Being one of the masochistic types drawn to marathon running, much of my reading in the Spring, in the lead up to the Belfast marathon, was about running form, fartlek training, tempo runs and tribes of Mexican Indians (more of all this, perhaps, in later posts). A suggestion I came across somewhere,  is for the runner to state their ambitions in advance for the marathon they are about to undertake, the theory being that if you have told a lot of people that you plan to finish your marathon in a particular time, and on the day find yourself faltering and succumbing to the temptation of taking it a little easier, then the embarrassment of having to tell all these people that you didn’t make your stated time but instead ambled over the line 45 minutes later, will prove more urgent than the fatigue and stimulate you to renew or maintain your effort. And so, applying this to posting a Secular Sundays on a regular basis, I am planning to write a series of posts on the ordinary in literature. 

 
It is not unusual, in June, in Dublin, that one’s thoughts turn to the ordinary. Wednesday, Bloomsday, sees what is, essentially, the celebration of the ordinary – Ulysses being  the epic attempt to represent the modern consciousness immersed in and bombarded by the utterly ordinary. By doing this, and by doing this in the way he does it, Joyce of courses, creates something utterly extraordinary. This as I think I’ve probably conveyed in my previous posts, is something of a preoccupation of mine, it is what I am drawn to in literature – the creation of art from the ordinary stuff of the day.
In the posts to come, I will reflect on and quote from work that is concerned with Kavanagh’s now overly-familiar phrase, the habitual banal. Rereading permitting, I will show how the likes of Updike, Nicholson Baker and William Carlos Williams, among others, understand how the ordinary, ordinary things, interact constantly with ones consciousness, how the fact of being in the world is dependent upon and conditioned by our relationships to the things around us, not just the extraordinary things, or the beautiful things or the huge things, but the trivial things, the small things, the bloody, messy things. Things have a different impact upon us, depending on our humour, or moods, our circumstances at the instant we encounter them – our memory of events are often triggered, Proustian-like, by a thing: the taste of peanuts, a song, a car, a tree, an advertisement, a shoelace, and on, and on. 

 
Of course, the ordinary can be trivial and inconsequential and dull. I had the misfortune recently to read Richard Russo’s Empire Falls a book about ordinary small-town life (that somehow won the Pulitzer prize)but one so formulaic and predictable and flat that returning to it each day required an act of will and discipline far greater than that needed to get out the door for that hard tempo run on a rainy Tuesday, after a hard day’s work. The book is a good example of the negative implication of the word ordinary, ordinary as in mediocre, uninspired, cliché. What distinguishes the authors I have mentioned above, is how their depictions of the ordinary, astonish, educate, elucidate while also reflecting their own fascination with and wonder in the face of the ordinary. This is beautifully articulated by one of our greatest chroniclers of the ordinary, John McGahern, describing the origins of his short stories in the preface to Creatures of the Earth: 

 
These stories grew in the mind and in the many workings of the material, but often began from as little as the sound of a chainsaw working in the evening, an overheard conversation about the price of cattle, thistledown floating by the open doors of bars on Grafton Street on a warm Autumn day, an old gold watch spilling out of a sheet where it had been hidden and forgotten about for years. (vii, Faber & Faber) 

 
To use William Carlos William’s theory about the creation of a poem – McGahern’s stories come from a fusion of the poetic sensibility, with imagination, and, importantly the ‘thing’. 

 
Finally, two things, one: to proffer an excuse in advance of any delay between postings for the next month, or rather, three excuses, three excuses per day, in fact, coming as they do at about twelve, three and seven. Two: a quote to get the thing underway, from Nabokov: 
 His thoughts were characterized by the same monotony as his actions, and their order corresponded to the order of his day. Why has he stopped the coffee? Can’t flush if the chain comes off every time. Dull blade. Piffke shaves with his collar on in the public washroom. These white shorts are not practical. Today is the ninth – no, the tenth – no, the eleventh of June. She’s again on the balcony. Bare arms, parched geraniums. Train more crowded every morning. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, every minute you will smile. They are fools who offer their seats to big strong women. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, clean your minute with your smile. Out we file. (King, Queen, Knave, Penguin Classics, p.201)

As William Carlos Williams writes: “There is no end of detail that is without significance”. (‘Spring and All’, Imaginations, New Directions, p.139) Updike is a particular example of a writer who understands this, his follower Nicholson Baker indeed never gets to the set pieces, the logistics of getting from A to B are never overcome: 

 
I had my coat on when I remembered that I had forgotten to put on antiperspirant. This was a setback. I weighed undoing the belt, untucking the shirt, untucking the T-shirt from the underpants: was it worth it? I was running late. (The Mezzanine, Vintage  p 51) 

   
Getting from A to B is the substance of the work, the ideas are the details, the mundane details that lie between a to b are so varied, so multifarious and such a cause of awe and delight that, for Baker, they contain anything you could wish to write about. 
As the oft-quoted William Carlos Williams maxim goes – …no ideas but in things. (Paterson, New Directions,p.6) 
The thoughts or impressions then, born of the interaction of the poet and the poetic imagination with things, and the expression of this impression – that unique moment when the poet with all his ideas and his imagination, meet, say, a soda sign, or a fire engine, or in the case of Nicholson Baker, three generations of vending machines at the top of an escalator (the journey up which has taken up much of the novel), or a shoelace.  The ideas should inform the writer, but should not replace the ‘things’ in the foreground. 

 
Anyhow, these musings were prompted by an essay in a recent Guardian Review by pianist Susan Tomes, who discussed those troublesome ideas: 

 
Having ideas about the music was a process we had relished in our rehearsals. But gradually, through experience of performing, I had to learn how to let my ideas sink down into the music and disappear.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/mar/20/susan-tomes-playing-piano-concerts) 

 
And all of this, in turn, brings me to Richard Powers, a writer who also has trouble with ideas, having too many, to the point that they, according to some critics, choke his prose. I enjoy Powers’s work but acknowledge the accuracy of this criticism. The mundane details, dialogue, human interaction, are often perfunctory, cliché-ridden and awkwardly rendered.  The ‘things’ are forgotten in the excitement caused by the ideas, and the desire to impart the ideas. I quote both here and below from pages 370 and 371 of Plowing in the Dark (certainly the worst of his books that I have read) but pick your page, really: 

 
Adie took charge of the mosaic saints. Spiegel delighted daily in watching her assemble the stones. As she turned high-resolution photographic reproductions back into low-res squares of coloured tile, the staircased edges of her own soul smeared and softened. (Picador, p.370) 

 
What?… I’ve no problem with the techie stuff but when he tries to apply it to the human, the incidental, we get the ‘staircased edges of her own soul smeared and softened’. Suggestions to what this actually means are welcome, and if anyone confesses to actually thinking like this please leave a comment, I am interested in knowing how one comes to realize the edges of their soul (leaving aside the whole ‘soul’ thing) is staircased etc, etc. 

   
To digress momentarily, I do not mean necessarily realism, I’m not arguing for realism over ideas, I am arguing for a convincing novelization of ideas. Thomas Bernhard, for example, does not, ostensibly anyhow, practice realism, nor, however, are his novels choked by ideas. Rather, the ideas constitute the impulse for his work, in his case, the impulse for every aspect of his work – the form, style, tone and subject matter – they are subsumed into the fabric of arresting, funny, vicious, ironic and compelling novels, novels that despite initial impressions are very much concerned with the getting from A to B, even if, like Baker, but in a very different way, the thoughts and details of getting from A to B can constitute the entire novel.   Once again to invoke Dr Williams, who articulates with greater efficiency and beauty indeed what I have been trying to say – they must be real, not “realism” but reality itself. (Imaginations p.117) 

 
So back to Powers, Powers chooses to write in the medium or genre of the contemporary American (realist-ish) novel.  So he puts people in situations whereby they engage in dialogue. This dialogue, however, is either stilted or ridiculous, or is essentially a series of lengthy theoretical digressions staged to deliver a message or idea, and are comprised of the kinds of things no one would ever say to each other (unless they do talk like that to each other In America, in which case this whole piece is invalid and I apologise): 

    
Destined to do? he asked. But the old irony hid itself under a bushel. She shrugged. Every person has something she’s supposed to do. I knew this when I was little, but I forgot. It comes back to you, though. That’s the beauty: you think you’re lost. You stumble around forever with-out knowing which way is forward. But you turn a corner one day and your work is right there, smack in front of you. Tracking you like the moon. (p.371) 

 
Seriously… 

 
This is the kind of thing that, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee draws attention to. Part of Powers’s problem is, I think, that he knows a lot about a lot of stuff – music, physics, technology and literature, and he tries to squeeze all of this theoretical knowledge into each novel, often at the expense of the novel . I am reminded of Hemingway’s comments on writing in Death in the Afternoon. He says that a writer should only write about what he knows, and that a good writer should know a little of everything. The little is important – Powers, I think, knows too much of everything.

It is another new release, however, that concerns me this Sunday – The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris. Veteran readers of these virtual pages will recall that I talked about Ferris’s excellent debut, And Then We Came To The End, in my very first posts about work and literature. It is a book narrated in the first person plural, a device that initially seemed a little like a gimmick but proved to be essential to the fabric of the novel. The second novel, treacherous waters responsible for the sinking of many a literary career, also features what at first seems like a gimmick. The central character, a successful lawyer, is periodically wrenched away from his work and his family, from his carefully constructed life, by corporeal demands – he suffers from a mysterious condition that demands constant walking to exhaustion, followed by sleep. The man, Tim Farnsworth, will suddenly leave a room and walk, without stopping (even for a cold drink or some food), until, exhausted, his body stops and he sleeps where he falls. The first part of the novel describes the carefully constructed life and the gimmick seems designed to counterpoint this, to offer some trite message along the lines of taking things for granted and to offer up opportunities for comedy. As with the first novel, though, the gimmick becomes central, the gimmick is the novel – the condition gets progressively worse, the walks longer, until the walking dominates the man and he deconstructs his previous life, constructing a new one around the demands of his condition. Anyone who has experienced serious illness, either directly or indirectly, will recognize the ability of infirmity, the ability of the body, to upend a life and suddenly begin determining every aspect of one’s existence.
It should be clear, then, that we are into some interesting theoretical stuff, about body and mind, about the existence or otherwise of self and soul:

“He” or “It” or whatever you wanted to call it – but certainly not “I” he thought – still bellyached for food, needed water, complained of soreness in the joints and muscles. He tended to its needs while trying not to spoil it. He made every effort to remember a time when he was not just the sum of his urges. (The Unnamed, p252)

This, in a way, is frontier writing, internalized. The frontier is no longer a physical space, man has colonized more or less all of the physical space – the frontier has been pushed back from the physical and become internalized, the frontier is now between the known and unknown self, the space between mind and body, an individual self or mere highly evolved animal
In a review of this book in the New Statesman, the reviewer alluded to John Gray’s Straw Dogs and in particular the following passage:

In Benjamin Libet’s work on the ‘half-second delay’, it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act. (p.66)

I always understood this as meaning we were mere animals and the attempts to elevate the human beyond this, were deluded. The reviewer (I’ve forgotten the chap’s name and an admittedly brief search on the New Statesman’s website was unsuccessful) argues that the impulse governing our actions in this half-second is God and claims Ferris is arguing that God is making Tim’s body work. This while I suppose (grudgingly) is arguable it doesn’t cut it. It is our animal instinct – to presume a God would bother or have the time to move my hand from the keyboard here to the cold beer beside me is as arrogant as assuming we are somehow more than animal. Farnsworth, true does flirt with God (I believe in God now. Isn’t that something? P.228) but seems then to reject it. The ending though is ambiguous about the whole God question. On my reading, Ferris comes down on the side of the mind and body, the ‘self’ and our corporeal urges all being one and the same thing:

The soul is the mind is the brain is the body. I am you and you are it and it will always win. (p.233)

It is not just by following Farnsworth’s struggle with his body and the construction of a life determined by his corporeal needs that Ferris introduces and examines his theoretical stuff. The thing is that Farnsworth’s fate is ours, our daily fate, whether we work or walk or run marathons. The other characters in the novel, much as they think they have a controlled, constructed existence, are subject to urgent physical needs, needs which tend to exert a degree of control, almost surreptitiously, on a character’s so called real, or external life. His daughter’s overeating, his wife’s sudden and unexpected alcoholism, and a colleague’s overwhelming need to have a snake (the more deadly the snake the better, it seems) in the room when he has sex. Ignoring all the religious symbolism here, this urge goes on to have a profound effect on the course of his life. Man’s lot, it seems, is to be at the mercy of his animal urges, for all of his urges are animal. As John Gray says:

The I is a thing of the moment, and yet our lives are ruled by it. We cannot rid ourselves of this inexistent thing. In our normal awareness of the present moment, the sensation of selfhood is unshakeable. This is the primordial human error, in virtue of which we pass our lives as in a dream. (Straw Dogs, p.78)

A review in the Guardian likened the latter part of the novel to early Auster, and the name Farnsworth echoes, in its arrangement of vowels and consonants, Fanshawe, another who abruptly upped and left a life. The struggle with mind and body similarly, is a struggle that informs Auster’s work, from his early non-ficiton writing, notably ‘The Art of Hunger’ right through to Invisible. This novel is superior to Auster’s most recent offering, and though it is a flawed novel (as noted in both reviews I mention), Ferris manages to combine a substantial idea with a compelling narrative - rarely  a successful marriage(some of his critics -not including this writer- might offer Richard Powers here as an example). 

Speaking of resonances, there are also echoes of another writer’s work in this book, evoked by the title, a writer whose work depicts men, animals, entities, trapped between states of non-being walking relentlessly, compulsively, sometimes even in circles with no end, no goal, other than eventual expiration:

…I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’ Trilogy, Calder p.418)

McGahern, in the essay ‘The Solitary Reader’, writes about how the nature of one’s reading changes, if one sticks with it, at a certain point. When young, we read for the escape, rather than the use of language or the ideas conveyed (even if it is the quality of these that allow, or facilitate the escape). All of us will identify with his description of ‘waking’ from being immersed in a book. One of the things that cause this immersion in a text is the evocation of place. Place is probably a little restrictive, by place I mean a place in time, as experienced or imagined by an author. This evocation of place is something that I certainly read for as a child – whether it was the rooms in 221b Baker Street (I’m terrified to see what Guy Ritchie has done to them) or Castle Rock or any of the other small Maine towns Stephen King depicted and then terrorised. While, as McGahern says, our reading experience changes as we develop intellectually, this evocation of place never ceases to be important – capturing the experience of poet and his environment in a fusion of time and place was William Carlos Williams’s poetic project. He believed the poem was a unique ‘thing’ birthed by the male and female elements of the poet interacting with the world, both natural and man –made.

McGahern’s great gift is certainly this evocation of place, evident obviously in his fiction and now, in his essays. The previously unpublished essay ‘Blake’s of the Hollow’ written about his favourite pub, is an absolute gem. Blake’s of the Hollow will undoubtedly experience a wave of strange, pale, socially awkward visitors (readers, that is) poking around, ordering a pint and mentally ticking off, from the remembered inventory, the lamps, “the ceiling and panelling” that are of “pitched pinewood” or the office that overlooks the bar and “could belong in a theatre or ship,” the snugs in the landing or the “patterned tilework of the floor,” not to mention the pint of Guinness or the “delicious sandwiches neatly cut into squares with generous measures of tea in the old aluminium tea pots”. The essay describes a pub but captures an atmosphere, a way of life, a moment in time, a time, for example, when one could arrange to collect one’s mail in the local pub. The essay is brief, but it may as well be a substantial short story, such is the cast of personalities and characters it conjures up (especially the man who comes, Thursday afternoons, to drink champagne and read the Financial Times, a short story all by himself), and the lives it suggests. Indeed, it is an essay, but if we were to visit Blake’s of the Hollow after reading this we would, no doubt, come away feeling slightly disappointed, or empty, no matter how little the pub has changed aesthetically (the kind of experience and slight disappointment McGahern actually describes in the next, also excellent essay ‘Dreaming at Julien’s’). It will not be as McGahern experienced and described, for that image was his and is now gone. Better, I think, not to go but to read the essay and reread it and enjoy the imaginative Blake’s and the lost world it suggests.

I am too full of turkey, and there are too many unopened bottles of Tyskie in the fridge, (not to mention the fact of a new baby demanding attention) for me to spend too much time typing this week. In fact, I just want to alert readers to some Christmas TV – the excellent Orson Welles season on BBC 4 continues this evening and ‘The Dead’, John Huston’s fabulous rendering of, arguably, the complete (perfect?) short story is on RTÉ tomorrow evening. As Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in the Irish Times, it is impossible now to read ‘The Dead’ and imagine Gabriel as anyone other than the magnificent Donal McCann.

Finally, some words from James Joyce to end 2009 – chosen, from ‘The Dead’, for absolutely no reason other than their simplicity and beauty:

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (Dubliners, Triad/Grafton p230)

What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes’. …/ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental: the editor, if the editor was Henry Robbins, was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it. (Live and Learn, Harper Perennial, p.375)

We can see, then, how it might be difficult for a writer to insist strongly against something an editor is vehemently arguing for, if this editor is a parental figure, one who gives a writer the idea of himself. And Gordon Lish did have this kind of relationship with Carver. In his essay ‘Fires’ the two influences Carver identifies as having a positive, constructive influence on his writing are John Gardner and Gordon Lish (his own children are also listed, in fact as the main, if malign, influence). If as Ms Battersby says, Carver was not a rookie, when What We talk About was being published, nor was he an established writer, he was only a published writer at all because of Lish, and this publication offered him hope when he was struggling with his personal circumstances and struggling to see himself as a writer:

My life soon took another veering, a sharp turn, and then it came to a dead stop, off on a siding. I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t back up or go forward. It was during this period that Lish collected some of my stories and gave them to McGraw-Hill, who published them (Call If You Need Me, Harvill, p.105).

The reason Lish had stories to collect is because he began accepting them and publishing them for Esquire magazine – Lish took Carver from being unpublished to publishing a collection, a young writer would inevitably trust an editor who had affected such a change in his life, the change, for an aspiring author. So if an editor who had succeeded in publishing one book, suggests or demands changes for the second, the author is gong to listen and he is going to trust, especially an author who is desperately trying to escape from a life that had “come to a dead stop”. A man who has tried for so long to become a writer is going to do what he has to do to remain a writer. We blame Lish for his insensitivity to the prose, or to his charge’s talent, but we can’t blame Carver for trusting his editor.

I also wrote, in that first post, that I was going to explain why I considered Carver the ‘biggest gun’. What I meant was that I was going to write about why I like Carver’s work so much. It is not for any particular technical reason, or as a result of any forensic reading, or comparative context – it is solely an emotional response, entirely subjective, to a style, to characters, to the stories. I mentioned that Carver deals with normality, and it is this that appeals to me – his understanding of our longing for normality, how tenuous, ephemeral, even absurd our conceptions of normality (of our normalities) are, and how quickly they can be undone and rendered irrelevant. This moment, from ‘A Small, Good Thing’ captures this beautifully:

She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital and someone, a woman in a long coat, got into the car. For a minute she wished she were that woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here to somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her when she stepped out of the car, ready to say Mom and let her gather him in her arms. (Beginners, Jonathan Cape, p. 63)

What We Talk About/Beginners, is full of people whose normality has become destructive, unhealthy and even desperate. People find themselves doing things, behaving in ways that they can’t quite believe. The best example of this, the best example I’ve read of the ways in which we incorporate behaviour into our conception of normality and thereby render it permissable, no matter how strange or unlikely, is portrayed in the story ‘Careful’ from the collection Cathedral. In the story, one of Carver’s alcoholics is adrift in a fog of his own making, lost in a normality utterly personal and unique and divorced from the normality that once was his, in his married life. He is living in a bedsit and is pretty much oblivious to the fact that his normality is the normality of a man on the cusp of an abyss. I say pretty much oblivious because he does have a moment, not quite an epiphany but a moment of understanding, one that sums up this whole ‘normality’ thesis:

One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There’s been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn’t seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn’t thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he’d done that day, starting with when he’d gotten up that morning. At first he couldn’t remember anything noteworthy. Then he remembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered this a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought about it, the more he could see it didn’t matter much one way or the other. He’d had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what? (Cathedral, Harvill, p.104)

I’ve thought about this passage and this story regularly since I read it. It struck me as especially accurate, and insightful, it struck me as a truth, if I can be so old-fashioned. I have thought about the story and the characters and the situation portrayed in the same way I think about things from my life, the way I remember and think about people I’ve met, things I’ve done, I think about them as if they were a part of my lived experience. I also think about ‘Where I’m Calling From’, ‘A Small, Good Thing’, ‘Are These Actual Miles’ and many more stories from different collections. This is why I think he’s so good, I don’t think about other writer’s work in this way, except for Hemmingway a bit – I think sometimes about the waiters from the well-lighted café, I find myself sometimes absently repeating to myself “our nada who art in nada”, and a couple of other writers’ work and characters and this, for me, is as good a yardstick for measuring the quality of a writer as anything else. I was surprised, almost shocked actually, to read in the foreword to Where I’m Calling From that this is the yardstick that Carver uses to measure success:

V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing”. First the glimpse given life, turned into something that will illuminate the moment and just maybe lock it indelibly into the reader’s consciousness. Make it part of a reader’s consciousness. Make it part of a reader’s own experience, as Hemingway so nicely put it. Forever, the writer hopes. Forever. (Where I’m Calling From, Harvill p.xiii)

In my last Secular Sundays I selected a number of examples, from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Beginners, that complicates somewhat the assertion made by Ms Battersby, above. Instead, there are clearly instances where the cuts work, and Carver evidently agreed. These, however, are the exceptions. Beginners is a better book, the stories are better, not only because they are more consistent and, well, just more, but because they are different stories, for the most part. And it is in the difference that the quality lies.

In Lish’s edit, the characters are more brutal, harsher; they are denied their confused humanity just as Carver is denied his literary voice. (Eileen Battersby, ‘Raymond Carver in his Own Words’ Irish Times, Sat Oct 31 2009)

Humanity is the important word here – the vital difference between the versions of the stories in these books is empathy. Ms Battersby details the numerous small instances of crude and clumsy editing, but more than this and more than removing words, length, Lish effectively removes the empathy and thereby removes the impulse, the very meaning behind Carver’s stories. Empathy, for his characters, for the situations they find themselves in, empathy for these troubled often desperate lives is the reason why Carver wrote the stories.
Certainly, the stories are longer, but as I mentioned previously, they are not verbose, nor are they all that expansive. There is still the sense of most of the story happening off the page, the reader’s hand is not held, we are not given detailed psychological explanation of why, say, Ed/Carl in the title story of both books acted as he did. Sure, the guy loved Terri, but we are not told why this love manifested itself in such extreme ways. Ed/Carl’s behaviour is not excused nor condoned or even understood, it just is – the pressures of life and relationships, of working a lousy job or of having no money can break a person, can cause them to do crazy things. Most importantly for Carver (and I will return to this), there is a sense of the different normalities these pressures can create for people – Ed/Carl’s normality was to love someone so obsessively he found it necessary to drag her around a room by the heels, Mel et al’s normality was to sit around a table, a brief moment of respite in a nomadic existence (“We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from someone else. Beginners, p.177), on a Saturday afternoon, packing away considerable quantities of gin. Carver doesn’t explain or judge, but what he does do, especially, and almost exclusively, in Beginners is to empathise. This is the characteristic feature of his stories in general, for me. His characters are people adrift in normalities that are full of violence and nastiness and drunkenness and full of characters struggling and failing to change these normalities – in fact, most take flight or are in the process of taking flight from one ‘normality,’ that they realise has become ‘abnormal’ to the promise of another more normal normality. If you follow.
This empathy and, therefore, the entirely different impulse and motivation behind these stories is clearly evident while moving from one version of a story to another. ‘A Small Good Thing’, I have mentioned briefly is one of the more obvious, ‘The Bath’ being almost unrecognisable from the restored version. The reader, moving through the collections concurrently, first notices the dramatic difference in the third story, ‘Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit’ in What We Talk About… ‘Where is Everyone’ in Beginners. None of the people in this story are particularly sympathetic, and the rather desperate normalities they have created for themselves are seemingly skewed – the alcoholism, failed/failing marriages, unemployement, tense, uneasy personal relationships:

But during those days, when my mother was putting out to men she’d just met, I was out of work, drinking and crazy. (Beginners, p.11)

The situations are similar in both versions but by dwelling on the tense relationships between these characters, and the moments of unexpected tenderness between them, they reveal the potential within these characters, the potential that has been all but squeezed from them by the pressures exerted on them. The following passage from ‘Where is Everyone’, which was not included in ‘Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit’ (which is, as a result, a harder, colder story), reveals not only one of these unexpected moments of tenderness but suggest the pressures these characters experience, pressures that are exerted, for the most part, off the page:

She bent and kissed me. Her lips seemed bruised and swollen. She drew the blanket over me. Then she went into her bedroom. She left the door open, and in a minute I could hear her snoring.
I lay there staring at the TV. There were images of uniformed men on the screen, a low murmur, then tanks and a man using a flamethrower. I couldn’t hear it, but I didn’t want to get up. I kept staring unitl I felt my eyes close. But I woke up with a start, the pajamas damp with sweat. A snowy light filled the room. There was a roaring coming at me. The room clamoured. I lay there. I didn’t move. (p21)

The empathy doesn’t disguise the lives that these people have developed – the lips seemed bruised and swollen because he knew his sixty five year old mother had been kissing a man earlier, but it does suggest the pressure and stress (the existential anguish represented by the roaring of the white noise) of these lives and the despair and anguish suffered by the characters.

‘Tell the Women We’re Going’ is an unusual story, atypical, almost, in both versions, of Carver’s work. While violence is important in Carver’s stories, it usually lurks off the page, it is threatened or implied, made manifest in the story as menace. When violence does erupt it is often the clumsy violence (examples of Ms Battersby’s ‘confused humanity’) of those who unexpectedy, almost unwittingly, find themselves lashing out, usually drunkenly. So a man puts too many logs on the fire in an apparent attempt to set his estranged family’s home alight, or he cuts the phone line, takes hold of the heavy ashtray, and merely retreats, each action independent and without premeditation, reacting to a normality that has developed apart from the characters’ wishes, as in the story ‘Pie/A Serious Talk’. The random, cold and cruel violence in ‘Tell the Women We’re Going’ has an almost Southern-gothic type of feel to it. It feels out of place in both versions, but the Lish cut is especially incongruous. The menace in the story quickly (too quickly) and almost absurdly becomes violence. The abrupt ending, with the almost dispassionate description of the murder, leaves us with a story driven only to deliver its overly dramatic, sensational ending:

He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s. (p56)

In Beginners, the story dwells on the circumstances leading up to the killing. We get more of a sense of the pressures, the pressures of struggling wih lousy jobs and a large young family to support and too much booze and the violence, when it happens, is stupid and clumsy (as clumsy as the prose in the quotation above) and fits to the rest of the story and a little better with Carver’s confused humans.

These are two examples of endings, but throughout Beginners we discover extra sentences and extra paragraphs that add an essential depth of feeling and empathy to the stories, so essential as to constitute entirely different stories, born of a different impulse, written to different agenda, and potraying, therefore, a very different country, Carver country.

This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images as well as the exact and correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn his eyes away from the text unless the house caught fire. (Harvill, pxii)

And this from the essay ‘On Writing’:

…And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the right notes. (Call If You Need Me, Harvill, p92)

Rather than minimalism or brevity, Carver’s emphasis is on precision and on accuracy and it is this that makes, for me (and not always, but for the most part) Beginners the superior version, because the stories are more accurately rendered. The extra scenes, the extra images and the extra detail are essential to the story Carver is trying to tell, the scene, for example, in ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ in the bakery, with the soft warm rolls that I can taste and smell when I think of this story, makes this version an entirely different story than ‘The Bath,’ which doesn’t contain the scene, and therefore a more faithful, more accurate one – that is, more faithful to the impulse behind the story, the impulse that led Carver to write the story.
I will return to this point and to this impulse in later posts, but I want to dwell for a moment on the exceptions here, on the reason I say that for the most part Beginners is superior to What We Talk About…. Carver, as many have pointed out (in answer to the question of whether or not the author would have welcomed this collection) had published the restored version of some of these stories already, in Where I’m Calling From,, most famously perhaps ‘A Small Good Thing’ and ‘So Much Water Close to Home’ (twice filmed, incidentally, by Robert Altman in Short Cuts and less successfully by Ray Lawrence in Jindabyne) which become dramatically different stories. Some of the stories, however, he collected in Where I’m Calling From, without revising, or restoring them, implying that he preferred the versions that Lish had suggested. An example is the final story , ‘One More Thing’ in What We Talk About… which is far tighter and more effective and more accurate, than the version in Beginners. ‘One More Thing’ ends thus:

“I just want to say one more thing.”
But then he could not think what it could possibly be. (Vintage Classics, p. 134)

This ending accurately conveys the desperation of the situation presented in the story and the nature of its development, how things began to go badly, to slip out of control, not due to the charcaters deliberate, willed actions, but almost in spite of them. There is a sense of unreality and impotence about L.D. and the situation he finds himself in, and this is nicely symbolised by his desire to say something and his inability to identify and articulate this something. In the version in Beginners, L.D. does say one more thing, taking about love, however, it lacks the power and accuracy of the seemingly more ambiguous ending above.
It is not, therefore, a case, as it has been portrayed, of one version, the version Carver liked (Beginners) versus the bad version, the version nasty Gordon Lish imposed upon the young author. A good example of this is the story ‘Distance,’ in Beginners, or ‘Everything Stuck To Him,’ in What We Talk About…This story is also published in Where I’m Calling From, as ‘Distance’ but this version combines elements from both the original longer story and from ‘Everything Stuck to Him.’ I read both books concurrently, reading a story first from What We Talk About… and immediately afterwards in Beginners. Reading this story I was struck, again, by the more effective ending of the Lish influenced cut, however the extra detail in the main body of ‘Distance’, when the boy drives over to Carl’s to tell him he won’t be going hunting, was essential to the story. Carver, it seems, felt similarly and the version published in the collection Where I’m Calling From combines the extra detail in ‘Distance,’ with the shorter, superior ending of ‘Everything Stuck to Him’.
This ending, or the difference in both endings is a good example of the accuracy and precision that Carver strives for and indeed the positive role of an editor. Lish’s role has been maligned in some of the commentary that I have read, and many have expressed dismay at the extent of the influence an editor has over a completed text. I will go into this in more detail in my next posts, however, surely one of the roles of an editor, an essential role, is to provide some clarity to an author, to understand the author’s impulse and intention and help him achieve this. The ending of ‘Everything Stuck to Him’ is an example of the editor recognising what the author is trying to say and helping him get there with greater accuracy, an accuracy this author is always striving for. In this instance, certainly, Lish’s influence is what you would expect of an editor. This is the ending from ‘Distance,’ in Beginners:

Absolutely, he says. Put your boots on and let’s get under way.
But he continues to stand at the window, remembering that gone life. After that morning there would be those hard times ahead, other women for him and another man for her, but that morning, that particular morning, they had danced. They danced, and then they held to each other as if there would always be that morning, and later they laughed about the waffle. They leaned on each other and laughed about it until tears came, while everything outside froze, for a while anyway. (Jonathan Cape P176)

This is the ending, then, from ‘Everything Stuck To Him’ in What We Talk About…, the ending that Carver retained for the version of ‘Distance’ that he published in Where I’m Calling From:

He says, Put your boots on and let’s go.
But he stays by the window, remembering. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else – the cold, and where he’d go in it – was outside, for a while anyway. (Vintage Classics P112)

We know, from the way the story is set up, that there were hard times ahead, and other women and other men, we know from reading the preceeding stories in the collection that this is what happens, almost always, invariably. It doesn’t need spelling out at the end, the story up to now, though not ostensibly sad, has been infused with the sadness of the unstated, subsequent hard times and other women and other men.

Throughout his work, Auster has been struggling with conflicting responsibilities – the responsibility to self or to one’s inner compulsion to lock oneself in a room and write, and one’s responsibilities to live and to life, often domestic life and human relationships. This struggle with responsibility becomes more blatant in the later work, especially in Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark. New elements seem to have further complicated the situation – the idea of having a civic, or social responsibility, in response to the wars being waged by America and by the war being waged within America – between ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’, between the East Coast liberals and the conservative majority (something like the war Owen Brick wakes up in). Auster is conscious, perhaps, of the power of words as they go out into the world, words articulated and words that are thought and then discarded, and the responsibility the author must take for the choices he makes. Again, from Oracle Night:
Words could alter reality, and therefore they were too dangerous to be entrusted to a man who loved them above all else. (p.211 Faber and Faber)
Man in the Dark is essentially an examination of the interplay between the two worlds – the fictional and the ‘real’ and the effects of one on the other. One must be responsible for what one does in one world, for the words one uses can have an impact upon the other ‘real’ world.
If Auster feels the weight of responsibility for the words he uses, and for the versions of reality he creates, he is also conscious of literature as escape, as avoidance. From Travels in the Scriptorium:
But Mr Blank does not move from his spot by the window for the simple reason that he is afraid, so afraid of what he might learn from the door that he cannot bring himself to risk a confrontation with the truth. (p. 37, Faber and Faber).
This, indeed, is a responsibililty to be faced by both the author and the reader.

This exercise, played out over the last few books seems, then, an assessment by a writer troubled by responsibility, of how he has met his responsibilities and where he has fallen short. As I mentioned earlier, Auster is at his best when he is telling tales, spinning stories – and the storytelling is also, in these works, particularly Man in the Dark, portrayed as the scene of hope, as a way of meeting these responsibilities, as a way of marrying somehow the alternate realities of the man in the world and the man in the locked room.
It would have been nice ,though, if Mr Auster had been more concerned with his responsibility to an expectant crowd, and delivered, that Thursday night in Dun Laoghaire, a new, original lecture on Beckett’s work.

It often seemed to me, sitting quietly at the back of the lecture hall, as it did reading yesterday, that Professor Kiberd is assuming a position reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson – calling for the emergence of an epic poet to describe ourselves to ourselves in a uniquely Irish way, requiring more than the superficial treatment of new Ireland in genre fiction (crime or chick-lit, which have prospered here of late, as Kiberd identifies). As Emerson urged, and celebrated with Whitman, Kiberd suggests that the new Irish epic poet (for poet read also novelist, dramatist etc) express contemporary ‘Irishness’ in a new or at least appropriate form, and that the new should be informed and perhaps inspired by the past, by history. This from Emerson’s Divinity School Address:
The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs. (Page 96 of the Dover Thrift Edition of Self-Reliance and Other Essays)

Kiberd too urges the epic poet to bring scepticism to the mix, in the face of the new affluence and the ascendance to the position of ‘religion-of-the-week,’ or ‘ism-of-the-week’ of ‘the market.’
An essential part of contemporary Ireland is, of course, a large immigrant community and this is identified as a potential source for this new poet, or new voice. The old beliefs Emerson mentions, for Kiberd are the old Irish myths – of Cúchulainn etc, with whom, he suggests, our recent arrivals might engage and identify with – certainly a fascinating and exciting prospect.

Joyce and Beckett are identified, in the essay, as epic poets of their time, as they undoubtedly were. Both found Ireland too claustraphobic, however, and became the epic poets, the describers of their people, from exile. Kiberd neglects to mention this, and it is an important point – perhaps our contemporary epic poets are busy scribbling away in Australia, or South America – inspiration and clarity available having been freed from the bounds of proximity.

While Kiberd recognises that we have excellent writers, he correctly asserts that many of them write about the past. He would rather the writer look to the past, to an Irishness found in our myths (as Yeats did with Cúchulainn) and apply this or meld this somehow to the present. In the Banville interview in the same section of the IT, Banville, one of those writers Kiberd surely had in mind, is concerned with the past. He acknowledges this and explains why – it is because we don’t change. I am inclined to agree, and this viewpoint is no doubt inforned by his reading of John Gray. We don’t change, the surfaces change but, by and large, what we do stays the same.
Perhaps we don’t have any striking new forms of expression because the old forms still speak to us about oursleves. It is interesting to note that some of the things Yeats, Joyce and Beckett expose about us – racism (anti-semitism), hyper-materialism, hypocrisy and small-mindedness – are defining characteristics of ‘Tiger Ireland.’