Don't Flatter Yourself

A few more thoughts on Raymond Carver’s “Are These Actual Miles?” and autobiographical elements in fiction. One way to shift autobiographical experiences into story mode is to resist the urge to make yourself the hero of the drama. For example, if “Are These Actual Miles?” is more autobiographical than a few shared experiences between Leo and Ray, if Leo is Carver, it’s not exactly a flattering self-portrait, is it? You have to be willing to tell the worst on yourself, and then exaggerate that into drama. So, if Leo isn’t Carver, but a fictional construct, the story task was to take a few details about a dark moment in Carver’s life and try to infuse those moments with more drama than real life had. How to do that? Compress. Take events that happened over months and compress them into a weekend, into a sleepless night. Bring the world crashing down all at once. Also, don’t make the story about just one thing—say, the selling of a car—throw in infidelity, disapproving neighbors, a wife telling it like it is (“you’re nothing,” “bankrupt”) and thoughts of chewing glass and suicide.

From Poem to Story

Raymond Carver was also an accomplished poet and when reading his poems it’s interesting to see some of the same themes and even the same wording show up in the stories. “Are These Actual Miles?” is one such story with a tie to a poem. Here’s “Bankruptcy”:

Twenty-eight, hairy belly hanging out
of my undershirt (exempt)
I lie on my side
on the couch (exempt)
and listen to the strange sound
of my wife’s pleasant voice (also exempt).
 
We are new arrivals
to these small pleasures.
Forgive me (I pray the Court)
that we have been improvident.
Today, my heart, like the front door,
stands open of the first time in months.

The bankruptcy comparison is obvious, but here’s the similar phraseology in “Are These Actual Miles?”:

Leo and Toni still had furniture. Leo and Toni had furniture and the kids had clothes. Those things were exempt. What else? Biccycles for the kids, but these he sent to his mother’s for safekeeping. The portable air-conditioner and the appliances, new washer and dryer, trucks came for those things weeks ago. What else did they have?

Both the poem and the story passage key on the sentiment of which possessions are exempt from creditors and the bankruptcy court. The speaker in the poem has made the shift from possessions to simpler pleasures. The story, however, explores the darker side of the experience as Leo is shown at the climactic moments of loss on his way to having nothing.

Adding Drama to Life

My previous blogs on Raymond Carver’s story “Are These Actual Miles?” continue to be the most frequently read in the entire weblog, so I thought I’d add to those postings with some background work on this story that I did in graduate school. One aspect of Carver’s fiction that has frequently been commented on by critics is how closely some of his stories track the details of his life. For example, Sam Halpert, in his book Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography persistently chases after the autobiographical elements in Carver’s fiction. Relevant to “Are These Actual Miles?” here are some quotes from Halpert’s interview with Carver’s first wife, Maryann. First on the question of autobiographical aspects in Carver’s fiction she says:

"People get into such generalities. Ray was a fiction writer. His work is not strictly autobiographical. Many incidents happened that were kernels of stories, but he had the dramatic sense to make them into a story that people would sit up and take notice. The fact is that all happy families are alike, as Tolstoy observed, but unhappy families are unhappy in a unique way. Ray fastened on what was unhappy and unique in a situation and was able to create a dramatic story rather than a bland tale with no tension. A lot of times, as I’ve said, he’d take a kernel of something that really happened and convert it into a fine story." [75]

Some background related to the story:

“When we were in Sacramento, we had two salaries. He had his job in the hospital, and I was office manager at Parents Magazine Cultural Institute. My immediate supervisor there was Werner Erhard, who later founded est…I had never made so much money in my life…then the cookie thing came up [Ray got fired from a job] and there was no money…The lights were turned off at our house at one time, and then we couldn’t pay the rent, I took the children and went to my mother’s in Paradise California, and Ray had to go live with his parents….At Parents I just rose in the ranks. There was opportunity to make money, dress well, use my intelligence, and I went for it. Before long I was wearing hundred-dollar dresses [this is in 1965] from Magnin’s, and I had a maroon Pontiac convertible. We started living the high-life, you know.” [69-70]

On the question of bankruptcy, which the Carver’s went through twice, she says:

“Well, we did get into debt in Sacramento. It was a debt we had been paying, and expected to continue making the payments. Ray got tired of that and suggested bankruptcy. We had a major disagreement about that. I was adamantly opposed to it, adamantly, adamantly, adamantly opposed to it.” [77]

And finally, her comments about the story itself:

“Or take the story ‘Are These Actual Miles?’ I actually went out and sold my Pontiac convertible. It was my car, and I sold it, but how I sold it was nobody’s business. Ray’s story wasn’t life. It was a story from an incident in our lives that captured his imagination, and Ray wrote it.” [76]

Regardless the percentage of strict autobiographical content in the story, picking up on Maryann’s point, dramatic tension is the key to this story, and Carver creates it by exerting pressure on Leo from beginning to end. First Leo has to face Toni’s teasing

”You look fine,” he says. “You look great. I’d buy a car from you anytime.”
   ”But you don’t have money,” she says, peering into the mirror. She pats her hair, frowns. “And your credit’s lousy. You’re nothing,” she says. “Teasing,” she says and looks at him in the mirror.

Then Leo has to endure his neighbor’s stare, which turns the pressure inward, reminding him of his other indiscretions. Carver then milks the wait, turning it into an excruciating all-night scotch drinking terror. It’s bad enough that Leo is left with his own imagination and feelings of self-loathing, but making it worse are the phone calls from Toni.
 
The fight on Toni’s return is perhaps the most expected part of the story, and one of the strokes of dramatic genius Carver employs is to not make that expected scene be the climax of the story’s arc. That climax comes in the following scene when the car salesman returns driving the convertible and all of Leo’s humiliations are dumped on him all at once as he stands there with his ripped shirt.

Left Right Left Right

Here’s “Interlude,” a story by Kelly Pilgrim in the spring issue of Tarpaulin Sky that uses a cool non-traditional two-column format. In the left-hand column the narrator cares for a dying dog and frets over when to put him to sleep while contemplating animal souls. The right-hand column is a phone/email dialog between friends. One friend is insistently specifying funeral arrangements while the other resists. Because of the way white space (actually black space in the web formatting) is used, a traditional left to right reading of this story leads to alternating between the left and right columns, which is how I read it the first time. When the story is read that way the two texts inform each other. You can also read each column independently. Reading the story that way allows a deeper entry into each text because of the lack of distraction factor. The two texts still inform each other, but after the fact as you think about how reading one affects your reading of the other. Alternating between the two was more interesting for me because the affective aspect of reading occurred in real time. Interesting non-traditional use of form in a story, though I have seen something similar done in poems. I suppose some might argue that “Interlude” is more poem than story. I wouldn’t go that far. However, I wouldn’t argue with calling them story fragments either. The interplay between the two is where the emotional and intellectual action is, and that is the (unwritten) story.