"Call Me If You Need Me" by Raymond Carver

1.7.22

“Call Me If You Need Me”

Raymond Carver was my true entrance into the genre of short stories. I tried to emulate him for a long time. The sparseness of his work, totally stripped down, intrigued me. It’s now widely understood that his editor, Gordon Lish, considerably reworked many of Carver’s stories. It can be eye-opening if you compare the drafts and finished products side-by-side. “Call Me If You Need Me” is a story that was gathered into a collection of the same name, a gathering of “loose” works. The story is defined in the book as uncollected.

I haven’t read Carver in a long time. He’s brilliant. He also has a legacy at Syracuse, one of the many writers who taught there. I used to walk by his old house almost every day on my way to and from school. We heard stories of how he was before he quit drinking.

I always felt a connection to him because I’d also grown up in the Pacific Northwest, mostly poor, raised by a single mom and mostly absent dad, careening from school to school. Carver grew up in Yakima and was married with kids by his early twenties. He worked a lot of different jobs before he became a writer, but always dreamed of that life. I identified with that, especially before I got myself to college in my thirties, before I ever had anything published, back when I would have never said “writer” to describe myself at all.

It was Gordon Lish who took Carver in. His big break, this editor who whittled his words down into fine, sharp points. Carver won the National Book Award in 1977. He quit drinking that year, too. From then on he experienced huge successes as a writer and called it “his second life.”

For me, this story felt incomplete, a little too sparse. I may choose another Carver story this year, maybe “Cathedral”, one of my favorites, just so everyone has a chance to read one more. That said, this story had all the elements of a Carver story— the fraying relationship, the alcohol, the sadness and hopelessness transformed into something physically beautiful (the horses on the front lawn). It’s a beautiful story— the minimalism of Carver’s prose is like a white background, against which any event or happening stands in sharp contract. Everything has meaning. Nothing is lost. That’s much harder to accomplish than one would assume.

What did you think?

Tomorrow: “Everything That Rises Must Converge”

(I’m a day behind! May the universe give me the strength to catch up :))