Michal Golis (330988)

doc. Michael Matthew Kaylor, PhD

AJ56012: Topics in British Culture

15th June 2013

Stylistic Features Carol Sklenicka’s

Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life

Raymond Carver was indisputably one of the most celebrated American short-

story writers of the 20th century, known as the American Chekhov, and widely regarded

for helping revitalize the short story and bring it back to the public eye. In spite of his

literary fame and even though his work has attracted fairly close critical scrutiny, not

much information had been publicly available about his life prior to Carol Sklenicka’s

biography. Perhaps because his stories seem to offer such a realistic portrayal of the life

of working class Americans, it may be hard for some to believe they are not simply

largely autobiographical episodes or anecdotes from the writer’s own life. However, as

has been shown by many biographers, the relationship and connection between an

artist’s life and work most of the time is not far as straightforward as one would imagine,

with the real events and experiences oftentimes serving just as conduits to or channels of

expressing a particular idea, atmosphere or emotion. In this respect Carver himself

always tried to stay true to the literary credo of one of his greatest writing influences

Ernest Hemingway, which says that: “his [writer’s] invention, out of his experience,

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should produce a truer account than anything factual can be (80).” In writing Raymond

Carver – A Writer’s Life, Sklenicka thus wanted to answer the need for an objective,

authoritative and scholarly, yet also gripping look on the man behind the stories which

do provide a largely true but not necessarily factual reflection of his life experience. The

authorial voice is therefore objective and mostly relatively unopinionated, yet the book is

nevertheless interspersed with little humorous comments that make it clear that Carver’s

story is actually being mediated by an author who finds it fascinating and intriguing

herself. In one instance, for example, the author draws reader’s attention to a quote from

Carver’s short story with “listen!” Commenting on a passage from another story where

he describes a depressed man running his finger across a wet drool on his window the

biographer exclaims emphatically: “Drool! As if the weather were a monster invading

his home!” (77)

The biography is divided into five parts whose names are slightly reminiscent of

the developmental stages of an ancient drama – beginnings, search, success and

discontent, recovery and triumph. The first part discusses the story of his ancestors and

early childhood pointing out factors and influences that were to haunt him and

simultaneously serve as his inspirational sources for the rest of his life. Already on the

first pages the reader gets a premonition of some of the main forces that would play a

role in the writer’s life. In a passage detailing his birth one gets to know a rather curious

little fact that: “Raymond made his first appearance in print on the front page of the

Clatskanie Chief alongside news of a grass fire started by celebrating workmen with a

jug and few bottles.” (4) The young boy’s parents then received a poem from his

grandmother, which “celebrated a hardworking family that went for generations

accomplishing little of note until, finally, one person rose above the rest to achieve some

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worldly fame (4).” Sklenicka’s inclusion of such a minor, seemingly unimportant detail

as the newspaper clip about drunken workmen seems to give Carver’s alcoholism a

certain sense of unavoidability. It is as if tragedy and alcohol were to accompany him in

one form or another since the earliest days of his life. The poem, on the other hand,

serves as a promise of the deserved fruition and eventual fulfillment of his dreams of

becoming a writer he was likewise predestined to and which he and his wife so

unwaveringly believed in.

There are several motives which reappear throughout the biography and lend it

another, richer dimension, on top of its chronological approach. One of the motives

Sklenicka uses a lot in carving her narrative is that of a circle, signifying a recurrent

circularity that can be observed in Carver’s life and stories, resembling the cycles of

nature and giving the events in his life a strong sense of inevitability and fatefulness as

well as completion. There are many instances of its use throughout the biography. Carver

wondered at the fate that led him from being on the front page of the Clatskanie Chief as

a newborn baby to entering it once again as a successful writer 46 years later, from

struggling to have his story published in BASS magazine and eventually working at its

editorial board. Sklenicka also places emphasis on how in order to regain the peace and

harmony he once experienced as a little boy, he had to come full circle and only after a

life of struggle reach it in his final years. Just like Carver’s stories and poems, the

biography frequently works with dichotomies and paradox. Those, as his wife Maryann

says, were characteristic for the way he saw the world and life in general: “Ray was

always of two minds about everything (333).” On a larger scale it found reflection in

what he and his friends called Good Ray and Bad Raymond– his sober, intensely work-

focused, relatively easy-going personality which was obscured by his former erratic,

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alcoholic, abusive and desperate alter-ego. As Sklenicka shows he already started

cultivating or resurrecting the Good Ray personality on paper long before his ultimate

sobriety took place, using thus his writing skills and imagination to reconstruct his own

life. There was also in him a strong conflict between living the existence of both “a

middle-class parent on a career path” and “a working-class guy just trying to stay afloat

(119).”

Writing served as a kind of a coping mechanism as it allowed him to become a

detached observer of himself and the world around him and disassociate himself from

the problems he was facing in his real life and thus see them more acutely. Only through

this disassociation was he able to make at least some sense of his life and simultaneously

subject the, often very painful, real-life material to his creative treatment. In this light it

is not all that surprising that the subjects of double-characters as well as voyeurism

belonged among Carver’s constant preoccupations and oft-used literary themes,

appearing in a number of his short-stories. However, as in the biography the readers see

primarily Carver the man rather than his fiction, the observer – writer who did not

hesitate to use the most personal of information about his close ones, suddenly becomes

the observed. For that reason Sklenicka does not delve into any lengthy discussions of

his stories per se, even though they do give the reader a unique glimpse of his creative

process and sometimes draw quite extensively on real events, focusing instead, as

suggested in the book’s subtitle on “the writer’s life” and never veering away from its

subject for too long. It is left up to the reader to conjecture how much of Carver’s writing

is autobiographical. His wife Maryann, who is the person that probably could shed the

most light on the issue, has kept silence regarding what truly happened as described in

the stories, what was embellished and what is a pure figment of his imagination, saying

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she “saw [herself] in these stories, of course, but Ray was a fiction writer and he took

liberties God knows (127).” While always trying to remain within the boundaries of

what can be said or surmised with relative certainty, Sklenicka nevertheless in places

obviously does comment on the inspirational sources for individual stories. Conversely,

what we do get to hear is how the stories and especially poems impacted his

relationships with his close friends and family. His son Vance, for example, does not

exhibit as much understanding as Maryann when his father used the experience of their

reconciliation as a basis for one of his most unsettling stories. Carver reacted

characteristically: “it’s nothing to take too seriously or get upset about. It’s just a good

story is all (410).” To him all the ups and downs of his life were thus first and foremost

seeds of inspiration for his work.

The axes which his life, and consequently the biography, revolved around and

were intrinsically closely interconnected with each other were writing, alcohol, universal

struggle and love. Carver’s life, like those of his characters, was marked by a constant

economic struggle, tension and strained relationships. For a long time he found a

welcome relief and solace in alcohol, which was slowly becoming a major problem.

Even though it is these experiences of alcoholism, financial and existential insecurity

that became the primary material for his stories, if there is one word that Sklenicka wants

Raymond Carver to be associated with it is love – love as a source of struggle itself but

also as a driving force of his life and work. Many of his stories deal with dysfunctional

relationships and the tedium of marital life but neither he nor his characters, who he

shares many qualities and foibles with, give up on love. As Sklenicka notes, need to be

loved and appreciated played an important role in his incessant strive to become a

respected writer. Writing, after all, was the greatest love of his life. Another key motive

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repeatedly stressed by the biographer is the conflict between Carver’s desire for

independence and his patent inability to ever fully attain it. For most of his life he dealt

with lack of independence by becoming even more dependent. In his desire for economic

and emotional independence that would enable him to fully devote himself to writing, he

largely depended on the two most important women of his life. Even though he yearned

for the stability of a family life and in spite of his obvious love for his children, they

often figure in his essays as a “heavy and often baleful influence (377),” the greatest

source of problems in his life as well as an inhibition to his career. According to the

biographer he thus used family, which for him represented often an unwelcome

distraction from writing, as a target on which he could blame his deeper personal

insecurities. His artistic dependence on Gordon Lish, whether real or exaggerated, was

certainly one of them. Finally managing to break away from the feelings of indebtedness

he felt towards his authoritarian and ruthless editor represented an important boost to

Carver’s artistic self-confidence and in turn significantly impacted his life and literary

style.

Reflecting the overall tone of Carver’s stories, Sklenicka’s biography also makes

sure to present the ubiquitous tragedy and tension in his life by tracing its undercurrents

often even in the positive events of his life. Relative happiness of the first years of his

marriage was marked by severe financial problems and his father’s illness. At the same

time as his literary career seemed to be finally taking off after years of struggle and he

was starting to gain some commercial success and wider recognition in the literary

world, his marriage was gradually disintegrating, his health deteriorating at an alarming

pace, and his private life in general, exacerbated by his uncontrollable alcoholism,

crumbling. The later years of his life, in which he finally attained enough stability to be

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able to devote his time and energies fully to writing, found him entangled in a number of

emotional dilemmas and were eventually abruptly ended by lung cancer. According to

his daughter Christine “the dichotomies ate him alive literally” but this vulnerability was,

paradoxically, at the same time “one reason he was so beloved by so many – the secret to

his success (449).”

Sklenicka is unflinching in the portrayal of her subject as she doesn’t sidestep his

many failings as a husband, father and human being. The overall picture the reader gets

from the biography is nevertheless still strangely positive and humane, mirroring a

sensation one can experience in many of Carver’s stories which somehow manage to

retain these qualities even amidst their characteristic bleakness. As he says his characters

“are good people…people doing the best they could,” and, as Sklenicka seems to be

suggesting, so was he. On the other hand she lets her sources speak and does not assume

the role of a moral judge or any supreme authority letting instead the reader to a large

extent make up his own mind as to whether Carver’s life’s story justifies all his failings

and faults, or whether simply, as his friend once remarked, indeed “anything was

forgivable as long as you were writing well (183).”

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Bibliography:

Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print.

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