Recently The New Yorker ran a piece on Raymond Carver and his relationship with editor Gordon Lish. A few things about the piece made me uncomfortable, including its lack of attribution and the way Carver’s life was characterized. Now Maryann Burk Carver, his first wife, has responded in the comments section. She writes, in part:
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.
