Articles/Interviews

Raymond Carver interview (May 1985)

Interview

This interview, conducted in London on May 14th 1985, was originally printed in Dave Haslam’s fanzine ‘Debris’.

Raymond Carver writes some of the most beautiful, disturbing and honest short stories being written in the English language today. Most of them concern just a small number of people; a married couple, a broken family, a few close friends. In the stories we glimpse them living through some domestic and personal pain. They live in run-down, smalltown America; all-night cafes, TVs, bankruptcy, dead-end jobs, violence and despair. Although it’s often a bleak world, its one which does occasionally generate moments of wry humour.

Many of the characters are insecure, threatened and dreading confusing circumstances, the power of the past, financial anxiety, their own weaknesses. The events of each story are related from inside the situation; from the perspective of one of the characters involved. They are told in short, bleak sentences, by narrators seeking to explain and justify events; a family quarrel, a death in the community, a meeting with a stranger.

For many of the characters in the world of these short stories love is a refuge, but one that constantly lets them down. Their loves are often destroyed by brutality, poverty, or alcohol.

You can read fifty-one of these stories in a new picador collection, ‘The Stories Of Raymond Carver’, which reprints his three collections; ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please’, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, and ‘Cathedral’. And also in a new collection which includes essays, poems and stories, called ‘Fires’, which has just been published by Collins.

In one of the essays in ‘Fires’ Carver recounts the insecurity of his own early life. He was born in 1939 and grew up in a small town in Washington State where his father worked in a sawmill. He married young, and he had two small children by the age of 20. married life was a shared struggle with his wife to gain some kind of financial security, a continual battle to pay the rent and buy clothes for the children. He and his wife could only get a string of short-term, low paid jobs. They lost many of their illusions about progress, getting-on, succeeding.

At this time Carver was first trying to write, and short stories were all that time and space allowed. And also a period of alcoholism ended in June 1977.

I met Carver when he visited London recently. He is a well-built man, with an earnest, shy manner, and a very careful, deliberate way of talking. When he laughed I felt something great had been achieved.

WHEN YOU STARTED TO WRITE YOU WERE FIGHTING ALL THESE OBSTACLES; LIKE FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES, THE DEMANDS OF PARENTHOOD ETC. WHAT WAS IT THAT DROVE YOU ON?

I can’t tell you. I don’t know. I just wanted to write more than anything. The writing was the one thing I was determined to hold on to, and even that left me; there was a time when I was dinking and so forth, when I was no longer writing. But it was the one connection that I felt if I could hold on to that, no matter how dim and guttering the candle became, it would give my life some validation. It was that important to me.

IN THE FIRST ESSAY IN ‘FIRES’ YOU DISCUSS YOUR FATHER AND YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM. HE DIED IN 1967. HOW DO YOU THINK HE WOULD LOOK UPON YOU IN YOUR POSITION NOW?

I think he would be very pleased and happy. I must tell you my family was not given to reading books; they didn’t put much stock in so-called ‘finer things’. There were a few books in the house; the bible and two or three my dad might get from the library – ‘westerns’. In my family you were expected to go to work, to work with your hands for a living, work by the sweat of your brow. And I wasn’t encouraged to go to college, although I wasn’t discouraged. I was expected to go to work and then if I wanted to do something else that’s fine; that’s how it was looked on; writing was a hobby much like fishing. None of them took it seriously. I’m sure he’d be happy. He’d surely want to know; “How much are you making from this”!

YOU ALSO SAY IN THAT ESSAY THAT YOU NEVER SHOWED HIM ANY OF YOUR STORIES, WHY WAS THAT? DID YOU FEEL THHAT HE JUST WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND?

Partly I felt he wouldn’t understand, and partly it was just the logistics; I wasn’t living anywhere close to him. He was hundreds of miles away when I was writing. I show Tess Gallagher my work, and not even always right after I wrote it; sometimes I let it sit for a while. But I’m not always terribly eager to show anyone my work. And during that period when I was writing, beginning to write, he was just so sick so it just didn’t seem appropriate.

IN THE TITLE ESSAY ‘FIRES’ YOU SAY HOW GREAT AN INFLUENCE YOUR CHILDREN WERE ON YOUR LIFE AS A WRITER. ARE THEY STILL THAT? THEY MUST BE IN THEIR 30s.

Yes, my daughter’s 27 and my son’s 26. I still am to a degree, what they made me. But their influence in my life now is not so considerable. We’re friends now; that wasn’t the case when I was drinking and when we were all living under the same roof together. It’s only since I quit drinking.

BUT DO YOU FIND THAT PERIOD UP TO 1977 IS STILL WITH YOU? AND NEEDING TO BE WRITTEN ABOUT?

Yes. That time – my 20s and 30s – made such a deep and profound and lasting impression on my emotional life, a very large dent in my emotional life. I still seem to be going back to that time, it seems inexhaustible for me. But all the stories and poems are not out of the same time. I think the stories to a large extent beginning to change. The stories in ‘Cathedral’ are, I think different to the stories in earlier volumes. There’s still ruin and devastation there, but some of the stories are departures from the earlier work. I think the stories are becoming more hopeful.

DO YOU THINK THAT IT’S IMPORTANT THAT A READER KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT A WRITER’S LIFE?

I don’t think it’s particularly important, but I think it’s very helpful. Myself, I’ve always been very interested in the lives of writers whose work I care about. When I first read James Joyce I wanted to know to know more about James Joyce, so I went and read the biography and read everything in fact I could get my hands on. I’m not into all this so-called ‘New Criticism’ where you don’t think at all about the writer; you think about the text and forget about the writer and the times in which he lived or whatever. I don’t go along with that at all.

IN A WAY IT’S JUST HUMAN CURIOSITY.

Yes. I believe that wholeheartedly.

DO YOU EVER FIND IN INTERVIEWS THAT PEOPLE BRING UP QUESTIONS ABOUT YOU AND YOUR WORK THAT YOU’VE NEVER THOUGHT OF?

Once in a while. I’ve had interviewers ask me questions putting a rather new interpretation on something. Yes, once in a while that happens.

DOES THAT FRIGHTEN YOU IN ANY WAY?

No.

DO YOU KEEP A NOTEBOOK?

That’s interesting that you should ask because when I taught – I’m no longer teaching because of this grant that I received about a year and a half ago – I always told my students to keep a notebook. I told them to write write down a little note to yourself about something you see or something you overhear. But I never kept a notebook myself! But I thought it was a good idea. Only in the last six months or so have I begun to carry round something that resembles a notebook. I don’t often use it, but once in a while, late at night or whenever, I will use it.

SO DO YOU CARRY A LOT OF IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD?

I do carry a lot of things in my head, and yet I’ll go for days, it seems, with nothing in my head. No ideas. Nothing. But when I’m working then I will work obsessively on something seven days a week, ten or fifteen hours a day. And everything that happens will suggest itself for a story.

SO CAN A LITTLE INCIDENT OR PHRASE SPARK A WHOLE STORY?

Usually it’s a spark that sets off something in me that makes me want to write that story. And once I begin to write that story, then I begin to see that story. It sort of jumps on me.

SO IN A WAY, THER’S AN ELEMENT OF CHANCE?

There is an element of chance, but it’s a strange piece of business because I trust to my instincts and the story seems to know its way in a rough way. It’s like groping around in a room in the dark looking for a light. You know more or less where the light is on the wall, but it’s just a question of feeling along the wall to find it. I know I’m going to find the switch if I look long enough. I suppose maybe that’s an unorthodox way of writing stories, but it’s my way. I don’t really know where I’m going when I begin to write the story, I don’t know the ending. I don’t know the middle of the story. And then things begin to fall into place as I begin to write. So when I begin I write very fast maybe out of fear that whatever made me want to write that story in the first place might get away from me.

DO YOU THINK THAT RELATES IN A WAY TO THE KIND OF CHARACTERS WHO ARE AT THE CENTRE OF YOUR STORIES. OFTEN THEY’RE PEOPLE WHO – IN YOUR PHRASE – ARE LOOKING FOR A SWITCH, IN THAT THERE’S A PROBLEM IN THEIR LIFE. THE STORY IS THEIR ATTEMPT TO WORK OUT A PROBLEM. SO THEY ALSO HAVE SOMETHING TO SOLVE. AND THEY ALSO DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY’RE GOING.

And they’re not entirely sure how they’re going to solve it, Yes, I hadn’t put those two sides together, but, yes, that’s true.

SO WHEN YOU GET INSIDE A CHARACTER TO TELL THE STORY, DO YOU THINK YOUR TRAINS OF THOUGHT COINCIDE?

Yes, I think so. That’s interesting. O.K!

WHILE YOU’RE WRITING THE STORY, HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE CHARACTERS THAT ISN’T ACTUALLY ON THE SURFACE?

While I’m writing the story somehow, in some mysterious fashion I feel like I know these people pretty well, and I know them very well before the story’s over. Before I’m finished with a story I know the secrets of their hearts.

WHILE YOU’VE BEEN WRITING A LOT OF THINGS HAVE HAPPENED IN AMERICA IN THE WORLD OF ‘CURRENT AFFAIRS’; VIETNAM, WATERGATE ETC. THESE THINGS SELDOM ARE MENTIONED IN YOUR STORIES.

Those things just have not seemed fitting, or appropriate or necessary to stories I’ve written. Most of the stories I’ve written – what goes on in the outside world; who’s President, what Bill is before Congress, what riots or strikes are taking place in Britain or France, or what famines are occurring – they don’t have bearing on my characters.
Of course it’s not a fault in the characters. It doesn’t matter who’s President, what Bill is going to be passed, life for them will be much the same. I would wager that most people in my stories don’t vote, because their vote is not going to change anything.
The outside world in that sense of that large outside doesn’t impinge that much on the lives of my people. This is not a bad thing. I’m very sympathetic to those people, if I were not I would not write about them; I care for these people, I know them very well. I was, and still am to a certain extent, one of them.
I grew up with these people. Nobody, but nobody, in my family was educated beyond the sixth grade. Education was not an important thing in their lives, they didn’t read books, they didn’t travel – except when they migrated from the south to the west and that was it.
They didn’t talk about politics; they were not political people. When I was a kid, the stories and the conversations I heard did not verge on politics and the world at large; they were all about what so- and-so had said to somebody, how many fish John had caught last week, and the bear that they shot at and missed.
The outside world was a place which belonged to someone else.

VIOLENCE, OR THREAT OF VIOLENCE PLAYS A LARGE PART IN THE WORLD ACCORDING TO RAYMOND CARVER; CHARACTERS ARE ALWAYS RESORTING TO VIOLENCE.

They don’t always resort to violence. There is though, always a possible violence looming on the horizon, a menace. But the world is a pretty menacing and violent place, especially if you’re scared and worried how to pay the rent. Thinking about that story. ‘What Is It?’, when the wife goes out to sell the car for the bankrupt and he sort of lunges at her when she comes home drunk and things like that. It’s close to violence; there’s a threat there. But the guy is at the end of his rope and anytime you get people at the end of their rope, they’ll do anything; anything is possible; mayhem is possible.
I don’t think any of it is gratuitous violence. The world of these characters is not always a friendly place.

ANOTHER THING WHICH INTERESTS ME IS THE WAY CHARACTERS PLACE SOME HOPELESS DEMANDS ON THEIR LOVE RELATIONSHIPS: THAT THERE IS AN INTENSE NEED IN THE CHARACTERS FOR LOVE, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME IT SEEMS TO BE MISDIRECTED. WOULD YOU GO ALONG WITH THAT?

I’m glad you found that there is love in these stories, even though it may be misdirected sometimes. But I think that’s true. My people in these stories do need love; sometimes those who need it most are the least capable of inspiring it. Sometimes it is misdirected, but that’s life.

IT’S A BLEAK VIEW OF LIFE.

Oh, it’s probably bleak, but you can’t fault a writer for the view of life he has if his work is true to that view.

THERE ARE STORIES – ALTHOUGH I WOULDN’T CALL THEM, QUITE, ‘HUMOUROUS’ – BUT STORIES LIKE ‘JERRY AND MOLLY AND SAM’, ABOUT A MAN WHO GETS RID OF THE FAMILY DOG, SOME OF THE STORIES ARE QUITE FUNNY.

There’s a lot of humour in my stories, albeit a dark humour sometimes. The humour comes at the oddest moments. I read that story ‘Careful’ – the story of a guy with ear-wax in his ear, drinking champagne – at Harvard University last month, and about two-thirds into the story people were cracking up. I noticed it suddenly seemed very funny. And that’s good. I’m pleased when people find humour there. But most often it is a kind of laughing through clenched teeth.

DO YOU WONDER HOW NOW THAT YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE CHANGED, PRESUMABLY YOUR MOTIVATIONS FOR WRITING ARE CHANGING?

My writing has changed; there’s no question of that in my mind. Poems I wrote last year are different in kind and degree to any poems I’ve ever written. And I dare say they’re better. I’m not being disloyal to the poems in ‘Fires’ when I say that, but my writing is changing and I think that’s good, because a writer is changing and I think that’s good, because a writer can’t go on writing the same story and the same poem over and over again.

ONE THING THAT INTRIGUES ME IS THAT ON THE FACE OF IT, YOU AND I HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON; IT’S AN ODD RELATIONSHIP, THE WRITER WITH THE READER, THAT ACT OF COMMUNICATION.

I think that’s good. What we do have in common is the fact that we’re human. That’s one of the things that writing can do; that’s one of the things that writing is ‘about’. It can make us realise our connections. It’s the same with music; you could listen to a piece by Mozart; I mean, what do Mozart and I have in common? Nothing. And yet when I hear a certain piece of music we connect somehow; it moves us somehow; we’re stirred.