Carol Sklenicka. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life

On the "daemonic compulsiveness" of a writer:



[This is about Raymond Carver taking a creative writing class from John Gardner at Chico State in 1959, before either of them was anyone:] These first-day pyrotechnics were meant to intimidate students who weren't serious. Carver stuck. "... I'd never laid eyes on a writer. And he was a writer, even though he hadn't published at the time." Gardner thought that writers had to possess particular traits -- "verbal sensitivity, accuracy of eye, and a measure of the special intelligence of the storyteller" -- and he believed he could help his students develop those traits. Gardner thought, he wrote in On Becoming a Novelist, that a novelist needs "almost daemonic compulsiveness." Gardner had that, even though to Ray he looked like a "square" in his "dark, severe-looking clothes." He was thin with fine facial features, a pale complexion made more dramatic by thick, black, crew-cut hair, and enormous energy. No doubt Carver expected a writer to have the means and discernment to own a stylish car, because he noted with disappointment that Gardner's black four-door Chevrolet with black-wall tires "didn't even have a car radio." More to Ray's taste was the fact that Gardner sat on his desk and chain-smoked in class. (pp. 65-66)






You don't have to be published, but you do have to write:

Perhaps the most useful thing Carver learned from Garner was that a serious and passionate writer might also be an unpublished writer. When Carver used Gardner's office, he saw stacks of correspondence from other writers and editors and boxes of manuscripts, including an early version of Nickel Mountain, a novel he later published, heaped on the floor beside the desk. Carver was desperate to publish, but the sight of those stacks of pages gave him reason to hope and be patient in the years to come. (p. 69)



You don't need A's; you just need to write:

Although Ray wrote some "superb" papers for his literature classes, he asked [Richard Cortez] Day [at Humboldt State College] at the end of one course, "How would you feel if I don't turn the paper in?" In reply, Day asked his student how he'd feel about a C. "Ray replied, 'Fine.' Because he was working on a story. So, like anybody with any sense [Day recalls], Ray chose the story." And took the C. (p. 78)

Iowa Workshop director Paul Engle and his staff understood that talented writers were often imperfect scholars. On the strength of Ray's writing samples, his As in English, and a letter of recommendation from Day, Carver was admitted. Engle offered him a $1,000 fellowship for the year. (p. 86)



On Carver's "consuming interest":

I don't know that there is ever any explanation for a drunk's being a drunk, but in my opinion [recalled Curtis Johnson, one of Carver's early publishers] , just my theory -- he couldn't stand the little hurts that people inflicted on each other; I'm not talking about self-pity -- he just wanted to get along so that he could write. That was his consuming interest. And conversation was fine, camaraderie was fine, making love was fine, raising a family was okay, but it interfered with his writing. He just wanted to write. And why he wanted to write is as inexplicable as why he wanted to get drunk. Maybe they have the same root cause. It's likely. (p. 152)



On making luck happen:

The most impassioned passage of his [Carver's] introduction [to Best American Short Stories 1986] is about luck:

"Once in a great while lightning strikes .... It may hit the man or woman who is or was your friend, the one who drank too much, or not at all, who went off with someone's wife, or husband, or sister, after a party you attended together. The young writer who sat at the back of the class and never had anything to say about anything. The dunce, you thought. The writer who couldn't, not in one's wildest imaginings, make the list of top ten possibilities."

Ray had been all of the people he lists -- the drunk and the teetotaler, the philanderer, the dunce. He knew that there was no assurance that the best writers enjoy the most success. But he'd also been the one that lightning struck. So he believed that it was all right to help his friends. Who else would? ... Thus he balanced the odds, had his cake and ate it, too, and tried to keep everyone happy. Lightning strikes, he continues, "But it will never, never happen to those who don't work hard at it and who don't consider the act of writing as very nearly the most important thing in their lives, right up there next to breath, and food, and shelter, and love, and God." (pp. 439-40).



And don't forget the paper clip:

"But at that moment [concludes Carver's short story "Errand"] the young man was thinking of the cork still resting near the toe of his shoe. To retrieve it he would have to bend over, still gripping the vase. He would do this. He leaned over. Without looking down, he reached out and closed it into his hand."

With a gesture known to no one except the waiter, this ending represents a restoration of order.... Either Carver or [Tess] Gallagher might have found a hint for closing the story in this piece of advice from Raymond Chandler: "They [readers of detective fiction] thought they cared nothing about anything but the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk." (Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Scribner, 2009, p. 452)

(Although The New York Times Book Review listed this biography as one of the top 10 books of 2009, I wouldn't recommend it, particularly. While its account of Carver's life is remarkable -- the years of struggle, endless writing, and poverty; a marriage, a wife and children, all sacrificed on the altar of Carver's craft; hair-raising accounts of Carver's alcoholism -- the biography smells of index cards and makes the exhausting, laborious process of crafting this biography look exhausting and laborious. If sprezzatura is the art of making the difficult look easy, its antonym should be sweatzzatura -- the art of making the difficult look difficult. And besides, what author -- or editor -- for that matter should settle for two "writer's" in the same sentence, much less for the tired cliche, "had his cake, and eat it, too"? Nonetheless, I thought that the comments on the writer's craft and its -- on how hard you need to want to write, on what it costs to make "luck" happen -- were worth the price of admission.)