paperhaus January 6th, 2008
Raymond Carver is perhaps the most esteemed short story writer of the latter half of the 20th century. His biography is well-known — an early marriage; a period of dissolution, struggle; “discovery” by editor Gordon Lish and fame, security, a second marriage — then early cancer.
Carver’s history is not so well-known, however, that it should be chronicled anonymously, as though it were some oft-repeated commonplace. In the Dec 24 issue of the New Yorker, an unsigned 2,200 word Life and Letters piece frames the life and work of Raymond Carver, paying particular attention to his relationship with Lish, followed by letters between the two and an original Carver story, unedited (with edits online). Quite a piece. But no authorial attribution for the 2,200 word bio? What’s going on?
Maud asked this question back in December, and I can’t find an answer. Life and Letters pieces going back to 2006 have been signed. I’ve been a subscriber for more than a decade and I can’t think of another unsigned piece of any significant length. 2,200 words is no brief paragraph — it’s substantial work, one that makes a specific argument. Who wouldn’t want to take credit for it? Why would the New Yorker, which values writers as much as any contemporary periodical does, omit this particular byline?
All this new fuss about Carver — his relationship with Lish and the extent to which Lish may have crafted his signature style — is getting attention as Tess Gallagher, his widow, makes moves to print his pre-edited, pre-Lish stories in a new book.
The efforts to publish his work unedited seem to go hand in hand with the calcification of the uncomplicated, lost-and-then-found version of his biography. The anonymous New Yorker author writes, “At Knopf, Lish signed Carver to a five-thousand-dollar contract for his next collection of stories. Carver and Maryann Burk had separated, and he was living, happy and sober, with the poet Tess Gallagher. Teaching jobs and grants were also coming his way. Carver’s ’second life,’ as he called it, had begun.”
That was 1977/78. But to call this “a new and miraculous beginning,” as the anonymous New Yorker writer does, is to give his “first life” short shrift. Lish published his first Carver story in 1971. In 1972, Carver had a yearlong Stegner fellowship at Stanford. He won 3 O Henry awards during his first life (and 3 during his second). Yes, Carver was married too young, was frustrated with his familial responsibilities, was plagued by financial difficulties. Yes, he drank too much. But it wasn’t all so bad. He was writing, he had a life.
And those life experiences seem to be material for his stories. Whether you read the well-known “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” or its pre-edited incarnation, “Beginners,” you’re reading about two couples, with their own tensions and troubles, sitting around a kitchen table one afternoon getting drunk. The domestic resentments, the quiet aggression, the destructive behaviors of Carver’s characters seem, to this reader, to come from his early years, his drinking years, his “first life.”
Maybe I’m biased (but I’m willing to admit it, and explain why, and put my name — Carolyn Kellogg — to it). When I took a creative writing workshop with Chuck Kinder in the fall, he shared some stories with us about those years in northern California, when he was friends with Raymond Carver. He passed out a copy of a Carver story — with Carver’s own handwritten edits. It all makes Carver’s “first life” (when did he say that “second life” thing? and to whom? in what context?) to have a resonance that the New Yorker missed.
The New Yorker article bore bias not just in the biography, but in the selection/excerpts of the Gish-Carver letters, which seems, as JE Luebering says at the Britannica Blog, editorially heavy-handed.
So I wonder about the New Yorker’s version of his biography. It seems too VH-1, not very thoughtful, and the anonymity is just plain weird. An attribution, however belated, would be welcome.
