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There is in the Soul a Desire For Not Thinking: The Double Life of Raymond Carver
Author, Director and Production: Alfred Koch
Assistance: Anna Handschuh
Sound engineering: Alfred Koch and Martin Leitner
ORF 2001
First Broadcast: 4/11/2001
Duration: 23.02
Translation: Robert Rotifer
Robert Altman based his movie Short Cuts on some of his best stories; he was compared to Hemingway and Chekhov, and celebrated as a literary minimalist: Raymond Carver, the worker's son from Oregon, who became "America's favourite writer" in the Seventies and Eighties. Carver, who refused to embrace novels, wrote short-stories about small people in the age of Reagan and Thatcher. They were tales of sleepwalking unemployed men and holy alcoholics -- of couples talking at cross-purposes and irredeemable optimists caught up in the traps of their own lives. Stories that appear to be rough sketches, but are in fact thoroughly calculated, masterfully shaped narratives. Texts which are capable of conjuring up grand images within limited linguistic frameworks.
But what is equally fascinating about Carver as his work, is his own life story. In the Sixties he began to write at night, while doing odd jobs during the day -- and fell victim to alcoholism just when he started to become successful as a writer. At the end of the Seventies, after several hospitalisations for acute alcoholism, the notorious gin and red wine drinker managed to do what nobody thought possible: Carver beat his illness with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and started what he would later call his "second life". His stories changed in tone, became more complete and carefully optimistic. The collection of short stories "Cathedral" written at that time is hailed as a milestone in the history of the American short-story.
But then his life took a last unexpected turn: Just when he had overcome the scourge of alcohol, the chain-smoker Raymond Carver died in 1988 -- of lung cancer. Six weeks before his death he had got married a second time -- to the writer Tess Gallagher.
TRANSCRIPT:
- Sound
Doug: Raymond Carver .... O.K.
Maryann: It was a bright, sunny day in June, when the doorbell rang and a tall, dark curly haired young man walked in ...
Speaker: ... Instantly I felt, that this tall young man with dark curly hair who stood in the doorway on that lovely day in June was going to change my life.
Tess: Oooh, I thought ...
Speaker: ...Ich dachte:
Tess: ...what a tender lovely man
Speaker: ... was für ein wunderbarer zarter Mann
- Music
Herb: He was quiet, introverted, shy -- but seemed to be seething or boiling a little bit underneath
Speaker: At least that was the first impression that he gave back then in the Fifties: nach außen hin ruhig, schüchtern und introvertiert, aber innerlich schien er aufgewühlt
Tess: He was laughing... kind of nervously...
Speaker: Er lachte, irgendwie nervös...
Tess: ...shuffling.
Maryann: What would you like to do when you are older?
Speaker: Was willst du einmal werden, fragte ich ihn
Maryann: I am going to be a writer like Ernest Hemingway
Speaker: He said that at the age of 19. Ich möchte ein Schriftsteller, werden. Ein Schriftsteller wie Ernest Hemingway.
- Music
Speaker: There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.
Narrator: The double life of Raymond Carver. A feature by Alfred Koch.
- Music
Carver: I have always wanted to write...
Speaker: ...Even as a child I wanted to write. There were no books at home, so I went to the library. Ich las alles, was ich in die Finger bekam
Carver: ...and read whatever came to hand...
Speaker: ....later, when I was working, I would write in the evenings, wenn schon alle im Bett waren. Am Küchentisch.
Carver: ...when everybody else was in bed. At the kitchen table.
- Music
Henry: Ray is often credited for saving the American short-story
Speaker: ...Man sagt, Ray sei der Retter der amerikanischen Short-Story. Nobody else's writing was at the same time as concise and as versatile as his.
Tess: ...and of course he will be remembered for having his finger on the
pulse of American life during a particular era
Speaker: In the age of Reagan and Thatcher, he wrote about those who could not get their share of the so-called American Dream.
Tess: and talking about working class people...
Speaker: ....Über die Arbeiterklasse, whose hopes and dreams he would convey to us like no other
Tess: ... and we came from there. We knew that life!
- Music
Henry: But...I just loved ...I just loved him...he was so full of life and Ray was...
Speaker: ...he was fighting his own death to the very end....
Henry: ...very much in denial about...
Speaker: ...er wollte nicht sterben...
Henry: ... Ray did NOT want to die...
Speaker: ...ich liebte ihn...
Henry: ... it was so very sad...
Speaker: ...es ist so traurig, dass er so früh sterben musste...
Henry: ...that he died so young... I really miss him...
Speaker: ...ich vermisse ihn sehr...
Henry: ...I miss him so much.....I don't think there's a day that goes by when I don't think about...
Speaker: ...es vergeht kein Tag, an dem ich nicht an ihn denke...
Henry: ...about Ray ...and some fun that we had together
- Music
Speaker: A man, married, two kids, wants to be a writer, keeps himself afloat by doing boring jobs, goes to college in the meantime, writes short-stories by night. He gets successful, takes to drinking, gets even more successful, drinks even more. His marriage falls apart. He goes into detox clinics, then into hospital, the end seems nigh. Then, a miracle that nobody had foreseen. He stops drinking. "Without relapse." He becomes a different man, has different friends, a different wife. He gets married for the second time, becomes a world-famous short-story writer, enjoys his second life -- falls ill with lung cancer and dies.
- Music
Narrator: A typical Carver story? Indeed. It's the story of his own life.
- Music
Narrator: Carver died in August 1988, when he had just turned 50, at the peak of his success as a writer. Just as people were beginning to compare him to Hemingway...
- Sound
Speaker: Encountering Carver's fiction was a transforming experience for many writers of my generation, an experience comparable to discovering Hemingway's sentences in the 20s.
- Music
Narrator: said Jay McInerney in the obituary he wrote for the New York Times. The simplicity and clarity of Carver's language, the repetitiveness, his precise descriptions likened him to Hemingway. Only the locations were completely different.
- Sound
Speaker: The cafés and pensions and battlefields of Europe were replaced by trailer parks and apartment complexes, the glamorous occupations by dead-end-jobs, the good vin de pays by cheap gin.
- Music
Speaker: Will you Please Be Quiet, Please?
Narrator: was the title of a volume of short-stories which would make Raymond Carver famous all over the USA in the mid-Seventies.
Speaker: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Narrator: - the title of the book after that. Skillfully crafted twenty-page stories about outsiders and the unemployed, of holy drinkers and couples unable to communicate with each other; of daydreamers who get caught in the traps of their own lives.
Speaker: "I am a kind of witness to the life that I led myself for many years."
Narrator: Some bought his books on the strength of their titles alone.
- Music
Speaker:
They're Not Your Husband.
So Much Water So Close To Home.
One More Thing.
Why Don't You Dance
- Music
- Port Angeles, harbour
Narrator: Port Angeles in Washington state. The most important harbour town in the north of the Olympic Peninsula. With their engines running, tourists are waiting for the large ferries about to take them to nearby British Columbia.
- Visitors' Center
Narrator: The Visitors' Center. Tourists come here to ask about ferry connections and affordable motels. But apparently, more and more of them also come to ask about Raymond Carver.
Woman: Enough...enough!
Narrator: Most of them want to know where Carver is buried.
Woman: You're here...follow this ..and you come to a....
- Car
Woman: ....just before it goes out to the mill.. you go up to Hill Street...follow this... all to the end...and on your right.
- Driving
Narrator: We go past crowded diners and snack bars selling burgers with salmon fillings, past the chimney stacks of a large sawmill, which cover the town in a thick cloud of smoke. Perhaps they might sometimes have reminded Carver of his past. Of the fact that his father had worked in a sawmill all his life and that he had originally been destined to become a saw-filer himself. When he came to Port Angeles in the early 1980s to spend the last years of his life here, this writer with a woodworker's past was already a world-famous author.
- Cemetery
Narrator: Ocean View Cemetery is located on a hill overlooking the town. With the cemetery's sloping grounds slanting towards the sea, the view is nothing short of spectacular.
- Flagpole
Narrator: No-one is in sight, an American flag is fluttering in the wind. The graveyard is lined by seven pine trees. Carver's grave is easily found. Not because the cemetery is so small, rather the reverse: It's his grave that is so huge.
- At the grave
Narrator: "Raymond Carver. Poet, Short-Story-Writer, Essayist. 1938-88." Below that inscription a poem called "Gravy," which his widow had carved into the tombstone. Time as a gift.
- Sound
Speaker:
No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that is was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don't forget it."
- Cemetery
- Airplane
Tess: Since his death, I find out going to the grave, many people who have
escaped alcoholism come there like it's a kind of shrine
Speaker: Seit seinem Tod I keep finding little notes on his grave saying: "Thank you, Ray." They get left there by former alcoholics, die zu dem Grab wie zu einem Schrein pilgern.
Tess: Just the fact that he made it out...
Speaker: Allein die Tatsache, dass er es geschafft hatte, is very important to a lot of people.
Narrator: Raymond Carver's widow, the writer Tess Gallagher.
Tess: I didn't write for about six months after he died.
Speaker: Nach seinem Tod habe ich 6 Monate nichts geschrieben. I wouldn't have known what to write. For two-and-a-half years I used to go to his grave and walk circles around it until a path appeared.
Tess: ...just walked...and I went every day....
Speaker: And at some point I stopped, I don't know why. Six months after his death I started to write poems for him, a book called "Mooncrossing Bridge". That helped me a lot.
- Music
- Airplane
Tess/Speaker:
By daybreak a north wind has shaken the snow from the fir boughs
Bei Tagesanbruch hat ein Nordwind den Schnee von den Tannenzweigen geweht
No disguise lasts long. Did you think there were
Keine Verkleidung dauert lange. Hast du gedacht, unter der Erde gäbe
no winds under the earth? My Tartar horse prefers a north wind.
es keine Winde? Mein Tatarenpferd liebt den Nordwind besonders
Did you think a little time and death would stop me?
Hast du gedacht, ein wenig Zeit und der Tod können mich aufhalten?
Didn't you choose me for the stubborn set of my head, for
Hast du mich nicht wegen meines Eigensinns, wegen der grünen Augen gewählt, die es
green eyes that dared the cheat and the haggler from our door?
wagten, Betrüger und Feilscher von unserer Tür zu vertreiben?
I'm the only one in the graveyard.
Ich bin allein auf dem Friedhof
You chose well. No one is as stubborn as me,
Du hast gut gewählt Keiner ist so eigensinnig wie ich
and my Tartar horse prefers a north wind.
Und mein Tatarenpferd liebt den Nordwind besonders.
- Music
Narrator: They say, Gallagher the widow is guarding Raymond's heritage like Cerberus. Normally, she turns down any interviews about Carver, arguing that she is not his "professional" widow. But for Europe she is ready to make an exception by giving a short interview, if only after the questions and their background has been thoroughly discussed in an exchange of about thirty emails. Thus at least, the reporter knew what to expect from his visit in Port Angeles:
- Music
- Sound
Narrator: A gloomy looking woman in her mid fifties, sporting a Tartar's beard.
Tess: [laughs]
Narrator: Forget the questions we agreed upon, ask what you want, says Tess Gallagher, who against all expectations turns out to be a charming and witty interviewee. There is something about her that reminds you of the TV character Lilly Munster: dark lipstick and wafting clothes.
- Sound
- Ridge House
Narrator: The widow's house: Apparently, Ridge House is made completely out of wood. His name is still written on the sign at the door. Tess Gallagher. Raymond Carver. As though he were still alive - You will surely want to see his room, Gallagher says, and is already on her way to the study of a writer who once said about himself
- Sound
Speaker: "I am a cigarette with a life attached
Tess: Ray would work in this chair here ... he didn't smoke in the house
Speaker: When he wanted to smoke he went out on the balcony.
-- Balkon
Tess: ...and he had a little chair out here...
Speaker: ..er hatte einen kleinen Stuhl hier
Tess: ...and if you sit right here or if you even lean here you can look up ..and
look what you see
Speaker: ... From here you can see ...
Tess: ....beautiful....
Speaker: ...the snow-covered mountains on the one hand .....
Tess: ...and the clouds drifting over the mountains
Speaker: ... and there, on the other, the view to the harbour
Tess: ... to the harbour.
- Sound
Narrator: The walls of his study are adorned by photographs, his fishing license, his entrance ticket from a visit to the casino in Reno, and of course a picture of the man Carver was mostly compared to: Chekhov
Tess: Yes, he was always interested in Chekhov, he loved Chekhov
- Music
Narrator: By strange coincidence, the last story of Carver's very last book revolves around the last days of his chosen Russian kindred spirit. "Errand" is the story's title. Chekhov in the spa of Badenweiler
- Sound
Speaker: Dr. Schwöhrer arrived and unpacked his bag, all the while keeping his gaze fastened on Chekhov, who lay gasping in the bed. The sick man's pupils were dilated and his temples glistened with sweat. Dr. Schwöhrer was not an emotional man, but he knew Chekhov's end was near
- Music
Narrator: A few months after having written the story of Chekhov's death, Carver himself was also spitting blood. He had fallen fatally ill with lung cancer. Finally, he was also diagnosed with a brain tumour. It seems as though Carver had described his own end in his Chekhov story. ;
Tess: I think the writing was ahead of him .. was ahead of what was happening...
Speaker: Ich denke, sein Schreiben war seinem Leben voraus
Tess: I think we can't explain those things
Speaker: Solche Dinge kann man nicht erklären
Tess: Do you think you can explain that?
- Music
Narrator: Just as the tuberculous Chekhov had got married to the actress Olga Knipper shortly before his death, Carver was seriously ill, when he went to the registrar's office once more together with the writer Tess Gallagher. Six weeks prior to his death, they went to the gambling town of Reno.
- Sound
Tess: It was Ray's idea that we should go to Reno and get married...
Speaker: ...es war Rays Idee, nach Reno zu gehen und dort zu heiraten...naturally we also went to the casinos....
Tess: I won just non-stop there, it was so amazing
Speaker: ...und das wirklich Verblüffende: ich gewann quasi nonstop... When we were about to leave and our suitcases already stood in front of the door, I suddenly felt that I was going to win again, and I said: I want to get back to the table just once more.
Tess: I said Ray come with me, I think I'm going to win again
Speaker: But he didn't want to. So I went on my own -- and won again. I left the casino, both of my hands full with the money I had won. Schau her, rief ich
Tess: Look at this, look at this. And I had my hands full of money, money in the right hand, money in the left
Speaker: We're going to miss the bus, he said. Vergiss den Bus, sagte ich, wir
nehmen ein Taxi.
Tess: Oh forget that bus, I said, we're taking a taxi!
- Music
- Airplane
Tess: We weren't sad, it's hard to believe I suppose
Speaker: Es ist vielleicht schwer zu glauben, aber wir waren nie traurig. Only at the airport, when he tried his luck once more with the gambling machine, he suddenly said:
Tess: It's probably the last time...
Speaker: ...es ist wahrscheinlich das letzte Mal that I am doing this ...
Tess: ...and that was a really sad moment.
- Music
- Sound
Speaker: I love dialogues between people who don't listen to each other
Narrator: Raymond Carver -- or how to get a good story
Carver: Rewriting and revising is something very dear to my heart...
Speaker: Überarbeiten und Revidieren ist etwas, das meinem Wesen entspricht...
Carver: ...I am never quite finished with the work
Speaker: ich bin nie ganz fertig mit der Arbeit
- Music
Carver: [heavy breathing]
Narrator: That's what Carver said in 1983, five years before his death in an interview with journalist Kay Bonetti. He would revise each of his stories between fifteen and up to twenty times, in order to, as he put it, strip the phrases and words to the bone.
Carver: Very often they come from a line ...
Speaker: Oft stammen meine Ideen von einem Satz that I pick up somewhere.
Carver: ...a spoken line...once I saw....
Speaker: ..... Once, when I sat in an aeroplane and we were just about to land,
Carver: ... as we're coming down the man who was sitting next to me took the wedding ring off his finger and put it into his pocket...
Speaker: nahm der Mann, der neben mir saß, plötzlich seinen Hochzeitsring vom Finger
und steckte ihn in die Tasche...
Carver: ...and all I had to do was to imagine what may be about to happen there
Speaker: ich mußte mir nur noch vorstellen, wie die Geschichte weiter ging
Carver: ...what he was up to.
Henry: He was always on the lookout...
Speaker: Er war ständig auf der Jagd for a new idea that he could use
- Music
Narrator: Henry Carlile, poet and Professor of English at Portland State University, Oregon.
Henry: Often, what happens, when a Carver character reaches that point...
Speaker: Wenn eine Carver Figur in einer Geschichte den Punkt errreicht where you would think that they might reach an insight -- what Joyce called an "epiphany" -- that's when you will be let down ... The character moves on intuitively without completely understanding what he is doing. That's where Ray's strength lies. He has a very good feeling for the way most people approach things.
Henry: ....most people approach a problem
- Music
Speaker: There is in the soul a desire for not thinking
Herb: Carver characters are people who are doing the very best they can with
what they have
Speaker: Carver Figuren geben immer ihr Bestes, tun alles, was in ihrer Macht
steht.
Herb: ....and it often is not enough.
Speaker: aber das ist meistens nicht genug
- Music
Narrator: Herb Blissard, a college teacher in Yakima; the town Carver grew up in.
Herb: It often will not get them ahead....
Speaker: They don't accomplish anything, they don't achieve prosperity, but they give their best ... These are people who constantly tell themselves: Next week or next month, everything is going to change. But nothing changes.
- Music
Narrator: June 2nd 1977 - the magical date in every Carver biography. The day Ray stopped drinking. I had reached the point where the doctors were giving me only a few months to survive, as Carver would later recall.
- Music
Carver: In 1976, two of my books were published...
Speaker: In 1976 two of my books were published. "Would you please be quiet, please" -- and a volume of poems ....
Carver: ..so everything I got to do was swell!
Speaker: That was great, and in that respect all was fine. But at the time, my first wife Maryann and I had separated, and because of my drinking I had been sliding until I reached a very serious situation.
Carver: ...it was out of control....
Speaker: Ich hatte mein Leben nicht mehr unter Kontrolle. ....
Carver: ...I was hospitalized twice...
Speaker: Ich musste zwei Mal ins Spital, within twelve months I stayed at the detox centre twice, which goes to show how serious the situation was.
Carver: ...so I ....
Speaker: ...so hörte ich eines morgens auf....
Carver: .....stopped. I just didn't drink one morning
Speaker: And the next morning I didn't drink, and the one after that
Carver: and the next morning...
Speaker: ...I was able to stay sober for a whole week ...
Carver: ..I was able to...
Speaker: ...another week, a month. ...
Carver: ...fortunately I was able to...
Speaker: I was very cautions. Day after day...
Carver: I just took things very carefully.
- Music
Tess: I met him he was 39...
Speaker: Als ich ihn kennen lernte, war er 39, glaube ich.
Tess: ...something like that, I believe...
Speaker: ...physically he was an old man...
Tess: ...he was already very old in his body...and his soul, too. But he was full of fun. [laughs]
- Music
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