Where water comes together with other water

2.2. Analysis of the most outstanding poems and short stories by Raymond Carver.
In introducing readers to his world of the desperation of ordinary people, Carver created tales that are “brief … but by no means stark,” noted Geoffrey Wolff in his New York Times Book Review piece on Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? “They imply complexities of action and motive and they are especially artful in their suggestion of repressed violence. No human blood is shed in any of these stories, yet almost all of them hold a promise of mayhem of some final, awful breaking from confines, and breaking through to liberty.” The theme of breaking from confines is central to one of the stories, “Neighbors,” in which Bill and Arlene Miller agree to feed their neighbors’ cat while the neighbors, the Stones, are on vacation. With access to the Stones’ home, the Millers find themselves increasingly taken with their friends’ clothes, furniture, and other belongings. Bill and Arlene, in fact, begin to assume the identities of the Stones; “each finds this strangely stimulating, and their sex life prospers, though neither can find anything much to say about it at all,” reported Edwards. The end of the story finds the Millers clinging to the Stones’ door as their neighbors return, knowing that their rich fantasy life will soon end.
The author’s “first book of stories explored a common plight rather than a common subject,” noted New York Times Book Review critic Michael Wood. “His characters were lost or diminished in their own different ways. The 17 stories in [Carver’s third collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love], make up a more concentrated volume, less a collection than a set of variations on the themes of marriage, infidelity and the disquieting tricks of human affection.” Newsweek’s Peter S. Prescott noted that Carver was concerned “with the collapse of human relationships. Some of his stories take place at the moment things fall apart; others, after the damage has been done, while the shock waves still reverberate. Alcohol and violence are rarely far removed from what happens, but sometimes, in another characteristic maneuver, Carver will nudge the drama that triggers a crisis aside to show that his story has really been about something else all along.” Weber described Carver’s unique, oft-imitated style in the New York Times Magazine: “A typical sentence is blunt and uncomplicated, eschewing the ornaments of descriptive adverbs and parenthetical phrases. His rhythms are often repetitive or brusque, as if to suggest the strain of people learning to express newly felt things, fresh emotions. Time passes in agonizingly linear fashion, the chronology of a given scene marked by one fraught and simple gesture after another. Dialogue is usually clipped, and it is studded with commonplace observations of the concrete objects on the table or on the wall rather than the elusive, important issues in the air.”
Of Carver’s 1984 short fiction collection, Cathedral, “it would be hard to imagine a more dispirited assortment of figures,” declared David Lehman in a Newsweek review. In each story, a “note of transcendent indifference, beyond resignation or fatigue, is sounded,” adds Lehman, cautioning, “fun to read they’re not.” But, the critic stresses, “it’s impossible to ignore Carver’s immense talent.” In Cathedral, Carver rewrote the ending of one of his most acclaimed stories from What We Talk about When We Talk about Love. The original story, “The Bath,” is about a mother who orders a special cake for her eight-year-old son’s birthday—but the boy is hit by a car on that day and is rushed to the hospital, where he lingers in a coma. The baker, aware only that the parents haven’t picked up their expensive cake, badgers them with endless calls demanding his money. As the story ends, the boy’s fate is still unknown, and the desperate parents hear the phone ring again. Cathedral retells this story (now titled “A Small, Good Thing”) up to the final phone ring. At this point, ambiguity vanishes; Carver reveals that the boy has died, and the call is from the irate baker. But this time the parents confront the baker with the circumstances, and the apologetic man invites them over to his bakery. There he tells the parents his own sad story of loneliness and despair and feeds them fresh coffee and warm rolls, because “eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”
“In revising ‘The Bath’ into ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ Carver has indeed gone into [what he describes as] ‘the heart of what the story is about,’ and in the process has written an entirely new story—has created, if you will, a completely new world,” declared Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World. “The first version is beautifully crafted and admirably concise, but lacking in genuine compassion; the mysterious caller is not so much a human being as a mere voice, malign and characterless. But in the second version that voice becomes a person, one whose own losses are, in different ways, as crippling and heartbreaking as the one suffered by the grieving parents.” As Anatole Broyard wrote in a New York Times review of Cathedral, “It is typical of Mr. Carver’s stories that comfort against adversity is found in incongruous places, that people find improbable solace. The improbable and the homely are [the author’s] territory. He works in the bargain basement of the soul.”
Irving Howe claimed that Carver’s stories evoke “strong American literary traditions. Formally, they summon remembrances of Hemingway and perhaps Stephen Crane, masters of tightly packed fiction. In subject matter they draw upon the American voice of loneliness and stoicism, the native soul locked in this continent’s space. [The author’s] characters, like those of many earlier American writers, lack a vocabulary that can release their feelings, so they must express themselves mainly through obscure gesture and berserk display.” And Paul Gray, writing about Cathedral in Time, said that “Carver’s art masquerades as accident, scraps of information that might have been overheard at the supermarket check-out or local beer joint. His most memorable people live on the edge: of poverty, alcoholic self-destruction, loneliness. Something in their lives denies them a sense of community. They feel this lack intensely, yet are too wary of intimacy to touch other people, even with language.”
Such appraisals of his writing left Carver himself a little wary. He told Weber: “Until I started reading these reviews of my work, praising me, I never felt the people I was writing about were so bad. … The waitress, the bus driver, the mechanic, the hotel keeper. God, the country is filled with these people. They’re good people. People doing the best they could.” Carver’s 1988 short fiction collection Where I’m Calling From, released shortly before his death, combined new and previously published stories. It was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Carver also wrote extensively as a poet. A collection of his poetry, including some works being written shortly before his death, was published in A New Path to the Waterfall. Although he had already released a volume of his collected verse, the diagnosis of lung cancer inspired him to write another volume. These poems are characterized by a reliance on sentence-sounds and a structure steeped in storytelling. Edna Longley commented in the London Review of Books that “all his writing tends toward dramatic monologue, present-tense soliloquy that wears the past like a hairshirt.” He explored tortured marriages and strained familial relationships, all of which lead him bravely into discussing his own terminal illness. Longley praised Carver for his ability to forge solid beginnings and endings: “A Carver poem instantly establishes its presence.”
In 1992 a collection of Carver’s early works was published. No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings contains poems, essays, book reviews, and other pieces that Carver had chosen not to include in any of his other collected work. Several of the short stories included had only been published before in student literary magazines. Of interest was the fact that in these stories Carver uses literary devises such as flashbacks and experimentation with verb tenses—techniques he shunned in his later work. Several of Carver’s previously published short stories received attention when acclaimed film director Robert Altman turned them into a motion picture. Although Altman took some liberties in adapting these stories for the screen, they remained essentially true to Carver’s ideas. The stories were collected into the book Short Cuts, which bears the same name as the movie.
From the late 1970s until his death, Carver lived with and was married to the poet Tess Gallagher, who is the literary executor of his estate. Gallagher ushered into print Beginners (2009), the original version of Carver’s book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The original text shows the final version had been severely edited by Carver’s editor Gordon Lish. The original was included in the Library of America’s Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (2009): the book “pushed the reset button on understanding Ray,” Gallagher claimed, “what he cared about in his writing, his tone, his care for his characters.”
“I never figured I’d make a living writing short stories,” Carver told Penelope Moffet in a Publishers Weekly interview only a few months before he died. “How far in this world are you going to get writing short stories? I never had stars in my eyes. I never had the big-score mentality.” Astonished by his literary prominence, Carver told Moffet that fame “never ceases to amaze me. And that’s not false modesty, either. I’m pleased and happy with the way things have turned out. But I was surprised.”
Raymond Carver died of lung cancer in his home on the Olympic Peninsula in 1988.
Sklenicka’s account of the changes in Carver’s third book of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981), is meticulous and heartbreaking. There were, she says, three versions: A, B and C. Version A was the manuscript Car­ver submitted. It was titled “So Much Water So Close to Home.” B was the manuscript Lish initially sent back. He changed the name of the story “Beginners” to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and that became the new title of the book. Although Carver was disturbed by this, he nonetheless signed a binding (and unagented) contract in 1980. Soon after, Version C — the version most readers know — arrived on Carver’s desk. The differences between B and C “astounded” him. “He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories,” Skle­nicka writes. “He had not expected . . . a meat cleaver.” Unsure of himself, Carver was only three years into sobriety after two decades of heavy drinking; his correspondence with Lish over the wholesale changes to his work alternated between groveling (“you are a wonder, a genius”) and outright begging for a return to Version B. It did no good. According to Tess Gallagher, Lish refused by telephone to restore the earlier version, and if Carver understood nothing else, he understood that Lish held the “power of publication access.”
This Hobson’s choice is the beating heart of “Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life.” Any writer might wonder what he’d do in such a case. Certainly I did; in 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading Sklenicka’s book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for “Carrie.” Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.
One needs only to scan the stories in “Beginners” and the ones in “What We Talk About” to see the most obvious change: the prose in “Beginners” consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue; in “What We Talk About,” there is so much white space that some of the stories (“After the Denim,” for instance) look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel. In many cases, the man who didn’t allow editors to change his own work gutted Carver’s, and on this subject Sklenicka voices an indignation she is either unwilling or unable to muster on Maryann’s behalf, calling Lish’s editing of Carver “a usurpation.” He imposed his own style on Carver’s stories, and the so-called minimalism with which Carver is credited was actually Lish’s deal. “Gordon . . . came to think that he knew everything,” Curtis Johnson says. “It became pernicious.”
Sklenicka analyzes many of the ­changes, but the wise reader will turn to the “Collected Stories” and see them for him- or herself. Two of the most dismaying examples are “If It Please You” (“After the Denim” in “What We Talk About”) and “A Small, Good Thing” (“The Bath” in “What We Talk About”).
In “If It Please You,” James and Edith Packer, a getting-on-in-years couple, arrive at the local bingo hall to discover their regular places have been taken by a young hippie couple. Worse, James observes the young man cheating (although he doesn’t win; his girlfriend does). During the course of the evening, Edith whispers to her husband that she’s “spotting.” Later, back at home, she tells him the bleeding is serious, and she’ll have to go to the doctor the following day. In bed, James struggles to pray (a survival skill both James and his creator acquired in daily A.A. meetings), first hesitantly, then “beginning to mutter words aloud and to pray in earnest. . . . He prayed for Edith, that she would be all right.” The prayers don’t bring relief until he adds the hippie couple to his meditations, casting aside his former bitter feelings. The story ends on a note of hard-won hope: “ ‘If it please you,’ he said in the new prayers for all of them, the living and the dead.” In the Lish-edited version, there are no prayers and hence no epiphany — only a worried and resentful husband who wants to tell the irritating hippies what happens “after the denim,” after the games. It’s a total rewrite, and it’s a cheat.
The contrast between “The Bath” (Lish-edited) and “A Small, Good Thing” (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son’s birthday, Scotty’s mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish’s baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death’s inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver’s version, the couple — who are actually characters instead of shadows — go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart.
“Lish was able . . . to make a snowman out of a snowdrift” is what Sklenicka says about his version of Carver’s stories, but that’s not much of a metaphor. She does better when talking about Lish’s changes to a passage in “They’re Not Your Husband” (in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”), pointing out that the Lish version is “meaner, coarser and somewhat diminishing to both characters.” Carver himself says it best. When the narrator of “The Fling” finally faces up to the fact that he has no love or comfort to give his father, he says of himself, “I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness.” Ultimately, that’s what is wrong with the Ray Carver stories as Lish presented them to the world, and what makes both the Sklenicka biography and the “Collected Stories” such a welcome and necessary corrective.