes crude and vulgar as he tries to prove his point about true love: “Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed . . . I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife . . . he couldn’t look at the fucking woman” (151). Alcohol has interfered with his thought process so significantly that he cannot articulate the emotional significance of his story; he can only ask, “Do you see what I’m saying?” (151). He cannot explain that this is an example of the more permanent love he yearns for but fears he may never experience. The couple’s deep spiritual love eludes his interpretive powers, and he destroys its purity with his profane language. This may appear to be emotional superficiality, but it is not; Mel is grappling with very deep emotions, both released and muddled by alcohol. The story ends abruptly, almost theatrically, when the gin runs out. Carver provides no resolution to the tension revealed under the influence of alcohol; he leaves the characters in the dark, listening only to their hearts beat.

“Chef’s House” also explores issues of impermanence, but tension arises from alcohol very differently in this story. In “Chef’s House,” not a single drop of alcohol is consumed, yet it is the ever-present menace just under the surface of the characters’ lives. Nowhere is Carver’s desire to create “a sense that something is imminent” (“On Writing,” 17) more powerfully realized. Edna decides to give up everything to move back in with her ex-husband Wes, a recovering alcoholic. They move into a house owned by Chef, Wes’s sponsor, and start spending a blissful summer there together. Edna yearns for permanence, symbolized by her wedding ring: “I found myself wishing the summer wouldn’t end. I knew better, but after a month of being with Wes in Chef’s house, I put my wedding ring back on” (28). Their bliss, threatened by the menace of Wes’s thin grasp on sobriety, is disrupted when Chef informs Wes that they must move out of the house so that his daughter can move in. Carver brings the menace to life; the day Chef comes, “clouds hung over the water” (29). Under this cloud, Wes succumbs to his perceived destiny as an alcoholic: “I’m sorry, I can’t talk like somebody I’m not. I’m not somebody else” (32). When Wes decides to resume drinking, he chooses to end his relationship with Edna and to forget the emotional connection they shared. They must clean out Chef’s house, and then “that will be the end of it” (33). Wes’s sense of inevitability underscores Carver’s conviction that “Menace is there, and it’s a palpable thing” in most people’s lives (“Interview with Raymond Carver” 67). Wes and Edna both feel powerless against the irresistible draw, the mysterious menace, of alcohol.

Alcohol also menaces the characters’ relationships and identities in “Where I’m Calling From.” Set in a drying-out facility, the story is driven forward by the characters’ fear of the lure of alcohol, of a relapse, of the impermanence of sobriety (ominously, the narrator is on his second stay). The menace looms larger when the narrator witnesses a fellow addict’s seizure, as his body adjusts to withdrawal from alcohol. This awakens the narrator’s deep fears of losing control of his body and his life: “But what happened to Tiny is something I won’t ever forget. Old Tiny flat on the floor, kicking his heels. So every time this little flitter starts up anywhere, I draw some breath and wait to find myself on my back, looking up, somebody’s fingers in my mouth” (129). To distract himself from his body’s cravings and his battle for self-control, the narrator drinks coffee and listens to a newcomer’s story: “J.P quits talking. He just clams up. What’s going on? I’m listening. It’s helping me relax, for one thing. It’s taking me away from my own situation” (134). Ironically, in this story, alcohol acts as a social lubricant, but not as a result of intoxication; talking and being social are the only things protecting these men from their need for alcohol. The men stay in control by telling each other about times when they had no control. J.P. remembers he had everything he wanted in life, “but for some reason—who knows why we do what we do?’—his drinking picks up . . . then a time comes, he doesn’t know why, when he makes the switch from beer to gin-and-tonic . . . Things got out of hand. But he kept on drinking. He couldn’t stop” (133-4). Alcohol, which gave him the confidence to ask for his first kiss, destroyed J.P.’s marriage to the love of his life, his happy home and children, and the job of his dreams. Most threatening of all, neither man can understand why he threw it all away. They tell their stories to stave off this tension, to try to attain control over the impermanence of sobriety and the menace that has shaped and ruined their lives.

“Cathedral” presents alcohol not as a destructive force, but as a constructive one, a means to build emotional connections between strangers, a way of liberating the mind and expanding consciousness. Alcohol functions in a positive capacity in this story, releasing tension, liberating the narrator, allowing him to see and connect in a way he is only open to do because he is stoned. The story opens with tension at its peak, with the narrator in his most jealous and closed-minded state. A friend of his wife, a man she has a close emotional connection with, a blind man, is coming to visit. The wife used to read to the blind man, and after she left, she kept in close contact, constantly sending and receiving tapes on which they would tell each other every detail about their lives. The narrator is bothered by their closeness, that “they’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man,” (210), irritated when his wife dismisses his jealousy with the retort, “you don’t have any friends” (212). He is most affected by the fact that “on the last day in office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She tried to write a poem about it [as she did] after something really important happened to her” (210). Her ineradicable memory of this intimate touch awakens her husband’s jealousy and fears of betrayal and abandonment, which intensifies his disgust with blindness: “And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed . . . A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (209). The superficiality of his vision is underscored by his lengthy description of the physical appearance of the blind man, which is salient in Carver’s writing because characters are typically minimally described.

As the story progresses, drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana release this tightly strung man’s inhibitions, facilitate male bonding, and finally expand and deepen his narrow, superficial vision. From the start, alcohol is introduced in a positive light, called a “pastime,” and received good-naturedly, even jokingly, by the blind man. Although the narrator begins drinking to drown out his jealousy of the emotional connection between his wife and the blind man, the end result of his intoxication, social lubrication, allows the man to reach an epiphany. Because his wife is smaller, she promptly falls asleep under the influence of the alcohol and drugs they all consume together, and neither man wakes her. When she no longer speaks, the source of tension between the two men is relieved and they are able to begin bonding. As the narrator drinks, he begins to appreciate the company of the blind man, and gradually realizes the emotional emptiness of his own life: “every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time” (222). Drinking and bonding with the blind man allow the narrator to confront his own loneliness and emotional evasions, and his mind and life start to open to new possibilities.

Gradually, guided by the blind man’s more expansive vision, the narrator begins thinking beyond the confines of his own narrow reality. As they “watch” a television program about cathedrals together, he suddenly remarks to the blind man, “something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is?” (223). Although he describes the physical appearance of cathedrals, the narrator cannot capture their spiritual essence and begins to realize the limits of his perfectly healthy vision. Under the liberating influence of alcohol and drugs, he responds positively to the blind man’s suggestion that they draw a cathedral together, and allows himself to experience a physical and emotional connection that would have disgusted his sober self: “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (228). This intimacy of hand touching hand, one man’s fingers riding another’s, recalls and transforms his vision of the blind man’s hand touching his wife’s face. Facing his deepest fear of real intimacy, the narrator inhabits and experiences the other man’s blindness; he closes his eyes, and then does not want to open them again, because he “didn’t feel like [he] was inside anything” (228). He feels completely free, no longer possessed by his jealousy, tension, or fear. The alcohol endows him with a liberating vulnerability he would never have been brave enough to reach were he not intoxicated. Although this story, too, ends with darkness, it is created by the narrator closing his eyes in an act of communion; the darkness signifies not unresolved tension or emotional evasion, but connection and revelation. The narrator has achieved a profound transformation of vision while under the influence of alcohol.

Alcohol possesses a paradoxical power in Raymond Carver’s short stories. The characters use alcohol to blunt their fear of death and the impermanence of life and love. But their consumption of alcohol in many cases brings them closer to death, and can just as quickly ruin love as stimulate it. Alcohol allows them to loosen up, to say and do things they would otherwise never be able to do, to tell their stories, but the intoxication robs them of their coherence. If they are able to finish their stories, it is possible that they won’t remember the profound nature of their intoxicated experiences in a few short hours. Although alcohol acts as a social lubricant that allows the characters to connect with one another through stories, it also creates and surfaces tensions between loved ones and friends, and can even end up breaking connections. Alcohol gives and takes, pushes and pulls, and places the stories in what Carver in his essay “On Writing” calls “relentless motion” (17), driving tension forward as a sometimes intimate, sometimes menacing cosmic force that is nearly impossible for many of the characters to resist, control, or comprehend.

Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral . New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1983. Print.

— “Fires.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories . Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983. 19–30. Print.

— “On Writing.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories . Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983. 13–18. Print.

— “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories . New York: Vintage Books, 1989. 137–54. Print.

Edel, Leon, and Robert P. Weeks, Ed. “The Art of Evasion.” Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays . Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963. 169–171. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Edition . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987. Print.

May, Charles E. “‘Do You See What I’m Saying?’: The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver.” The Yearbook of English Studies (2001): 39–49. Print.

McCaffery, Larry, Sinda Gregory, and Raymond Carver. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review (1985): 62–82. Print.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Short Story › Analysis of Raymond Carver’s Short Stories

Analysis of Raymond Carver’s Short Stories

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 16, 2020 • ( 0 )

Nearly everything written about Raymond Carver (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) begins with two observations: He is a minimalist, and he writes about working-class people. Even when the critic is sympathetic, this dual categorization tends to stigmatize Carver as a minor artist writing little stories about little people. Although it is true that most of Carver’s characters belong to the working class, their problems are universal. Carver writes about divorce, infidelity, spiritual alienation, alcoholism, bankruptcy, rootlessness, and existential dread; none of these afflictions is peculiar to the working class, and in fact, all were once more common to members of the higher social classes.

Carver was a minimalist by preference and by necessity. His lifelong experience had been with working-class people. It would have been inappropriate to write about simple people in an ornate style, and, furthermore, his limited education would have made it impossible for him to do so effectively. The spare, objective style that he admired in some of Hemingway’s short stories, such as “The Killers” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” was perfectly suited to Carver’s needs.

The advantage and appeal of minimalism in literature is that it draws readers into the story by forcing them to conceptualize missing details. One drawback is that it allows insecure writers to imply that they know more than they know and mean more than they are actually saying. This was true of the early stories that Carver collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? A good example of Carver’s strengths and weaknesses is a short story in that volume titled “Fat.”

As the title suggests, “Fat” is about a fat man. It is little more than a character sketch; nothing happens in the story. Throughout his career, Carver based stories and poems on people or incidents that he observed or scraps of conversation that he overheard; these things seemed to serve as living metaphors or symbols with broader implications. Carver frames his story by setting it in a restaurant and by describing the fat man from the point of view of a waitress. She says that she has never seen such a fat person in her life and is somewhat awestruck by his appearance, by his gracious manners, and by the amount of food that he can consume at one sitting. After she goes home at night, she is still thinking about him. She says that she herself feels “terrifically fat”; she feels depressed, and finally ends by saying, “My life is going to change. I feel it.”

The reader can feel it too but might be hard pressed to say what “it” is. The story leaves a strong impression but an ambiguous one. No two readers would agree on what the story means, if anything. It demonstrates Carver’s talent for characterization through dialogue and action, which was his greatest asset. Both the waitress and her fat customer come alive as people, partially through the deliberate contrast between them. His treatment of the humble, kindly waitress demonstrates his sensitivity to the feelings of women. His former wife, Maryann Carver, said of him, “Ray loved and understood women, and women loved him.”

“Fat” also shows Carver’s unique sense of humor, which was another trait that set him apart from other writers. Carver was so constituted that he could not help seeing the humorous side of the tragic or the grotesque. His early, experimental short stories most closely resemble the early short stories of William Saroyan reprinted in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other Stories (1934) and subsequent collections of his stories that appeared in the 1930’s. Saroyan is perhaps best remembered for his novel The Human Comedy (1943), and it might be said that the human comedy was Carver’s theme and thesis throughout his career. Like the early stories of Saroyan, Carver’s stories are the tentative vignettes of a novice who knows very well that he wants to be a writer but still does not know exactly what he wants to say.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? includes the tragicomic “Neighbors,” the first of Carver’s stories to appear in a slick magazine with a large circulation. Gordon Lish, editor of the men’s magazine Esquire , recognized Carver’s talent early but did not immediately accept any of his submissions. Lish’s welcome encouragement, painful rejections, and eventual acceptance represented major influences in Carver’s career. “Neighbors” deals with ordinary people but has a surrealistic humor, which was to become a Carver trademark.

Bill and Arlene Miller, a couple in their thirties, have agreed to feed their neighbors’ cat and water the plants while they are away. The Stones’ apartment holds a mysterious fascination, and they both find excuses to enter it more often than necessary. Bill helps himself to the Chivas Regal, eats food out of their refrigerator, and goes through their closets and dresser drawers. He tries on some of Jim Stone’s clothes and lies on their bed masturbating. Then he goes so far as to try on Harriet Stone’s brassiere and panties and then a skirt and blouse. Bill’s wife also disappears into the neighbors’ apartment on her own mysterious errands. They fantasize that they have assumed the identities of their neighbors, whom they regard as happier people leading fuller lives. The shared guilty adventure arouses both Bill and Arlene sexually, and they have better lovemaking than they have experienced in a long while. Then disaster strikes: Arlene discovers that she has inadvertently locked the Stones’ key inside the apartment. The cat may starve; the plants may wither; the Stones may find evidence that they have been rummaging through their possessions. The story ends with the frightened Millers clinging to each other outside their lost garden of Eden.

This early story displays some of Carver’s strengths: his sense of humor, his powers of description, and his ability to characterize people through what they do and say. It also has the two main qualities that editors look for: timeliness and universality. It is therefore easy to understand why Lish bought this piece after rejecting so many others. “Neighbors” portrays the alienated condition of many contemporary Americans of all social classes.

Neighbors, however, has certain characteristics that have allowed hostile critics to damn Carver’s stories as “vignettes,” “anecdotes,” “sketches,” and “slices-of-life.” For one thing, readers realize that the terror they briefly share with the Millers is unnecessary: They can go to the building manager for a passkey or call a locksmith. It is hard to understand how two people who are so bold about violating their neighbors’ apartment should suddenly feel so helpless in the face of an everyday mishap. The point of the story is blunted by the unsatisfactory ending.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

The publication of the collection titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love made Carver famous. These short, rather ambiguous stories also got him permanently saddled with the term “minimalist.” Carver never accepted that label and claimed that he did not even understand what it meant. He had a healthy mistrust of critics who attempted to categorize writers with such epithets: It was as if he sensed their antagonism and felt that they themselves were trying to “minimize” him as an author. A friend of Carver said that he thought a minimalist was a “taker-out” rather than a “putter-in.” In that sense, Carver was a minimalist. It was his practice to go over and over his stories trying to delete all superfluous words and even superfluous punctuation marks. He said that he knew he was finished with a story when he found himself putting back punctuation marks that he had previously deleted. It would be more accurate to call Carver a perfectionist than a minimalist.

Why Don’t You Dance?

One of the best short stories reprinted in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is “Why Don’t You Dance?” It is one of the most representative, the most “Carveresque” of all Carver’s short stories. A man who is never given a name has placed all of his furniture and personal possessions outside on the front lawn and has whimsically arranged them as if they were still indoors. He has run an extension cord from the house and hooked up lamps, a television, and a record player. He is sitting outside drinking whiskey, totally indifferent to the amazement and curiosity of his neighbors. One feels as if the worst is over for him: He is the survivor of some great catastrophe, like a marooned sailor who has managed to salvage some flotsam and jetsam.

A young couple, referred to throughout the story as “the boy” and “the girl,” drive by and assume that the man is holding a yard sale. They stop and inquire about prices. The man offers them drinks. The boy and girl get into a party spirit. They put old records on the turntable and start dancing in the driveway. The man is eager to get rid of his possessions and accepts whatever they are willing to offer. He even makes them presents of things that they do not really want.Weeks later, the girl is still talking about the man, but she cannot find the words to express what she really feels about the incident. Perhaps she and her young friends will understand the incident much better after they have worked and worried and bickered and moved from one place to another for ten or twenty years.

Why Don’t You Dance? is a humorous treatment of a serious subject, in characteristic Carver fashion. The man’s tragedy is never spelled out, but the reader can piece the story together quite easily from the clues. Evidently there has been a divorce or separation. Evidently there were financial problems, which are so often associated with divorce, and the man has been evicted. Judging from the fact that he is doing so much drinking, alcoholism is either the cause or the effect of his other problems. The man has given up all hope and now sees hope only in other people, represented by this young couple just starting out in life and trying to collect a few pieces of furniture for their rented apartment.

Divorce, infidelity, domestic strife, financial worry, bankruptcy, alcoholism, rootlessness, consumerism as a substitute for intimacy, and disillusionment with the American Dream are common themes throughout Carver’s stories. The symbol of a man sitting outside on his front lawn drinking whiskey, with all of his worldly possessions placed around him but soon to be scattered to the four winds, is a striking symbol of modern human beings. It is easy to acquire possessions but nearly impossible to keep a real home.

Carver did not actually witness such an event but had a similar episode described to him by a friend and eventually used it in this story. A glance at the titles of some of Carver’s stories shows his penchant for finding in his mundane environment external symbols of subjective states: “Fat,” “Gazebo,” “Vitamins,” “Feathers,” “Cathedral,” “Boxes,” “Menudo.” The same tendency is even more striking in the titles of his poems, for example, “The Car,” “Jean’s TV,” “NyQuil,” “My Dad’s Wallet,” “The Phone Booth,” “Heels.”

In his famous essay The Philosophy of Composition , Edgar Allan Poe wrote that he wanted an image that would be “emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance,” so he created his famous raven perched on the bust of Pallas Athena and croaking the refrain “nevermore.” To highlight the difference in Carver’s method, Carver might have seen a real raven perched on a real statue, and it would have suggested mournful and never-ending remembrance. This kind of “reverse symbolism” seems characteristic of modern American minimalists in general, and Carver’s influence on their movement is paramount.

Poe states that he originally thought of using a parrot in his famous poem but rejected that notion because it did not seem sufficiently poetic and might have produced a comical effect; if Carver had been faced with such a choice, he probably would have chosen the parrot. What distinguishes Carver from most minimalists is a sense of humor that is impervious to catastrophe: Like the man on the front lawn, Carver had been so far down that everyplace else looked better. He would have concurred heartily with William Shakespeare’s often-quoted lines in As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600):

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like a toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head

On a different level, “Why Don’t You Dance?” reflects Carver’s maturation as a person and an author. The responsibilities of parenthood as well as the experience of teaching young students were bringing home to him the fact that his personal problems could hold instructional utility for others. As a teacher of creative writing, placed more and more in the limelight, interacting with writers, editors, professors, and interviewers, he was being forced to formulate his own artistic credo. The older man in the story sees himself in his young yard-sale customers and wants to help them along in life; this is evidently a reflection of the author’s own attitude. Consequently, the story itself is not merely an autobiographical protest or lament like some of Carver’s earlier works but is designed to deliver a message—perhaps a warning—for the profit of others. The melancholy wisdom of Carver’s protagonist reflects Carver’s own mellowing as he began to appreciate the universally tragic nature of human existence.

Where I’m Calling From

“Where I’m Calling From” is a great American short story. It originally appeared in the prestigious The New Yorker , was reprinted in the collection titled Cathedral, and appears once again as the title story in the best and most comprehensive collection of Carver’s stories, Where I’m Calling From . The story is narrated by an alcoholic staying at a “drying-out facility,” an unpretentious boardinghouse where plain meals are served family style and there is nothing to do but read, watch television, or talk. The bucolic atmosphere is strongly reminiscent of the training- camp scenes in one of Hemingway’s most brilliant short stories, “Fifty Grand.”

The narrator in Carver’s story tells about his drinking problems and interweaves his own biography with that of a friend he has made at the drying-out facility, a man he refers to as J. P. The only thing unusual about their stories is that J. P. is a chimney sweep and is married to a chimney sweep. Both J. P. and the narrator ruined their marriages through their compulsive drinking and are now terrified that they will be unable to control their craving once they get out of the facility. They have made vows of abstinence often enough before and have not kept them. They have dried out before and gone right back to the bottle.

Carver manages to convey all the feelings of guilt, remorse, terror, and helplessness experienced by people who are in the ultimate stages of alcoholism. It is noteworthy that, whereas his alcoholic protagonists of earlier stories were often isolated individuals, the protagonist-narrator of “Where I’m Calling From” not only is actively seeking help but also is surrounded by others with the same problem. This feature indicates that Carver had come to realize that the way to give his stories the point or meaning that they had previously often lacked was to suggest the existence of largescale social problems of which his characters are victims. He had made what author Joan Didion called “the quantum leap” of realizing that his personal problems were actually social problems. The curse of alcoholism affects all social classes; even people who never touch a drop of alcohol can have their lives ruined by it.

“The Bridle” first appeared in The New Yorker and was reprinted in Cathedral. It is an example of Carver’s mature period, a highly artistic story fraught with social significance. The story is told from the point of view of one of Carver’s faux-naïf narrators. Readers immediately feel that they know this good-natured soul, a woman named Marge who manages an apartment building in Arizona and “does hair” as a sideline. She tells about one of the many families who stayed a short while and then moved on as tumbleweeds being blown across the desert. Although Carver typically writes about Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, this part of Arizona is also “Carver Country,” a world of freeways, fast-food restaurants, Laundromats, mindless television entertainment, and transient living accommodations, a homogenized world of strangers with minimum-wage jobs and tabloid mentalities.

Mr. Holits pays the rent in cash every month, suggesting that he recently went bankrupt and has neither a bank account nor credit cards. Carver, like minimalists in general, loves such subtle clues. Mrs. Holits confides to Marge that they had owned a farm in Minnesota. Her husband, who “knows everything there is about horses,” still keeps one of his bridles, evidently symbolizing his hope that he may escape from “Carver Country.” Mrs. Holits proves more adaptable: She gets a job as a waitress, a favorite occupation among Carver characters. Her husband, however, cannot adjust to the service industry jobs, which are all that are available to a man his age with his limited experience. He handles the money, the two boys are his sons by a former marriage, and he has been accustomed to making the decisions, yet he finds that his wife is taking over the family leadership in this brave new postindustrial world.

Like many other Carver male characters, Holits becomes a heavy drinker. He eventually injures himself while trying to show off his strength at the swimming pool. One day the Holitses, with their young sons, pack and drive off down the long, straight highway without a word of explanation. When Marge trudges upstairs to clean the empty apartment, she finds that Holits has left his bridle behind.

The naïve narrator does not understand the significance of the bridle, but the reader feels its poignancy as a symbol. The bridle is one of those useless objects that everyone carts around and is reluctant to part with because it represents a memory, a hope, or a dream. It is an especially appropriate symbol because it is so utterly out of place in one of those two-story, frame-stucco, look-alike apartment buildings that disfigure the landscape and are the dominant features of “Carver Country.” Gigantic economic forces beyond the comprehension of the narrator have driven this farm family from their home and turned them into the modern equivalent of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

There is, however, a big difference between Carver and Steinbeck. Steinbeck believed in and prescribed the panacea of socialism; Carver has no prescriptions to offer. He seems to have no faith either in politicians or in preachers. His characters are more likely to go to church to play bingo than to say prayers or sing hymns. Like many of his contemporary minimalists, he seems to have gone beyond alienation, beyond existentialism, beyond despair. God is dead; so what else is new?

Carver’s working-class characters are far more complicated than Steinbeck’s Joad family. Americans have become more sophisticated as a result of the influence of radio, motion pictures, television, the Internet, more abundant educational opportunities, improved automobiles and highways, cheap air transportation, alcohol and drugs, more leisure time, and the fact that their work is less enervating because of the proliferation of labor-saving machinery. Many Americans have also lost their religious faith, their work ethic, their class consciousness, their family loyalty, their integrity, and their dreams. Steinbeck saw it happening and showed how the Joad family was splitting apart after being uprooted from the soil; Carver’s people are the Joad family a half-century down the road. Oddly enough, Carver’s mature stories do not seem nihilistic or despairing because they contain the redeeming qualities of humor, compassion, and honesty.

Where I’m Calling From is the most useful volume of Carver’s short stories because it contains some of the best stories that had been printed in earlier books plus a generous selection of his later and best efforts. One of the new stories reprinted in Where I’m Calling From is “Boxes,” which first appeared in The New Yorker. When Carver’s stories began to be regularly accepted by The New Yorker, it was an indication that he had found the style of self-expression that he had been searching for since the beginning of his career. It was also a sign that his themes were evoking sympathetic chords in the hearts and minds of The New Yorkers’ middle and upper-class readership, the people at whom that magazine’s sophisticated advertisements for diamonds, furs, highrise condominiums, and luxury vacation cruises are aimed.

Boxes is written in Carver’s characteristic tragicomic tone. It is a story in which the faux-naïf narrator, a favorite with Carver, complains about the eccentric behavior of his widowed mother who, for one specious reason or another, is always changing her place of residence. She moves so frequently that she usually seems to have the bulk of her worldly possessions packed in boxes scattered about on the floor. One of her complaints is about the attitude of her landlord, whom she calls “King Larry.” Larry Hadlock is a widower and a relatively affluent property owner. It is evident through Carver’s unerring dialogue that what she is really bitter about is Larry’s indifference to her own fading charms. In the end, she returns to California but telephones to complain about the traffic, the faulty air-conditioning unit in her apartment, and the indifference of management. Her son vaguely understands that what his mother really wants, though she may not realize it herself, is love and a real home and that she can never have these things again in her lifetime no matter where she moves.

What makes the story significant is its universality: It reflects the macrocosm in a microcosm. In “Boxes,” the problem touched on is not only the rootlessness and anonymity of modern life but also the plight of millions of aging people, who are considered by some to be useless in their old age and a burden to their children. It was typical of Carver to find a metaphor for this important social phenomenon in a bunch of cardboard boxes.

Carver uses working-class people as his models, but he is not writing solely about the working class. It is simply the fact that all Americans can see themselves in his little, inarticulate, bewildered characters that makes Carver an important writer in the dominant tradition of American realism, a worthy successor to Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner, all of whom wrote about humble people. Someday it may be generally appreciated that, despite the odds against him and despite the antipathy of certain mandarins, Raymond Carver managed to become the most important American fiction writer in the second half of the twentieth century.

Other major works Anthology: American Short Story Masterpieces, 1987 (with Tom Jenks). Miscellaneous: Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, 1983; No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings, 1991 (revised and expanded as Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, 2001). Poetry: Near Klamath, 1968; Winter Insomnia, 1970; At Night the Salmon Move, 1976; Two Poems, 1982; If It Please You, 1984; This Water, 1985; Where Water Comes Together with Other Water, 1985; Ultramarine, 1986; A New Path to the Waterfall, 1989; All of Us: The Collected Poems, 1996. Screenplay: Dostoevsky, 1985.

Bibliography Bugeja, Michael. “Tarnish and Silver: An Analysis of Carver’s Cathedral.” South Dakota Review 24, no. 3 (1986): 73-87. Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Carver, Raymond. “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk.” The New York Times Book Review, February 15, 1981, 9. Gentry, Marshall Bruce, and William L. Stull, eds. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Halpert, Sam. Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. ____________, ed. When We Talk About Raymond Carver. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991. Kesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Nesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. Powell, Jon. “The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of Perpetual Uncertainty.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Fall, 1994): 647-656. Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Scofield, Martin. “Story and History in Raymond Carver.” Critique 40 (Spring, 1999): 266-280.

Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories

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By Stephen King

Nov. 19, 2009

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.

Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”: “The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”

Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. In 1956, the Carvers relocated to Chester, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif.; Chico, Calif.; Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County . . . and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.

Through most of those early years of restless travel, he dragged his two children and his long-suffering wife, Maryann, the mostly unsung heroine of Sklenicka’s tale, behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper of a jalopy that no car dealer in his right mind would take in trade. It’s no wonder that his friends nicknamed him Running Dog. Or that when his mother took him into downtown Yakima, she kept him on a leash.

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Longtime A.A.’s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out-of-control boozer on a plane in California, an out-of-control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. Or Iowa. Or Mexico.

And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. “I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

It was Maryann Burk Carver who won the bread in those early years while Ray drank, fished, went to school and began writing the stories that a generation of critics and teachers would miscategorize as “minimalism” or “dirty realism.” Writing talent often runs on its own clean circuit (as the Library of America’s “Raymond Carver: Collected Stories” attests), but writers whose works shine with insight and mystery are often prosaic monsters at home.

Maryann Burk met the love of her life — or her nemesis; Carver appears to have been both — in 1955, while working the counter of a Spudnut Shop in Union Gap, Wash. She was 14. When she and Carver married in 1957, she was two months shy of her 17th birthday and pregnant. Before turning 18, she discovered she was pregnant again. For the next quarter-century she supported Ray as a cocktail waitress, a restaurant hostess, an encyclopedia saleswoman and a teacher. Early in the marriage she packed fruit for two weeks in order to buy him his first typewriter.

She was beautiful; he was hulking, possessive and sometimes violent. In Carver’s view, his own infidelities did not excuse hers. After Maryann indulged in “a tipsy flirtation” at a dinner party in 1975 — by which time Carver’s alcoholism had reached the full-blown stage — he hit her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her. “He needed ‘an illusion of freedom,’ ” Sklenicka writes, “but could not bear the thought of her with another man.” It is one of the few points in her admirable biography where Sklenicka shows real sympathy for the woman who supported Carver and seems to have never stopped loving him.

Although Sklenicka exhibits something like awe for Carver the writer, and clearly understands the warping influence alcohol had on his life, she is almost nonjudgmental when it comes to Carver the nasty drunk and ungrateful (not to mention sometimes dangerous) husband. She quotes the novelist Diane Smith (“Letters From Yellowstone”) as saying, “That was a bad generation of men,” and pretty much leaves it at that. When she quotes Maryann calling herself a “literary Cinderella, living in exile for the good of Carver’s career,” the first Mrs. Carver comes across as just another whining ex-wife rather than as the stalwart she undoubtedly was. Ray and Maryann were married for 25 years, and it was during those years that Carver wrote the bulk of his work. His time with the poet Tess Gallagher, the only other significant woman in his life, was less than half that.

Nevertheless, it was Gallagher who reaped the personal benefits of Carver’s sobriety (he took his last drink a year before they fell in love) and the financial ones as well. During the divorce proceedings, Maryann’s lawyer said — this both haunts me and to some degree taints my enjoyment of Carver’s stories — that without a decent court settlement, Maryann Burk Carver’s post-divorce life would be “like a bag of doorknobs that wouldn’t open any doors.”

Maryann’s response was, “Ray says he’ll send money every month, and I believe him.” Carver carried through on that promise, although not without a good deal of grousing. But when he died in 1988, the woman who had provided his financial foundation discovered that she had been cut out of sharing the continuing financial rewards of Carver’s popular short-story collections. Carver’s savings alone totaled almost $215,000 at the time of his death; Maryann got about $10,000. Carver’s mother got even less: at age 78, she was living in public housing in Sacramento and eking out a living as a “grandmother aide” in an elementary school. Sklenicka doesn’t call this shabby treatment, but I am happy to do it for her.

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.

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.”

Sklenicka analyzes many of the changes, but the wise reader will turn to the “Collected Stories” and see them for him- or herself. Two of the most dismaying examples are “If It Please You” (“After the Denim” in “What We Talk About”) and “A Small, Good Thing” (“The Bath” in “What We Talk About”).

In “If It Please You,” James and Edith Packer, a getting-on-in-years couple, arrive at the local bingo hall to discover their regular places have been taken by a young hippie couple. Worse, James observes the young man cheating (although he doesn’t win; his girlfriend does). During the course of the evening, Edith whispers to her husband that she’s “spotting.” Later, back at home, she tells him the bleeding is serious, and she’ll have to go to the doctor the following day. In bed, James struggles to pray (a survival skill both James and his creator acquired in daily A.A. meetings), first hesitantly, then “beginning to mutter words aloud and to pray in earnest. . . . He prayed for Edith, that she would be all right.” The prayers don’t bring relief until he adds the hippie couple to his meditations, casting aside his former bitter feelings. The story ends on a note of hard-won hope: “ ‘If it please you,’ he said in the new prayers for all of them, the living and the dead.” In the Lish-edited version, there are no prayers and hence no epiphany — only a worried and resentful husband who wants to tell the irritating hippies what happens “after the denim,” after the games. It’s a total rewrite, and it’s a cheat.

The contrast between “The Bath” (Lish-edited) and “A Small, Good Thing” (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son’s birthday, Scotty’s mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish’s baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death’s inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver’s version, the couple — who are actually characters instead of shadows — go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart .

“Lish was able . . . to make a snowman out of a snowdrift” is what Sklenicka says about his version of Carver’s stories, but that’s not much of a metaphor. She does better when talking about Lish’s changes to a passage in “They’re Not Your Husband” (in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”), pointing out that the Lish version is “meaner, coarser and somewhat diminishing to both characters.” Carver himself says it best. When the narrator of “The Fling” finally faces up to the fact that he has no love or comfort to give his father, he says of himself, “I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness.” Ultimately, that’s what is wrong with the Ray Carver stories as Lish presented them to the world, and what makes both the Sklenicka biography and the “Collected Stories” such a welcome and necessary corrective.

RAYMOND CARVER

A writer’s life.

By Carol Sklenicka

Illustrated. 578 pp. Scribner. $35

Collected Stories

Edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll

1,019 pp. The Library of America. $40

A cover illustration on Nov. 22 carried an incomplete credit. While Ruth Gwily was indeed the illustrator, her portrait of Raymond Carver was based on a photograph by Bob Adelman/Corbis.

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Raymond Carver became a short story writer for a surprisingly practical reason.

When we talk about Raymond Carver, we talk about the short story. Despite having published eight poetry collections before his death (33 years ago to the day), he’s known for works like “Cathedral” and “Why Don’t You Dance.” But, as it turns out, Carver wrote short stories out of practicality, not pure love of the form. In his 1983 Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review , Carver revealed that his short stories came about through limited time and limited patience:

INTERVIEWER In an article you did for The New York Times Book Review you mentioned a story “too tedious to talk about here”—about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now?

CARVER The story that was “too tedious to talk about” has to do with a number of things that aren’t very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay “Fires,” which was published in Antaeus . In it I said that finally, a writer is judged by what he writes, and that’s the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories.

I was beginning to see that my life was not—let’s say it was not what I wanted it to be. There was always a wagonload of frustration to deal with—wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for it. I used to go out and sit in the car and try to write something on a pad on my knee. This was when the kids were in their adolescence. I was in my late twenties or early thirties. We were still in a state of penury, we had one bankruptcy behind us, and years of hard work with nothing to show for it except an old car, a rented house, and new creditors on our backs. It was depressing, and I felt spiritually obliterated. Alcohol became a problem. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit. That’s part of what I was talking about when I was talking about things “too tedious to talk about.”

The rest of the interview is equally illuminating; in it, Carver discusses his path to sobriety, his daily writing habits, and his extensive approach to revision.

But this particular section is a useful reminder that there’s a host of factors that shape a finished piece of writing besides sheer inspiration. Life’s limitations on writers’ creative practices are depressing—or, as Carver puts it, “tedious”—but, in this specific case, short story readers everywhere have benefited.

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Raymond Carver

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938– August 2, 1988) was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s.

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and heavy drinker. Carver’s mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family. After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born a year later. He supported his family by working as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer. During their marriage, Maryann also supported the family by working as an administrative assistant and a high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress.

Writing career

Carver became interested in writing in Paradise, California, where he had moved with his family to be close to his mother-in-law. While attending Chico State College, he enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver’s life and career. Carver’s first published story, “The Furious Seasons”, appeared in 1961. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. “Furious Seasons” was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and is now in the recent collection, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.

It is a common misconception that Carver was influenced by Ernest Hemingway, as both writers exhibit a similar economical and plain prose style. In his essay “On Influence”, however, Carver states clearly that, while he was an admirer of Hemingway’s fiction, he never saw him as an influence, citing instead the work of Lawrence Durrell.

Carver continued his studies under the short-story writer Richard Cortez Day (like Gardner, a recent PhD alumnus of the Iowa program) at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California. After electing not to take the foreign language courses required by the English program, he received his B.A. in general studies in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the university’s literary magazine, in which he published several of his own pieces under his own name as well as the pseudonym John Vale.

With his B– average—exacerbated by his penchant to forsake coursework for literary endeavors—ballasted by a sterling recommendation from Day, Carver was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963–1964 academic year. Homesick for California and unable to fully acclimate to the program’s upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A. degree or 60 for the M.F.A. degree. Although he was awarded a fellowship for a second year of study from program director Paul Engle after Maryann Carver personally interceded and compared her husband’s plight to Tennessee Williams’ deleterious experience in the program three decades earlier, Carver decided to leave the program at the end of the semester. Maryann (who postponed completing her education to support her husband’s educational and literary endeavors) eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977, when she enrolled in the University of California, Santa Barbara’s doctoral program in English.

In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, California, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He did all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote at the hospital through the rest of the night. He audited classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, under Schmitz’s guidance.

With the appearance of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in Martha Foley’s annual Best American Short Stories anthology and the impending publication of Near Klamath by the English Club of Sacramento State College, 1967 was a landmark year for Carver. He briefly enrolled in the library science graduate program at the University of Iowa that summer but returned to California following the death of his father. Shortly thereafter, the Carvers relocated to Palo Alto, California, so he could take his first white-collar job at Science Research Associates (a subsidiary of IBM), where he worked intermittently as a textbook editor and public relations director through 1970. Following a 1968 sojourn to Israel, the Carvers relocated to San Jose, California; as Maryann finished her undergraduate degree, he continued his graduate studies in library science at San Jose State through the end of 1969 before failing once again to take a degree. Nevertheless, he established vital literary connections with Gordon Lish and the poet/publisher George Hitchcock during this period.

After the publication of “Neighbors” in the June 1971 issue of Esquire at the instigation of Lish (by now ensconced as the magazine’s fiction editor), Carver began to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the behest of provost James B. Hall (an Iowa alumnus and early mentor to Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon), commuting from his new home in Sunnyvale, California. Following a succession of failed applications, he received a $4,000 Stegner Fellowship to study in the prestigious non-degree graduate creative writing program at Stanford University during the 1972–1973 term, where he cultivated friendships with Kesey-era luminaries Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman in addition to contemporaneous fellows Chuck Kinder, Max Crawford, and William Kittredge. The fellowship enabled the Carvers to buy a house in Cupertino, California. He took on another teaching job at the University of California, Berkeley that year and briefly rented a pied-à-terre in the city; this development was largely precipitated by his instigation of an extramarital affair with Diane Cecily, a University of Montana administrator and mutual friend of Kittredge who would subsequently marry Kinder.

During his years of working at miscellaneous jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started abusing alcohol. By his own admission, he essentially gave up writing and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. With the assistance of Kinder and Kittredge, he attempted to simultaneously commute to California and maintain his lectureship at Santa Cruz; after missing all but a handful of classes due to the inherent logistical hurdles of this arrangement (including various alcohol-related illnesses), Hall gently enjoined Carver to resign his position. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Carver went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but continued drinking for three years.

His first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year.

After being hospitalized three times (between June 1976 and February or March 1977), Carver began his “second life” and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. While he continued to regularly smoke marijuana and later experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 had he not overcome his drinking.

Carver was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection, Cathedral, the volume generally perceived as his best. Included in the collection are the award-winning stories “A Small, Good Thing”, and “Where I’m Calling From”. John Updike selected the latter for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. For his part, Carver saw Cathedral as a watershed in his career, in its shift towards a more optimistic and confidently poetic style.

Personal life and death

Decline of first marriage.

The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll’s review of Maryann Burk Carver’s 2006 memoir describes the decline of Maryann and Raymond’s marriage.

The fall began with Ray’s trip to Missoula, Mont., in '72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge’s birthday party. “That’s when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything.”

“By fall of '74", writes Carver, “he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes”. Over the next several years, Maryann’s husband physically abused her. Friends urged her to leave Raymond.

“But I couldn’t. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I’d do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always.”

Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. “It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving.” So he wrote a letter instead.

“I thought, I’ve gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him.”

Second marriage

Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers’ conference in Dallas, Texas, in November 1977. Beginning in January, 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas; in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, Washington; and in Tucson, Arizona. In 1980, the two moved to Syracuse, New York, where Gallagher had been appointed the coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University; Carver taught as a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read “Writers At Work” in order to be left alone. In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced. He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In December 2006, Gallagher published an essay in The Sun magazine, titled “Instead of Dying”, about alcoholism and Carver’s having maintained his sobriety. The essay is an adaptation of a talk she initially delivered at the Welsh Academy’s Academi Intoxication Conference in 2006. The first lines read: “Instead of dying from alcohol, Raymond Carver chose to live. I would meet him five months after this choice, so I never knew the Ray who drank, except by report and through the characters and actions of his stories and poems.”

On August 2, 1988, Carver died from lung cancer at the age of 50. He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. The inscription on his tombstone reads:

LATE FRAGMENT 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.

His poem “Gravy” is also inscribed.

As Carver’s will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of his literary estate.

In Carver’s birth town of Clatskanie, Oregon, a memorial park and statue were constructed in the late 2000s spearheaded by the local Friends of the Library, using mostly local donations. Tess Gallagher was present at the dedication. It is located in the old town on the corner of Lillich and Nehalem Streets, across from the library. A block away, the building where Raymond Carver was born still stands. There is a plaque of Carver in the foyer.

Legacy and posthumous publications

The novelist Chuck Kinder published Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale (2001), a roman à clef about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. Carver’s high school sweetheart and first wife, Maryann Burk Carver, wrote a memoir of her years with Carver, What it Used to be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver (2006).

The New York Times Book Review and San Francisco Chronicle named Carol Sklenicka’s unauthorized biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (2009), published by Scribner, one of the Best Ten Books of that year; and the San Francisco Chronicle deemed it: “exhaustively researched and definitive biography”. Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, refused to engage with Sklenica.

His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant in Britain (included in “Where I’m Calling From”) was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of these stories, especially “Errand”, have led to some speculation that Carver was preparing to write a novel. Only one piece of this work has survived– the fragment “The Augustine Notebooks”, first printed in No Heroics, Please.

Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in Call If You Need Me; one of the stories ("Kindling") won an O. Henry Award in 1999. In his lifetime Carver won five O. Henry Awards; these winning stories were “Are These Actual Miles” (originally titled “What is it?”) (1972), “Put Yourself in My Shoes” (1974), “Are You A Doctor?” (1975), “A Small, Good Thing” (1983), and “Errand” (1988).

Tess Gallagher fought with Knopf for permission to republish the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as they were originally written by Carver, as opposed to the heavily edited and altered versions that appeared in 1981 under the editorship of Gordon Lish. The book, entitled Beginners, was released in hardback on October 1, 2009 in Great Britain, followed by its U.S. publication in the Library of America edition that collected all of Carver’s short fiction in a single volume.

Literary characteristics

Carver’s career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described himself as “inclined toward brevity and intensity” and “hooked on writing short stories” (in the foreword of Where I’m Calling From, a collection published in 1988 and a recipient of an honorable mention in the 2006 New York Times article citing the best works of fiction of the previous 25 years). Another stated reason for his brevity was "that the story [or poem] can be written and read in one sitting." This was not simply a preference but, particularly at the beginning of his career, a practical consideration as he juggled writing with work. His subject matter was often focused on blue-collar experience, and was clearly reflective of his own life.

Characteristics of minimalism are generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver’s work, although, as reviewer David Wiegand notes:

Carver never thought of himself as a minimalist or in any category, for that matter.

“He rejected categories generally,” Sklenicka says. “I don’t think he had an abstract mind at all. He just wasn’t built that way, which is why he’s so good at picking the right details that will stand for many things.”

Carver’s editor at Esquire, Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver’s prose in this direction– where his earlier tutor John Gardner had advised Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five, Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the “surgical amputation and transplantation” of Lish’s heavy editing, Carver eventually broke with him. During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of Esquire.

Carver’s style has also been described as dirty realism, which connected him with a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff (two writers with whom Carver was closely acquainted), as well as others such as Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips. With the exception of Beattie, who wrote about upper-middle-class people, these were writers who focused on sadness and loss in the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-middle class or isolated and marginalized people.

Collections

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (first published 1976) Furious Seasons and other stories (1977) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) Cathedral (1983) Elephant (1988)– this title only published in Great Britain; included as a section of Where I’m Calling From: New & Selected Stories in the U.S.

Compilations

Where I’m Calling From: New & Selected Stories (1988) Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993)– published to accompany the Robert Altman film Short Cuts Collected Stories (2009)– complete short fiction including Beginners

Near Klamath (1968) Winter Insomnia (1970) At Night The Salmon Move (1976) Fires (1983) Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) Ultramarine (1986) A New Path To The Waterfall (1989) Gravy (Unknown year)

In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (1988) All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996)

Screenplays

Dostoevsky (1985, with Tess Gallagher)

Films and theatre adaptations

Short Cuts directed by Robert Altman (1993), based on nine Carver short stories and a poem Everything Goes directed by Andrew Kotatko (2004), starring Hugo Weaving and Abbie Cornish, based on Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” Whoever Was Using This Bed, also directed by Andrew Kotatko (2016), starring Jean-Marc Barr, Radha Mitchell and Jane Birkin, based on Carver’s short story of the same name Jindabyne directed by Ray Lawrence (2006), based on Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” “After The Denim” directed by Gregory D. Goyins (2010) starring Tom Bower and Karen Landry, based on Carver’s short story “If It Please You” Everything Must Go directed by Dan Rush (2010), and starring Will Ferrell, based on Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” Carver a production directed by William Gaskill at London’s Arcola Theatre in 1995, adapted from five Carver short stories including “What’s In Alaska?” “Put Yourself in My Shoes” and “Intimacy” Studentova žena (Croatian) directed by Goran Kovač, based on “The Student’s Wife” Carousel (Croatian) directed by Toma Zidić, inspired by “Ashtray” Men Who Don’t Work directed by Alexander Atkins and Andrew Franks, based on “What Do You Do in San Francisco?” Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, depicts the mounting of a Broadway production of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” as its central storyline. The film’s main character, Riggan Thomson, attributes his choice of acting as a profession to a complimentary note he once received from Raymond Carver written on a cocktail napkin. The film also preludes with Carver’s poem “Late Fragment.” In February 2015, Birdman won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Musical adaptions

Everything’s Turning to White is a folk rock track written and performed by Paul Kelly on the album So Much Water So Close to Home (1989), which was based on Carver’s short story of the same name.

Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver

#AmericanWriters

Fires by Raymond Carver: a reminder why writing matters

Old favourites: a year of lucy sweeeny byrne’s classic texts.

Raymond Carver in 1969 Photograph: Gordon Lish

Raymond Carver is my favourite writer. I generally dislike all that “favourite” malarkey, but then I open one of his collections, and am struck dumb. Carver, in his raw brevity, cuts to the quick and reminds me with a shock every time why writing even matters.

When asked about my favourite writers, I often forget him. It’s only later, when I glimpse his name on a spine on the shelf, searching for something else, that I guiltily recall. Why do I always forget Carver?

Recently, re-reading Fires, a collection of his essays, poetry and stories, published after the breakdown of his first marriage, it occurred to me – I forget, because his writing is so essential, that it’s impossible to remember its existence as a separate thing, written by a hand, on paper, rather than a component of my own self. I forget Carver’s writing the same way I forget my organs, or blood.

I hope this doesn’t sound hyperbolic. This level of praise may have made Carver himself uncomfortable (unless he was already a few drinks in). For balance, I’ll admit the poems aren’t quite as strong as the rest. But they’re still marvellous. They still have that Carver quality, that tells us to look right, then sock us in the jaw from the left.

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His use of language, not only in the collection’s two essays and 80 poems, but in stories such as Distance, or The Cabin, is so uncomplicated, yet perfectly compact (he describes his own method as; “Get in. Get out. Don’t linger. Go on.”). The stories, of course, are magnificent: always so seemingly straightforward, while in fact so oblique. His writing is invariably devastating, not in any dramatic way, but in the truth of small, ordinary human lives. In it, we read our daily interactions, our hopes, often thwarted, and the inevitable relentlessness of our lives’ journeys, repeating over and over. Reading Carver, there is a feeling of suddenly realising the characters (and, in turn, oneself) are on the wrong train, unable to get off.

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Raymond Carver: On Writing

Read On Writing by Carver if you harbor ambitions, then print the good lines and stick it on your wall. I came by this piece via an article in Guardian by Stuart Evers.

I am going to skip what Stuart said and point you to what interested me most in Carver's essay.

Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.

Without clear-headed self-appraisal and awareness of one's own level of skill and talent, we ain't going nowhere. Reminds me of a quote that's an old favorite of mine:

Like all young men, I started out to be a Genius, but mercifully laughter intervened. -- Lawrence Durrell

Another bit that struck me in Carver :

Every great or even every very good writer makes theworld over according to his own specifications. It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Cervantes is still around because--even with all the cheap tricks he uses in Don Quixote, (I don't know what Carver may have thought about Cervantes and his tricks)--he succeeds immensely in creating the uniquely crazed and uproarious world of Don Quixote.

More like this

How offensive can a drawing be, elaborate mediocrity, the glamor of surgery (part 1 of an occasional series), 600 hidden plastic jars.

Useful info! Thanks!

Inspiring..!!!

Thanks for sharing.

A Summary and Analysis of Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Cathedral’ is perhaps the most widely studied of all the short stories of Raymond Carver (1938-88). The story is narrated by a man whose wife has invited her friend, a blind man named Robert, to come and stay with them. Although he is initially uncomfortable and even scathing about their guest, the narrator eventually bonds with Robert and comes to realise something valuable.

You can read ‘Cathedral’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Carver’s story below.

‘Cathedral’ : plot summary

The story is narrated by a man whose wife has been friends with a blind man named Robert for years, even longer than she has been married to the narrator. The narrator tells us that his wife has invited Robert to come and stay with them, after he has visited his late wife’s family in Connecticut.

The narrator outlines some of the history between Robert and his wife: how she had taken a job which involved reading to a blind man, in order to earn some extra money while her boyfriend, who later became her first husband, was going through officers’ training school. Then he tells us how, when his wife’s first husband graduated and was posted to various places around the country, his wife kept in touch with Robert, with the two of them sending audio tapes to each other which shared their latest news.

He also tells us how, in time, his wife’s first marriage broke down and she got divorced from her army husband. He also hints at a home-administered abortion, which implies that his wife was already having doubts about her long-term future with her husband. She also wasn’t enjoying the places where her husband was being posted to, and life as an army wife clearly didn’t suit her. Eventually, she met the narrator and now they are married.

Meanwhile, her friendship with Robert became stronger and stronger. Robert himself married a woman named Beulah, who died. The narrator is quite naïve and mocking about Robert and his blindness; he appears to be jealous of the close bond Robert and his wife have shared over the years. When Robert shows up, his wife is very friendly and welcoming towards him but the narrator doesn’t quite know how to interact.

However, during the course of the evening, over dinner and whiskey, the narrator and Robert slowly start to bond. When his wife goes upstairs, the narrator offers to roll a joint for himself and his guest, and Robert, keen to try something new, agrees to smoke with him. When a documentary programme about European cathedrals comes on the television, the two of them start to discuss it.

The narrator tries to describe a cathedral to Robert, who, being blind, has never seen one. But he realises that he cannot find the words to offer a good description. Robert proposes that the narrator get a sheet of paper and a pencil and that he tries to draw a cathedral. The narrator agrees to this, and as he is drawing, his wife returns downstairs and asks that they are doing.

Robert tells the narrator to close his eyes as he finishes his drawing, and then to open them and tell him what he sees. But the narrator suddenly feels different and doesn’t open his eyes. When Robert asks him if he is looking, the narrator keeps his eyes closed, but replies, ‘It’s really something.’

‘Cathedral’ : analysis

Raymond Carver’s work is often associated with the term minimalism, a literary technique marked by a simple descriptive style (often utilising short, clipped sentences) and spare dialogue. Carver himself expressed a dislike for this term, but we can certainly see a line between someone like Ernest Hemingway and Carver’s own short stories. And ‘Cathedral’ is as notable for what it doesn’t tell us as for what it does, and the narrator’s account of his evening spent with Robert and his wife invites us to ponder further questions.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the ending to the story, which is where most critics and students of ‘Cathedral’ focus the majority of their analysis (and speculation). While watching the programme on cathedrals and talking to Robert, who cannot see the images on the screen, the narrator comes to realise how little he has observed of the world around him. His moment of deepest insight comes at the end of the story when he closes his eyes while finishing the drawing of a cathedral.

Obviously this drawing cannot be for Robert’s benefit, as he cannot see it. Instead, inspires the narrator to realise how little he really sees of the world he lives in. Ironically, it is only by closing his eyes and ‘seeing’ as Robert does that he can realise this: it is only by closing his eyes, in other words, can he truly ‘see’.

The final words of the story, ‘It’s really something’, are neatly double-edged: on the face of it, the narrator is lying to Robert and pretending to be looking at the picture he has drawn, but of course the words carry another meaning. There is a suggestion that the narrator, having bonded with Robert and then closed his eyes, has had some sort of epiphany : a realisation or sudden coming-to-consciousness, whereby he comes to recognise something new about himself and the world.

In this case, then, what he has recognised is what it must be like for Robert. Or at least, that is one way to analyse and interpret the end of Carver’s story. But although epiphanies in fiction often involve characters reaching beyond themselves and discovering a new sense of connection and empathy with others, sometimes they are more complex and ambiguous than this.

In James Joyce’s fiction, for example, characters’ epiphanies are often more undecidably poised between generosity and self-absorption; between realising one’s connectedness to the rest of the world, and merely self-dramatising this realisation. In ‘Cathedral’, too, we may question precisely what the narrator has become aware of at the end of the story. Has he realised that he should appreciate things more, including his gift of sight? Has he realised he should be kinder to Robert and respect his wife’s friendship with this man?

There are obviously some interesting parallels between the two men. Robert had a wife he was close to but he lost her; the narrator has a wife, but in many ways he is more lonely than Robert, despite this. Both men like whiskey and, it turns out, smoking weed. They obviously have the narrator’s wife in common as the most important woman – now Robert’s wife has died – in each of their lives.

We might also question the cause of this change in the narrator. It’s possible that it’s through talking to Robert and realising how his blindness has shut out so many experiences from him that the narrator gains an awareness of how lucky he himself is to have sight, and how far he has fallen short of using the sense he is lucky to have. What point is there having sight when you are happy to go through life without ever noticing or appreciating the beauty and majesty of a medieval cathedral?

Alternatively, and perhaps more probably, it is not just Robert’s blindness – and the narrator’s realisation of how little he himself has appreciated his gift of sight – that causes this shift in the narrator at the end of the story. The narrator tells us that he does not enjoy his job. His wife reveals that he doesn’t have any friends. He is, in short, quite a lonely figure who spends his nights sitting by himself watching television and smoking weed.

It is also clear that, his own initial mockery of Robert’s disability notwithstanding, his wife is not especially sensitive to his insecurities regarding her close and longstanding friendship with Robert. It seems likely, then, that Robert is the first person in the narrator’s life, at least for a long while, who actually takes an interest in him and treats him kindly and encouragingly. The act of drawing the cathedral at the end of the story is the pinnacle of this.

In summary, then, all that is clear from Raymond Carver’s story is that the narrator undergoes some kind of change at the end. But how generous and outward-facing, as it were, and how introspective and self-motivated, this change is, remains to be decided. Carver deliberately leaves it open to us to decide.

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A trick question for Raymond Carver

Speaking at the Manchester Literary Festival, James Lasdun – probably the closest in recent years this country has come to a genuinely great practitioner of the short story – expressed dismay at the publication of Beginners ; the original, more expansive version of Raymond Carver's minimalist masterpiece What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Unlike Blake Morrison, who saw it as a revelation , Lasdun suggested that this was muddying Carver's great legacy. Reading the two volumes side by side, I found it hard not to agree with Lasdun; in all too many cases it's like looking at a Edward Hopper painting to which someone has added graphic-novel-style thought bubbles .

The rights and wrongs of publishing these stories before editor Gordon Lish took a scalpel to them can be debated, but there's no doubt that this publication has once again put Carver in the limelight – if he'd ever really been in the shadows. Carver is, I suppose, the ultimate modern short story writer. His fiction has a resonance that is attractive to both readers and writers. How he achieves this mesmerising effect is set out in his essay " On Writing ", published in the same year as his much shortened version of Beginners.

"On Writing" is Carver's vision for fiction; his blue-collar blueprint. It's a fine and persuasive piece, full of insight into the creative process and the obligations of the writer. There are moments of personal confession, coupled with elegantly quotable sentences – "Get in, get out. Don't linger" for example. But as with his very best writing, there is a darker, less palatable truth lurking within its pages.

The lessons that Carver provides are second hand ones, derived from creative writing teachers and authors he admires. This is no criticism when you consider his mentors are Chekhov, Isak Dinesen, Isaac Babel and Flannery O'Connor. The advice, it seems to me, is well chosen. Trusting your instincts, while also being open to new discoveries; to write a little each day without despair; to revel in the mysteries of revelations.

All good – if slightly non-specific – advice, told in a considered, conversational tone. But then, Carver hits you with a curve ball. "No tricks." He says. "Period. I hate tricks." Experimentation, as Carver goes on to say, is too often "a licence to be careless, silly or imitative." Which in amongst the homilies and creative class wisdom changes his essay from a fascinating insight into his working practices, into a manifesto. A sort of write-in-a-day-the-Raymond-Carver-way.

I like tricks. I like formal invention; not for its own sake, but in the sense that it gives the reader something to think about, to look at from another angle. To be told that this is wrong, somehow mistreating the reader, made me suddenly quite angry. What about Barthelme, I thought, Sterne, BS Johnson, Angela Carter? And what about perhaps this year's most feted story collection, David Vann's Legend of a Suicide ?

Vann's book seems initially to conform to all Carver's edicts. It is polished, elegant and beautifully written; fitting into an American lineage that encompasses Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. But then halfway through, Vann does something transformative, something that you simply don't see coming and nothing is the same again. You could call this a "trick", but to me it's something approaching genius.

When people talk negatively about creative writing classes and the kind of fiction they produce, it's precisely Carver's prejudice against invention and tricks to which they are usually alluding. New voices are stifled behind rules and conventions, like Carver's, that should be challenged and bent and railed against. Innovation – as Vann and his fellow countryman Wells Tower prove – is what keeps the short form vital and alive, despite its status as a commercial pariah for publishers.

For all Carver's disdain for experimentation, even Donald Barthelme and BS Johnson would look on admiringly at the effect of Beginners. How much would they have enjoyed readers holding two versions of the same stories, reading them side by side? And how ironic that a writer who said that he "ran for cover" at the sight of a trick, has now become the newest trick in town.

Raymond Carver
Short stories

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Charles Agvent

FIRES. ESSAYS POEMS STORIES

Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983. First Edition. Hardcover. One of 250 numbered copies in red boards SIGNED by Carver of this superb collection containing the title essay as well as his essay "On Writing," along with 50 poems and 7 stories, including "So Much Water So Close to Home," which figured prominently in Robert Altman's film SHORT CUTS. Fine in original glassine. Item #017421

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Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories Paperback – June 18, 1989

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Print length 208 pages
Language English
Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date June 18, 1989
Dimensions 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
ISBN-10 9780679722397
ISBN-13 978-0679722397
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ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0679722394
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Reissue edition (June 18, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780679722397
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679722397
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
#760 in American Fiction Anthologies
#6,134 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
#11,830 in Short Stories (Books)

About the author

Raymond carver.

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

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My Father’s Life by Raymond Carver Free Essay Example
Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"
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COMMENTS

"Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on." Read Raymond Carver's greatest
Raymond Carver was born 83 years ago, in Clatskanie, Oregon. Later, he would cement his position as one of America's greatest and most beloved writers and poets, a true master of the short story form. Carver is one of those writers who tends to spawn other writers—more than one person I know fell in love […]
Raymond Carver "On Writing": Words of Advice for Poets, Short Story
Before diving into my 2023 project of reading a short story a day from the Library of America's Carver: Collected Stories, I read his brief essay "On Writing" and jotted some bon mots (French for 'words that seem more important than others').Of course, no one gives a damn about a writer's opinions on writing until said writer has "made it."
Alcohol, Emotion, and Tension in Raymond Carver's Fiction
Alcohol gives and takes, pushes and pulls, and places the stories in what Carver in his essay "On Writing" calls "relentless motion" (17), driving tension forward as a sometimes intimate, sometimes menacing cosmic force that is nearly impossible for many of the characters to resist, control, or comprehend. Works Cited. Carver, Raymond.
PDF Essay-Carver-3
BY RAYMOND CARVER. lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhab-ited by anything recognisably human, a place of inter- ... In an essay called, simply enough, "Writing Short Sto-ries," Flannery O'Connor talks about writing as an act of dis-covery. O'Connor says she most
Analysis of Raymond Carver's Short Stories
Categories: Short Story. Nearly everything written about Raymond Carver (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) begins with two observations: He is a minimalist, and he writes about working-class people. Even when the critic is sympathetic, this dual categorization tends to stigmatize Carver as a minor artist writing little stories about little people.
Raymond Carver on Writing
Raymond Carver was an unusual thing — a successful author who focused entirely on short stories. He wrote poetry and a bit of non-fiction too, but no novels at all. His piece "On Writing" is ...
Raymond Carver
Poet and short-story writer Raymond Carver was born in the logging town of Clatskanie, Oregon, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. He was married and the father of two before he was 20, and he held a number of low-paying jobs: he "picked tulips, pumped gas, swept hospital corridors, swabbed toilets, [and] managed an apartment complex," according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times Magazine ...
Raymond Carver's Life and Stories
Nov. 19, 2009. Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka's exhaustive and ...
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver Raymond Carver's work, which began to reach a national audi-ence when Martha Foley included "Will You Please Be Quiet, ... In the essay "On Writing" in Fires, Carver also acknowledged the tension-producing value of "the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth ...
Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Fires. : Raymond Carver. Vintage, 2009 - Literary Collections - 204 pages. Fires is the best introduction to the full range and humanity of Carver's writing. It contains four essays, including a moving memoir od his father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor John ...
Raymond Carver became a short story writer for a ...
Raymond Carver became a short story writer for a surprisingly practical reason. By Walker Caplan. August 2, 2021, 12:29pm. When we talk about Raymond Carver, we talk about the short story. Despite having published eight poetry collections before his death (33 years ago to the day), he's known for works like "Cathedral" and "Why Don't ...
Raymond Carver: poems, essays, and short stories
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938- August 2, 1988) was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s. Early life . Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver.
Essay On Writing by Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver. Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme ...
Fires by Raymond Carver: a reminder why writing matters
Lucy Sweeney Byrne. Sat Mar 7 2020 - 06:00. Raymond Carver is my favourite writer. I generally dislike all that "favourite" malarkey, but then I open one of his collections, and am struck dumb ...
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver 1938- American short story writer and poet. Carver's portrayal of the stark existentialism of everyday life may signal a new literary trend toward a reappraisal of traditional ...
Raymond Carver: On Writing
Read On Writing by Carver if you harbor ambitions, then print the good lines and stick it on your wall. I came by this piece via an article in Guardian by Stuart Evers. I am going to skip what ...
Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories by Raymond Carver
April 26, 2009. Fires is a mix of Carver's essays, poems and early versions of short stories, some published in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," pieces that aren't really tied together but don't really fit with his other work. It's a great read and offers some real insight on Carver and his writing.
Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver: A Writer's Strategies of Reading
In this account of Carver's reading of Chekhov's strategies of composition I have largely been concerned with the way Carver delivers his effects. It is a delicate matter, and one risks the charge of heavy-handedness in commen- tary of this kind. And to do this is to negotiate the distance between practice.
A Summary and Analysis of Raymond Carver's 'Cathedral'
The act of drawing the cathedral at the end of the story is the pinnacle of this. In summary, then, all that is clear from Raymond Carver's story is that the narrator undergoes some kind of change at the end. But how generous and outward-facing, as it were, and how introspective and self-motivated, this change is, remains to be decided.
A trick question for Raymond Carver
How he achieves this mesmerising effect is set out in his essay "On Writing", published in the same year as his much shortened version of Beginners. "On Writing" is Carver's vision for fiction ...
FIRES. ESSAYS POEMS STORIES
FIRES. ESSAYS POEMS STORIES. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983. First Edition. Hardcover. One of 250 numbered copies in red boards SIGNED by Carver of this superb collection containing the title essay as well as his essay "On Writing," along with 50 poems and 7 stories, including "So Much Water So Close to Home," which figured prominently in Robert Altman's film SHORT CUTS.
Raymond Carver Short Fiction Analysis
Carver was a minimalist by preference and by necessity. His lifelong experience had been with working-class people. It would have been inappropriate to write about simple people in an ornate style ...
Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories: Carver, Raymond: 9780679722397: Amazon
From "one of the great short story writers of our time—of any time" (The Philadelphia Inquirer)—comes more than sixty stories, poems, and essays, including two early versions from the seminal collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. "Show[s] the enormous talent of Raymond Carver beginning to take hold." — San Francisco Chronicle A wide-ranging collection by the ...