You have all, I hope, read the fantastic material that was put up on the ‘New Yorker’ website – the story as Carver submitted it, which I’m going to call ‘Beginners’ the story with the edits, which I’ll call ‘Beginners,’ Edited and the story as it finally appeared, which I’ll refer to as ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’ (or ‘What we talk about…’ for short’) and also the letters between Carver and Lish.īut before I start looking at these words in detail, I’m going to backtrack a little. Beginners will be brought to press (against some opposition) by Tess Gallagher who believes that these stories, in these versions, have their own integrity – an integrity that Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, I won’t say ‘compromised’ that might be too strong – an integrity that Lish helped to change. It will be called Beginners, and will contain the original versions of the stories which became What we talk about when we talk about love. In October this year, a brand new book by Carver is going to be published. The general view of him is about to be permanently altered. Perhaps the most interesting since his death. I think this is a very interesting moment for Carver’s reputation. But for now I’ll pass on, because the sainthood issue brings us to the second reason I’ve chosen to talk about Carver. What I eventually wrote on the back inside cover of the book, referring to the picture on the front, was ‘So tell me, friend, is it honest?’ I was about to travel across the country on a Greyhound bus, and I wanted the right company. I bought this copy of Where I’m Calling From in Stanford in October 1989. Just to add, I wasn’t immune from this myself. Sanctification is a great disservice to such a morally complex, morally implicated, writer. Carver’s greatest friends are, in my opinion, his worst enemies. No story is every inevitable – particularly no great one. To say ‘almost inevitable’ is to turn the stories into a physiological process. In a long essay I particularly hate, Richard Ford wrote blandly about Good Raymond:Īs long as I knew Ray – the next ten years – there was this feeling of so much good and bad that had been left behind in a single lot, so that among my friends, he seemed to be facing life in the most direct and jarring way, the most adult way – a way that made the stories he wrote almost inevitable. How does a greater number of foreign translations prove a more relentless honesty?) At the climax of the same introduction, Gallagher writes, ‘This book is like rain collected in a barrel, water gathered straight from the sky.’ Carver’s goodness and bounty have become the goodness and bounty of nature itself – the nature of the Pacific Northwest, what she called in another book Carver Country. (Sorry, as an aside, I can’t help saying this is ludicrous. Here’s Salman Rushdie’s quote on the front of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: ‘One of America’s most original, truest voices.’ The poet Tess Gallagher, Carver’s wife and widow, wrote in the introduction to Call If You Need Me of Carver’s ‘extraordinary voice – its witnessing so clarified by relentless honesty that its stories have entered into over twenty languages around the world’. Almost everything one reads about him emphasizes his moral qualities – everything, that is, apart from the things he wrote and let slip about himself. ‘Carver wouldn’t have it, would he?’įor better and definitely for worse, Carver has become something of a literary saint – or maybe a Holy Ghost. I sometimes think about him halfway through writing a sentence: ‘Is this word necessary?’ I think. This is for a couple of reasons.įirst, he’s a writer who bugs me. Instead of David Mamet – who would be a very interesting case – I’m going to talk about Raymond Carver. Most of what I say wouldn’t apply to the music of Steve Reich or the architecture of John Pawson, though they are often referred to as minimal – and there are probably points to be made about a general cultural yearning for simplicity, for a stripping away of unnecessary detail. Today, I’ve taken minimalism as my subject – literary minimalism, the minimalism of fiction. Why would any writer want to take this as a maxim? How might addressing themselves as ‘stupid’ be useful to them? I’m not going to be talking about David Mamet today, but “Keep it simple, stupid” is a useful stepping off point for this lecture. Yes, this is the American playwright and screenwriter David Mamet’s famous formulation, which we are to imagine him muttering to himself as he bangs away at his typewriter: “Keep it simple, stupid.” ‘KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID’: MINIMALISM IN PROSE
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