Biographical Influence of Raymond Carver - Research Paper Example

Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral:” A Reflection of his Life. Raymond Carver is a reputed poet and short story He is considered “surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century” (King). He is credited with helping to revive the short story form. Raymond Carver’s short story, “Cathedral,” is one of his most-anthologized and popular stories. It relates the narrator’s encounter with a blind man, who is his wife’s friend and a house-guest. The narrator starts out with rigid, preconceived notions of a blind person and is surprised to find that his guest does not conform to these ideas. His initial antagonism towards his guest gradually melts away and the narrator lets down his guard. As the narrator interacts with the blind man, he experiences an epiphany which is transformative. The story explores the metaphorical blindness of the narrator. Although it is the guest who is physically blind, it is the narrator who is blind to the beauty of life. It is widely recognized that Carver’s stories and poems are largely biographical. A study of Carver’s life reveals that many aspects of “Cathedral” reflect the author’s own experiences. Raymond Carver was born on May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Oregon. The Carvers were a working-class family. The father worked at a sawmill as a saw-filer. The mother did various jobs as a waitress, clerk, housewife and high school teacher. The family moved frequently. The young Carver graduated from Yakima High School, Washington, developing his passion for reading and writing while still in school. He went on to work with his father at the local sawmill for a short period. At the age of eighteen, Carver married the sixteen year-old Maryann Burk, who was then pregnant with their first child, a daughter. A son was born to them the following year. He moved to California. Carver worked to support his family during the day and attended night classes at  Humboldt State College, from where he graduated in 1963. Carver received a grant towards graduate study at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the family moved to Iowa. Carver’s literary career included five collections of short stories, two chapbooks, and three volumes of poetry. His stories were included in The Best American Short Stories, and were nominated for various awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. On the career front, Carver worked as an Advertising Director and taught at several universities. His personal life was a constant struggle: “between 1976-1977, Carver was hospitalized several times for a severe drinking problem that almost killed him and his marriage fell apart” (Dota).  Carver filed for bankruptcy twice. 1977 marked the turning point of Carver’s life. He gave up alcohol and met his second wife, Tess Gallagher. Carver went on to lead a “second life” of comparative happiness and fulfillment, before dying of lung cancer on June 2nd, 1988. (Dota). Many little facets of Carver’s life and social world are incorporated into “Cathedral.” The story is “peopled with the type of lower-middle-class characters the author was familiar with while he was growing up” (Poetry Foundation). The characters in “Cathedral” need to work for a living and are not well-off. The narrator’s wife meets the blind man because she is out of money and needs a job. The blind man and his wife sell Amway products. This is reminiscent of Carver’s wife, Maryann, selling “a series of book digests door-to-door” (Poetry Foundation). The narrator and his wife obviously cannot afford to splurge thoughtlessly on their household needs. The sofa is a recent acquisition and the color television is bought in an exchange offer. Carver’s social circle thought that “a good time consists of smoking pot with the neighbors” (Poetry Foundation). In “Cathedral,” the narrator invites his guest to smoke a joint with him as a way to interact. The narrator’s wife is an aspiring poet. This is a reflection of Carver’s second wife Tess Gallagher being a poet. In real life, Carver realized the crucial need of those struggling with alcoholism for mentor’s to guide them out of their predicament. Carver “accompanied friends in need to their first A.A. meetings” and “also wrote to those who found themselves dismantled by alcoholism” (Wriglesworth, 474), encouraging them and offering his help. The blind man’s serves as the narrator’s mentor in “Cathedral” and Carver conveys this beautifully with the words, “He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand” (Carver, 114). The blind man encourages the narrator, saying, “You didn't think you could. But you can, can't you?” (Carver, 122). The blind man guides the narrator out of his fog of alienation and alcoholism, just as Carver guided alcoholics in real life. The alcoholism which dogged Carver through the major part of his life is an undercurrent which runs throughout the narrative of “Cathedral.” Carver admits that alcohol became a persistent problem in his life and he was “making things terribly difficult for myself and everyone around me by my drinking” (Carver interview, 64). He was forced to resign from his position as a ‘visiting lecturer’ at UC Santa Barbara because of his alcoholism. Carver’s father was also an alcoholic (Dota). In “Cathedral,” the narrator is almost never without a drink in his hand. He listens to his wife relate the story of the blind man once he has “made a drink” (Carver, 15). He prepares to listen to the blind man’s tape with a drink in hand. His overt racism spurs his wife to ask, “Are you drunk?” (Carver, 13). This accusation implies that being drunk is a routine state of affairs for the narrator. He waits for his wife and guest to arrive from the railway station by “having a drink and watching the TV” (Carver, 17). The drinking continues with the introduction to the guest, extends into the dinner and goes on into the post-dinner conversation. In fact, the reader can but agree with the narrator when he says that drinking is “one of our pastimes” (Carver, 30). It is obvious that the narrator uses alcohol as a refuge from his disconnect with life, just as Carver’s penury and continued hardships pushed him into using alcohol. Both Carver and the narrator use alcohol as a coping mechanism, particularly as they confront marital breakdown. Carver’s marriage to Maryann Burk lasted for twenty-five years. Maryann worked as a cocktail waitress, a restaurant hostess, an encyclopedia saleswoman and a teacher in order to support Carver as he studied and penned his stories and poems. His first typewriter was bought with money earned by her by packing fruit. Carver’s alcoholism and violent personality eroded the marriage, and culminated in divorce (King). Reflecting this, the narrator of “Cathedral” is evidently on the brink of marital breakdown. The negative vibes between the narrator and his wife underscores their interaction. The wife is tired of the narrator’s drinking, his overt racism and his inability to relate to her intimately. On his part, the narrator is aware of his wife’s increasing antipathy. As his wife looks at him, he says, “I had the feeling she didn't like what she saw” (Carver, 28). The narrator is aware that poetry is an important form of self-expression for his wife. However, he refuses to make the effort to understand her poems and dismisses them cursorily with a “Maybe I just don't understand poetry” (Carver, 3). Again, when his wife attempts to share her tapes of the blind man, the narrator is glad of the interruption which ensures that he remains ignorant of their contents. This is a portrait of a man who is deeply insecure and unwilling to open his heart to his wife. The increasing alienation of the narrator from his spouse is clear from his admission, “Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep (Carver, 83). This is definitely a marriage on the verge of disintegration. Carver’s marital problems were compounded by his excessive possessiveness and violence. He was a “nasty drunk and ungrateful (not to mention sometimes dangerous) husband” (King). In 1975, a tipsy Maryann flirted with a man at a dinner party. Carver, the alcoholic, reacted by hitting “her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her” (King). Carver expected the beautiful Maryann to tolerate his own infidelities “but could not bear the thought of her with another man” (King). Carver’s possessiveness and jealousy towards any other man in his wife’s world is echoed in the character of the narrator in “Cathedral.” The narrator resents both the blind man and his wife’s first husband. The fact that he does not give either of them a name is an indicator of this resentment: he remarks, rather pettily, “Her officer--why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?” (Carver, 5). His antagonism towards “this man who’d first enjoyed her favors” (Carver, 4) glares through his words and is again seen in his attitude towards the blind man. The narrator sarcastically calls his guest “a regular blind jack-of-all-trades” (Carver, 44). The narrator is particularly repelled by the thought that the blind man intimately ran his fingers over his wife’s face and is disturbed when his wife tell him that “he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose--even her neck!” (Carver, 2). The narrator is jealous of the intimacy of the relationship between the blind man and his wife and feels excluded from their interaction. As a matter of fact, he sulks childishly and mocks their interaction with a caustic running commentary, which is actually a defense mechanism. Carver was haunted by the fear of failure and remained insecure for the larger part of his life. His penury, alcoholism and struggle to keep his family together, while continuing to write, exacted a heavy toll on him. He admits, “For such a long time, when I was an alcoholic, I was very un confident and had such a very low self-esteem, both as a person and as a writer, that I was always questioning my judgments about everything” (Carver Interview, 67). This insecurity is one of the dominant character traits of the narrator in “Cathedral.” The narrator’s sense of alienation and loneliness shouts out through his caustic remarks. His wife emphasizes his isolation when she points out “You don't have any friends” (Carver, 10). The narrator assumes an outward indifference and sarcasm which hides the deeply vulnerable and hurt man inside, whose fear of rejection makes him close himself to any intimate relationship. His poignant confession to the blind man “I guess I don't believe in it. In anything. Sometimes It's hard” (Carver, 101) is a cry for help. The narrator is poised on the verge of self-destruction. Carver wrote “Cathedral” in the second phase of his life, when he was at peace with himself and the world and his self-destructive tendencies and hardships were behind him. In line with this change, “Cathedral” is a story “of hope and spiritual communion” (McCaffery and Gregory, 63). This is a marked departure from his earlier work, which largely left his characters enmeshed in their loneliness and fear and broken relationships. According to Carver, ““Cathedral” was a larger, grander story than anything, I think, I had previously written. When I began writing that story I felt that I was breaking out of something I had put myself into, both personally and aesthetically” (Interview, 65). In the same way, the narrator breaks out of the confines of his self-imposed isolation into the light of freedom. He acknowledges this liberation by saying, “But I didn't feel like I was inside anything” (Carver, 133). “Cathedral” ends on a note of optimism and hope. The reality of Carver’s life intersects with the narrative of “Cathedral” in the various details of the settings and the characters. The narrator of the story mirrors Carver’s real-life in his struggle with alcoholism, the impending breakdown of his marriage, his jealous possessiveness over his wife and the insecurity and fear which lie under his surface indifference. Above all, “Cathedral” reflects the renewed hope and optimism with which Carver entered into his ‘second life,’ and is an expression of the author’s emergence into the happiest phase of his existence. Works Cited. Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.” Title of Collection. Ed. Editor's Name(s). City of Publication: Publisher, Year. Page range of entry. Medium of Publication. Dota, Kristin. “Raymond Carver: Life and Works.” 2003. Youngstown State University. Web. 26 Nov 2013. http://cwcs.ysu.edu/resources/literature/raymond-carver-life-and-works King, Stephen. “Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories.” 2009. The New York Times. Web. 26 Nov 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/books/review/King-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& McCaffery, Larry, Gregory, Sinda and Raymond Carver. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review , Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 62-82 “Raymond Carver: 1938–1988.” The Poetry Foundation. 2013. Web. 26 Nov 2013. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/raymond-carver Wriglesworth, Chad. “Raymond Carver And Alcoholics Anonymous: The Narrative Under The Surface Of Things?” Religion & The Arts 8.4 (2004): 458-478. Read More