Squirrel Hill couple recall their friendship with Raymond Carver
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Diane Cecily and Chuck Kinder, at home in Squirrel Hill, were both friends of writer Raymond Carver. -
Gordon Lish was Raymond Carver's controversial editor.
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It's been a milestone year for the late Raymond Carver, one of America's major short story writers who died in 1988 at 50.
Scribner recently published the first full-scale biography of the author, "Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life" by Carol Sklenicka, and the Library of America released a collection of 90 stories several months ago with detailed notes on how the stories were revised before publication.
Carnegie Mellon University Press joined the Carver revival by re-releasing "Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale" by Chuck Kinder. It's a "nonfiction novel" about the friendship between the two writers and contains chapters cut from the original publication as well as intimate letters between Carver and his one-time lover, Diane Cecily, now married to Kinder.
One way to assess the work of Carver is to cast it as the product of the American writing scene of the late 20th century when creative writing courses began to influence fiction.
With its emphasis on "write what you know," much of that fiction came to resemble a typical Carver short story -- intimate, small-scale and with "ordinary" working-class characters.
Another is to view Carver as the reluctant accomplice in the creation of "minimalism," a spare, unadorned style that achieved its effects largely on what was unexpressed.
Gordon Lish, Carver's editor, is now recognized as reshaping his original stories into condensed versions that were imitated by others, most notably Ann Beattie, who enjoyed a brief fame with such simply written novels as "Chilly Scenes of Winter."
Carver himself rejected the "minimalist" label, and comparisons of his original stories with Lish's extremely trimmed versions back him up.
There's an inspiring side to the Carver saga -- his struggle to recover from alcoholism, a successful effort that gave him 11 sober years to enjoy the honors and income that eluded him in his formative, although desperate, years.
The best way, though, is to take Carver for what he was -- a flawed individual hampered by alcoholism, but also a generous, talented man and close friend to many writers.
Among his closest were Kinder and Cecily. Their Squirrel Hill home has long been an open house for the nation's finest writers as well as students of Kinder's writing classes at the University of Pittsburgh, where he's taught since the 1970s. Michael Chabon created a fictional version of his days as Kinder's student in his second novel, "Wonder Boys."
According to Carver's biographer, Sklenicka, it was Kinder's hospitality when both men were Wallace Stegner fellows at Stanford University in 1972 that buoyed the shy writer through the fellowship year and formed a lasting friendship.
Cecily and Carver had an affair for several years before she met Kinder; they married in 1975 and remained friendly with the writer and his first wife, Maryann, as well as Carver's second spouse, poet Tess Gallagher. The couple were prime sources for Sklenicka's book.
"Carol certainly put a lot of effort into the biography," said Cecily. "She listened to what we had to say and never imposed her own views over ours or others. I really admire her work." Sklenicka was the houseguest of the couple during her research in Pittsburgh.
"The inaccuracies (in the biography) were few and far between," Kinder said. "They were mostly in matters of tone."
Both found several important errors in the chronology of Carver's life in the Library of America story collection, however, most notably involving events in 1972.
"The old days were the old days," said Kinder of the 1970s when he, Carver and such fellow writers as William Kittredge, Richard Ford, Richard Hugo and James Crumley were engaging in what might best be called injudicious behavior during their gatherings.
Those days were the genesis for Kinder's "Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale," a book he continued to work on throughout the 1980s and '90s until it reached thousands of pages. It focused on the lives of the Carvers and Kinder and Cecily. Eventually whittled down to manageable length, it was published originally by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2001.
After Carver became sober, he continued to stay in touch with his Pittsburgh friends, calling them every time he received a new honor or praise.
"Ray just wanted to talk to somebody about his recognition," said Kinder. "No matter the prize, he still had a childlike sense of amazement when his work was noticed."
Carver seldom visited Pittsburgh, but was the judge for the 1982 Drue Heinz Literature Prize supervised by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
In such collections as "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" and "Where I'm Calling From," Carver "created a new legitimacy for the short form," Cecily said.
"He reinvigorated it," said Kinder. "Before the short story was seen as too intellectual. Ray's stories demonstrated that there could be mystery in the mundane."
Both also emphasized Carver's poetry, something "he's not been recognized for," said Cecily.
"Ray always said, 'I am a survivor,' during the hard times and to me, that was always the good part of him," Kinder said.
First Published December 30, 2009 12:00 am
