Raymond Carver was called "the Chekhov of middle America" by The Times of London. His writing, especially his short stories, has influenced countless writers and even helped to revitalize the short story as a popular format in the mid-1980s. And his reach even extended to film: a compilation of his stories formed the basis for the Robert Altman feature, Short Cuts. But despite his skill and mastery of the form, very little is known about the man.
Perhaps this is because his stories and poems felt so raw, so real. The reader would assume "this must be what the writer has experienced. He had to go through this himself --- no one's that good a writer." Well, yes and no. Yes, Carver experienced a lot of what he wrote about --- the desperate lives of blue-collar men, the recriminations of an angry spouse --- and no, he actually is that good. Carver's own formula for writing was fairly simple: "....a little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best" for writing fiction. His early life in hardscrabble Washington state mill towns formed the spine for most of his stories and memorable characters. Carol Sklenicka's exhaustively researched biography presents a striking portrait of Carver as a man as well as the talented writer.
Carver was born in Oregon in 1938 and then raised mostly in Washington state. His father, C.R. Carver, a hard drinking mill worker, "bequeathed his two sons the muted dreams and finely honed resentments of a disappointed man." Right out of the gate, Carver was given inspiration for his stories, which were sometimes called "dirty realism," but the muse was hard-won. His father's job at the Cascade Mill, where most of the population of the area worked, provided grist for his writing. Carver often stated that the Mill was "my entire frame of reference when I was a kid." His mother was more of a romantic figure. As later described by Maryann Burk Carver, his first wife, Carver's mother, Ella, "was straight out of Gone with the Wind."
After living with the Carver family early on in their marriage, she could see "how the characters of his parents were manifested in Ray...because the son got the sweetness and primary qualities from his dad, but he got...determination and arrogance, a kind of pride or self-possession from his mother." Life in those times, in those towns, was tough, and C.R. was often gone on epic benders. Later in life, Carver recalled, "I still remember the sense of doom and hopelessness that hung over the supper table when my mother and I and my kid brother sat down to eat." It forever edified in him a sense of division between mother and father, between love and hate, between success and failure. This theme of the "divided self" fascinated Carver, and his story, "Nobody Said Anything," reflects this vividly.
At 18, he married Maryann Burk, then 16, and the couple welcomed their first daughter a few months later. Another child, a son named Vance, followed a year later. By age 20, Carver was already a married man with two children. Maryann always promised him that he would never have to give up his writing, and, determined to achieve that dream, both worked hard at a number of menial jobs. After following his family to northern California, Carver enrolled in a fiction course taught by the novelist John Gardner, who became a profound influence on his career for the rest of his life. After stints at Chico State and Humboldt State, he earned his degree and, shortly thereafter, moved to Iowa City to attend the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop. (He would later return as a teacher in the early 1970s along with John Cheever, but from his own admission, the two spent more time drinking than writing.)
Despite growing up in a house steeped in alcohol abuse --- or perhaps because of it --- Carver himself was a heavy drinker, well on the road to severe alcoholism. Because of his drinking, his marriage to Maryann often mirrored his parents' own troubled union: "When his parents were unhappy with each other `their misery inundated the family, gouging channels that would influence Ray's own marriage and shape his writing.'" These issues found their way into his stories and poems, his tales of blue-collar workers and their strained relationships.
Carver sold a story here and there until he came to the attention of Esquire magazine's fiction editor Gordon Lish in the 1960s, which gave Carver his first major placement in an esteemed national magazine. (Recently, Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher, conducted a rather public dispute with Lish over certain stories of Carver's that she claimed he over-edited, and some claim Lish ghost-wrote. Gallagher was adamant that the stories be reprinted in their original form --- the way Carver intended them.) He enjoyed more frequent publication as the 1970s became the '80s and continued speaking at literary festivals and took teaching positions throughout the country. He finally quit drinking in 1977, and so began his "second life." After the demise of his first marriage, Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writer's conference, and the two were together until his death from lung cancer at age 50 in 1988.
Despite his early passing, Carver made his mark on writing and on writers in general as evidenced by the warm friendships he shared with fellow writers Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Richard Cortez Day. His upbringing made an indelible imprint on him, and his stories, in turn, inspired others. He often said "the best art has its reference points in real life," and this enlightening and very readable biography by Carol Skelnicka, an essayist and short story writer herself, helps to illuminate the man and his work, and just how intertwined the two are.
--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller
