Introducing the world, at last, to the real Raymond Carver
The title of Raymond Carver’s second major story collection is one of the more memorable and quotable titles of our time — “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
It was published in January 1982. I reviewed it in these pages at the time in a way not dissimilar from the lion’s share of Carver reviews at the time — in authentic awe at the compression and apparent syllabic perfection of Carver’s sweepingly influential minimalism.
He seemed, at the time, the greatest master of the American short story since Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme, a couple decades earlier. Twenty-seven years later, he still seems all of that.
Some weeks after the publication of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and my review, Carver—then teaching at Syracuse University— came to Buffalo to read from his work in the superb Fiction Diction series at the Hallwalls Gallery (then on Main Street). After Carver’s reading, a couple of us were introduced to him by R. D. Pohl, the co-curator of the series (and now the News’ literary blogger and poetry editor).
Carver still seems to me the most deeply uncomfortable writer (or any other public figure) I’ve ever met. Because of my familiarity with his work — which referred so liberally and matter-of-factly to his ’70s alcoholism (and periodic dry-outs), I blithely assumed that the sweating and mysteriously frightened man I was introduced to was merely in terrible and primal need of a drink.
He had just read his stories at Hallwalls to a large, enthusiastic and comprehending audience. He should have been relieved at that point in the evening and ready to bask a little in the extravagant admiration we all had for him. And yet it was as if, for him, the easy part of the evening was over and the true terror about to begin.
I didn’t understand until two decades later — long after Carver, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer at 50—just why he was so uncomfortable with those of us who couldn’t possibly have admired him more — or been more sympathetic to everything about him.
That was when the news hit the New York Times Magazine of the unique — and excruciating and painful—relationship of Carver and his editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, himself a writer and immensely important, self-styled “Capt. Fiction” as the landmark former fiction editor of Esquire Magazine. Lish was as much a champion of Carver as any writer could possibly have. And yet, as the editors of the cornerstone current volume put it, “Lish more than halved the length of Carver’s manuscript and radically altered many of the stories. Carver had initially been deeply distressed by Lish’s aggressive editing, going so far as to request in a letter of July 8, 1980, that Knopf halt production of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’ ”
When the book was first published, then, Carver was receiving the hearty congratulatory handshakes of those who had praised to the heavens and beyond the work of an author whose last name might be thought to be “Carver-Lish,” a kind of literary collaboration like Kaufman and Hart or Nordhoff and Hall. That memorable title alone — “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” — is Lish’s, not Carver’s.
That is why, at long last, this definitive Library of America edition of Carver’s Collected Stories — along with all the key essays — is, by far, the most important Carver collection that has ever been published. Included within, in fact, is “Beginners,” Carver’s original manuscript of “What We Talk About etc.,” as well as the Carver/Lish book it became, which was one of the most praised in American literature of the past 40 years.
It would be nice to report that Lish’s high-handedness resulted in travesties and depredations and that the first publication of “Beginners” uncut proves it. In fact, Carver-Lish remains a striking American writer.
But make no mistake. Look at the lead paragraphs of Carver’s original stories in the book: “A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.” (“Viewfinder.”)
“That morning she pours Teacher’s Scotch over my belly and licks it off. In the afternoon, she tries to jump out the window. I can’t stand this anymore and I tell her so.” (“Gazebo.”)
Carver is Carver. The stories in “Beginners” may be quite different — and more discursive and expository than those of Carver-Lish — but everything that Raymond Carver has been revered for remains unchanged by this, which now has to be seen as the only definitive Carver volume extant.
Whereas Donald Barthelme, with tidal influence for one whole literary generation, took the American short story into previously unimagined territories of cultural knowingness and surreal wit (there is far more Max Ernst in Barthelme’s work than Hemingway or Chekhov), Carver, a couple decades later, was, by far, the greatest of those sarcastically and unfairly demeaned as “the K-Mart realists.”
His intimate dispatches from America’s bedrock “lives of quiet desperation” (thank you, Thoreau) hit with the visceral impact of truth. His literary relatives are many and varied — Richard Ford, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, Andre Dubus — but Carver’s were the stories that brought the news that the occupation “writer” was just as much a blue-collar profession as it was a profession for art museum curators and adventuring expatriates who claimed to liberate the Ritz with a bottle of champagne.
There were fish in Carver’s stories — not the Big Fish, or the Big Hunt either—but something else entirely written by a man who once wrote that his biggest literary influence was his kids. And, say, the experience of doing “five or six loads of clothes, kids’ clothes for the most part” in an Iowa City laundromat and having “sharp words with an old harridan over the number of washers I’d had to use” and waiting for his chance at some much-coveted dryers—which was thwarted when the user decided her clothes just weren’t dry enough.
“I remember thinking at that moment, amid the feelings of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing — and brother, I mean nothing — that had ever happened to me on this earth could have come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could possibly make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children. And that I would always have them, and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.”
I submit that before then, no other American writer had quite written with such fearless self-pity.
These stories are not meant to be read more than three or four at a time. If they are, their astonishing purity may begin — quite erroneously — to seem like monotony.
Raymond Carver remains one of the American writers of our lifetimes whose work tells us what we are when we truly are what we are.
Jeff Simon is the News’ Arts and Books Editor.
FICTION
Collected Stories
By Raymond Carver,
edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
Library of America
1019 pages, $40
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