Raymond Carver’s Death

On Monday, August first, 1988, I found my­self writing some notes about Raymond Carver’s stories. I had been immersed in them for weeks, and had written the column which preceded this one about “Errand,” the final story in Carver’s most recent, and alas, last collection, Where I’m Calling From. I had even begun to dream of meeting him some day — talking with him and learning from him.

I have spent a lot of time talking with so-call­ed working-class people — men and women who show up regularly on assembly lines, on construction crews, in stores and offices, in gas stations, in trucks that crisscross America. I think I know some children who hail from that “middle Ameri­ca” fairly well. As I have read Carver’s stories I’ve kept wandering back in my mind to certain homes I used to visit in Lynn, Massachusetts, near a General Electric plant; in Framingham, Massachusetts, near a General Motors plant; and too, in the South and the Southwest, where as one truck driver put it, “there are lots of folks who keep trying to get by, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.” That mood — that mixture of stoic persis­tence and melancholy tentativeness — used to hit me in the face, sometimes, as I’d enter, yet again, a bungalow, a mobile home, a not very fancy apartment house. In Carver’s stories I felt the same mood — a writer summoning his readers to a world he knew like the fingers of his hands. His people are holding on for dear life; some, in fact, are sinking fast, while others tough it out, day by day. They are not exactly the ones who figure in most Amer­ican fiction today. They are not well-to-do subur­ban men and women, or fast-thinking academics or urban sophisticates. They don’t even have race or geography going for them — the liberal fascination with one “them” after another.

On Wednesday, August third, my fan letter to Raymond Carver finished in the rough, I sat down to the newspapers, and in one of them as I turned the page, I caught sight of this statement in the upper left hand corner of an even-numbered page: “Raymond Carver, Writer and Poet of the Working Poor, Dies at 50.” I’ve been reading New York Times obituaries for years, and usually find them to be a brag sheet: all too predictably concerned with the pomp and circumstance of big-shot lives. Carver has, indeed, become a major literary pres­ence, and so I suppose the significant attention paid him in our nation’s leading paper of record marked a final success of sorts. His smiling, hand­some face is allowed a farewell to all those busy, intelligent readers. Yet, the write-up of this prominent American short-story writer and poet is sure­ly one of the more unusual death notices to appear in an important American paper. He is quoted this way: “I’m a paid-in-full member of the working poor. I have a great deal of sympathy with them. They’re my people.” We learn, further, that he was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, the son of a sawmill worker and a waitress. His father loved Zane Grey’s many books, and read from them aloud; he also hunted and fished a lot (Carver was an avid fisher­man) and told stories, such as the time an ancestor (the author’s great-grandfather) “stole a hog for the hungry men in his regiment.”

As a young man Carver struggled hard to break even. He had married fresh out of high school, and had two children to support. “Like a displac­ed person,” the Times obituary tells us, “he knock­ed around California with his family, moving from one dead-end job to another in search of a better life.” He was a janitor; he worked as a farm hand; he became a delivery “boy” for a while. He also drank hard and smoked heavily. Alcoholics Anony­mous gave him sobriety about five or six years ago, and it is only in the last decade that his stories, es­pecially, and his poetry have earned him the grow­ing and grateful respect and admiration of many of us readers who look to people like him, like Walker Percy, like John Cheever, for not only entertain­ment but a clue or two about what matters in this life, and why.

As I sat at the breakfast table, saddened and even a bit numb, and angry that his precious and singular life had been taken from us prematurely, I kept thinking of some of the fine stories he has giv­en us, and a few of the memorable poems, too. I thought, as well, of William Carlos Williams, whom I got to know in my early 20s, and whom I admir­ed beyond the power of words to convey, and whom I very much loved. Williams and Carver both tried to connect some of us who live in relatively comfortable, privileged circumstances with the lives of ordinary American men and women who scrape by during good times, and are down on their luck when things go sour in our nation. Both men knew whereof they spoke and wrote — Carver out of personal experience, Williams out of his decades of work as an old-fashioned general practitioner in northern, industrial New Jersey, a doctor who put in countless unpaid hours among the vulnerable, needy people of, say, Paterson or Hackensack or Passaic. Both men wrote verse and prose; both had an instructive and powerful anti-intellectualism at work in them, a kind of class animus: as if they willingly linked arms with plain and sometimes sor­ry people as against the all-too-fortunate intelli­gentsia, with its not uncommon susceptibility to smugness, pretentiousness, self-importance. Both men combined a romanticism that celebrated as­pects of nature with a tough, unflinching realism that looked sharply at people and wasted no time getting at their central preoccupations. Both men were marvelously responsive to water, to rivers — and attended lost souls others were anxious to ig­nore completely or dismiss as beneath their concern; or put differently, these were two down-to-earth writers who had no use for the smug, snob­bish world writers (among others) can occasionally be found inhabiting.

The West — Oregon and Washington — is far from New Jersey, yet in between are all the lonely or hurt people, the vulnerable souls who are as American as those who run things, own things — and it is such folks, trying to get through hard-luck days and weeks, whom Carver and Williams both addressed: the particulars of their lives, the frustra­tions and disappointments, the small moments of affirmation, if not triumph.

In next month’s column I will discuss a story or two, a poem or two, of Carver’s, but first I want to mention the gratitude some of us have felt these past years for Raymond Carver’s many gifts to us, and the sadness we feel that he has left us here on this earth; and too, I’d like to register a private hope, a daydream, I had as I read the Times obitu­ary and remembered reading the William Carlos Williams one — that somewhere, somehow, in some moment of God’s time, some place in His kingdom, those two brave and strong and fiercely indepen­dent souls might meet, talk, laugh, exchange a yarn or two, and also get a chance to greet Anton Chek­hov, the spiritual kinsman whom each so much ad­mired.