On not rereading Raymond Carver

The trouble with Raymond Carver is that I read him when I was drinking. When I read him now I am assailed by memories of myself drunk, weeping over my paperback copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love sometime in the late 1980s, drinking from a five-litre box of white wine secreted in a hall cupboard next to an unending supply of smoked mussels in flat oval cans given to me by a recovering alcoholic who was a travelling salesman for John West seafood. The salesman had two years sobriety when he relapsed on holiday in Victoria Falls and tried to shoot his wife and a waiter on the hotel verandah overlooking Mosi oa Tunya, the’smoke that thunders’.

 

When I began reading Raymond Carver I didn’t know he was becoming famous. His stories frightened and depressed me, but I found them a mirror to the parts of myself I would not look at. Years later when I read he was termed ‘minimalist’ I was surprised because I thought he had amplitude and felt at home in the world of deadbeat drunks, had an affection and even nostalgia for places where it never seems to get any better. I had grown up in an ugly small town of used car lots and army barracks and bungalow motels and hated that life. I had escaped into fiction to get away from it and Carver took me right back there.

 

There were faults, it seemed to me then. He wasn’t honest about adult children, he blamed them for not forgiving the drunk who was their father. His bitterness skewed that aspect of his writing. He also wrote about being honest in Fires in a way that made me think of the practised sincerity of an alcoholic liar who has managed to get away with half-truths all his life. His own life was not available for the same kind of truth-telling he could reach in his fiction.

 

But one of his stories was all about a man who is deaf in one ear, a build-up of wax, a temporary stoppage. This narrator is also drinking himself to death all alone in an apartment. His wife, angry and frightened, comes to visit him. He has a bottle of champagne hidden in the bathroom. He can’t hear anything his wife is saying, even after she has jabbed at his ear with a hatpin. She has spoken to his landlady upstairs and has found out how bad his drinking is. The narrator is oblique in telling us any of this but he lets the truth slip out. He can’t hear his wife, just a sloshing noise in his ear. But he doesn’t want to hear what his wife has to say to him. Even when he can hear again, he doesn’t want to listen. No matter how bad it gets he wants to be alone in that apartment with the light of late afternoon coming through the blinds and a fridge full of champagne.

 

It is a devastating short story. For years I could not read it when I was sober, only when I was soothed and anaesthetised by alcohol. The despair would come up inside me like a great dark wave swelling out of nowhere and I would sit all alone in tears, unable to say to myself why the story moved me so much. I knew and didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.

 

As long as there are drunks and ex-drunks, Carver will be read for his austere and bitter truthfulness. The amnesia and lost places of drinking were his territory, he understood what alcoholism does to consciousness, that inexorable downward spiral:  ’This is what it felt like and this is what happened to my life while I was off drinking somewhere.’ In the meanwhile I look forward to the day I can reread Carver without having my former self walk into the room, swaying a little, eyes unfocused and ready to start weeping those tears of bad faith and self-injury.