FREE ESSAY ON CARVER'S VISION

CARVER'S VISION

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. He recounts one of
the strongest of these moments in his essay on writing influences, Fires. On a Saturday
afternoon in the early 1960s, when Carver was a student at the University of Iowa, he was
doing chores and taking care of their two children, Christine and Vance. The children
were with some of their friends, at a birthday party, Carver was not sure--he often
admitted to having a very poor memory. He was at the laundromat washing clothes and, at
this point in the essay, waiting for a dryer: 
When and if one of the dryers ever stopped, I planned to rush over to it with my shopping
basket of damp clothes. Understand, I'd been hanging around in the Laundromat for thirty
minutes or so with this basketful of clothes, waiting my chance. I'd already missed out
on a couple of dryers--somebody'd gotten there first. I was getting frantic.... even if I
could get my clothes into a dryer it would still be another hour or more before the
clothes would dry.... Finally a dryer came to a stop. And I was right there when it did.
The clothes inside quit tumbling and lay still. In thirty seconds or so, if no one showed
up to claim them, I planned to get rid of the clothes and replace them with my own.
That's the law of the laundromat. But at that minute a woman came over to the dryer and
opened the door. I stood there waiting. This woman put here hand into the machine and
took hold of some items of clothing. But they weren't dry enough, she decided. She closed
the door and put two more dimes into the machine. In a daze I moved away with my shopping
cart and went back to waiting. But 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 ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere close, could possibly
be as important to me, could 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 (Fires 32-33).
This sort of epiphany is what Carver deals with in almost all of his stories--the daily
responsibilities of life weighing down on one's shoulders when nothing is certain, not
one's marriage, one's sobriety, not even a dryer to finish drying the clothes. Almost all
the characters in my stories come to the point where they realize that compromise, giving
in, plays a major role in their lives, Carver said. Then one single moment of revelation
disrupts the pattern of their daily lives. It's a fleeting moment during which they don't
want to compromise anymore. And afterwards they realize that nothing ever really changes
(Gentry 80). 
More than once Carver has been criticized for condescending to his characters, or in more
favorable terms, dealing with them ironically. He flatly denied this stance at every
opportunity. I'm not talking down to my characters, or holding them up for ridicule, or
slyly doing an end run around them. I'm much more interested in my characters, in the
people in my story, than I am in any potential reader. I'm uncomfortable with irony if
it's at the expense of someone else, if it hurts the characters (Gentry 185). If he had
condescended to his characters then he would had to have condemned the first forty years
of his own life for its ordinariness. I do know something about the life of the
underclass and what it feels like, by virtue of having lived it myself for so long, he
said in a 1986 interview. Half my family is still living like this. They still don't know
how they're going to make it through the next month or two (Gentry 138). 
Carver's writing career began to take shape when he started his B.A. at Chico State
College in the Fall of 1958 as a part-time student. In the Fall of 1959 he took Creative
Writing 101 with an unpublished writer who had recently arrived at Chico State, John
Gardner. Carver recognized Gardner as a strong influence on his writing even though his
exposure to Gardner was short, only one academic year in 1959 and 1960. Gardner
recognized Carver's need for a quiet place to work and loaned his office key to Carver
for him to work. In the office, surrounded with boxes of unpublished manuscripts by an
honest to goodness writer, he wondered about the world that he wanted to inhabit. In his
office on the weekends I used to go through his manuscripts and steal titles form his
stories, Carver said in his first formal interview in 1977, I mean take his titles, which
struck me as awfully good, as I recall, and rephrase them, and put them on my own
stories. Then I began to show him my stories with his titles, and he had to give me a
little lecture on the basic proprieties and the like (Gentry 4). In criticizing students'
work Gardner was stern. He made clear what would not be allowed in honest fiction. He
would go through a story line by line with the author and tell him or her why certain
omissions were non negotiable and then haggle over the others. Carver recounts his
conferences with Gardner in his essay John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher collected in
Fires: 
Before our conference he would have marked up my story, crossing out unacceptable
sentences, phrases, individual words, even some of the punctuation; and he gave me to
understand that these deletions were not negotiable. In other cases he would bracket
sentences, phrases, or individual words, and these were items we'd talk about, these
cases were negotiable (45).
Carver admits that though this is not necessarily the best way to teach, at that early
stage in his writing, he was particularly receptive to the strong advice. 
Aside from all of his influences academic and familial, arguably the strongest and most
negative influence on his work was his drinking. The vice became a habit as his despair
grew, despair about ever finding the good life through menial jobs, feeling continually
cursed with bad luck because of the financial situation his family struggled with. Early
on he used to say that he didn't have any problems that money couldn't solve. Ironically,
the decade of his life when he began getting books published at small and eventually
large presses was the decade that he almost died of alcoholism. As we've seen with
several other writers of this century, success, for some reason, often accompanies self
destruction. Though there was no causal connection for Carver between those successes and
his drinking, the publishing and alcoholism did begin roughly at the same time. When
asked exactly how alcohol worked for or against his work, he acknowledged his life
experience as being significant for his work, but recognized his relationship to alcohol
as only destructive: 
Obviously my drinking experiences helped me write several stories that have to do with
alcoholism. But the fact that I went through that and was able to write those stories was
nothing short of a miracle. No, I don't see anything coming out of my drinking
experiences except waste and pain and misery....No good came out of it except in the way
that someone might spend ten years in the penitentiary and then come out of that and
write about the experience (Gentry 115) 
There are at least two major periods in Carver's work, and to understand the change in
his stories, one must know the dramatic difference between what he called his first life
and his second life. As Maryann Carver recalled in her only published interview in
...when we talk about Raymond Carver, Ray was publishing a number of pieces in literary
journals before the family moved to Israel for a year for the California State College
Study Abroad program. Ray and Maryann had always wanted to travel and were excited at the
chance. Ray got a year's leave of absence from his textbook editing job at Science
Research Associates (S.R.A.) in Palo Alto, California, and they went in June of 1968.
They only stayed four months. Ray and their son Vance were quite disgruntled with the
four of them living in a two bedroom apartment in a Jerusalem suburb. The children were
not in English-speaking schools as they were promised--it took them an hour and a half
and three bus transfers to get to school in the old Arab city of Jaffa. One day a bomb
went off in a wastebasket in the bus depot, killing six people, just fifteen minutes
after our children were there, Maryann remembers (Halpert 94). She also remembers clearly
Ray's response to this last straw, This may be the high time of your life, studying at
the university, learning Hebrew, and listening to Golda Meir speak, and dancing Jewish
folk dances, but I'm going to take my children and go home (Halpert 94). They returned in
October and lived with relatives in Hollywood until February of 1969. In February of 1969
Raymond was rehired at S.R.A. In 1970, Ray received a National Endowment for the Arts
Discovery Award for poetry and in September his job at S.R.A. was terminated. Along with
the N.E.A. award, the severance pay from S.R.A. and unemployment benefits allowed him to
write full time for a year. He wrote a great deal during this time, as Maryann recounts:

The first year I 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 (Halpert 95).
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. Douglas Unger recounted this time: 
We all knew he was going to die if he didn't quit drinking. And he knew it, too....What
happened next was he was affected by CNS seizures. For a certain number of alcoholics,
especially the heaviest drinkers, their nervous system has become so adjusted to having
alcohol that when they stop drinking they go into seizures, as though with epilepsy.
These seizures are very dangerous. It's how brains are damaged during convulsions
(Halpert 59).
The seizures only complicated matters. Unger continues, He was then terrified to quit
drinking, because it had happened in a hospital in San Francisco and it had happened when
he'd tried to quit on his own; so he kept on drinking (59). 
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. 
Maryann said in her interview that it took Ray about five or six years to process the
material that would end up in a story, whether it was his own experience, a story someone
had told him, or simply a line he had overheard (Halpert 90). Ray quit drinking on June
2nd, 1977 and didn't write for almost a year. He said at that point that he didn't even
care if he wrote again, his sobriety was so important to him. During that time of early
sobriety, he made some connection between his writing and drinking, the ruin he'd made of
his life. Perhaps because writing had always been his first priority, his first love, and
alcohol came along competing for that love and attention. The coincidence of the
beginning of his publishing and the beginning of his problem drinking may have helped to
foster this psychological connection. At any rate, his first life, or the time of his Bad
Raymond Days as he called it, was over and his second life began with his sobriety. No
writing was done for some time, then he wrote the stories that were included in What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love. That collection, also edited by Gordon Lish, was
published in 1981. This book marked the end of his first literary life, his extremely
pared down style. In 1982, about five years after the end of his first life--the
processing time Maryann mentioned--Carver wrote what would become the title story for his
next collection, Cathedral. He said at the time, There is definitely a change going on in
my writing and I'm glad of it. It happened when I wrote the story 'Cathedral.' I date the
change from that story (Gentry 29). Later on, when he had finished the collection and had
thought about his development as a writer, he commented on the aesthetics involved in
this newfound life: 
The stories in What We Talk About are different to an extent....I pushed and pulled and
worked with those stories before they went into the book to an extent I'd never done with
any other stories. When the book was put together and in the hands of my publisher, I
didn't write anything at all for six months. And then the first story I wrote was
Cathedral, which I feel is totally different in conception and execution from any stories
that have come before. I suppose it reflects a change in my life as much as it does in my
way of writing....I knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go,
cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that
direction and I'd be at a dead end--writing and publishing stuff I wouldn't want to read
myself, and that's the truth (Gentry 44).
This drastic and immediate change in Carver's style marked an opening up. His new life of
grace called for a new way of looking at things, new and old, and although he did not
enjoy looking at the past too long, he went back to a story first printed in What We Talk
About called The Bath. Though this story had already been published in a collection and
had won Columbia magazine's Carlos Fuentes Fiction Award, he rewrote the story, making it
three times as long by adding to the original section and continuing the story to what he
felt was it's true conclusion. The second story is called A Small, Good Thing, and he
says of the two versions, In my own mind I consider them to be really two entirely
different stories, not just different versions of the same story (Gentry 102). They are
as different as his two lives. In a way he was, in this second life, rewriting the first.
He continues, I went back to that one, as well as several others, because I felt there
was unfinished business that needed attending to. The story hadn't been told originally;
it had been messed around with, condensed and compressed in 'The Bath' to highlight the
qualities of menace that I wanted to emphasize (Gentry 102). As most agree when they read
both stories, the risk was worth taking. Carver's obsession with rewriting paid off in
critical acclaim when A Small, Good Thing was awarded first place in Prize Stories 1983
and the same year was included in The Pushcart Prize, VIII. Then, at the height of his
critical acclaim, Carver, along with Cynthia Ozick, won the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters' first Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award. These are
renewable five-year fellowships that carry annual tax-free stipends of $35,000. The award
not only allowed Carver to stop teaching, but required that he not engage in any other
employment (Gentry xxvi). Once again, looking back at his life, it seems appropriate that
his last five years be spent in full time writing. After this sort of wish fulfillment,
poetic justice would not allow him to continue upwards. He couldn't have written his own
story any better than he lived it. 
In terms of representative vision, it is interesting that both A Small, Good Thing and
Cathedral are Carver's most anthologized stories. They are arguably his best stories, and
they appeal to a wider audience than his other work, perhaps accidentally because of the
expansiveness, the generosity that Carver felt in his life and allowed to enter his work.
Ironically enough, these two stories, most popular among all of his work, are the least
representative of the bulk of his writing. Even in his last story collection, Where I'm
Calling From, the rewritten and new stories do not so much follow those two examples. 
Errand, on the other hand, Carver's last published story and the last in this collection,
is yet again different from anything else he had done. It may have to do with the fact
that it was one of only two or three stories that he wrote that had no thing to do with
his own experience, and that he was inspired by the new biography of Chekhov by Henri
Troyat that he was reading at the time. Or it may have had something to do with, as
Douglas Unger relates, the strong influence the actual biography made. I was at Yaddo
when that story came out, Unger said, and it so happened there was a copy of Henri
Troyat's biography of Chekhov around. James Salter noticed that the death scene in the
biography and a large part of the death scene in 'Errand' was almost exactly alike,
almost word for word. That caused quite a stir and discussion among the writers there
(Halpert 71). To Carver, using that material was no different than using a story one of
his friends had told him (Halpert 72). 
Cathedral does have its main character in common with many of his stories--someone who
has a rather limited feel for other's experiences and is afraid of differences, such as
Robert's blindness. But the relationship that develops in the evening depicted in the
story is much different than what might have happened six or seven years before Cathedral
was written. At an earlier time, the main character might not have overcome his unnamed
fears and done something odd to offend Robert. Robert himself might have been different,
much less affable, perhaps he would represent much of what had been bad in the narrator's
life. This is the story that might have been, and what would have to be for it to
represent Carver's overall vision. As it is, it represents the change in his life and
work and it shows how a writer's vision is not static anymore than his or her life is
static. The progression of Carver's career represents a reality that is not dealt with in
criticism; it is a dirty reality, something his work mirrors. The fallacy of
criticism--that something can actually be taken apart, examined, and reassembled to be
looked at in a different, fuller light--is revealed by Carver's work. Political theories
are made to deal with the clear oppression of American Capitalism in Carver's
representation of working poor. Some critics point to his minimal style as the beginning
of the end of true literature. 
In one specific example, Mark Helprin, the editor for The Best American Short Stories
1988, spent his introduction condemning minimalists and everything he thought they stood
for. For sixteen pages, he tells us, as only a non-minimalist like himself can, in
thirteen different ways, how the minimalists are boils on the ass of literature and the
cause of the literary cannon being under siege. He then begins talking about how he is
glad that he read the stories to be judged not knowing the writers or the publications
they came from. And, after all of this, he tells of his learning the names of the writers
that he chose for inclusion, I was surprised, delighted, and a little taken aback to
discover that I had chosen stories by some people whom I do not like personally, by one
who wrote one of the stupidest reviews I have ever read (of my first book, no less), and
by some whose work I find very hard to bear (Helprin xxvii). Do you suppose one of those
references, after a large part of his essay had been dedicated to cutting down
minimalists every way he could, concerned Raymond Carver, whose story Errand was included
that year by none other than Helprin? The coincidences are astounding and humiliation is,
especially when performed by his own hand, quite a wonderful spectacle. 
In final analysis, though every attempt is made to peg Carver's entire body of work down
to a few distinguishing characteristics, even by this paper, his work does not sit still
for such classification any more than his life. Youthful optimism, early marriage,
alcoholism, near death, recovery, sobriety--this isn't simple and it's all in his work,
true and clear. We can say a certain percentage of his stories dealt with the working
poor, or alcoholics out of work, or adulterers. Or we can say that overall he dealt with
people who had no hope, or little hope, until we look at his most popular
stories--Cathedral for instance--where hope is primary. Perhaps only the broadest
classification is accurate--change. In an organic, dirty reality, Carver's work changed
with his life. He grew and received reprieves in life that most do not encounter.
Anything can happen, he tells us. He once said, It's strange. You never start out life
with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a
liar (Gentry 38). At one time Carver was all of these. If we can learn one thing, it is
that nothing is set in stone. Change is the only sure thing. 
Bibliography
Carver, Raymond. Fires. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989. 
Gentry, Marshall Bruce, and William L. Stull, eds. Conversations With Raymond Carver.
Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 
Halpert, Sam, ed. ...when we talk about Raymond Carver. Layton: Gibbs Smith, 1991. 
Helprin, Mark, ed. The Best American Short Stories 1988. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.