Raymond Carver at the Wikipedia
Raymond Carver: bibliography
Errand: review
Errand: summary and analysis: enciclopedia
Errand: enotes
Short Cuts (trailer)
Raymond
(or Ray) Carver was born in a milltown in Oregon (on the West coast), in 1938
and died when he was 50 years old of lung cancer.
His
father was a millsaw worker and a heavy drinker, and his mother worked as a
waitress and a clerk, so they were a lower class family.
Raymond
also worked with his father in the millsaw. He also learned to fish, so fishing
is a theme that appears in some of his stories.
At
19 he got married to Maryann Burk, 16 years old. We have to suppose that they
married because they had a baby the same year. Then they had another next year.
Both,
Raymond and Maryann, had different jobs and they try to go on studying; Maryann
finished her studies, but Raymond never finished any of his courses. Besides
temporary occupations, he got precarious jobs as a writing teacher or
university teacher, but because of his alcoholism he finished working as a
janitor in a hospital and writing in his spare time.
At
34 he fell in love with Diane Cecily, editor at university, and he started
drinking heavily and abusing his wife.
When
he was 38 he began to date Tess Gallagher, a writer who later will become his
wife. In this time he had to go to the hospital several times because of liquor
intoxication. He realized that he had to stop drinking, and he started his
second life thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous (but he never stopped smoking marihuana
and even tried cocaine).
At
44, he got divorced (he was already living with Tess).
Six
weeks before dying at 50, he got married to Tess.
He
published his first short story when he was 23 and was studying at Chico Public
University. It was called The Furious
Seasons and bore a strong influence of William Faulkner.
His
first short story collection Will You Please
Be Quiet, Please? was published when he was 38. But although it was
shortlisted for the National Book Award, he didn’t sell many copies.
He
had more collections of short stories, and the most famous are What We Talk When We Talk About Love and
Cathedral.
When
we talk about Carver we talk about minimalism
and dirty realism. Minimalism means avoiding
all rhetoric, and that if you can say something in ten words, please, don’t use
twenty. And dirty realism implies that in your stories you are going to use
characters that belong to the lower classes of the society, that your heroes
are going to be anti-heroes, e.g., isolated marginalized people, people with
alcoholic problems or difficult relationships or broken families. So we have to
suppose they are sad stories.
Everyone
can feel the influence of Hemingway minimalism in his work, but he said his main
influence was D. H. Lawrence.
It’s
an irony, but the last story he wrote, before dying, is Errand, where he narrates an anecdote of Chekhov, another famous
short story writer, just before his own death.
Errand
In
this story, very different from his other stories because it’s almost “classical”,
Carver writes about the last days of the life of Chekhov, a Russian writer
revered by most short story writers. Chekhov was having dinner with Suvorin, a
publisher, in Moscow, when he started bleeding from his mouth. The Russian
author knows that his life is in danger and travels first to Berlin with his
wife Olga Knipper, where he sees a doctor who doesn’t help him, and then to
Badenweiler, a spa resort where he says he expects to get some recovery (although
he doesn’t really believe it). He and his wife are staying in a hotel, and the doctor
who treats him, Dr Schwörer, realizes that there’s no hope and orders champagne
as the last honour to the famous writer. The author drinks and dies, and then there
is a change in the way of telling the story, because we see the situation
through the eyes of his widow Olga. Then, after a wake until morning, she asks
a waiter who had come into the room to bring a vase of flowers to go and fetch the
mortician. The story has a special ending, but I’m not going to be a spoiler revealing
it.
QUESTIONS
Anton Pavlovich ChekhovSuvorinMaria ChekhovLev Nikolayevich TolstoyOlga KnipperDr Karl EwaldDr Schwöhrer (and his presciptions)The waiter (the young blond man)
What were the characters’ feelings about the TB?
Personal question: Do you have an opinion or a belief about the immortality of the soul?
What do you know about TB?
Where is Badenweiler?
Explain the courtship between Olga and Anton.
What can you say about The seagull and The Cherry Orchard?
Why did Chekhov mention the Japanese?
Summarize in one sentence Chekhov’s death.
What do you think is the meaning of the “large moth”?
What is the meaning of “history” in the sentence “Dr Schwöhrer picked up his bag and left the room and, for that matter, history.”
What happened with the bottle’s cork?
Describe the scene between Olga and the young man at Anton and Olga’s room.
What is the meaning of the title Errand?
In the last paragraphs, there is a change in the verbal tense: the past tense has changed into “would”? Why?
What do you think is the meaning of picking up the cork in the last sentence of the story?
VOCABULARY
private,
take in (took in), stanch, jest, sleet, well-wisher, out-line, junk, bearskin, numbered,
reckless, on the mend, complexion, Moët, grapple, mortician
