The last story in his last collection, and very much concerned with death. This story, based on the death of Chekhov and its immediate aftermath, segues seamlessly from fact to fiction; you just cannot see the join. I’m endlessly intrigued by the way that something made-up can shed light on the real world.
First published in 1987 in The New Yorker, and available to subscribers to read here; included in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988
Raymond Carver was seen for a long time as the minimalist par excellence, but it became apparent after some years just how much his editor Gordon Lish worked on Carver’s stories, including huge cuts, renaming characters, and even changing stories.
I have a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and also a copy of Beginnings; these books contain the same stories, in the same order, sometimes with different titles – but the stories in the former were edited by Gordon Lish, those in the latter weren’t, and are as Carver originally submitted them. I picked up the two books again for this article, curious to see if I had the same reaction as the first time around, and it’s a qualified ‘yes’.
‘The Bath’ began its life as ‘A Small, Good Thing’, and was edited down to probably a quarter of the original length. Although a “cleaner” text, it feels like almost a completely different story. So I wonder about editorial choices and the reasons for them.
Is this two stories or one? Which version is better? I can’t decide. But if Carver hadn’t written the original, Lish would not have had anything to cut and rewrite.
The through-line is that a mother orders a birthday cake for her son, Scotty (the only person in the story who retains a name in the edited story), but the boy is hit by a car and dies.
The heavily edited version is sparse and spare, with no room for human connection – which is there in abundance in ‘A Small, Good Thing’.
Raymond Carver himself intended to publish the stories in their full unedited version, but it was his widow Tess Gallagher who eventually did that. I’m glad we have both versions. Interestingly, I have seen in various places online a common belief that ‘The Bath’ was the original story, later expanded to ‘A Small, Good Thing’. I can see why people may think that, but it’s not the case.
These stories – both books of stories – make me think about my own choices in writing and editing my own work. And how might I respond if my work were to be edited so brutally as here? I hope that never happens…
‘The Bath’ was first published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981; ‘A Small, Good Thing’ was first published in Beginners, Jonathan Cape, 2009
At university, an unrequited love (or unconsummated crush, I’ll never know) told me to read Carver. I’m not sure there could be a better introduction. In the finest Carver stories, that unspoken force called literature stands just in the next room and, at certain moments, we are allowed to glimpse it, like neighbours who have snuck into its apartment, finding it gone but frozen with awareness of its having been. It is usually an everyday breakdown of reality, by a car accident and a cake or a broken fridge, or, in this case, a letter pushed under a door, that affords us this glimpse. Why I think ‘Blackbird Pie’ stands out among the Carver stories I love is that here, quite literally, literature itself is what intrudes, what pulls at the fabric of living, of all that rough sentiment Carver writes so expertly.
First published in The New Yorker, July 7, 1986; collected in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic Monthly, 1988/Harvill Press, 1993
In this story a mother orders a birthday cake for her son but the same day her son, Scotty, is in a road traffic accident and ends up in a coma. The anxiety of the boy’s parents throughout the day is interspersed with calls from the baker, who wants the cake paid for and collected. It’s interesting because there are two versions of this story: the originally published one, which was brutally cut by editor Gordon Lish, and the restored full version about four times the length, subsequently released and titled ‘A Small, Good Thing’, which became one of Carver’s most lauded and best loved stories. Towards the end of this version, the mother has taken a break from watching over the child who is in a coma in hospital and gone home intending to take a bath. When she reaches home, someone phones and asks for her by name. She asks, “Is it about Scotty?” The man says, “It has to do with Scotty, yes.” That is the last line, the abrupt ending of the Lish version. It leaves us with the bitter sense of cruelty and selfishness of the baker and his unconcern for the plight of the distraught parents.
First published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981
What Carver does here puts me in mind of one of those popularly imagined martial artists who, through the subtlest positioning and alteration of balance, dispatches his charging opponent. By that I suppose I mean I’m very struck by the minimalism here, the mastery of craft, the role given to the reader – also the sheer impact. It really, really gets me, this one.
First published, in an earlier form, in Quarterly West in 1978, and then, in the form I’m familiar with, in The Paris Reviewin 1981. First collected the same year in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and then in Where I’m Calling From, Atlanticm 1988/Harvill, 1993. The story’s available to Paris Review subscribers on their website
I’ve buried this story deep in my anthology here, but it’s actually the story that gave me the idea to create a collection around endings. Carver’s narrator is a belligerent and unsympathetic character and in some ways seems infected by his thinking, like his notions and resentments are permanently germinating under the surface. His reluctance to look past himself means the reader has to read through his murk, and in the process of the story he is disassembled slowly, until it ends with a sudden light, a release of breath.
First published in the Atlantic Monthly, in 1981. Collected in Cathedral, Knopf 1983. Read here
I was a writer from as early as I can remember (at around 8 I started writing novel-length stories!), but past the self-consciousness of adolescence I didn’t come back to it in any serious way until I did an MA in my 20s. It was around this time that I discovered Raymond Carver and loved his deceptively simplistic style, and how much is said through pauses and blank spaces. I also loved how often the dialogue was awkward and repetitive, but how natural it felt in that awkwardness. I could name any number of short stories that I loved, but this is the one I return to now.
It’s interesting to read it again now knowing what I know. So many of his stories were about drinking and alcoholics, with a subtext of crisis. In this particular story, there is a steady mood of provocation, in the furniture out in the yard, the main character challenging the young couple and getting them drunk, dancing with the young girl, and the hold he has over her and her inability to admit to it. How it lingers and stays with her beyond the page.
First published in Quarterly West, 1978 and subsequently in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988
There’s really no point recommending a short story by Raymond Carver to someone on this site, is there? So, assuming you have already read it, the amazing thing about this one for me is the ending. The narrator is trying to describe a Portuguese cathedral to Robert, a blind man, firstly though words, and then by trying to draw it with him. It is a cathedral neither of them knows, and which the narrator has only glimpsed on TV. The result is, of course, tremendously profound in its brevity, a brilliant exploration of how curiously abstract the idea of physical place can be.
First published in Best American Short Stories 1982. Collected in Cathedral, Knopf, 1983
I first encountered Carver’s short stories when I was a teenager, trawling the local library for things I hadn’t already read. At the time, I couldn’t work out if he liked people or not, but I was drawn to his style and his acute observations of relationships between men and women.
In ‘So Much Water…’ Claire, the narrator, is shocked to discover that her husband and his buddies have found the body ofa dead girl washed up on the shore upon arrival for their annual camping trip. Instead of reporting this to the police, the men carry on with their boys’ weekend, merrily fishing, eating, and drinking whisky. Reading it again, I share Claire’s horror and disbelief.
Carver writes with detached observation about the disillusionment of men in mid-century America, his emotionallydisengaged characters full of grimy, unapologetic bluntness. Marriage and domestic life – meal times, conversation, sex – are all portrayed with a scary kind of detachment, devoid of passion or feeling.
First published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981
In the introduction to Best British Short Stories 2022, Nicholas Royle says of The Stories of Raymond Carver, “Wherever I open the Carver and read an opening line, I want to read on”. ‘Whoever Was Using This Bed’ starts, “The call comes in the middle of the night, three in the morning, and it nearly scares us to death.” Disturbed by a strange phone call, Jack and his wife Iris stay up smoking and talking, “the kind of talk that could only take place at five in the morning.” They reveal their health concerns and discuss “a life-and-death thing” with a sense of intimacy and understanding and trust, which is brilliantly undercut by the chilling punchline.
First published in The New Yorker, April 1986, and available online for subscribers here. Collected in Where I’m Calling From, Harvill Press, 1995
So many Carver stories could have been on this list, but I chose this one because – in only 1600 words or so and set entirely on a driveway where a garage sale is being held by the alcoholic narrator – we see the broken remains of a life, and how important connection is, however minimal that may be.
A young couple scope out the furniture pieces, possibly to buy for their own apartment, but there are no price tags on any of the items. As the girl is looking through his record collection, they put a song on and dance together.
There is no traditional ‘plot’ and the reader is only drip fed certain tiny, but crucial, elements of information. Nothing is resolved, everything is implied.
First published in Quarterly West, 1978. This version first published in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988
The simplicity of language and action in this story encourages the reader to co-create the “more to it” that cannot be “talked out.” I imagined entire lives on this artfully blank canvas, in a frame sketched out with minimal words:
His side, her side.
First published in Quarterly West, 1978. This version first published in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988
‘A Small Good Thing’ was the first short story that showed me the transcendent possibilities of the form. I didn’t understand how Carver could create his effects with such precision and concision; I still don’t. The story of a parents’ loss of a child and their consolatory interaction with a baker, ‘A Small Good Thing’ is a devastating tale of forgiveness and kindness that continues to reverberate deep within me.
First published in the USA in Cathedral, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983, and in Britain by Collins Harvill, 1984; collected in Where I’m Calling From – The Selected Stories, Harvill, 1993
The story I have read most often – and in the most detail – ‘Fat’ is a deep dive into the dumper truck of sadness. It has moments that still make me shiver even having read it hundreds of times. To think, this was the first story in his first collection! For me, it remains the high watermark of Carver’s art, and perhaps his most affecting.
First published in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? McGraw Hill, 1976. Currently available from Vintage Classics, 2009. Also collected in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic/Harvill Press
A Personal Anthology 