Articles

The first time I read a Raymond Carver essay was in the opening of John Gardner’s On Becoming A Novelist. Carver’s writing was every bit as good and sparkling clean as the writing that followed it. Even in those short pages—no more than a half a dozen, I think, because Gardner’s book is short to begin with—Carver painted a vivid portrait of his teacher in those days as either “a Presbyterian minister or an F.B.I. man.” One particularly vivid image is of Carver writing in Gardner’s office every Sunday surrounded by boxes of his teacher’s manuscripts. As Carver writes, Gardner and his first wife, Joan, pull up to the white church across the street, park their dark car, with its black-wall tires, and go in to worship. An hour later they reappear, climb in the car, and drive away.

The image of Gardner—which I eventually had to reconcile with Barry Silesky’s John Gardner: Literary Outlaw—was constructed with such alacrity that it stuck with me for years.