RAYMOND CARVER

'Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr.' (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.

Contents

Life

Writing

Works

Fiction

Collections

Compilations

Story summaries

Poetry

Collections

Compilations

Screenplays

Essays, Poems, Stories (Uncollected Works)

Films

Music

Books about Carver

External links

Life

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. His father, a sawmill worker, was an alcoholic. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.
Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. 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 Davis High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June of 1957, aged 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. His daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December of 1957. When their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver was 20. Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library assistant. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative assistant, and teacher.
Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, where he was first published and studied with Richard Cortez Day and received his B.A. in 1963. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.
In the mid-60s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, where he worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He sat in on classes at what was then Sacramento State College including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver's first book of poems, ''Near Klamath'', was published in 1968 by the English Club of Sacramento State College.
With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of ''Near Klamath'', and the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year. That was also the year that he moved his family to Palo Alto, California, so that he could take a job as a textbook editor for Science Research Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his inapproptiate writing style, too many active verbs. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the United States.
During the years of working in different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily and stated that alcohol became such a problem in his life that he more or less gave up and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a teacher in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver continued drinking for three years. After being hospitalized three times because of his drinking (between June of 1976 and February or March of 1977), Carver began his 'second life' and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced.^[1] From 1979 Carver had lived with the poet Tess Gallagher whom he had met at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas in 1978. They married in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. As his will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of his literary estate.
In 2001 the novelist Chuck Kinder published ''Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale'', a roman à clef of his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. In 2006 Maryann Burk Carver wrote a memoir of her years with Carver: ''What It Used To Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver''.

Writing

Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described himself as "inclined toward brevity and intensity" and "hooked on writing short stories" (in the foreword of ''Where I'm Calling From'', a collection published in 1988—and a recipient of an honorable mention in the 2006 New York Times article citing the best works of fiction of the previous 25 years). Another stated reason for his brevity was "that the story [or poem] can be written and read in one sitting." This was not simply a preference but, particularly at the beginning of his career, a practical consideration as he juggled writing with work. His subject matter was often focused on blue-collar experience, and are clearly reflective of his own life. The same could probably be said of the recurring theme of alcoholism and recovery.
Carver's writing style and themes are often identified with Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka. Carver also referred to Isaac Babel, Frank O'Connor, and V. S. Pritchett as influences. Chekhov, however, seems the greatest influence, motivating him to write ''Errand'', one of his final stories, about the Russian writer's final hours.
Minimalism is generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work. His editor at ''Esquire magazine'', Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver's prose in this direction - where his earlier tutor John Gardner had advised Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five, Gordon Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the "surgical amputation and transplantation" of Lish's editing, Carver eventually broke with him.[1]) During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of ''Esquire''. His style has also been described as Dirty realism, referring to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff -- two writers Carver was closely acquainted with -- as well as Ann Beattie, and Jayne Anne Phillips. With the exception of Beattie, who wrote about upper-middle class people, these were writers who focused on the sadnesses and losses of the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-middle class or isolated and marginalized people who represent Henry David Thoreau's idea of living lives of "quiet desperation."
His first published story appeared in 1960, titled "The Furious Seasons." More florid than much of his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and can now be found in recent collections ''No Heroics, Please'' and ''Call If You Need Me''.
His first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was first published in 1976; the title story had appeared in the ''Best American Short Stories 1967'' collection. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year. He was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection Cathedral, generally perceived as Carver's best. Also included in the collection are the award-winning "A Small Good Thing," and "Where I'm Calling From" - a story later selected by John Updike as one of the Best American Short Stories of the Century. Carver said that he saw the collection as a turning point in his career and a move towards a more mature, poetic and optimistic style.
His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled ''Elephant'' in Britain (included in "Where I'm Calling From") was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of these stories, especially ''Errand'', have led to some speculation that Carver was preparing to write a novel. Only one piece of this work has survived - an unpromising fragment "The Augustine Notebooks," printed in "No Heroics, Please."
Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in "Call If You Need Me"; one of the stories ('Kindling') won an O. Henry Award in 1999. Prior to his death, Carver had won six O. Henry Awards for the stories 'Are These Actual Miles' (originally titled 'What is it?') (1972), 'Put Yourself in My Shoes' (1974), 'Are You A Doctor?' (1975), 'A Small, Good Thing' (1983), and 'Errand' (1988), respectively.

Works

Fiction

Collections

★ ''Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?'' (first published 1976)

★ ''Furious Seasons'' (1977)

★ ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'' (1981)

★ ''Cathedral'' (1983)

★ ''Elephant'' (1988)

Compilations

★ ''Where I'm Calling From'' (1988)

★ ''Short Cuts: Selected Stories'' (1993) - (film tie-in)

Story summaries

'"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"'
1. “Fat” . A waitress serves a fat man and is moved by the experience
2. “Neighbours”. A couple house-sitting for neighbours are gradually taking over their neighbours’ lives. One says, “Maybe they won’t come back.”
3. “The Idea”. A couple spies on a man who spies on his own wife from his garden.
4
★ . “They’re Not your Husband”. An out of work salesman makes his waitress wife diet when he realises that other men think she’s fat.
5. “Are you a Doctor?”. A woman calls a doctor by accident, it’s a wrong number. She begs him to meet her and he does.
6. “The Father”. A mother and grandfather and daughter discuss the new baby’s features. “But who does Daddy look like?”
7. “Nobody Said Anything”. A boy catches a big fish.
8. “Sixty Acres”. A Native American accosts two young kids shooting ducks on his land. He lets them go. He decides to lease some of his land.
9. “What’s in Alaska?”. Two couples get stoned one evening.
10. “Night School”. A man is out of work and living with his parents. He meets two women in a bar and tells them. “I’d say you’re kind of old for that.”
11
★ . “Collectors”. A vacuum salesman demonstrator shows up at the house of an unemployed man. He pointlessly goes through his sales patter .
12. “What do you do in San Francisco?”. A postman observes the young couple who move in next door. They seem to break up quite quickly.
13. “The Student’s Wife”. A night of insomnia.
14. “Put yourself in my Shoes”. Coming back from an office party, a couple are interrogated and insulted in a strange meeting with their landlord and his wife.
15
★ . “Jerry and Molly and Sam”. A man is driven crazy by the family dog and decides to get rid of it by dumping it on the edge of town.
16. “Why Honey?”. Letter from the mother of an apparently pathological liar who has become President of the United States. “I should be proud but I am afraid.”
17. “The Ducks”. At work the foreman suddenly dies, so everyone is sent home. At home one man fails to use the opportunity to have sex with his wife.
18. “How About This?”. A couple come to look at her father’s deserted place in the country. Maybe they will move there.
19
★ . “Bicycles, muscles, Cigarets”. A man quits smoking. He calls round to the house of a friend of his son where a dispute is in progress over a missing bike. He and the accused boy’s father have a fight.
20
★ . “What is it?”. An unemployed man’s wife goes out to sell their car and doesn’t return until dawn.
21. “Signals”. A couple in a flashy restaurant seems to be trying to find out if they still have a future together. “I don’t mind admitting I’m just a lowbrow.”
22. “Will you please be quiet please?”. The story of Ralph and Marian, two students who marry and become teachers. Ralph becomes obsessed with the idea that Marian was unfaithful to him once in the past. Ralph gets drunk and feels his whole life changing.
'"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"'
1. “Why don’t you dance?”. At a yard sale, a teenage couple dance to a record the man puts on.
2. “Viewfinder”. A man with no hand sells photographs of people’s houses to the occupiers. He calls on one man whose family have just left him.
3. “Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit”. A man thinks about how his wife left him and what kind of a man she left him for.
4. “Gazebo”. A couple who manage a motel are at the end of their tether after he’s had an affair with the Mexican maid.
5. “I could see the smallest things”. A sleepless woman has a conversation with the next-door neighbour who used to be good friends with her husband.
6
★ . “Sacks”. A man visits his son and explains the circumstances of his adultery, which led to the divorce.
7. “The Bath”. First version of “A Small Good Thing”.
8
★ . “Tell the women we’re going”. Jerry and his pal pick up a couple of girls. Later for no apparent reason Jerry kills both of them.
9. “After the Denim”. An old couple go to play bingo. They find a longhaired couple sitting in their regular seats and the man becomes irrationally angry. The old woman is ill.
10
★ . “So much water so close to home”. Three men go on a fishing trip and one finds the body of a girl in the river. They decide to report the body when they’ve finished their fishing trip.
11. “The third thing that killed my father off”. Dummy has a pond of bass. He allows a man and his son to fish one time in this pond, but he gets mad at them anyway.
12
★ . “A serious talk”. A man is visiting his separated wife and is on the verge of exploding into violence. He cuts the phone and she throws him out. “He hoped he had made something clear.”
13. “The calm”. In a barbershop a man tells a tale about how he didn’t kill his deer when out hunting that day, but he did mortally wound it. A dispute breaks out with the other customers who tell him he ought to be out looking for the deer instead of getting his hair cut.
14. “Popular mechanics”. A couple are arguing and their baby gets in the way.
15. “Everything stuck to him”. A very young couple’s baby is crying through the night. They have a fight about whether he can go duck hunting. He doesn’t go and they make up.
16. “What we talk about when we talk about love”. Two couples are out for an evening. Mel, a doctor, tells everyone what he thinks about love, including the story about the two old farts in the real bad accident.
17. “One more thing”. A man gets into a long argument with his daughter. He thinks she’s gone crazy with new age thinking. When his wife gets home, it’s the last straw – she throws him out.
'"Cathedral"'
1. “Feathers”. A man and his wife are invited for dinner at a workmate’s house. Bud and Olla have a peacock and a really ugly baby. (“Even calling it ugly does it credit.”) But he realises they’re content.
2. “Chef’s House”. Edna’s story about her attempted reconciliation with her husband Wes, a recovering alcoholic. They have a fine summer together but then they have to leave the Chef’s House. Wes immediately plunges into despair.
3. “Preservation”. A man loses his job and his life disintegrates. The fridge breaks down. His wife gets ready to go to an auction to buy a new one.
4. “The Compartment”. Myers is travelling through France to see his son.
5
★ . “A Small Good Thing”. A boy is hit by a car and later dies. The bereaved parents receive upsetting calls from the baker who’s expecting them to collect the birthday cake he’s made for their son.
6. “Vitamins”. A man’s wife gets a job selling vitamins door-to-door. She’s sick of it. The man tries to start an affair with her workmate and takes her to a club where they’re insulted and menaced by a black guy just back from Vietnam.
7. “Careful”. A man has a visit from his estranged wife Inez. His ear is blocked by wax and she helps him.
8. “Where I’m calling from”. Frank is in rehab and listens to his fellow inmate JP tell his life-story.
9. “The Train”. A woman takes a train journey.
10. “Fever”. A college teacher’s wife leaves him. She’s gone to California to become an artist. He had major problems finding someone to look after his two kids while he’s at work.
11. “The Bridle”. The wife of a couple running a motel gets interested in a farming family who come to stay. They’re bankrupt. The farmer’s wife gets a job as a waitress. The farmer has an accident in the pool.
12. “Cathedral”. A man’s wife once worked as a reader for a blind man, who now wants to visit them en route for somewhere else. The man is very hostile to the visit. When the blind man arrives he gets into a strange conversation with him about seeing cathedrals.
Note : stories marked with an asterisk were used in the Robert Altman film “Short Cuts”.
'"Elephant"'
1. “Boxes”. A man’s mother continually moves around the country.
2. “Whoever was using this bed”. A couple are woken at three in the morning by a wrong number which keeps ringing back. They give up sleep and have a long conversation which gravitates towards their health and fears of death.
3. “Intimacy”. A writer drops in unannounced on his ex-wife. She insults him vociferously and at great length. (“Then you held me up for display and ridicule in your so-called work”). He asks for forgiveness and gets it.
4. “Menudo”. A man is having an affair with his neighbour’s wife. He meditates on the ruin of his own life and the other lives he’s affected.
5. “Elephant”. A man sends money to his ex-wife, his mother, his son and his brother.
6. “Blackbird Pie”. An aggravating pedantic man receives a 23 page letter from his wife announcing that she’s going to leave him. He keeps claiming that the letter is not in her handwriting. She leaves him that night.
7. “Errand”. The death of Chekhov.

Poetry

Collections

★ ''Near Klamath'' (1968)

★ ''Winter Insomnia'' (1970)

★ ''At Night The Salmon Move'' (1976)

★ ''Where Water Comes Together With Other Water'' (1985)

★ ''Ultramarine'' (1986)

★ ''A New Path To The Waterfall'' (1989)

Compilations

★ ''In a Marine Light: Selected Poems'' (1988)

★ ''All of Us: The Collected Poems'' (1996)

Screenplays

★ ''Dostoevsky'' (1985, with Tess Gallagher)

Essays, Poems, Stories (Uncollected Works)

★ ''Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories'' (1983)

★ ''No Heroics, Please'' (1999)

★ ''Call if You Need Me'' (2000)
These books gather otherwise uncollected works. ''Fires'' covers Carver's career during the period 1966–82. The latter volumes were published posthumously, and include early fiction, essays, and reviews of other authors. ''Call if You Need Me'' was identical to ''No Heroics, Please'' apart from the replacement of poetry in the latter with new stories, two found in Carver's desk by his last partner, Tess Gallagher and three found in his archives by scholar William Stull.

Films

★ ''Short Cuts'' directed by Robert Altman

★ ''Everything Goes'' directed by Andrew Kotatko

★ ''Jindabyne'' (based on ''So Much Water So Close to Home'') directed by Ray Lawrence

Music

★ The 1989 album ''So Much Water So Close to Home'' by Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, includes a track ''Everything's Turning to White'' which is a re-telling of Carver's story ''So Much Water So Close to Home''

Books about Carver

★ Conversations With Raymond Carver (Literary Conversations Series), Stull, William L. and Gentry, Marshall Bruce (editors), , , University Press of Mississippi, , ISBN 0878054499

★ Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver, Stull, William L. and Carroll, Maureen P. (editors), , , Capra Press, , ISBN 0884963705

★ Stories Of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study, , Kirk, Nesset, Ohio University Press, , ISBN 0821411004

★ What It Used to Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver, , Maryann Burk, Carver, St. Martin's Press, , ISBN 0-312-33258-0

External links

★ Carversite Features story, video, photographs, poems, quotations, bibliography, more

★ Raymond Carver: And suddenly everything became clear to him

★ An indepth interview from 1985 in which Carver talks about his father, his early writing, his characters, and the 'dark humour' in some of his stories.

★ The Raymond Carver Page

★ Map of Port Angeles marked with Carver's 'haunts' such as the Odyssey Bookshop

★ Audio interviews with Raymond Carver

★ Echoes of Our Own Lives; An interview with Raymond Carver

★ Raymond Carver's first wife remembers the influential American writer. A review of Maryann Burk Carver's ''What It Used To Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver''