Call If You Need Me

“The last of the last,” I wrote to a friend, during the yearlong process of bringing five newly discovered stories by Raymond Carver to publication. As a poet, I also hear in that phrase an echo of “lasting.” Yet this is all the new work there will ever be from that extraordinary voice—its witnessing so clarified by relentless honesty that his stories have entered into over twenty languages around the world.

When Haruki Murakami, a fine novelist and Ray’s Japanese translator, visited me with his wife, Yoko, after Ray’s death, he confided that he felt accompanied by Ray’s presence and dreaded finishing his complete edition of Ray’s work. I know now the mixture of pleasure and sadness he must have been feeling.

The certain joy of this present endeavor has been in hearing something new from a voice it seemed had left the earth, of being glad for its unexpected entrance after a curtain has rung down. If a trunk of Kafka’s or Chekhov’s manuscripts were discovered today, there would be a scramble to see what it held. We are like that—curious, nostalgic, eager for the familiar ghosts of those we admire in our literature and lives.

These discoveries of new work by Ray are a separate, yet connected event in relation to work he published while he lived. There is value for those who wish it, for when we love a writer, we want to read on and on, to encounter the full range of what he or she wrote—the transcendent, the unexpected, even the unfinished. We’re able. This value comes not only from the whole, but also from small things: phrasing and syntax, the recognition or surprise of characters, the line-by-line play of the telling.

The discoveries of these stories took place at different times and in different locales. The first occurred in March 1999 at Ridge House, the Port Angeles, Washington, home where Ray and I lived at the time of his death. Jay Woodruff, a friend and senior editor at
Esquire
, assisted me in this process. The second came that midsummer, when William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, husband and wife partners in Carver scholarship, visited the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at the Ohio State University Library. There, while examining a box of manuscripts, they found two complete unpublished stories. They phoned me excitedly, on my birthday, with this news.

It was bounty added to bounty when these two stories joined the three Jay and I had located. Moreover, it is grounds for a republication of Ray’s uncollected writings. Many of these works had appeared earlier in
No Heroics, Please
(published by The Harvill Press in Great Britain, and Vintage Books in America). In addition to these unpublished stories, we have further enriched the book with four essays previously included in
Fires
, a 1983 miscellany of poetry, prose, and fiction.

Shortly after Ray’s death, while writing the introduction to
A New Path to the Waterfall
, I had come upon folders containing typescripts and hand drafts of unpublished stories. At the time I wasn’t sure these were complete manuscripts or, if they were, whether they should come to light. I felt that before unpublished work should be considered, all the writing Ray had clearly intended to see in print should first be made available. It would take nine years to accomplish that with the appearance of Ray’s collected poems in
All of Us
(Harvill, 1996; Knopf, 1998).

There was plenty to do after Ray’s too-early death at fifty in 1988 from lung cancer. I saw three of his books into print in British and American editions; finished
Carver Country
, a book of photographs by Bob Adelman; and advised on the Robert Altman film
Short Cuts
, which drew on nine of Ray’s published stories. I participated in the making of three documentary films about Ray. Much of the above I did while teaching far from
home. Somehow I also managed to write three books of poems, a book of stories, and a collection of essays.

Early in 1998, as the tenth anniversary of Ray’s death approached, Jay Woodruff phoned to say he wanted to do something to honor Ray in
Esquire
. “There are these folders in the desk,” I said. “There may be nothing whole or worthwhile,” I told him. “But I could look sometime.” I suspect Jay heard hesitation. At any rate he said, “Tess, when you get ready to look at those things I’ll be happy to come out and help you.”