Allison Muri, creator of the David Carpenter website, has provided a wonderfully written essay that David wrote about a hunting trip he went on with Ray, Richard Ford, Bill Robertson, and Peter Nash. Many thanks are due to both Allison and David for permission to republish this essay.
Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, David Carpenter, Bill Robertson
Photo by Peter Nash
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1986
"Gettin kinda dark out," says Robertson.
Honor leans toward me. "Bill says it's -"
"I heard."
"Oi," she says.
"How do we know these guys can shoot?" says Calder. "Maybe they're as rusty as we are."
"They can shoot."
"Hey, Carp, isn't it gettin kinda dark out?" Robertson asks again.
I mumble something and weave through the traffic on 11th Street, eyeing the dark gray horizon, then accelerate for an orange light. Honor clutches the dash. "Watch out," she says.
"It's okay."
In September, in Saskatoon, the evening light seems to vanish like a memory of August. Every fall this happens and every fall I get ambushed by the rapid change. You start thinking about winter for weeks before the Grey Cup or the World Series. It's unsettling. It makes me brood on the brevity of life.
"What if someone hears our shots in the dark?" Robertson asks. He can't quite believe what's going on. "What if they call the cops?"
"There's still some light," I counter.
"Where?" Calder asks.
Honor starts to laugh. The other two join in.
Raymond Carver is coming to Saskatoon. He will arrive tomorrow with his friend Richard Ford. They are bringing their shotguns and expect to hunt with ... well ... hunters. I am determined that all of my hunters will make a good showing. They will act like Saskatchewanians. Bob Calder (a biographer) will re-discover that feeling of squinting down the barrel of a twelve gauge, and Bill Robertson (a poet) will cease to wonder how to work his safety catch. He's just bought his first shotgun, an old twelve gauge double, for twenty dollars. Calder last hunted in 1963. I am the veteran here. I last fired a shotgun four years ago.
"Seriously though," says Calder. "It is pretty dark out."
"Maybe we can use the headlights," I offer. My determination is still strong, but my voice sounds limp.
My determination is strong because in 1982 I stumbled on Carver's stories and felt I just had to meet this guy. Bring him up here for a reading. The question was, how? Our English Department is strapped for visiting speaker funds. Then I read "Distance," one of Carver's stories in Fires, and I began to see a way. In this story a young man is about to go goosehunting when his baby breaks out in a crying spell. His young wife suspects the baby is sick, but neither parent knows for sure. She prevails upon her husband to stay home and he misses out on his hunt. The baby stops crying and soon recovers. This story comes to us twenty years later when the marriage is long over.
An idea began to grow. I would invite Carver to read on campus (where I teach on alternate years). Art Sweet, a writer friend of mine, somehow dug up the address of Carver's agent. I wrote to Carver. Let the critics say what they will about "Distance" (... a polgnant examination of lost bliss ... a portrait of the raconteur as exile in time and space ...), its ultimate meaning is a far more fundamental cry from the heart: Will somebody please take me goosehunting?
On January 19, 1986 Raymond Carver answered my letter and said yes, we might be able to work something out.
Honor turns to me. "Do you know the people who own the land?"
"Sort of."
"What are you going to say to them?" she asks.
"I'll just ask them if they mind us firing off a few shells behind their house."
"In the dark," Robertson adds.
"They probably won't even be home."
But the house in question has the lights on. It's a small cozy bungalow built among the aspens and willows. Through the front window I can see the man of the house helping his son with his homework, the woman and daughter kneeling by the fire. The man answers the door.
"Hi," I say, thrusting my hand forward. "I'm Dave Carpenter. I used to camp on that stretch next to you."
He shakes my hand, smiles, and holding his pipe he introduces me to his little foursome. I explain that Honor and I and a couple of friends want to try out our shotguns on a few clay pigeons, shooting into the dunes, of course. My neighbour, who has never seen me until this moment, glances nervously at something in the kitchen. He seems to be gauging the distance between his front porch, where we stand, and his telephone. He strokes his chin, peers at my car.
"Hmm," he says.
But sanity prevails, or something, and my neighbour shows us where to drive out to the dunes in the dark. I take my little Toyota to the top of a small sandhill and point the headlights at a dune about seventy-five feet away. We will release the clay pigeons with a little hand launcher that looks like a long sling shot, aiming these at the small hill in front of us. There is no dwelling in this direction for miles, so the set-up seems safe, if a little unorthodox. I let fly with a few while my friends load up. The clay pigeons are black and yellow discs about the size of a small dessert bowl. They glide like accelerated Frisbees into the beams of light and out again. For about three seconds they are visible.
"Gotta be kind of quick," says Robertson dubiously.
He goes first.
"Ready?" I call out.
"Ready."
I send one out a bit high. It skirts the very edge of the headlight's beams.
"Try again."
"Ready?"
"Ready."
I send one across the beam and this time Robertson manages to get his gun to his shoulder.
"Little low?"
"Yeah, try one medium height, straight away."
"Okay, ready?"
"Ready."
This one wobbles in flight, but it's just where Robertson wants it. He fires and misses.
Calder tries. The same thing happens. Robertson tries again. The night reverberates with shotgun blasts followed by 'shit" or "Next time send er higher." Honor tries and nicks one. I try, but no luck. Then Calder, then Robertson. The little yellow saucers pass in and out of the headlights, untouched, safe as UFOs. No one scores a direct hit, but after half an hour of this, we all have a feel for the gun's recoil, and where our safety catches are, and what not to do with a shotgun among friends, so we head back to town. When I've dropped everyone off I discover that my car doorjambs are sticky with dozens of rose hips.
SEPTEMBER 24
Raymond Carver is inspecting a hunting licence in my kitchen. "I am Lee Henchbaw," he says, "and I am from Sass-katchewan."
"No," says Honor, 's's-katchew"n. You don't pronounce the first and last "a"."
Carver looks up from the licence. "My name is Lee Henchbaw and I am from Skatchewan."
"S's-katchew'n," says Honor.
"S's-katchew'n," says Carver. "I am Lee Henchbaw and I am from S's-katchew'n." He smiles. "Eh?"
This is the first time I've participated in giving lessons in spoken
Canadlan: the interrogative "eh" at the end of declarative sentences, the tightlipped "ou" sound that rings Scottish to American ears, the clipped syllables through a puckered mouth, the irresolute shift of the eyeballs as if to ask if life were a federal or a provincial responsibility.
"Have the geese come south?" asks Richard Ford. His south sounds like sowth to my ears. There is a trace of Mississippi in his volce.
"South," says Honor, "with the mouth contracted. Pretend you're ashamed of your teeth."
"Sewth," says Ford.
"Sewth," says Carver.
"No, south. Don't open your mouth so wide."
"Mewth so wide," says Ford.
"My name is -"Carver peeks. "My name is Lee Henchbaw and I am from Sass-katchewan."
"Fantastic," says Ford.
"Oi," says Honor.
A lot of geese are down, I tell them. Honor and I have heard them going over for the last three nights, wave after wave.
"Now, Dave, how is this going to happen?" Carver asks. He and Ford are very keen. The thing that makes a spaniel strain at his choke collar is in these guys.
"Pits," says Peter Nash. "A guy name Jake will dig them for us."
Nash is a bearded physician I have known since I was six or seven.
Like Richard Ford, he's in very good shape. At every birthday party, Nash was the kid who had twenty-five per cent more laughs than anyone else. He is still that way. Becoming a father and an ophthalmologist have not visibly altered him. His preparation for this trip meant buying and reading all the books by Carver and Ford he could find in Vancouver. He's as keen as they are. There is an excitement here among us that keeps building. I know that I will scarcely sleep tonight.
"You guys call em?"
"Jake does. He knows what he's doing."
Even though she isn't coming on the hunt, Honor's face is all aglow. She
has lived in six states, and it seems to me she has missed the sound of American voices. As most Canadians know, Americans are anything but ashamed of their teeth.
The deal is this: I will take Ford and Carver goosehunting if they will give a joint reading at the University of Saskatchewan for a drastically low fee, what you might call the best kind of free trade arrangement. I have written to the Saskatchewan Minister of Fish and Wildlife to waive Carver and Ford's alien status so that they can hunt in this area right after their joint reading, rather than wait around for six days with nothing to do. The reading is slated for September 25th, but around Crocus, Saskatchewan, Americans aren't allowed to hunt until October 1st. Duke Pike, the minister in question, is a circumspect man who believes the universities and intellectuals are out to get him, or so people have told me. Predictably, our request is denied. He suggests we re-schedule the whole damn event, which at this point is impossible.
I had to get two extra hunting licenses. Enter Art Sweet and Lee Henchbaw, both writers. They haven't hunted a day in their lives, but for the cause of literature, they put their asses on the line. Art Sweet, among other things, is a very fine one-handed guitarist. Emergencies seem to be his stock in trade. Lee Henchbaw is a possessed poet; he seems perpetually astonished by life. He handed me his hunting licence and announced his intention to write a Raymond Carver poem. Perhaps Carver will write a Lee Henchbaw poem. Lee is beset by verbal overload. He may burst before he jumps on his motorcycle.
"I am Lee Henchbaw, and I am from Sass-katchewan," says Carver, all night long, through a bout of insomnia.
THAT's THE PART I remember from Wednesday night. What Honor remembers is quite different. None of this talk about goosehunting. She remembers Nash at the stove frying a large batch of fresh-caught smelts in egg and bread-crumb batter. She remembers a series of confessions during our meal. Ford was first: "You know the last words my mother ever said to me? She was on her deathbed. She said, "Richard, will you please stop asking me all those questions?"" This remark inspired other confessions about pain, death and worry. Carver talked about how terrified he was when Tess Gallagher (his partner) had to have an operation for cancer. Nash told us about his fears upon discovering an advanced melanoma on his right arm. I'm sure I put in my two cents worth. In my youth I was very enthusiastic about pain.
Just before we fell asleep, Honor marvelled about the evening's talk. "Here's four guys, none of them trying to sound liberated, talking about their feelings." She was still all aglow. "I've gotta tell Lorna."
SEPTEMBER 25
From B.C. to Western Saskatchewan there is a hurricane warning, rare for these parts. In Lethbridge it has rained four inches; in Calgary it has snowed twelve. In Saskatoon the wind buckles the elm trees near the campus and dismantles election campaign signs. For the first time in Saskatchewan history, there are New Democratic Party signs on the lawns of the wealthy. The rain has turned to sleet, but not yet snow. Carver and Ford are having lunch down the street from my house, Nash and I making sandwiches for the road, when the phone rings.
It's Honor at her studio. Jake's been trying to get hold of me. He thinks we should cancel the trip. I tell Nash. He can see I'm very worried; I've got that why-me look.
"Let's not phone Jake," he suggests. "Let's pretend we never got the message. Let's just go."
"Yeah." Desperate dilemmas require desperate solutions.
We stare at each other. The reading is two hours away. Perhaps more than a hundred students, writers, profs and book lovers will be getting ready to brave the storm for this event. I am holding my head in my hands, moaning something about the unfairness of life. In Saskatchewan that often means weather. I rail for a while, and Nash, undaunted, counters with his own philosophy: that life is random, not fair or unfair. "The test is always how well we deal with the randomness!" he cries. He's in an impassioned state of inspiration, like the wind outside. We seem to be caught in the plot of a Russian novel here.
We decide to phone Jake. Jake says exactly what I had feared: "Yiz guys better call the whole thing off, eh. I mean my brother an I we can't even get a four-wheel drive into the field, dig the pits. You can't get no vehicle nowheres near there."
"Jake, I can't call this whole thing off. These guys have come a long way."
"Well, I dunno what I can do. We got two inches a rain down here in the past twenty-four hours. Fields an roads solid gumbo."
"Are the geese down?"
"Yeah".
"Could you show us where they're flying?"
"Yeah, but yiz'll all have t'walk some."
"What's the forecast?"
"Pissin."
I look at Nash, who holds a knife heaped with mayonnaise in one hand, a slice of bread in the other. He does not seem rattled. "Well, Jake, we're coming."
This is one of those days when you simply worry your way from one decision to another. I will worry about the reading till it's happening, worry about not telling Carver and Ford that Jake wanted to cancel, worry about the condition of the highway, worry about the sufficiency of everyone's rain gear, hit the sack and worry about how to get to sleep. I will worry about setting back Canada/U.S. Iiterary relations by twenty years and giving Saskatchewan a bad name. In my dreams my parents will tell me that they told me so, and I will worry about where they went wrong with me. I am leading five guys to their death. I will really worry about that one. Outside, the wind howls, the rain lashes, and life's randomness proclaims itself all day long.
THE CLASSROOM is full, hushed. People's foreheads, hair, and coats are streaked with rain. The linoleum is splattered with mud and yellow elm leaves. We can hear the wind outside, and this sound precipitates, it seems to me, a cozy smug feeling. The best writers and some of the best artists in the province are here. A contingent of twelve people has driven all the way from Regina against this wind and into the sleet. The classroom seems to bristle and glow. People are still gasping from that last dash across the quad. Guy Vanderhaeghe (My Present Age) is chewing a huge pink wad of bubblegum. Barbara Sapergia (Foreigners) huddles into her coat and breaks out in little shudders. Pat Krause (Freshie) and Byrna Barclay (The Last Echo) babble about how cars were swaying in the wind fifty miles south of Saskatoon. Anne Szumigalski (Dogstones) spreads her wool shawl out around her like a tea cozy and smiles her four year old girl's smile. Patrick Lane (Linen Crow, Caftan Magpie) looks straight ahead as several women talk to him. "You better believe it," he says. "You better believe it." Geoffrey Ursell (Perdue) strokes his beard, folds his arms, surrounds himself with reflective silence. Lois Simmie (Pictures) looks at Carver with undisguised adoration. Elizabeth Brewster (Selected Poems, 1944-1984) hurries in at the last moment, huddles into the last available chair. Lorna Crozier (The Garden Going On Without Us) is the last one in the room to stop laughing. Art Sweet (fiction writer, guitarist, poet) and Bob Calder (Rider Pride) look as though they are seconds away from opening kickoff. And (words bouncing off his brain like ping-pong balls) Lee Henchbaw is perhaps thinking, I am Raymond Carver and I am from Port Angeles. Nash's head goes around and around three hundred and sixty degrees so he can see everything. This is show biz and he knows it. Bill Robertson (Standing on Our Own Two Feet) gawks impatiently, as though he wants to get in a dozen windsprints before the reading begins.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," I begin. My voice seems to be talking and I'm helpless to do anything with it. "I suppose I was hired on here because I am a regionalist. That means I'm interested in the writing that has been done around here. Well, angling for Raymond Carver and Richard Ford has been a very good exercise for me, because I'm now willing to admit that, yes, some very good writing is going on outside of Saskatchewan."
Polite laughter.
Get on with it, Carpenter.
Carpenter (Jokes for the Apocalypse) gets on with it. A warm applause, at long last, for Richard Ford. He is lean, pale; his face flickers with sensitivity. (Elizabeth Brewster confides later to me that he certainly is "cute".) His voice has gathered intonations from all his wanderings, from the Deep South, to the industrial Northeast, to the Midwest, and to the Old West, where he now lives.
I was standing in the kitchen while Arlene was in the living room saying goodbye to her ex-husband, Danny. I had already been out to the store for groceries and come back and made coffee, and was standing drinking it and staring out the window while the two of them said whatever they had to say. It was a quarter to six in the morning.
This was not going to be a good day in Danny's life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail.
Thus begins "Sweethearts", Richard Ford's latest story in Esquire (August, 1986). For half an hour, the audience wraps itself up in Richard's story and wears his voice like a comforter as the wind buffets the window panes. It occurs to me that being read to is a great luxury, especially on a stormy day. The audience responds warmly, and I wonder if the public Carver can be half as captivating. On the page, of course, he is, but this is show biz.
Raymond Carver stands six feet two, a bigbodied man apparently
comfortable with his size. He has a way of going quiet and quizzical and at such times reminds me of that awkward brainy kid in grade six. Or as an undergraduate, he would be the shy, dishevelled guy in the corner, lost in thought. A bit like Lee Henchbaw. They both have an abundance of curly hair which I envy, and it seems to announce something luxuriant in their minds that cannot stop growing. They are working class men right down to their cigarettes. Both recall hard times and domestic strife all the way back to childhood. But the man at the lectern has now become Raymond Carver, and Lee is perhaps fifteen years away from becoming Lee Henchbaw. His first poems have just appeared, but he is still young enough to ride a motorcycle. In a few years, he will be up there at the lectern, launching one of his books. In a few more, if he remains devout and disciplined, he will become a small part of literary history. Then fade with the rest of us. Clay pigeons flashing through the headlights of the Cosmos. The critics take their pot-shots in the dark, and usually miss, and then we all die. I wonder if Nash would agree with this. The weather breeds such ruminations.
Carver is absolutely unhistrionic, soft spoken, humble by disposition rather than design. He begins by asking the people at
the back of the room if they can hear. But perhaps they can't hear him yet, so they just stare back at him. He asks again. They stare back again. Carver is in Saskatchewan, where seldom is heard an extrovert's word. People in readings don't raise their voices if they are in the audience. That would be showing off. So Carver begins, plainly worried. He reads from one of his recent New Yorker stories ("Whoever Was Using this Bed," April 28, 1986). In about one minute, with the line, "What in God's name do they want, Jack? I can't take any more!" he has us. Soon, more than a hundred sodden people are howling with laughter. The characters grope through the night for words to put on their fears and their despair, but throughout the story there is this laughter. I
can't help wondering, is this the man Madison Bell attacked (in Harper's, April, 1986) for being a "dangerous" influence on American short story writing? Another studiedly deterministic nihilist? Bell argues that the reader is drawn into a Carver story "not by identification but by a sort of enlightened, superior sympathy." The audience here goes from rib-aching hysteria to rapt attention as the narrator and his wife talk in bed at five or six in the morning about whether one would unplug the other from a life-support system if s/he were suffering unduly. Is this conversation the sort of thing the genteel Mr. Bell would call nihilistic? Am I missing something? When I read Cathedral (upon which Bell focuses his attack), did I miss out on all that impoverishment of the human soul? Maybe like Bell I should have been saying to Carver's characters, "I understand the nature of your difficulty; how is it you don't?"
I decide, at the moment of applause, that the genteel Mr. Bell suffers acutely from a superiority complex and that he wouldn't know a compassionate story if it goosed him in the subway. This, of course, isn't exactly a meditated judgement, only a reflex. But I can't escape the conviction that Carver is telling our story, however squalid or despairing, and we find ourselves having slept in his narrator's bed. The applause continues for a long, long time. You"d think Tommy Douglas had come back from the grave.
The crowd ascends to the I0th floor coffee lounge and descends upon the Americans. They have to clutch their styrofoam cups close to their chins, and guard them with the other hand. Saskatchewan has come to pay court to them. The mood is suddenly effusive.
In fact, for this place at least, it is wildly effusive. I feel like one of those Broadway producers who chews on cigars and shouts at the last minute replacement for the leading lady, "Go out there, Mabel, and break their hearts!" My God, I keep thinking, I've got a hit on my hands.
An hour later it occurs to me that I have a hit and no pits. No pits, no geese. No geese, no reciprocity from us to them. Carver and Ford
have waived a considerable sum in fees and expenses to come here and shoot. Which makes me (in collusion with the weather) one of the all-time welchers in Canadian literary history.
"SAY, AH, DAVID," says Carver in the front seat, "that's a heavy rain coming down. Is that normal for here?"
"Well, no, Ray. Actually it's a real heavy one."
He looks out at the countryside flashing by in the fading light. Ford is silent. Perhaps he is looking for geese. So far we have seen none.
A minute later, Carver says, "Say, ah, David, that's a heck of a wind out there. Is that normal?"
"Well, no, Ray. Actually it's quite unusual for up here." I've said nothing about the absence of goose pits or Jake's phone call. I've said nothing about the hurricane warning. The one blessing is that this pummelling wind is behind us.
"About these pits," says Ford. "Aren't they likely to be a bit on the wet side?"
I tell a censored version of the grim facts. There may be no pits at all. There can't be any digging in the farmers' fields until they've managed to take in their crops. And in this weather, digging is impossible, walking "a bit dicey." I suppose my nervousness has begun to show through.
"David," says Carver, "I'm excited. Richard here is excited. I feel I'm on some sort of adventure. If I even see some geese tomorrow and get a bit of walking in, that'll be fine. I'll have had my fun. So don't worry. Hell, we're all on an adventure here."
I nod, very much relieved, and repeat Nash's words on contending with the randomness of life. This view, the kind of advice an ophthalmologist may have to give to a patient on occasion, rides well with us all the way through the storm and down to Crocus. Nash is no doubt spreading his gospel of adventure in Calder's vehicle. The six of us have become soldiers of fortune. We face the howling infinite together. This last statement probably sounds self-dramatizing. Such is the language of epic.
SASKATCHEWAN AND CARVER. Why the instant love-in? He's a fine writer, but many other fine writers (Margaret Atwood) and scholars (Northrop Frye) have bombed in Saskatoon. First we single out Carver's books for praise, then, in about two minutes of reading, we respond just as warmly to the man. Better readers (W.O. Mitchell, Erin Moure, Graham Gibson, Michael Ondaatje) have worked harder to warm up an audience. And wasn't Ford's story a bit tighter? It seemed so during the reading.
Should we not, then, be more circumspect about Carver's books, such as Mr. Bell has advised? Some of us are no doubt aware of Carver's excesses even as he reads, but no one voices any critical disapproval later on, after the event. Is the Carver/Ford reading one of those obsequious moments, then, in which a bunch of Canadians grovel at the feet of someone who has made it big in America? I can't absolutely deny there was at least a trace of this feeling in the room. But I don't think the excitement at the reading was impelled by mere obsequiousness. I think much of the laughter, for instance, was that of recognition, that the agonies of Carver's two insomniacs, their dread of a prolonged death, were to a great extent our own.
Mr. Bell seems distressed over the language of many Carver stories, concerned as they are with "the predicaments of bluecollar workers verging on the skids." What rankles at Bell's sense of literary propriety "is a slightly artificial lowering of diction" to "describe a very sophisticated pattern of events."
I find this argument irksome.
I read Carver's stories for many things: among them that strange dependency of squalor and humour in the tone, the equally strange dependency between the ordinary and the numinous, and that way his characters have of telling us far more than they mean to. Who says this is an artificial lowering of diction? Is it artificial because plain- speaking people are not generally competent to talk about the complexities of their lives, or at least report their own stories in a suggestive way?
Carver brings to Saskatchewan the suggestive richness of plain speech. Saskatchewan greets Carver with a tradition of plainspeaking. Our greatest works of fiction (Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House, W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind, Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow , Guy Vanderhaeghe's Man Deseending, for example) are unapologetically realistic. Perhaps this adherence to the imperatives of realism doesn't seem surprising to readers unfamiliar with the Canadian West. But if we look at the finest Alberta fiction over the same fifty years (Howard O"Hagan's Tay John, some of Rudy Wiebe's Indian stories, most of W.O. Mitchell's Alberta fiction, and Robert Kroetsch's Badlands, for instance), we get myth, epic, tall tales and other kinds of comedy in the hyperbolic tradition, romance, postmodern satire--anything but realism.
When Albertans were forging the Social Credit Party out of the remains of the United Farmers Movement and the biblical prophesies of William Aberhart, Saskatchewanians were creating the C.C.F. party. Compare the mythopoeic style of Aberhart's or Manning's speeches (in church or in the Legislature) with the hardnosed realism of Tommy Douglas' speeches, and you have a rough idea of what I'm talking about in the literature of these neighbouring provinces.
Nowhere I know of are the niceties of middleclass diction, the borrowed jargon of deconstructionism, the linguistic excesses of romantic fiction less relevant than in Saskatchewan literature. And in Carver's stories, I suspect. There is a correlation here, and it shows up in the language: the rhetoric of hard lessons, limited expectations, toughminded compassion. We have known hard times and from this knowledge comes our regional pride. Western Albertans are mountain snobs, Vancouverites like to feel sorry for the rest of Canada.
Home| Biography| Chronology| Pictures| Short Stories & Poems| Precisionist| Etc., etc., etc.| Yakima Haunts| Port Angeles Haunts| Drafts of "Shooting"| About This Site| Comments|