Staring the world in the face

BIOGRAPHY: GERALD DAWEreviews Raymond Carver: A Writer's Lifeby Carol Sklenicka, Scribner, 578pp, $35

IN ONE of the most revealing asides in this copious portrait of the hugely talented American short story writer, poet and essayist Raymond Carver, Carol Sklenicka remarks of the 18-year-old who, like many another young adult “lived in disjunction and limbo” that Bill Barton, a man who saw him “almost daily” noticed a bit of the “renegade” in Ray while sensing that “Ray felt his family had not had a fair deal and that the government or somebody, owed him something”.

For the 1950s America in which Carver grew into manhood that feeling would have to fit in with the thriving material world of work, the all-powerful preoccupations of a mass industrial society recovering from the brutalities and victories of the second World War and subsequently Korea, along with the burgeoning weight of hope and expectation of getting on in the world and doing well.

What this might mean for a young, white, working-class boy from the northwest with family roots in the south, is the story which Raymond Carver: A Writer's Lifetells in all its twists and turns. And there are lots of twists in Carver's short, intense life, many inherited from the time and places of his upbringing and some self-inflicted. But throughout this substantial study there is an abiding sense of Carver's humane nature bringing laughter and fun as much as difficulty into his orbit.

According to Sklenicka, Carver’s people “for generations” had ancestors who “struggled to survive”: “On both sides of his family tree, his forebears were descended from so-called Scots-Irish immigrants (lowland Scots and northern English who had displaced the Celtic Irish in Northern Ireland) who began coming to North America in the late 1700s. The people of this migration were ‘poor and proud’ farmers and labourers who crossed the Atlantic primarily for material betterment. Many lacked the religious or political ideals professed by previous immigrants though they had the fortitude associated with their Calvinist and Methodist religions”.

"Fortitude" is the word alright. The constant moving in search of work, or better pay, the leased homes, the driving after a decent, acceptable way of life that characterised the migrant ancestors, who had also to cope with illness, alcoholism, disappointment and that most unacceptable of traits in America, the perception of failure. Fast forward to the late 1950s and early 1960s, as society opens up and the cracks begin to show and the options variously and vigorously present themselves to a younger generation of writers in their 20s and 30s, Raymond (or Ray) Carver among them, in particular, the idea of writingfor a living. By the time of his first real successes, the strain already showing on both himself and his family started to tell.

The story of Carver’s alcoholism, his shockingly early death from cancer at the age of 50 in 1988, in spite of the years of artistic achievement and public recognition and a life reborn in sobriety alongside his second partner, Tess Gallagher, reads like a tragic life.

The fiction that remains is impeccable; once read never forgotten; an electrical current that lies dormant under the surface narratives; flashes of lightening in the glimpse of an eye, the turn of a phrase; an unsaid thought. And the grand absolutes of the American landscape are also present, outside the windows of Carver’s imaginary rooms, no wonder, since he knew the rivers and mountains and valleys as well as the small towns and villages of the northwest and south. Fishing and shooting were his sport from a young age; the great outdoors was part of his interior landscape:

“A wet breeze off the river blew against his face. The sides of the low bluffs overlooking the river down below were deeply grooved and cut back into the rock, leaving table-like projections jutting out, marking the high water lines for thousands of years past. Piles of naked white logs and countless pieces of driftwood lay jammed on top the ledge like cairns of bones dragged up onto the cliffs by some giant bird. Farrell tried to remember where the geese came over three years ago. He stopped on the side of a hill just where it sloped into the canyon and leaned his gun on a rock. He pulled bushes and gathered rocks from nearby and walked down toward the river after some of the driftwood to make a blind.”

( Furious Seasons)

In another fascinating anecdote into the young Carver’s mind, on a drive into the hills with his older mentor, a family friend, Frank Sandmeyer, the pair “came across remnants of the people who had tried to live in this austere land by farming or mining or trading with Columbia River steamers and early railroads. Sandmeyer was intrigued by an abandoned school, but Ray was restless to get on with the hunting”.

And who would blame the young lad? He probably had heard and seen enough about the past, from the damaged figure of his father to the forbearance of his self-possessed mother, as along with his younger brother, the Carvers tried to keep their heads above water.

Carver's people were in a sense "unlovable" and not the cultural source for mainstream middlebrow literary America until, with others from his and similar backgrounds, he brought them into dramatic life in stories as emotionally quick and morally scrupulous as Joyce's Dubliners. (Though it was a later Irish writer, Bryan MacMahon, who had a direct impact on Carver's early aspirations as a writer through a workshop MacMahon gave at the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City, which was widely considered to be "turning out some of America's best writers"). As a historian of other, often down sides of human wishes, and the individual cost of American dreams, Carver was clear in his own mind about where the inspiration had come from – the Yakima Valley, Washington State, one of the places he and his family had lived in while his father worked in the lumber business:

“That life and those people whom I knew so intimately made a very large and profound impression on my emotional life, so I still find myself going back to that time no matter how much my circumstances might change. If I have any strengths and can really make a claim in my heart for my fictions, it is with those people.”

Along with this hefty biography readers might like to pick up Carver: Collected Stories, recently published by the magisterial Library of America, which features a fine photographic portrait of the man in full possession of his gifts as a writer, staring the world straight in the face, unflinchingly, just like his own stories and essays.

Gerald Dawe's most recent books include Points West(Gallery) and The World as Province: Selected Prose(Lagan). He teaches at Trinity College, Dublin