Raymond Carver is a loser

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I haven’t read much Raymond Carver, some short story collections, a couple of his books of poetry, an anthology he had edited, some works in the Paris review and Chicago and the New Yorker-but the stuff that I had read I liked. He had a stark economy, not in the overly precious, not a word out of place way, but something better then that. He knew what he wanted to say, what emotions he needed to convey, what words best expressed those emotions, and carried the plot along, plus gave us relevant character information- all things a short story writer should do. He only gave us what we needed, he efficiently hummed along until it reached a logical conclusion, and then ended it. You could see this efficiency in how he eschewed most adjectives and adverbs, how his sentences were not overly long, how little punctuation he used beyond a comma and a period, how he favoured the Anglo Saxon over anything else. Even in the titles of his books was this sparse democratic voice (for example Put Yourself in My Shoes or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love or A New Path to the Waterfall)
I am a tangled reader and a thinker who tramps along in the brambles, sometimes there is pain that occurs, but mostly it’s a grand adventure. Carver wrote about things that were not tangled or brambled, even though it seems like they should be- stories about drunks, bad marriages, relationships dissolving, suburban angst, poems about wronged lovers, driving drunk, a fathers death-these are indicators of misery and depression, the inwardness of that illness or lifestyle should mean a solipsism and a desire to unwind or unweave the minor disasters that infiltrate our lives.
Their was a tension for Carver, he didn’t believe that writers lie and who wanted everyone to be accurate as well as truthful (he followed this maxim by Pound “fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing”), and yet he lied every day, the writer doesn’t tell the whole truth-he edits, and refines and adds bits and fictionalizes and through all that myth making risks forgetting or exploiting the source. Maybe his clarity is used in the same way as a magician shows his hands in front of a performance or a kid yells “look ma now hands” or how a teenager takes pride in how he can drive with his knees.
All of those metaphors fail though, and they fail because they are about showing off, Carver was a drunk, a bad father, and a lousy writer, one a legion throughout the history of writers who used a talented wife (Tess Gallagher) as an editor and secretary-like Lee Krasner cleaning up Pollocks puke and piss instead of painting- the thing about Carver, the thing that you can see though, is that he is aware of how he treats this, how he realizes the messes he made and how he tries to correct them. He gives Gallagher her due in places, talking of her writing or reading-as well he wrote a whole collection of love poetry to her, and this love poetry did not seem to romanticize a disasterous relationship. Even though it didn’t last, she seems to have affection of him.
Anyone who tries and even remotely succeeds with this kind of writing is called Hemmingway-and with Carver the problem is confounded by his admiration for Hemmingway and the fact that they were both had a taste for booze. There is something more to Carver-Hemmingway is all macho bluster, he spends his novels with his dick against a tape measure-and that’s all he can use it for, the love of Hemmingway is for Hemmingway, the myth of Hemmingway is one of the urban professional who wants to go out and play big boy with guns-it’s the myth of a world where the women are virgins, whores or bulldaggers. Hemmingway is a neurotic and messy as Roth or Bellow but scared to admit it. What Carvers does, or did, was try to clean up messes. His prose is clean, but his content is filthy, and in that sense the prose works as a way to control the effluvia that is happening in his characters lives, and by extension his own.
This is where the problem comes in, and I have just started realizing it once I got to the essays, if you have so much concern for control and avoiding mess you run the risk of being mannered. Carver’s love of narrative sustains him, of course and that love has some definite virtues, but it also traps him. If he is narrative focused, not really concerned with language or lyricism, but just wanting to get words across, then there is a risk of becoming reactionary.
The innovations of the 20th century have been against this kind of propulsive narrative, and reading his unreleased essays in the post humus collection No Heroics, Please (note the plain prose of the title, the subtle irony), you get this impression that Carver would have been happier if we had all stayed with the dramas of 19th century drawing rooms-I am not saying that everyone needs to run up and write Finnegans Wake, but that a little of Carver goes along way, and also there is an over dependence on narrative tricks (in his first essay in the collection of occasional pieces, Fires, he wrote that he hated tricks, and he was attempting to be the simplest writer he could be, what he didn’t realize is that simplicity was a trick in itself.)
Having tricks is good, the writer as a magician is not a bad thing, but the problem is when you over rely on them-when you think your trick is the only trick, and then you can only view literature in your tradition. He tends sometimes, especially when he gets closer to death, to view his writing as the only trick, and so he becomes strained- the virtuous balance is lost to sameness. Reading his introduction to the Best American Short Stories 1986, which he edited, this sameness becomes clear. He half heartedly apologizes for his conservativeness, but he seems stubbornly proud of lines like “a reader looking for “experimental” or “innovative” stories won’t find them around here.
The weird thing about this line, was that for 10 years after his death Carver become the reactionary that was so new that he lead the charge, readers had to endure hundreds of pages of poetry and prose about little people doing little things not because they were compelled to tell truths but because Uncle Raymond did it first. Writing like Carver, with delicacy and starkness is such a difficult task that even for him it became almost impossible- and if he had not died when he did, he would have added to the pile.

― anthony easton (anthony), Monday, 2 June 2003 20:25 (twenty-one years ago) link

"poetry and prose about little people doing little things not because they were compelled to tell truths"

So do you think that Carver did feel compelled to tell truths? I certainly do. In college I got way into Carver -- read everything he had written -- and it affected my writing heavily: story after story of drunk fathers and cowed sons (my growing-up story in a nutshell) that all ended up being shit (except for one poem, which I'm still very proud of). What I finally realized was that while Carver is a very good writer (I still believe this to be the case), imitating him will only lead to bad writing...

― Yanc3y (ystrickler), Monday, 2 June 2003 20:38 (twenty-one years ago) link

Yeah, I'm not sure he's a good influence (though I do like some of those who certainly seem to have been influenced by him - Richard Ford, for instance), but I love his writing. I love your post here too, Anthony, but I'm not sure that I think your argument is right. I think it's a bit flimsy in places, and relies on certain assumptions about kinds of artistic traditionalism being a bad thing that I don't go along with. Also, I have seen people argue that Carver and the dirty realists have a claim to be described as important Postmodernists. I don't buy that (though I've seen John Barth argue it), but it might suggest that there is a bit more going on than you're maybe acknowledging.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 2 June 2003 20:52 (twenty-one years ago) link

i meant his students did not have the same compulsions as carver did, ie to tell the truth.

― anthony easton (anthony), Monday, 2 June 2003 21:05 (twenty-one years ago) link

more explicit feedback please martin ?

― anthony easton (anthony), Monday, 2 June 2003 21:06 (twenty-one years ago) link

I haven't read anyone else who can write of alcoholism so truthfully. He is unsentimental and self-deprecating and describes the amateur theatrics of the disease very well.

― estela (estela), Monday, 2 June 2003 21:24 (twenty-one years ago) link

thanks anthony, best thing I've read on ILXor in a long time.

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Monday, 2 June 2003 21:25 (twenty-one years ago) link

I like writers, supposedly realist writers, who develop their own small closed worlds. Not like those SF/Fantasy writers who construct worlds without limit, with languages etc. I mean worlds with crazy limits: for instance, there might be a world with a real bed, the woods, and a petrol station, and nothing else. Carver does this better than most people I've read.

But Anthony, your post was very interesting.

― Eyeball Kicks (Eyeball Kicks), Monday, 2 June 2003 21:49 (twenty-one years ago) link

Hmm, I need to dwell on some of this stuff and come back tomorrow. I do like Carver lots, and have written about him elsewhere, so I look forward to seeing how this thread turns out.

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, 2 June 2003 21:57 (twenty-one years ago) link

estela, you should read some richard yates. carver took a lot from yates. and yate's best stuff-revolutionary road, easter parade, his short story collections(especially 11 Kinds Of Loneliness)is as good/better than carver's best stuff.i'm always amazed that surly drunks like yates and carver could get any writing done, let alone write some of the greatest american short stories of the 20th century.

― scott seward, Monday, 2 June 2003 22:39 (twenty-one years ago) link

i knew this was anthony before clicking

― jess (dubplatestyle), Monday, 2 June 2003 23:00 (twenty-one years ago) link

He tends sometimes, especially when he gets closer to death, to view his writing as the only trick, and so he becomes strained- the virtuous balance is lost to sameness.

If my Carver trajectory is correct, then this statement is off the mark. From what I recall, Carver did realize he had trapped himself in compressing every story into its skeletal frame. Which is why some of the stoires in Cathedrals and Where I'm Calling From open up a lot more. I do remember a quote from him where he felt his stories had gotten so bare that they were practically unreadable at one point.

I remember reading some of those essays in a bookstore years ago and melting at the thought of him and Tess reading Chekhov to each other over breakfast.

Also I'd love to be a 1% the loser Carver was.

― bnw (bnw), Tuesday, 3 June 2003 00:00 (twenty-one years ago) link

I'd be curious to know if women and men respond to Carver differently. His writing has all that doomed manliness.

― JesseFox (JesseFox), Tuesday, 3 June 2003 01:38 (twenty-one years ago) link

im being a bit ironic.

― anthony easton (anthony), Tuesday, 3 June 2003 05:13 (twenty-one years ago) link

Thanks Scott, I will read Richard Yates.

― estela (estela), Tuesday, 3 June 2003 10:14 (twenty-one years ago) link

I'll try to come back to this when I get home tonight (my lunch break is just finishing), Anthony, but I am of course no expert. I've read most of his stories, and loved them, and read quite a few writers (double figures, certainly) of the 'dirty realist' school, and liked some of those too.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Tuesday, 3 June 2003 11:51 (twenty-one years ago) link

I was a junior in high school when I read Where I'm Calling From. I loaned the book to my English teacher, who said she'd have it read it all in one sitting, except she got so depressed at one point she had to run out for ice cream ("Double scoop of rocky road.") "What's a 16-year-old kid like you doing reading such bleak, bleak stories?" she asked. Ah, but it wasn't what they were about. It was the economy in which they were told. It was the way he was generous with dialogue, letting his characters talk and fumble without interrupting them or getting in the way. I've called it a "lack of authorial intrusion," but it's worth pointing out that this doesn't negate Anthony's claim that his style was a trick in its own right -- after all, the amazing part of the trick is that he seemed not to be there.

― jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, 3 June 2003 14:46 (twenty-one years ago) link

There's a good essay about Carver on the Atlantic website. This part about the differences between Carver's style and Hemingway's is particularly quoteable:

"By the time of his death in 1988, at the age of fifty, Carver had established himself as the new torchbearer for what had formerly been celebrated as the Hemingway ethos, forging a scenically simple, dialogue-driven idiom that conveyed powerfully not just the undercurrents of rage and longing in his characters, but also suggested the palpable blockages and blind-spots that kept these forces moving with destructive momentum. The difference between Carver and Hemingway is that Hemingway's sharply angled reticence somehow implicated the whole larger world—as if the corrosions of civilization, a world gone wrong, were to blame—whereas in Carver's world the problem was merely human, there in the very clay. Better: the ordinary clay, in the working people who were almost unfailingly warped by their hard lot and who handed down the misery of their foreshortened lives to their children. Somewhere along the way he got called a minimalist and the label lopsidedly stuck."

― o. nate (onate), Tuesday, 3 June 2003 15:58 (twenty-one years ago) link

one year passes...

i'm always amazed that surly drunks like yates and carver could get any writing done, let alone write some of the greatest american short stories of the 20th century.

Carver was clean by the time he started writing, i think.

I'm quite confused by Anthony's first post but i will read it again.

― jed_ (jed), Monday, 15 November 2004 21:20 (nineteen years ago) link

Good revival timing, Criterion releases Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" 2xDVD tomorrow (my copy arrived today):

# Reflections on Short Cuts, a new 25-minute videotaped conversation with Robert Altman and Tim Robbins
# Luck, Trust, and Ketchup: Robert Altman in Carver Country, a 90-minute documentary on the making of Short Cuts
# Segment from BBC television's Moving Pictures tracing the development of Raymond Carver's short story "Jerry, Molly and Sam" for the film
# Hour-long audio interview with Raymond Carver from 1983
# To Write and Keep Kind, a PBS documentary on Carver
# Deleted Scenes
# A look inside the marketing of Short Cuts, featuring trailers and more than sixty print advertising campaigns
# Original song demos by Dr. John
# An essay by film critic Michael Wilmington and a guide to the music
# Special reprint of Short Cuts, the Vintage Books companion collection of Raymond Carver short stories
# Number of discs: 2

― gygax! (gygax!), Monday, 15 November 2004 21:42 (nineteen years ago) link

i loathed this film but it's been so long i'm not sure i can tell you why.

― jed_ (jed), Monday, 15 November 2004 22:20 (nineteen years ago) link

god I love that film! and I used to love carver (or did for a while anyway). Short Cuts is probably the best literary adaptation for film I've seen.

― kyle (akmonday), Monday, 15 November 2004 22:24 (nineteen years ago) link

I didn't loathe it, but I didn't like it much. Carver and Altman might have seemed like a good match, and it doesn't surprise me Altman was a Carver fan, but their sensibilities and personalities really don't mesh very well. As I recall, only the Lyle Lovett/bakery sequence seemed to really inhabit anything like Carver's universe, and even that one works a lot better in the story than the movie.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Monday, 15 November 2004 22:28 (nineteen years ago) link

i thought the tom waits/ lily tomlin scenes were closest but still made me furious i seem to remember!

― jed_ (jed), Monday, 15 November 2004 22:37 (nineteen years ago) link

"I didn't loathe it, but I didn't like it much. Carver and Altman might have seemed like a good match, and it doesn't surprise me Altman was a Carver fan, but their sensibilities and personalities really don't mesh very well."

From what I can recall reading somewhere, Altman wasn't really a fan of Carver's. He was in desperate need of a good script (contractual obligation with the studio), and a producer friend of his gave him Short Cuts as a present, suggesting him to adapt it to film. He loved it, and as such, initiated that little endeavor. But yes, you're right, their sensibilities don't really fit together, I don't think.

― a (Francis Watlington), Monday, 15 November 2004 23:43 (nineteen years ago) link

i read the story Cathedral for the first time since the 80's a while back and it just took my breath away. what a barnburner. i had forgotten what he could do with a story.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 01:03 (nineteen years ago) link

I just read it again this morning (before I saw this thread) and had the same reaction.

― estela (estela), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 01:05 (nineteen years ago) link

did you get a chance to read any Yates, estela? i finally read A Fan's Notes by Exley since this thread. Another good one in the beautiful loser canon.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 01:09 (nineteen years ago) link

Scott, I've read some of Yates's short stories- thanks for the recommendation- and I have Revolutionary Road lined up to read. He's brilliant.
He makes me nervous.

― estela (estela), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 02:11 (nineteen years ago) link

Yeah, he makes me cringe like Carver. But in a good way. I think. (I get so embarrassed for their characters.) The first chapter of Revolutionary Road is one of the most perfect things I have ever read. It staggered me.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 16 November 2004 03:51 (nineteen years ago) link

two years pass...

So, Anyone read this in the Times yesterday? The edits are really interesting.

The edits are available to look through here

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/Carver.pdf

I dunno, I think Lish was a great editor. He really cuts down on the B.S. I think his edit of "One More Thing" is terrific. I also think the "controversy" is pretty funny--I'm sure this book will come out, eventually one way or another.

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 18 October 2007 15:57 (sixteen years ago) link

I was going to post yesterday and forgot.

Don't see the big deal. The power of good editors is overstated. Maxwell Perkins hacked at Thomas Wolfe's books and didn't approve them.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 18 October 2007 16:04 (sixteen years ago) link

I would say that the edits Lish made make a case that the power of good editors is understated.

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 18 October 2007 16:08 (sixteen years ago) link

Carver was a good writer already.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 18 October 2007 16:09 (sixteen years ago) link

I think I read the original draft of "A Small Good Thing" in a college fiction class.

― jaymc, Thursday, 18 October 2007 16:09 (sixteen years ago) link

From the looks of the edits, he was even more of a sappy sentimental writer than I thought he was.

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 18 October 2007 16:10 (sixteen years ago) link

I also happened to read, this morning, a story I wrote when I was 16 that is almost ridiculous in how much it owes to Carver.

― jaymc, Thursday, 18 October 2007 16:12 (sixteen years ago) link

please post, jaymc.
i also want to read yancey's poem.

i like raymond carver, and it's all thanks to gygax (RIP.)

― ian, Thursday, 18 October 2007 16:31 (sixteen years ago) link

i realize i may be talking to myself at this point, but this article is fantastic

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E3D71F38F93AA3575BC0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

― Mr. Que, Friday, 19 October 2007 18:40 (sixteen years ago) link

eleven months pass...

Of Carver's work, I've only read "A Small, Good Thing." It's really amazing. Where do I go next?

― Tape Store, Sunday, 21 September 2008 05:31 (fifteen years ago) link

To A Relative Stranger by Charles Baxter.

― Eazy, Sunday, 21 September 2008 05:37 (fifteen years ago) link

I think you could do a lot worse than just reading Where I'm Calling From, which has most of his best and famous stories, and then, if you're still curious, going to the individual collections to fill in the cracks.

― jaymc, Sunday, 21 September 2008 05:38 (fifteen years ago) link

'cathedral' is beautiful (from the same-titled collection).

― your ass is (Rubyredd), Sunday, 21 September 2008 06:09 (fifteen years ago) link

i always liked this one. it's mawkish, but whatever.

― tipsy mothra, Sunday, 21 September 2008 07:16 (fifteen years ago) link

The whole Lish sage in re: Carver is pretty fascinating

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/12/19/talking_about_editing_ray_carver/

― exHOOS my back! (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Sunday, 21 September 2008 09:25 (fifteen years ago) link

READ IT ALL!

― I know, right?, Sunday, 21 September 2008 10:42 (fifteen years ago) link

Drinking While Driving by Raymond Carver

It's August and I have not
Read a book in six months
except something called The Retreat from Moscow
by Caulaincourt
Nevertheless, I am happy
Riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.
If I closed my eyes for a minute
I would be lost, yet
I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road
My brother nudges me.
Any minute now, something will happen.

― I know, right?, Sunday, 21 September 2008 10:43 (fifteen years ago) link

sorry if I've already said this 10,000,00x but I saw him give a reading at Reed in either '85 or '86 - dude had it working

― J0hn D., Sunday, 21 September 2008 12:29 (fifteen years ago) link

Thanks, everyone!

― Tape Store, Sunday, 21 September 2008 15:20 (fifteen years ago) link

I like that poem, but it's in the exact same meter and format as a lot of great James Wright poems.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on Carver (as well as David Mamet and Susan Rothenberg, two other late-70s/early-80s who made a similar major shift in their work from fragmented essentialism to a fuller, connection-based style), and I treated him with reverence in high school and college, but I've become much more conflict about his work in the years since. I'd love to be blown away again by a poem or story of his.

― Eazy, Sunday, 21 September 2008 21:30 (fifteen years ago) link

late 70s/early 80s artists
...much more conflicted

― Eazy, Sunday, 21 September 2008 21:32 (fifteen years ago) link

wait Eazy what meter is that poem in

― J0hn D., Sunday, 21 September 2008 21:56 (fifteen years ago) link

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

OK, OK, not meter.

― Eazy, Sunday, 21 September 2008 22:09 (fifteen years ago) link

It's interesting how James Wright's development was in the other direction, no?

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 21 September 2008 22:35 (fifteen years ago) link

His line breaks are so perfect, he just holds ideas an arms length away from each other, like here:

I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road

― I know, right?, Sunday, 21 September 2008 22:41 (fifteen years ago) link

I admire Carver but he's too depressing to compel me to spend a lot of time with him.

― calstars, Monday, 22 September 2008 01:43 (fifteen years ago) link

one year passes...

READ IT ALL!

― I know, right?, Sunday, 21 September 2008 10:42 (1 year ago) Permalink

OTM

― Yonder Mountain Zing Band (Tape Store), Saturday, 24 April 2010 03:52 (fourteen years ago) link

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