I haven’t read much Raymond Carver, some short story collections, a couple of his books of poetry, an anthology he had edited, some works in the Paris review and Chicago and the New Yorker-but the stuff that I had read I liked. He had a stark economy, not in the overly precious, not a word out of place way, but something better then that. He knew what he wanted to say, what emotions he needed to convey, what words best expressed those emotions, and carried the plot along, plus gave us relevant character information- all things a short story writer should do. He only gave us what we needed, he efficiently hummed along until it reached a logical conclusion, and then ended it. You could see this efficiency in how he eschewed most adjectives and adverbs, how his sentences were not overly long, how little punctuation he used beyond a comma and a period, how he favoured the Anglo Saxon over anything else. Even in the titles of his books was this sparse democratic voice (for example Put Yourself in My Shoes or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love or A New Path to the Waterfall)
I am a tangled reader and a thinker who tramps along in the brambles, sometimes there is pain that occurs, but mostly it’s a grand adventure. Carver wrote about things that were not tangled or brambled, even though it seems like they should be- stories about drunks, bad marriages, relationships dissolving, suburban angst, poems about wronged lovers, driving drunk, a fathers death-these are indicators of misery and depression, the inwardness of that illness or lifestyle should mean a solipsism and a desire to unwind or unweave the minor disasters that infiltrate our lives.
Their was a tension for Carver, he didn’t believe that writers lie and who wanted everyone to be accurate as well as truthful (he followed this maxim by Pound “fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing”), and yet he lied every day, the writer doesn’t tell the whole truth-he edits, and refines and adds bits and fictionalizes and through all that myth making risks forgetting or exploiting the source. Maybe his clarity is used in the same way as a magician shows his hands in front of a performance or a kid yells “look ma now hands” or how a teenager takes pride in how he can drive with his knees.
All of those metaphors fail though, and they fail because they are about showing off, Carver was a drunk, a bad father, and a lousy writer, one a legion throughout the history of writers who used a talented wife (Tess Gallagher) as an editor and secretary-like Lee Krasner cleaning up Pollocks puke and piss instead of painting- the thing about Carver, the thing that you can see though, is that he is aware of how he treats this, how he realizes the messes he made and how he tries to correct them. He gives Gallagher her due in places, talking of her writing or reading-as well he wrote a whole collection of love poetry to her, and this love poetry did not seem to romanticize a disasterous relationship. Even though it didn’t last, she seems to have affection of him.
Anyone who tries and even remotely succeeds with this kind of writing is called Hemmingway-and with Carver the problem is confounded by his admiration for Hemmingway and the fact that they were both had a taste for booze. There is something more to Carver-Hemmingway is all macho bluster, he spends his novels with his dick against a tape measure-and that’s all he can use it for, the love of Hemmingway is for Hemmingway, the myth of Hemmingway is one of the urban professional who wants to go out and play big boy with guns-it’s the myth of a world where the women are virgins, whores or bulldaggers. Hemmingway is a neurotic and messy as Roth or Bellow but scared to admit it. What Carvers does, or did, was try to clean up messes. His prose is clean, but his content is filthy, and in that sense the prose works as a way to control the effluvia that is happening in his characters lives, and by extension his own.
This is where the problem comes in, and I have just started realizing it once I got to the essays, if you have so much concern for control and avoiding mess you run the risk of being mannered. Carver’s love of narrative sustains him, of course and that love has some definite virtues, but it also traps him. If he is narrative focused, not really concerned with language or lyricism, but just wanting to get words across, then there is a risk of becoming reactionary.
The innovations of the 20th century have been against this kind of propulsive narrative, and reading his unreleased essays in the post humus collection No Heroics, Please (note the plain prose of the title, the subtle irony), you get this impression that Carver would have been happier if we had all stayed with the dramas of 19th century drawing rooms-I am not saying that everyone needs to run up and write Finnegans Wake, but that a little of Carver goes along way, and also there is an over dependence on narrative tricks (in his first essay in the collection of occasional pieces, Fires, he wrote that he hated tricks, and he was attempting to be the simplest writer he could be, what he didn’t realize is that simplicity was a trick in itself.)
Having tricks is good, the writer as a magician is not a bad thing, but the problem is when you over rely on them-when you think your trick is the only trick, and then you can only view literature in your tradition. He tends sometimes, especially when he gets closer to death, to view his writing as the only trick, and so he becomes strained- the virtuous balance is lost to sameness. Reading his introduction to the Best American Short Stories 1986, which he edited, this sameness becomes clear. He half heartedly apologizes for his conservativeness, but he seems stubbornly proud of lines like “a reader looking for “experimental” or “innovative” stories won’t find them around here.
The weird thing about this line, was that for 10 years after his death Carver become the reactionary that was so new that he lead the charge, readers had to endure hundreds of pages of poetry and prose about little people doing little things not because they were compelled to tell truths but because Uncle Raymond did it first. Writing like Carver, with delicacy and starkness is such a difficult task that even for him it became almost impossible- and if he had not died when he did, he would have added to the pile