Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver: A Writer's Strategies of Reading

Abstract

In a recent issue of The Guardian the British novelist GeoffDyer expressed the view that Raymond Carver's essays were rather flat and uninspiring. Certainly, they do not have that energy of self-scrutiny evident in the work of his friend and contemporary, Tobias Wolff, whose Vietnam war memoirs, In Pharoah's Army, were the occasion of a review by Dyer when he commented on Carver's essays. Carver usually chose the poem as the vehicle of confession or self-examination: by contrast his essays are characterized by a restrained informality and a certain slightly apologetic tone of voice as though the mode is uncongenial to his deepest instincts as a writer. So as a general rule it is true that Carver's essays conceal as much as they reveal about the practice of his art and though he repeatedly acknowledges the exemplary influence of John Gardner, Ezra Pound, V. S. Pritchett, and others, the terms in which he invokes his debts are generalized and repetitious. What is missing from his essays is anything like a detailed exposition of the compositional methods and strategies of short-story writing in relation to his own work. This is also true of what he wrote about Chekhov, who is Carver's central discovery as a writer, though there are moments of selfrevelation in what he writes about Chekhov, as I shall show. The best place to look for what Carver held to be qualities of writerly excellence is in what he wrote about his contemporaries, especially in the introductions to various selections of poetry and prose he edited in the midand late-Ig8os, reprinted in No Heroics, Please.l In these pieces Carver is concerned tojustify his editorial choices about the writing of others since the mid-I950s, including some work produced by writing schools at which he taught. The common denominator of his judgements on these occasions is a resistance to fashionable modes of experimentation, itemized in the introduction to American Short Story Masterpieces ( 987), co-edited with TomJenks, as 'self-reflexive, fabulist, magical realist, as well as all mutations, offshoots, and fringe movements thereof' (NHP, p. I47). Against these experimental forms Carver andJenks prioritized 'narrative interest' as 'one of the deciding factors in our selections', and argued for stories that had not only a strong narrative drive, with characters we could respond to as human beings, but stories where the effects of language, situation, and insight were