something about Raymond Carver's short stories

In the Raymond Carver collection Fires (which I have not read), he supposedly says of his short story “Put Yourself in My Shoes” that he did not know when he started writing that the protagonist was going to be a writer. He had the sentence, “The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner,” and, from there, “I made the story just as I’d made a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.”

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes touches on the themes of the writing process and perceptions of writers and writing.

The writer and protagonist in the story is Myers (last name), and the story begins when Myers’s wife (possibly his estranged wife) Paula calls from an office Christmas party to invite him. But Myers is reluctant; he quit his job at that office—a textbook publishing company—to become a writer. During this conversation, Paula says a former coworker, Carl, admires Myers’s “nerve” for quitting the job in order to be a writer. And Carl says, ribbingly, that Myers should come to the party—“Get him out of his ivory tower and back into the real world for a while.” Myers refuses to go to the party.

 

Instead, Myers and Paula visit a couple they barely know, Edgar and Hilda Morgan. The Morgans, upon remembering that Myers is a writer, feed him some story ideas, commenting on the possible perspectives and significance of each story, all the while making comments about writing, including

• “It would take a Tolstoy to tell it and tell it right," Edgar said. "No less than a Tolstoy."
  

• "We want you to hear about Mrs. Attenborough, poor Mrs. Attenborough. You might appreciate this story, too, Mrs. Myers. This is your chance to see how his mind goes to work on raw material."

• "You know writers," Hilda said to Paula. "They like to exaggerate."
  "The power of the pen and all that," Edgar said.
  "That's it," Hilda said. "Bend your pen into a plowshare, Mr. Myers."
  

• "If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers, you wouldn't laugh," Edgar said as he got to his feet. "You wouldn't dare laugh! You'd try to understand. You'd plumb the depths of that poor soul's heart and try to understand. But you're no writer, sir!"

But Myers appears not to want to hear them talk about writing and repeatedly gets up to leave, telling Paula to get her coat.
 

Earlier in the story, as Myers is driving to meet Paula, we learn Myers is “between stories”:

As he drove he looked at the people who hurried along the walks with shopping bags. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. He tried to see everything, save it for later. He was between stories, and he felt despicable.

Although he is not writing, he is not looking for story ideas; he seems instead to be paying attention to points of form. And as the story ends and Myers and Paula are driving away from the Morgans, and Paula comments on how crazy the Morgans are, we hear again about Myers's attention:

He didn't answer. Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving. Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.

So without hunting for plots, Myers finds himself at the end of a story that seemed to unfold one sentence at a time.

 

The other characters in the story seem to think of writing as highfalutin, which repels Myers. But I do not think this story is necessarily a comment on What people get wrong about writing or on What writing is. I think the character—and maybe Carver himself at the time—is not writing, feels bad about it, is frustrated by people talking about writing, and then finds himself inspired. Even after stumbling on the inspiration, he still will have to write, to get it on paper, and to revise and revise again.  

 

Put Yourself in My Shoes is one of the great stories in the 37 included in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. I know I read Cathedral in high school or college, and I remember liking it a lot. How could I have gone this long without reading his other stories? My favorite stories are "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Feathers," "Whoever Was Using This Bed," and "Blackbird Pie." I love the writing style and the mix of weight and ordinariness. I especially love the humor. “Put Yourself in My Shoes” is a great example. So is "Blackbird Pie," which is about a delusional guy's thoughts after his wife leaves him. He imagines that the Dear John letter she left him was actually written by someone else, and one of his rationalizations is a formatting choice in the handwritten letter:

Secondly, my wife never underlined her words for emphasis. Never. I don’t recall a single instance of her doing this—not once in our entire married life, not to mention the letters I received from her before we were married. It would be reasonable enough, I supposed, to point out that it could happen to anyone. That is, anyone could find himself in a situation that is completely atypical and, given the pressure of the moment, do something totally out of character and draw a line, the merest line, under a word, or maybe under an entire sentence.

Amazing. And where it goes from there:

I would go so far as to say that every word of this entire letter, so-called (though I haven't read it through in its entirety, and won't, since I can't find it now), is utterly false. I don't mean false in the sense of "untrue," necessarily. There is some truth, perhaps, to the charges. I don't want to quibble. I don't want to appear small in this matter; things are bad enough already in this department. No.

Note: I am so glad I have now read some Raymond Carver and most or all of Richard Yates. How did I go so long without really enjoying such writing happened?

something about Richard Yates’s “Liars in Love”

Yates's superb short-story collection Liars in Love hits many of his best themes: fragile and fraught relationships, co-dependence and emotional distance, dignity and humiliation.

 

My favorite story in this collection is probably "Trying Out for The Race," in which two single mothers and their two children share a house in the suburbs. Elizabeth's daughter Nancy is close in age to Lucy's son, Russell. In one scene, Nancy kids Russel after he throws a tantrum about his mom going out for the evening. Russell, embarrassed, silently compares himself to the boy next door, Harry:

School as yet had produced no real friends for Russell, and he worried about that, but Harry Snyder was the boy next door, and so a casual, loafing kind of friendship had been easy to achieve with him. One day they were intently hunkered down over many tin soldiers in the basement of Harry's house when Mrs. Snyder came to the stairs and called down "Russell, you'll have to go home now. Harry has to come up and get ready because we're all going for a drive to Mount Vernon."

"Aw, Mom, now? You mean now?"

"Certainly, I meant 'now.' Your father wanted to get started an hour ago."

And that was when Harry went into action. In three swift, merciless kicks he sent soldiers flying in all directions, ruining formations that had been all afternoon in the making and he howled and flailed and cried like someone half his age, while Russell looked away in a wincing smile of embarrassment.

"Harry!" Mrs. Snyder called. "Harry, I want you to stop this right now. Do you hear me?"

But he didn't stop until long after she'd come down and led him tragically upstairs; when Russell crept out for home he could still hear the terrible sound of it ringing across the yellow grass.

Even so, there was an important difference. Harry had cried because he wanted his mother to leave him alone; Russell had cried because he didn't—and therein lay the very definition of a mother's boy.

That is so good. I found more perfect prose in "Saying Goodbye to Sally" when Jack, the would-be protagonist, gets sloppy drunk at a party:

Jack did his best to leave the room quickly but kept veering sideways against the near wall; then he decided it might be helpful to use the wall for support and guidance, letting one shoulder slide heavily along it while he gave his whole attention to lifting and placing his feet in the deep champagne-colored carpet. He knew dimly that Ralph had finished at the fireplace, had lurched past him muttering "Come on" and gone away into the hall, leaving him alone in this treacherously unstable but mercifully open room; he could see too that the bright doorway was very near now—only a few more steps—but his knees had begun to soften and buckle. He thought he could feel his shoulder sliding down the wall, rather than along it; then the tilting yellow carpet came slowly closer until it offered itself up as a logical, necessary surface for his hands, and for the side of his face.

These short stories exhibit all of the American master's gifts.

 

I went on a Yates binge, working my way through his bibliography after years ago having read his masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, as well as The Easter Parade and the posthumous collection, The Collected Short Stories of Richard Yates. I also previously posted about Disturbing the Peace, A Special Providence, and Cold Spring Harbor.

 

Note: Liars in Love was published in 1981; Yates died in 1992.