Where water comes together with other water

CHAPTER II REVITALIZATION OF SHORT STORY IN THE AMERICAN LITERATURE
2.1. Contemporary style of Short Stories in the works of Raymond Carver
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) was the first major-press short-story collection by American writer Raymond Carver. Described by contemporary critics as a foundational text of minimalist fiction, its stories offered an incisive and influential telling of disenchantment in the mid-century American working class.
Unlike his later collections, the stories collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? were written during a period Carver termed his "first life" or "Bad Raymond days", prior to his near-death from alcoholism and subsequent sobriety. The earliest compositions date from around 1960, the time of his study under John Gardner at Chico State in English 20A: Creative Writing.
In the decade and a half following, Carver struggled to make space for bursts of creativity between teaching jobs and raising his two young children, and later, near-constant drinking. The compositions of Will You Please... can be grouped roughly into the following periods:
1960–1961 – "The Father"
1960–1963 – "The Ducks", "What Do You Do in San Francisco?"
1964 – "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", "The Student's Wife", "Sixty Acres"
1967 – "How About This?", "Signals", "Jerry and Molly and Sam"
1970 – "Neighbors", "Fat", "Night School", "The Idea", "Why, Honey?", "Nobody Said Anything", "Are You a Doctor?"
1971 – "What Is It?" ("Are These Actual Miles?"), "What's In Alaska?", "Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes", "They're Not Your Husband", "Put Yourself in My Shoes"
1974 – "Collectors"
Although several of the stories had appeared previously in prominent publications (the Foley Collection had published the story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" in 1967 and Esquire had accepted "Neighbors" in 1971), as the first author to be collected in the new McGraw-Hill imprint for fiction, this marked the first major commercial success of Carver's career. The title for the collection was originally proposed by Frederic W. Hills, editor at McGraw-Hill, as Put Yourself in My Shoes, and Gordon Lish, Carver's editor, agreed. However, after polling friends, Carver made a stand for the eventual title, under which Lish selected 22 of the more than 30 Carver had published to that date.
The Title Of Raymond Carver’s first major collection of poetry calls to mind a couple of earlier Carver titles, those of his story collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In all three one hears the unsettling echo, the peculiarly distended phrase, the sentence somehow folded back on itself. They offer a foretaste of the “Carver” voice, an oddly arresting monotone that pervades his stories and poems, a variant of the “ordinary” voice. It is inchoate, even banal, frequently groping for the precise word but all too often rising only to vagueness, a hopeless, verbal shrug: The nights are very unclear here. But if the moon is full, we know it. We feel one thing one minute, something else the next. (“Romanticism”) Life is full of disaster and ruin, and no one knows this better than Mr. Carver. No one can chronicle it so keenly, and no one seems more sensitive to the fatuity of language, especially poetic language, in evoking desolation. To call Mr. Carver a “minimalist” is too easy. More simply and accurately, as a teller of tales he knows the value of understatement:
Malediction. (“Late Night with Fog and Horses”) I say teller of tales rather than poet, because that essentially is what Mr. Carver is, even when he is writing poetry. The absence of “poetic diction” in these poems is so resounding as to be almost self-conscious. Unlike his near-namesake Raymond Chandler, or his literary forebear Stephen Crane, Mr. Carver’s attempts at poetry do not abandon the austere brilliance of his prose for an assumed and uneasy prosody. If anything, the language here is more constricted than in the stories. Sentence fragments—sometimes a mere word—are charged with the task of imparting imagery and emotion: Once more he found himself in the presence of mystery. Rain. Laughter. History. Art. The hegemony of death. He stood there, listening. (“Listening”) And in places Mr. Carver is content to do away with any “formal” notion of “poetry” altogether, as in “Fear”, which is nothing more than a stark catalogue of phobias: Fear of seeing a police car pull into the drive. Fear of falling asleep at night. Fear of not falling asleep. Fear of the past rising up. Fear of the present taking flight. . . . It is this unadorned directness that gives these poems their power their peculiar beauty. Of course, Mr. Carver is also a teller of tales in the most obvious sense of the term. Almost all of the poems in this volume are short stories, and the people in them are the same sort to be found in “Cathedral”, “Tell the Women We’re Going”, “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit”, any of those stories in which his spiritually listless characters drift inexorably downward. Drinking, a major theme in Mr. Carver’s fiction, also figures in the poetry. “Anathema” is a relentless account of the absolute ravages of alcohol upon an entire household. Moreover, it is a modern retelling of the Loss of Eden collapsed into the dissipation of the American Dream:. . . our children . . . pleaded to be taken anywhere but here. And then mice entered the house in droves. Followed by a bull snake. My wife found it sunning itself in the living room next to the dead TV. . . . We saw we couldn’t hold out any longer. We were beaten. We wanted to get down on our knees and say forgive us our sins, forgive us 164 our lives. But it was too late. Too late. No one around would listen. We had to watch as the house was pulled down, the ground plowed up, and then we were dispersed in four directions. There are other, bleaker variations on the theme of alcoholism. In “To My Daughter”, a kind of response to Yeats’s “A Prayer For My Daughter”, a father who is a recovering alcoholic laments his daughter’s obsession with the bottle; “Next Year” details a couple unable to salvage their sodden lives (“this time next year/things were going to be different.”); and “Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying To Get Back In” includes a comment about the alcoholic life that is grimly sardonic: “if this sounds/like the story of a life, okay.” But there are poems about recovery, too. “The Old Days” is a moving account of the long-distance conversation between two drinking buddies, one of them now sober:
In what is perhaps the most joyous piece in the collection, as well as the poem from which the volume’s title is taken, the speaker celebrates rebirth in a voice full of astonished gratitude: I’m 45 years old today. Would anyone believe it if I said I was once 35? My heart empty and sere at 35! . . . It pleases me, loving rivers. Loving them all the way back to their source. Loving everything that increases me. Recovery exacts a price, however. Clarity and fullness of vision can arise only if accompanied by the absence of delusion. I think that if there is an overriding preoccupation on Mr. Carver’s part, it is a preoccupation with death. About half the poems in the volume deal with this subject, and Mr. Carver’s unblinking recognizance of his own mortality emerges and again, often in unexpected places. “Woolworth’s, 1954” is ostensibly a pleasant reminiscence of adolescent sex, yet it manages to end grimly enough: . . . All those girls. Grownup now. Or worse. I’ll say it: dead. “In the Year 2020” is a reflection about the long sadness of aging, the loneliness of outliving one’s friends. “The Eve of Battle” is an unusual 165 piece for Mr. Carver—it is set during the First World War, and the speaker is a German officer who describes, almost as a kind of Ingmar Bergman scenario, the sudden appearance of Death, “dressed in coat-and-tails.” In a moment that is comic and chilling at the same time, the speaker notes that.
A couple of cemeteries figure in “A Walk” and “Ask Him”. One of them is a rural churchyard in Washington State, the other the cemetery in Montparnasse, where du Maupassant, Sartre, Verlaine and Baudelaire are buried. Mr. Carver senses all too well what he terms “the hegemony of death,” swallowing the obscure and the illustrious alike. The poetry of Raymond Carver should not be regarded as a body of ancillary work, the effluvia of his prose fiction. We will, of course, always regard him as a master, perhaps the master, of the latter, but readers of Where Water Comes Together With Other Water will discover that the poetry is its own excuse for being. While informed by a “Carverian” language found in the stories, it is nonetheless a distinct and admirable form of utterance. It is intensely personal; at once vigorous and startlingly tender. Mr. Carver has in the past described himself as an “occasional” poet, adding that it is better to be that than no poet at all. Readers of this volume will not only agree with that sentiment, but wish him to be a more frequent poet than he is at present.⁸
This evening I’d like to share a poem that hits me at a gut level. Now, I should say this before going on any further: I am a newcomer to poetry generally, and Raymond Carver in particular. Sure I’ve read a few things – Paradise Lost as well as Bukowski – mostly modern stuff though. I suppose I’ve never had much patience for the thing (which is a shame), and I hope to remedy this.
Considering the anxious and tireless obsession with lyrical composition in my youth (another post altogether), I find it sort of odd that it’s taken me so long to find solace in the poetic form. This piece is taken from a collection of the same name, published a year before my birth, by Raymond Carver. Carver is know for his particularly minimalistic style, with a focus on blue-collar personalities, connecting him with the dirty realism literary genre.
I remember the first time I read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It too hit me on a gut level. I was deeply affected by the stark settings of these stories, complicated and fashioned by the brevity of the dialogues and morose nature of the characters – those characters! Oh, the characters were something else entirely. They were as lifelike and disgusting as any human being I could recall meeting, both in reality and in my own dreams. They were simple, in a way that also hit me on a gut level.
This poem has also served as a source of inspiration for a musical composition I wrote earlier this year.
He decided to go back into education and achieved a Bachelors’ degree in 1963 from the Humboldt State College in Arcata, California. While at college he acted as editor for a campus literary magazine and he also contributed a number of his own pieces to the publication. He might have got a Masters’ but dropped out less than half way through the course citing the program’s “upper middle class milieu” as a reason.
During the 1960s Carver continued to write stories while working at a number of manual labour jobs and became associated with the poet Dennis Schmitz in Sacramento. Schmitz guided him towards the publication of his first collection of poems, called Near Klamath. Soon, life got better for Carver with his appointment to a post as textbook editor and public relations director for a scientific company in Palo Alto, California. He remained in touch with the literary world though and established relationships with writers such as George Hitchcock and Gordon Lish into the 1970s.
Here is an example of his poetry, a piece almost written as prose. It is called Gravy:
He moved into teaching at the universities of Santa Cruz and Berkeley while also taking up his own studies in creative writing at Stanford University. He was becoming comfortably off and also well established in the literary world. His first collection of short stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Appeared in 1976. It was well received and made the short list for the National Book Award.
Just when things were starting to go so well he lapsed into excessive drinking, thus following his father in that line. He was treated for alcoholism and also experimented with marijuana and cocaine, thus seriously abusing his health. Somehow he pulled back from the abyss and got back into writing good short stories and poetry. His excesses contributed to the destruction of his marriage though. He did, eventually, remarry, but this happened just months before he died in 1988.
Obviously influenced by where he had come from, much of Carver’s work can be described as “blue collar” themed. He never “pigeon-holed” himself, tending to write quickly and briefly with the intention of always finishing a poem or a story in one sitting. Critics though have aligned him with the so-called “dirty realism” movement, a style of writing often focusing on the seamier side of life.
Raymond Clevie Carver died of lung cancer on the 2nd August 1988, aged 50.