The Trip to Echo Spring (31 page)

In later life, Carver would come bitterly to regret taking on the burden of a family so young. When Christine was born he and Maryann could barely afford to eat a proper meal or heat two rooms – a situation that didn't improve when she discovered six weeks later that she was pregnant again. Though they were already sinking into a quicksand of debt, both remained determined to get an education and make something of their lives.

In her loving and sometimes shocking memoir,
What It Used To Be Like,
Maryann Burk Carver remembered an argument the couple had a few days after their wedding, in which her new husband announced that he regretted marrying and would always choose writing over her. Swallowing her own ambition, she decided that her duty was ‘to preserve Ray's opportunity to be a writer . . . I would walk the tightrope between Ray's writing life and our family. I'd walk it better than anyone ever had.' What this commitment meant in practice was hard labour: a run of punishing jobs that began with a summer stint in a
warehouse packing cherries to buy Carver his first Father's Day present: an Underwood typewriter.

Maryann wasn't the only one working flat-out. It's almost impossible to overestimate the hardship of those years, in which Carver struggled to educate himself and get food on the table while stealing every spare minute in which to write. In such straitened circumstances, it's not difficult to understand why alcohol might have begun to seem like an ally, or else a key to a locked door. His father had drunk to escape the monotony of work and to ease the pressures of survival. For Ray, there was also bitterness to choke back; bitterness and self-reproach and a sense of spoiling time. These are the sort of things that can sour in your head if you're still working as a janitor at twenty-seven, swabbing corridors in Mercy Hospital. And these are the sort of things you might try to soothe in the Fireside Lounge on H Street, knocking back a boilermaker at the end of the night shift, readying up for another day with your own exhausting children.

There's no doubt that the odds were stacked against him; but nor is there much doubt that he became, six days out of seven, his own worst enemy. Reading Maryann's book reminded me of Brick's line about a drunk being two people, two men fighting one another for control of a bottle. The things Carver did seem so senselessly self-destructive. One Raymond – Good Raymond, I suppose – would get on to a Masters programme, or find a decent job, and the other Raymond, the perverse, malevolent one, would somehow conspire to mess it up. He published three volumes of poems during his drinking years, and wrote almost forty short stories, among them ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?', ‘Tell the Women We're Going', ‘Dummy' and ‘So Much Water So Close to Home'. And at the same time he
had affairs, and dragged his family back and forth across the country. He made his wife give up her best-paid and most emotionally satisfying job. He was unreliable, paranoid and violent, and as he approached the nadir of his drinking he could barely write at all.Years later, looking back at this period in an interview with the
Paris Review,
he said:

I was in my late twenties or early thirties. We were still in a state of penury, we had one bankruptcy behind us, and years of hard work with nothing to show for it except an old car, a rented house, and new creditors on our backs. It was depressing, and I felt spiritually obliterated. Alcohol became a problem. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit . . . I suppose I began to drink heavily after I'd realized that the things I'd wanted most in life for myself and my writing, and my wife and children, were simply not going to happen. It's strange. You never start out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.

Good Raymond emerged from the wreckage slowly, like a man struggling from a smashed car. Like Berryman, he spent a long time shuttling through recovery, getting dry and then going straight back out to drink. Early on, during the bad years in California, he had a seizure on the floor just as he was about to leave a treatment centre, smashing his forehead open. The doctor warned him that if he ever drank again he risked becoming a
wet-brain,
a graphic term for alcoholic brain damage. According to Maryann, he spent that evening ‘sucking brandy
from a bottle as if it were Pepsi, his stitches concealed under a bandage, indifferent to the doctor's warning'.

In 1976 his first volume of stories,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please
was published. That same year he checked into Duffy's, a private treatment centre in Napa that was later the setting for the short story ‘Where I'm Calling From'. The programme consisted of frequent AA meetings and controlled withdrawal by way of
hummers,
progressively weaker shots of rotgut bourbon in water, doled out every three hours for three days. Shortly after his release, he announced that he understood he could never drink hard liquor again, and would in future stick to Andre champagne.

Unsurprisingly, he was back again two months later, checking himself in on New Year's Eve. It was his last pass through formal treatment. That spring, around the time his old friend John Cheever published
Falconer,
he left his family and rented a house alone in McKinleyville, overlooking the Pacific. For the next few months he went to AA meetings and tried, not always successfully, to maintain his balance on the wagon. The turning point came on 29 May 1977, when he was offered an advance of $5,000 by McGraw-Hill for a novel. He was in the midst of a bender at the time, but four days later took his final drink in the Jambalaya bar in Arcata. ‘June 2nd 1977,' he remembered in the
Paris Review.
‘If you want the truth, I'm prouder of that, that I've quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life. I'm a recovered alcoholic. I'll always be an alcoholic, but I'm no longer a practicing alcoholic.'

In those early months, he clung to AA, driving out to meetings once or twice a day. His marriage was breaking down and his children loathed him. For a long time he stayed on his toes, paranoid and leery of responsibility. The novelist Richard Ford met him around then, and
later wrote down his memories of his friend in an essay for the
New Yorker
.

In 1977 he was tall, skinny, and bony, hesitant, barely speaking above a clipped whisper. He seemed friendly but slightly spooked, though not in a way that spooked you; more in a way that suggested he'd recently been on the ropes and definitely didn't want to show up there again. His teeth needed work. His hair was dense and practically matted. He had rough hands, long fat sideburns, black horn-rimmed spectacles, a pair of mustard-colored trousers, an ugly brown-and-purple striped shirt from Penney's basement, and a taste in footwear that ran to Hush Puppies knockoffs. He looked as if he'd stepped down off a Greyhound bus from 1964, and from someplace where he'd done mostly custodial duties. And he was completely irresistible.

Slowly, over the next two years, this skinny, irresistible man backed away from his family, whose ongoing troubles he felt certain were capable of scuttling his recovery. For a while he barely wrote, and then the new stories started coming; stories infused with ‘little human connections'; stories he'd ‘come back from the grave' to write. In June 1980, he delivered a collection of these and a few older pieces to Gordon Lish, his beloved editor at Knopf, with the working title
So Much Water So Close to Home.

Lish bought the book, which he retitled
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,
but not without making changes. He brutally pruned each story, slashing by up to seventy per cent and excising any
whiff of sentimentality or tenderness. He cut the last six pages of ‘If It Please You', in which James Packer, knowing his wife's cancer has returned, prays for everyone he knows, the living and the dead. He cut the last eighteen pages of ‘A Small, Good Thing', losing the entirety of its redemptive ending, in which a baker feeds a newly bereaved couple on cinnamon rolls and warm dark bread.

Carver was devastated by the cuts, the newly minimal landscape of silence and erasure. The expansiveness Lish objected to was intimately bound up with his own sense of recovery and renewed grace. ‘I'm afraid, mortally afraid,' he told Lish in a long letter begun on 8 July at 8 a.m., ‘that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that's how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.'

He felt the changes, and the compromise they represented, were directly antagonistic to his sobriety, and that if the untruthful object the book had become was published in its current form, he was liable to stop writing and start drinking again. He referred to demons rising up and taking him over; to confusion and paranoia; to a sense that he might lose both his soul and his fragile sense of self-esteem. The letter rambles frantically on, begging for forgiveness, begging that publication be stopped. ‘God almighty, Gordon,' he writes. ‘Please forgive me . . . Please hear me . . . Please help me.'

Two days later, he wrote another, shorter letter, asking for a few specific changes. Four days after that he sent a third. This time, his mood had shifted: ‘I'm thrilled about the book and its impending publication.' Once again he asked for a few reinsertions, to keep some semblance of the stories' original vision. No dice. Lish remained
adamant that his own version was correct.
What We Talk About
was published in 1981, catapulting Carver to fame.

It's hard to know how to interpret those three letters, the volte-face they represent. In the first, Carver was evidently in the grips of what he sometimes called ‘the willies', a sense of intolerable jitteriness common in newly recovered alcoholics. But whether the decision to accept Lish's edits came as a result of staring down his own anxiety or represented a capitulation born out of a weak will and an overdeveloped desire to please is difficult to gauge. He certainly valued Lish very highly. (‘You're my mainstay,' he'd written in the spring of 1980. ‘Man, I love you. I don't make that declaration lightly, either.') That said, he never let himself be edited so brutally again. By the time
Cathedral
came out in 1983, he was in full command, and Lish's changes were strictly cosmetic.

Carver's gathering self-confidence had a lot to do with a relationship begun in that same turbulent season of early sobriety. In the summer of 1978, he fell in love with the poet Tess Gallagher, the protector and companion of his second life. At the time, she'd just built a house in her home town of Port Angeles, and at the tail end of 1982 Ray moved in. It was in this period that he produced – though he might have preferred
caught
– clutch after clutch of poems, slippery and pristine as the dream salmon he sometimes encountered on his nights in town.

I'd read one of them so many times I'd almost worn a track in it. It's called ‘Where Water Comes Together With Other Water'. ‘I love creeks and the music they make,' the narrator begins, and then lists, exultantly, all the other waterways he knows, and the enlarging effects they have on his heart. ‘I'm 45 years old today,' he announces.

Would anyone believe if I said

I was once 35?

My heart empty and sere at 35!

Five more years had to pass

before it began to flow again.

He elaborates on how it pleases him, loving rivers, and then ends with a characteristically heartfelt, sawn-off sentence, a kind of credo or manifesto: ‘Loving everything that increases me.'

You could live like that all right, especially if you'd once felt, as he did, that every action you took was poisoning further the wellsprings of your life. It could be read, in fact, as a kind of boiled-down, idiosyncratic version of Step Three –
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
It has the same faith in enlargement, in the possibility of benediction from oblique and unexpected sources.

Somewhere along the line I'd found out that the title of the poem referred to a specific place. The Sky House, as Gallagher's new property was known, was situated not far from Morse Creek, an old steelhead run that gave out into the Juan de Fuca Strait. Carver walked and fished there often, and it was this confluence he was thinking of when he wrote the line about some places standing out in his mind as if they were holy. I knew what he meant. I share that susceptibility to water myself, and now we were in the town I was almost frantic to find the creek.

We went that afternoon, driving back along the 101 and leaving the car in a lot by the bridge. The river came down hard beneath it, bottle green, ploughing messily over waterworn rocks and boulders. There was a path that looked as if it might lead to the beach, though it skirted first around an estate of incongruously suburban houses. Many of the
plants on the wayside were familiar. I counted nettles, cleavers, dandelion, even shepherd's purse. But I needed my
National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest
to identify Scouler's willow and salmonberry, the pink flowers a cross between a clematis and a heraldic rose.

The beach was sandy and scattered with ninepins of driftwood. Some of the pieces were enormous: whole trees torn out by the roots, their bark worn down to a silky sandy grey that felt pleasantly animate to the touch. Sea grass grew up between stones big as ostrich eggs, in variegated shades of buff and gunmetal, marl and slate. Some were striped or stippled and a very few were pale pink. I kept picking up nubs of driftwood, little bone-white and ash-black twigs. All the time there was the sucking, rushing sound of water, sluicing and pulling in contrapuntal motion, each wave drowned out by the next. Up close, it was seal-grey and pitted with darker marks, like spots of rain on paving stones.

A few yards ahead the river joined the sea. Morse Creek cut out through a stretch of blackish sand, over stones that ranged in size from pebbles to boulders. It ran very fast now, maybe four feet deep, humping and shouldering, the surface breaking apart in pleats. I knelt and dipped my hand, wincing. It had come straight off the mountain: snowmelt, old ice, clear and astringent as gin. Two black and white birds came overhead then, driving hard against the wind. It had begun to rain. I leaned back on my heels and took it all in. A ferry was chugging out to sea and on the horizon I could just make out the thin ridge of Victoria, almost blotted out by cloud.