On the Edge: The Uneasy World of American Author and Poet Raymond Carver {1938-1988}
By Stephen Wilson, one of our reporters abroad
Raymond Carver
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“I was going crazy with it. I worried night and day. I couldn't sleep over it. I was paying out nearly as much money every month as I was bringing in. You don't have to be a genius, or know anything about economics, to understand that this state of affairs couldn't keep on. I had to get a loan to keep up my end of things. That was another monthly payment….”
“So I started cutting back. I had to quit eating out, for instance. Since I lived alone, eating out was something I liked to do, but it had become a thing of the past. And I had to watch myself when it came to thinking about movies. I couldn't buy clothes or get my teeth fixed. The car was falling apart. I needed new shoes, but forget it.”
The cited passage is from a short story written by Raymond Carver called “Elephant.” It is about an American worker who, through no fault of his own, is having to bail out a brother who has fallen into debt, care for his ailing mother, children and so many others. He is anxious and on edge as he realizes that his whole world might suddenly crash down. During the story he has a dream recalling better times when he played the game elephant with his late father who carried him on his shoulders when he was a young child. The story was published again in 1988 in the collection “Where I'm Calling From.’'
Despite being published 46 years ago, the story could still be about a person in 2024 who is floundering on the edge and may find himself destitute on the streets. Raymond Carver's short stories are about the plight of the underdog who lives in an increasingly chaotic and unpredictable world where there is no longer any stable work prospects, protection, and certainty. His characters experience deep poverty, unemployment, debt, and the intense pain which comes from broken dreams, broken marriages, and the bitterness which follows from the infidelity which scars once promising relationships.
In a sense, Carver represents the largely lost and ignored voice of the underdog who many people prefer to ignore because it upsets their 'peace of mind.' As one American homeless advocate Jack {not his real name} succinctly put it, Carver's stories “Are painful to read. He is not as well known as he was during the 1970's and 1980's.”
Jack stated that one of his favorite stories was titled “So Much Water, So Close to Home.” This is a dark and disturbing story of a young girl who had been raped, murdered, and thrown into a river. Carver, with great empathy, mentions how the death of such a girl in a small town devastates the local people who knew her very well. The original version of the story ends with the harrowing, haunting words “She was only a child.”
Perhaps the pain of reading such stories is one reason why Carver is not so well known as other American authors. His stories might strike people as just too painful to read. It is not always pleasant bed night reading. It depicts a precarious America which makes a blatant mockery of the illusions behind the American Dream.
Finding out about Raymond Carver was just a pure accident. It might never have happened. Hardly anyone, including my American friends, know about him! In fact, I only discovered him as a result of my daughter Anna bringing his collected stories back from America this Summer! She had visited America for the first time and dropped into a small library to have a look. The library was in a small village in America. She was browsing through some books in alphabetical order and then caught sight of a title which just hit her. It was the title of his collection ”What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
Anna, a 26-year-old graphic artist who has grown up in Moscow, told me “I know we have a saying in Russia going. “You should not judge a book by its cover, but I did! The title of the book stunned me. When I read this story, it just captivated me!
I later understood that some Americans often treated American literature in a way which I was not used to hearing of in school in Moscow. I found people here liked many short stories which directly related or mirrored their own personal experiences in their lives.' This short story centers around two couples who meet for a drink to try and discuss and define “What is love?”
In the story, one couple , Herb McGinnis and his second wife Terri, clash over whether her first husband really loved her. Her first husband, Carl, incensed by jealously, threatened and stalked them, and later killed himself. While Herb thinks he never genuinely loved her, Terri is convinced he did. She is still upset about his death. Herb asks the question “What do we really know about love?” He wonders, “But at one time I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself, and we had kids together. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you figure that? What happened to that love? Did that love just get erased from the big board, as if it was never up there, as if it never happened? What happened to it is what I would like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”
Those are questions all of us, like Herb, should keep on asking. But Herb later speculates that if one of our partners died, we'd get over it and choose another partner. However, his wife Terri disagrees. In this story, a drama unfolds when Terri breaks down in tears and confesses, “I love Carl, and there is no question of that in my mind. I still love him. But God, I love Herb too.”
In this story we hear another narrative where an old couple who have had a car accident are treated by Herb. Their intense love for each other after so many years stuns all the staff in the hospital! It is no accident that the story was first titled “Beginners.” The implication is that many of us are beginners in love who are learning to take the first groping, stumbling and clumsy steps on the way to loving people more generously. I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to read James Joyce's short story “The Dead” to compare the experiences of love in each story.
In one story titled 'A Small Good Thing,' parents order a cake for their son's birthday. But his son is run over in an accident and dies in hospital. The baker keeps phoning them asking when they would like to collect their birthday cake. The couple conclude the baker is just a hard grasping businessman. But when they turn up to meet the baker and tell him how their son has died he is deeply sympathetic and offers hospitality to the couple. It turns out that this baker is working 16 hours a day just to get by and he has also lost much in his life. But the baker asks them to eat his food with the warm words that eating tasty bread is 'A small, Good thing.'
It is clear from those stories that they convey much compassion and deep empathy for grief and immense suffering .
Carver does not preach any morals but leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions. In fact, Carver was bemused by some of the reviews of his stories. He once stated, “Until I started reading these reviews of my work, praising me, I never felt the people I was writing about were so bad. The waitress, the bus driver, the mechanic, the hotel keeper. God, the country is filled with these people. They are good people. People doing the best they could.”
The critics described Carver's stories as a kind of 'minimalism' and ' dirty realism.' Carver's stories are told in a concise, clear, and very colloquial way. There is a deceptive but beautiful simplicity behind those stories. Carver also thought it important to have tension and drama unfolding in those stories so they would be gripping enough for readers. That he was strongly influenced by Anton Chekhov is clear. Indeed, one of his short stories “Errand” describes how hotel staff and doctors might have thought while attending to the dying Anton Chekhov.
One of the stories which deeply touched me was “Jerry and Molly and Sam'.” In this story, a hard up and desperate father who has lost his job secretly attempts to get rid of the pet dog by abandoning it on a highway. The story stunned me because many years ago while I was walking to a bus stop near Moscow I noticed a driver in a car, drive to a grinding halt, leave his pet dog on a road, and then quickly drive off. The dog felt disbelief and confusion. It tried to chase the car. I often wondered how people would or could act so cruelly. But a passage in this story shed a little light.
In this story we read: -
“Nothing was going right lately. He had enough to contend with without having to worry about a stinking dog. They were laying off at Aerojet when they should be hiring. The middle of the summer, defense contracts let all over the country and Aerojet was talking of cutting back. Was cutting back, in fact, a little more every day. He was no safer than anyone else even though he had been there two years going on three. He got along with the right people, all right, but seniority or friendship, either one, didn't mean a damn these days. If your number was up, that was that- and there was nothing anybody could do. They got ready to layoff, they laid off. Fifty, a hundred, men at a time. No one was safe, from the foreman, and supers right on down to the man on the line” {page 116 , “Jerry and Molly and Sam,” in Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, 2009 ed., New York: The Library of America}.
In a way, the short stories of Raymond Carver anticipate the mass emergence of what an English economist Guy Standing has labelled 'the precariat'. By this term he means a group of people who live a precarious existence on the edge of society. They have no job security or social protection of any kind. They tend to be migrants, free lance workers or unskilled workers who lack trade union membership. Such people lack permanent and stable work. They tend to have only short-term contracts and often do long hours on zero hour contracts. “They have to do a lot of work that isn't counted, recognized and remunerated...To be in the precariat is like running on sinking sand.” In some countries this precariat makes up 25 % of the working population of the country. Those trends have been fueled by widening economic inequality, a more ruthless capitalism, sustained attacks on welfare states, the decline of the trade unions, and harsh austerity polices imposed on the poor. Since the 1970's the size of this precariat has dramatically soared! Guy Standing states, “Every aspect of life is uncertain. And when something goes wrong, there is no assured network of support. This is why living on the edge of chronic, unsustainable debt is a norm for the precariat' {“The Precariat and Class Struggle,” RCCS Annual Review, 7, 2015, issue number 7, https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/585).
It would be an overstatement to suggest Carver was a prophet. Nevertheless, Carver's stories anticipate a worsening situation where a growing number of people are living on the edge in a state of high anxiety!
As for Raymond Carver, he lived a hard life. He was born in a logging town of Clatsanie. He was married and had two children before he was twenty. He toiled in several low paid dead-end jobs. He worked as a salesman, gas attendant, and restaurant worker. Like Chekhov, he came from a very poor background and had to intensely struggle to make ends meet. That is why his stories have such an authentic aspect about them. He also struggled but won his battle against alcoholism.
He tragically died at only 50 from lung cancer. Carver once stated in an interview that “I never had stars in my eyes. I never had the big score mentality. I'm pleased and happy with the way things turned out. But I was surprised.” Carver confessed he never imagined he could make a living from writing short stories.
What I find inspiring about Carver is how he kept his sense of childlike wonder. He mentions that while reading Chekhov he came across a sentence with the words “And suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is a mystery, too, what had been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation {page 729, “On Writing,” in “Raymond Carver: Collected Stories,” 2009, New York: The Library of America}.
With words like those Raymond Carver deserves to be read much much more !