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"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."
Plenty of writers are admired, celebrated, imitated, and hyped. Very few
writers can, as Raymond Carver does in his poem "Late Fragment,"
call themselves beloved. In the years since his death in 1988, at fifty,
from lung cancer, Carver's reputation has blossomed. He has gone from
being an influential—and controversial—member of a briefly fashionable
school of experimental fiction to being an international icon of
traditional American literary values. His genius—but more his honesty,
his decency, his commitment to the exigencies of craft—is praised by an
extraordinarily diverse cross section of his peers.
Richard Ford, whose work, like Carver's, carries the Hemingway tradition
of masculine virtue into the perilous world of discount stores, suburban
sprawl, and no-fault divorce, published a tribute to his old friend in The
New Yorker last year. Jay McInerney, a student of Carver's at Syracuse
in the early 1980s whose cheeky, cosmopolitan sensibility seems, at first
glance, antithetical to Carver's plain-spoken provinciality, has written
memorably, and movingly, about his teacher. And Carver's stripped-down
vignettes of ordinary life in the United States have been championed by
such heroes of international postmodern super-fiction as Salman Rushdie,
Amos Oz, and Haruki Murakami, who is also Carver's principal Japanese
translator.
Carver's influence has proven remarkably durable and protean: the
chronicles of family dysfunction, addiction, and recovery that dominate
American writing in the late 1990s may owe as much to his example as did
the flood of laconic, present-tense short fiction that nearly drowned it
in the mid-1980s.
………..
………..
At the beginning of the story "Why Don't You
Dance?" a nameless man drinks whiskey and stares through his kitchen
window at the contents of his house, arranged in the front yard:
The chiffonier stood a few feet from the foot of the bed.
He had emptied the drawers into cartons that morning, and the cartons
were in the living room. A portable heater was next to the chiffonier. A
rattan chair with a decorator pillow stood at the foot of the bed. The
buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a part of the driveway. A yellow
muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down
over the sides. A potted fern was on the table, along with a box of
silverware and a record player, also gifts.
In some ways, All of Us resembles this tableau—the
interior furnishings of a life dragged out into the sunlight, where they
seem incongruous and, at the same time, desperately sad. The pathos of
"Why Don't You Dance?"—surely a case of ordinary objects
acquiring power by being rendered in ordinary language—intensifies when
we learn, early on in the collected poems, that the man at the window is
Carver himself. "Distress Sale" begins with a catalog of
household goods:
Early one Sunday morning everything outside—
the child's canopy bed and vanity table,
the sofa, end tables and lamps, boxes
of assorted books and records.
These things belong to someone else, a family reduced to selling off all
their possessions. The speaker is a friend—"I'm staying with them,
trying to dry out"—whose sympathy is both deepened and limited by
the fact that he's not much better off than they are: "I reach for my
wallet and that is how I understand it:/I can't help anyone."
In fact, as Carver recorded in poems like "Bankruptcy" and
"The Miracle," he and his first wife, Maryann, were twice forced
to declare bankruptcy. And the hardships of Carver's early adulthood—the
alcoholism, the financial insecurity, the cruelties and betrayals that
finally wrecked his marriage—turn up again and again in his poetry. As
Gallagher puts it, "Ray's appetite for inventorying domestic havoc is
often relentless." "Inventory" is perhaps more apt than
Gallagher would wish, given the formal slackness of so many of the poems,
but the poems in All of Us will serve, for serious readers of
Carver's fiction, as a useful storehouse of biographical information, and
as irrefutable cumulative evidence of how closely bound up Carver's
stories are with the events of his life.
…….
…….
This kind of reticence, the balked, clumsy attempt to
express an experience paralyzed in its enormity and yet at the same time
resolutely ordinary - the destruction of a family - resembles the way many
of the characters in Carver's stories express themselves. At the end
of "Why Don't You Dance?", for example, the point of view shift
from the man at the window to a young woman who had stopped with her
boyfriend to check out the junk on the man's lawn:
Weeeks later, she said: "The guy was about middle-aged.
.....
......
She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to
it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she gave up
trying.
The girl knows she has witnessed something terrible, but
lacks the resources—quite literally, the vocabulary—to explain to
herself or anyone else what she has seen. She can only say what happened,
and it isn't enough—there is more to it. But in her inarticulate state
she is not much different from the narrator of the story, or indeed, as
the poems and essays suggest, from Carver himself. And yet, the girl's
inability to say more, when coupled with Carver's refusal to say more—the
words husband, wife, divorce, alcoholism, bankruptcy, and despair occur
nowhere in the story—manages to say it all.
To his admirers, Carver's taciturnity becomes its own kind
of eloquence. But critics, especially those who are bothered by Carver's
disproportionate influence on other writers, have complained about how
much he leaves out. For Sven Birkerts, writing in 1986, the fiction of
Carver and his followers is marked by "a total refusal of any vision
of larger social connection." And it is true that the inhabitants of
Carver's world appear to exist not only in states of isolation and
impermanence, but, to borrow a phrase from George W.S. Trow, in a context
of no context, without geographical, social, or historical coordinates. We
seldom learn the name of the town, or even the state, in which a given
story takes place. The stories tend to be devoid of the cultural and
commercial references—popular songs, brand names, movies—that so many
contemporary writers use to fix their narratives in time and space. And
though Carver began writing in the early 1960s, and came to prominence
over the next two decades, his stories, at first glance, take no notice of
the social and political tumult of the era. We never know who the
president is, or whether men have walked on the moon; the characters never
read newspapers; and nobody expresses any political interests or opinions.
As far as I can tell, Vietnam is mentioned exactly once: in
"Vitamins" the leering, predatory behavior of a black man named
Nelson—one of the very few nonwhite characters who appear in Carver's
work—is ascribed to the fact that he is a veteran just returned from
combat in Southeast Asia.
…..
….."I'm much more interested in my
characters," Carver once told an interviewer, "in the people in
my story, than I am in any potential reader." This is a statement of
artistic priorities, to be sure, but it also amounts to an expression of
solidarity. Carver's characters are a lot like him: they marrytoo young,
divorce too late, and drink too much. Their midlife crises occur in their
early thirties. They are menaced by debt and sporadically employed.
Childhood in Carver's world consists of the uncomprehending, often brutal
imitation of adults; adulthood, which comes suddenly and irreversibly, is
a state of mourning for lost possibilities punctuated by eruptions of
childishness. The desire for permanence, for stability, for home and
family and steady work, is perpetually at war with the impulse to flee, to
strike it rich, or just to be left alone.
The spareness of Carver's style represents not parsimoniousness, but tact.
It represents, above all, an absolute loyalty to the people he writes
about. It's as if Carver, in deciding to become the kind of person who has
his own library, and who will someday see his own name under the words
"edited by," at the same time swore to remain true not only to
the delivery boy he had been, but to that boy's original state of
ignorance. In his recent introduction to The Best American Stories of
the Twentieth Century, John Updike writes, somewhat ruefully, that the
fiction of Carver and fellow minimalists like Barthelme and Ann Beattie
involves "a withdrawal of authorial guidance, an existential
determination to let things speak out of their own silence." This is
well put, but it would be more accurate in Carver's case to say that he is
motivated by a moral determination to let persons speak out of their own
deep reticence. The exercise of authorial guidance would imply, for him,
an unprincipled claim to omniscience, an assertion that he knows more than
his characters and is, therefore, better than they are.
To read Where I'm Calling From from beginning to
end, supplemented by some of the stories from earlier collections that
Carver chose not to reprint, is to discover that a great deal of what is
supposed to be missing—in particular, the changing social landscape of
the United States—has been there all along, but that it has been
witnessed from a perspective almost without precedent in American
literature. Stories like "What Do You Do in San Francisco?" and
"After the Denim" record the curious, suspicious, and disgusted
reactions of the small-town working class to interlopers from the urban,
well-to-do counterculture. "Jerry and Molly and Sam,"
"Nobody Said Anything," and "Bicycles, Muscles,
Cigarettes," among others, are ultimately about how the spread of the
suburbs transformed family life, and about the crisis of masculinity that
resulted. Carver's work, read closely and in the aggregate, also carries a
lot of news about feminism, work-ing conditions, and substance abuse in
late-twentieth-century provincial America.
To generalize in this way is, of course, to engage in a kind of analytical
discourse Carver resolutely mistrusted. More often than not, the big
talkers in Carver's stories are in possession of a degree of class
privilege. "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking," goes the famous
opening of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."
"Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the
right." The imperious homeowner in "Put Yourself in My
Shoes" and the jealous college teacher in "Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please?" also come to mind. People who carry on as if they
know what they're talking about are regarded with suspicion. Carver's
greatest sympathy is reserved for those characters who struggle to use
language to make sense of things, but who founder or fail in the attempt.
It is striking how many of his stories turn on the inability or refusal of
people to say what happened. Think of the girl at the end of "Why
Don't You Dance?," unable to convey the fullness of what she has seen
on the strange man's lawn, or the narrator of "Where is
Everyone?," clamming up at his AA meetings. And there are many more
examples. "Why, Honey?" is a mother's desperate, almost
incoherent, and yet strangely formal effort ("Dear Sir," it
begins) to explain to a nameless, prying stranger how her darling son went
wrong. In "Distance" (also published as "Everything Stuck
to Him"), a father, asked by his grown daughter to tell her
"what it was like when she was a kid," produces a fairy tale of
young parenthood (the main characters in which are referred to only as
"the boy" and "the girl") that leaves both teller and
listener unsettled, unenlightened, and remote from each other.
And then there is "Cathedral," one of Carver's most beloved
stories and the closest thing he produced to an allegory of his own
method. The narrator is visited by a garrulous blind man, an old friend of
his wife's, whose arrival he anticipates with apprehension. The two men
end up smoking marijuana together, while the television airs a documentary
about the cathedrals of Europe. It starts to bother the narrator that his
new acquaintance, while he knows something about the history of
church-building, has no idea of what cathedrals really are, and he tries
to tell him about them:
"They're really big," I said. "They're
massive. They're built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden
days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In
those olden days, God was an important part of everyone's life. You
could tell this from their cathedral-building. I'm sorry," I said,
"but it looks like that's the best I can do for you. I'm just no
good at it."
The blind man proposes that they draw a cathedral
instead, and they do—the narrator's eyes closed, the blind man's hand
guiding his. The narrator undergoes an epiphany: "It was like nothing
else in my life up to now."
The reader is left out: the men's shared experience, visual and tactile,
is beyond the reach of words. But the frustrating vicariousness of the
story is also the source of its power. Art, according to Carver, is a
matter of the blind leading the tongue-tied. Carver was an artist of a
rare and valuable kind: he told simple stories, and made it look hard.
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