The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (12 page)

My husband eats with good appetite but he seems tired, edgy. He chews slowly, arms
on the table, and stares at something across the room. He looks at me and looks away
again. He wipes his mouth on the napkin. He shrugs and goes on eating. Something has
come between us though he would like me to believe otherwise.

“What are you staring at me for?” he asks. “What is it?” he says and puts his fork
down.

“Was I staring?” I say and shake my head stupidly, stupidly.

His characters spoke a language that sounded ordinary, except that every word echoed
with the strange, and in the silences between words a kind of panic rose. These lives
were trembling over a void.

“Most of my characters would like their actions to count for something,” Ray once
said. “But at the same time they’ve reached the point—as many people do—that they
know it isn’t so. It doesn’t add up any longer. The things you once thought important
or even worth dying for aren’t worth a nickel now. It’s their lives they’ve become
uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down. They’d like to set things right,
but they can’t.”

Ray was doing things the long, hard way, going against every trend of the period.
In those years, the short story was a minor literary form. Realism seemed played out.
The writer Ray brought most quickly to mind, Hemingway, was at the start of a posthumous
eclipse. In the sixties and seventies, the most discussed writers—Mailer, Bellow,
Roth, Updike, Barth, Wolfe, Pynchon—reached for overstatement, not restraint, writing
sprawling novels of intellectual, linguistic, or erotic excess, and high-octane journalism.
There was a kind of competition to swallow American life whole—to mirror and distort
in prose the social facts of a country that had a limitless capacity for flux and
shock.

Ray, whose hero was Chekhov, moved in the opposite direction from literary trends
and kept faith with a quieter task, following Ezra Pound’s maxim that “fundamental
accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.” By paying close attention
to the lives of marginal, lost people, people who scarcely figured and were rarely
taken seriously in contemporary American fiction (if they appeared anywhere, it was
in the paintings of Edward Hopper), Ray had his fingers on the pulse of a deeper loneliness.
He seemed to know, in the unintentional way of a fiction writer, that the country’s
future would be most unnerving in its very ordinariness, in the late-night trip to
the supermarket, the yard sale at the end of the line. He sensed that beneath the
surface of life there was nothing to stand on.

In the early seventies, Maryann got her degree and began to teach high school English.
That freed Ray to put his effort into writing and finding a college teaching job.
He began publishing stories in big East Coast magazines. The Carvers bought their
first house, in the future Silicon Valley. There was a nonstop party scene with other
working-class writers and their wives in the area. Things were looking up for the
Carvers. That was when everything went to pieces.

The children became teenagers, and Ray felt that they now held the reins. Ray and
Maryann each had an affair. They went into bankruptcy twice. He was convicted of lying
to the state of California on his unemployment claim and almost sent to prison. Instead,
he went in and out of detox. His drinking turned poisonous, with long blackouts. Maryann
tried to keep up in order not to lose him. Ray was a quiet, spooked-looking man, but
with the scotch he grew menacing, and one night, after Maryann flirted with a friend,
Ray hit her with a wine bottle. She lost 60 percent of her blood from the severed
artery by her ear and was taken to the emergency room while Ray hid in the kitchen.

A few months later, in 1976, his first book of stories,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
—written over nearly two decades—was published in New York. The dedication page said:
THIS BOOK IS FOR MARYANN
.

Ray was a drinker and a writer. The two had always gone along separate tracks. What
the first self fled or wrecked or rued or resented, the second stared into high art.
But now his writing dwindled to nothing.

“The time came and went when everything my wife and I held sacred or considered worthy
of respect, every spiritual value, crumbled away,” he later wrote. “Something terrible
had happened to us.” He never intended to become an alcoholic, a bankrupt, a cheat,
a thief, and a liar. But he was all those. It was the 1970s, and a lot of people were
having a good time, but Ray knew ahead of the years that the life of partying and
drinking poor was a road into darkness.

In the middle of 1977 he went to live by himself on the remote California coast near
Oregon. It was fear for his writing, not for his own life or the life of his family,
that made him take his last drink there. Sober, he began to write again. In 1978 he
and Maryann split.

That was the end of Bad Ray and the beginning of Good Raymond. He had ten more years
before a lifetime of smoking finally caught up with him and he died at fifty, in 1988.
During that decade he found happiness with a poet. He wrote some of his best stories
and escaped the trap of self-parody that had begun to be called minimalism, turning
to more fullness of expression in the service of a more generous vision. He became
famous and entered the middle class. He received prestigious appointments and won
major prizes, a literary hero redeemed from hell. He walked with the happy carefulness
of someone pardoned on the verge of execution.

The turn to flash and glitz in the eighties worked in his favor. During the Reagan
years he was named the chronicler of blue-collar despair. The less articulate his
characters, the more his many new readers loved the creator. If the sinking working
class fascinated and frightened them, they could imagine that they knew its spirit
through his stories, and so they fetishized him. The New York literary scene, hot
and flush again, took him to its heart. He became a Vintage Contemporary alongside
writers in their twenties who had learned to mimic the austere prose without having
first forged it in personal fires. He posed for jacket portraits with some of the
old menace, like a man who had wandered into a book party from the scary part of town.

“They sold his stories of inadequate, failed, embarrassed and embarrassing men, many
of them drunkards, all of them losers, to yuppies,” one of his old friends said. “His
people confirmed the yuppies in their sense of superiority.”

But every morning, Good Raymond got up, made coffee, sat at his desk, and did exactly
what Bad Ray had always done. After all, they were the same craftsman. The distractions
were different now, but he was still trying to set down what he saw and felt with
utmost accuracy, and in the American din, that small thing was everything.

DEAN PRICE

Dean spent seven years in Pennsylvania. He married a girl who also worked for Johnson
& Johnson, and they lived in Harrisburg and had two boys—Chase in 1993, Ryan in 1995.
After leaving the company, Dean went to work as an independent contractor selling
Johnson & Johnson orthopedic knees and hips. He made good money, but within a few
years the marriage fell apart, and Dean turned to drinking. It got harder and harder
to walk out the front door in the morning, and eventually he stopped making his sales
quotas. He quit before the company could terminate his contract.

He decided to return to Rockingham County. He couldn’t live in the North, couldn’t
stand the winters, the unfriendliness, the fact that drivers didn’t lift their fingers
from the wheel and wave when they passed you on the road. He was afraid that his boys
would grow up not knowing the land or farming or fishing, not knowing their kin who
all lived within ten miles of one another. The court gave primary custody to the boys’
mother, with Dean getting them the first ten days of every month until they started
school, then every other weekend. Dean felt that if he went back home, he would eventually
be able to lure them and their mother down there. Until then, he would drive north
to pick up and return his sons as often as necessary, even six times a month, even
crying at the wheel.

Dean always said, “I’m a great father, a pretty good businessman, and a shitty husband.”

When he moved back to Stokesdale in 1997, he was thirty-four. He vowed that the divorce
would not make him bitter. He resolved to change his life and become a better father,
a more honest human being. He loved the fact that so much about his part of the country
was old. The backbone of America was right here, the self-sufficiency and loyalty.
Jefferson had written, “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They
are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied
to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.”
It was still true. If the United States was invaded, how many people in California
or New York would pick up a pistol and fight? “The thing about the farmers is it’s
in their blood to be entrepreneurs,” Dean said. “That’s why they came here two hundred
years ago. They didn’t want to have to punch the clock, they didn’t want to have to
work for the Man. They could have a hundred fifty acres of land and be their own boss.
If you had a Petri dish and you were trying to grow an entrepreneur, the environment
in this country is perfect, because there is reward with the risk.”

He joined the Sardis Primitive Baptist Church, a simple redbrick building under a
giant old oak that had been around since 1801, next to the little graveyard where
his grandparents Birch and Ollie Neal lay buried. By the time Dean joined, the congregation
at Sardis had dwindled to no more than eight or nine people, most of them twice his
age. He loved the smell of old wood in the church, the a cappella singing of old hymns.
The Primitive Baptists put a lot of store in dreams, and the preacher, Elder Mintor,
often spoke of them from the pulpit. How else would God talk to you if not through
your dreams, your imagination? The theology was called sacred hope. Dean was no longer
a Christian in the way of his parents. He hoped to goodness he was saved, but he didn’t
know anything for sure—didn’t know if he would make it home at the end of the day.
You did the best you could. He was baptized in the Dan River, his third time—the first
two hadn’t taken—and came out of the water rejoicing, feeling that he could have a
fresh start.

*   *   *

The plateau of hardwood hills and red clay fields between the Appalachian range and
the Atlantic coastal plain is called the Piedmont. Along the border between Virginia
and North Carolina, from Danville and Martinsville down to Greensboro and Winston-Salem,
the mainstays of Piedmont life in the twentieth century were tobacco, textiles, and
furniture. In the last years of the century they all started to die, more or less
simultaneously, as if a mysterious and highly communicable plague swept through the
region. Dean Price returned home just as the first bad signs were showing up across
the landscape.

Most of the tobacco grown in the area was bought, warehoused, aged, processed, blended,
rolled, and cut into cigarettes by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem.
Dean liked to drive up the Jeb Stuart Highway across the Virginia line and visit the
Reynolds homestead, within view of No Business Mountain, which got its name from moonshining.
He admired Richard Joshua Reynolds—born in 1850, rode into Winston on a horse in 1874,
started manufacturing tobacco there the next year, and became the richest man in North
Carolina by inventing the packaged cigarette. That was a good time to be an entrepreneur,
Dean thought—virgin territory in business, with the best ideas rising to the top.
Reynolds was an innovator, a modern industrialist at a time when the South was still
rural and dirt poor. There was a stone marker at the homestead with a quotation from
his grandson saying how Reynolds had given a decent life to thousands of people “who
otherwise would have been doomed to the backwardness of a region that had no future
and was burdened with a past that had failed.” R.J. Reynolds Tobacco made the city
of Winston-Salem, took care of its workers with (segregated) company housing and free
day care, gave them Class A stock that paid a handsome yearly dividend, and built
a local bank, called Wachovia, to house its stock and deposits.

By the early 1980s, the company had slipped out of Reynolds family control and was
coming under heavy pressure from competitors. Reynolds sales peaked in 1983 and fell
every year after that. In the same period, the federal government applied a different
kind of pressure—banning cigarette advertisements and doubling the excise tax on cigarettes
in 1983, while antismoking crusaders carried out a huge public awareness campaign.
To stay on top, Reynolds merged with Nabisco Foods in 1985, and the headquarters was
moved to Atlanta, which made a lot of people in Winston-Salem unhappy. In 1988, RJR
Nabisco became the target of the biggest leveraged buyout in history until that point,
acquired for twenty-five billion dollars by the Wall Street firm of Kohlberg Kravis
Roberts. The factory workers had little understanding of the deal, but almost immediately
Reynolds started cutting its workforce in Winston-Salem to pay off the pile of debt
in New York. The writing was on the wall for tobacco.

In 1990 a tobacco farmer Dean Price knew, James Lee Albert, was interviewed and photographed
by the Greensboro
News & Record
. When he was twenty-five, in 1964, Albert had bought a hundred-seventy-five-acre
farm in Rockingham County for a hundred dollars an acre, when top tobacco brought
forty-seven cents a pound. As he raised his family and added on to his house, the
price went up ten or fifteen cents a year after that, almost every year, until it
hit its peak at $2.25 around 1990. That was when Albert told the paper that the government
was going to put the tobacco farmers who had built this country out of business.