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The aims of the work.
The aims of my course work is to get acquainted with the life of Raymond Carver and to study and interpret his works correctly. I must to give others useful information about the work I have read and the author.
The practical value of the work.
Carver's stripped-down, minimalist prose style is remarkable for its honesty and power. He is credited with helping revitalize the genre of the English language short story in the late 20th Century Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub's "Ghost story": "The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America's bottom dogs".
Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, wash. In 1956, the Carvers relocated to Chester, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. After that, the moves accelerated : Paradise, Calif; Chico, Calif; low City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino Humboldt Country...and that takes us up only to 1977,the year Carver took his last drink.
Chapter I. GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT RAYMOND
CARVER'S EARLY LIFE AND PROLIFIC LITERARY PATH
Literary Style and legacy of Raymond Carver.
Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and a heavy drinker. Carver’s mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.
Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family.
After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born a year later. Carver worked as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer, while Maryann worked as an administrative assistant, high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress.
The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll’s review of Maryann Burk Carver’s 2006 memoir describes the decline of Maryann’s and Raymond’s marriage.
The fall began with Ray’s trip to Missoula, Mont., in ‘72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge’s birthday party. «That’s when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything.»1
«By fall of ‘74», writes Carver, «he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes». Over the next several years, Maryann’s husband physically abused her. Friends urged her to leave Raymond.
«But I couldn’t. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I’d do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always.»
Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of ‘78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. «It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving.» So he wrote a letter instead.2
«I thought, I’ve gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him.»
After being hospitalized three times between June 1976 and February or March 1977, Carver began his «second life» and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. While he continued to regularly smoke marijuana and later experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 had he not overcome his drinking
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