Writing That Will Be ‘Around for a Time’

“Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind,” says a vacuum cleaner salesman in Ray Carver’s story, “Collectors.” “Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where! Pillows too. It’s all the same.”

Words like these, so ingenious in their co-mingling of common suffering and comic anguish, fill the pages of “Will You Please Be Quiet Please?”--a story collection nominated for a 1977 National Book Award. Its author, who is to Northwest fiction what Theodore Roethke is to its poetry, left his signature on the American story. He did what O’Henry or Hemingway, with whom he is often compared, did for such obscure places as Yakima, Wash., and Joyce did for Dublin and Cheever for Westchester County. Yet Carver knew and told us in his interviews that “most of the stories, it seems to me, could take place anywhere.” Thus, the distinct region on Earth called “Carver Country” is an emotional landscape where we find the most extraordinary lives--waitresses, mill workers and postmen--made extraordinary. Your passport there is a knowledge of pain. And you cannot leave until you learn, as if for the first time, the anguish of the American underclass, the forgotten people who have fallen away from hope and, in some instances, entirely outside history.

The one time I met Raymond Carver--at a party after he read his story “Cathedral” to a packed audience at the University of Washington--he came across as a quiet, openhearted man with a sort of independent and practical outlook you see in so many Northwesterners. But, if you’ve lived here long enough, you know that the simplicity and dislike of frills is hard won and can’t be romanticized, coming as it did in Carver’s case from an early life of misfortune. Before he could vote, he was married and had two children, which led to a round of “crap jobs,” as he called them, work so draining that it only left time for things he could “finish now, tonight, or at least tomorrow night, no later, after I got off work and before I lost interest,” short bursts of brilliance he revised and pruned into prose where no word was unnecessary.

“For as long as I can remember,” he explains in one of his essays, “since I was a teen-ager, the eminent removal of the chair from under me was a constant concern. For years and years my wife and I had no money, that is to say, marketable skills--nothing that we could do toward earning anything better than a get-by living.”

He endured bouts of alcoholism, which he overcame, divorce, bankruptcy and died of lung cancer Aug. 2, but not before winning rewards as impressive as the stories he leaves behind: prestigious teaching posts; numerous honors, including a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, providing $35,000 a year for five years; a legion of imitators (the University of Iowa once sponsored a Carver “write-alike contest”); the translation of his work into 23 languages; induction into the American Academy of the Institute of Arts and Letters this year; and a loving relationship to Tess Gallagher, one of this country’s pre-eminent poets.

Strictly speaking, the most we shared in common was an apprenticeship to novelist John Gardner, who taught Carver at Chico State College in 1958. At first glance, no two writers could differ more in aesthetic vision and literary style. Gardner was contentious for short fiction, calling it a watercolor when compared to the mural-like range of the novel. But Carver distrusted novels, believing that to do one “the writer should be living their world to make sense, a world that will, for a time anyway, stay fixed in one place.” In such a world, he had little faith because: “The time came and went when everything my wife and I held sacred, or considered worthy of respect, every spiritual value, crumbled away.”

He also said, “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.” Yet it is precisely the pyrotechnical possibilities of language and literary form that so often fuel Gardner’s stories. On one subject, however, they seemed in agreement: the moral priority of character in fiction.

For Carver in his early stories this is achieved, not by propositions or essayism, which often occur in Gardner’s fiction, but rather by close attention to characters at the moment of heartbreak. The stories in his first collection, written over 12 years, with many first appearing in the “Little Magazine,” often began, “My marriage is falling apart. I couldn’t find a job. I had another girl. But she wasn’t in town.” Or, my simpler, “I was out of work.” The word “nothing,” like a note, is heard again and again to describe spaces, faces, and the feeling of emptiness blimps peripherally at the edge of everyday experience.

“Carver Country,” which seemed so compatible with the cruel penetrating light and loneliness of paintings by Edward Hooper, is inhabited by people like Earl Ober, an unemployed salesman who overhears two men in business suits make cruel sexual remarks about his fat wife Doreen, a waitress. His ego bruised, Earl urges her to go on a diet, then haunts the coffee shop, asking perfect strangers if they find Doreen desirable and special. In another story, “Neighbors,” Bill Miller, a bookkeeper and his wife Arlene, a secretary, are asked to watch the apartment of Harriet and Jim Stone, friends they envy who live a gayer life and are away for 10 days. Soon Bill finds himself slipping into their apartment to try on Jim’s clothes, then Harriet’s, and drink their liquor, all of which revitalizes his sex life with Arlene, a whole new world of possibilities opening to them until they accidentally leave the key inside and lock themselves out.

These stories, and those by writers like Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and James Alan McPherson, are given credit for reviving American short fiction in the 1970s, although David Lehman, a Newsweek reviewer, said of the stories in Carver’s fourth collection: “Fun to read they’re not.” True, much of Carver’s fiction is bleak and his stories often seem anecdotal, but as the circumstances of his own life improved, his later work revealed a deepening of vision, a desire to draw connections between events, and tentative steps toward redemptions for his characters. In “Cathedral,” a husband must play host to Robert, a blind friend of his wife’s, a man whose sightlessness is at first frightening (though still comic for Carver), then a challenge to the narrator when he is called upon to describe the beauty of cathedrals--and their homage to God--to Robert. To deliver cathedrals to a blind man is akin to describing religious faith to the husband who admits, “I guess I’m an agnostic or something.” That is, in his own realm of darkness. Together, with Robert’s hand on his own, the narrator draws spires and flying buttresses and finds himself unable to stop. Robert makes him close his eyes as he draws. At the story’s end, the narrator is unsure of what’s happened to him and concludes that “it’s really something.”

The great writer, said Carver, “has some special way of looking at things and gives expression to that way of looking: That writer may be around for a time.” There can be no doubt that the work of Raymond Carver will be “around for a time” and that the renaissance of the American short story owes much to his contribution.