Читать книгу Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked - Брайан К. Эвенсон - Страница 9

One

A LOT OF BOOKS THAT HAD A HUGE FORMATIVE EFFECT on friends or writers I admire I either read at the wrong moment or didn’t read at all. Despite spending a decade of summers teaching in Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac school, I didn’t read On the Road until I was nearly forty—and only read it then because it had begun to feel too awkward to confess to pro-Beat students that I hadn’t. I read Catcher in the Rye in college and enjoyed it, but kept wishing that I’d read it when I’d been in high school, when it might have mattered to me. Vonnegut I only read when I was in my late forties, mainly because I had a free Kindle copy of Slaughterhouse–Five that I could read on my phone while I fed my infant son a bottle—it was much easier to swipe and turn a page than try to turn a real page with a baby in my arms—and then went on to read most of the rest of his work. Under the Volcano, which I loved when I finally got to it, I read only a few months ago. Other books I did read, but they left me cold.

But two writers stood out for me. I was fourteen and reading pretty much exclusively science fiction and fantasy when my father gave me a copy of The Basic Kafka. He sat down and read aloud to me a story he liked: “A Fratricide.” It’s a minor story, not one of Kafka’s best, but there’s something about the theatricality of it, the way that people seem to be acting out their roles as much as actually living them, that baffled me in a productive way. It made me realize that imitating life wasn’t always the point to fiction. In addition, the novelty of the situation interested me: my mother and father were avid readers, but recommending a book to me so strongly wasn’t something my father was prone to do back then, though he often has since. Looking back on it now, I see that as the first moment my father consciously acknowledged me as an adult.

I still love “A Fratricide.” I can spend an entire class period talking about it and still have a great deal left to say. But the real Kafka revelation for me was not that nor the much better known “The Metamorphosis,” but “A Country Doctor” and “In the Penal Colony.” The first did things with replicated doubles that fascinated me and suggested that fiction not only had its own reality separate from imitating life, but that it could strobe between the realistic and a sort of symbolic game. The second introduced me to a notion of language as something that could be inflicted upon someone, and raised questions about the relationship of the state, the individual body, and language. That’s not how I would have described it at fourteen, but it’s still an accurate representation of what I felt.

The other writer was Samuel Beckett, discovered a year or two later. We had read in our AP English class Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. Everybody who read it in our predominantly Mormon and conservative high school seemed to hate the play, except for me and my friend David Beus, who loved it. The note heading the play in our anthology mentioned Beckett’s work, though I no longer remember why—perhaps because the first production of The Zoo Story was a double bill with Krapp’s Last Tape. I moved quickly through Beckett’s plays, settling on Endgame as my favorite, but it wasn’t until I read Molloy that I realized I had found a writer I would read and reread. I thought of Beckett as writing what I tended to call (perhaps because I had heard someone else say it—I no longer know where the phrase comes from, my head or outside of it) fractured allegories: work with the weight and structure of allegory or symbol but essentially indecipherable. Like Kafka, Beckett showed me you could write something literary whose thrust was narrative but which was not, in any sense, realism.

So, when I got to Carver, I had Beckett and Kafka as models for what I hoped literature could do. Which probably made me see Carver in a very eccentric light.

•

My first encounter with Carver’s work was not What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but a story from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? I was eighteen. I had taken Beginning Creative Writing and Intermediate Fiction Writing the first and second semester of my freshman year at Mormon-run Brigham Young University. I’d decided to enroll in the non-required Spring term (half the length of the normal semester) and to take the final undergrad class in the sequence, Advanced Fiction Writing, as well. Since there was no graduate workshop offered for Spring term, the class turned out to consist of a mix of upper classmen and grad students. I was the only freshman in the class. It never crossed my mind that a freshman shouldn’t take Advanced Fiction. I don’t know what the teacher, Eloise Bell, thought, but for some reason she let me in.

Eloise Bell was at once funny and caustic, exceptionally quick, theatrical—one of the few Mormons I’ve met with such qualities. The room we met in was unbearably hot. Some of my most vivid memories of the class are all of us sitting in a circle watching one another sweat. Bell, among the most corpulent of us, was a very able perspirer, which to my mind gave her a certain undeniable authority.

It was perhaps the third or fourth class session, early in the term in any case. I arrived a few minutes late to find class just starting. We were sitting, as usual, in a circle, though for some reason the circle was oriented differently than it habitually was, crowded on the side of the classroom with the door on it rather than on the side close to the window where we’d have at least the hint of a breeze. Bell generally sat with her back to the window, nearly touching the wall just below it. Now she sat closest to the door, almost backed against it. Coming into the classroom I had to sidle past her. It felt like she was guarding the door, either keeping people from entering or keeping people from leaving.

I was just taking my seat directly across from her (the only seat left) when she announced that we were going to start by listening to a tape recording of a writer reading his work. Raymond Carver, she said his name was, and I could tell by the appreciative nods that some of the grad students gave that they knew who he was. I had never heard the name. She pressed play and we began to listen, all of us—or me at least—trying to look attentive and thoughtful, staring through each other instead of catching one another’s gaze.

The story was “Nobody Said Anything.” It’s told from the perspective of a boy who wakes up to hear his parents fighting, then fakes illness so he can stay home from school, steals cigarettes (which he calls “weeds”) from his mother’s purse, beats off, explores his parent’s drawers, speculates on how Vaseline might be used for sex, and then leaves the house to go fishing. On the way, he’s picked up by an older woman who he fantasizes fucking, though it’s clear from the way he imagines it (“She asks me if she can keep her sweater on and I say it’s okay with me. She keeps her pants on too. That’s all right, I say. I don’t mind.”) that he has little idea what that might actually entail. The boy’s thoughts often stray to sex. He has frequent boners, “shoots off” over a stream, talks about swearing on a bible to stop masturbating but getting jism on the bible in the process. He’s very consciously not thinking about his parents’ fight, though it continues to wait there, just beneath the surface of his consciousness.

But when he’s fishing, when a trout strikes or when he’s trying with another boy to catch a long but oddly thin fish, he does almost seem to forget. Pure delight seeps in. Carver’s details of that process—descriptions of hooking salmon eggs or affixing the sinkers to the line by biting them—are simple and stripped down, but have great authority. They reminded me vividly of fishing with my father.

In the end, he and the other boy manage to catch the oddly thin fish. They’re incredibly proud, but have a hard time knowing how to share the spoils—the glory of the fish is its sheer length, but if one of them takes it home, the other will go home empty-handed. The narrator manages to convince the other boy, shivering because of a fall into the water, to cut the fish in half, then strikes a deal so he can take the half home with the head on it. Excited, he hurries back home, only to find his parents home already and vehemently arguing. When he tries to present his catch, partly as a way of distracting his parents, getting them to share in his joy, they turn on him. “Take that goddam thing out of here!” his father says. “What in the hell is the matter with you? Take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddam garbage!” The story ends with the boy outside and alone near the trash can, holding his half fish, not quite willing to let go of the magic of it.

•

What Bell played must have been from the American Audio Prose Library’s 1983 recording of three Carver stories—“Nobody Said Anything,” “A Serious Talk,” and “Fat.” Would “Fat” or “A Serious Talk” have had as much impact on me if either had been my first Carver story? I don’t think so. The characters in “A Serious Talk,” when I did read it, reminded me of older versions of friends I had, people I worked with at Hamburger World, the local burger joint where I’d been employed throughout high school, or the older brothers and sisters of kids I’d gone to school with. But I was insulated from that life: I knew I wasn’t those people. “Fat” might have—the viscerality of that story, a fat man eating and the dislocation between the waitress’s sense of him and everybody else’s view of him, the way she feels at once driven to talk about him and unable to express herself in a way that captures what the experience was for her listener, were different from anything I’d read before. And the story offered a painful insight into the complexity of sexuality that, idealistic and eighteen, I probably was far from ready for. It was a story I thought about often once I did read it. But even that, because it had a female central character who was quite different from me, felt safer to me. But was that just because it was the second Carver story I read, not the first? That I’d already begun to understand what to expect?

What hurt me about “Nobody Said Anything” was the thought that I might be more like this masturbating kid, coyly called only “R.”, than I wanted to believe. Joan Didion speaks in My Year of Magical Thinking of how “People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces . . . The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.”² That was something the story expressed to me: the boy, despite his bluster, managed over the course of his narrative to lay himself bare, recounting for the first time his consciousness of the collapse of his parents’ relationship and a trauma that he would continue to have to recount for years to come. It struck me that Carver was giving voice not only to his character’s trauma but to a trauma of his own, and calling upon me, uncomfortably, to share it because of all the ways that I was like this kid. It was a story that did a great deal more work for me after it was finished than it did on the page: it was a story that would continue to evolve and change as I thought about it. Until I read “Nobody Said Anything,” I didn’t know a story could do that.

I remember Carver reading the story flatly—nonchalantly and almost crudely, it seemed to me—which made the story’s impact all the greater. I suspect that Bell chose to have us listen to that story just because it was the first one on the tape. If not, perhaps it was because it was the longest story and we hadn’t yet reached the point in the class of workshopping so there was ample time to fill. As we all listened to it, facing one another, my façade began to break. Soon I was darting glances at others, but people were still going to great pains not to react and to look serious. The story upset me, and I had a hard time not revealing that it had. I did not want people to know how deeply it had spoken to me, because that would reveal, I feared, too much about me.

Once the story ended, Bell clicked off the recorder. She swept us with her gaze, and then said, “Thoughts?” When nobody volunteered, she began to go around the circle, asking us one by one what we thought of the story.

I don’t remember specifically what anybody said, but I do remember growing more and more agitated, partly because my turn was coming, and partly because the measured responses that the more advanced students were giving seemed to me to have very little to do with what the story was or what it was trying to do—what, anyway, it had done to me. I felt dully angry, but resentful too that I would soon have to speak.

When my turn came, I don’t remember what I said either. Something offhand and semi-sarcastic, just a sentence or two, a vague lashing out partly at Carver’s story for ambushing me, partly at the other students for not having a more visceral response. I was young and fairly naïve, and probably a bit of an asshole. Looking back at the story now, just having reread it, I have a hard time seeing why it shocked me so much. But it still strikes me as a great story, and a painfully honest one.

I remember Bell listening and then asking if I could clarify what I meant. I struggled, offered something equally vague, tried again, failed, and then shrugged, hoping perhaps she’d be able to give me a way to phrase what I’d failed to express. Instead, she simply looked at me for a moment without expression and then moved on to the student sitting beside me.

As it would turn out, this was for me the best possible response.

•

I was looking for a box to put the story in. It had made me uncomfortable, and if I’d had an easy way to dismiss it, I would have. I was groping for that in the few words I was forced to say after just having listened to it. But my response was complex in that I was objecting to the other students’ approach for that very reason—they had readymade boxes they could put the story in, but they didn’t strike me as boxes that could actually, if properly considered, contain the story.

If I’d read the story on the page, rather than hearing someone say “beat off” and “goddamn” aloud, I would have been able to metabolize it easier. One of the shocking things about the story, in retrospect, was that I first heard it on BYU’s campus. Mormons were not supposed to take the name of God in vain, and that was particularly true of BYU students. Indeed, we had a strict code of conduct that concerned not only the language we were allowed to use but every aspect of our lives. To attend BYU you had to remain worthy members of the Mormon church and have your worthiness periodically affirmed by your ecclesiastical leaders. You could not drink alcohol, drink coffee, or smoke. You could not have sex (or, well, you could as long as both you and the person you were having sex with kept it a secret). Boys were supposed to report if they masturbated to their Bishop and had to strive to stop, and could in fact be suspended from the university if the practice continued. You were not allowed to take the name of the Lord in vain—if I’d said the word “goddamn” in front of the wrong person (I said this and more, of course, but always with great awareness of who was in earshot) I would have been reported for a conduct violation.

In addition, you had to live in BYU-approved housing. The dormitories, where I lived as a freshman, were strictly divided by gender. You were not allowed to visit the room of someone from the opposite gender except for a few hours on Sunday, when visits were strictly monitored and doors always left wide open. If you snuck into the room of someone of the opposite gender at another time, you could be suspended.

There was more. Men’s hair had to be cut short, off the back of their collar with the ears not covered by hair. If you violated this, or had what was judged an extreme hairstyle, you could get reported. There was a strict dress code you would get reported for violating as well—no tank tops for either men or women, no shirts that would reveal the belly, and all shorts had to fall at least to the middle of the knee. This had to do with the particulars of the Mormon garment, the sacred underwear that Mormons who had been on a mission wore underneath their clothing.

Mormonism is a strangely bifurcated religion. On the surface, it seems largely protestant: a secular ministry with weekly church services at a local meeting house that are open to anyone. But there’s a second, ritualized layer to Mormonism, consisting of what goes on in the Mormon temple. In 1984–85, when I was a freshman at BYU, this involved a sacred (and consequently secret) Masonic-style passion play made up of watching movies, putting on and rearranging ritual clothing, engaging in promises and handshakes, and exchanging ritual phrases. You made promises not to reveal the secrets, and then mimed how you would kill yourself if you did.³ To participate in the Mormon temple ceremonies, you have to receive your “temple endowment,” a particular ceremony where you are first introduced to the mysteries of the temple and are given a new name that you are told you must keep secret.⁴ To receive your endowment, you have to be a member in exceptionally good standing, and I’d guess well over half the people on the active rolls of the Mormon church have never gone, so it’s as if there’s a secret society hidden within the Mormon church.

In 1985, as a freshman, I hadn’t been endowed yet—I would be endowed a year or so later as I prepared to go on a Mormon mission to Switzerland. But I’d been raised Mormon all my life. I knew there were disjunctions between how Mormons acted in private and public. I wasn’t averse to swearing or privately violating boundaries that I publically seemed to affirm. But despite that, I was stunned to see it being done in class at a Mormon-controlled university. One part of me felt it was deeply inappropriate. Another part of me was simply amazed and eager for more.

•

Looking back, I can’t help but be impressed by the risk Professor Bell took. If any student had chosen to report the story as “inappropriate”—code for a range of things objectionable to Mormon culture—she would have had a lot to answer for. At the very least, she would have had her hands slapped. When I returned to teach at BYU almost a decade later, I discovered that there was a committee that quietly looked over the books you assigned to your class. If one of your books had been the subject of past controversy or complaint, the committee chair would “helpfully” call you and let you know. If a book you were planning to teach was unfamiliar to the committee, the chair would call—as, indeed, he did with me—and ask you to “vouch for it.” “We’re not telling you you can’t teach it,” I was told about one of the books I was teaching, “that would be censorship.” But my guess is that that feeling of being monitored alone was enough to encourage most BYU professors to self-censor.

•

Unsettled by “Nobody Said Anything,” I felt I had two choices: either to reject the story wholesale or to scrutinize it and try to crack the code of how it did what it did to me. I don’t know why I chose to opt for the latter. Perhaps it was partly because I was ashamed of not having been able to articulate a response to the story. Perhaps it went back to something I remembered Mormon prophet Brigham Young saying: “I mean to learn all that is in heaven, earth, and hell.”⁵ I wanted to know more than I wanted to be comfortable. Or perhaps it was just sheer cussedness.

In any case, after class I went to check the book that contained “Nobody Said Anything” out of the BYU library. There was only one copy and it was already checked out. So I went to the bookstore and bought it, and then, instead of studying for the following day’s classes, read it straight through. On the page, “Nobody Said Anything” felt more poignant and painful than shocking, but there were other stories that had a similar effect for me. “Fat,” the second story I ever read by Carver, struck me nearly as hard, and “Neighbors” had a kind of oddness to it that appealed to me very much—not the same emotional impact, but there was something damaged about it that was nonetheless profoundly human. “They’re Not Your Husband” reminded me of how one of my high school friends used to act when he was drunk and had lost all of his filters. “Why, Honey?”—a story about a politician with a vicious hidden past, told by his mother after she’s been tracked down by a reporter, worked away at me long after I had finished it. Critic Adam Meyer rightly calls it “one of the most technically dazzling stories in the collection.”⁶ Indeed, all of the stories, even the ones I didn’t like as well, struck me as different from anything else I’d read.

And so, as soon as I’d finished, still hungry for more, I went back to the bookstore. I managed to get there just a few moments before it closed. They had two other Carver books in paperback: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and the newer paperback, Cathedral. Because the repetition in the title of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love reminded me of the repeated “Please” in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and because the book was two dollars cheaper than Cathedral, I bought that one.

2. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 74–75.

3. This portion of the Mormon temple ceremony, the “penalties” phase, was dropped a few years later.

4. I’ve described some of this in more detail in the middle of my novel The Open Curtain, feeling that now that I’m an excommunicated Mormon the promise of secrecy no longer applies.

5. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 2 (Liverpool: F.D. Richards, 1855). Discourse 2, page 94.

6. Adam Meyer, Raymond Carver (New York: Twayne, 1995), 58.