Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Lyall Bush

The retrofitting results in a film that only infrequently echoes Carver's mood-strewn writing. Short Cuts takes up themes first announced in The Player, the 1992 film that put Altman back on the map after a desultory decade with stage-to-film translations: all the characters tell stories to each other or to themselves, whether in the form of lies, long-kept truths or enabling fictions. Via the symbol of the Malathion spraying for the medfly, moreover, Altman projects an objective correlative for the stories in the contaminated embrace of metropolitan Los Angeles. That, for better or worse (and it is the screenplay's most artificial ingredient), is how the film push-pins Carver onto a line of postwar American writing that runs from Mailer to DeLillo, and makes him palatable to the Frank Lentricchia vision of American writing. Short Cuts, in other words, is a very nearly great film, but it is not exactly Raymond Carver.

A standard first impulse on encountering Carver is to pull away from the rawness of his characters, from their stunted recollections and imaginations, their horizonless meditations on drink and fat babies and ugly fish, the heavy-hearted and heavy-handed way they impinge on each other. How many readers readily visit, or revisit, his mill-town tomorrows where the past is always washing up on a blurry TV present and future of alcoholism and scraped nerves? Thousands, it seems. Raymond Carver, who published his first short story and his first poem almost together in 1967 was, if the testimonies of friends and colleagues are any measure, loved for his writing almost immediately, and years before he made it into print. Remembering Ray, a "composite biography" edited by the husband-wife editing team of William Stull and Maureen Carroll, is stuffed with 43 accounts of the impact of Carver's writing on an ever-widening circle of acquaintances that included fellow writers, students, professors, neighbors and fishing buddies. They range from David Carpenter's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Carver"--a soft, inner tube sort of pastiche describing Carver on a reading and goose-hunting trip to Saskatoon in 1982--to heartfelt personal testimonies like Morton Marcus's recollection of the early 1960s:

[w]hat was astonishing, even unique about Ray's stories at that

time was not that they engaged everyday American life and went

behind the doors of suburban middle-class and blue-collar homes,

but that they were scenarios of our worst dreams about the reality

of our neighbors' existences, scenarios about the spiritual barreness

[sic] at the heart of American life which the majority of us were

living, whether we admitted it or not.

It is no small tribute to Carver that even his earliest readers gladly accepted these worst-dream scenarios.

Remembering Ray is full of remembrances in both poetry and prose of the writer who bloomed into national prominence despite a self-destructive streak that, to hear it, would have brought down a horse. Jim Somers, for example, recalls living upstairs from the Carvers in the mid-1960s: "Ray would sneak into our place when we were not home and steal our liquor and . . . he would sometimes drink Nyquil or mix it with vodka." He quit drinking in the mid-1970s and became a soft-spoken smoker and hard-working chocoholic. Jay McInerney remembers leaning in to hear him talk in writing class; Tobias Wolff remembers leaning forward in Plainfield, Vermont to hear him read. Others recall his old-fashioned exclamations of "You don't say!" on hearing a good story. Missing from the collection is Carver's dear friend (and fellow goose-hunter) Richard Ford, who, seven years after the death, read a dozen Carver poems in a Seattle bookstore vowing he wouldn't cry.