Raymond Carver was born in 1939 in Clatskanie, Oregon. He grew up in ‘a little two-bedroom house’ in Yakima, a small town in Eastern Washington. After school he worked for six months in the same saw-mill his father worked in, beginning a series of jobs that included ‘janitor jobs, delivery man jobs, service-station jobs, stockroom boy jobs…’ He married young and had two children – ‘I was eighteen, she was sixteen and pregnant’.

He managed to put himself through college, and got a BA degree from Chico State, where he was taught by John Gardner to whom he pays tribute in Fires. He also attended the Iowa Writers Workshop for a year on a five hundred dollar scholarship, and was an undergraduate at Humboldt State in Arcata, California. Later he worked as night janitor at the Mercy Hospital in Sacramento. He began to publish his stories and poems in small and then national magazines.

In 1970–71 he got his first white-collar job working for a text-book publishing firm in Palo Alto. After re-organization he was fired, and managed a year of writing on the severance pay and unemployment compensation. But by now he was drinking heavily, as his father had done, and he began fighting a ten-year battle with alcohol: ‘I was out of control, almost as good as dead … My life was a wasteland, I destroyed everything I touched’. He suffered ‘blackouts, the whole business ‘, and ended up in a rehabilitation centre that had formerly been a hospital for the criminally insane.

In 1976 his first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? had been published by Knopf. Fifteen months later, June 2nd 1977, he stopped drinking. ‘I’m prouder of that than I am of anything in my life’, he says; ‘I’m a recovered alcoholic. I’ll always be an alcoholic, but I’m no longer a practising alcoholic’.

In 1983 he was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award worth $35,000 a year, and now writes full-time. He lives with the poet Tess Gallagher, outside Syracuse, New York, and in a house they have had built on the West Coast in Washington State.

Raymond Carver’s stories have been presented in Britain under the ‘dirty realist’ label fashioned by Bill Buford of Granta, which has also been applied to such writers as Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elizabeth Tallent, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff.

Raymond carver came to England in May for the joint publication of Fires, a collection of essays, stories, and those poems previously published in America which he wishes to preserve, and of the Picador Stories, a bargain compendium of the two collections that have previously been published here, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1982) and Cathedral (1984), plus the one that has not, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

It was his first visit to this country, and when we met at the Belgravia-Sheraton he was still tired from the plane. Raymond Carver is a large man, but in a way oddly amorphous, and very softly spoken.

In the first essay in Fires about the death of your father, there is this last sentence about these ‘beautiful voices out of my childhood’, saying ‘Raymond’, his name and yours. Your father is connected with the fact that you write, isn’t he? Did he tell you stories?

He did. We had the Bible in our house but the family did not read. We didn’t have books in the house, but now and again I would see father reading a book in bed. He’d take this book to bed with him to read – it was a Zane Grey Western, as I recall. He would be reading these Zane Grey books and this seemed to me to be a private life that he had in a family that didn’t really appreciate privacy. We lived in a very small house. But I would see him reading these books from time to time, and I was struck by this little world he had while reading this book. So sometimes I would sit on the bed and ask him to read to me. I’d like the things that he read to me. And he told me stories: stories about when he was a kid, and stories about my grand-father, who had fought in the Civil War – fought for a while on the Southern side, and then when the Southerners began to lose the war he became a turncoat and went to fight with the North, shooting at his friends. He told me that, and he told me a lot of stories about hunting and fishing, and encounters with bears and giant snakes and such. Stories that he’d lived through or stories that had been passed on to him. The stories made an impression on me, but Dad was not much of a reader, and he didn’t live long enough to see the work that I began to publish.

He died in 1967. I like to think that he would have approved of what’s happened.

What were the very first things you wrote? Did you write as a child?

I wrote as a child. I wrote and tried to imitate to a degree what I was reading. What I was reading was science fiction. So my early attempts had to do with people who became animals and animals who became people, and spooky stories – things like that. As I said there were no books in the house. I had no one to tell me what to read, so I just followed my nose. I’d go to libraries, to the public library in our town, and just check out books on pirate treasures, people looking for gold in South America, historical novels. Just whatever came to hand. I read everything -nothing very elevated or highbrow.

You still have a lot of stories with a fishing or shooting setting. Do you do these things yourself?

I do when I have the chance to do so. For many years I did not do any fishing or any hunting when I was living in the cities. But for the last year and a half I’ve been doing a lot of salmon fishing where I live now. But most of what you’re talking about – the poems that have to do with fishing or hunting – were written prior to the time of my salmon fishing. Obviously those things made a large dent in my emotional life because some of these things still come back.

After school you went into the sawmill your father worked in. Was that more or less an automatic thing?

Yes, it was. I wasn’t encouraged to go to college, or, as it were, discouraged. Nobody told me what I had to do with my life. It was assumed that I had to earn a living and the way I could earn a living was to get a job at the mill where my father worked. When I went to work in the mill I went to work as what they call a common labourer. But it didn’t take too long for me to understand that I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. It was very hard work and not much satisfaction. But I had to do it.

And then when you were very young you were married and had children. One of the extraordinary things about Fires is the expressions you have about the ‘ferocious years of parenting’, describing the children’s influence as ‘a negative one, oppressive and often malevolent’, and again as ‘heavy and often baleful’.

That was all true then. I’m happy to say that I have a different relationship with my children now. But it was very difficult then for a number of reasons. My wife and I did not have any money. We did not have any skills. We did have a lot of dreams. When we had the children we were not grown up ourselves, and as it turned out we had all this staggering amount of responsibility. It was incumbent upon me to try to earn a living and at the same time I wanted to go to school. I’d be trying to write and trying to earn a salary. It was difficult. We seemed to bear up under it in our twenties. Maybe we had more strength and more idealism. We thought we could do it all. We were poor but we thought that if we kept working, if we did the right things, the right things would happen.

By the time we got to our thirties we were still poor, still trying to do the right things, but the life we had hoped for was not coming to pass. It was receding further and further. So somewhere in there in my early thirties I began to drink too much. And the children were coming into their own at that time – they were thirteen or fourteen. It became difficult.

How much of the oppressive influence they had was economic, or was it also psychological? In a story – hardly a story, it’s a situation – ‘The Father’, in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, the child asks ‘who does Daddy look like?’, and the children argue ‘Daddy doesn’t look like anybody’; ‘but he must look like somebody’. He’s suddenly faced with being on his own.

Well, for many years I felt that my wife and I had no problems that money wouldn’t solve. That was true for a long time, and then later in our thirties when we were still poor, we understood that it wasn’t just money. There was a period of ten years when we were horribly poor, we were the working poor, we worked all the time, night and day – I worked nights and went to school days, and this went on for years. We still believed that if we worked hard and did the right things … This is the American dream, what you’re told when you’re young: that if you work hard things will work out all right.

The economic thing was always a problem. So much theatre drama and movies and novels are built on the premise of family troubles, the breakdown in relationships. If you had these problems but at the same time were having to worry about putting food on the table or paying a doctor’s bill or paying your rent … everything is compounded.

I don’t want to make it sound like it was all bad, because it wasn’t. My wife and I had some very good years. It sounds corny to say: we were poor but we were happy. We had all these responsibilities, but we were young and strong and felt we could do everything. And we were very much in love.

But in the main it was economic. Nobody in my family had ever gone beyond sixth grade in school. They knew work and nothing else but work. Nobody in my wife’s family was educated or had done anything or knew anything. And nobody ever bought so much as a pair o’f shoes for the kids. No one had money. My parents were fighting for their lives. Our respective families were living a very marginal kind of life. I talk about it in my essay on my dad. It would have been nice to have had some kind of respite. I used to dream of just having a week or two to be relieved of pressure. Impossible to find that.

You say in Fires that you limited yourself to writing things that you could finish in one sitting. But you also say that to write a novel you need to see a world that will ‘for a time anyway, stay fixed in one place’. Was the reason for the short stories also that the world was fractured for you?

The world was very fractured, and the world I was living in didn’t want to stay in one place. Not only did the people change – other than the characters in my family – but by dint of our moving around and hoping for a better job, in one case going to someplace 2000 miles away from our home where I’d been given a small scholarship to college, we moved too much. We were dislocated, dispossessed.

I wanted to write, so I wrote when I could. I wrote poems when I didn’t have time to write a story – I could write a poem much quicker than I could write a story. I didn’t have time to work on anything longer. Now the situation is different and I do have what I didn’t have then, time to write. Now it’s a matter of choice that I write stories or poems. My last book that was just published in the United States, and what Collins will publish here in England next year, Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, is a book of poems.

Your style has changed, hasn’t it? The sentences have become longer, you use more active expressions. It shows particularly in the revision in Fires of three stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

That’s true. And in the new book Cathedral the stories are different somehow from the earlier stories. Especially different from the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love which are so pared down. Everything I thought I could live without I just got rid of, I cut out, in that earlier collection. It felt like I’d gone as far in that direction as I wished to go. I felt I’d soon be writing stories I wouldn’t want to read myself. After I’d finished that book and it was accepted for publication, I didn’t write anything else for about six or eight months. Then the first I wrote was ‘Cathedral’ and I knew that story was different from anything I’d ever written, and all of the stories after that seemed to be fuller somehow and much more generous and maybe more affirmative. And the stories in Cathedral were written in a shorter period of time than the stories in the other books. All the stories were written over a fifteen month span of time, from fall of 1982 to spring of 1983. T he book was published in fall of 1983. The first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, took me about fifteen years.

Things have changed in my life, and I think those changes have been reflected to a degree in my work. My poems are different. I rather think they’ re better. I feel closer to them now than to the poems that are in Fires. I think that a writer shouldn’t go on writing the same thing over and over again. But it wasn’t a conscious thing on my part. Certain things were happening in my life that seemed to have an influence that moved over into my work.

Is it right that the extreme clipped precision of the earlier work is in some sense influenced by alcohol? One gets a feeling that this extremely controlled writing down of uncontrolled happenings may be.

No, because when I wrote the stories I was cold sober.

I wasn’t suggesting they were written under the direct influence – but that the view of the world given in this extremely poised style was indirectly influenced by alcohol.

That’s partly true. I hadn’t thought of that. In a way you’ re right because alcoholism can manifest itself in many ways, and if your life is in shambles and chaos, there’s the desire to be able to exercise some kind of control. And I think maybe I was doing that in the prose of those stories which I tried to make so precise and so exact. It was some arena, some place on the map where I could exercise complete and total control. Also I’m obsessive about saying exactly what I wanted to say.

The use of ellipse, things left out, is also very precise.

This goes back to Hemingway of course – it’s all right to leave things out as long as you know what you’re leaving out. I think that was one of his dictums. I hate to say, me too, but I did feel like I knew what I was leaving out. I talk about this a little in the essay ‘On Writing’. I get bored easily and I get bored with prose that’s too circuitous or overblown, and I just don’t have much patience for stories of that sort. So I guess I was in a hurry to get on with the story. I left out unnecessary movements. I was interested in having stories that worked invisibly. They would work without the author obtruding. He would put things in motion and let the story assume a life of its own, and go on about its business. In life we sometimes take short-cuts, do things in such a fashion that there are little things that we don’t need to pay attention to any longer. I didn’t want to take short-cuts in my stories, but I wanted things to operate on their own, so to speak – as they so often do in life. Sometimes I might have taken out too much. That was when I was beginning to feel I was going too far in this direction.

Someone, meaning it as praise, called me a ‘Minimalist’, and I didn’t like that, it just made me uncomfortable. There are great minimalist painters, writers and composers I guess, but it made me uncomfortable. I thought, maybe I’ve taken out too much. So maybe I’ve relaxed a bit. Relaxed is not the right word. Begun to open up.

Is that the motive behind the revision? Some of them are actually expanded as if the character had remembered more about the story.

Yes. That’s partly due to the fact I started looking at those differently. Some of the stories I went back to seemed like unfinished business to me. This is nothing too amazing. Frank O’Connor was a great one to revise his stories – even sometimes after they were in print. His great story ‘Guests of the Nation’ is published in about four different versions.

But perhaps it’s expected more of poets. In ‘On Writing’ you mention starting a story (‘Put Yourself In My Shoes’) with the sentence ‘He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang’, and you say that from there you made the story just as you’d make a poem, ‘one line and then the next, and the next…’ ‘Line’ is a word usually used for poetry isn’t it? You use some material both as a poem and as a story, as with ‘Distress Sale’ and ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’.

That’s unusual. I don’t think I’ve done it too often. That is the only case I can recall.

When do you decide when something is going to be a poem or a story?

Last spring when I wrote all the poems that make up this new book, everything that came to me seemed to want to be a poem. But I am sure that there are many many stories buried in the poems.

Can I ask you specifically then about how you write? Hemingway used to space out the words on the typewriter when he was writing fiction.

He wrote his first drafts in longhand. I write my first draft or rough draft in longhand. I write the first draft of a poem or of a story very quickly – I just get it out on the page. As Guy de Maupassant said, ‘get black on white’, get something down. Then everything is subject to change after that except for the first sentence – the first sentence or the first line of a poem or a story remains the same. Rarely if ever does that change. But everything else is subject to change. I get the bare bones of the thing down, then I feel like everything will be all right, eventually. I like to revise, to re-write. But I need something to go from, of course. So I guess there’s always the fear that if I don’t get it down in a hurry, I’ll lose it. It goes back to the old days of having to write in such a hurry and in such peculiar circumstances. This is not true these days, of course, but I still tend to work that way – get something down very fast and type it up. And once I get it typed up I can begin to work it. I mean really work on it.

Are endings a trouble? People always pick up on them, don’t they? Yours are very carefully pitched between confirming the pattern and being oblique.

I think I have overshot the end sometimes on some of the stories, and had to go back and work on it to get it right. Next to beginnings, endings are certainly the most important, most crucial, for poems or stories. I don’t think endings have caused me any more trouble – any more hard work – than the rest of the story, but they’ve got to be done just right. It’s often the last line or the last word of a poem or a story that really moves you in a certain way, that is meaningful to you. Most often I know how a story is going to end early on. I get the first line and the ending some way ahead.

Do you still teach creative writing?

No, I don’t. I received this grant from the Academy of Arts and Letters. It’s a tax-free annual income for 5 years, and it’s renewable at the end of that time. The only stipulation is that I do not have any other form of employment – that I am not teaching or running a hotel or working for wages in a saw-mill or what-have-you. So I resigned my job the day I got this news. I finished the semester and said I wouldn’t be coming back. I no longer teach and I don’t miss it. I think I did a good job when I was teaching but I don’t miss it at all. In fact I wonder how I got anything else done while I was teaching.

What did you feel able to teach? In Fires you quote John Gardner as saying writers are made as well as born, but then add in brackets ‘(Is this true? My God, I still don’t know)’.

You can teach writers, putative writers, some of the things not to do. You can teach them the absolute necessity of being honest in the work, not faking it.

I think in writing, like playing the violin or playing the piano, or painting, certain things can be taught. Some of the most distinguished violinists or pianists today studied with masters, with maestros. This dosn’t mean that everybody who studies with a maestro is going to become a great pianist or a great violinist or a great writer. But at least it keeps them on the right track. Michelangelo didn’t jump up full grown and do the Sistine Chapel – he worked as an apprentice with another painter for seven years. Beethoven learned to write his own music by studying with Haydn and other composers. I think this is an old and honourable relationship. You can’t make a great writer or even a decent writer out of somebody who’s incapable of writing, but I think certain things can be taught and passed along. And I think I was able to pass along some of these things to some students of mine, in the same way that certain things were passed along to me.

So I think by teaching writing or music or photography or architecture or any of the arts, young artists can be helped. They can also be hurt, but they can be hurt otherwise by not knowing anything at all. It is a phenomenon in our time over there it’s probably the single most important literary revolution that’s come along. Yeats learned a lot from Ezra Pound, and Pound helped and taught Ernest Hemingway as well as Yeats. Guy de Maupassant learned from Flaubert. Flaubert read de Maupassant’s stories in manuscript, and said, No, no, no, this will never do. Finally Guy de Maupassant gave Flaubert a story: ‘Boule de Suif’. Flaubert said, This is a story, you’ve done it. So that kind of informal teaching has always been going on, and what has been done these days is to formalize it.

Did you teach literature in your courses?

Yes. I had a unique situation at Syracuse University; I taught one course in fiction writing and I taught another course in Literature, but it could be a course of my own devising. Comparing an author’s creative work in novels or short stories and a critical work by the same author seemed to work out very well.

‘The Blue Stones’ is a beautiful poem in Fires, which turns on its epigraph from Flaubert. It reveals something of your directly Flaubertian regard for the mot juste. When did you read him?

I first read Madame Bovary many, many years ago. I’ve read it three times, most recently when I taught it two years ago. But that particular poem came from something that happened some time ago – the poem itself is not so old, I wrote it in 1978 or ’79. Many years ago I read the journals of the Goncourt Brothers, and in the Journals there’s this talk about Flaubert. The poem was based on a particular passage – Flaubert is talking to Edmond de Goncourt about writing Madame Bovary and how he would jack off at his desk when he was writing some of the love scenes in the novel. That stuck in my head.

How much do you think literature can help readers make sense of their lives?

I’ve read things, especially when I was younger, that made me know I was living my life in a very unbecoming way. I thought I could change my life, that I’d have to change my life after I put the book down. But it was impossible – impossible to go out and become a different man, or live a different life. I think literature can make us aware of some of our lacks, some things in our lives that diminish us, that have diminished us, and it can make us realize what it takes to be human, to be something larger than we really are, something better. I think literature can make us realize that our lives are not being lived to the fullest possible extent. But whether literature can actually change out lives I don’t know. I really don’t know. It would be nice to think so. Maybe a story or novel could change our lives, change our emotional lives, while we’re reading it. Maybe if we do this enough a process of osmosis will take place, will help us with what lies ahead.

I wonder what a Russian reading your work might think about America. Your stories aren’t political, are they? They don’t make that extension, and they’re not set in a sharply particular time.

No, it doesn’t much matter who’s running for President, they don’t care what Bill ‘s before Congress, because whoever’s President, whatever Bill ‘s before Congress, it’s not going to made any real difference. And what other readers in other countries might make out of this I don’t know, but I think there are enough other things in the stories that interested readers can connect up with.

But somebody attacked me last fall, a neo-conservative critic, saying that he was afraid my stories were going to give a false impression of America – to the Americans, as well as to people in other countries. (The stories have been translated into twenty or so languages.) Because under the Reagan administration, you see, people should be happy, people shouldn’t be suffering, or out of work, or sick of their jobs. This critic was saying that we shouldn’t write about people who are dispossessed and unhappy, and whose lives have gone bust. ‘Let’s put a happy face on things’ was what he seemed to be wanting.

But I don’t know. I read stories by Maxim Gorky and Chekhov, and a number of Italian writers and French writers, and Irish short story writers, and most often they’ re writing about the dispossessed, the submerged population. They’re not writing about professional people who are having crises at their white-collar places of employment, or worried that something’s happened to their Rolls-Royce. I’m not trying to take any political stance. I’m just writing stories, writing something about what I know about.

A reviewer said of ‘Where is Everyone?’: ‘I laughed all the way through the story – but it was awkward, uneasy laughter’. He said he needed a couple of stiff drinks afterwards. Your humour is close to pain, isn’t it?

That’s life, is it not? In a lot of instances the humour has a double edge to it. We laugh at it because if we didn’t laugh at it – I don’ t mean to sound corny, but if we didn’t laugh at it we could bawl our eyes out. I’m glad somebody does find humour in these stories. A story in Cathedral called ‘Careful’, about a guy who has his ear plugged up, is on the face of it a grim and desperate situation, but I read the story aloud at Harvard University last month – the first time I’d read it – and the people howled. They found it terribly funny in parts. They were not laughing at the last pages of the story, but there are places that are very funny. It’s not the Saturday Nite Live kind of humour, it’s dark humour.

The story ‘Cathedral’ really is the only one where people make contact, isn’t it? In ‘After the Denim’ it’s clear the Packers do love each other, but it’s unusual in your stories, isn’t it?

The fact that there’s not much love and connection made between my characters?

Yes. You really make a jump at the end of the ‘Cathedral’, when suddenly they move together instead of apart.

Yes, and I like that a lot. When I wrote that story I knew the story was different in kind and degree than any story I’d ever written. And that was the first story I wrote for the book Cathedral. I think the story signals something for me that is not present in the earlier stories. I think that in the book Cathedral a lot of the stories are fuller and more interesting, for me anyway, than any of the other stories. The story ‘Fever’ for instance – where the wife has gone away and left him with the kids. ‘A Small Good Thing’, that’s a story where people make connection after the baby has died.

But my life has changed and I think it’s fair to say I’m becoming more optimistic. So I hope that’s what you’ve detected in the work.

I do keep going back, however, for a lot of things that made a great impression on me when I was younger. I do go back to things that happened in my other life for material. It’s still very much present for me, though my circumstances are different now of course.

How autobiographical are the stories in fact?

Stories don’t just come out of thin air, they have to come from someplace. So everything I’ve written about – something in that story has really happened – or I’ve overheard something, I’m bearing witness to in some way. I imagine, I recollect, I combine – as any good writer does. Writers can’t write strict autobiography it would be the dullest book in the world. But you pull something from here, and you pull something from over here, well it’s like a snow-ball coming down a hill, it gathers up everything that’s in its way – things we’ve heard, things we’ve witnessed, things we’ve experienced. And you stick bits and pieces here and then make some kind of coherent whole out of it.

Seeing all your stories together in one book brings out continuities, doesn’t it?

I think that a writer’s signature should be on his work, just like a composer’s signature should be on his work. If you hear a few bars of Mozart, you don’t need to hear too much to know who wrote that music, and I’d like to think that you could pick up a story by me and read a few sentences or a paragraph, without seeing the name, and know it was my story. Even though it might be about living in London and commuting to Brussels, something I’ve never written about and probably won’t.

So this is a bit strange. I started out writing stories and poems and I guess at the time my expectations were very low, so I don’t know exactly how to relate to this. Carver stories – no one could be more surprised about this than I am. But I’m very pleased and happy, yes.