Portrait of the artist as a total bastard

Back in the 1980s, Raymond Carver was just about the biggest deal in the cloistered and trendy world of contemporary American writing. He was credited with launching “minimalism,” a school of writing that took the economy of language Hemingway pioneered and pared it down even further. Carver was also known as the prose-poet chronicler of the working poor, and he inspired lots of imitators who pumped out bad Carver by the ream, just as earlier generations of Hemingway imitators had done with the model offered by the fashionable literary hero of their time.

Carver got good at his craft in Chico, studying under the fondly remembered John Gardner, yet another writer who managed to combine legitimate chops as a writer with a flair for marketing a literary persona, just as Hemingway had done a generation before when he was busy creating a personal mythology out of boozing, photo ops and war reporting derring-do.

In Gardner’s case, there was the hair, the pipe and the motorcycle that finally took his life. In Carver’s case, there was the mystique of the working-class hero, the hard-drinking artist, tormented by the burden of bearing witness to so much psychic pain, carrying the weight of the human condition on his back while pausing daily to get plastered as a release from all of that.

When Carver was studying at Chico State from fall 1958 to spring 1960, he was being supported by his wife, Maryann, who took a series of low-paying jobs to keep her husband at the typewriter. And, as time wore on, she also took an ever-increasing amount of abuse from her increasingly alcoholic mate who, as he began to gain recognition and fame, also began to find a wider range of opportunities to cheat on her.

She chronicles her marriage, and her life, in the recent book that bears a Carver-esque title: What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver. In the jargon of recovery, the book is also a classic portrait of an enabler, a sad and sordid tale of a woman who sacrifices all to the greater good of her husband’s art. Thus it is that loyal wives earn their statues in the No-Good-Deed-Goes-Unpunished wing of the Great American Writers Hall of Fame.

William Faulkner, another in the legion of alcoholic American writers, once observed: “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” And there are those who will surely argue that a story like Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is worth any number of abused and abandoned wives, women left behind after years of sacrifice once all that sacrifice has begun to pay off.

There was a time when I probably believed such self-serving bullshit myself, back when I was a young writer wannabe who spent a lot of time worshiping at the Temple of the Tortured Talents, a secular church founded on its first tenet—that the pursuit of art is an excuse for almost any bad behavior by anyone who deems himself an artist. I use the male pronoun here because the gods in that particular temple are all male. Women who behave badly for their art are nearly always seen as selfish, lacking in the appropriate priorities that would put their husbands and, most especially, their children before all other concerns.

But male “artists” can even kill their wives, and the mythologizing will only increase as a result. Back in 1951, when William S. Burroughs shot his wife to death in Mexico City while attempting to shoot a glass off her head in a drunken debauch, that was a pretty good career move for him, helping enhance his image as a writer who was more than just a tad crazy. Of that incident, Burroughs would later say, “I’m forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death … .” Ahhh, the sacrifices we make in the name of art.

We’ve always liked our artists to be just a mite crazy, but only if they are male. Being just a tad crazy has always looked good on the resumes of male artists; it seldom looks good when women artists claim that quality, unless their madness is linked to idolization of another artist, as in the case of a woman like Frida Kahlo, who was, among other things, an artist of long suffering for Diego Rivera, her man.

As for Carver, he would offer a faint echo of the Burroughs episode a couple of decades later when he broke a vodka bottle over his wife’s head in similar stumble-bum fashion. And Norman Mailer stabbed his wife in a drunken melee back in the early 1960s. Then, of course, there is the tin god of boozy excess, Charles Bukowski, hero to a couple of generations of guys looking for a legitimizing hook on which to hang their addictions and their self-indulgence.

Then there is the tradition of the great and near-great literary figures who spend time away from their keyboards trolling for co-eds while out on the college reading circuit, hustling up little trysts with doe-eyed girls younger than their own daughters by trading on their celebrity status. In his time, Frost did it, and in his time Robert Bly did it, too, not to mention dozens of others who played out their seductions of the innocents, those bush-league Byrons on reading tours, bedding the undergrads. Take away their fame and the bardic posturings, and most of these guys couldn’t get laid in a women’s prison, but strike a few poses for moony lit majors, and you’re in like Flynn (Errol Flynn, to be precise, the man who best embodied jailbait hijinks).

Nor is it merely women who get hustled or consumed under cover of the drooping banner of art. Allen Ginsberg was a notorious pedophile, an early member of NAMBLA, the group dedicated to celebrating the fine old tradition of buggering prepubescent youth. You wouldn’t want Ginsberg anywhere near your kid’s playground, but what’s a few molested boys in Third World countries next to all that great poetry.

So, in that parallel universe where art can be used as a justification for nearly all selfish and self-absorbed behavior, what does it matter when a compliant wife like the long-suffering Maryann Burk Carver writes up the tale of her marriage and finds in her ex-husband’s art a redemption for all her sufferings and her myriad misjudgments? How convenient to be able to lay all of that baggage and bad behavior on the altar of art. And, after all those years of supporting her husband, drinking with her husband, giving up her own jobs for her husband and plumping up his ego, that husband finds his way, at long last, to sobriety and bliss in a brief final chapter spent in the arms of Tess Gallagher, the poet and the “other woman” who cashes the happiness check and withdraws the capital built on all those years of beer and burdens, vodka and vituperation.

Maryann Burk Carver gave her life to that handful of stories now being spoon fed to college freshmen in required literature classes throughout the land, so it was all worthwhile—all those dark nights of the soul, all of that tackiness, all those hungover, gray mornings.

As in Faulkner’s assessment of the relative value of poems and old ladies, the former Mrs. Carver can justify her own boozy neglect of her children after she’d followed Ray into his alcoholism, because those stories he wrote are worth any number of stitches to her forehead, or any number of emotional scars on their children. In her chronicle of struggle, working poverty, nonstop moves from place to place and the alcoholism she shared with her husband, Maryann Burk Carver remains an enabler even after her deceased former husband has gone to that great writer’s conference in the sky, where the booze flows free and the nubile young writer wannabes smile beatifically for all eternity.