Raymond Carver shines in a restricted forum

I was prompted to investigate the works of Raymond Carver due to an article, accompanied by a short story, that were both published in the New Yorker recently. The article, entitled “Rough Crossings,” detailed numerous exchanges between Carver and his then editor, Gordon Lish, portraying the fact that Lish had encouraged Carver to cut about 40% of his stories in Carver’s original volume of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Immediately following the article was the original, uncut version of Carver’s story of the same name, which he originally entitled “Beginners.”

I decided to pick up Carver’s volume, Where I’m Calling From, which draws together his best stories from the entire span of his writing career. Most of the first half of the collection is comprised of Carver’s stories in What We Talk About and his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The latter half of the collection is made up of stories from Carver’s later volume Cathedral, which Carver created largely without the help of Lish. Also included are newer stories of Carver’s, many of which were first published in the New Yorker.

It is clear from the outset that Carver not only is a master of English minimalism, evoked in his short stories, but that he grew over time to harbor a style much of his own, that not only carried the brutal realism of his earlier short stories but also included more detail, and I would say thus, power.
Unfortunately, I feel that I was never able to inspect Carver’s first short stories without a side of disappointment, due to the New Yorker collection, in that it is clear that Carver is being sliced and diced, and that he could provide so much more that he is withholding. Stories end, it seems, when they could go on and be more giving, yet still have the same force of reduction.

But whatever is lost in the early stories is made up for in the stories in the latter half of the collection. Carver focuses primarily on a series of central themes in all of his stories.

He chronicles broken love, confused love, love tortured by alcohol and bankruptcy, the haunting love that never goes away even when a person seems to leave, and the maladies of trying to make ends meet in low-rent American suburbia, which today would be coupled with double-mortgages and eviction by the IRS.

Carver never misses a beat in capturing the inherent sadness of this lifestyle, but also the beauty of cleaning up and moving on. Carver never gives up too much, and his descriptions are barer than those of Hemingway, descriptions that fostered the beginning of a new literary movement; dirty realism in the 1980s.

Carver makes the ordinary seem incredibly evocative and meaningful, such as in “Collectors,” when the simple act of a free carpet-vacuuming becomes an investigation into a man’s discarding of the unrequited love of his ex-wife. Carver, of course, leaves this up to the reader to discover, but the undeniable mystery and meaning of each situation is clear.

Carver had a clear penchant for tackling such topics, in that he suffered from alcoholism (a prevalent motif throughout his stories) and numerous heartbreaks. But he is far from being a morose griever. He seems to be trying to tell his readers to look at their lives, and consider the importance of every connection of love that they retain. Comparing the highly edited What We Talk About When We Talk About Love to the uncut Beginners, though, I can only wish that a posthumous edition of all of his original stories could be published.