With the exception of a two-year stint as a janitor, Carver’s trajectory resembled that of most relatively successful contemporary American writers: schooling, publications, teaching writing. But he lived hard, in a way that Raymond Senior would have recognized. A poem called “Our First House in Sacramento” begins: “This much is clear to me now – even then / our days were numbered.” The narrator loses the grocery money in a poker game. Someone, in frustration, drives his fist through a wall. They eventually abandon the house in the middle of the night, loading everything on a U-Haul trailer, the narrator wondering what the neighbors must think to see the
family going from room to room by lantern light, packing.
Night escapes from landlords come up several times in Carver’s earlier writings. The neighbors also play a big role in the stories, a dynamic that seems a little out of place in the America of today. No one these days sits in the front yard in suburbia and asks, “Don’t I know you?” A lot of these episodes sound like they could have taken place during the Depression. In one of his earliest poems, “Distress Sale,” the narrator helps a neighbor take all his possessions out to the sidewalk for the sale, even the favorite easy chair that the family had named “Uncle.” “Must everyone witness their downfall?” he asks. “This reduces us all.”
