Arts and Letters

Some hard times are part of every writer's equipment, but Raymond Carver had more than his share. He was born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, and grew up in Yakima, in the center of the state of Washington. His father filed saws in a sawmill; his mother sometimes worked as a waitress and salesclerk; the family, which included a younger brother, moved from one two-bedroom house to another. The father, Clevie Raymond Carver, had a drinking problem, and would die at the age of fifty-four. When young Junior, as Ray was called, wrote a story about his favorite activity, fishing, and asked his mother to type it up, she went out and rented a typewriter and the two of them amateurishly typed it up and sent it to the circulation department of an outdoor sport magazine in Boulder. It came back, but Ray's stubborn career as a writer had begun. To his stringent blue-collar beginnings he added the handicap of an early marriage; he was eighteen and his bride sixteen and pregnant. By the time she was eighteen, they had two children. As Carver put it in his interview with The Paris Review, "What shall I say at this point? We didn't have any youth. We found ourselves in roles we didn't know how to play. But we did the best we could. Better than that, I want to think." Both these young parents managed, finally, to get college degrees; while acquiring the credits, they worked at such jobs as waitress, night janitor, door-to-door saleswoman, farm worker, and delivery boy, mostly in the state of California. In 1963 Carver saw a story and a poem of his published, when he was an undergraduate at Humboldt State University in California. Thirteen years were to go by before his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, appeared in 1976. To find the space and peace to write, he at times had to resort to sitting in the family car. After over a decade of struggle, in his words, "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…. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit…. I made a wasteland out of everything I touched. But I might add that towards the end of the drinking there wasn't much left anyway." He gave up drinking in 1977, and in the same year he and his first wife separated. Ten good years followed, years of recognition, of measured but steady productivity, of a new marital relationship, of teaching positions, grants, and honors, including a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the Academy-Institute. Then hard luck struck again, in the form of lung cancer, and after one last gallant year of fighting the disease he was dead, at the age of fifty.

And yet, out of this near-wreck of a life, Raymond Carver produced stories of exquisite directness, polish, and calm, that sit in the mind like perfect porcelain cups. The clay from which this porcelain comes is American life of a most modest sort, life lived near the poverty line, often in an advanced state of domestic deshabille, among cultural signifiers of an unrelenting bleakness. It is lived out of the range of news, beneath the threshold of any aspiration higher than day-to-day survival, where a good time is an uneasy evening in another couple's living room, a quizzical conversation in a bar, or a moment of instantly regretful sex. The stories are usually in the first person, and the narrator is usually but not always male, and he almost invariably is one of a couple, if not married then very much aware of his vanished half. There is a stoic woundedness in these voices that engages our nervous systems; in his early stories especially, Carver presents domestic life as curiously packed and sinister, as somehow dangerous, as if its meager scuffed decors were about to tip into darkness. An inexpressible native sorrow wants to well up; the characters suddenly find themselves kneeling and unable to rise, raking the lawn and unable to stop, awake and unable to go to sleep. The later stories recapitulate in less jagged rhythms, at a distanced perspective The New Yorker’s pages could accommodate, the aboriginal mystery; in the marvelous "Whoever Was Using This Bed," the hero and his consort discover an illuminating strangeness by—having been awakened at three in the morning—by sitting together at the foot of the bed: "We're sitting on the part of the bed where we keep our feet when we sleep. It looks like whoever was using this bed left in a hurry. I know I won't ever look at this bed again without remembering it like this. We're into something now, but I don't know what, exactly."

Of Carver's stories it must be said that they are beautiful. Not since Hemingway, perhaps, has anyone built so lovingly in stacks of plain sentences; Carver was a poet as well as a prose writer, and though the poems could do, perhaps, with a bit less plainness, those frequent stories of his that omit quotation marks look, on the page, like poems. Like Hemingway, he listened to laconic American speech and fished for the tragic consciousness, the ominousness, beneath the gliding skin of plain utterance; in prefacing his collected stories Ray Carver spoke of "trying to learn my craft as a writer, how to be as subtle as a river current." His best stories do move like rivers, as gently and inexorably, with a certain sheen that almost blinds. In our daily misery as he had experienced it he felt something lyrical, and to extract it he revised tirelessly and put himself to school with all the traditional masters of short fiction. His titles—challengingly curt like "Fat," "Feathers," "Vitamins," "Careful," "Sacks," "Boxes," or "Gazebo" or else musically vernacular, as in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," "What We Talk about When We Talk About Love," "The Third Thing that Killed My Father Off," "Where I'm Calling From," and "Nobody Said Anything"—bespeak a consciously literary wit. In person he was ursine, amiable, quietly spoken, and yet impressively precise—a Westerner who weighed his words. His body of work is relatively small, but it displays the loftiest qualities: honesty of vision, integrity of workmanship, and a warm and humane desire to celebrate, to bring the news, as he himself expressed it, from one world to another, in a style that reveals "the fierce pleasure we take in doing it."