Opiate of the Masses

The Sunday New York Times Book Review Section has an interesting piece, the cover story, Stephen King’s review of a new biography of Raymond Carver and the recently available edition of Carver's stories restored to their original forms before the heavy hand of editor Gordon Lish. (The New Yorker had an excellent piece, including correspondence between Carver and editor, some time ago, along with observations by Tess Gallagher, and a bit of background on the editorial relationship that brought Carver’s work to light.)

Mr. King’s piece is in keeping with the kitschy way the Book Review seems to want to treat matters of human sensitivity, here using a sprinkling of white trash language, as if to claim that Carver’s own sensitivity must be placed, anchored, specifically in white trash American. The mannerism is as if to say, human problems only exist if they are placed within some story that makes them very recognizable. We only get sensitivity, the great capacity of humanity to love and understand, as a negative photograph, existing largely, maybe exclusively, in situations we’re already supposed to be aware of through viewing the news, thus our need to take interest in them. We get the story of the extremes of human experience, the political prisoner under the oppressive regime, the victim of addiction, incest, incredibly strange family situations, twists of poor justice, etc.. We don’t get too much in the Book Review of the poor humdrum run of-the-mill persons like you and I trying to get through life. We don't get too much of that person's sensitivity, which we might speak of generally as part of the innate poetic imagination.

So, I think it fair to say, poetry is something of the first battle lines of the human being’s sensitivity in the Post World War One world we inhabit of mass economy, mass forces, mass debt, personal insignificance to the broad forces of history. It doesn’t have to be poetry necessarily; it could be some prose reminder of what living life is like, without having to touch on some extraordinary situation where things are obviously happening, like murder or being tossed into jail or becoming a drug addict.

It is certainly fair to, through the biography of Raymond Carver, touch upon alcoholism and struggles that are perhaps a little out of the ordinary for a lot of Americans. It’s fair to relate his personal stuff—demons, we like to say, to spice things up a bit and make reading about something more obviously worth our time—to his manner of writing.

Mr. King, having been an alcoholic himself, has the right to bring in this experience here. And Mr. King is a sensitive guy. He really is. (Read his book on writing.) But of course he’s also not shy to suddenly bring out a knife at someone’s innocuous high school prom and have blood pouring everywhere and over everything. (Sells books. Gave him his first break. Took him out of poverty.) And so, as you must with Carver, King mentions the outsized struggles with his subject’s behavior under the effects of alcohol. He hits his wife “upside the head” with a wine bottle. Horrible, would be an understatement.

What a reader might have found interesting is, here in this piece, the AA meeting’s self-recognition of the abusers habit of ‘people pleasing.’ I guess it makes sense. The subject goes through great lengths to please other people, or pretend he’s doing so. And all along he’s not pleasing something basic within, and so he drinks, drinks in a great fit of not-being-able-to-take-it-any-longer and to now will seek his own pleasure, in effect just dimming the lights so he feels some form of pleasure addictively without addressing any real need. It shows a personal weakness, Mr. King tells us, rather quickly. Mr. King works his math: Carver’s personal weakness leads to Lish’s editorial abuses. Being a horror-story teller, Mr. King then focuses on the horrors of having such an editor, and we can’t blame him for this choice in concluding his own take on the general matter.

It’s a little scary, when you think about it. An individual could so bow to please the wishes and wants of other people, that he/she endangers the self, so that the self, left so alone and hurting out of unmet wants, resorts to the numbing of booze, indeed, drinks alone. With Carver, the writer, it is a strange story to fully reconcile. The writer brings us moments of heightened sensitivity that reek of caring for other beings, a sadness taken in upon seeing the grim fall of another person, an awful seizing fear when he feels swept along with a group of people falling. Difficult to reconcile the writer with the person who subjected his wife to etceteras of work, suffering, abuse, all the while he was writing.

And then he quit drinking. He pulled himself together. He got a little better about being aware of his own needs, we somehow get from off-camera. Or at least put the end to a destructive habit.

We all know the famous AA saying about fixing the things one can fix, and knowing the things one can’t, the granted strength to distinguish the two. (I should know it better, I guess.) There’s a certain poetry to it you have to like.

It would indeed be frightening to look back on your life and say to yourself, you bent over backwards to please others, and all you had was your bottle of wine to come to at the end of the day, and that though desperately wanting to succeed at family stuff and relationships you lacked something to carry through with it.

But you might also be able to say that your work, of writing and poetry, was work for the benefit of the human race, that you were able to bring the general reader to a moment of sympathy, empathy, understanding of otherness, of a moment in time, a feeling, a poetic comprehension. You might step back from Mr. Carver’s particular problems to take in something cruel and impersonal about modern life. About how we no longer recognize and care about the small things that defeat a person, but exclusively the big ‘serious news-worthy’ matters of awful history, oppressive regimes, the skewed ends of the potential of some and psychopaths to do evil. Despite the private details of his life, Carver was a writer reminding us of regular personal stuff, not the incomprehensible the modern eye seems bent on drifting toward, whilst numbing the eye with materialism and fashion. (No wonder the economy is so screwed up, for being unable to register the needs of people, decent jobs, affordable housing, not being ripped off by powerful banks and health care providers, etc., etc., etc..)

Shakespeare, writing in Elizabethan England, wrote of the same issues, particularly in Hamlet, I suppose. Such a thing is man, how capable of the finest sensitivities, and yet… Here we have that sensitive being so well fleshed out and fully inhabited. A telling drama unfolds, not unlike our own.

Is poetry the opiate of the masses then? A celebration of that which is no longer consequential to us?

Anyway, this reader, of Carver and occasional book reviews, wishes that Mr. King had explored some more of this 'people pleasing' tendency. Maybe I feel the need in particular because I who write must go and tend bar tonight for a living, which in some ways is the ultimate of the alcoholic pleasing others. The mind goes off on many tangents. How could a self-centered prick like Hemingway have come up with a sensitive moment, or is he just interesting to the reader who falls for selfish people? Why can't one have a conversation with the opposite sex about basic human stuff without being regarded suspiciously, 'you're hitting on me?' thus sadly derailing whatever intellect might have been brought along. Is 'people pleasing sensitivity,' or the greatest weakness? Some poets like their wine. Some overdo it, maybe, and some don't. Some, through life, gain a handle on what it is to be human, enough to be empathetic with fellow beings.

Mr. King puts Mr. Carver, the individual, in one of those boxes that organizations like AA are wont to. The weak person. But where does that leave us, if we are to broaden the picture out away from Raymond Carver? Are writers and poets, artists, musicians prone to be so? is there something incapable in them of dealing with everyday life without resorting to their own brand of naval-staring? Should they just shut up and move on and get along with it? But then where does that leave us in our estimation of the obvious usefulness of poetry, short stories, novels and the like, as far as our own being able to get through the day and retain our sensitivity and humanity? The approach of Mr. King, to lump Carver so, while it may be reasonably accurate, is not very reassuring.

Carver, a weakling, showed in his stories that people need help. Mr. King's review does leave us with a commentary on the quality of the help people actually do receive.