In private desperation, Raymond Carver’s characters struggle through their lives, knowing, with occasional clarity, that the good life they had once hoped would be achieved through hard work will not come about. In many ways, Carver’s life was the model for all of his characters. Married to Maryann Burk on June 7th, 1957, at nineteen, and having two children by October of 1958, the Carvers’ life was decided for years to come. Early on, Carver felt, along with his wife, that hard work would take care of nearly everything. “We thought we could do it all,” he said in one interview, “We were poor but we thought that if we kept working, if we did the right things, the right things would happen” (Gentry 123).
Somewhere in the middle of this life of dead end jobs and child raising, he realized, very much like one of his characters, that things would not change. He recounts one of the strongest of these moments in his essay on writing influences, “Fires.” On a Saturday afternoon in the early 1960s, when Carver was a student at the University of Iowa, he was doing chores and taking care of their two children, Christine and Vance. The children were with some of their friends, at a birthday party, Carver was not sure–he often admitted to having a very poor memory. He was at the laundromat washing clothes and, at this point in the essay, waiting for a dryer: When and if one of the dryers ever stopped, I planned to rush over to it with my shopping basket of damp clothes. Understand, I’d been hanging around in the Laundromat for thirty minutes or so with this basketful of clothes, waiting my chance. I’d already missed out on a couple of dryers–somebody’d gotten there first. I was getting frantic…. even if I could get my clothes into a dryer it would still be another hour or more before the clothes would dry…. Finally a dryer came to a stop.
The Essay on Adults Because Certain Childhood Life Person Child
Childhood history has a lot to do with how we live as adults because certain childhood events could trigger something that would last a life time. Take for example if a child fails at something and the parent does nothing to help the child, the child will grow up thinking that failing is alright and that he or she will have a hard time in life with their job or in school or life in general. Many ...
And I was right there when it did. The clothes inside quit tumbling and lay still. In thirty seconds or so, if no one showed up to claim them, I planned to get rid of the clothes and replace them with my own. That’s the law of the laundromat. But at that minute a woman came over to the dryer and opened the door. I stood there waiting. This woman put here hand into the machine and took hold of some items of clothing. But they weren’t dry enough, she decided. She closed the door and put two more dimes into the machine. In a daze I moved away with my shopping cart and went back to waiting. But I remember thinking at that moment, amid the feelings of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing–and, brother, I mean nothing–that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children. And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction (Fires 32-33).
This sort of epiphany is what Carver deals with in almost all of his stories–the daily responsibilities of life weighing down on one’s shoulders when nothing is certain, not one’s marriage, one’s sobriety, not even a dryer to finish drying the clothes. “Almost all the characters in my stories come to the point where they realize that compromise, giving in, plays a major role in their lives,” Carver said. “Then one single moment of revelation disrupts the pattern of their daily lives. It’s a fleeting moment during which they don’t want to compromise anymore. And afterwards they realize that nothing ever really changes” (Gentry 80).
More than once Carver has been criticized for condescending to his characters, or in more favorable terms, dealing with them ironically. He flatly denied this stance at every opportunity. “I’m not talking down to my characters, or holding them up for ridicule, or slyly doing an end run around them. I’m much more interested in my characters, in the people in my story, than I am in any potential reader. I’m uncomfortable with irony if it’s at the expense of someone else, if it hurts the characters” (Gentry 185).
The Essay on A Story In My Life
A story in my life Stories have been told from generation to generation, some families use stories in different context than others. Some families use stories to entertain, touch someone, or to help you learn some sort of life lesson. Story telling has dated far back in time, it began as people singing and chanting while doing tasks to keep themselves entertained. In my family stories are told ...
If he had condescended to his characters then he would had to have condemned the first forty years of his own life for its ordinariness. “I do know something about the life of the underclass and what it feels like, by virtue of having lived it myself for so long,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Half my family is still living like this. They still don’t know how they’re going to make it through the next month or two” (Gentry 138).
Carver’s writing career began to take shape when he started his B.A. at Chico State College in the Fall of 1958 as a part-time student. In the Fall of 1959 he took Creative Writing 101 with an unpublished writer who had recently arrived at Chico State, John Gardner. Carver recognized Gardner as a strong influence on his writing even though his exposure to Gardner was short, only one academic year in 1959 and 1960. Gardner recognized Carver’s need for a quiet place to work and loaned his office key to Carver for him to work. In the office, surrounded with boxes of unpublished manuscripts by an honest to goodness writer, he wondered about the world that he wanted to inhabit. “In his office on the weekends I used to go through his manuscripts and steal titles form his stories,” Carver said in his first formal interview in 1977, “I mean take his titles, which struck me as awfully good, as I recall, and rephrase them, and put them on my own stories. Then I began to show him my stories with his titles, and he had to give me a little lecture on the basic proprieties and the like” (Gentry 4).
In criticizing students’ work Gardner was stern. He made clear what would not be allowed in honest fiction. He would go through a story line by line with the author and tell him or her why certain omissions were non negotiable and then haggle over the others. Carver recounts his conferences with Gardner in his essay “John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher” collected in Fires: Before our conference he would have marked up my story, crossing out unacceptable sentences, phrases, individual words, even some of the punctuation; and he gave me to understand that these deletions were not negotiable. In other cases he would bracket sentences, phrases, or individual words, and these were items we’d talk about, these cases were negotiable (45).
The Essay on Family and Life Story Work
?In this assignment I aim to discuss life story work: which can provide the care worker, and care receiver a better understanding of each other’s needs, and provide the care worker with information that can help support the care receiver in the best way. The carer needs to possess certain skills sensitivity, confidentiality, empathy, trustworthiness, and have commitment to seeing the story to the ...
Carver admits that though this is not necessarily the best way to teach, at that early stage in his writing, he was particularly receptive to the strong advice. Aside from all of his influences academic and familial, arguably the strongest and most negative influence on his work was his drinking. The vice became a habit as his despair grew, despair about ever finding the “good life” through menial jobs, feeling continually cursed with bad luck because of the financial situation his family struggled with. Early on he used to say that he didn’t have any problems that money couldn’t solve. Ironically, the decade of his life when he began getting books published at small and eventually large presses was the decade that he almost died of alcoholism. As we’ve seen with several other writers of this century, success, for some reason, often accompanies self destruction. Though there was no causal connection for Carver between those successes and his drinking, the publishing and alcoholism did begin roughly at the same time. When asked exactly how alcohol worked for or against his work, he acknowledged his life experience as being significant for his work, but recognized his relationship to alcohol as only destructive: Obviously my drinking experiences helped me write several stories that have to do with alcoholism.
But the fact that I went through that and was able to write those stories was nothing short of a miracle. No, I don’t see anything coming out of my drinking experiences except waste and pain and misery….No good came out of it except in the way that someone might spend ten years in the penitentiary and then come out of that and write about the experience (Gentry 115) There are at least two major periods in Carver’s work, and to understand the change in his stories, one must know the dramatic difference between what he called his first life and his second life. As Maryann Carver recalled in her only published interview in …when we talk about Raymond Carver, Ray was publishing a number of pieces in literary journals before the family moved to Israel for a year for the California State College Study Abroad program. Ray and Maryann had always wanted to travel and were excited at the chance. Ray got a year’s leave of absence from his textbook editing job at Science Research Associates (S.R.A.) in Palo Alto, California, and they went in June of 1968. They only stayed four months. Ray and their son Vance were quite disgruntled with the four of them living in a two bedroom apartment in a Jerusalem suburb. The children were not in English-speaking schools as they were promised–it took them an hour and a half and three bus transfers to get to school in the old Arab city of Jaffa. “One day a bomb went off in a wastebasket in the bus depot, killing six people, just fifteen minutes after our children were there,” Maryann remembers (Halpert 94).
The Essay on Walter Mitty Story Life Time
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a humorous short story that reveals the many fantasies of heroism Mr. Walter Mitty engages himself in to help him escape the daily pressures of life. The story begins with Mr. Mitty as the commander on a military plane ordering the crew to proceed through a dangerous storm, and reassuring the scared passengers that everything will be ok. Reality soon intrudes, ...
She also remembers clearly Ray’s response to this last straw, “This may be the high time of your life, studying at the university, learning Hebrew, and listening to Golda Meir speak, and dancing Jewish folk dances, but I’m going to take my children and go home” (Halpert 94).
They returned in October and lived with relatives in Hollywood until February of 1969. In February of 1969 Raymond was rehired at S.R.A. In 1970, Ray received a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award for poetry and in September his job at S.R.A. was terminated. Along with the N.E.A. award, the severance pay from S.R.A. and unemployment benefits allowed him to write full time for a year. He wrote a great deal during this time, as Maryann recounts: The first year I taught [at Los Altos High School], Ray had a whole year off where he could write, and he wrote many, many stories. He finished the bulk of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please. That was in 1971….[It] wasn’t published until 1976, and for five years Ray didn’t draw a sober breath. He left his job at University of California, Santa Barbara, a semester early [in 1974] due to his health, and after that he wasn’t able to work until 1978 (Halpert 95).
The Essay on Down: Personal Life and Time
In college it is easy to stray away from the main purpose, which is having a higher education. College years are supposed to include fun but not too much fun. There are many ideals to consider when trying achieving success in school. They way students manage their time and consume energy has an effect on the outcome of their success. Relaxation also plays a significant role in the turn out of ...
The alcoholism grew to take up all of his time. He became what he called a full-time practicing alcoholic. In 1976, the same year Will You Please Be Quiet, Please was published by McGraw-Hill with the help of Gordon Lish Ray hit rock bottom. Between October of 1976 and January of 1977, he was hospitalized four times for acute alcoholism. The Carver’s house was sold in October and Ray began living apart from his wife, all at the same time. Douglas Unger recounted this time: We all knew he was going to die if he didn’t quit drinking. And he knew it, too….What happened next was he was affected by CNS seizures. For a certain number of alcoholics, especially the heaviest drinkers, their nervous system has become so adjusted to having alcohol that when they stop drinking they go into seizures, as though with epilepsy. These seizures are very dangerous. It’s how brains are damaged during convulsions (Halpert 59).
The seizures only complicated matters. Unger continues, “He was then terrified to quit drinking, because it had happened in a hospital in San Francisco and it had happened when he’d tried to quit on his own; so he kept on drinking” (59).
In his story “Where I’m Calling From,” Carver has a character named Tiny in Frank Martin’s drying out facility who has these sort of seizures immediately after describing to his fellow recovering alcoholics how he feels much better and will be leaving soon. Carver was often suspicious of good fortune. During his successful, sober years he would often marvel that he could own things like boats to fish in, and two cars–one a Mercedes–that weren’t breaking down all the time. Maryann said in her interview that it took Ray about five or six years to process the material that would end up in a story, whether it was his own experience, a story someone had told him, or simply a line he had overheard (Halpert 90).
Ray quit drinking on June 2nd, 1977 and didn’t write for almost a year. He said at that point that he didn’t even care if he wrote again, his sobriety was so important to him. During that time of early sobriety, he made some connection between his writing and drinking, the ruin he’d made of his life. Perhaps because writing had always been his first priority, his first love, and alcohol came along competing for that love and attention. The coincidence of the beginning of his publishing and the beginning of his problem drinking may have helped to foster this psychological connection. At any rate, his first life, or the time of his “Bad Raymond Days” as he called it, was over and his second life began with his sobriety. No writing was done for some time, then he wrote the stories that were included in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. That collection, also edited by Gordon Lish, was published in 1981. This book marked the end of his first literary life, his extremely pared down style. In 1982, about five years after the end of his first life–the processing time Maryann mentioned–Carver wrote what would become the title story for his next collection, “Cathedral.” He said at the time, “There is definitely a change going on in my writing and I’m glad of it. It happened when I wrote the story ‘Cathedral.’ I date the change from that story” (Gentry 29).
Started University Time Work Make
I never realised how important time is until I started university. Getting the best out of you studies in university is forgoing one thing for another. (opportunity cost). When I first started university I was working full time. As time went by I realised that I just could not cope, so I decided to work part-time while studying. I can now cope better with my school work load and can produce a ...
Later on, when he had finished the collection and had thought about his development as a writer, he commented on the aesthetics involved in this newfound life: The stories in What We Talk About are different to an extent….I pushed and pulled and worked with those stories before they went into the book to an extent I’d never done with any other stories. When the book was put together and in the hands of my publisher, I didn’t write anything at all for six months. And then the first story I wrote was “Cathedral,” which I feel is totally different in conception and execution from any stories that have come before. I suppose it reflects a change in my life as much as it does in my way of writing….I knew I’d gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I’d be at a dead end–writing and publishing stuff I wouldn’t want to read myself, and that’s the truth (Gentry 44).
This drastic and immediate change in Carver’s style marked an opening up. His new life of grace called for a new way of looking at things, new and old, and although he did not enjoy looking at the past too long, he went back to a story first printed in What We Talk About called “The Bath.” Though this story had already been published in a collection and had won Columbia magazine’s Carlos Fuentes Fiction Award, he rewrote the story, making it three times as long by adding to the original section and continuing the story to what he felt was it’s true conclusion. The second story is called “A Small, Good Thing,” and he says of the two versions, “In my own mind I consider them to be really two entirely different stories, not just different versions of the same story” (Gentry 102).
They are as different as his two lives. In a way he was, in this second life, rewriting the first. He continues, “I went back to that one, as well as several others, because I felt there was unfinished business that needed attending to. The story hadn’t been told originally; it had been messed around with, condensed and compressed in ‘The Bath’ to highlight the qualities of menace that I wanted to emphasize” (Gentry 102).
As most agree when they read both stories, the risk was worth taking. Carver’s obsession with rewriting paid off in critical acclaim when “A Small, Good Thing” was awarded first place in Prize Stories 1983 and the same year was included in The Pushcart Prize, VIII. Then, at the height of his critical acclaim, Carver, along with Cynthia Ozick, won the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters’ first Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award. These are renewable five-year fellowships that carry annual tax-free stipends of $35,000. The award not only allowed Carver to stop teaching, but required that he not engage in any other employment (Gentry xxvi).
Once again, looking back at his life, it seems appropriate that his last five years be spent in full time writing. After this sort of wish fulfillment, poetic justice would not allow him to continue upwards. He couldn’t have written his own story any better than he lived it. In terms of representative vision, it is interesting that both “A Small, Good Thing” and “Cathedral” are Carver’s most anthologized stories. They are arguably his best stories, and they appeal to a wider audience than his other work, perhaps accidentally because of the expansiveness, the generosity that Carver felt in his life and allowed to enter his work. Ironically enough, these two stories, most popular among all of his work, are the least representative of the bulk of his writing. Even in his last story collection, Where I’m Calling From, the rewritten and new stories do not so much follow those two examples. “Errand,” on the other hand, Carver’s last published story and the last in this collection, is yet again different from anything else he had done. It may have to do with the fact that it was one of only two or three stories that he wrote that had no thing to do with his own experience, and that he was inspired by the new biography of Chekhov by Henri Troyat that he was reading at the time. Or it may have had something to do with, as Douglas Unger relates, the “strong influence” the actual biography made. “I was at Yaddo when that story came out,” Unger said, “and it so happened there was a copy of Henri Troyat’s biography of Chekhov around. James Salter noticed that the death scene in the biography and a large part of the death scene in ‘Errand’ was almost exactly alike, almost word for word. That caused quite a stir and discussion among the writers there” (Halpert 71).
To Carver, using that material was no different than using a story one of his friends had told him (Halpert 72).
“Cathedral” does have its main character in common with many of his stories–someone who has a rather limited feel for other’s experiences and is afraid of differences, such as Robert’s blindness. But the relationship that develops in the evening depicted in the story is much different than what might have happened six or seven years before “Cathedral” was written. At an earlier time, the main character might not have overcome his unnamed fears and done something odd to offend Robert. Robert himself might have been different, much less affable, perhaps he would represent much of what had been bad in the narrator’s life. This is the story that might have been, and what would have to be for it to represent Carver’s overall vision. As it is, it represents the change in his life and work and it shows how a writer’s vision is not static anymore than his or her life is static. The progression of Carver’s career represents a reality that is not dealt with in criticism; it is a dirty reality, something his work mirrors. The fallacy of criticism–that something can actually be taken apart, examined, and reassembled to be looked at in a different, fuller light–is revealed by Carver’s work.
Political theories are made to deal with the clear oppression of American Capitalism in Carver’s representation of working poor. Some critics point to his “minimal” style as the beginning of the end of true literature. In one specific example, Mark Helprin, the editor for The Best American Short Stories 1988, spent his introduction condemning “minimalists” and everything he thought they stood for. For sixteen pages, he tells us, as only a non-minimalist like himself can, in thirteen different ways, how the minimalists are boils on the ass of literature and the cause of the literary cannon being under siege. He then begins talking about how he is glad that he read the stories to be judged not knowing the writers or the publications they came from. And, after all of this, he tells of his learning the names of the writers that he chose for inclusion, “I was surprised, delighted, and a little taken aback to discover that I had chosen stories by some people whom I do not like personally, by one who wrote one of the stupidest reviews I have ever read (of my first book, no less), and by some whose work I find very hard to bear” (Helprin xxvii).
Do you suppose one of those references, after a large part of his essay had been dedicated to cutting down “minimalists” every way he could, concerned Raymond Carver, whose story “Errand” was included that year by none other than Helprin? The coincidences are astounding and humiliation is, especially when performed by his own hand, quite a wonderful spectacle. In final analysis, though every attempt is made to peg Carver’s entire body of work down to a few distinguishing characteristics, even by this paper, his work does not sit still for such classification any more than his life. Youthful optimism, early marriage, alcoholism, near death, recovery, sobriety–this isn’t simple and it’s all in his work, true and clear. We can say a certain percentage of his stories dealt with the working poor, or alcoholics out of work, or adulterers. Or we can say that overall he dealt with people who had no hope, or little hope, until we look at his most popular stories–“Cathedral” for instance–where hope is primary. Perhaps only the broadest classification is accurate–change. In an organic, dirty reality, Carver’s work changed with his life. He grew and received reprieves in life that most do not encounter. Anything can happen, he tells us. He once said, “It’s strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar” (Gentry 38).
At one time Carver was all of these. If we can learn one thing, it is that nothing is set in stone. Change is the only sure thing.
Bibliography:
Carver, Raymond. Fires. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989. Gentry, Marshall Bruce, and William L. Stull, eds. Conversations With Raymond Carver. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. Halpert, Sam, ed. …when we talk about Raymond Carver. Layton: Gibbs Smith, 1991. Helprin, Mark, ed. The Best American Short Stories 1988. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
