Raymond Carver (1938-1988) knew working people and wrote about them. Ever heard of him?

Interview with Ray Carver

Raymond Carver writes some of the most beautiful, disturbing and honest short stories being written in the English language today. Most of them concern just a small number of people; a married couple, a broken family, a few close friends. In the stories we glimpse them living through some domestic and personal pain. They live in run-down, smalltown America; all-night cafes, TVs, bankruptcy, dead-end jobs, violence and despair. Although it's often a bleak world, its one which does occasionally generate moments of wry humour.

Many of the characters are insecure, threatened and dreading confusing circumstances, the power of the past, financial anxiety, their own weaknesses. The events of each story are related from inside the situation; from the perspective of one of the characters involved. They are told in short, bleak sentences, by narrators seeking to explain and justify events; a family quarrel, a death in the community, a meeting with a stranger.

For many of the characters in the world of these short stories love is a refuge, but one that constantly lets them down. Their loves are often destroyed by brutality, poverty, or alcohol.

You can read fifty-one of these stories in a new picador collection, 'The Stories Of Raymond Carver', which reprints his three collections; 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please', 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love', and 'Cathedral'. And also in a new collection which includes essays, poems and stories, called 'Fires', which has just been published by Collins.

Sklenicka notes, "When printer's galleys arrived for his first book of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Carver and his wife . . . had just been released from their debts by a federal bankruptcy court." And on the day after the book's publication in March 1976, he was on trial for lying in order to cash unemployment checks.

Carver owed the publication of that first story collection to a high school teacher and grammar textbook writer named Gordon Lish, who was "inventing himself as a literary impresario" when he and Carver became friends in Palo Alto, Calif. Soon after that, Lish went to New York City with higher ambitions and improbably won the job as fiction editor at Esquire magazine, where he published Carver's story "Neighbors" in 1971.

To a great many readers that was the first introduction to the funny, weird, unsettling fiction of Raymond Carver, whom the Times of London called "America's Chekhov." The jacket for the Library of America's volume of Carver aptly describes him as writing "unsparingly about desperation and betrayal, about working-class frustrations, the rift between the sexes, and the ravages of alcohol. But his sensibility was complex: he could also write with the compassion and the lyricism of a poet."

This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk -- determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong -- duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back i didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.