What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver, the 'American Chekhov' as he so regularly gets dubbed, is a recent discovery for me. Perhaps because I'm just battling with my own attempts at short stories, it's particularly meaningful for me to find such a master. But more than likely, it's the fact that Carver manages something rather spectacular without even appearing to try to.


His stories, all set in the American mid-west, focus on ordinary lives of ordinary people. Or so it first appears. But scratch beneath the surface of any given story, and one sees that these people are extraordinary, that the events of their lives, even if they are described in the simplest, most unadorned prose, are tragic or epic. This is the real mind-blowing strength to Carver's work: his style, so unaffected and straightforward, only heightens the implicit drama of the scenes he describes.


Take 'Why Don't You Dance?', in which a man has moved all his furniture out onto his drive and gets a young couple drunk, or 'Gazebo', which opens with the line 

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

In both instances, one rushes to try to come to terms with the fact that these people aren't all right, that their simple lives, so simply told, are shot through with a hidden suffering. Or even the suffering need not be hidden. In 'Sacks' or 'The Bath', we read of the painful reunion of a son with his estranged father and of a road accident on the eve of a young boy's birthday. Both times I was struck by how it seemed somehow unfair that regular folk were suffering like this. It's a masterful, terrifying observation. It's Carver at his best.


There's the macabre too. 'Tell the Women We're Going' leads the reader along a familiar path, until one realises that one character's reticence is not that he's just a quiet man, but that he hides a horrific secret. Or 'The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off', a record of the decline of a good man before his son's eyes. But 'Popular Mechanics' bests them both for its intensity and agony. In the briefest of moments Carver has captured domestic struggle at its most violent and destructive. But he has not sensationalised it; he never does. He's packaged it up in a mere two pages of dialogue and action that seem so concise and factual but only emphasise the enormous tragedy of the scene. There's skill even in the titling, with 'Popular' hinting that we are reading something that happens regularly, that we should understand to be happening around the world. That's scary. That's great writing, to pose a question so succinctly. 


I'll read these again. Carver gets it right again and again. 


~~~
1981
Raymond Carver

The End Of The Affair

I picked up Graham Greene's The End Of The Affair while I worked at Vintage briefly; it's a Vintage Classic, and rightly so, as I found myself reading a book that demanded I keep a pencil close at hand to mark up sections of the text. It was written in such an eminently quotable and essential concise and brilliant manner that I was left feeling over-awed by reading it. In fact, I asked myself "Why had I not read this already?"


The story follows Maurice Bendrix, a writer, during the Second World War as he reflects on his affair with Sarah Miles. Through a series of chance meetings with Sarah's husband Henry, Bendrix embarks on a journey to find out what Sarah is up to now. 


The book is one that charts the depths of human emotion at its most intimate; the feelings of love and loss, of pain and hatred are ever present in Bendrix's language. His ability to ruminate over thoughts of jealousy and revenge without becoming tedious is impressive and this is the central strength of the novel, to go over much of the same ground repeatedly while managing to find new things to say, new ways to say the same thing.


There is also the timelessness of what is said; part of that feeling of awe, that frustration with not having read the book earlier, surely ties in to the fact that Greene managed to say something important, something that has stood the test of time, about love and the end of a relationship. He has written in a way that strikes a chord with the reader, that encourages them to identity with the feelings he has described,  to believe that Greene is writing about the reader rather than himself. Yet it remains intensely personal for Bendrix too; it's too easily to believe this is entirely autobiographical, but that effect remains prevalent.


Heartily recommend this book; wherever you're at in a relationship, it's worth thinking about the depth of feeling that love can bring about.


~~~
1951
Graham Greene