All of Us (34 page)

FOR CHRISTI

This is a last book and last things, as we learn, have rights of their own. They don’t need us, but in our need of them we commemorate and make more real that finality which encircles us, and draws us again into that central question of any death: What is life for? Raymond Carver lived and wrote his answer: “I’ve always squandered,” he told an interviewer, no doubt steering a hard course away from the lofty and noble. It was almost a law, Carver’s law, not to save up things for some longed-for future, but to use up the best that was in him each day and to trust that more would come. Even the packaging of the cigarettes he smoked bore the imprint of his oath in the imperative: NOW.

This was an injunction that would bear down on us with increasing intensity as we attempted to finish this book. In an episode eerily like that which preceded the death of Chekhov, to whom he had recently paid tribute in his story “Errand”, Ray had been diagnosed with lung cancer after spitting up blood in September 1987. There would follow ten months of struggle during which the cancer would reoccur as a brain tumor in early March. After twice swerving away from recommendations for brain surgery by several doctors, he would undergo seven weeks of intense, full-brain radiation. After a short respite, however, tumors would again be found in his lungs in early June.

These are the facts of that time, enough to have made realists out of us if we hadn’t been realists already. Nonetheless, much as Chekhov had kept reading the train schedules away from the town in which he would die, Ray kept working, planning, believing in the importance of the time he had left, and also believing that he might, through some loop in fate, even get out of this. An errand list I found in his shirt pocket later read “eggs, peanut butter, hot choc” and then, after a space, “Australia? Antarctica??” The insistent nature of Ray’s belief in his own capacity to recover from reversals during the course of his illness gave us both strength. In his journal he wrote: “When hope is gone, the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.” In this way he lived hope as a function of gesture, a reaching for or toward, while the object of promise stayed rightly illusory. The alternative was acceptance of death, which at age fifty was impossible for him. Another journal
entry revealed his anguish as the pace of the disease quickened: “I wish I had a while. Not five years—or even three years—I couldn’t ask for that long, but if I had even a year. If I knew I had a year.”

In January 1988 Ray began keeping a journal under the inspiration of Stephen Spender’s
Journals: 1939—1983
, but with the discovery of his brain tumor it broke off suddenly in March, though he would start again in another notebook later. Our attentions were turned instead to the task of drafting a short essay to appear in the commencement booklet for the University of Hartford, where Ray was to accept a Doctorate of Letters in May.

During much of this time I had been clinging to the stories of Chekhov, reading one after the other of the Ecco Press volumes, and now I offered two passages to Ray from
Ward No. 6
to illustrate the epigraph from Saint Teresa (“Words lead to deeds … they prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness”), which he’d used from my book of poems to begin his essay. Ray incorporated the passages from Chekhov into his piece, and this was the beginning of an important spiritual accompaniment which began to run through our days, and which eventually would play an important part in the writing of this book.

The fervor with which we both seized on these particular moments in
Ward No. 6
came, I think, directly out of the ordeal we were undergoing with Ray’s health, and this was particularly true of the second passage in which two characters, a disaffected doctor and an imperious postmaster, his elder, suddenly find themselves discussing the human soul:

In his framing of the passage Ray underscored the power of “words which linger as deeds” and out of which “a little voice in the soul” is born. He seemed almost grateful to observe how in the Chekhov story “the way we have dismissed certain concepts about life, about death, suddenly gives over unexpectedly to belief of an admittedly fragile but insistent nature”.

I continued to bring Chekhov into our days by reading a story first thing in the morning and then telling it to Ray when I came down
for breakfast. I would give the story in as true a fashion as I could, and Ray would inevitably become engaged by it and have to read it for himself that afternoon. By evening we could discuss it.

Another of Ray’s influences came from one of the books he’d been reading early in the year, Czeslaw Milosz’s
Unattainable Earth
, and it began to affect his idea of the form and latitude his own book might discover. In the interests of what he called “a more spacious form”, Milosz had incorporated prose quotes from Casanova’s
Memoirs
, snippets from Baudelaire, from his uncle Oscar Milosz, Pascal, Goethe and other thinkers and writers who’d affected him as he was writing his poems. He also includes his own musings, which take the form of confessions, questionings and insights. Ray was very much attracted to the inclusiveness of Milosz’s approach. His own reading at the time included García Lorca, Jaroslav Seifert, Tomas Tranströmer, Lowell,
The Selected Poems
of Milosz and a rereading of Tolstoy’s
The Death of Ivan Ilych.
From these he selected whole poems, which we later used as section heads for the book.

But in early June, when the devastating news of tumors in the lungs again was given to us, it was to Chekhov we instinctively turned to restore our steadfastness. One night I looked at certain passages I had bracketed in the stories and realized that they seemed to be speaking toward poems of Ray’s which I’d been helping him revise and typing into the computer. On impulse I went to the typewriter and shaped some of these excerpts into lines and gave them titles. When I showed the results to Ray, it was as if we’d discovered another Chekhov inside Chekhov. But because I’d been looking at the passages with Ray’s poems in mind, there was the sense that Chekhov had stepped toward us, and that while he remained in his own time, he seemed also to have become our contemporary. The world of headlong carriage races through snowstorms and of herring-head soup, of a dish made of bulls’ eyes, of cooks picking sorrel for vegetable soup, of peasant children raised not to flinch at the crude language of their drunken parents—this world was at home with the world of Raymond Carver, in which a man puts his head on the executioner’s block while touring a castle only to have the hand of his companion come down on his neck like an axe, a world in which a drunken father is caught in the kitchen by his son with a strange woman in a heavily sexual context, and in which we watch as a drowned child is carried above the trees in the tongs of a helicopter.

Once we’d discovered the poet in Chekhov, Ray began to mark passages he wanted to include and to type them up himself. The results were something between poems and prose, and this pleased us because
some of Ray’s new poems blurred the boundaries between poem and story, just as his stories had often taken strength from dramatic and poetic strategies. Ray had so collapsed the distance between his language and thought that the resulting transparency of method allowed distinctions between genres to dissolve without violence or a feeling of trespass. The story given as poem could unwind without having to pretend to intensities of phrasing or language that might have impeded the force of the story itself, yet the story could pull at the attention of the reader in another way for having been conceived as poetry.