Calls From Heaven
Five previously unpublished
Raymond Carver short stories show his lasting genius
By
PAUL GRAY
Raymond
carver was only 50 when he died, in 1988, of lung cancer.
Those who knew him personally mourned, and continue to mourn,
the loss of a warm and generous friend, a man whose hard early
life-periods of dead-end jobs and poverty, severe alcoholism-had
somehow made him gentle. Readers aware of him only from his
books have missed him too, for Carver had, during the 12 years
preceding his death, virtually reinvented the American short
story.
His acclaim
stemmed from four collections: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
(1976); What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981);
Cathedral (1983); and Where I'm Calling From (1988). Carver's
stories also became a staple in Esquire during the 1970s and
the New Yorker in the '80s. His voice-spare, understated,
unsentimental-and his typical subject matter-moments of truth
in the lives of hard-luck men and women who know they are
failing in a country consecrated to success-became immediately
recognizable. Carver resisted the trend toward gentrification
in U.S. fiction, the Jamesian notion that only those with
fine-tuned sensibilities and no money worries have the leisure
to mess up their lives in interesting ways. Carver could write
about life's losers without any condescension because he had
often felt he was one of them.
His stories
appeared so simple and effortless that many aspiring writers
decid-ed to turn them out themselves. These admirers might
get the props right-say, a mobile home with linoleum on the
floor and an opened bottle of gin on the kitchen table-but
not the magic that Carver could work with such material, not
the sense of enormous import lurking in the pauses of desultory
conversations.
Reviewers
and critics dubbed Carver and his epigones Minimalists, a
term the author disliked. His reasons for doing so extended
beyond the normal artistic resentment at being pigeonholed.
Carver knew, as others have discovered in the past few years,
that heavy excisions were per-formed on his early stories
by Gordon Lish, a fiction editor at Esquire in the '70s and
then at U.S. publisher Knopf during the preparation of What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love. That book, with 17
terse stories crammed into 159 pages, solidified Carver's
reputation but left him feeling that he had ceded too much
control to his editor. (He later restored Lish's cuts to two
of the stories and included them in Where I'm Calling From.)
Carver devotees portray Lish as the villain of this piece,
an overreaching editor who bullied an uncertain beginning
writer. Lish's defenders argue that he did for Carver's fiction
what Ezra Pound did for T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, i.e.,
cut out the fat to expose the essential genius within the
work.
That opinion
rests on the premise that the stories Carver published without
Lish's oversight were inferior to the radically trimmed ones,
and not many people believe that. Fresh evidence to the contrary
can now be found in Call If You Need Me (Harvill; 300 pages),
a gathering of the author's previously uncollected nonfiction,
plus five unpublished short stories. Three of them were found
by the poet Tess Gallagher, Carver's companion for the last
decade of his life and wife for his last few months, in the
home they shared at Port Angeles, Wash.; the other two turned
up among Carver's papers at Ohio State University. In a foreword,
Gallagher notes that she had reservations about making public
stories that her late husband had not finished to his satisfaction:
"Ray would sometimes take a story through 30 rewrites. These
stories had been put aside well before that."
But she
decided that the discovered works were good enough to publish,
and she was right. Even though they were not polished to the
extent the author probably intended, these five stories are
set unmistakably in Carver country and populated by Carver
people. The heroes have quit drinking, as Carver did in 1977.
Marriages are tense or broken. In Kindling, a man named Myers
has just gotten out of an alcohol rehab center and can't go
home again because his wife "had a lawyer and a restraining
order." So he rents a room in another town and winds up voluntarily
chopping a load of firewood for his landlord. In What Would
You Like to See?, a married couple have agreed to split up.
Before they vacate the house they have rented all summer,
they are invited to a farewell dinner by their landlord and
his wife, who believe they are moving on together. After the
meal, the host and hostess show slides from their travels.
Summaries of these and the other three stories would suggest
that nothing much happens. Yet to read the works themselves
is to experience vividly the tectonic shiftings and rumblings
and reknittings that go on beneath the surface of everyday
lives. There was truly nothing minimal about the reach and
grasp of Carver's art.
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April 2, 2001 | No.
13
COVER
STORIES
Dread
Heads
Scared? You're not alone-millions of people suffer from debilitating fears.
But science is devising cures for every anxiety, from ablutophobia (fear
of bathing) to zoophobia (fear of animals).
THE
ARTS
CINEMA: In the Mood for Love delights and
mystifies
A gender-bending Thai film takes on the
world
BOOKS:
Calling from Carverland
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY
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