It is late afternoon, a Saturday and we are sitting
in my apartment drinking coffee. Outside the living room window some
neighborhood children are arguing. A station wagon moves slowly down the
street. It could be the opening scene from one of his short stories,
because it is seemingly ordinary. Raymond Carver lights his cigarette,
gestures slightly with the match, leans forward.
"You are not your characters, but your characters are you," he says.
An interesting observation, considering the many roles that Carver has played in his lifetime. He has been a janitor, a saw mill hand, a delivery man, a retail clerk, and an editor of a publishing firm. He taught fiction writing at several universities, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1973-1974.
For the next few months, however, Carver will simply be living in Iowa City, working on several writing projects before leaving the Midwest to join the faculty of Goddard College in Vermont.
"This is a new time in my life. My children are both grown, and I just received a Guggenheim Fellowship. I have large blocks of time to work with," he says.
"I've been working on a novel. I had already received an advance from the publisher, but they've agreed to accept a collection of short stories this fall, instead."
Carver has previously published two collections of his short stories: Will you Please Be Quiet, Please?, which was a National Book Award nominee for 1977, and Furious Seasons, which contains his Pushcart Prize-winning story, "So Much Water So Close To Home."
Carver thinks of himself primarily as a fiction writer, although he has published three excellent volumes of poetry and is assembling a fourth.
"A year ago I thought I 'd never write another poem. I don't know exactly what it is, but since I've been in Iowa City I've written an entire book. The past few weeks have been very good."
We talk a while about the division that is sometimes evident between a writer's poetry and her-his prose. I suggest that Carver's poems often resemble his fiction. He lights another cigarette.
"I believe a plotline is very important. Whether I am writing a poem or writing prose I am still trying to tell a story. For a long time I wrote poems because I didn't have the time to write short stories. The nice thing about a poem is that there is i nstant gratification. And if something goes wrong, it's right there. It would be a hard thing for me to work for months on a novel and then have it be bad. It would be a tremendous investment for me, and I don't have a very long attention span."
If it is fair to say that Carver's poems resemble his short stories, it is equally true that his short stories have a poetic intensity. The language is very clear and deceptively simple. The reader is never certain where the action is going until she-he arrives.
Raymond Carver has tremendous skill with dialogue, and his characters remain tangible in the most bizarre situations.
In the story, "What's In Alaska," Mary and Carl spend an evening with Jack and Helen, trying out the water pipe Jack received for his birthday. Carver not only simulates the conversations of four stoned adults with amusing accuracy, he succeeds in subtly suggesting a series of conflicts that create a kind of subliminal tension in the reader, a tension that culminates in the disturbing last line of the story.
Carver's fiction quite often encourages a kind of empathic response in his readers. This is due to his keen eye for common, small details, details we imagine unique to our personal histories. Therefore we sometimes forget we are reading fictions, suspec t that we are dealing with echoes of our own words, our own lives.
We refill our coffee cups and I ask him about process, the origins of his stories. He pauses for a moment.
"A lot of things come from experience, or sometimes from something I've heard, a line somewhere."
I mention that often his titles are taken from lines in his stories. He leans forward.
"You start writing. Sometimes you don't find what you are trying to say in the story until you turn a line, and then suddenly you know where the story is going. You just have to discover as you go. Then when you get that first draft, you go back.
"Everything is important in a story, every word, every punctuation mark. I believe very much in economy in fiction. Some of my stories, like 'Neighbors,' were three times as long in their first drafts. I really like the process of rewriting.
"Beginnings are very important. A story is either blessed or cursed with its opening lines. Editors have so many manuscripts to look through that often all they do is look at the first paragraph or two, unless it's an author they know."
Apparently Carver knows what he's doing, because his stories have been included in some of the most competitive collections in the country: Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories.
The longest pause in our conversation follows my question, "What do you think about writing programs, such as the Iowa Writers' Workshop? I know you were a student here several years ago."
"I think writing programs can be a good thing, a place to learn craft. Of course, one problem is that a lot of people who are active in the writing program are never heard from again after they leave it. They move away from the school and they just stop writing."
"My time at Iowa wasn't very productive. I didn't put much work up. I was here for two semesters and I left before I could get my M.F.A.
"The important thing is to find someone you can work with. For me it was John Gardner. He was there at a very important time in my development."
Carver will read in the English lounge at 8 p.m. today; he will read, perhaps, the title story from his new collection of short fiction, Why Don't You Dance? [not published under this title].
"I might read another story, also," he says. "'Put Yourself In My Shoes.' I'll decide on Tuesday."
Carver stands up, looks at me, his cup in his hand. "Is there anymore coffee?" he asks.