Self-defeat, self-destruction, and fame

This post isn't a review of the new Raymond Carver biography, as I'm only about halfway through--indeed, at the moment, I'm at the nadir of Carver's life, when he is busy drinking from morning until night, bankrupt, and whacking his wife on the side of the head with a wine bottle. At the moment, I can barely even think about rereading Carver's work (which is what I planned to do after reading the bio), so odious, cowardly, hypocritical, and repulsive is the man at this stage of his life. Presumably things will soon start getting better, and my sympathy for the master of the short story will return.

But Jesus Christ. What a fucking bummer. Carver comes off very poorly here, as does almost everyone he knows--drinking buddies, enablers, philanderers, abusers, liars, fools. And Gordon Lish (whose editing I do believe improved Carver's work enormously, as Rhian and I previously discussed in these posts) would appear to be a total ass.

And yet...these monstrous years created a tremendous, if small, body of work--some of the best stories of the past half a century. I find myself in the position of not wanting it to be true, as there is nothing that enrages me more than that particular masculine insecurity that surfaces as self-pity and disrespect for women. But it is, and it often seems to be. How come weak men so often create great art?

Here's a passage from the book that really got my blood boiling. Carver is palling around with John Cheever in Iowa, who is busy drinking himself to death:

Cheever told Ray, "Fiction should throw light and air on a situation, and it shouldn't be vile. If somebody's getting a blow job in a balcony in a theater in Times Square, this may be a fact, but it's not the truth." Cheever believed fiction is "our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehensions and intuitions on the meaning of life and death." Both writers also disdained the so-called experimental fiction of the era.

What a bunch of horseshit! How convenient for Cheever, denying that the squalor of his own life could be regarded as "the truth" (Cheever and Carver got to the liquor store early, to make sure they were the first guys in the door), then dissing the fiction of the era designed specifically to explore the nuances of what he claimed to hold most dear. The hypocrisy and insecurity are staggering.

And yet...Cheever! And Carver! I love what these men did--they are heroes. And my heroes are bastards.

Of course, if we go around holding our favorite artists to high standards of personal behavior, there will be little art left for us to love. But why should that be? How can such personal weakness give way to such stunning brilliance? You can tell, obviously, that I have a horse in this race: I want to believe a nice fella can be a genius, too. And sure, I suppose it's possible. But it is sad to see how a writer so original could have been living, daily, the most boring imaginable cliché.

Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish (and me)

Many months ago when I discovered Literary Rejections on Display, I searched high and low for my collection of rejection letters, hoping to contribute to that fine blog, but I couldn't find them. They dated mostly from the late 80's to early 90's, when sending stories out and having them rejected was my favorite hobby. I knew that at one point I grew sick of the wallpaper of rejection I had surrounded myself with and threw most of them away, keeping only a few good ones: those with handwriting on them. I found them the other day, hidden away in a folder marked "Art."

The above is one of my favorites. (Perhaps I'll keep the others for LROD.) I don't remember what I sent -- some junk about the disillusionments of small-town teenagers, probably, or maybe small-town elderly people. Did I really think Lish might like it?? But I was happy to get this rejection note. I stuck it on my bulletin board and it was there long enough for me to more or less memorize it. Is it just me, or is this note totally crazy?

At the same time, it's really, really nice. It goes out of its way to make the impression that the mag is an accidental, collaborative thing, not a snooty magazine concerned with publishing only the very best, which you, sadly, are not. He didn't have to do that. He could have gotten away with snooty.

If I remember correctly, the Q's rejection note changed every few weeks (yes, I sent a lot of crap out) but was always similarly verbose.

Which is kind of ironic, when you remember that Lish is the guy often credited with (or accused of) cutting all the extra words out of Raymond Carver's stories.

I have always loved Carver's last story, "Errand," which is about the death of Chekhov. In it he leaves the minimalism, and presumably Lish, behind. It's a great, rich story and it seemed to indicate a new direction for Carver.

But I don't think that his early work would have been better without the editing, and wow, you can really see this in the story published by the online New Yorker this week. Carver fans will recognize that story as the one better known as "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," a much better title than the original, the forgettable "Beginners." That is one excellent edit. All the repetitive stuff, all the beard-scratching between thoughts: gone. Lish didn't make the story into something it wasn't; he understood what was essential about Carver and brought it out.

Tess Gallagher obviously cares deeply about her husband's legacy and thinks she's setting something to rights by publishing the stories in their original form. It's true the editing upset Carver, and he wanted to feel as if his success was his, and his alone, not Lish's. But I wonder -- if Carver had lived and gone on to establish himself apart from Lish, would he feel the need to do this? I don't know. Writers are egoists, and as hard as it is to be rejected, it's even harder, sometimes, to take an edit -- especially if it's a good one.

It makes me wonder if maybe what the world really needs now are more great editors.