An Awful Thing

body_image_group

 

I knew noth­ing of Raymond Carver until January 1978, when he and John Irving and Grace Paley read their work at Goddard College in Vermont. Carver was the last reader that evening. He stood up awk­wardly to read “Fat” fol­lowed by “Why Don’t You Dance?” and when he stopped, the room seemed to go still.

Everyone seemed to want to study with him and I doubted I’d get into his work­shop. The fol­low­ing day, though, I was in.

The frozen sun­light in Carver’s office nearly blinded me on that win­ter morn­ing when we had our first con­ver­sa­tion. We talked about what I would do over the semes­ter. We talked about writ­ers we both liked: Kafka, Isaac Babel, Milan Kundera, Rainer Maria Rilke. He was gen­er­ous with encour­age­ment and spar­ing with advice, and he seemed to see that we all had to find our own way in this busi­ness. Whatever busi­ness that might be.

“Never write a line you don’t mean,” he said. “And don’t ever imag­ine drink­ing will make you a bet­ter writer.” I didn’t drink, I told him. He seemed surprised.

We said good­bye and I went home to Montreal to take care of my mother, who was chron­i­cally ill, and to work at my job as a sec­re­tary. On my way, aboard the Greyhound, I started read­ing his first col­lec­tion of sto­ries, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, pub­lished two years ear­lier and nom­i­nated for a National Book Award. By the time I reached Montreal, I’d had a taste of what it might feel like to be born sui­ci­dally depressed. Maybe I should have cho­sen another men­tor, I thought. His bleak rooms were not the same as my bleak rooms. I had to force myself to fin­ish the book.

In Vermont, Carver had said, “Always try to write a story in a sin­gle sit­ting. Even if it’s only a first draft, put it all down. When you get to the end, you’ll know.” I sent him a piece I had been work­ing and rework­ing for more than a year, and within a week I had his response — the first of many three-page single-spaced com­men­taries, which he typed the way he talked, pil­ing up impres­sions and ques­tions — some­times grop­ing for phrases and wor­ry­ing a topic until he had pinned it down. He was con­crete in his think­ing and repet­i­tive in a rhyth­mic way, like a char­ac­ter in one of his sto­ries. He said parts of my story — which had been short­listed for a prize in Toronto — were inter­est­ing, but over­all he found the piece “mawk­ish.” He advised me to get to work on some­thing new.

For the next six months, Carver and I worked by cor­re­spon­dence, com­mu­ni­cat­ing every two weeks. I would mail him my writ­ing and reports on my read­ing, and he would send me com­ments and rec­om­mend new read­ings. During that time I tried to write about my life in Montreal, but the more I wrote, the less fas­ci­nat­ing it seemed. My char­ac­ters bab­bled and did inex­plic­a­ble self-destructive things, and I had no idea why. Carver com­mented that I was stuck at the sur­face, not going deep enough. I needed time to find my real mate­r­ial, he said. I’d just have to allow my life to unfold. He rec­om­mended that I read a south­erner called Barry Hannah, for his gor­geous nat­ural style.

The first story of mine that Carver liked, “A Journal of Mona,” had been accepted by a Toronto mag­a­zine. “Now that Mona’s gone,” it began, “I feel the need to recon­struct her.” It was about a self-conscious night­club dancer who couldn’t get her act together.

“Write more about that world up there, where you’re from,” he had said at our first meet­ing. “It’s sophis­ti­cated and fas­ci­nat­ing. Don’t be tempted to get involved with the­ory, though — it will dis­tract you. Just write your stories.”

Carver told me he was head­ing out to Port Angeles, not too far from Yakima, Washington, where he grew up. I tried to imag­ine such a place, a blank far cor­ner of America. How could peo­ple live there? How did they write? Montreal sur­rounded me with its gyrat­ing mys­ter­ies — which, when I tried to put them on paper, lacked form and direc­tion. I was trapped in a man­sion crammed with lay­ers and tex­tures, but with lit­tle nat­ural light.

The sec­ond and last time I saw Ray Carver was in early July, when I returned to Vermont to wrap up the semes­ter. I thanked him for all his let­ters and com­ments. It had been a great expe­ri­ence, I said, but I could no longer afford to con­tinue pay­ing the high tuition at Goddard and I had decided to drop out of the program.

It was hot. I wore a dress that looked like a night­gown. He seemed wor­ried about me. I had been work­ing as a sec­re­tary, tak­ing care of my mother, writ­ing in my spare time and try­ing not to let my writ­ing be too influ­enced by Ray Carver. He was finally done with drink­ing, he told me, hav­ing fallen in love with a poet named Tess Gallagher. That was why some of his let­ters to me had been mailed from Texas, where she lived. And from other towns in America, where he had been invited to give read­ings and lectures.

By then I had come to admire his sto­ries, how they reveal a tiny cos­mos feed­ing on deep cur­rents of malaise. Many of his char­ac­ters seem hand­i­capped by a spell­bind­ing igno­rance, a crip­pling fear of the unknown. Each seemed to be a liv­ing peb­ble in the desert of the great­est coun­try on earth. I told him I could never write like that, and wouldn’t even try. I’d leave it to him to squeeze the world into a space the size of a diner.

Some of the other work­shop stu­dents had started to sound like Ray Carver, I told him, but none of them were. In his under­stated way he could over­whelm you, and it was dan­ger­ous. Silence in his sto­ries sug­gested great depths, but stu­dents were falling into the trap, per­haps hop­ing to absorb his secrets by imi­tat­ing his style. “Never mind,” he said. “They’ll never know what you know.” It sounded like a com­pli­ment, but I had no idea what I knew — only what felt true and false in the moment.

Carver may have stopped drink­ing but he still smoked, and his voice was muf­fled and hoarse. We sat in the noisy cafe­te­ria for that final con­fer­ence. I had to strain to hear what he was say­ing. He was a mum­bler; I was a jum­bler. His words dis­solved before they reached my ears. Several times I asked him to repeat him­self — he acted as if com­mu­ni­ca­tion were a frus­trat­ing, painful thing, not his forte. He was really a very shy man, built large like an extro­vert who’d abdi­cated the role.

At one point, when his lips began mov­ing inaudi­bly, I leaned for­ward to hear. “You know, it’s an awful thing …” he said. The rest of the sen­tence rang clear as a bell, but made no sense.

I asked: “Did you just say, ‘It’s an awful thing to take a bite out of an old Arab’?”

It could have been an open­ing line for a Ray Carver story, like “A man with no hands came to take a pho­to­graph of my house.”

“No,” he laughed. “No, I didn’t say that.” He started to repeat what he’d actu­ally said, then stopped to laugh some more. And so our last meet­ing dis­solved in wave after wave of silly gig­gling. At least I’d made him laugh.

Before we said good­bye for good, I brought up one fur­ther item of busi­ness. Because he had moved around so much over the semes­ter, he’d turned in his offi­cial eval­u­a­tion a few days before he received my final pack­age. One sen­tence in the eval­u­a­tion sug­gested that my course work was unfin­ished. He told me to con­tact the Records Office and get that note deleted.

He said he could get me a schol­ar­ship to Iowa, if I wanted to go there. He thought I should. All the best young writ­ers grad­u­ated from the mfa pro­gram at Iowa. If I enrolled, I’d have it made, he said. I said I’d think about it.

I never did get that com­ment removed, so it’s prob­a­bly still there on my record. He was right — some­thing was unfin­ished. And my mother was dying; I would not go to Iowa. Anyway, where was Iowa? I was a city girl, from Montreal, where there were plenty of exotic tales to be writ­ten, that could light up all the din­ers of America. Or so I thought.

A few years later, when Carver was very famous, I tossed our entire cor­re­spon­dence into a black plas­tic bag and left it out on the side­walk for the garbage truck to col­lect. I didn’t want Raymond Carver’s influ­ence — or any­one else’s — in my life.

Early in 1988 I sold my first novel, based on that first short story. The pub­lisher asked me if I knew some­one who could write a blurb for the back cover. I found a para­graph from Carver’s 1978 eval­u­a­tion, which had sur­vived the purge, and wrote to him for per­mis­sion to quote from it. I never heard back, though he appeared to me in a dream one night. Yes, he remem­bered me. No, he couldn’t be of much help. He waved as if to say, Good luck!

A few months later, I heard he was dying of lung can­cer. Come to think of it, I never wrote a short story after that. I wrote per­sonal essays, book reviews and novels.

“Never write a line you don’t mean.” The few times I repeated that advice to my stu­dents, I tried not to make it sound like a death sentence.

“When you get to the end, you’ll know.”

He did. I’m not quite there. Not yet.