Fires by Raymond Carver

The essays in Raymond Carver’s collection Fires describe his writing life and influences. He champions clear, precise, accurate, commonplace language. He likes a little menace and tension in stories, the sense of something imminent.

Carver studied under literary critic John Gardner, a writer who recommended endless revision and reading right: Céline, Isak Dinesen, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Hemingway, and Gustave Flaubert, among others.

“It was a basic tenet of [Gardner’s] that a writer found what he wanted to say in the ongoing process of seeing what he’d said. And this seeing, or seeing more clearly, came about through revision.” (43)

What stoked Carver was creating fire from commonplace language.

“It is possible in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a from, a stone, a woman’s earring - with immense, even startling power. That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.” (24)

As well as four essays, Fires includes a selection of Carver’s poems and short stories. I’m not a fan of his poetry, but there’s plenty of menace and marvel in those short stories.

And they were short for a reason. In the essay ‘Fires’, Carver explains that the biggest influence on his writing were his two children, and that their influence was “heavy and often baleful.” He felt “unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.” There’s a sigh in his words: accommodations were made, the sight was lowered.

“…if ever I wanted to take satisfaction out of finished work, I was going to have to stick to stories and poems.”

In the current coronavirus lockdown, it’s easy to empathise with Carver. My children holler and chase mercilessly from room to room. They squabble, cry, fall off tables. My desk is a station for Playdough and maths. My chair, upside-down, is a fort. John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction lies lost beneath colouring books and unicorn stickers.

When writing, Carver stuck motivational messages near his desk. This is the one I would take from Fires:

“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones…” (24)