Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography. - book reviews

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 1994 by Steven G. Kellman

Edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll / Capra Press, 1993, pp. 275, $14.95 (paper)

The release of "Short Cuts," Robert Altman's film based on the short stories of Raymond Carver, likely will attract new readers to the man once cited as "the most influential writer of his generation." Admired for his stories and poetry. Carver was 50 when he died of lung cancer in 1988. Remembering Ray is designed to take the measure of a brief, but enduring life.

Collections of recollections in lieu of a coherent biography are fashionable, but often facile and disjointed. In the case of Carver, a protean presence who touched many different people in different ways, the genre fits. A collective biography, Remembering Ray offers testimony from 43 people--friends, students, colleagues, and readers--who knew or read Carver at various stages of his lite. Carver himself identified June 2, 1977-the day he gave up the drinking that almost killed him--as marking the birth of a transformed self. The editors have gathered accounts of the brilliant, but self-destructive young hell-raiser as well as of the sober, focused man whose last 10 years were extraordinarily productive and rich in friendships and love.

The book publishes 14 poems about Carver by such authors as Marvin Bell, Hayden Carruth, Jane Kenyon, Joyce Carol Oates, and Charles Wright. At least as affecting is a memoir by Dorothy Catlett, whom Carver hired as a typist during his final years. Robert Coles recalls the radical effect of Carver's work on the students Coles taught at Harvard, and several buddies recount what it was like to go fishing with the man. The book is replete with anecdotes, none more striking than a report of Carver's encounter with a soused, abusive Charles Bukowski, a fellow author. Again and again, Anton Chekhov is invoked--not merely because Carver admired the Russian's art, but because Carver shared his reverent attentiveness to ordinary experience and his personal strength of character.

The Carver who emerges from these multiple renditions was a gentle, burly man who impressed virtually everyone he met with his honesty, generosity, and loyalty. Stricken by Carver's agonizing death, Haruki Murakami writes: "I imagined what an ordeal it must have been for so large a person to die over such a long period of time. I thought it must be something like the slow fall of a giant tree."

The maestro of fictional minimalism, Carver left behind a void in contemporary literature and in the lives of those he knew. Second wife Tess Fallagher shared his final years as well as this last assessment of his legacy: "Carver's stories had the kind of impact on American fiction that Einstein's theory of relativity had on science. We couldn't quite fathom how it worked, but it changed the way we regarded the lives of middle-class working people. They were at last given full dignity."