Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Read online

  Acclaim for Raymond Carver

  “Carver’s writing career [is] a literary achievement equaled only by the very best of modern American story writers—Hemingway, Welty, Salinger, Cheever.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “One of the great short story writers of our time—of any time.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “With painful, funny acuteness, Carver captures the electric currents that shoot through people’s lives and singe them indelibly.”

  —Newsweek

  “Nearly 200 years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge started a revolution when they proclaimed their aim to write in ‘the language really used by men.’ Neither of them quite achieved that … Raymond Carver has. And it is terrifying.”

  —The Nation

  “Clear, hard language so right that we shiver at the knowledge we gain from it.”

  —Chicago Tribune Book World

  BOOKS BY RAYMOND CARVER

  FICTION

  Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

  Furious Seasons and Other Stories

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

  Cathedral

  Where I’m Calling From

  POETRY

  Near Klamath

  Winter Insomnia

  At Night the Salmon Move

  Where Water Comes Together with Other Water

  Ultramarine

  A New Path to the Waterfall

  PROSE AND POETRY

  Fires: Essays, Poems, and Stories

  POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED

  Short Cuts: Selected Stories

  Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose

  All of Us: The Collected Poems

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EBOOK EDITION, MAY 2015

  Copyright © 1991, 2000 by Tess Gallagher

  Foreword copyright © 1991, 2000 by Tess Gallagher

  Editor’s preface and notes copyright © 1991, 2000 by William L. Stull

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Britain as No Heroics, Please by The Harvill Press, London, in 1991. This edition first published in Great Britain by The Harvill Press, London, in 2000. Subsequently published in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2001.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carver, Raymond.

  Call if you need me : the uncollected fiction & prose / Raymond Carver; edited by William L. Stull; foreword by Tess Gallagher.

  p. cm.

  Rev. ed. of: No heroics, please. 1992

  I. Stull, William L. II. Carver, Raymond. No heroics, please. III. Title.

  PS3553.A7894 C26 2001

  813´.54—dc21

  00-043834

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-72628-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-97054-6

  Cover design by Buchanan-Smith LLC

  Cover photograph © Todd Hido / Edge Reps

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For Georgia Morris Bond

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Tess Gallagher

  Editor’s Preface by William L. Stull

  Epigraph

  UNCOLLECTED STORIES

  Kindling

  What Would You Like to See?

  Dreams

  Vandals

  Call If You Need Me

  FIVE ESSAYS AND A MEDITATION

  My Father’s Life

  On Writing

  Fires

  John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher

  Friendship

  Meditation on a Line from Saint Teresa

  EARLY STORIES

  Furious Seasons

  The Hair

  The Aficionados

  Poseidon and Company

  Bright Red Apples

  FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL

  From The Augustine Notebooks

  OCCASIONS

  On “Neighbors”

  On “Drinking While Driving”

  On Rewriting

  On the Dostoevsky Screenplay

  On “Bobber” and Other Poems

  On “For Tess”

  On “Errand”

  On Where I’m Calling From

  INTRODUCTIONS

  Steering by the Stars

  All My Relations

  The Unknown Chekhov

  Fiction of Occurrence and Consequence (with Tom Jenks)

  On Contemporary Fiction

  On Longer Stories

  BOOK REVIEWS

  Big Fish, Mythical Fish

  (My Moby Dick by William Humphrey)

  Barthelme’s Inhuman Comedies

  (Great Days by Donald Barthelme)

  Rousing Tales

  (Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison)

  Bluebird Mornings, Storm Warnings

  (The Van Gogh Field by William Kittredge)

  A Gifted Novelist at the Top of His Game

  (A Game Men Play by Vance Bourjaily)

  Fiction That Throws Light on Blackness

  (Hardcastle by John Yount)

  Brautigan Serves Werewolf Berries and Cat Cantaloupe

  (The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan)

  McGuane Goes After Big Game

  (An Outside Chance by Thomas McGuane)

  Richard Ford’s Stark Vision of Loss, Healing

  (The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford)

  A Retired Acrobat Falls under the Spell of a Teenage Girl

  (Balancing Acts by Lynne Sharon Schwartz)

  “Fame Is No Good, Take It from Me”

  (Selected Letters by Sherwood Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin)

  Coming of Age, Going to Pieces

  (Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years by Peter Griffin; and Hemingway: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers)

  Notes

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  “The last of the last,” I wrote to a friend, during the yearlong process of bringing five newly discovered stories by Raymond Carver to publication. As a poet, I also hear in that phrase an echo of “lasting.” Yet this is all the new work there will ever be from that extraordinary voice—its witnessing so clarified by relentless honesty that his stories have entered into over twenty languages around the world.

  When Haruki Murakami, a fine novelist and Ray’s Japanese translator, visited me with his wife, Yoko, after Ray’s death, he confided that he felt accompanied by Ray’s presence and dreaded finishing his complete edition of Ray’s work. I know now the mixture of pleasure and sadness he must have been feeling.

  The certain joy of this present endeavor has been in hearing something new from a voice it seemed had left the earth, of being glad for its unexpected entrance after a curtain has rung down. If a trunk of Kafka’s or Chekhov’s manuscripts were discovered today, there would be a scramble to see what it held. We are like that—curious, nostalgic, eager for the familiar ghosts of those we admire in our literature and lives.

  These discoveries of new work by Ray are a separate, yet connected event in relation to work he published while he lived. There is value for those who wish it, for when we love a writer, we want to read on and on, to encounter the full range of what he or she wrote—t
he transcendent, the unexpected, even the unfinished. We’re able. This value comes not only from the whole, but also from small things: phrasing and syntax, the recognition or surprise of characters, the line-by-line play of the telling.

  The discoveries of these stories took place at different times and in different locales. The first occurred in March 1999 at Ridge House, the Port Angeles, Washington, home where Ray and I lived at the time of his death. Jay Woodruff, a friend and senior editor at Esquire, assisted me in this process. The second came that midsummer, when William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, husband and wife partners in Carver scholarship, visited the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at the Ohio State University Library. There, while examining a box of manuscripts, they found two complete unpublished stories. They phoned me excitedly, on my birthday, with this news.

  It was bounty added to bounty when these two stories joined the three Jay and I had located. Moreover, it is grounds for a republication of Ray’s uncollected writings. Many of these works had appeared earlier in No Heroics, Please (published by The Harvill Press in Great Britain, and Vintage Books in America). In addition to these unpublished stories, we have further enriched the book with four essays previously included in Fires, a 1983 miscellany of poetry, prose, and fiction.

  Shortly after Ray’s death, while writing the introduction to A New Path to the Waterfall, I had come upon folders containing typescripts and hand drafts of unpublished stories. At the time I wasn’t sure these were complete manuscripts or, if they were, whether they should come to light. I felt that before unpublished work should be considered, all the writing Ray had clearly intended to see in print should first be made available. It would take nine years to accomplish that with the appearance of Ray’s collected poems in All of Us (Harvill, 1996; Knopf, 1998).

  There was plenty to do after Ray’s too-early death at fifty in 1988 from lung cancer. I saw three of his books into print in British and American editions; finished Carver Country, a book of photographs by Bob Adelman; and advised on the Robert Altman film Short Cuts, which drew on nine of Ray’s published stories. I participated in the making of three documentary films about Ray. Much of the above I did while teaching far from home. Somehow I also managed to write three books of poems, a book of stories, and a collection of essays.

  Early in 1998, as the tenth anniversary of Ray’s death approached, Jay Woodruff phoned to say he wanted to do something to honor Ray in Esquire. “There are these folders in the desk,” I said. “There may be nothing whole or worthwhile,” I told him. “But I could look sometime.” I suspect Jay heard hesitation. At any rate he said, “Tess, when you get ready to look at those things I’ll be happy to come out and help you.”

  Jay seemed exactly the person I’d been hoping might appear. He respected my work, loved Ray’s writing, and understood the process of revision and publication. Moreover, as both a fiction writer and a magazine editor, Jay knew good stories when he saw them. In March 1999 he flew to Seattle and came three hours, by car and ferry, to Port Angeles. The next day, from nine in the morning until eleven at night, we carefully examined the contents of each drawer in Ray’s desk. We read the pages in the folders, labeled and photocopied them, and finally made our choices. It was a quiet, intimate process, full of purpose. As we read, it became clear there were three fine stories. The dread I’d felt of coming to the last of Ray’s work was subsumed by the prospect of doing right by these unpublished stories. It seemed especially fitting that Esquire, where Ray’s stories found their first broad readership in the early 1970s, should participate in this discovery.

  Jay took on the job of deciphering Ray’s cramped handwriting to make accurate transcriptions. One manuscript was entirely handwritten, while others were in typescript with hand corrections. Far from finding this work tedious, Jay drew energy from the task. Having spent eleven years deciphering Ray’s handwriting, I checked Jay’s transcriptions word for word against the originals to fill in a few spots he couldn’t make out. We were mindful that Ray would sometimes take a story through thirty rewrites. These stories had been put aside well short of that. (In Ray’s final months, he turned from fiction to poetry for what became his last book, A New Path to the Waterfall.) Still, very little editing was needed on these stories. Characters and place names were standardized, so Dotty didn’t become Dolores a page later, or Eureka did not become Arcata. Endings, where Ray always worked hardest, were, in some instances, left as one leaves a meal when the phone rings. We simply let those last moments reverberate, allowing the story to come to rest.

  Ray had written several accounts of men trying to start over again, most notably “Where I’m Calling From.” In “Kindling,” the first of the new stories to be published in Esquire, a man desperately splitting a cord of wood tries to clarify his will toward going forward after alcoholism and the breakup of a marriage. The narrator is also a writer, and his tentative attempts to write again hark back movingly to that time in 1979 when Ray and I began our lives together in El Paso and he made his own fresh start at writing after a ten-year bout with alcoholism.

  Of the five new stories, “Dreams” became my favorite and Jay’s. Here a woman loses her children to a fire after the collapse of her marriage. The story seemed to bridge our lives in both Syracuse (where Ray and I had, like the couple in the story, slept in the basement to avoid the August heat) and the Northwest (where a fire had broken out on our street, although no lives had been lost). I recognized the echo of Ray’s story “A Small, Good Thing,” in which a child also dies. In both cases I admired Ray’s audacity in taking on subject matter that easily could have gone sentimental. In “Dreams,” the details curl forth like smoke from a roof, the action unfolding in chiaroscuro: the scene looms, glowers, then flares. These characters’ lives are so plundered by circumstance that they become our own.

  The two stories Bill and Maureen discovered date from the early 1980s, and both deal with the collapse of a marriage. One of them, “Call If You Need Me,” anticipates a central image in the story “Blackbird Pie” and the poem “Late Night with Fog and Horses.” In all three tellings, horses mysteriously appear through fog at a fateful parting. The other story, “What Would You Like to See?”, seems a cousin to “Chef’s House”; in each a husband and wife, while attempting to bring their lives together again, remain so injured at the core that they must go their separate ways. The closing image of spoilage recalls Ray’s story “Preservation” in its suggestion that relationships, like food on the thaw, are perishable, and beyond a certain point, you can’t get them back.

  When all but one of the stories had seen serial publication, Gary Fisketjon, Ray’s friend and editor, went over them again with me. At one point we discovered ourselves taking out the commas we’d put in. We laughed and quoted Ray to each other—that if you find yourself taking out what you just put in, it’s a sure sign the story is finished.

  I recently reread the four essays from Fires included here. I felt about “My Father’s Life” as I did when Ray first showed it to me in an early draft. It has to be one of the most moving expressions on record of a son’s love for his father. In an emotionally implosive scene, Ray goes to his father, who’s in the mental ward of the hospital where Ray’s child has just been born, and tells him, “You’re a grandfather.” His father responds, “I feel like a grandfather.” That sentence falls as softly as distant thunder, yet it has the effect of a hammer blow.

  In “On Writing” we get Ray’s literary credo. Eschewing what he calls “cheap tricks,” he delights in the labor of rewriting. He’s brave enough not to know where he’s going as he writes his initial draft. He sees to it that the story has tension, or what he calls a “relentless motion.” He knows what to leave out or to let rest “just under the surface.” Above all, there is his injunction to use “clear and specific language,” for which he set the mark for writers of his generation.

  Ray’s homage to John Gardner, his mentor and teacher, made me recall our driving through a snow
storm to visit John at his home in upstate New York. We’d talked into early morning, savoring the company of this man who had cared about Ray and his writing at a time when Ray desperately needed it—even loaning him the keys to his office so he had a place to write. Later, when John died in a motorcycle accident, Ray and I remembered John hadn’t wanted to go to bed that last night we’d spent together.

  It’s natural to want to know where a writer we admire began, and Ray’s first published story, “Furious Seasons,” marks that beginning, with Faulkner and Joyce as mentors. Also there is the rough gem of a story, “The Hair,” which seems antecedent to the later “Careful.” In “The Hair” we witness the first moments of that honed “dis-ease” for which Ray became famous. “The Aficionados,” also written at this time, is one of only two parodies he published. Here, under the pseudonym John Vale, he took his jabs at one of his clearly recognizable influences. Nonetheless, Hemingway remained an important literary model who would later give way to Chekhov.

  The reviews, introductions, and remaining essays collected here remind us of Ray’s enthusiasms: his love of a pure “good read,” vagaries of character, turns and twists of plot. Always there is the mandate of having something important at stake. As we read what Ray says about teaching writing or the reasons behind his choices for an anthology, we draw instruction from his respect for “vivid depiction of place” or “demonic intensity” and his awareness of “what counts”: “Love, death, dreams, ambition, growing up, coming to terms with your own and other people’s limitations.” Ray understood writing as a process of revelation, and his essay “On Rewriting” emphasizes the importance of revision as a means to open up the story and discover, in the deepest sense, why it was being written in the first place.

  I have great respect and affection for the writings collected in this book, not only for their biographical and literary value, but for their passion and clarity. As at the initial publication of No Heroics, Please, I feel greatly indebted to William L. Stull, who did the work of collecting Ray’s fugitive pieces from newspapers and periodicals. I will always be grateful to Jay Woodruff for his personal kindness and cooperation during all phases of presenting the three stories we discovered; our work enhanced an already great friendship.