Put Yourself in my Shoes: On Reading Raymond Carver

During his career, Raymond Carver won over thousands of readers with his honest, to-the-point poetry and short stories such as Cathedral and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, writing in a style that is frequently referred to now as “dirty realism”. His work often portrayed people dealing with the struggle that daily life can be, recording moments both seen and unseen. His own road to becoming a renowned writer was fraught with conflict, including battles with addiction and familial problems. Carver’s relationship troubles, struggle with alcoholism, and eventual sobriety have strong implications for readers looking to better understand his work.

Carver was born in Oregon and grew up in Washington, where he met his first wife, Maryann Burk. She was 14, he was was 17. The next year, they relocated to California, and the year after that, they were married with a kid on the way. The young couple, with Carver himself barely in his twenties, moved around a lot, with each transition fueled by a combination of Carver’s restlessness and penchant for booze. While Carver wrote, his wife worked multiple jobs to support the family: “a cocktail waitress, a restaurant hostess, an encyclopedia saleswoman and a teacher. Early in the marriage, she packed fruit for two weeks in order to buy him his first typewriter.” (King, NYTimes.com) Carver found many ways to portray the struggles of young couples in his work. In “Distance”, also known as “Everything Stuck To Him”, Carver tells the story of a young man and his wife dealing with a sickly, crying baby. The husband wants to go fishing, the wife wants him to forego the trip to help her take care of their child. While it initially appears that the husband is going to skip out on the wife, he arrives at his fishing buddy’s house, decked out and ready to go, only to let him know that he needs to take care of something at home instead of going out today. Things end with the couple, their argument now behind them, laughing over a spoiled breakfast and saying they won’t fight any more. This portion of the story appears to serve as an accurate reflection of Carver’s life with Burk: contentious, but with an undercurrent of love. However, the end of “Distance” reflects the other side of Carver’s relationship with Burk, as the man, grown up, reflects on his relationship with his now-estranged wife: “They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else — the cold and where he’d go in it — was outside, for a while anyway.” (Where I’m Calling From 197)

This quiet end can be juxtaposed with the more bombastic ending to another Carver classic, “Little Things”, to reflect different phases of Carver’s relationship with Burk. Carver throws us into the middle of a couple’s relationship-ending spat, complete with yelling and hysterical crying and clothes being mashed into a suitcase. When the man, almost ready to leave, decides he wants to take the baby too, the woman clutches on to her child while the man tries to take the kid for himself. The poor child becomes the rope in a game of tug-of-war, with neither side willing to concede. In the devastating last moments of the story, the woman grabs one arm, the man grabs the other, and each pull with all their might. Carver echews any gory details in favor of a simple sentence: “In this manner, the issue was decided.” (Where I’m Calling From 154) This angrier, more violent couple is reminiscent of the latter days of Carver and Burk’s marriage. By this time, Carver had descended into the depths of alcoholism, and the way he treated his wife really showed that. In one memorably gruesome instance, “after Maryann indulged in ‘a tipsy flirtation’ at a dinner party in 1975 — by which time Carver’s alcoholism had reached the full-blown stage — he hit her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her.” (King) This version of Carver, seeking to protect his interests through whatever means he felt were necessary, is almost unrecognizable from the family man, head-over-heels in love that he once attempted to be.

Until Carver got sober in 1977, he was able to write, but not able to find happiness. Stephen King describes Carver at the height of his addiction as “the destructive, everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper.” (NYTimes.com) Carver himself said to Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory that his time as an alcoholic felt like “a state of incomprehension, despair, really…for a long time I found myself living by the seat of my pants, making things terribly difficult for myself and everyone around me by my drinking.” (64) Carver remained prolific but lacked confidence in himself and in his writing ability. Even after noted editor Gordon Lish took Carver under his wing and he began to have his work published in notable places such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, Carver still found himself “always questioning [his] judgments about everything.” (McCaffery and Gregory 67) With the new lease on life sobriety provided him, Carver was able to better reflect on the poor situation he found himself in while he was drinking. He starts his poem “Luck” with something of an explanation for how he got in such a bad way: “I was nine years old./I had been around liquor/all my life.” (Fires 36-37, 1-3) By the end of the poem, Carver lets the reader see the way in which alcohol warped his desires:

Years later,

I still wanted to give up

friends, love, starry skies,

for a house where no one

was home, no one coming back,

and all I could drink. (55-60)

In “Alcohol”, he describes a cycle he seemed to repeat in his drinking days:

Let her

fall in love with you and you

with her and then…something: alcohol,

a problem with alcohol, always alcohol —

what you’ve really done

and to someone else, the one

you meant to love from the start. (Fires 46, 21-27)

Here, Carver is remorseful for his actions in a way that he was unable to be while he was in the throes of alcoholism, almost asking for penance for his wrongdoing. And, indeed, Carver felt great remorse for the way he treated the world outside himself during his alcoholism. He was, by his own admission, creating a great deal of pain for himself and others that he simply could not comprehend from behind his drunken stupor. “I made a wasteland out of everything I touched,” he told The Paris Review in 1983. (Fires 196) Carver was luckily able to pull himself out of that pit and get sober, and it is obvious in his work that he understands that his drinking came at great personal cost.

In all phases of his life, it is evident that Carver was a great writer, but his sobriety enabled his heart to shine through in his work, owed to the self-confidence he discovered when he quit drinking. In one of his greatest triumphs, “A Small, Good Thing”, Carver paints a portrait of a family about to celebrate their son’s birthday before he is struck by a car and eventually passes away after several long hours of uncertainty. The seemingly malicious baker, constantly calling the couple, demanding they pick up the cake they ordered, is confronted by the grief-stricken husband and wife at the end of the story. The baker is initially dismissive, but after hearing the anguished story of how things got this way, he apologizes, inviting them in for coffee, sweet rolls, and healing conversation. The baker’s apology sounds like something Carver might have said in the process of his twelve-step recovery: “Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was…That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I’m deeply sorry.” (Where I’m Calling From 404) Carver, finally able to let go of his demons a little bit more, was able to apologize for his past actions and move on to the new phase of his writing, conquering his low self-esteem and showing those he cared about – his friends, family, and readership – that he had changed for the better.

Raymond Carver’s checkered past plays a significant part in his short stories and poetry. His ever-evolving sense of self can be seen in the way his work changed throughout the years he was active as a writer. His marital problems, descent into destructive alcoholism, and road to recovery all were important, distinct phases of his life, and those phases are reflected in the words he wrote and the characters he crafted.

Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Print.

Carver, Raymond. Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stores. Vintage Contemporaries ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.

King, Stephen. "Raymond Carver's Life and Stories." The New York Times 19 Nov. 2009, sec. Art & Design: n. pag. NYTimes.com. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.

McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. “An Interview With Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review 14 (1985): 62-82. Print.