Today is the 71st anniversary of Raymond Carver’s birth. Carver, who died at the age of 50 in 1988, was a writer who produced poems that were like short stories, and short stories that were like poems. He probably didn’t lengthen his time by the heavy drinking that he indulged in until the last decade of his life, when he seemed to find peace.
Carver grew up in a working-class home in Washington; his father was an alcoholic mill worker, his mother a sometimes waitress and retail clerk. He was married in 1957 at the age of 19 to a 16-year-old girl. They had a daughter six months later and a son the next year. Carver worked as a janitor, sawmill laborer, library assistant and delivery man. His wife worked as a waitress, teacher, salesperson and administrative assistant.
As a boy he had been an avid reader of Mickey Spillane mysteries and outdoors magazines. He became interested in writing in his twenties and began to take creative writing courses; he eventually received a bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State College in California. With a degree, he was hired as a textbook editor, the first job he’d ever had that allowed him to work with words; he was fired after three years as his writing style was understandably unsuited to the genre of the science textbook.
Carver’s writing didn’t appear in print until he was in his thirties, and then under the humble auspices of a college literary club. Carver’s first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976, when he was thirty-eight. It struck many readers as spare and unfinished, like the interior of the hunting and fishing cabins he had spent much time in over the years. Some critics stuck the “minimalist” label on him, but there is some dispute as to whether the style was truly his, or imposed upon him by Gordon Lish, his editor at the time. Carver’s second wife, the poet Tess Gallagher, is currently attempting to republish the stories collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in their original, unedited form, an effort that the publisher is resisting.
Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher
I heard Carver read once before he died, in 1981 when What We Talk About was first published. He had an unimposing presence, better suited to the many low-wage jobs he’d held over the years than the mantle of literary lion, compared to Hemingway and Chekhov, that he assumed at the end of his life. He had a faint voice and autographed copies of his second collection without ceremony, as if he were still somewhat surprised to find that, after all the years of scuffling, he’d produced something that a roomful of admirers at the other end of the continent in Boston would turn out for.
In an interview, Carver was once asked how he found time and the will to write during his years of obscurity, when he had to work long hours to make ends meet. His response was that he would take scraps of paper and a pencil with him wherever he went, and would use every spare moment–waiting for his wash in a laundromat is one example I recall–to write something, if only the thoughts running through his head, or an inchoate idea for a short story he was trying to shape.
Carver is buried in Port Angeles, Washington. Two poems are inscribed on his head stone, Gravy and the following, Late Fragment:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Tags: poetry, raymond carver, short stories
