ON AN AUGUST morning in 1988, I was sitting at a seminar table in a sunny, dusty-windowed classroom in Loew Hall at the University of Washington. I was taking a beginning fiction writing class from the poet David Wagoner, and he was a little late. Finally, he arrived. He walked slowly into the room and set his books and papers down on the table. “Bad news,” he said. “Ray Carver has died.” Hardly a breath, hardly a beat had passed when one of my fellow students dropped her head into her hands and cried, “Poor Tess!” She didn’t know Carver or his wife, the poet Tess Gallagher. But those of us who were young writers in Seattle in the 1980s felt an ownership of Raymond Carver. His writing was new, it was important, and it was coming out of the Northwest. He was significant to us, and dear. Tess Gallagher, in that moment, became in our minds irretrievably Carver’s widow. She was left behind, with the rest of us.
A poet’s life is not one of renown. A poet usually achieves fame in death, or more often not at all. Had Tess Gallagher not fallen in love with Raymond Carver 30 years ago, she might be living the quiet life of a successful poet at her home in Port Angeles, writing verse, traveling for pleasure, going for walks. For Gallagher is in fact successful, far beyond most poets’ wildest dreams. The Seattle Times said her latest book, Dear Ghosts, was worthy of the Pulitzer. The San Francisco Chronicle called her 1987 collection, Amplitude, a “masterpiece.” She has won the Guggenheim Fellowship; she has published regularly with Graywolf, a venerated house for poetry; she is respected by other poets. But she has another job, one for which she might justly be called famous during her lifetime: She is the widow and literary executor of Raymond Carver.
Since Carver’s death 20 years ago, Gallagher has led a kind of double life. She is both producer of her own work and protector of Carver’s. She, like any writer, creates a new future every time she sits down to write. Yet as widow and literary executor, she is pulled constantly into the past. Last fall, her connection to the past drew her into controversy. Carver’s second book, the breakout 1981 story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, has long been the subject of speculation. Gordon Lish, Carver’s editor at Knopf, reportedly claimed to have edited the stories so heavily that they were as much his as they were Carver’s. This past fall, Gallagher made plans to publish the stories as Carver first wrote them, before Lish got his pen on them, in a volume titled Beginners. Her decision set off a firestorm. She was decried by Carver’s former editors and his still-rabid fans: How could she know what he would want? How could she publish material he hadn’t approved for publication?
As the talk about What We Talk About played out in the press this past winter, my curiosity about Gallagher grew. I had read, and liked, her -poetry. She had written one particularly well-received book, 1992’s Moon Crossing Bridge, a cycle of grief poems about her loss of her husband. Since then, she had moved forward to write with variousness and curiosity. And yet here she was, once again defined by her relationship with Carver.
It seemed strange to think of this serious poet and native Northwesterner sitting in her house in Port Angeles like a sea captain’s wife on a windblown hillside, controlling the legacy of a major twentieth-century writer. I wanted to talk to her, but first I had to find her.
Gallagher’s phone number and address are unlisted. I traveled through a gauntlet of book review editors, neighbors, and former assistants until I finally obtained her e-mail address and wrote, asking for an interview. No, she said, in final tones, if an e-mail can have final tones.
I hadn’t really expected it to be easy. Yet, unlike most poets, Gallagher has made herself visible around town. Seattleites might remember her from KCTS in the early ’90s. She would appear in the intervals between, say, American Masters and some creaky old British sitcom, and stand before a white background, intoning her poems. Poems! On TV! She was an unsettling apparition, with her plucked, arched eyebrows and her heavily rhythmic line readings.
Published: May 2008
