Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked. Брайан К. Эвенсон
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And indeed, a moment later, in the unnerving single sentence paragraph that ends the story, we have the father described. “He had turned around in his chair and his face was white and without expression.”
That was what my face struck me as, white and without expression, as if my sense of self had been stripped away, as if I were more the matrix for a being than a being itself, as if I were no longer part of the human race.
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I’ve thought about “The Father” a lot since then. I first encountered that story when Leslie Norris, the Welsh poet who was my mentor, read it aloud to our class because of a story I had written. Rereading “The Father” thirty years later, I still hear the rich cadences of Leslie’s voice despite the fact that he has been dead for more than a decade. I realized in late 2013, when I was assembling the collection that would become A Collapse of Horses, that I’d had the story in the back of my mind when I wrote “Three Indignities,” despite it being a very different sort of story, about a moment of almost unbearable panic during a medical procedure—one of my few autobiographical stories.
What I admire so much about Carver, particularly in his early collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is his ability to move so rapidly and seamlessly from the ordinary to the uncanny, from the banal to the destructive or debilitative, and to do it with just a few careful strokes. In “The Father” there’s a deliberate shifting of terms: it starts as an ordinarily realistic story, presenting a ritual we’ve all participated in, and only begins to trouble our sense of its realism three-quarters of the way through, waiting to assert itself as a fantastical story or parable until the final line. So you think you’re reading one thing and only discover at the end, from the strange, blank presence of the father in the room, that you’ve been reading quite another.
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This experience was not unique for me. Indeed, Carver’s work has spoken directly to me at some extraordinary moments and in extraordinary ways. He writes about a peculiar and particularly American form of abjection which, even if I never shared the specifics of it (I never really learned how to smoke and though I now drink I can put it down or pick it up with little effort), I still relate to in other ways. In addition, there’s a great deal that is unexpected about his work if you look closely at it, particularly if you’re a writer. This, as has become clear in recent years, is only partly due to Carver. It is due as well to Gordon Lish, who severely edited his first two books.
I’m not a realist, or rather I don’t care if my work is or isn’t—I’ve made a literary career out of muddying that distinction. That, too, is something that I learned from Carver, even though many of his critics, particularly those who favor his later stories, minimize this aspect of his work. But without this, Carver is a great deal less interesting.
Carver’s work arrived for me at exactly the right moment. My relationship to that work has changed over time, but of all the writers I read when I was first developing as a writer he, more than anyone except perhaps J. G. Ballard, taught me how to write the fiction that I wanted to write.
1. “[N]ot only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: FSG, 1968), 134.
A LOT OF BOOKS THAT HAD A HUGE FORMATIVE EFFECT on friends or writers I admire I either read at the wrong moment or didn’t read at all. Despite spending a decade of summers teaching in Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac school, I didn’t read On the Road until I was nearly forty—and only read it then because it had begun to feel too awkward to confess to pro-Beat students that I hadn’t. I read Catcher in the Rye in college and enjoyed it, but kept wishing that I’d read it when I’d been in high school, when it might have mattered to me. Vonnegut I only read when I was in my late forties, mainly because I had a free Kindle copy of Slaughterhouse–Five that I could read on my phone while I fed my infant son a bottle—it was much easier to swipe and turn a page than try to turn a real page with a baby in my arms—and then went on to read most of the rest of his work. Under the Volcano, which I loved when I finally got to it, I read only a few months ago. Other books I did read, but they left me cold.
But two writers stood out for me. I was fourteen and reading pretty much exclusively science fiction and fantasy when my father gave me a copy of The Basic Kafka. He sat down and read aloud to me a story he liked: “A Fratricide.” It’s a minor story, not one of Kafka’s best, but there’s something about the theatricality of it, the way that people seem to be acting out their roles as much as actually living them, that baffled me in a productive way. It made me realize that imitating life wasn’t always the point to fiction. In addition, the novelty of the situation interested me: my mother and father were avid readers, but recommending a book to me so strongly wasn’t something my father was prone to do back then, though he often has since. Looking back on it now, I see that as the first moment my father consciously acknowledged me as an adult.
I still love “A Fratricide.” I can spend an entire class period talking about it and still have a great deal left to say. But the real Kafka revelation for me was not that nor the much better known “The Metamorphosis,” but “A Country Doctor” and “In the Penal Colony.” The first did things with replicated doubles that fascinated me and suggested that fiction not only had its own reality separate from imitating life, but that it could strobe between the realistic and a sort of symbolic game. The second introduced me to a notion of language as something that could be inflicted upon someone, and raised questions about the relationship of the state, the individual body, and language. That’s not how I would have described it at fourteen, but it’s still an accurate representation of what I felt.
The other writer was Samuel Beckett, discovered a year or two later. We had read in our AP English class Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. Everybody who read it in our predominantly Mormon and conservative high school seemed to hate the play, except for me and my friend David Beus, who loved it. The note heading the play in our anthology mentioned Beckett’s work, though I no longer remember why—perhaps because the first production of The Zoo Story was a double bill with Krapp’s Last Tape. I moved quickly through Beckett’s plays, settling on Endgame as my favorite, but it wasn’t until I read Molloy that I realized I had found a writer I would read and reread. I thought of Beckett as writing what I tended to call (perhaps because I had heard someone else say it—I no longer know where the phrase comes from, my head or outside of it) fractured allegories: work with the weight and structure of allegory or symbol but essentially indecipherable. Like Kafka, Beckett showed me you could write something literary whose thrust was narrative but which was not, in any sense, realism.
So, when I got to Carver, I had Beckett and Kafka as models for what I hoped literature could do. Which probably made me see Carver in a very eccentric light.
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My first encounter with Carver’s work was not What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but a story from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? I was eighteen. I had taken Beginning Creative Writing and Intermediate Fiction Writing the first and second semester of my freshman year at Mormon-run Brigham Young University. I’d decided to enroll in the non-required Spring term (half the length of the normal semester) and to take the final undergrad class in the sequence, Advanced Fiction Writing, as well. Since there was no graduate workshop offered for Spring term, the class turned out to consist of a mix of upper classmen and grad students. I was the only freshman in the class. It never crossed my mind that a freshman shouldn’t take Advanced Fiction. I don’t know what the teacher, Eloise Bell, thought, but for some reason she let me in.
Eloise Bell was at once funny and caustic, exceptionally quick, theatrical—one of the few Mormons I’ve met with such qualities. The room we met in was unbearably hot. Some of my most vivid memories of the class are all