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Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life

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I do not believe that I have ever learned so many details about the life of anyone whose biography I have read than that of Raymond Carver or Ray Carver as he was known to his friends and family. When I finished Carol Sklenicka's too-long book-- over 570 pages if you count the hundreds of notes-- about the only fact I didn't know had to be whether he wore boxer or briefs. The author took ten years to write her book, apparently read everything that Carver wrote and interviewed literally hundreds of people, including his family members, in her quest to get to who the writer often compared to Chekhov was.

Raymond Carver's life reads like that of many of his characaters. Born of bluecollar parents, he was the first in his family to graduate from high school; and his childhood home in Yakima County, Washington had no indoor toilet. At the age of 18, Carver married Maryann Burke, who was only 16 and a recent high school graduate. Their first child Christine was born a few months later; their son Vance, soon afterwards. Maryann would be the primary breadwinner of the family for many years to enable Carver to do what was most important on earth to him, to be a writer. The family moved again and again with the children never being able to stay in the same school or make and keep friends for long, and both Ray and Maryann held dozens of jobs. Even though she eventually got a degree and taught high school English, Maryann often supplemented her teaching jobs by working as a waitress, even when she was 37 years old. Carver worked in a plywood mill, also as a janitor, detailed cars at a gas station, was a clerk and delivery man at a pharmacy, had a job as a shipping clerk in a department store, worked for $1.25 an hour in a library and was a salesman in a bookstore. To his everlasting credit he turned down a job as a bill collector because he wanted to tell the "poor devils owing money to lie low until the heat was off." The Carvers filed for bankruptcy twice-- Sklenicka even lets you know what debts they listed in their bankruptcy petitions-- and Raymond Carver never stayed on one job for more than a year until he was a professor at Syracuse University at the age of 41.

Then there is Carver's drinking as well as Maryann's-- and their daughter's later-- his physical abuse to Maryann, his arrests, his brief homelessness, his adultery, his blackouts. The author spares no detail of Carver's descent into a place where he even stole alcohol from a liquor store. Finally the man who liked to drink RC colas because the soda had his initials became sober and for the last ten years or so of his life lived with the poet Tess Gallagher, whom he eventually married, and became hugely successful as a writer. He who had once driven a Corvair with no reverse gear now owned a shiny Mercedes. Finally, Ray, who had smoked cigarettes for forty years, died far too young of lung cancer at the early age of fifty.

Carver's writer friends were many: John Gardner (also his early teacher), Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, John Cheever-- another alcoholic-- et al. Sklenicka covers in great detail Carver's relationship with his editor Gordon Lish and the controversy over Lish's editing of his fiction. Beloved by both fellow writers and students alike, he was always kind in his criticism of his pupils' works. The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami went so far as to have a special extra-large bed built for the very tall Carver for a trip to Japan that he was never able to take.

Ms. Sklenicka in the end successfully brings Raymond Carver to life although she surely could have accomplished as much with less. Carver's humanity shines through. His characters were real people to him-- whatever their position in life-- waitress, bus driver, mechanic-- and they were good people he said, people doing the best they could. In "Last Fragment" Carver said that what he wanted from life was the knowledge that he was loved. (Isn't that the wish of most of us?) Ms. Sklenicka concludes that Carver has been loved as a son, a brother, a friend, a father, twice as a husband and "finally as an author."

I suspect that Ms. Sklenicka's biography will create new interest in the writings of Carver-- a very good thing. Although I read most of his short stories years ago, after I finished this book, I bought and read WHERE WATER COMES TOGETHER WITH OTHER WATER, his collection of poems. That was a good thing to do too.

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

Carver was called the father of minimalist fiction and when he finally gained acclaim it was because he connected with readers who either identified or were horrified by his stories of money problems, alcoholism, and rancorous marriages. His personal trajectory included those very issues and many more including his overweight childhood, longtime cigarette smoking, and his eventual battle with cancer. The years of moving, living dollar to dollar, bottle to bottle had profound influence on his writing.

I appreciated Sklenicka revealing the sources for many of his stories including Maryann working at Sambo's coffee shop which inspired "They're Not Your Husband". The author does the same for "Harry's Death", "Night School", and "Fat" (which is my favorite Carver). The part of the book covering the writer's workshop with John Cheever was very cool: "Pardon me. I'm John Cheever. Could I borrow some scotch?". Cheever told Carver that fiction is "our most intimate and acute means of communication" and Carver took that to heart.

His wife Maryann deserves huge credit. I found her completely fascinating. Picking up oddjobs, pursuing her education, living her husband's angst, and sharing many of his bad habits. Incredibly as they moved to pursue new opportunities and away from debts and disappointments she would work two hours in a restaurant along the way in exchange for feeding the family. Maryann deserves both our sympathy and admiration as do the Carver children.

This is a tremendous biography that provides superb context for Carver's work. I remain unsure if I like the man himself but I am definitely a fan of his writing.

Carol Sklenicka details Raymond Carver's struggle to fulfill himself as an artist. She writes about his family, his friends and his editors--those who helped and hindered his creative development and reveals his early drinking problem and how he finally overcame it. She enables the reader to understand the writer's emotional turmoil about his inability to meet the demands of his family and at the same time to fully realize himself as writer. Gordon Lish, Carver's first wife, MaryAnn, his children Chris and Vance and the later love of his life, Tess Gallagher, all are portrayed This iconic biography moved me to tears.

Rosalind Solomon

Carol Sklenicka's biography of Raymond Carver runs the spectrum from brilliant to sad, humorous to touching, thought-provoking to inspiring, and then some. I've read his works for over 15 years and didn't know about some of the things that she mentioned in this book. This book will be cherished for years to come as a wonderful biography about the American Chekhov.

It was a great and complicated pleasure to read Carol Sklenicka's Raymond Carver. I was moved by the story (the stories ) and I loved watching the author build this world. The range and depth of Sklenicka's scholarship is obvious, but she never simply overwhelms the reader with her knowledge. She uses detail especially well -- deploying perfectly chosen, memorable little facts, almost like daubs of paint -- to give you the texture of the period and of her characters' experience.

She sees the big picture too. Inside the arc of Raymond Carver's life, Sklenicka finds and follows many large ideas. About class, culture, and ambition; about the act of writing and its institutions; about failure and success; about love, ambivalence, loyalty, and betrayal; about addiction and recovery, strength and weakness, delusion and self-knowledge; about parents, children, time, and death. This portrait is very strong, quite wise actually, clear-eyed and yet still deeply generous. Raymond Carver, his circle, and his world come poignantly alive here, in all their logic and contradiction.
Dick Blau

At 500 pages, Sklenicka's biography provides overwhelming detail about Carver's comings and goings, as well as rich insights into the women in Carver's life. In contrast, the men in Carver's life are for the most part sketched as two dimensional figures, either occasional drinking buddies or business connections in the publishing world. The central "thesis" of the biography seems to be that Carver's genius in finding stories and making them into distinctive "Carvers" arose somehow from the women in his life. If you believe Sklenicka, a great deal of Carver's genius was actually Maryann's. If you believe Carver, his marriage and his children almost completely destroyed his ability to write.

Unfortunately, the book lacks much insight into Carver's shaping, rewriting, and polishing of stories. There is some discussion of a correspondence course Carver took, while still very young (in high school? I don't quite remember). Then, 25 or 30 years later, Carver is giving his daughter some good advice on how to write a story. But in between the raw beginner and the accomplished New Yorker writer, there is very little discussion or even description of how he evolved his style. In that regard I consider the subtitle "A Writer's Life" to be misleading. This book is a fascinating read, as well as a socio-historical review of the 1950s through the 1980s in the U.S. But, in my opinion:
1) the author displays a strong and unsupported bias in favor of women, and
2) there is little here to inform an aspiring writer about how Carver did it, his "writer's life".

First of all this is a well written, fast paced biography that you won't want to put down. The author Carol Sklenicka did an excellent job and stays on track despite the volume of material which must have been massive. This book is not just the story of a writer, its the story of American writing in the second half of the twentieth century in microcosm. For any writer contemplating the current landscape of American writing with its ten thousand mfa writing programs across the fruited plain, Ray's story is really more mythology than history.

Finished the book--inhaled it, drank it, consumed it, whatever--this afternoon. The best biography I've ever read. Made me cry more than a couple of times, but especially the last sentence, where she says he died. WTF?!I knew he was going to die, why'd it hit me so hard?

Because Sklenicka had opened me up to the man's life, the immensity of his struggle and the sacrifices he made for his art and the people whose lives intertwined with his and the price they paid for the privilege. Sklenicka went deep and wide, presenting so much more than the facts and details of Carver the person. I learned a suprising amount about literary criticism and the subtle mechanics and politics of the publishing world. I was delighted to know who Carver's friends (and enemies) were and the whys ahd hows of their connections. I can't wait to see Carver's life on film.

$25, peanuts. Thank you Carol, thank you, thank you, thank you. (You helped me be a better writer.)

Like other reviewers here, I found myself immersed in Carol Sklenicka's biography of Raymond Carver. I didn't get much else done over the few days I read this absorbing account and the work leaves an emotional residue still. Carver made art from his bewildering triumphs and tragedies and Sklenicka has done the same with the materials of his life. The rainy Northwest, and especially Humboldt County, are conjured in a way rarely seen in the work of more urban writers. Sklenicka captures the gray, rainy sensibility (enhanced by marijuana and alcohol) that contributed to Carver's dreamy (and nightmarish) vision of the everyday. The shuffle among small college towns, the obsession with getting a story in a magazine, the disdain for "real" life - Carver's sensibility is rendered palpable.

I enjoyed this evocative life so much I'm recommending it regardless of a reader's familiarity with Carver's work. An absolutely first-rate biography.