Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life

By Carol Sklenicka

‘I don’t know what I want, but I want it now.’ Raymond Carver copied this quote into his notebook just after the mid-point of his truncated life and it hints at the internal divisions that tore him apart. In one sense, it was a lie, because what Carver always wanted, from adolescence, was to be a writer. As a working class boy whose family slaved in the saw mills of Oregon, he could never see how you became one and spent the rest of his life trying to work it out. Even when he finally made it, he could never reconcile how it felt with how he’d imagined it might be. Most of the time he felt a fraud.


This big, compendious biography illuminates the division between the strict, controlled form of his fiction, and the unstructured, chaotic sprawl of the life he mined for its content. Married with a child while still a teenager, his 17 year old schoolgirl wife pregnant again six weeks after giving birth to the first baby, they both worked full time as they struggled to get educated, pay the bills and be happy in a welter of family crises, exhaustion and debt. Carver’s father had been a depressive alcoholic and Carver too began to take refuge in the bottle, consuming vodka in industrial quantities, in common with writer friends who believed in the mythology of drink and creativity. He and his friends had mammoth drinking sessions in bars, were sometimes too inebriated to give readings, or lectures (Carver had to be removed from the stage on one occasion) and fell in and out of rehab. It was the era of Hemingway, Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. Carver was violent towards his wife and neglected his children.

But in the face of the enormous personal challenges that he had to meet, you can’t help but forgive him. He was a vulnerable human being, born on the wrong side of the American tracks, who surmounted huge obstacles to become a writer at all. You can’t help but realise in this book, that if Carver had been born Ivy League, there would have been no struggle and his career would have been stratospheric. But, on the other hand, he might not have had so much to write about.

He was classed a ‘dirty realist’ by Granta editor Bill Buford, a ‘minimalist’ and ‘the American Chekhov’ by others. His stories are 20th century masterpieces of form as well as brilliant vignettes of human life at the bottom edge of the American Dream.

When his 24 year old marriage collapsed under the pressure of drink-related violence and bankruptcy, Carver abruptly went on the wagon and found another woman - the poet Tess Gallagher - to take care of him for the last ten years of his life. The only thing that sours the happy ending is the fact that he failed to provide for his children and the ex-wife who had sacrificed her own prospects to support him. Though his income was by then enormous, and he had considerable assets, he left them only $5,000 in his will and wrote, in an essay, that having children had ruined his life.  The people who had suffered most to ensure his success, were prevented from sharing the benefits of it.

A few lines of poetry, just titled 'Late Fragment', jotted in his notebook hint at the relative serenity he eventually achieved.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

This is an excellent biography, written in the traditional style of literary biographies. There are some very careful chapters at the end, where you can sense the lawyer’s pencil in action. It is very marked that the only person not thanked in the acknowledgements is Carver’s second wife. She was never interviewed and is only quoted from work in the public domain. The omissions hint at another story I’d love to hear.

Barbara Trapido: Sex and Stravinsky

It’s a wonderful title for a wonderful novel. I’ve loved most of Barbara Trapido’s books - my favourite was Temples of Delight - but I didn’t like her most recent Frankie and Stankie. I was sent advance drafts by my agent (we shared the same) and was told it was a memoir. Something about the form of it troubled me, though I wasn’t brave enough to say as much. But when it was published it was subtly altered and classified as a novel. I still didn’t feel it worked as fiction and I didn’t think the writing measured up to some of her previous work either. Now I wonder whether perhaps that was because it was just too autobiographical. Anyway, I was disappointed, and so, when Sex and Stravinsky was published I didn’t rush out to buy it.

We were both supposed to be performing at the ill-fated Christchurch Literature Festival which was cancelled due to the earthquake last September, so I never got to meet the author, but the bookshops were full of the novel. I picked a copy up, read a few pages and was hooked. Too expensive (and too heavy!) to buy abroad, I waited until I got a good deal on the paperback in the UK - one of these 3 for 2 in W.H. Smith. The novel is an absolute delight. It is witty, ascerbic, lyrical and poignant, sometimes all at the same time. I read it twice.

There are 7 main characters; Australian Caroline, blonde, six feet tall, is a high achiever who can do her own plumbing, make designer clothes out of chair covers, but can’t cope with her own mother. She is married to sweet natured South African Josh who is an expert in mime, dance and Stravinsky but finds it difficult to say ‘no’ to anyone. They have a teenage daughter called Zoe who doesn’t get on with her mother, and they live in the south of England, in a converted bus, because all their money has to go to keep Caroline’s demanding mother - the ‘Witch-Woman’ and Caroline’s younger sister, ‘The Less Fortunate’.

Then there’s South African Hattie who once went to school with Josh, who currently writes ballet books for girls and is married (not happily) to wealthy entrepreneur Herman. She has an impossible daughter called Cat, and they live in Durban.

And then there’s Jack - or is he Jacques, or Giacomo? He is something of a mystery.

These disparate characters are all destined to be collected together in one time and place at the end of the novel where their complicated relationships are resolved with all the expert choreography of the dance.

When the novel opens it’s the 1970s and Josh has arrived in London and meets the exotic Caroline in a student house. It’s a collision of opposites that works well, until Caroline’s father dies and her impossible mother arrives in England with a one-way ticket. As the novel moves through time, Caroline will do anything to gain her mother’s affection and approval, including the sacrifice of her own husband and child. Barbara Trapido makes the relationship with the monster mother totally convincing, both tragic and hilarious at the same time. Josh, who puts up with everything for the sake of peace and his beloved daughter Zoe, thinks wistfully of his first love Hattie, who left him for the more forceful, ‘rugger bugger’, Herman.

Meanwhile in Durban, there’s a growing distance between Hattie and her husband and the daughter who takes after her father. Both despise Hattie and her love of ballet, the books for girls she writes so well and her chintzy, old world taste in furnishings and decor. Hattie thinks nostalgically of Josh and the budding relationship that never got a chance to form.

Things begin to change with the arrival of Jack/Jacques/Giacomo, who rents the studio at the bottom of Hattie’s garden, and the arrangement of an international conference in dance and mime in Durban, to which both Josh and Hattie are invited.

A complex back-story is woven together with a skill that leaves you breathless and you arrive at the denouement at exactly the right moment with a gasp of astonishment. Nothing is as it seems. My favourite part of the story is the moment when Caroline finds her mother’s will and undergoes a complete change of character. I wanted to shout ‘Yes! Yes,Yes!’ And when she crushed the antique porcelain into the kitchen floor with a mallet I was with her all the way.

Alongside Rose Tremain’s Trespass, T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, Amy Sackville’s The Still Point and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, this has to be among my top ten books for the past year. And it’s a good reminder to authors that getting an attention grabbing title for your book is essential. It’s the starting point for that very important relationship. First, catch your reader .........

A.S. Byatt: The Children's Book

In the age of the three minute sound-bite and novels designed to be consumed at a gallop, A.S. Byatt’s work appears to come from another world where the word ‘literary’ was regarded as a complimentary adjective. The Children’s Book is a Victorian novel - it’s intelligent, full of description, philosophical discussion, and discursive authorial comment. Forget tightly constructed plots and narrative hooks.   The story-line is linear, sprawling through space and time.  It’s a fascinating read - but you have to give it your full attention.


Living at the turn of the last century, the Bohemian Wellwood family are the central subjects, with a large cast of children and adults. They are at the centre of the arts and crafts movement and, just as in Possession, the worlds of William Morris and Oscar Wilde are vividly brought to life.  The men are bankers and artists;  the women are dabbling in the suffragist movement,  fighting for the 'life of the mind'.  The matriarch, Olive Wellwood, is an author, writing fairy tales for children.

Byatt said that when she wrote the book she was interested in the idea that people who wrote for children were often not very good with their own. ‘I noticed that the children of the great writers for children often came to unhappy ends - even suicide - and this interested me dramatically. Kenneth Grahame's son, for whom The Wind in the Willows was ostensibly written, lay down on a railway line when he was at Oxford. Two of the Llewellyn-Davies boys, for whom Barrie wrote Peter Pan, ended in suicide.’

In the novel, each of Olive’s children has his or her own book - a special tale she keeps in a cupboard and adds to as they grow. But there are dark secrets concealed in fairytales - children who are other people’s children, stepmothers who are forced to wear red hot clogs and dance until they die, pretty young mermaids willing to be maimed and dumb for love. This is the world that the novel explores - the children’s real lives above the water and their darker reflection submerged beneath. Things are never what they seem and everything has consequences.

I really enjoyed the book, but it isn’t for everyone.

Io Sono L'Amore (I am Love)

I’m trying to improve my Italian, so spending some time here watching TV programmes and films. This 2010 film features Tilda Swinton, an actress I really admire, and has won a lot of awards.

At the beginning of the film a beautiful Russian woman, collected when very, very young by the Italian heir to a textile fortune, has just spent 30 years as a trophy wife in fashionable Milan. Tilda Swinton plays Emma, the inscrutable, perfect wife whose life lacks love and passion. Her 3 children are grown up and she claims she can no longer remember her Russian name and has no identity outside her marriage. Then Emma meets a young chef, a friend of her son and her whole existence as wife and mother is thrown into jeopardy.

It’s a good study of the Italian family and a woman’s place in it. Lavish family meals form the narrative spine of the film - celebrations of birthdays, engagements, business deals, illicit lunches, funerals. It’s all beautifully filmed, gloriously stylish, but rather slow.

If the film has a message beyond food and sex it’s that the old Italian family is in decline - the Recchi’s business is being overtaken by competitors from Asia and their women are no longer under patriarchal control. Emma is having an affair with a chef and her daughter has become a lesbian.

I was left feeling rather dissatisfied at the end though, feeling that the narrative should have had deeper layers. But perhaps that’s unfair - it was very enjoyable and films are all about entertainment. It’s filmed by an Italian director with music by John Adam and definitely deserves its ‘best foreign film’ award.

T.C. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain

People have been telling me I should read this book ever since it was published. A friend of mine even teaches it to her creative writing students. I think I must have an inbuilt aversion to hyped books because it’s been sitting on my shelf and I’ve been avoiding eye contact for over a year. Now, I wish I’d read it earlier.
It begins with a quote from The Grapes of Wrath - that other iconic novel about American society. ‘They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.’   These days it seems to be illegal immigrants who are de-humanised by a society that doesn't want to see them or address their problems.   Boyle’s writing, like Steinbeck's,  is tight, so perfectly crafted it never gets in the way of the story - which is explosive. The whole novel is an indictment of contemporary American life - obsessed with material possessions, paranoid, fearful, guilt-ridden and increasingly angry.
Delaney, one of the main characters, is an eco-journalist who wants (in public) to preserve the wilderness, but he has second thoughts when it encroaches on his own private patch of earth. His wife Kyra is a realtor with her eye permanently on closing the next deal. Their lives change dramatically when Delaney knocks down and badly injures an illegal Mexican immigrant, Càndido - the same day a wild coyote skims their fence and goes off with the family’s pet dog.
Càndido is living rough in the canyon with his seventeen year old pregnant wife Amèrica. They have been tempted by the American Dream and have found only a nightmare existence of hunger, discrimination and violence. Càndido is badly injured by the accident, but they can’t afford a doctor, dare not go to a hospital and he’s unable to work to earn money for his young wife.
Delaney is shocked by the accident and, to assuage the guilt he initially feels, gives the man $20 and then convinces himself that Càndido had jumped out in front of him deliberately in order to get money. It’s the beginning of a long sequence of deceptions that ends with the realisation that no gates, walls, or fences, however high can keep out The Wild, or the hordes of hungry people from across the border.
The ending is magnificent. I read it three times in order to grasp its full significance, which is all in the sub-text, pitching you forwards to a future that still holds hope. This is one of the important novels of the 20th century, with a very serious message. But is anyone listening?

Allan Russell: Veiled in Shadows

I’ve been following the progress of Veiled in Shadows through all its stages via the Australian author’s blog ‘Publish or Perish’, so it’s very satisfying to finally be in possession of a copy of the novel. Allan Russell chose in the end to design his own cover and have the book printed by Lightning Source, distributed through The Book Depository and Amazon.com.
Allan Russell is a very interesting person - he has Bachelors Degrees in Anthropology and Education, but has also studied Archaeology and History.  He lives near Melbourne Australia with his family and is a social worker, currently working for a charity supporting the homeless. He is also a wonderful wildlife photographer - as his blog testifies - and now a published author.


I see a lot of ‘self-published’ books, as the judge of a small regional literary award, and my heart often sinks in anticipation, because so many of them are so poorly edited and badly produced, however good the content. Veiled in Shadows is very different - a lot of thought has gone into it and the result is a quality product.

The novel itself was also a surprise - though it shouldn’t have been. I think there is still an inbuilt prejudice against ‘self-publication’ and an expectation that the quality will be of a lower standard than mainstream publishing. Not a bit of that with this one.

World War II fiction is not my first choice, so that was another reason to be wary. I opened Veiled in Shadows when it arrived, just for a glance over a mug of coffee; half an hour later I was still reading and my coffee had gone cold. Al is a born story-teller and I was quickly wrapt up in the characters and their lives - I’ve been compulsively reading it ever since. The ending didn’t disappoint either.

Briefly, Ebi Gausel is an ambitious young SS officer who, in 1938, meets the half English Princess Victoria Katharina von Brunnenstadt and they fall deeply in love. When war breaks out, their engagement is broken off - Ebi believes because of a misunderstanding over another woman - and Victoria is taken to England by her father. There she meets a young RAF officer, Peter Robinson, and grows to love him too. At the beginning of the war, Victoria is recruited by the English secret services and played back into Germany, involved from then on in a dangerous double game at the risk of her own life. To tell you more than that would spoil the plot. One of the other female characters, Jena, is a Polish jew who survives a massacre and is subsequently recruited by Victoria as both friend and agent. Jena was one of the characters I most cared about - feisty and vulnerable and utterly real. Even Ebi, the ‘bad guy’, has his human side, as all the Nazis did, though his deeds are graphically depicted.

Veiled in Shadows isn’t literary fiction, but it’s a very good read, and more than that it’s a book that has a moral and emotional core. The characters and their lives will be with me for a long time. Allan Russell is a very good writer. I know he’s working on his second book and I will be reading that one too!

Lyndall Gordon: Lives Like Loaded Guns

The title of this book should win an award - biographies don’t usually sound so intriguing. It comes from one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems ‘my life had stood a loaded gun’, and in this biography the poems themselves are the weapons wielded by the protagonists after Dickinson’s death.
But to call Lyndall Gordon’s book a biography is rather misleading - there is little conventional biographical detail in it. The book is subtitled ‘Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds’ and it tells the story of how an adulterous relationship divided the family while Emily was alive and then after her death how a series of intestacies resulted in a family split along the same fault lines arguing over who owned the poet’s manuscripts and reputation.

Austin Dickinson

The elder Dickinsons were Amherst’s ‘First Family’ - deeply religious parents of unimpeachable virtue who preached (and practised) a life of abstinence, deprivation and duty. Unfortunately their three children were eccentric, gifted, pleasure loving, sensual beings. Austin, photographed as a young man, smouldering from the sepia emulsion, resembles Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights; Emily stares out of her portrait like a gazelle with an unusual combination of innocence and intellectual assurance. Her youngest sister Lavinia, a girl with beseeching eyes and sensual lips, was kept close by her parents, rather like Rapunzel, and eventually jilted by the only prince who came to the door - a man she loved passionately.

Emily Dickinson

Austin married a young woman - a friend of Emily’s - who was afraid of sex. He promised Susan a ‘mariage blanc’ if that was the only way to win her. They did manage to have three children, but Susan rarely allowed him physical contact. Needless to say, when a stylish temptress appeared on the scene Austin was a fruit ripe for plucking.
Mabel Loomis Todd was the young, dissatisfied wife of an astronomy lecturer. Her husband was a philanderer and Mabel seems to have decided that what was sauce for the gander might also be good for the goose. The Todds had little money and Austin was wealthy, with much local influence. There were benefits all round. The affair was conducted on the day bed in the secluded dining room of the parental mansion still inhabited by Emily and Lavinia after the death of their parents. Austin paid the bills, so it was hardly surprising that the sisters felt unable to refuse him. Lavinia at first seemed to like Mabel. Emily stayed upstairs, and sent her terse, coded messages in verse. Susan and her children next door felt utterly betrayed. Yet Mabel seemed to be astonished when Austin’s wife refused to entertain her.

Mabel Todd

The affair went on for 15 years, occasionally as a threesome with Mabel’s husband. Amherst had no idea that it’s leading citizen and pillar of society had such an interesting private life.

After Emily’s death, Mabel, backed by Austin, offered to transcribe and edit Emily’s poems and Lavinia agreed.  Susan, across the garden, also wanted to edit them, but had no experience. The poems in her possession remained unpublished. Mabel, better placed, spent years editing and finding publishers for the first collections of Dickinson poems in print. She kept some of the originals and claimed later that they were rightfully hers as recompense for her work. Austin gave her a plot of land which actually belonged to Lavinia and which became the source of even more law suits.
After Austin’s death the gloves really came off and the three women became involved in legal battles over ownership of land and poetry. Mabel lost, mainly because her adultery with Austin could not be revealed in court and without it she had no visible reason for such a close relationship with the family that might give rise to such monetary rewards. Lies were told on both sides and the whole truth is still not known, though Lyndall Gordon makes a lawyer’s case for her own premise.
One of the most interesting revelations in the book is that Emily Dickinson probably had epilepsy, like her nephew and her cousin, and that seems to have been the main reason for her seclusion and repudiation of marriage. Epilepsy was shameful - something to be hidden. King George V of England had a son (the lost prince) with epilepsy and he was kept out of the public gaze, unnamed and unmentioned. Lyndall Gordon makes a very good case for Dickinson’s affliction.

This book is going to make Dickinson scholars rethink a lot of received theories. I would have liked to have more of Emily Dickinson’s life in the book - the poetry, the feud, the family and particularly the Scarlet Woman Mabel Todd, are centre stage and Emily just a ghostly presence in white in the upstairs room - a voice off-stage. But what a voice!