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No heroics, please : uncollected writings (1991)

de Raymond Carver

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This volume of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Raymond Carver's early stories (including the first one he ever published), a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small-press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction. Included here as well is Carver's last essay, "Friendship" about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Arranged chronologically, this book affords an intimate and comprehensive thirty-year vision of a great writer in the process of becoming himself.… (mais)
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Once upon a time, I turned to my wife and said, without a trace of irony in my voice, “Y’know…if Raymond Carver ever decided to publish a collection of his grocery lists, I’d be the first in line to buy the book.â€?

My wife turned at the stove where she was cooking our dinner—bowls of macaroni-and-cheese spiked with ham—and said in that patient voice of hers, “Sure. Sure you would.â€?

I riffled my thumb across the pages of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver’s fabulous-beyond-words short story collection. “I mean it. I really would.â€?

I was, to put it bluntly, head over heels in love with the guy’s writing—he rivaled the beautiful-beyond-words Mrs. Grouch for a place in my heart. Part of my infatuation was, of course, with Carver’s lightning-stroke prose, those hard-edged vignettes of lower-middle class American life; part of it had to do with the fact that my life at the time was a hard-edged Carver vignette, minus the alcoholism and adultery. The mac-and-cheese dinner was just one small part of my near-poverty, young-married life. To say Raymond Carver spoke to me was like saying God chatted with Moses at the burning bush. Ironically—and, no, I’m not making this up—it was Carver’s essay “Firesâ€? (also included here in this collection) which spoke most deeply to my mac-and-cheese, paycheck-to-paycheck existence. You simply cannot be a young struggling writer with three kids and a car payment and not get choked up when reading that essay.

Since then, I’d read everything Carver had published and now I wanted more. I was as thirsty as a camel in the middle of the Sahara whose hump suddenly runs dry.

Unfortunately, lung cancer got the best of Raymond Carver, cutting short a life in letters that seemed like it was just getting revved up. When Carver died I mourned like only a devout disciple can mourn. And then, lo and behold, three years after his death in 1988, Vintage Books produced a volume of “uncollected writingsâ€? called No Heroics, Please. There weren’t, as far as I could see, any grocery lists, but darned close. The volume contained early attempts at stories, the fragment of a novel, poems, book reviews, introductions to other writers’ books and some scraps of essays called “occasions.â€? I was delirious with delight.

I promptly bought the book, brought it home with shaking, sweating hands…then put it on my bookshelf and left it there, unread, for eight years.

Until two months ago, I had no idea why I did that—leaving all that unread Carver unread. Perhaps it was for the same reason that I’ve plowed through nearly everything of Charles Dickens except Bleak House, putting off the reading experience like a chocoholic housewife hides away that box of imported rum-filled truffles. Imagining the experience is half the delight. I was saving Carver for a suitably rainy day—preferably one that was gloom-drenched and bottom-scraped.

At any rate, I never read No Heroics, Please. It collected dust and was boxed and unboxed through three different household moves.

Then, in January of this year, I understood why. That’s when Vintage brought out Call If You Need Me, a revised and expanded version of the earlier uncollected writings. In the past several years, new—brand-new—stories of Carver’s had been found by his widow, Tess Gallagher, and a pair of Carver scholars, William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, on two separate, coincidental occasions. It was new Carver for the new millennium. The time for me to finally read these scraps of Ray had ripened, sodden day or no sodden day.

(You might have seen some of these five new stories recently when they were published in Esquire and Granta. Now, they’ve been cobbled into one convenient [though uneven] package.)

I bought the new collection—my hands still trembling and greased with perspiration—brought it home and swapped it out for No Heroics, Please (I was going to donate it to the used bookstore, but I liked the Marion Ettlinger photo of Ray on the cover so much, I couldn’t bear to part with it).

So, was it worth the wait? Absolutely yes and unequivocally no. How’s that for a Carveresque answer?

The new material is, of course, the best part of the book. I share Gallagher’s feelings when she writes in the foreword to the new edition:
The certain joy of this present endeavor has been in hearing something new from a voice it seemed had left the earth, of being glad for its unexpected entrance after a curtain has rung down. If a trunk of Kafka’s or Chekhov’s manuscripts were discovered today, there would be a scramble to see what it held. We are like that—curious, nostalgic, eager for the familiar ghosts of those we admire in our literature and lives.

There certainly is a ghost of the familiar in the five unearthed stories: “Kindling,â€? “What Would You Like to See?,â€? “Dreams,â€? “Vandalsâ€? and “Call if You Need Me.â€? There’s the usual cast of characters: drunks, recovering drunks, divorcees, husbands and wives on the edge of divorce. There’s also the forced optimism hobbled by bad luck—the kind of clear-eyed realism we’ve come to expect from Carver. “Things come around sometimes. Things work out,â€? says the narrator of “What Would You Like to See?â€?

Later, in the title story, a father talks with his seventeen-year-old son about the marital split that’s looming over the family:

“We don’t want to get a divorce. We want to be alone for the summer and try to work things out first.â€?
“You still love Mom?â€? he said. “She told me she loves you.â€?
“Of course I do,â€? I said. “You ought to know that by now. We’ve just had our share of troubles and heavy responsibilities, like everyone else, and now we need time to be alone and work things out.â€?

And then there’s this terrific opening from “Kindling,â€? two paragraphs that still tingle my veins when I read them:

It was the middle of August and Myers was between lives. The only thing different about this time from the other times was that this time he was sober. He’d just spent twenty-eight days at a drying-out facility. But during this period his wife took it into her head to go down the road with another drunk, a friend of theirs. The man had recently come into some money and had been talking about buying into a bar and restaurant in the eastern part of the state.

Myers called his wife, but she hung up on him. She wouldn’t even talk to him, let alone have him anywhere near the house. She had a lawyer and a restraining order. So he took a few things, boarded a bus, and went to live near the ocean in a room in a house owned by a man named Sol who had run an ad in the paper.

Reading lines like these, we know we’re solidly back in Carver territory. Myers works through detox by chopping firewood for the landlord and his wife. It’s grim, rewarding reading—like most of the things you’ll find in the Carver canon.

In “What Would You Like to See?,â€? an older married couple on the brink of divorce rents a house for the summer as a last resort just to “take a look at things and see.â€? To fill the uncomfortable silences, they scrub the house from top to bottom, symbolically scouring their lives.

“Vandalsâ€? has the distinct feel of Carver’s classic “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.â€? Two couples sit around a kitchen table on a Sunday morning, swapping stories about fishing and drinking (two huge Carver themes) while, down the street, a house burns.

These stories, along with “Dreamsâ€? and “Call if You Need Me,â€? are certainly worth the cover price of the book; they may not be as cut and polished as Carver’s later efforts, but as works-in-progress they are in the advanced stage. Carver was a diligent disciple of the school of rewrite; doubtless, these five pieces would have gone under his pen a couple more times, even after initial publication. But what we’ve got is fine, just fine.

It’s what comes later, in the “Early Stories,â€? that leaves the reader wondering why Carver didn’t torch the rough drafts with a cigarette lighter years ago. I’m also left wondering why Gallagher would allow her husband’s reputation to be put under such a critical microscope with these stories—literary efforts which could only politely be called “sub-par graduate workshop efforts.â€? Indeed, some of them were written when Carver was a student at Humboldt State College in California. Today, they’re best used as proof of how far the writer progressed—serving as a kind of carbon-dating system for Carver’s career, if you will. Most of them come off smelling like cheap imitations of Hemingway and Faulkner. Carver is still trying to find his distinct voice on these pages and the struggle is evident in every unfettered sentence.

This section of early-career stories is mercifully short, leaving us plenty of time to devote to the essays, meditations, book reviews and a seven-page fragment from a novel which bears all the promise of being another Sun Also Rises or The Sheltering Sky. Sadly, like Carver’s life, it ends abruptly, just when it’s getting interesting.

For those who have never encountered the author’s essays on writing (most of them previously published in Fires), there’s plenty of required reading on hand here—not just as a glimpse inside the psyche of our modern master, but also as a sort of blueprint for constructing unadorned fiction that packs a solid gut-punch:

It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it.

Or this:

This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images, as well as the exact and correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn away his eyes from the text unless the house caught fire.

Call if You Need Me has plenty more where that came from, along with Carver’s musings on his literary friendships with John Gardner, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff and reviews of works by Thomas McGuane, Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison, Donald Barthelme and others. As an added treat, there’s an account of a screenplay about the life of Dostoevsky that Carver worked on for director Michael Cimino. The movie never got made and, after Heaven’s Gate, Cimino’s career fizzled. The prospect of our Great American Short Story Writer scripting a film about the Great Russian Novelist is tantalizing…but, like most everything else in this book, it leaves you wondering what might have been if only Ray had lived out a full allotment of years.

We may never get the gift of “fresh Carverâ€? again, so my advice is to savor these last ragged scraps of a familiar ghost. For devoted students of Carver, they are indeed small, good things. ( )
  davidabrams | May 7, 2006 |
Carver was a master.
  drewj | Oct 19, 2005 |
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This volume of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Raymond Carver's early stories (including the first one he ever published), a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small-press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction. Included here as well is Carver's last essay, "Friendship" about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Arranged chronologically, this book affords an intimate and comprehensive thirty-year vision of a great writer in the process of becoming himself.

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