Man of Constant Sorrow

The standard advice for young writers has always been "Write what you know." Raymond Carver did exactly that. It so happens that for most of his life, what Carver knew best was hardship, both physical and psychological. In his short stories--tight-lipped parables of abjection that became hugely influential in the 1980s--life is a kind of nonstop distress sale. The apartments are shabby; the rent is unpaid; the living room furniture has been carried outside and strewn across the lawn. The people seem dislocated too, even when they're stuck in one place, licking their wounds and drinking hard.

In Carol Sklenicka's judicious, thorough and sometimes harrowing biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (Scribner; 578 pages), we learn just how well Carver knew the worlds he wrote about. He grew up mostly in blue collar Yakima, Wash., where his father worked in a sawmill, changed jobs frequently and drank heavily, patterns he passed on to his son. Carver was barely 18 when he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, but he had already dedicated himself to life as a writer.

And what that would turn out to mean was a life of struggle. For years, the couple moved constantly, taking whatever jobs they could find while trying to cobble together degrees at one school after another. In Sklenicka's book, Maryann emerges as an admirable if flawed anchor in her husband's life. Companion, breadwinner, fierce believer in Carver's genius, she was also a classic enabler who sank into alcoholism just as he did, though he sank deeper. Over the years, Carver and Maryann, with their two wary children in tow, would suffer just about every indignity that drunkenness confers, including his blackouts, her boozy flirtations, two bankruptcies and a holiday brawl at their place that knocked over the Christmas tree.

Apart from his wife, the pivotal figure in Carver's adult life was Gordon Lish, an influential fiction editor at Esquire magazine who later became a power in book publishing. In 1970, when Carver was 32, Lish gave him his first crucial exposure in Esquire--but at a price. He revised Carver's manuscripts extensively, cutting out whole pages, changing titles, expelling lyrical passages and moments of uplift. The result was a set of stories more terse and elliptical than the originals, more "minimalist," which was how Carver's early style came to be known.

Carver had very mixed feelings about all that, especially when he saw the heavy changes Lish made to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver's second volume of stories, published in 1981. At the last minute he even pleaded with Lish to withdraw the book, then relented, possibly because he felt that Lish was still the gatekeeper at fame's door. But Carver may also have sensed, and maybe even feared, that the darker register Lish summoned from those stories made his voice more distinctive and would secure his reputation--which it did. Before long, honors and money were coming Carver's way.