Raymond Carver: life, works, and literary significance

Raymond Carver

When one is seeking a bright, cheerily optimistic view of the world one does not automatically turn to the works of Raymond Carver. The short story writer - whom many critics cite as being the greatest master of that form since Ernest Hemingway - filled his pages with anger and discontent, despair and loss, desperation and the demons of addiction. The overall tone of his work is certainly dark. But his writing is not universally so, a fact that tends to be overlooked in the overall tone of this oeuvre. But while it would of course be dishonest (and a disservice to the tone of his writings) to call Carver an optimist, it would also be a disservice to him not to consider the happier, gentler and sweeter moments that intercede into his work. This paper examines those moments of brightness, those moments of lightness, in his work when he observes the world around him and seems to take happiness from the everyday, seems to be aware of the healing power of the ordinary.

This paper argues that while his work was often dark, Carver was in his writing (as in his life) searching for the common happiness that arises from daily life. Because he himself spent so many years not being able to feel happy (indeed living an essentially miserable existence while he was addicted to alcohol), I believe that he wanted to prove both to himself and to his readers that it was possible to find light in the world. Using works from his earlier and later periods as well as critical analyses of his writing, this paper argues that while his later works were certainly not in any way simply Pollyannaish, they were imbued with a sense of hope and an inclination to look more forward than backward.

Sense of Beauty and Mystery

Carver's fiction - although this is certainly much less true of his poetry - was often compared to that of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway, hovering as it did in the borderlands between minimalism and realism. Carver himself disliked the term "minimalist" because it "smacks of smallness of vision and execution" (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rcarver.htm) but there is a certain truth in calling his work minimalist rather than realist. Crane and Hemingway were writing in a different world and about a different world than was Carver; they belonged within the tradition of High Modernism. And they belonged to a moment in history in which the center was wobbling but might well still be expected to hold.

Carver was a product of - as well as an architect of - postmodernism. The world that wrote about in his short stories was one in which there was no possibility that the pieces could be put back together. This sense of fragmentation is, of course, the primary distinguishing feature of postmodernism. It might also be said to be the distinguishing feature of his life. The two are not unrelated and not simply in a personal sense: Carver was a writer of postmodern tales while living a postmodern life. He was, in other words, a product of his moment in history (as are we all) and as such a man living in a time in which the world had come apart.

His insistence on the appropriateness of the short story through which to tell his message was important, for the form reflected his sense of the impossibility of the long view, either in life or within fiction. "I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact - so crucially important to me back at the beginning and now still a consideration - that the story can be written and read in one sitting, " he wrote in the foreword to Where I'm Calling From (1998) and it is this intimate fit between his philosophy and the form of the short story and the poem that we find evidence both of the postmodernism of his work and also the hopefulness that resides in his writing.

Life is seen and experienced and understood in flashes that in real life can be almost instantaneous but that in writing must take at least as long as a poem or a short story. This way of living produces a highly fragmented existence, a highly fragmented perspective, but it also allows for happiness to creep in. If Carver's perspective on life (and his work as a writer) had been more unified, we might not have seen these flashes of hope, of simply joy. But because he presents the world - his world - to us in pieces, we are able to hear birdsong in them, see the sunlight upon our faces, taste the first dappled apple of the season.

Mickey Spillane and Early Fatherhood

It is, of course, always problematic to draw inferences between a writer's life and his (or her) work, but it is tempting to do so in the case of Carver because certainly much of the darkness that ran through his fiction also ran through his life. As Halpert (1995) tells us in his excellent biography of the writer, Carver was born in a Columbia River Oregon mill town where his father - also an alcoholic, worked at the sawmill and told his son about his own early adventures as a hunter in the Northwestern wilderness and his grandfather's fighting in both the Confederate and Union armies. Carver's mother worked as a waitress or stayed home to care for her family, which lived in that area between poverty and working-class persistence.

Carver grew up, Halpert tells us, reading Mickey Spillane novels and magazines filled with boys' life adventures. But the larger world that he read about between book and magazine covers would be essentially closed to him. Just after he graduated high school in 1956, he married his 16-year-old high-school girlfriend, whom he had gotten pregnant. She would have their second child two years later. While he worked trying to sell various products, as a janitor, as an unskilled laborer in the local sawmill, his wife, Maryann, waited tables, taught school, and worked as a sales clerk and secretary. It was indeed a most fragmentary existence and one that produced just enough to keep the family fed and housed - most of the time. Like many writers, Carver would grow in full adulthood in an atmosphere in which he had no sense of professional affiliation. He was not a professional, just a working man scrambling to stay ahead.

It was an attempt to improve the economic position of his family that prompted Carver in 1959 to move from Oregon to a town called Paradise, California. It was also here that he began to be a writer, after taking a creative-writing course. His course - all the way through to the point at which he died at the age of 50 of cancer - would remain troubled. Although he would write from 1959 until his death in 1988 his career never ran smoothly and would worsen considerably after 1967 - the same year that his first really successful story, "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," came out and even more so after 1970, when he lost a textbook editing job. This did allow him to write full time although he would also teach in university writing programs as well.

The first year I [Maryann] taught [at Los Altos High School], Ray had a whole year off where he could write, and he wrote many, many stories. He finished the bulk of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please. That was in 1971....[It] wasn't published until 1976, and for five years Ray didn't draw a sober breath. He left his job at University of California, Santa Barbara, a semester early [in 1974] due to his health, and after that he wasn't able to work until 1978.

The alcoholism grew to take up all of his time. He became what he called a full-time practicing alcoholic. In 1976, the same year Will You Please Be Quiet, Please was published by McGraw-Hill with the help of Gordon Lish Ray hit rock bottom. Between October of 1976 and January of 1977, he was hospitalized four times for acute alcoholism. The Carver's house was sold in October and Ray began living apart from his wife, all at the same time" (http://cai.ucdavis.edu/enl3/carver'svision.htm).

The most important event of his mature years was arguably his decision in 1977 to join Alcoholics Anonymous and become sober: His stories after this point are less sere, more touched by a sense of the possible as if his own recovery had allowed him a chance to understand that the path of one's life can lead one to unexpectedly lovely places, even if it does not allow one to stay in them.

An Editor's Hand?

Another possible explanation for the shift in tone between Carver's earlier and later works has also been floated, which is that his earlier works were molded (and perhaps even more) by the hand of editor Gordon Lish, who worked both at Esquire and also at Alfred A. Knopf. Lish himself argues that he shaped Carver's earlier work and that the substantive differences in the two parts of his career reflect not his soboriety but the difference between his own hand alone and that guided by Lish.

The details varied from telling to telling, but the basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that they were more his than Carver's.

No one quite knew what to make of his statements. Carver, who died in 1988, never responded in public to them. Basically it was Lish's word against commonsense. Lish had written fiction, too. If he was such a great talent, why did so few people care about his work?

As the years passed, Lish became reluctant to discuss the subject. But seven years ago he arranged for the sale of his papers to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Since then, only a few Carver scholars have examined the Lish manuscripts thoroughly. When one tried to publish his conclusions, Carver's widow and literary executor, poet Tess Gallagher, effectively blocked him with copyright cautions and pressure.

I'd heard about this scholar's work through a friend and decided to visit the archive. What I found there, when I began looking at the manuscripts of stories such as Fat and Tell the Women We're Going, were pages full of editorial marks - strikeouts, additions and marginal comments in Lish's sprawling handwriting. It looked as if a temperamental seven-year-old had somehow got hold of the stories" (Max, 1999, p. 17).

Many have dismissed Gish's claims as little more than attempting to ride the coattails of the famous writer. However, when researchers have examined the texts themselves, there does seem to be a case to be made that Lish (well-known at Knopf for being an especially aggressive editor) would have felt perfectly comfortable fundamentally rewriting Carver's work. In one examination of Lish's editing of Carver's early stories the common explanation that Carver's stories changed because his life changed seems at best to tell only part of the story.

I had previously seen some manuscripts in the Carver holdings at Ohio State University, an archive to which Gallagher has said she will ultimately give the Carver papers in her possession. The manuscripts at OSU are clean, almost without editing marks, as if they'd gone straight from author to typesetter.

The Lilly manuscripts are different. There are countless cuts and additions to the pages; entire paragraphs have been added. Lish's black felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate the original text.

In the case of Carver's 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Lish cut about half the original words and rewrote 10 of the 13 endings. "Carol, story ends here," he would note for the benefit of his typist.

In Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit, for example, Lish cut 70 per cent of the original words. With a longer story, A Small, Good Thing, in which a couple anxiously wait for their child to come out of a coma, Lish cut the text by one-third, eliminating most of the description and all of the introspection. He retitled it The Bath, altering the story's redemptive tone to one of Beckettian despair. In Lish's version, you no longer know if the child lives or dies.

Lish was constantly on guard against what he saw as Carver's creeping sentimentality. In the original manuscripts, Carver's characters talk about their feelings. They talk about regrets. When they do bad things, they cry. When Lish got hold of Carver, they stopped crying. They stopped feeling" (Max, 1999, p. 17).

The truth about the extent to which Lish transformed the earlier stories may be hard to decipher, with Carver dead, his widow, Tess Gallagher, silent on the subject, and Lish himself mostly silent as he believes that anything he says will only tend to lead to his further vilification (Max, 1999, p. 17).

Peacocks in the Road

Turning away from secondary sources back to primary ones. we can see glimmers of sweetness throughout Carver'slater works, where they tend to come in two different forms. There are moments of pleasure that are so tightly entwined with either loss or deprivation that they can only barely be glimpsed as such, as in this passage in "Feathers," which was included in the 1983 collection Cathedral:

Sometimes when her hair get in her way she has to pick it up and push it over her shoulder. She gets mad at it. "This hair," she says. "Nothing but trouble." Fran works in a creamery and has to wear her hair up when she goes to work She has to wash it every nigh and take a brush to it when we're sitting in front of the TV. Now and then she threatens to cut it off. But I don't think she'd do that. She knows I like it too much. She knows I'm crazy about it. I tell her I fell in love with her because of her hair. I tell her I might stop loving her if she cut it. Sometimes I call her "Swede." She could pass for a Swede. Those times together in the evening she'd brush her hair and we'd wish out loud for things we didn't have. We wished for a new car, that;s one of the things we wished for. And we wished we could spend a couple of weeks in Canada" (p. 5).

This is an archetypical passage of later Carver: The image of the beautiful hair, the sensuousness of Fran's washing and brushing it, the way she lets it loose when she is at home is bound up with all the "things we didn't have." Beauty is acknowledged, but its presence in the midst of poverty and want tarnishes it.

But then later in the story we have another eruption of the beautiful, an episode of the unexpectedness of life and the ways in which each day has the potential to astonish us that marks his later work. Something that initially promises to be both frightening an ugly (a vulture or a miserable, squalling baby) turns out to be (literally) unspeakably lovely:

Then something as big as a vulture flapped heavily down from one of the trees and landed just in front of the car. It shook itself. It turned its long neck toward the car, raised its head, and regarded us.

Goddamn it," I said. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and stared at the thing.

Can you believe it?" Fran said. I never saw a real one before.

We both knew it was a peacock, sure, but we didn't say the word out loud. We just watched it. The bird turned its head up in the air and made this harsh cry again. It had fluffed itself out and looked about twice the size it'd been when it landed.

Goddamn," I said again. We stayed where we were in the front seat.

The bird moved forward a little. Then it turned its head to the side and braced itself. It kept its bright, wild eye right on us. Its trail was raised, and its was like a big fan folding in and out. There was every color in the rainbow shining from that tail.

My God," Fran said quietly. She moved her hand over to my knee.

Goddamn," I said. There was nothing else to say (pp. 7-9).

This acknowledgement that sometimes there are no words to describe the wonder of life is a motif that runs throughout his later works - and this understanding is itself both hopeful and despairing as he acknowledges the beauty of life and the limits of art.

Often there is a conflict (although almost always implicit) between the degree of hope that different characters in a story are willing to allow into their lives. In "Why Don't You Dance" (in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) a distinct tension runs through the story. We can see the skill of Carver's writing - and the clarity of his characterization - in the ways in which he presents the world view of these two characters to us, fleshing them out while at the same time giving us only the slightest bit of information about each one of them.

In this story we clearly have one character who wants to dance and another who does not - that is, one who would like to fling herself into life while the other stands back. Here is the girl's point-of-view:

The girl sat on the bed. She pushed off her shoes and lay back. She thought she could see a star.

Come here, Jack. Try this bed. Bring one of those pillows," she said.

How is it?" he said.

Try it," she said.

He looked around. The house was dark.

I feel funny," he said. "Better see if anybody's home."

She bounced on the bed.

Try it first," she said,

He lay down on the bed and put the pillow under his head.

How does it feel?" she said.

It feels firm," he said.

She turned on her side and put her hand to his face.

Kiss me," she said.

Let's get up," he said.

Kiss me," she said.

There are people in the world who believe that they can see stars and those that cannot. In his early years as a writer, Carver could not, and he remains suspicious of such stargazing even as he recognizes its attractions. Carver writes - certainly before 1977 and still quite often after he began his trip into sobriety - like a man who believes that everything can be taken away from one at any moment, so it is wise not to count on too much.

In his story "Where I'm Calling From," Carver has a character named Tiny in Frank Martin's drying out facility who has these sort of seizures immediately after describing to his fellow recovering alcoholics how he feels much better and will be leaving soon. Carver was often suspicious of good fortune. During his successful, sober years he would often marvel that he could own things like boats to fish in, and two cars - one a Mercedes that weren't breaking down all the time" (http://cai.ucdavis.edu/enl3/carver'svision.htm).

Beauty Binds Us To the World

Carver's early characters are not so much incapable of seeing the beauty in life but all too wary of it. They might be Buddhist monks in their understanding that there are far too many ways in which people become bound to the world. And of these ways in which the soul becomes caught in the cycle of endless toil and incarnation beauty is probably more dangerous even than love.

One of the essential markers of the experience of living in poverty is the realization that almost everyone who is poor makes at some point: Hard work is not enough. Luck has to enter into the picture for things to change, and luck tends to stay as far away as possible from those who are poor.

In private desperation, Raymond Carver's characters struggle through their lives, knowing, with occasional clarity, that the good life they had once hoped would be achieved through hard work will not come about. In many ways, Carver's life was the model for all of his characters. Married to Maryann Burk on June 7th, 1957, at nineteen, and having two children by October of 1958, the Carvers' life was decided for years to come. Early on, Carver felt, along with his wife, that hard work would take care of nearly everything. "We thought we could do it all," he said in one interview, "We were poor but we thought that if we kept working, if we did the right things, the right things would happen" (Gentry 123). Somewhere in the middle of this life of dead end jobs and child raising, he realized, very much like one of his characters, that things would not change" (http://cai.ucdavis.edu/enl3/carver'svision.htm).

His stories - both the early and the late ones - tend to be filled with characters who want to believe that things will change, who are themselves hovering on the verge of change, but who are living in worlds in which such change is unlikely to occur. He touches on this idea at the end of his early story "Will You Please Be Quiet Please?" get into bed and move clear over to the edge and le there on my stomach. But right away, as soon a she turns off the light and gets into bed, Rudy beings. I turn on my back and relax some, though it is against my will. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel I am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.

That's a funny story, Rita says, but I can see she doesn't know what to make of it.

I feel depressed. But I won't go into it with her. I've already told her too much.

She sits there waiting, her dainty fingers poking her hair.

Waiting for what? I'd like to know.

It is August.

My life is going to change. I feel it."

We may or may not believe this claim, this feeling, at this point in Carver's career. But we do believe it later on - perhaps because Carver himself began to believe in it, as Randolph (1992) suggests.

From "The Bath" To "A Small Good Thing"

We can see much of the changes that took place in Carver's work (whether they were induced by his alcoholism and then his sobriety, by the influence of Gish, by some combination of these two factors or by other factors altogether) if we look at his two stories "The Bath" (of which there are two versions) and "A Small Good Thing."

The narrative arc of both of the stories is the same: In each story Carver tells us the story of a woman who orders a birthday cake for her son, who is hit by a reckless driver two days later, on his birthday. The mother and father rush to the hospital to care for their son. We they return home briefly to shower and change clothes they receive an anonymous phone call that tells them only " It's about Scotty."

Both versions of "The Bath" end with this line, and we as readers are left to guess whether this is the hospital calling to tell them their son is dead, the hospital calling to tell them that their son has awakened from his coma, the police calling to say that the reckless driver has been arrested, or the bakery calling to remind them to pick up the ordered cake.

Small Good Thing" continues the narrative arc of the story so that we find out that the boy dies. The parents receive another call and find that it is in fact the baker. They storm out to confront him at midnight, and (as much as Carver's characters ever do) they connect with each other. The baker apologizes for their loss, and gives them some fresh rolls to eat, reminding them that "Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this."

By the end of this version of the story the parents have begun to understand that grief can be lessened by a sense of connection and the story ends once again in ambiguity but with the suggestion of hope: "They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows,..."

It is rare that an author presents critics with such a perfect opportunity to see inside (and to critique) the creative process. Because we are presented with one version of a story from one recognized period of a writer's work ("The Bath" from his early, depressive phase) and a second version from a different period of his work "A Small Good Thing" from his "expansive" phase) it is difficult not to examine the two as providing clues for the larger differences in these two sets of Carver's writings.

In other words, we are inclined to see the entire collection of "What We.." In which "The Bath" appears as being shot through with despair and hopelessness while "A Small Good Thing" seems substantially more hopeful. This might seem ironic since the more hopeful of the two stories ends in death while the other does not, but the later story is transformed by the fact that people in it actually connect to it other.

The earlier version of the story has a distinctly menacing cast to it. It presents us a world in which people are kept separate from each other by misfortune. They do not trust the fates and so they cannot trust each other. Terrible things happen and there is no way at all in which one can mitigate them.

This sense of despair disappears in the second story in which we see that even tragedy (even the terrible loss of a child) cannot destroy hope so long as people still try to find common ground with each other. There is despair in both stories and loss, but in the second story there is also redemption. The second story also has an almost religious cast to it as the parents receive the bread from the baker and eat it in a recreation of the Catholic rite of eating bread that is really flesh.

While the story is certainly not meant to convey us to a world in which a loving God watches over us and cares for us, there is the sense that the kinds of transformations that are usually attributed to religious rituals may actually be possible through the operation of human grace. Such a sense is entirely missing from the first version of the story in which the key ritualistic element - the taking of a bath - does not have the power to give new life (as a baptism would) or to cleanse sins.

Hundred Small Changes

There are a number of technical changes that Carver makes between "The Bath" and "A Small, Good Thing" that are worth noting in that they contribute to the overall sense of the story.

The first of these is the greater degree of specificity in the later story. We may not in general think of specific details as being linked to optimism per se (because they might well be details of terrible things) but these details in the latter story suggest that greater degree of connection that the characters have to the world, as if they were more committed to the process of life itself.

We see this at every level - including the fact that many of the characters in "The Bath" do not even have names. This inability to give names to things, to use language to do its most fundamental job of describing and anchoring the world, is exemplified by the baker's oddly inarticulate calls (surely he must have to make such calls all of the time?) as well as by the doctor's inability to talk about Scotty, to name the truth of his condition (and this too is surely something that he must have to do all the time?"

In "The Bath" we see the doctor unable to use language to engage himself or to reach out to Scotty's mother. He lacks the ability to connect himself to the world around him:

He said, "His signs are fine. Everything's good."

The mother said, "But he's sleeping."

Yes," the doctor said.

By the time we have arrived at "A Small Good Thing" the doctor is able to speak the truth, is willing to make the leap into a world in which language is designed to link people together.

But all of his signs are fine. They're as normal as can be."

It is coma, then?" Ann said.

The doctor rubbed his smooth cheek. "We'll call it that for the time being, until he wakes up"

We might not notice the difference in such a passage if similar changes were not made throughout the two stories as the characters each emerge, no longer content to take refuge in their own isolated lives. The characters acquire pasts, and as they do so they acquire not only presents but also futures - something that it is hard to imagine the characters in "The Bath" possessing.

For example, Howard (the father) who is very much a cipher in "The Bath" become a man with whom we can identify (and who we can understand) in "A Small Good Thing":

Until now, his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction -- college, marriage, another year of college for the advanced degree in business, a junior partnership in an investment firm. Fatherhood. He was happy and, so far, lucky -- he knew that. His parents were still living, his brothers and sister were established, his friends from college had gone out to take their places in the world. So far, he had kept away from any real harm, from those forces he knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man if the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned."

This is a far richer psychological portrait than we get in "The Bath":

It had been a good life till now. There had been work, fatherhood, family. The man had been lucky and happy. But fear made him want a bath."

The baker too becomes a much more fully fleshed figure in the later story. He is so inarticulate in the first story that he seems only subhuman, little more animate than the loaves that he makes (and whom he represents and much as they represent him). But by the later story we see him too as a complete being. We shift from this image of the baker in "The Bath":

The cake would be ready Monday morning, in plenty of time for the party Monday afternoon. This was all the baker was willing to say. No pleasantries, just this small exchange, the barest information, nothing that was not necessary."

To this version in "A Small Good Thing":

While he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he'd ever done anything else with his life besides be a baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the baker's age - a man old enough to be her father - must have children who'd gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought."

The phrase "that between them" might single a barrier, but in the larger context of the passage and the story we see it as a sort of lifeline - a suggestion of what is to come with the Communion-like offering of the bread.

The connection between mother and son is also made much more explicitly in the later story. In "The Bath" we see the mother leave the hospital - not knowing if she will ever see her son again - but are not allowed to see inside her to what she is feeling: "He helped her into her coat. She moved to the door." But in "A Small Good Thing" we are allowed to glimpse what she is feeling and so as readers connect her more closely to her son - as well as connect her more closely to ourselves as well:

She stood in her coat for a minute trying to recall the doctor's exact words, looking for any nuances, any hint of something behind his words other than what he had said. She tried to remember if his expression."

This is almost an entirely different character from the one that we met before: It is hard to conceive of that other character as being one who would ever even think to look for nuance.

There and Back Again

What is especially striking about the progress of this story is that many elements that are found in the original version are cut out of the published version and then added back in to "A Small Good Thing." This process tends to support the idea that Gish may well have had a hand in crafting stories like the originally published version of "The Bath" and that Carver (when he had the freedom to do so later) returned to his stories the elements that he had valued in them and that Gish had removed.

We can see this progression in the following passage:

young woman knocked and came in. She wore white slacks and a white blouse and carried a little tray of things that she put on the stand beside the bed

Doctor's orders," the young woman said. "I do what I'm told to do. They say draw, I draw. What's wrong with him, anyway?" she said. "He's a sweetie."

In the published version we are given the scene without most of its affect:

technician came in and took blood.

A don't understand this," the mother said to the technician.

Doctor's orders," the technician said.

The original sentences - and the original sense - is returned to the story in "A Small Good Thing." There is in this passage from "One Bath" the kind of writing that made critics attach to Carver the hated title of minimalist but there is also a certain flatness. The passage (especially compared to the version of it in "A Small Good Thing") is lacking resonance. We are as disconnected from the characters as they are from each other, and while that was arguably Carver's intention (and arguably an important point for him to essay) it is also an aesthetically and philosophically dangerous path to tread.