Raymond Carver: Life, Work, and Blue-Collar Resilience

Introduction: Origins of a Working-Class Voice

Given poet and author Raymond Carver's life history, it comes as no surprise that his works consist of raw and often severe portrayals of blue-collar existence, yet they also capture his characters' innate ability to be resilient and find a way to rise above their circumstances. Born in the mill town of Clatskanie on the Columbia River in Oregon in 1938, Carver grew up the son of an alcoholic father who had ridden the rails from Arkansas to Washington state during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s and then made his living as a sawmill worker. His mother, Ella Casey Carver, a victim of domestic violence, supplemented the family income by working as a waitress and retail clerk. Carver's 1986 poem "Shiftless" summarizes the story of his childhood: "The people who were better off than us were comfortable.... / The ones worse off were sorry and didn't work." Out of a life of hardship, Carver created unforgettable stories of sorrow, endangerment, and hard-won acceptance. "They're my people," he once said about the laborers and service workers who populate his fiction. "I could never write down to them."

Carver's work first reached a national audience with the publication of "Neighbors" in Esquire magazine in 1971. It "was the product of a shy, sometimes self-destructive sensibility that drew its vision from the lives of the working poor among whom Carver grew up — and whose mode of perceiving he never fully left behind, despite the comfort and acclaim he enjoyed in the last decade of his life" (Scribner Writer's Series). It is precisely this unassuming depiction of mid-twentieth-century American life that made him such a well-known and enduring author. By the time of his death in 1988, Carver was widely acknowledged as one of the finest short story writers of his generation.

Carver's Childhood and Early Influences

In 1941, when Carver was three years old, his family moved to Yakima, Washington, a region known for fruit growing and the timber industry. One of his earliest memories was of his mother taking a couple of tablespoons of "nerve medicine" every morning from a bottle kept beneath the kitchen sink. Home was a succession of little two-bedroom rented houses, most of which lacked indoor plumbing.

Growing up, Carver and his brother spent a great deal of time hunting and fishing. In an interview, Carver described his childhood as "fairly conventional in many respects": "We were a poor family, didn't have a car for the longest while, but I didn't miss having a car. My parents worked and struggled and finally became what I guess you'd call lower-middle class." He added that they did not have much in the way of material goods or cultural enrichment. "But I didn't have to go out and work in the fields when I was ten years old or anything of that sort. Mainly I just wanted to fish and hunt and ride around in cars with other guys" (Scribner).

Although his father was often drinking, Carver enjoyed his company when he read aloud from the Bible and Zane Grey Westerns or told stories about his grandfather's Civil War adventures. Carver credits his father's storytelling, sporting magazines such as Field and Stream, and his love of hunting for his desire to write. In high school he took a correspondence writing course and submitted his first piece — a fishing story — to an outdoor magazine. "The piece came back, finally, but that was fine," Carver recalled. "It had gone out in the world, that manuscript — it had been places" (Kibble 2001).

Early Career, Marriage, and Alcoholism

After high school, Carver married, attended college in California, and began to be recognized for his writing ability. He supported his family by working as a janitor while writing in his spare time. In 1967 he became a textbook editor, and his short story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" was included in Best American Short Stories. Despite this initial success, he began to drink heavily. As he explained in an interview: "We were still in a state of penury... I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit" (Kibble). For the following decade, both his writing success and his alcoholism intensified. He published many stories and earned a reputation as a significant literary voice, but he also divorced and was hospitalized for drinking on numerous occasions. In 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, he stopped drinking, and his work began to take on a more positive character.

Carver continued to write extensively until his death from lung cancer in 1988. In the book A New Path to the Waterfall, Tess Gallagher — the author's long-time companion and wife in his final months — writes of his last poems and his attitude toward life as he approached death: "Ray kept on working, planning, believing that he might, through some loop in fate, even get out of this." His hope persisted to the end, as he wrote in his journal: "When hope is gone, the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws." For Carver at fifty, the alternative to reaching forward was acceptance of death, which was impossible for him (xviii).

In the second passage of Chekhov's "Ward No. 6," a doctor and an elderly postmaster discuss the human soul:

"And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?" he would ask suddenly. "No, honoured Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no grounds for believing it." "I must own I doubt it too. And yet I have a feeling as though I should never die. Oh, I think to myself: 'Old fogey, it is time you were dead!' But there is a little voice in my soul says: 'Don't believe it; you won't die.'"

This optimism, however, came only in Carver's later years. As an alcoholic burdened by depression, his characters were markedly different. When his first major collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976, he acknowledged in an interview that all his writings were grounded in autobiographical details, but warned: "Unless you're a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it's dangerous to write volume after volume on the Story of My Life. [...] A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best" (Kibble).