VANTAG galeria: Caleb Crain on Raymond Carver

Monday, June 26, 2023

Caleb Crain on Raymond Carver

Caleb Crain on "Careful" by Raymond Carver.

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Portrait of Raymond Carver, 1988. Photograph by Marion Ettlinger, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This week, we’ve unlocked a story from the archive selected by Caleb Crain, whose story “The Letter” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244.

Some products of the eighties are immortal, I realized the other night, while I was listening to the Pet Shop Boys and thinking about Raymond Carver’s short story “Careful,” which was published in The Paris Review in the summer of 1983. The Pet Shop Boys may not seem to have a lot in common with Carver, but I was having a moment, as they say. Let me see if I can get back to it and make clearer what I was thinking.

I started to read Carver in high school, judging by the squiggliness of my signature in a paperback of his I still have. My understanding of the writer, as a social role that a person could inhabit, was then crystallizing, and stories I had heard about Carver were crucial. There was the long struggle he had put into his writing, which he had had to do in parked cars and during nighttime janitorial shifts. There was his apprenticeship to John Gardner, whose books of writing advice seem ridiculous to me now but which I read very earnestly at the time, because they made writing sound like a vocation that required the self-hazarding self-regard of knight-errantry. There was the plundering that Carver did of his personal life, even at its most embarrassing, which seemed proof of how much he was willing to sacrifice.

And then there was Carver’s style, both psychological and literary. My ability to show masculinity was fairly aspirational in those days. Carver seemed to have mastered it. The feelings of his male heroes were cauterized, and their smoking and drinking suggested indifference to their bodies, or at least to those bodies’ mere preservation. Neither the cauterization nor the indifference was complete—that was part of how perfectly the masculinity was being performed. The cauterization had been done jaggedly, by the irregular operation of market forces, which hardly polished the psyches it seared; there were eruptions of anger and sorrow. And now and then a sign of corporeal decay filled a character with dread. In “Careful,” which I first read in a Vintage Contemporaries paperback of Cathedral that came out in 1984, the main character, Lloyd, is seen hitting the side of his head early on in the story. Carver lets half a paragraph go by before he explains why: Lloyd’s right ear is stopped up. It’s a trivial, silly, banal, and maddening problem. It makes vivid the everydayness of Lloyd’s misery, isolation, and helplessness. Because of it, Lloyd can’t hear what other people are saying, but in a Dantean twist, much of the time Lloyd doesn’t seem to want to hear.

I took all this very personally when I first read the story. Someday, teenage me was sure, I was going to live in an apartment like Lloyd’s and my ears were going to be clogged up the same way. I, too, was going to have appealingly roughened psychic surfaces. I needed to remember how Lloyd gets out of his predicament, because, unlike Lloyd, I probably wasn’t going to have a soon-to-be-ex-wife to help me.

In fact, my ears didn’t ever get clogged up as bad as Lloyd’s, or at least they haven’t so far. Nor did I grow up to be a man much like Lloyd, or like Carver, really. Which isn’t to say I didn’t ever try to put on their kind of armor. I did, but then I turned out to be gay, and this is where the Pet Shop Boys come in: nearly every gay man of my generation started off trying to be a straight one, and one’s gay masculinity, when one finally gets around to it, is therefore to some extent an adaptation, a step away from the path but also a step further along it—a riff on one’s initial, somewhat imaginary straight masculinity. This is the reason, I think, that some of the best Pet Shop Boys tracks are covers of classic straight anthems: of Elvis Presley’s rendition of “Always on My Mind,” of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.” The gay singers camp the songs up, but they don’t just camp them up. One senses that the Pet Shop Boys have real fondness for the earlier songs and feel numerous points of identification with the songs’ personae. They really were these men, too, once upon a time, and somewhere inside, they still are, and so a histrionic quality in the straight original is liberated in the gay cover version, not transcended. The awareness that one’s feelings can never be consistently or permanently confined within the ethos that society has prepared for one—this sense of needing to break out is always within straight masculinity, too. A gay person has to come up with a new approach to the shame that patrols the borders of straightness, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still feel it, or sympathize with feeling at its mercy.

Another way of putting it: my ears may not have gotten clogged up (yet), but I have sometimes wanted attention I was pretty sure I didn’t deserve, and I’m still going to die and am capable of feeling all kinds of sorry for myself about it. (It wasn’t until the third time I re-read “Careful” last week that it dawned on me what Lloyd is rehearsing when he gets in bed with his shoes on, toward the end of the story, and crosses his arms over his chest.) Carver wouldn’t be Carver without his stoic, heartbroken eighties masculinity, but in a way it’s beside the point to what is immortal in his style: his ability to make a story out of rhythm, to reveal feelings by implication, to suggest what spills over when communication fails, when the conventions that usually define and channel warmth and meaning can no longer hold them—warmth and meaning that are, anyway, like all mortal things, expiring. Indeed, Carver’s tone, at the opening of “Careful,” as he itemizes the dinette set, sofa, and combination refrigerator-stove in the rooms that Lloyd has rented, reminds me now of nothing so much as Jean Rhys’s tone at the start of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, as she describes her heroine’s hotel room: “The bed was large and comfortable, covered with an imitation satin quilt of faded pink. There was a wardrobe without a looking-glass, a red plush sofa and—opposite the bed and reflecting it—a very spotted mirror in a gilt frame.” For both Rhys’s and Carver’s narrators, interior design is existential: in each work there’s the same close attention to surfaces and the same terror of looking beneath them, the same need to paint an exact image of how far they have fallen in the social world and the same compulsion to try to draw out of that image a reassurance it doesn’t contain. Whether it’s a man or a woman demoralized by the furniture—or a straight or a gay one—is not what makes it literature.

—Caleb Crain, author of “The Letter”

To read our Art of Fiction interview with Raymond Carver, or more from issue no. 88? Why not subscribe? You’ll receive four print issues a year and digital access to our entire seventy-year archive.

PROSE
Careful
Raymond Carver

“Farther,” she said. He held onto the chair for balance and lowered his head even more. All of the objects in his vision, all of the objects in his life, it seemed, were at the far end of this room. He could feel the warm liquid pour into his ear. Then she brought the dishrag up and held it there. In a little while, she began to massage the area around his ear. She pressed into the soft part of the flesh between his jaw and skull. She moved her fingers to the area over his ear and began to work the tips of her fingers back and forth. After a while, he didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been longer. He was still holding onto the chair. Now and then, as her fingers pressed the side of his head, he could feel the warm oil she’d poured in there wash back and forth in the canals inside his ear. When she pressed a certain way, he imagined he could hear, inside his head, a soft, swishing sound.

From issue no. 88 (Summer 1983)

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