Call If You Need Me and Demonology

Dear Professor Leavis,

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I think maybe you're a little hard on poor Raymond Carver--not that I'm inclined to defend this latest ill-conceived, perhaps mercenary attempt to keep him in the public eye by repackaging material from Fires and No Heroics, Please, with the additional padding of a handful of uncollected stories, some embarrassing juvenilia, and other miscellany, garnished with a cringe-inducing introduction by Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher: (The two of them, we learn, once collaborated on a screenplay for Michael Cimino based on the life of Dostoevsky. Can you imagine?) "This book," she inimitably writes, "is like rain collected in a barrel, water gathered straight from the sky. We can dip into it at any point and find something to refresh and sustain us--to bring us close again to the life and works of Raymond Carver."

Well no, actually, we can't. Or rather, as you suggest, what we find in Call if You Need Me are fresh reminders of Carver's limitations, which you catalog incisively. The publication of this volume, like the Collected Poems that came out a few years ago, diminish the sense of Carver's achievement rather than enlarging it. Where I'm Calling From, the collection of his stories he authorized near the end of his life, is really all the Carver anyone needs. It's a book I'd give as a graduation present to any young person interested in writing. The canon of essential stories may indeed be small (though I'd expand your selection to 10 or a dozen, adding "Jerry and Molly and Sam," "Boxes," "Cathedral," "Nobody Said Anything," "So Much Water so Close to Home," "The Third Thing that Killed My Father Off," and maybe a few more), but they're sufficient to sustain a reputation, and a handful will find their way into high-school and college anthologies. (The first story here, "Kindling," about a man who takes refuge in a rented room in his flight from booze and a bad marriage, is the only one that approaches Carver's best work. And while it is constricted by style, class reference, and subject matter in all the ways you mention, I still found myself beguiled by its clear, simple writing and touched by its tenderness and compassion.)

Curricular immortality strikes me as an apt and honorable fate for Carver: It's how writers like Ring Lardner, Katherine Ann Porter, Guy de Maupassant, and even Hemingway survive. But the insistence on treating Carver, a gifted minor writer, as a major literary figure does him no favors. He was a lackluster poet and, on the evidence here, an utterly pedestrian critic whose insights into the craft of fiction amount to a series of writing workshop homilies. ("Short stories, like houses--or cars, for that matter--should be built to last. They should also be pleasing, if not beautiful, to look at, and everything inside them should work." You can picture a classroom full of earnest young MFA's-in-waiting nodding their heads and scribbling in their notebooks, but what the hell, exactly, is this supposed to mean?)

During his lifetime, Carver was hardly an uncontroversial figure. If the hagiographers, led by Gallagher and William Stull, the indefatigable (and apparently unboreable) editor of this volume and the collected poems, seem to be in the ascendant today, there are still people out there who hold Carver responsible for the sins of his many imitators and even, by extension, for the decline of American literature. What he writes about Donald Barhelme in a 1979 review reprinted here could, by the middle of the next decade, easily have applied to Carver himself:

His chief imitators were then, and still are, students of writing at colleges and universities across the country. The influence of Barthelme's stories has been considerable, but not always salutary, on young and not-so-young writers.

The imitators--no other word will do--are easy to recognize. Once in a while you see them in print somewhere, but most often you see them handed in in depressing numbers at writing-workshops classes around the country where Barthelme stories are often studied and held up as models for young short story writers.

Carver and Moody are both, as it happens, products of the strange marriage of convenience between literature (or, if you prefer, "creative writing") and our institutions of higher learning, and though they have, at least at first glance, very little in common, their writing shares a certain self-consciousness, a quality of worriedness that seems to be the hallmark of school-made fiction. Moody (whose real first name, I just discovered, is Hiram) was an undergraduate at Brown in the early '80s, a stronghold of Barthelmean experimentalism whose creative writing faculty included Angela Carter, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes. I was briefly there, enrolled for a semester in Hawkes' workshop, and I recall someone--for all I know it could have been young Hiram Moody himself--asking Hawkes what he thought of Raymond Carver. He made a face and said something like, "He strikes me as very anti-language."

Hawkes, who wrote some of the most gorgeous hothouse-modernist prose of the postwar era, intended this as an unambiguous put-down, but in hindsight it strikes me as descriptively precise. The evidence before us suggests that Carver was not a naturally articulate man, but his best stories turn his difficulty with words into an asset, and also a theme. Smooth talkers, like the doctor in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," are viewed with some suspicion, and a number of stories (for instance, "Cathedral") turn on the difficulty of getting the words out. "Why not say what happened?"--Carver occasionally quoted this line from Robert Lowell, and in his case it was not a rhetorical question: His stripped-down style can be seen as a response to the overwhelming difficulty of narration, a way of answering the intimation that the tools we have for making sense of and communicating experience are untrustworthy and prone to error.

Moody, I think, writes out of a similar anxiety, a feeling--which can only be the product of schooling--that language is booby-trapped against the accurate representation of experience. Whereas Carver responds by underwriting--by pushing realism to the extreme of flat-tongued, minute-by-minute empiricism--Moody overwrites, rigging his often straightforward, well-observed, anecdotal narratives with tricky perspectives, distancing effects, and moments of high self-consciousness. (The kind of stuff Carver reflexively dismissed as "gimmicks.") The narrator's intrusions in "The Ice Storm" are a notable example, as is the coy revelation of the narrator's identity at the end. But like Carver, what Moody is aiming at--and what his education tells him is no longer possible at this late date in literary history--is realism. And he's brilliant at it and at approximating the idioms and references of hyper-articulate, anxious, confused white people in their 20s and 30s. Like you, I occasionally found myself wishing he'd just tell the fucking story--the fucking story, by the way, is called "Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal"--but one of the reasons he refuses to is that if he did, he might sound like Raymond Carver. And like others of his age and ilk--David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Donal Antrim--his writing is often in explicit opposition to Carver, an attempt to put back into American fiction what Carver took out.

Until tomorrow,
Tony

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This week, our critics look at the grand old man of short fiction and a popular younger author. Click here to buy Call If You Need Me, by Raymond Carver; here for Demonology, by Rick Moody; and here for an explanation of our format.

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