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.
Why are so many people wondering who wrote it. I was William Stull, a prominent Carver scholar; it’s fairly obvious and no big secret,
I know because I am writing a biography on Carver and a book on Lish’s impact on American fiction.
Dear Ms. Kellogg,
If Ray were writing this letter to you, in response to your excellent reaction to the New Yorker article, he would say “Dear Carolyn,” I know, and I’m inclined to do the same. You feel like a friend and kindly voiced many of the feelings I had when I read the article in the December New Yorker.
In fact, I awoke one morning last week at 4am, and the “mood was on me,” to write a response, a letter to the editor at The New Yorker, the Mail- Bag section, which might have ultimately weighed in as an article, which is their right to do–decide the format for such items; and either format would have been fine with me.
However, in true Carver-Country fashion, just as I was concluding my brilliant treatise, in which I made clear that for many years, my name has been Maryann Burk Carver, Maryann Carver for short, at my jobs, on my driver’s licenses, paychecks, and what I write on the chalk board when I substitute teach these days, not Maryann Burk, as William Stull would have it. (Like Michael Hemingson, I recognized immediately that mouthpiece, who purports to tell the world what my name is, has never met me, Ray’s wife for twenty-five years, the personage that Sam Halpert, another self-appointed, self-annoited biographer of Ray’s, went around the country saying, “If Maryann had not existed, Ray would have had to have invented her, so central to his stories was that ‘dear young wife,’ as he calls her in his poem, “The Windows of the Summer Vacation Houses.”
In point of fact, last June 7, 2007, was the fiftieth anniversary of Ray’s and my marriage, and so for fifty years, I have answered to the name, MARYANN CARVER. At first it was a strange thought that my name had been changed, and I documented that experience in my memoir, WHAT IT USED TO BE LIKE; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 2006. In my book, I tell the thoughts I had as I sat close to Ray in his old chevy, en route to Seattle for our honeymoon. I fingered the large silver cross I had just received that same week from St. Paul’s School for Girls, when I graduated from that college-preparatory girls’ school, one of the very best private schools in the country at the time. I was thinking: Ray is still Ray Carver, a name I loved, as well as the handsome young man, but I’m not Maryann Burk anymore; I’m Maryann Carver, but who is she? What is her life going to be like?
Well, as might have been an incident in a Carver story, and was in mine…just as I was ready to send off my masterpiece letter to the New Yorker, a couple of Jehovah-Witness ladies come to the door. The young lady, a beautiful girl from Mexico who makes such an effort to read in English a passage in the Bible to me when she comes, and “teach” me about it, was accompanied by an older lady I hadn’t seen before. I hate to be rude to anyone, especially that young lady who has my welfare at heart. So, I let them in and told them I was busy, writing, but we could take a minute and see what passage in the Bible I was supposed to think about that day.
It turned out to be a passage from Job at his worst possible point of suffering, before he was redeemed and got everything back, including a new spouse, and new children, not to mention all the cattle and sheep. His sores disappeared, too, which must have been a relief, but the ladies and I didn’t get as far as his redemption. The young lady read in halting English the torturous passage, and then asked me, as the talking point for discussion, whether or not I thought God, aka Jehovah, was behind the suffering of an innocent, pious man.
I told her I did not blame God, but she had arrived with a quintessential existential question, that a writer I know is about to unveil in an operetta that presents that very story. Then I explained my statement to her, and, as usual, we both shared our information, had a heart connection, and she went on her way, having had at least one friendly exchange in her day.
However, when I went back to my computer and the masterpiece I’d left there, it wasn’t thirty seconds until my computer ate my day’s work, beginning, as I say, at 4am. At that point, I felt like Job, for sure, even as I cautioned myself not to take myself too seriously. Perhaps my life was none of my business, as I’ve heard in AA meetings, anymore than Job’s was his business if God had a higher purpose for him–to come down to this very day as an example of uncompromised devotion, no matter what pain and losses came to him.
However, seeing the responses on Maud’s Blog to The New Yorker and your valiant defense of Ray’s “first life” gives me the inspiration to again weigh in perhaps and give some further, accurate information about that “first life of Raymond Carver’s,” despite its dislodging some of the myth, some of the “party line,” the revised history that through repetion passes for truth. (Again, I appreciate Chuck Kinder, our old friend, who is still out there telling the truth as well about those times).
In point of fact, in that “first life,” Raymond Carver wrote half of everything he ever wrote, right down to the number of poems. He taught at University of California Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; University of Iowa Writers Workshop; University of California, Santa Barbara; and Goddard College while we were together, in addition to his “crap jobs.” Again, in point of fact, he never picked tulips–not once–nor pumped gas, though those two prosaic activities sound good in the crap-jobs resume. While a student at Chico State College, Humboldt State College, and The University of Iowa, Ray worked in the college libraries, where a multitude of literary journals passed under his gaze, and he ordered them if they were not already there. On “company time,” he saw who was publishing where, who the editors were, as well as surveying the hundreds of books contained in those libraries.
In between his graduating from Humboldt State and doing graduate work at the University of Iowa, Ray got a job at the biology library at UC Berkeley. For his student jobs in the libraries, Ray received $1.00 an hour, whereas I frequently worked in restaurants where I could earn $10.00 to $15.00 an hour, way back then, which is more than minimum wage currently is, and was more in keeping with the amount of money we needed to support ourselves and our adorable young children.
Well, I’m sure you get the idea, and Mr. Hemingson might be advised to consult some actual eye- witnesses to events and people from back then, instead of reinforcing information that is often dead wrong. Carol Sklenika, a scholar whose biography of Raymond Carver will be published this year by Scribners, has taken years to research her topic, and did so, when my mother and sister were still alive, for example, to speak with, as well as many other people close to Ray and our lives.
Enough for here and now. My seeing this site has made me aware of the extent of the response to the New Yorker piece, and the need perhaps to rebut some of it, much of which I already have done in my memoir. I talk about Ray’s early association with Gordon Lish and the good he did Ray as a publicist for him and his work in New York: The agents he introduced him to, and the other markets, besides Esquire, where he was Fiction Editor and published “Neighbors” and “What Is It?”, aka “Are These Actual Miles?”, (a title change I emphatically disagreed with, as the first reader and “editor” of Ray’s stories for over twenty years).
Thank you, Carolyn, for perceptively dating just when Gordon began to edit Ray’s stories (and a lot of Gordon’s edits Ray appreciated and agreed with, make no mistake about it). He just needed to be able to decline them when he wanted, and sometimes did. However, Gordon was very overbearing in that aspect of things, though when he took Ray home to prepare him lunch, when we all lived in Palo Alto, Gordon only made one plate of food. It was for Ray, and when Ray finished what food he wanted from the plate, Gordon ate the remainder of it for his lunch. I thought at the time, when I heard about this bizarre practice, which Ray told me about with a little laugh, “How weird,” and further realized what an apt metaphor it was for the situation. Gordon loved Ray’s stories, and like so many people, including D.T. Max, a failed short-story writer, Gordon so wished Ray’s stories were his own stories: that he had written them himself. A few years ago, I saw a book of Gordon’s stories that was remaindered at Village Books, here in Bellingham,Washington. I opened it and ran into a story of Gordon’s that was a take-off of Ray’s story, “Put Yourself In My Shoes,” one of my very favorite Carver stories. Gordon tried to juggle around Mr. X and Mr. Y, as Ray had, but Gordon’s story just didn’t come off; just didn’t work, and again, I vividly saw the situation between those two men–who had the original talent, and who was an editor who necessarily fed off of other people’s work.
Best,
Maryann Carver
Sorry, again I had two calls coming in when I sent this reply off without properly proofing it. I would like to send it again after I have corrected it, please.
Maryann Carver
Without meaning to, I have amply contributed to both “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “Beginners,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Editing,” and with all that, I’m not going to worry further about the syntax of anything. Those who have eyes to read can decipher what I’ve said (not to mention ears to hear), and with all that, I’m going to call it a night and probably go back to all my telephone calls. Who knows, I may want to awaken at 4am tomorrow and take up these issues again.
Best,
Maryann Carver,
mother of two, grandmother of four, and great grandmother of four (well, three and three-fourths); in any case, the gifts from Ray that keeps on giving, as well as the literature that he left behind…
‘The gifts from Ray that KEEP on giving…Good night.
My text should not be, “Without meaning to, I have contributed to both “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “Beginners,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Editing.” Strike the both as I ended up going beyond two items. See what is involved in writing and editing….Ray was just this meticulous and careful! I hurt, because I misspelled repetition in the long piece above, through becoming distracted by the telephone, and not properly proofing my material.
My point in all this is that Ray was this careful. Very careful in terms of how he weighed every word, every comma! He would go through multiple drafts until he reached the perfection he demanded from himself. Sometimes he put stories in the drawer and left them several weeks until he could look at them with a fresh eye. He was an excellent self-editor, having learned the procedure when he was a student of John Gardner’s. Then he taught me, so I could edit his stories the way Gardner had. Then, in Palo Alto, Ray worked as a professional editor and further honed his editorial skills.
Later, rumor has it, he went through twenty-nine drafts of “Errand,” his last story, before he called it good. Very good, indeed.
Maryann
Honestly, I haven’t been drinking. Haven’t done that, not even once, since 1978. I’m just “partying” with all of you, and appreciative of your interest in our lives and work. What a life, what work, and when I met Ray when he was seventeen, it was exactly what he wanted to have, what he wanted to do: become a great writer, a writer like Ernest Hemingway…
I’m also writing a biography of Raymond Carver, unauthorized and unbiased, detailed and documented, to be published next year by Scribner. I’ve studied all the manuscipts in question and written about them at length in the book.
Carolyn Kellogg’s post is pertinent. I checked with several people in New York, including Gary Fisketjon (Ray’s last editor, who is quoted in the New Yorker article) and was told that David Remnick, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, wrote the article. But it seems likely that William Stull, who edited the proposed book of stories with Tess Gallagher’s cooperation, provided the template for this unsigned piece.
The first person to write about Lish’s editing of Carver was not, by the way, D.T. Max, but Carol Polsgrove in her book IT AIN’T PRETTY FOLKS, BUT DIDN’T WE HAVE FUN? ESQUIRE IN THE SIXTIES. After that a scholar and novelist named Brian Evensen did further research and he in turn was followed by Dan Max, who wrote about the issue in THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE in 1998.
The whole story of Carver’s life is complicated, as Kellogg points out, and I’m trying to get all of that into my book. It takes time and care.
“I’ve had two lives. My first life ended in June 1977, when I stopped drinking”. Raymond Carver in his essay “Friendship” (Call if You Need Me, p.121 Vintage ed.).
Hot damn…someone beat me to the Carver bio…I am going to kill my agent…and we have hit New York all over with my bio and NO ONE has mentioned Carol’s from Scribner’s (and oddly I don’t think my agent sent it to Simon & Schuster), nor did it ever come up in my Goodgle searches, but now I see Pub.’s Lunch mentioned the sale as far back as Aug. 2003.
Mine looks like it may come out from a certain university press I will not name until I sign something, but every major writer has more than one bio out on them. I have “heard” Prof. Still has been working on a bio and I would not doubt it. Mu bio, however, is “interpretive” and written like a novel, so hopefuilly it will add to the collection of bios that are to come.
I really did wonder why there had not been a Carver bio yet. It seemed odd, unless Tess G. has declined authorization. Like Carol’s, mine will be unauthorized, and I think I may have uncovered some ground she didn’t, like two former Carver studnts at Iowa I talked to, and they never mentioned being contated by another biographer.
My book on Lish, however, will be published by Routledge, maybe late this year but for sure the first half of 2009, and is a critical overview of his own work as it relates to those he edited, which will be Carver, yes, but also Barry Hannah, Don DeLillo, Jack Gilbert, Amy Hempel, and another of others.
I agree with Maryann that Lish wished he could write like Carver and that does show in his first two colelctions of stories, but he later developed his own unique “Lish” style and that he has been unduly overlooked by the literary community because of the power he once had over so many careers and the shape of fiction in the 1980s. SOme editors can make that trasnition to major author, like EL Doctorow, who was once Kurt Vonnegut’s editor and editor of many big names in the 1960s before becoming a full time writer.
But my study does examine Lish’s INFLUENCE, hence the title, GORODN LISH AND HIS INFLUENCE ON 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE. And there is no denying he had quite an influence on publishing and a number of great writers working today. His legacy alone, that many new young writers “hear” about, also serves as an influence.
I should also mention — and Maryann will like this — I am coming out wth a critical study on Carver called CARVER’S WOMEN – Role, Place, and Identity of the Feminine in RC’s Short Stories; one chapter will be on the influence of the real women in his life…would love to chat, Maryann, if you read this, my email is michaelhemmingson@yahoo.com.
The more the merrier is how Ray would look at your work, pertaining to him and his life. He loved attention, adulation, and didn’t much care for criticism. Unique, of course, and unlike the rest of us, but in him, all these things were cultivated and pronounced (and very funny, and meant to be).
Best,
Maryann
Hello, Everybody,
I’m back from my summer hiatus, and what a summer and hiatus it has been!
Best,
Maryann