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.

How lovely that driving is,/ how deadly.

I spent today preparing to teach a two-week short-story-writing class to high school students. I always like to start over, when I teach, rather than fall back on old class plans and lessons. Otherwise I might start to think I'm really only a teacher, and am done with learning. It's a pleasure to be using short stories of Roberto Bolaño for the first time in this context. "The Grub," from Last Evenings On Earth, should lead to a different series of questions and writings than I'm used to, or at least that's what I'm hoping.

Bolaño. Bolaño. Bolaño. I read and read and read him, but I can't explain why--what in his writing is so appealing? There's some sort of recovery happening when I read his stores and novels. (Not so much the poetry.) He makes me want to write. He makes me a little more disgusted by other writers.

I was surprised, rereading John Cheever stories in my search for interesting models and talking points for these high schoolers, to find more mystery and sympathy in his work than I ever used to, and I think it's because they remind me of Bolaño--a similar patient spokenness in both, a similar composed and devious honesty. It's an odd match, I acknowledge, but there's some metaphor between them. Check out "The Death of Justina" or "Clemantina."

Another writer who seems fresher in context of Bolaño is John Newlove, a Canadian poet who also died in 2003. He was from Saskatchewan, as unlikely a place on earth as Chile. He lived for a while around Deep Springs College in Death Valley, though I'm not sure if he taught there.

This John Newlove poem is worth a whole life. It's from his 1986 book The Night the Dog Smiled. I found it in a small bookstore in Victoria, or rather Kurt Slauson found it and encouraged me to buy it. At the time the buzz in the english department at the university of victoria, apparently, was that Newlove had disappeared after the book came out, was in hiding, maybe for drink or health, or maybe stealth. This poem should be on the Canadian dollar, on its flag. I hate the poet laureate trend in North America, the condescending nationalistic nod it implies. Yet Canada should make John Newlove the Canadian permanent posthumous poet laureate for writing this poem.

Driving

You never say anything in your letters. You say,
I drove all night long through the snow
in someone else’s car
and the heater wouldn’t work and I nearly froze.
But I know that. I live in this country too.
I know how beautiful it is at night
with the white snow banked in the moonlight.

Around black trees and tangled bushes,
how lonely and lovely that driving is,
how deadly. You become the country.
You are by yourself in that channel of snow
and pines and pines,
whether the pines and snow flow backwards smoothly,
whether you drive or you stop or you walk or you sit.

This land waits. It watches. How beautifully desolate
our country is, out of the snug cities,
and how it fits a human. You say you drove.
It doesn’t matter to me.
All I can see is the silent cold car gliding,
walled in, your face smooth, your mind empty,
cold foot on the pedal, cold hands on the wheel.