Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I am so glad you
are here with us today. If you are new to the
show, here's the drill. We take a massive stack
of articles, biographies, research papers, and
critical essay stuff that would take you weeks
to get through on your own, and we squeeze them.
We really do. We squeeze them until we get the
pure juice of knowledge out of them. We are looking
for the insights, the context, and the why behind
the facts, all without the fluff or the information
overload. That is exactly right. Our goal is
to get you to that aha moment. We want to take
you past the Wikipedia summary and into the engine
room of the topic. Yeah. We want you to walk
away feeling like you didn't just hear a story,
but that you actually understand the machinery
behind it. And today, oh man, today we are tackling
a giant, a quiet giant, maybe, but a giant nonetheless.
We are looking at the life and work of Raymond
Carver. Carver, yes. Now, if you have taken a
creative writing class in the last 40 years,
or even if you've just casually browsed a bookstore's
fiction section, you know this name. Oh, you
do? You have felt this man's influence, whether
you realize it or not. He is often called the
American Chekhov. And that's not just some, you
know, fancy marketing phrase. It's a real comparison.
Right. He is basically credited with single handedly
revitalizing the short story form in the 1980s.
It is honestly hard to overstate how influential
he was. You have to understand the context before
Carver hit the scene. The literary landscape
in America was. Well, it was very different.
You had high modernism. You had metafiction writers
who were writing about writing. It was very cerebral,
very tricky, sometimes a bit academic. Very exclusive
in a way. Very exclusive. And then suddenly here
comes Raymond Carver with these brutal, simple,
honest stories about working class people. It
just changed the temperature of American fiction.
It grounded it again. But what makes this deep
dive so fascinating to me and why I was so excited
to dig through the stack of sources is that the
story of Raymond Carver is just as compelling
and frankly just as tragic and triumphant as
anything he ever wrote. This isn't just a biography
of a writer who sat in a room and typed for 30
years. Not at all. It's a survival story. This
is a case study in Dirty Realism. It's a brutal
look at the struggle between making art and just
trying to survive the day. It's a study in poverty.
in alcoholism, and crucially, in the ethics of
editing. We are going to get into some really
messy territory regarding authorship today. Oh,
the Gordon Lisch controversy. Yeah. That is the
elephant in the room. We absolutely have to unpack
that because it changes how you read every single
word Carver published. It really does. It's fundamental.
And structurally, his life is so clean cut, it
almost feels scripted. He strictly divided his
existence into two parts. He actually referred
to them that way. He did. His first life and
his second life. That distinction is vital, isn't
it? It's everything. You have the first life,
which was defined by chaos. Poverty, bad decisions,
and a really severe life -threatening battle
with alcoholism. Total collapse. Just utter collapse.
And then you have the second life, which was
this miraculous period of sobriety, redemption,
and global acclaim. It's a redemption arc, but
it's a gritty one. It's not a Disney movie. No,
not at all. So we have a lot of material to get
through. We are pulling from biographical accounts,
publication histories, details regarding his
literary estate, and even some really interesting
notes on the film adaptations of his work. We've
got a lot to unpack. Okay, so here is our mission
statement for this deep dive. We want to understand
how a guy from a blue -collar sawmill town in
the Pacific Northwest, a guy who didn't even
finish his master's degree, ended up shaping
an entire literary movement. Right. How does
that guy become the guy? Exactly. Then we need
to unpack the massive controversy surrounding
his famous minimalist style. Specifically, how
much of that was actually him and how much was
his editor, Gordon Lish? The million dollar question.
And finally, we're going to look at that redemption
arc because honestly, it's one of the most compelling
comebacks in literary history. It really is.
And I think to understand any of that, we have
to start at the very beginning. We have to look
at where he came from because with Carver. Geography
isn't just a setting. It's a character. It's
destiny. Let's go there. Segment one, the blue
-collar roots. Raymond Clevey Carver Jr. was
born on May 25, 1938, in Klatskanie, Oregon.
Which is a mill town on the Columbia River. Yeah.
But he mostly grew up in Yakima, Washington.
Now let's paint the picture for the listener.
When we say Yakima in the 1940s and 50s, we aren't
talking about the Pacific Northwest of Portlandia.
Oh no! We aren't talking about artisanal coffee
shops and tech startups. No, absolutely not.
This is harsh, dry country. It's the eastern
side of the Cascades. It's agricultural and industrial.
It's apple orchards and sawmills. Yeah. It's
a place where you work with your hands and your
body breaks down by the time you're 50. It's
a tough place. And I think when people picture
a famous writer, they imagine someone growing
up in a house full of books, maybe parents who
are professors or lawyers. A certain level of
comfort. Right. They imagine a certain level
of comfort. That was not the Carver household.
Not even close. And this is crucial context.
His father, Clevey Raymond Carver, was a sawmill
worker originally from Arkansas. He was a fisherman
and, importantly for our story later, a very
heavy drinker. A functional alcoholic for a time.
For a time. And his mother, Ella. worked on and
off as a waitress and a retail clerk. She was
always trying to hold things together. So to
be clear, we are talking about the working poor.
Yes, and that distinction is vital. A lot of
writers observe the working class. They might
go on a poverty tour to get material for their
novel, or they might work a summer job in a factory
to see what it's like. Sure, research. Carver
didn't do that. He was the working poor. He grew
up in that environment. His brother James was
born in 1943, and the family dynamic was always
centered on just getting by. The anxiety of if
the car breaks down, we don't eat was the baseline
hum of his childhood. Wow. And his early interests,
they really reflect that environment, too. The
documentation says he wasn't reading high theory
or French philosophy. No, no. He was reading
novels by Mickey Spillane. He was reading publications
like Sports Afield and Outdoor Life. He was out
hunting and fishing with his friends and family.
Exactly. He was immersed in the outdoors and
the gritty reality of that specific American
landscape. It grinded him. When he wrote about
fishing or hunting later in his stories, he wasn't
looking up the terminology in a library. He lived
it. He lived it. Right. When a character in a
Carver story claims a fish, Carver knows exactly
what that smells like, the texture of the scales,
the sound the knife makes. That authenticity
is something you can't fake. You feel it on the
page. Now we have to talk about how quickly adulthood
hit him, because this blows my mind, and I think
it really explains the pressure cooker that his
life became. He graduated from Yakima High School
in 1956, and then he immediately started working
with his father at a sawmill in California. The
path was set. Graduate, work at the mill, die
at the mill. That was the trajectory. There was
no college fund waiting for him. But then, boom,
June 1957. The turning point. Or what seemed
like one. He is 19 years old. He marries Marianne
Burke. How old was she? She was 16. Just 16.
She had just graduated from a private Episcopal
school for girls. A completely different world.
19 and 16. They were babies. They were essentially
kids playing house, except the stakes were incredibly
real. And they didn't waste any time. Not at
all. Their daughter, Christine, was born in December
of that same year, 1957. And their son, Vance,
came along just a year later. So before he's
even old enough to legally drink, he's a husband
and a father of two. I just can't imagine that
pressure. And this sets up the dynamic that would
dominate the next 20 years of his life. The grind.
The struggle for time. The struggle for money.
This is where the tragedy of the first life begins.
Not because they were bad people, but because
the economic trap was sprung before they even
knew what was happening. OK, let's list some
of the jobs he helped just to give the listener
a sense of this. I'm looking at the list here
from our sources and it's just it's brutal. Delivery
man, janitor, library assistant, sawmill laborer.
And meanwhile, Marianne is working as an administrative
assistant, a salesperson, a waitress and later
a high school English teacher. Whatever it took.
It was a constant hustle. They were always broke.
They were moving from rental to rental. Bankruptcy
was always looming over their heads. They filed
for bankruptcy twice, I believe. Twice. And this
is where we find one of those huge aha moments
regarding his writing style. Yes. This is so
important. Go on. There's a persistent myth that
Carver's style, that short, punchy, minimalist
style, was purely an aesthetic choice. that he
sat down in a leather chair and decided, I shall
be a minimalist. Right. As if. But when you look
at his life, you realize it was a logistical
necessity. There was a specific anecdote about
his time in Sacramento in the mid -60s. He was
working as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital.
Oh, I love this story. It's so cinematic. So
he's the janitor. He's pushing a mop. He's the
janitor. But he figures out a system. He would
do all the janitorial work, cleaning the floors,
the toilets, the trash, everything in the first
hour of his shift. Just a mad dash of cleaning.
So he could sit down and write for the rest of
the shift. Wow. In some back closet, probably.
Exactly. Think about what that does to your writing.
You are exhausted. You are smelling bleach. You
are stealing time from your employer. You are
worried about money. You're not writing a symphony.
No. You don't have the luxury of spending four
years plotting out a 600 -page novel with complex
subplots and sprawling genealogies. You need
to write something you can finish in one sitting.
Because if you don't finish it tonight... You
might not get a chance to come back to it for
a week or ever. Precisely. The format of his
work, short stories and poems, wasn't just an
aesthetic choice initially. It was a logistical
necessity. His lifestyle dictated his form. He
wrote short pieces because that's all he had
the bandwidth for. He needed works that were
portable, that he could hold in his head while
he was mopping a floor. That makes so much sense.
It's like the pressure of his life compressed
the coal into these little diamonds of stories.
But he did try to get a formal education in writing,
right? He did. It wasn't all just writing in
hospital closets. No, he did. And this leads
us to the education of a writer. He moved his
family to Paradise, California. Ironic name,
given their struggles. Very ironic. This was
in 1958. He started attending Chico State College.
And this is where fate stepped in. He enrolled
in a creative writing course taught by John Gardner.
John Gardner, the famous novelist? Grendel, the
sunlight dialogues? Yes, though at the time he
was a recent doctoral graduate, just a young,
passionate professor. But he became a massive
mentor for Carver. He saw the talent immediately.
What did he do? Well, for Run, he gave Carver
the key to his office so he could write on weekends.
Just an incredible act of generosity. But more
importantly... Gardner gave him a piece of advice
that is almost legendary now. We talked about
minimalism earlier. Well, Gardner started planting
those seeds. What was the advice? Gardner told
him to use 15 words instead of 25. Use 15 words
instead of 25. Okay, that's specific. It's about
economy. It's about cutting the fat. Gardner
was teaching him that every word has to fight
for its life on the page. If a word isn't doing
work, fire it. Get rid of it. Now, keep that
in mind. Because later, when we talk about his
editor, Gordon Lish, we're going to see that
ratio get even more extreme. Yeah. But Gardner
was the first one to tell him, keep it tight.
Don't show off. Just tell the truth. After Chico
State, he moved to Humboldt State College in
Arcata. He's studying under Richard Cortez Day.
He's serving as the editor for the literary magazine
there called Toyon. Right. He's getting his B
.A. in general studies. Interestingly. He avoided
the foreign language requirements, which is a
very Carver detail. He just wanted to focus on
the writing. He wasn't trying to be an academic.
No. And despite having a B -minus average, because,
again, he was prioritizing his own writing over
coursework, he got accepted into the holy grail
of writing programs, the Iowa Writers Workshop.
This is the big leagues. This is where the literary
elite are made. Flannery O 'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut,
Philip Roth. The list of Iowa alumni is insane.
It's the pinnacle. He gets a $1 ,000 fellowship
for the 1963 -1964 academic year. So the blue
-collar kid from Yakima packs up the family and
heads to Iowa. How did that go? Not well. Not
well. No. It was basically a disaster. He felt
completely out of place. You have to remember,
the Iowa Writers Workshop was a very upper -middle
-class milieu, as the sources describe it. You
had kids from Harvard and Yale. They didn't have
wives and children. They weren't worried about
paying the electric bill. They were there to
discuss theory with a capital T. And Carver's
there, probably wearing cheap clothes, worrying
about feeding his kids, feeling like a total
alien. He was culturally alienated. He was homesick
for California. He only completed 12 credits.
He didn't even finish the degree. No. He left
after one year. He didn't get the MFA. In fact,
later on his CV, he falsely claimed he got the
MFA, which shows you how much pressure he felt
about credentials. And the shame. And how much
shame he carried about leaving. But the reality
was he couldn't afford to stay, emotionally or
financially. Mary Ann even tried to intercede
with the program director to get him more money,
comparing his plate to Tennessee Williams, but
it didn't work. Wow. Carver eventually just decided
to leave. He couldn't do it. That class tension
seems like it really defined him. He was talented
enough to be in the room with the elite, but
he never felt like he belonged in the room. Exactly.
And that tension fuels the stories. Yeah. His
characters are often people who feel life is
happening to them, people who are on the outside
looking in. They're bewildered by their own bad
luck. They don't have the language of the elite
to explain their own pain. So he goes back to
California. And for a while, it looks like he
might go the straight and narrow path. He gets
a white -collar job. Yeah, this is the late 60s.
Yeah. A brief moment of stability or what looked
like it. He moves to Palo Alto and works at Science
Research Associates, which was a subsidiary of
IBM as a textbook editor. Yeah, he's wearing
a tie, editing textbooks. It was a transition
period. He's making connections, too. He meets
Gordon Lish around this time, who was working
across the street at a place called Behavioral
Research Laboratories. They started grabbing
drinks together. Ah, okay. Put a pin in that
name. Gordon Lish. That relationship is going
to become the most important and most volatile
creative partnership of his life. Absolutely.
Before we get to the literary stardom, we have
to go through the darkness. We have to talk about
the first life and the collapse. Right. Segment
three, the alcoholism. The sources say the serious
drinking really kicked into high gear around
1973 or 1974. That's the timeline. Carver admitted
himself that he gave up writing and took to full
-time drinking. Full -time drinking. That's his
phrase. His phrase. It wasn't just a bad habit.
It was a consumption of his entire existence.
Yeah. We aren't talking about having a glass
of wine with dinner. We were talking about vodka
in the morning. We were talking about blackouts.
There's this infamous period where he returns
to Iowa, of all places, as a visiting lecturer.
And he's teaching alongside another literary
giant, John Cheever. Teaching might be a strong
word. Laughs. Right. The source says Carver stated
they did less teaching than drinking and almost
no writing. It's one of the great tragic pairings
in American letters. Cheevers was also a terrible
alcoholic. So you had these two brilliant writers,
these two masters of the short form, just enabling
each other's self -destruction. Can you imagine
being a student in that class? You have Raymond
Carver and John Cheever, two of the greatest
American writers, and they are just getting smashed
together. It sounds romantic in a tragic bohemian
way. the tortured artist trope. But the reality
was grim. It was messy. It was sad. Carver was
also trying to juggle teaching gigs at UC Santa
Cruz and Berkeley at the same time. He was commuting,
or trying to, but he was missing classes. He
was hospitalized for alcohol -related illnesses.
Eventually, he was gently asked to resign. He
was burning bridges everywhere he went. He couldn't
hold a job. And the toll this took on his family,
reading about it is heartbreaking. We have the
account from Marianne Burke Carver's memoir,
What It Used to Be Like. It is heartbreaking.
The fall began in earnest around 1972. He started
an affair. The drinking escalated. Marianne writes
that by the fall of 1974, he was more dead than
alive. More dead than alive. That phrase just
sticks with you. She had to drop out of her own
Ph .D. program to drive him to his classes because
he couldn't drive himself. He'd lost his license.
And it wasn't just negligence. There was physical
abuse. Right. We can't shy away from that part.
We can't. There were smashed bottles. There was
violence. It was a chaotic, dangerous household
for her and for the kids. And she stayed for
a long time. She said she wanted to hang in there
for the long haul. She thought she could outlast
the drinking. That's a very common dynamic in
these situations. She remembered the boy she
married at 16. She believed in his talent. She
was his first and most important editor in many
ways. But there was a breaking point. When was
that? It happened in 1978. Carver had started
a new teaching position in El Paso. And he met
someone else. He tried to invite his new partner
to Thanksgiving. Oh, wow. With Marianne and the
family? Yes. That's a bridge too far. Unbelievable.
Yeah. And Marianne realized, I've gone through
all these years fighting to keep it balanced,
and here it is coming at me again. She realized
she had to save herself. It's important, though,
isn't it, to not just gloss over this? When we
read his stories about broken marriages and desperate
people sitting at kitchen tables drinking gin...
We need to know he isn't making this up. He isn't
imagining what a bad marriage feels like. He
isn't. He rode from the trenches. And he believed,
truly, that he would have died at age 40 if he
hadn't stopped. He was hospitalized three times
between 1976 and 1977. He was on the brink of
death. His liver was failing. His brain was frying.
But then the miracle happens. Segment four, the
second life. June 2nd, 1977. That's the date.
That is the date Raymond Carver stopped drinking.
He did it with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And he drew a hard line in the sand. Everything
after June Tekken, 1977, he called his second
life. It's amazing that he could pinpoint it
so precisely. It's like a rebirth. And shortly
after this, in November 1977, he meets Tess Gallagher
at a conference in Dallas. Tess Gallagher is
a phenomenal poet in her own right. And this
relationship was completely different from his
first marriage. How so? It was a meeting of literary
peers. It wasn't founded on teenage dependency
or the chaos of survival. It was two mature artists
finding each other. They moved in together, lived
in El Paso, Tucson, and finally settled in Syracuse,
New York. And I love this detail about their
life in Syracuse. Apparently they were so popular
and their house was such a hub for students and
friends that they had to hang a sign outside
to stop interruptions. Writers at work. Writers
at work. Like, go away. We are being geniuses
in here. But it shows the stability he finally
found. Tess managed the household. She managed
his estate later. But she also protected his
time. This stability allowed his work to flourish
in a way it never could during the chaos of the
first life. He wasn't writing in a janitor's
closet anymore. No. He had a room. He had peace.
He had a partner who understood the work. So
he's sober. He's happy or at least stable. He's
with Tess. But now we have to talk about the
work itself. And this brings us to the biggest
controversy in Carver scholarship. Segment five,
the minimalist controversy and Gordon Lish. OK,
let's unpack this because this is the stuff that
literary critics fight wars over. This gets to
the heart of what it means to be an author. First,
let's define the terms. Dirty realism. What is
it? Dirty realism is a label critics apply to
a group of writers in the 70s and 80s. Carver,
Richard Ford, Tobias Wolfe. It refers to fiction
about blue -collar, marginalized people. It focuses
on the sadness and loss in the everyday lives
of ordinary people. It's not about kings and
queens or professors. It's about the guy who
sells vitamins door -to -door and his wife who's
leaving him. It's about people who shop at Kmart
and drink cheap beer. And then there's minimalism.
Right. Minimalism refers to the style. Sparse,
brief, omitted details, no adverbs. The idea
is that what you don't say is as important as
what you do say. It's the iceberg theory, 10
% on the surface, 90 % underwater. The reader
has to do the work. But here's the thing. Carver
rejected these categories. He didn't like being
called a minimalist. Yeah. He felt it was diminutive.
He thought it implied his work was small or lacked
ambition. He just thought he was writing stories.
But the reason his stories became the definition
of minimalism has a lot to do with Gordon Lish.
Okay, so we mentioned Lish earlier. He was the
fiction editor at Esquire magazine. He was a
major champion of Carver's work. He was known
as Captain Fiction. He was a kingmaker. Yeah.
If Lish liked you, your career was made. Yeah.
But he was also, let's say, hands -on. Hands
-on is putting it mildly. The documents we have,
the letters, the marked up manuscripts. It's
shocking. Lish was aggressive. Remember John
Gardner's advice? Use 15 words instead of 25.
Yeah. Lish's philosophy was use five words in
place of 15. Or better yet, say nothing at all.
Wow. That's a huge difference. It's a fundamental
difference in worldview. He performed what has
been called a surgical amputation on the Carver
stories. He would take a story Carver submitted
and he would cut it down to the bone. How much
are we talking about? You would cut 40, 50, sometimes
70 percent of the text. He would change the titles.
He would change the endings. He would change
the tone. He would strip away sentimentality,
make it bleaker, harder, colder. And Carver let
him do this. Why? For a while, yes. You have
to understand the power dynamic. Carver was insecure.
He was a recovering alcoholic. He needed the
validation. He needed the publication credits.
Lish. was powerful at Esquire. He felt he didn't
have a choice. He felt he didn't have a choice,
so Carver allowed it. He suppressed his own instincts.
He was grateful, in a way, but also deeply troubled
by it. The result was the 1981 collection, what
we talk about when we talk about love. This is
the breakout book. It made Carver famous. It
put him on the map. But it is heavily, heavily
influenced by Lish's editing. It is the Bible
of Minimalism. Yeah. But is it Carver? That's
the question. Eventually, Carver started to push
back. He did. He felt his work was being hijacked.
He wrote a letter to Lish at one point begging
him to stop, saying he felt like he was losing
his soul. He said, I can't take this anymore.
If the book has to be this way, I don't want
to publish it. And what did Lish do? He basically
ignored him. Lish went ahead anyway. By the time
The Collection Cathedral came out in 1983, Carver
had regained more control. He was famous enough
to say no. And Cathedral is different, right?
The tone is different. Very different. It's widely
considered his masterpiece. The stories are longer.
They're more generous. They're more optimistic.
Yeah. If you read the story Cathedral, it ends
with a moment of connection and transcendence.
A blind man and a narrator drawing a cathedral
together on a piece of paper. It's a moment of
pure empathy. It's not just bleak despair. That
was Carver moving away from Lish's shadow. And
this controversy didn't end when Carver died.
In fact, it kind of exploded in 2009. Yes. Tess
Gallagher, his widow, knew the truth. She had
the original manuscripts, the versions Carver
typed, before Lish got his red pen out. Yeah.
She fought for years to have the stories published
as Carver originally wrote them. And that resulted
in the book Beginners. Exactly. Beginners was
published in 2009 by the Library of America.
It contains the original unedited versions of
the stories from what we talk about. So now as
a reader, you can actually compare them side
by side. You can play detective. You can read
the bath version and a small good thing. The
Carver version. And the difference is staggering.
It's not just a few word changes. It's a complete
change in philosophy. Let's look at that example.
Walk us through it. Okay, so in the bath, a young
boy is hit by a car on his birthday and goes
into a coma. The parents are terrified. The baker
keeps calling the house about the birthday cake,
not knowing what happened. In the Lish version,
the story ends abruptly. The baker calls again,
and it feels like a menace. It feels like existential
dread. It's cold. In the Carver version, a small
good thing. In A Small Good Thing, the story
continues for another 10 or 15 pages. The boy
dies. The parents are broken. They go to the
bakery to confront the baker. The baker realizes
his mistake. He didn't know the boy died. He
is mortified. He apologizes. Wow. He sits them
down. He gives them warm rolls to eat. He tells
them eating is a small good thing in a time like
this. And they sit there together until morning,
finding comfort in each other, finding a moment
of grace in the darkness. That completely changes
the meaning of the story. It turns it from a
horror story into a story about communion and
forgiveness. Exactly. It shows the real Carver
versus the Lish Carver. Lish wanted cool, detached
shock. Carver wanted human connection, however
small. That is fascinating. It really makes you
question the concept of authorship. Like who
actually wrote the classic version? Was it the
writer or the editor who cut 50 percent of the
words? It's the great debate. Some people prefer
the Lisch versions because they are so punchy
and unique. They have this icy precision. Others
prefer the Carver versions because they have
more heart. But you can't tell the story of Raymond
Carver without talking about that tug of war.
OK, let's quickly run through the major works
for listeners who want to start reading. We mentioned
what we talk about. And cathedral. What else?
His first major collection was Will You Please
Be Quiet, Please? in 1976. That was pre -Lish's
heaviest edits, and it was shortlisted for the
National Book Award. That's a great place to
start. Okay. And then shortly before he died,
he published Where I'm Calling From in 1988,
which is the definitive collection of his stories.
It has new stories and his own curated selection
of the old ones. If you buy one book, buy that
one. And we shouldn't ignore his poetry. He was
a serious poet. He thought of himself as a poet
first, sometimes. He was. Collections like Ultramarine
and All of Us. His poetry is very similar to
his fiction -accessible narrative, clear. You
can understand it in one reading. He didn't believe
in hiding the meaning behind complex metaphors.
He wanted to communicate directly with the reader.
Which brings us to the end of the road, segment
seven. Death and legacy. It happens so fast.
He gets sober in 77. He has this incredible decade
of work. And then... Lung cancer. He was a heavy
smoker. Cigarettes were a prop in all his stories,
and they were a prop in his life. He was diagnosed
in 1988. He died on August Tech in 1988. He was
only 50 years old. 50. That is tragically young.
He was just getting started with his second life.
It is. But remember, he thought he would die
at 40 from the drink. So he viewed those last
10 years as... Gravy. Gravy. That's the title
of one of his last poems. He talks about this
explicit idea that every day he lived past his
drinking days was a bonus. It was all gravy.
He and Tess managed to get married just six weeks
before he died in Reno, Nevada. A proper ending
to their partnership. A validation of their bond.
It was important to both of them. And I want
to read the inscription on his tombstone because
it is one of the most beautiful epitaphs I've
ever heard. It's from his poem Late Fragment.
Please do. It says it all. It reads, And did
you get what you wanted from this life? Even
so, I did. And what did you want? To call myself
beloved? To feel myself beloved on the earth?
It chills me every time. Even so. Even with the
alcoholism, even with the poverty, even with
the abuse and the failures and the struggle,
did you get what you wanted? I did. To feel himself
beloved. For a guy who spent the first half of
his life feeling broken and unworthy, that is
a powerful statement of redemption. It really
is. It recontextualizes all the pain. It wasn't
a tragedy in the end. It was a triumph. He got
what he wanted. Now, even if our listeners haven't
read Carver, they've probably seen his influence
in pop culture. Oh, definitely. The most famous
adaptation is Robert Altman's film Shortcuts
from 1993. Altman took nine of Carver's stories
in a poem. and wove them together into this massive
Los Angeles tapestry. It captures the mood perfectly,
even if the setting is different. It's a masterwork
of adaptation. And then more recently, the movie
Birdman, the one that won Best Picture in 2015.
Right. The main character in Birdman, played
by Michael Keaton, is obsessed with putting on
a play based on what we talk about when we talk
about love. And the reason is that he has this
cocktail napkin signed by Carver from years ago.
The movie is basically haunted by Carver's ghost.
It shows how much Carver represents artistic
integrity to people. And there's that Will Ferrell
movie, Everything Must Go. Based on the story,
Why Don't You Dance? Which is a classic Carver
setup. A guy puts all his furniture out on the
front lawn and just sits there drinking. It's
funny, but it's incredibly sad. Which is Carver,
in a nutshell. That tragic comic tone. So what
does this all mean? As we wrap up this deep dive,
what are the big takeaways? If you're going to
remember three things about Carver, what are
they? I think there are three main things. First,
Carver transformed American literature by looking
at the people everyone else was ignoring. The
ordinary, the marginalized, the people living
paycheck to paycheck. He gave them a voice. He
showed that their lives had dignity and trauma.
Second. The power of the second life. His life
is a testament to the fact that you can come
back from the brink. You can be... more dead
than alive and still find 10 years of brilliance
and love, it is a profound message of hope. And
third? The complexity of art. Yeah. The Lish
controversy teaches us that a genius writer doesn't
work in a vacuum. The tension between Carver's
raw material and Lish's ruthless editing created
a style that defined a decade. It shows that
art is often a collaborative, messy process.
It's a messy, beautiful legacy. It is. Okay,
here is my final provocative thought for you,
the listener. We talked about minimalism. We
talked about writing in the margins of a janitorial
shift. I want you to ask yourself, how much of
that famous minimalist style, that style that
changed the course of writing, was an artistic
choice? And how much of it was just logistical
necessity? Did he write short because he wanted
to or because he was cleaning floors at Mercy
Hospital and only had an hour? And how much was
it Gordon Lish forcing his hand? Where does art
come from? Choice or circumstance? And to add
to that, I'd encourage everyone to go read Beginners.
Read the story, A Small Good Thing. Then read
the Lish version, The Bath. You decide which
one feels truer. You decide who the real Raymond
Carver was. It's a fascinating exercise. I love
that assignment. Go be the critic. Thank you
so much for joining us on this deep dive into
the life of Raymond Carver. We'll see you next
time. Keep reading.