Friday, February 23, 2018

Describing Raymond Carver.

Ray Carver arrived at The University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop as I was beginning my last semester there. By then I had not only enjoyed reading a number of his short stories in Esquire, I had also heard at length about his complicated relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish, who by then was Esquire fiction editor.

 

The buzz feed was that Gordon cut Ray's stories to shit, and the shorter Lish made Carver's stories, the better they became. We Iowa Workshop students, every one of us, wished we could be discovered like Gordon had discovered Ray. They met when they both worked at a college textbook publishing house in Palo Alto, and one thing led to another.

 

Ray Carver is called a minimalist writer. I didn't know what that was when I was twenty-six years of age. All I knew was that Ray Carver had a very special way of writing that allowed me to feel free to enter into his stories and identify with the hurt people he wrote about, with the ache they felt inside them that they could not quell and that drove them to do things and say things that made me feel something very real and raw and memorable had just happened on the page. I never felt comfortable writing description. The beauty of reading Ray Carver and of writing like him was that he seemed to make description itself passé. That's why I wasn't comfortable with description, I would tell myself. Because intuitively, I knew, and as Carver's work so rightly seemed to suggest to me at the time, description was a totally unnecessary artifice.

I requested that for my last semester I be placed in Ray Carver's workshop. I wasn't the only student with that idea. I was informed that his workshop was full. So as the semester got under way, I sent him one of the stories I felt pretty good about and asked him if he would be so kind as to read it and tell me what he thought of it.

A few days later I received a phone call from him telling me he had read my story and asking me if I could drop by his office.

 

All the faculty offices in the English-Philosophy Building were identical. Small. Cramped. Blond wood furniture with rounded edges. It was called contemporary.

 

Jack Leggett. Fred Exley. Marvin Bell. Donald Justice. Angus Wilson. John Irving. Gail Godwin. I had visited them all in their office and when I visited them they were all seated behind their blond wood desks.

 

I knocked on his office door. Raymond Carver opened it. He was a regular looking man—older than me but not by much. His eyebrows peaked in the middle. After we said hello and shook hands he sat down behind his desk. I sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. Right away he started looking for something to do with his hands. I again thanked him for reading my story, and he seemed very agreeable. We both knew he didn't have to do this—this that he was doing right now for me. It was out of the goodness of his heart. He was a generous, gracious man and he smoked like a fiend. I think it gave him something to do with his hands.

He'd often cover up his face with the hand that was holding the cigarette. I assumed he was shy. I was shy then, too. I liked him from the moment we met.

 

We got right to it. He found beauty in my story I didn't know was there. One example: Something about a woman wearing clogs, which were wooden shoes popular back then. "She walked towards him in her clogs making wooden sounds." Something like that. I had created an automaton without knowing it. He liked that. I got what he said, that description creates character, and I tried to store that gleaning away for the lean years I knew would come.

I learned from Ray: Be gracious. Be generous. Be kind. It's extremely important. It's your obligation, your duty to find beauty amongst the ugliness in every story you read. Much beauty. Surprise the author. That's a wondrous moment when a diver comes back to the surface from the deep and shows you what she found on the ocean floor you never knew was there.

We went through my story that way. Gleaning after gleaning with me storing each of them away as best I could. Understanding that at the heart of it, it's poetry. Unadorned poetry. That was the most important gleaning. It's why even today I hang with poets. I thanked him again. We shook hands. I left his office and never saw him again.

 

I was glad when I heard he had finally rejected Gordon Lish's advice. There comes a point when you know what you're about and you have to go your own way, a point where you cut your own stories to shit enough, you don't need a voracious editor to cross out stuff for you. This, too: There comes a point when you can cross out too much and do damage, destroy what you've created.

I was very sad when I heard he died. His work stands as a monument, a testament to what someone can accomplish with the simplest words strung together in the simplest ways. With courage to face the truth. With unadorned poetry.

I gradually learned the world got this minimalist-writing-thing totally wrong. It wasn't that description was passé. Quite the opposite. It's that writing is all about description, using simple words to describe what people do and say. Yes, say. Dialogue is description, too. It's all description. In one of Ray's stories I was reading this morning a radio is playing music in the background. There's no need to describe what kind of music was playing. Anyway, the reader already knows. Because the reader knows the character and knows the music such a person would be playing on the radio.

So this is what I know about Ray Carver: He was a maximalist. A stripped-down maximalist. And he was a great writer. And a great teacher.