Documentary On Raymond Carver's Life

There's a marvelous moment in Jean Walkinshaw's new documentary on Raymond Carver when the late writer is captured on home video. Carver is at ease and, yes, he's feeling his oats.

That's the sort of cliche that Carver would embrace and magically recast into art. Yet here he is, acting it out:

Grinning, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, Carver comes out a door onto a porch. He flexes his biceps, he-man style, and does a little jig down the steps. Then he shimmies, wiggling his butt in a gesture that seems a good-humored defiance of the deadpan gravity of his fiction.

Life was good for this man by the time the video was taken. It was, as he wrote in a fearless poem of the same name, "gravy": "Eleven years/ ago he was told he had six months to live/ at the rate he was going . . . So he changed his ways/ somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?/ After that it was all gravy, every minute/ of it . . ."

After he quit drinking in 1977, Carver forged a new life with another short-story writer and poet, Tess Gallagher. Writing at their home in Port Angeles, they enjoyed a decade of mutual creativity and success before he died of lung cancer in August 1988, at age 50.

Without being maudlin, Walkinshaw's "To Write and Keep Kind" captures the wistful loss we experience when an artist's life is cut short at its peak. Yet there are smiles within the pain: When Studs Terkel reads Carver's poem, "What the Doctor Said" - whose subject is no less serious than impending death - Terkel's impish, gravelly voice perfectly draws out the wry, self-deprecating humor that Carver packed into every line of that sing-song verse.

The KCTS production will air on Channel 9 at 9 p.m. Wednesday and be repeated next Sunday at 10 a.m. It is a fine introduction to the life and career of a man whose literary voice has been the most influential in American writing for the past 20 years.

Carver was born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Ore., but his family soon moved to Yakima, where he grew up the older of two brothers whose father spent too much time in the bars but who taught Ray to love fishing, storytelling and reading. Married at 19, Carver and his first wife, Maryanna, were soon parents of two children; with her pulling in waitress wages, they eked out life while Carver studied writing in California universities.

Maryanna Burk-Carver recalls Carver's increasing success in the early 1970s, when he won Guggenheim and Stegner fellowships and later taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the California campuses at Berkeley, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. At the latter school, she says, Carver's drinking pattern altered for the worse.

"We had a crisis that lasted for six years. . . . We had the equivalent of the Vietnam War in our home for six years," she says - a view borne out by their son Vance, a handsome, articulate young man who remembers his father falling into a world of hard-living writers.

Beginning in 1976, Carver was hospitalized four times for alcoholism, even as his first, highly praised collection of stories, "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," was published. The next year proved seminal: He was separated, he stopped drinking for good, and he met Gallagher. After a decade together, the couple were finally married in Reno two months before Carver's death.

". . . Tess was able to provide ultimately what he needed more - and that was more peace and quiet and less interference. That's really what turned his life and career around," says a clearly proud Vance Carver.

Besides hearing Carver himself, "To Write and Keep Kind" features many friends explaining his influence, none more compellingly than writer Tobias Wolff. He challenges the view that Carver's characters, often afflicted with alcohol or divorce, reflected a sense of guilt over his own past.

"Ray was about the least guilty person I've ever met," laughs Wolff. "He went back there because he was an artist, and he saw that's where the good stories were. Good stories thrive on difficulty, they thrive on the chaotic elements and challenges that his earlier life had presented him with."

Donn Fry's column appears Sunday in the Arts and Entertainment section of The Times.