A Writer's Life and Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories - Raymond Carver

The value of matching the events in a writer's life to his/her work has always been suspect, but interesting, to me. My first year English prof warned us against doing so (and this was well before the reality TV got placed a headlock on pop culture and the public confession became our new art form) - he recognized it was fun but it didn't add much to the discussion, or the understanding, of the work.  He was right - knowing that Carver was a drunk for most of his life doesn't add a dimension to any of his stories - but it is satisfying to connect some dots between fact and fiction.

Two main points stand out in Raymond Carver A Writer's Life Carol Sklenicka: the relationship that Carver had with his editor, Gordon Lish, and Carver's dedication to becoming a writer.  The first has been talked about at some length, but it appears that what a lot of people like about Carver may have been from Lish - the sparse detail, the minimal style that Carver made famous.  Most of the controversy has to do with what we think a writer is versus what we think an editor does, but also that Carver was so eager to achieve literary success (and not to mention some measure of financial success as well) that he may have sold out to Lish in order to be publish. Once he establishes himself, he does push back on Lish - reading through Where I'm Calling From:Selected Stories, you can chart the relationship.


Carver's dedication to be a writer forms early, and his entire life is dedicated to the cause, to the extent that he sacrifices personal relationships. Sklenicka portrays a man that grows resentful at his wife and children for distracting him from writing, who takes the raw material of his life and transforms it into stories. Boxes, which appears in Where I'm Calling From is a good example - the narrator's mother keeps moving apartments, never satisfied and resembles Carver's own mother so much that she "threw the book across the room."


Intentional or not,  Carver becomes a character in one of his own stories. The risk in reading a writer's biography, even one as neutrally written as A Writer's Life, is that it can reveal the writer's true nature, forming a stain on the writer's work.  If the writer is a terrible human being, does it mean the work is viewed differently?