…Everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical […] Of course, you have to know what you're doing when you turn your life's stories into fiction. You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself. You're told time and again when you're young to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? But unless you're a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it's dangerous to try and write volume after volume on The Story of My Life. A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best…__Raymond Carver
What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver by Maryann Burk Carver; 368 pages, Hardcover; Published: July 11, 2006 by St. Martin's Press; ISBN: 9780312332587 (ISBN10: 0312332580)
There are a couple reasons why I am reading, for a second time, this memoir. I was unfortunately impelled to abandon my first attempt. I thought Maryann Burk Carver’s writing was pretty bad, and unfortunately it still isn’t the best. But I needed to get another fresh look with a different mindset, perhaps gain a closer insight into the working process of Raymond Carver. As in what exactly, in her opinion, made him tick. Maybe I also needed a voyeuristic peek into the insides and out of their difficult marriage. And I wanted to see if I had perhaps missed something my first go around.
What I immediately, and subsequently, sadly realized again and again was how much Maryann desired herself to be seen and noticed. How important it was for her to be given just due for her husband’s early success. She did work hard to support him and there is no doubt she sacrificed plenty to help him succeed. I am sure their life was often painful and involved years of angst and suffering. Excessive drinking rarely solves anything. And friends you drink with generally fall by the wayside when you stop imbibing with them and sharing your troubles.
What is also apparent early on was Maryann’s need to set herself above her peers, especially those she worked beside. It was common to read descriptions of her “fat” co-workers or how good she herself looked in her snappy and sexy outfits. She for some reason also considered herself an intellectual, and may have been, but she had this incessant need to let us know this as well. So these irritating self-aggrandizing remarks peppered throughout her memoir first made me abandon her work and caused me some consternation in moving forward again. But this time I needed to know which stories of Ray’s were actually a part of their lives, or those of people they both knew.
…Everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical […] Of course, you have to know what you're doing when you turn your life's stories into fiction. You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself. You're told time and again when you're young to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? But unless you're a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it's dangerous to try and write volume after volume on The Story of My Life. A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best…__Raymond Carver
Tobias Wolff has adamantly defended Ray Carver in interviews and essays he has written and goes to great length to claim in no uncertain terms that the Carver stories were all generally made-up, and certainly not at all autobiographical as most of us would want to believe after reading them. But that isn’t true either, and my interior bullshit meter seemed to be aggressively acting out while reading Mr. Wolff’s remarks in one of his prior interviews. Even Tobias Wolff instinctively knows that everything we write about has some semblance to something we have personally heard, talked about, experienced for ourselves, or fantasized over. There is nothing of any worth truly “made-up.” Of course a writer will claim his or her fiction is not autobiographical. It is part of the ruse. Good fiction comes off as true, feels authentic, and the mystery needed to keep the wheels in motion is the intuitive thought that the author is, or was involved, in some way or another. Gordon Lish is not only a good example of how this occurs in writing, but being Carver’s early editor and friend for many years adds additional moxy to this premise.
In his fiction-writing classes Gordon Lish espoused how important it is to not belittle someone on the page unless it is yourself. He demanded you not put yourself above another. I witnessed him in action attacking a student in class for making herself appear more favorable than one of her fictional characters, and I also received the disdain of Lish when I once stated I wasn’t a big fan of one of his favorite writers. Ray Carver, to my knowledge, never made himself appear better than another. He was a poster boy for humility. Today I am not sure who learned more from the other, Gordon or Ray? Lish is credited with making Carver famous but while re-reading the collected stories of Raymond Carver I can see how Lish may have benefited as much from Carver’s honesty on the page and his engagement with the terms of living an everyday life. Gordon’s own fiction reads as memoir too. Autobiographical. And no matter how absurd or salacious the story is, the reader wants to believe it is true, that Gordon did have these experiences he deftly relates on the page. But he isn’t any better at transcribing them than Raymond Carver was. And the breadth and depth of Carver’s writing encompasses much more of “real life” than Gordon could ever attempt to achieve himself. Not that Lish and Carver did not both live their life experiences, they did. But Carver’s life was in many ways naturally fuller, more culturally real and authentic, and definitely more painful than the famously privileged New York lifestyle generally expounded on in the Lish oeuvre. Epigraph is the one Lish title bereft of ensconced privilege, and instead exemplifies how painful even a New Yorker’s life can be when faced with the onset and finality of a loved one’s disease. I believe it to be his masterpiece.
Every experience Gordon Lish privately related to me in conversation, no matter how elaborate the affair, or outlandish the story, turned out to be true even though I initially always wanted to doubt his word. Even his oft-related and dangerous sexual encounters appeared to be true, and it seemed to me that Gordon needed to purposely cuckold almost every man he came in contact with, even myself. So it would come as no surprise to me that Raymond Carver was taking real life experiences and liberally transferring them onto the page as a fictional account that happened to his narrator or other suitable protagonist. Often his narrator remains the victim. I believe Raymond Carver maintained his stories were made up in order for him to remain an enigma for us. We can certainly imagine these stories as being true, they feel like honest accounts, but in no way would they be proven except in interviews conducted by others who were there, or in a tell-all memoir written by a close confidant such as his ex-wife. Same goes for Lish. Writers are basically liars, but their words on the page are not. The words must ring true or else they will be intuitively discounted.
Of late I have been reading several reams of writing by the brilliant neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris. Most notably his book titled Free Will. But another title of his called Lying is adamantly opposed to such behavior for telling untruths, and I basically agree with his premise. But as a writer, and as explained above, we, by definition, must lie to survive, otherwise we could be judged unfairly and our work despised, especially if it purports certain despicable behaviors such as having an illicit adulterous affair, committing murder or robbery, imbibing in alcoholic drinking and illegal drugs, or a host of other unsavory acts. If what we authors wrote about was admittedly true about ourselves we could very well be disdained and blacklisted by the very people we want involved in our literary undertakings, expressly and pointedly our now-informed consumer. So as much as I believe in personal claims made by this memoirist Maryann Burk Carver, and as much as I need to compare her personal truths to the fiction composed in her ex-husband’s books, I remain skeptical as to whether or not Raymond indulged himself in these salacious matters beyond the page. By not admitting to them, and having surrogates defend his honor, Raymond Carver remains a literary enigma and his work extremely attractive to those of us needing to dig and play in the dirt of societal sleaze that is often, and skillfully, exemplified brilliantly in his work.
Maryann Burk Carver suffered immensely. Her husband became quite sick and diseased from alcoholism. He conducted affairs of the heart while married. He was sexually dishonest and often unreliable as a parenting spouse. He was also dangerously abusive. But Maryann obviously wanted to be married to a famous writer and was willing to abide by this unsavory life they had created. That is, until she couldn’t. It is quite sad that she did not get the final prize and that Tess Gallagher was the eventual recipient of this new and reformed Ray Carver. But Maryann did help to create an astounding masterpiece, flawed as a man, but now our long-standing and infamous king of American literature.
…But I’m the “Maryann” you find in Ray’s poetry. I’m also in some of the women in his short stories. I was a source of inspiration for Ray as he imaginatively recast incidents from our lives into his poetry and fiction. I was the sounding board who knew his friends, his whole family, and the brilliance of the man long before he was anybody’s bootable author…
I was wrong about Maryann Burk Carver. What she was attempting to achieve in this book was saving herself for posterity, possessing herself as Gordon Lish himself once told me to do, or die. The problem, as I see it now, is that Raymond Carver failed to honor on the page his wife’s sacrifice for him, failed to acknowledge her worth and beauty in his fiction and essays. He did speak of her often in his poems and that matters, but he failed miserably in giving her the attention she deserved. So she did what Raymond Carver for some reason couldn’t. The horror behind my earlier reaction to what appeared as a somewhat braggadocious Maryann noting what was important to both of them, that being her looks and body, their sexcapades and adventures, her hard work to support the family, and their mutual need for literary fame, it was Raymond Carver who was remiss and selfishly irresponsible. So I forgive her indulgences in making herself appear important, because she was. And let’s honor and allow her long and living art to stand as she undoubtedly was the person most responsible for molding perhaps the greatest American writer who ever walked this earth.
"Writers are basically liars, but their words on the page are not. The words must ring true or else they will be intuitively discounted."
The very best lies are the truth told in size 11 shoes.
Truth lies in paradox.
I disagree vehemently with this statement: There is nothing of any worth truly “made-up.”
I think you are playing a language game here. Define "made up" for me, please. Everything is based in reality, or else it would not be able to spoken of, or understood.
Enlighten me, please. This is not snark. I truly want to know what you mean.
Cheers!
Appreciate your thoughts and questions. Plus your time. Some of my poetry can be construed as non-sense and appears “made-up” but assuredly it is not. But I don’t know where it exactly comes from but the unconscious might just have to do. I could not make it up. Impossible. For years I used to think Stephen King made up his novels but eventually realized he couldn’t have. Some us do terrible things on the page. Thank you for reading my work and caring enough to comment.