One good thing about dead writers is that they don’t become relics. The work they leave behind keeps their intellectual and emotional and artistic spirits alive, and the people who knew them, for better or for worse, quite often spill their guts out about what kind of people they were outside of their prose. I never feel like authors are gone, only perpetually absent, occupying places unknown, but somehow still available.
In Haruki Murakami’s 2009 non-fiction work 私たちの隣人、レイモンド・カーヴ (“Our Neighbor, Raymond Carver”) — part of the Haruki Murakami Translation Library series, which collects his translated work under a single publishing banner — he edits and translates a series of essays from friends and contemporaries of Raymond Carver, the celebrated American author whose entire oeuvre has been translated into Japanese by Murakami himself.
In this collection, compiled and translated (Murakami tells us in his introduction) from the eighth volume of Carver’s collected works, various people who interacted with a master of the American short story tell us just what they thought of him. How he affected them. What changes he wrought in their lives.
There are those who don’t give a shit about the private lives of authors. I’m not one of them. I like to know a little bit about everything when it comes to the writers that I respect. This book gives us a series of humorous and thoughtful anecdotes about what kind of a guy Carver was, and, based on these testimonies, it sure sounds like he was a good one.
Murakami only met Carver once in the flesh, but the American’s influence on Japan’s most popular modern writer is clearly manifold. So much so, in fact, that this is the second book of reflections-on-Raymond-Carver that Murakami has translated into Japanese, the other one consisting of a series of interviews from people that he knew. This one, in contrast, is made up of seven essays, filled, Murakami tells us in the introduction, with posthumous memories and impressions of Carver’s lasting impact on those who knew him via varying degrees of professional and personal intimacy.
Carver, Murakami points out, had been a hurt kid who, not surprisingly, as an adult, also hurt others, but he was also a deeply empathetic writer who wrote from the bottom of his stomach. (There’s an abidingly gritty earthiness to Carver’s work, focused as it was on the ‘ordinary’ angst of working-class Americans.)
Dying at fifty, when Murakami was forty, the latter admits in this introduction that, having never been fifty, he didn’t know how to feel about that fact. Was fifty too young to die? Now, having passed the age of fifty himself, Murakami acknowledges: Yes, fifty was far too young for Ray to pass away.
Murakami has written elsewhere about the one time that he met with Ray and his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher, at their home in the United States shortly before his death, but this brief introduction is all we get here from Murakami (in terms of personal asides) about his affection for Carver.
Yet I choose to believe that the very act of translating all of these essays is, in and of itself, quite a confession on Murakami’s part. He wanted his Japanese readers to know what Carver meant to others, which, in a way, is proof-positive of what he surely must have also meant to Murakami. (The act of translation, after all, is also an act of endless empathy.)
As for the book’s readers, you don’t have to be a fan of Carver’s works to get something out of these essays, but it sure doesn’t hurt.
Throughout the collection there are scattered references to the author’s styles and themes, but no grand, overarching summary of his artistic approach. I think I’ve read almost all of Carver’s short stories, as well as Carol Sklenicka’s fantastic 2009 biography, but I’m by no means an expert, so I’m not going to pretend that I can summarize all that he represented and embodied as an author. I do feel safe in saying, however, that Carver specialized in the short story; that his characters were inevitably down-on-their-luck, broke, struggling with their relationships, endlessly scrounging for money; and that he had a spare, lean, stripped-down style that was (as is made clear in a few of these essays) in stark contrast to the literary fashion of the times (those times being mostly the late 1960s to the late 1980s).
What’s not discussed in any of these reminiscences is the revelation in recent years — and pretty much definitively proven in Sklenicka’s biography — that Carver’s signature style was, in large part, a result of cuts made by his editor, Gordon Lish, who insisted on a brevity that Carver himself did not necessarily advocate.
Fair enough, this omission, because this book is not truly about the work.
It’s about the man.
And what a man he seems to have been.
The first essay — written by that literary wunderkind Jay McInery, part of that infomral literary brat pack of the 1980s that also included Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz — was composed a year after Carver’s death, and delves into the impact Carver had on McInery as a friend and a teacher.
The thing was, according to McInerney, Carver was a very unteacher-like teacher. Perhaps this was because he came to teaching in a rather slipshod fashion, having had multiple other odd jobs before writing, and talking about writing, began to pay some bills.
It could also be due to the fact that Carver was part of an artistic renaissance that resembled Hemingway’s experience in the Paris of the Twenties, only Carver-in-the-Seventies was no romantic egoist. He was writing about impoverished people, trailer-park people. McInerney admits that he, himself, has never even been in a trailer park, but he recognized the people that Carver wrote about. Depressed people. Actual people. In an era of metafiction, here was Raymond Carver writing truthfully about folks who had never heard of metafiction, let alone read it.
In McInerney’s eyes, Carver was exceedingly kind as a teacher, and genuinely interested in what his students had to say. In the early 1980s, in Syracuse, Carver taught a fiction class centered on ‘form’ and ‘theory’, although McInerney doesn’t really remember those topics actually being discussed. Instead, Carver would assign nineteenth century Russian authors, read students’ own work, talk about various translated writers. Writing was exceedingly serious to him, and he wanted it to be serious for his students as well. Carver was a literary disciple of John Gardner, and it seemed to McInerney that it was important to Carver that he be respected by his former teacher — that he be seen worthy of the literary crown that had been placed upon him.
This kind of dedication was quite obvious in the classroom, too. Dissecting one of McInerney’s short stories, Carver wondered questioned McInerney as to why he had used the word ‘earth’ (大地) and not ‘ground’ (地面). Murakami includes the English version of these words here in this translation, emphasizing, perhaps, the precision, the distinction, that Carver himself was highlighting.
He was also a nice guy. McInerney would chat about baseball with him, use his office for his own writing. Carver changed his life, McInerney says, and he can still here his voice.
I’ve included so many of the above details from McInerney’s recollection because this is the sort of stuff that is present throughout each essay in the collection — highly personalized, unusually affectionate moments in time, preserved.
Celebrated author Tobias Wolff states, similar to McInerney, that he also continues to feel Ray’s presence. The two of them had been good friends. Had roomed together for two weeks while teaching at a university in Vermont. They also had kids around the same age, were teachers together; Ray helped him get a job at Syracuse, helped him find a house. They aged alongside each other.
Wolff had read Carver, the writer, before he ever knew Carver, the person. Instantly recognized from this prose that this was an important new voice in American fiction. Unlike McInerney, Wolff knew Ray, the man, in his ‘drinking era’; many parties, many bottles. Yet he believes that Carver’s writing became stronger, more mysterious, after he quit drinking. The man merged with his writing in new, striking ways.
He won’t reveal the last words he had with Ray as his friend lay dying, but Wolff confirms that Ray was a hero in his final few months, continuing his huge appetite for life right up until its premature end.
Each subsequent essay offers similarly warm and admirable praise of Carver (the artist), and Ray (the chum).
Martin Marcus, a poet who knew Ray from 1966 to 1977, at the height of his alcoholism, and who Carver dedicated a book to, believed that Ray’s own poetry was written with a small ‘p’. No arrogance, no pride, no chest-thumpin’. Carver though poets were special people (even though he didn’t consider himself ‘special’).
Marcus and Ray differed on their recollections of how they first met — the former feeling it was at the apartment of mutual friend John Hitchock, the latter believing it to be at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa — but no matter. That’s part of what makes friendship fun, the lack of past-cohesion.
This was the era when Carver went from being a textbook editor to teaching his first writing class. He was sensitive, nervous, in a new social and occupational realm. When Charles Bukowski came to the University of Santa Cruz to do a reading alongside Ray in 1973, chaos erupted. Bukowski was drunk, berating students. Ray, too, ended up having a few too many. It was all a bit much, but that was Ray’s new world now, it seems to me: a lot of writing, some teaching, a few offshoots of literary fame, some mutual drinking. It all held together, somehow, until it didn’t.
Essay after essay ends up cohering into a common portrait of a good man who went off the rails for a bit before finally getting his act together just as it was ultimately too late; essay after essay casually illustrates the parties, the classes, the writing and the drinking that filled up Carver’s days and cornered out his brain.
In between, as James D. Houston relates, are extended car trips, wherein we learn that Carver was a fan of dining-and-dashing-without-paying at roadside diners (which he never fully trusted, those omnipresent American small-town eateries); that he felt a kinship to Chekhov, who was another outsider of sorts; that he would sell you a car for fifty dollars, even though he couldn’t find you the proper paperwork.
Famous names are dropped, yes — John Cheever and John Irving among them — and yet we also have a delightful essay in which we see Carver come up to the University of Saskatoon to deliver a lecture alongside his friend Richard Ford, a piece which not only delves into Carver’s writing style in relation to current Saskatchewan and Albertan authors (and therefore music to this particular Canadian’s literary ears), but we also learn about Ray’s fondness for hunting, and the dedicated way he would practice and practice to get the pronunciation of ‘Saskatoon’ just write in order to pretend to be a local and not be fined for illegal shooting.
Sort of trivial stuff, maybe, but I do like me some trivia.
Another essay, by Michiko Miyamoto — which is also the only one here not translated by Murakami, as it was originally written in Japanese by Miyamoto and given to Murakami by his good friend Motoyuki Shibata, another celebrated translator — is filled with these kinds of amiable trivia, discussing Carver’s kind cordiality when she went to interview him at the tony Carlyle Hotel in New York City, and how he told her that his children were his biggest influence on his style, simply because he had no time, with them constantly hanging around, requiring his attention, to ever write a full novel. Noting that he had quit drinking, Miyamoto suggested that ‘writing’ and ‘drinking’ were never a good mix. Carver agreed. Easier to drink than write, he admitted.
Taken together, these essays kind of collectively show how scattershot a modern writer’s life is, how filled with friends and booze and work and teaching. They become, together, a portrait of a life that is also, at times, a microcosmic representation of how unglamorous, but personally satisfying, the ‘writing life’ might be. (At least for some.)
There are also some other, unexpected linguistic pleasures to the collection; given that this is a translated book, it was fascinating to see Murakami, in Japanese, add his own special touch here and there.
One of Carver’s most famous short stories is called ‘Neighbors’; the title of this collection (which I think Murakami himself coined) contains the word ‘neighbor’, which seems like a slight nod to that prominent work.
Also with regards to the title, Murakami uses the word 私たち (‘watashitachi’, with a formal meaning of ‘us’ or ‘our’), but in certain essays he uses 俺たち (‘oretachi’, with a casual, male meaning of ‘us’ or ‘our’) when the author is talking about he and his buddies’ mutual friendship with Ray. In English, we’re stuck with ‘I’; in Japanese, Murakami has a wee bit more leeway to play around with the formality of ‘I’ amongst friends in different situations.
At another point, poems, or 詩, are talked about, but the way to ‘read’ that kanji character is written alongside it using the furigana for ‘poetry’, but written in katana — an impossible-to-replicate effect in English, but one which, in Japanese, stresses, I think, the ‘English’ feel of the word ‘poetry’. (It’s such a common character, 詩, that the furigana is not necessary to ‘read’ that word, but Murakami, like many authors, is therefore simply having some fun by finding a creative, unorthodox way of furigana-izing the kanji.)
There are also a few changes to some of the essay’s English titles. Often, Murakami will directly translate them, word for word into Japanese; at other times, he’ll make up a new title, or subtly change it. For example, James D. Houston’s essay THE DAYS WITH RAY becomes, in Japanese, ‘Memories Of Ray’; Morton Marcus’s ALL-AMERICAN NIGHTMARE shifts in Japanese to the equivalent ‘Our American Nightmare’. (Colloquialisms in English do always have a one-to-one equivalent in Japanese.)
Fun aside, there is still a certain, unavoidable sadness to this collection. Dead by the age of fifty from lung cancer, a few of these essays do, indeed, reference his final days, but this is not a morbid book. Nor is it a comprehensive one. It gives you a few of the flavors of Ray Carver, enough to satisfy his fans and perhaps induce those unfamiliar with his work to give it a try.
Indeed, I suspect that Murakami’s secret motive for translating this book was to entice Japanese readers into sampling some of Carver’s work. (That he, himself, is Carver’s primary translator would also make this a good business decision!) I also feel that he does a great service here, to the Japanese literary world; this collection is such a cool time capsule of literary Americana (for lack of a better term), and, as with Murakami’s other, multiple translations, its sheer existence ensures that western literary figures are allowed entry into Japan’s own mainstream reading culture.
Of course, given Murakami’s own penchant for stories which inhabit strange and fantastical worlds, his overwhelming affection for Carver’s kitchen-sink, mundane-realism mode of short stories might seem sort of odd, but Murakami has always insisted that he tries to be simple and clear in his writing, and Carver’s own prose is nothing if not that.
And, just as Murakami’s own characters are often ‘ordinary’, so, too, are Carver’s. They are just people, doing their thing. I can sort of see what I think Murakami sees in Carver — a tiny bit of himself, subdued.
nihongobookreview 