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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
Talking of Carver
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Raymond Carver’s short stories are well known, his poems less known. But it is Carver, the teacher, who is in focus here.
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The stories of Raymond Carver never gripped my imagination and moved me the way his poems have. He is best known for his short stories, while his poems remain undiscovered. I prefer his poetry to his fiction and feel they’re better. I began rea
ding his poems by chance: a friend drew my attention to a poem by Czelaw Milosz that Carver had used as an epigraph for A New Path to the Waterfall. It’s called ‘Gift’ and goes this way:
A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me. In my body I felt no pain. When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.
Personal poems
Experiencing the poem became a defining moment in my life, one I would return to again and again for understanding and happiness. That Carver had chosen this poem for his own book of poems made me immediately want to read all his poetry. I liked them at once. They were very personal; poems about him, his companion Tess Gallager, his friends and students. He spoke of loneliness, sleepless nights filled with smoking and drinking coffee, the struggle and the fulfilment of writing well and teaching well, gratitude to his companion soul, Tess, bodily pain, Chekhov (who he felt very close to), grief, alcohol, not having enough money, love, fear, illness, and the beautiful and clear way things look, feel and smell in the early hours of most mornings. He was speaking to you intimately; that was clear. The poems are so direct and honest (yet intense and lyrical) that it is as though he wanted nothing except the most minimal communication possible between the reader and him. As if you were in the room with him (or on the phone) and he was talking. His poems are collected in All of Us. He died when he was 50, and the last thing he wrote was this: a poem titled “Last Embrace”:
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
But it is Carver the teacher that I want to write about. There is little in literature about teachers and students. A few scattered essays more than actual full length memoirs. In a book called Fires, Carver has an essay on his creative-writing teacher and mentor, John Gardner. Gardner was a meticulous and demanding teacher, Carver tells us, but also kind and thoughtful. Realising that the young Carver needed a quiet place to write, he leant him the use of his office and typewriter. “In his office on the weekends I used to go through his manuscripts and steal titles form his stories,” confesses Carver in his “The Writer as Teacher” essay.
Mentor
Years later when Carver himself became a popular teacher, Jim McInerney (author of Bright Lights, Big City) wrote on him, titling the essay, “Raymond Carver, Mentor”. Picking up on this, McInerney informs us how he in turn cribbed Carver titles. The titles are unforgettable: Will you please be quiet, please? and What we talk about when we talk about love are two of the best known. (McInerney would title his story “Do you mind if I smoke?” or along those lines).
“A year after his death,” notes JM, “the recurring image I associate with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening. He mumbled… Never insisting, rarely asserting, he was an unlikely teacher. I now think it was a function of a deep humility and a respect for the language…you sensed a writer who loved the words of the masters who had handed the language down to him, and who was concerned that he might not be worthy to pick up the instrument. You feel this respect for the language — humility bordering on dread — in every sentence of his work.”
Here was a teacher whose work, in his own lifetime, had acquired cult status, and yet Carver taught shyly, even nervously, preferring instead to listen to his students. What he enjoyed doing in class more than anything else is read aloud from favourite passages of books he loved. “For someone who claimed he didn’t love to teach,” writes Jay McInerney, closing his essay, “he made a great deal of difference to a great many students. He certainly changed my life irrevocably and I have heard others say the same thing. I’m still leaning forward with my head cocked to one side, straining to hear his voice.” Reading that last line, I couldn’t help wondering if those of us who’ve been similarly changed by a teacher aren’t still leaning in to hear that particular voice.
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