Regarded as one of the modern masters of the short story Raymond Carver’s works continue to captivate audiences with their raw depictions of contemporary life. Threading the hardships and lows of his life into his stories Carver created a body of work that has been both hailed and criticised for its brutal honesty. This personal opening up saw Carver take a central role in the renaissance of the American short story and the legacy of his style can still be felt today in all mediums from literature to journalism and cinema.
Carver was born to a working-class family in Oregon in 1938. His father was a skilled saw doctor in the local mill and a regular binge drinker. As he grew up Carver inherited this hard work ethic and hard drinking style. At 19 he married his 16 year old high school sweetheart, Maryann Burke, and the two soon made three with the birth of their daughter later the same year. A son followed soon after and by 20 Carver was working various jobs to help support his full household.
This time also saw Carver start to succumb to alcoholism as drink increasingly became a staple of his life. It was after the family moved to California that Carver seems to have begun writing in earnest. Here he took his first creative writing course under the tutelage of author John Garner. The following years saw Carver continue to grow as a writer while at college. In 1963 he graduated with his BA and went on to attend the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Throughout this time Maryann supported Carver and the family by working various jobs. While this had enabled Carver to pursue his career as a writer it also saw him regularly left to mind the children. This role as parent often rankled with Carver and in some of his works his children and parenthood are cast as millstones burdening him down. After dropping out of the Iowa Workshop Carver returned to California where he began to work and support Maryann and their family.
'Gas' by Edward Hopper, 1940
For the rest of the ‘60s Carver would continue to work and build up his reputation as a writer. In ’67 he had a short story featured in the annual ‘Best American Short Stories’ and the following year his poetry collection, ‘Near Klamath’, was published. By 1970 Carver had established himself as a writer and built up the connections that were so vital for success in this field.
The most important of these connections was a man named Gordon Lish. Appointed by ‘Esquire’ magazine as the new fiction editor in ’69, Lish came to the post with the express intention of discovering the new fiction. Over the following eight years Lish helped to foster the careers of numerous authors and proved to be one of the defining forces of the minimalist movement.
Carver was one such author and much of his success in the ‘70s was thanks to Lish. These successes included the publication of his first collection of short stories, ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?’, as well as teaching positions in numerous colleges in California and wider America. Yet Lish eventually proved to be too intrusive an editor, his focus on the minimalist movement saw him increasingly push Carver to tighten up and cut into his works; Carver himself disliked being classified as a member of minimalism, or any other literary movement.
The ’70s brought more than just literary success, however, as Carver’s alcoholism worsened. Though his relationship and struggles with alcohol had helped to form much of Carver’s work it had become so that the drink had all but eclipsed writing in his life. Only after multiple hospitalisations did Carver finally kick the bottle after joining Alcoholics Anonymous in ’77. That same year he met fellow poet and author Tess Gallagher.
The stress and strain of marriage, like his alcoholism and children, had often been the focus of Carver’s writing. As romance blossomed between himself and Tess, however, Carver’s first marriage began to fall apart. In 1980 he moved to New York with Tess and two years later he and Maryann were divorced.
Cover of 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?', Vintage Books
These massive changes were reflected in Carver’s writing, though he continued to unabashedly write his life onto the page for all to see. In ’81 his seminal work, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, was published. Though Lish once again heavily edited the featured works this collection proved a great success and cemented Carver’s status as one of America’s foremost living writers; the manuscript version was published under the title ‘Beginners’ in 2009.
Always aware of his own mortality Carver had incorporated a bleak fatalistic outlook into his work and even thought he would have died at 40 if he hadn’t gotten sober. Yet he was still destined for an early grave and at 50 years old Carver died from lung cancer. Only six weeks earlier he and Tess had married in Nevada.
Though reluctant to ascribe to any literary school Carver became one of the defining authors of both minimalism and dirty realism. His poems and stories spoke in a working-class voice of the struggles and loss of everyday American life. Together with other authors he revitalised the art of short story writing, creating tangible worlds that briefly flared to life on the page.
This episode of ‘Talking Books’ is dedicated to the life and writing of Raymond Carver. Join Susan as she talks with Professor Robert Miltner and Tim Groenland about Carver’s life in literature and the legacy he has left behind. In the second half of the show Susan will delve into the realities of this great writer’s life with biographer and author of ‘Raymond Carver: A Writer’s life’, Carol Sklenicka.
