Gallagher and Carver treated each other’s work with the kind of ruthless beneficence that characterizes the best literary partnerships. “It was always a spirit of helpfulness toward the other person,” she said. “He was better at taking criticism than I was. To edit with your mate really takes a certain kind of balance. I tended to be more protective of my work, but finally I got rid of my attitude. It’s about discovery, the method and the intent of your discovery.” The process took some undoing of ego. “If I mandated something and he didn’t use it, so what? It’s his work. I never felt any possessiveness about what he was up to. I would be very frank, and that frankness I think served him well.”
Gallagher isn’t the first poet to wield posthumous responsibility for another writer’s work. David Wagoner, the very man who first delivered me news of Carver’s death, is another. As a young man Wagoner, now a renowned poet and a professor at the University of Washington, put together Straw for the Fire, a model of what a well-edited posthumous publication can look like. Wagoner combed through the notebooks—215, he said—of his teacher, the great Northwest poet Theodore Roethke. (Gallagher also studied with Roethke.) Wagoner culled fragments of poetry and prose and brought them together in a 1972 collection that has inspired two generations of writers and readers with its sharp juxtapositions and surprising insights.
As he worked on the collection, Wagoner thought about how Roethke would have wanted the writing to be used and presented. “I tried to imitate his own random intensities,” he told me. Like Gallagher, Wagoner ran into criticism for the project. “A number of people expressed doubt about doing it. For instance, a couple of other poets, who I think had the creeps that someone might do it to them.” While Wagoner wouldn’t comment on Gallagher’s efforts to publish Beginners, he felt no worries about his own role in reviving the material in Roethke’s notebooks. “The journals of Emerson are published in toto. The journals of Thoreau are published complete. Why not?”
Wagoner’s matter-of-fact tone is illuminating. As an editor, he tried to approximate Roethke’s process as best he could. The role of the widow is more complex. One imagines all kinds of emotional wet spots, and of course there is the question of self-interest.
Gallagher described her role as a kind of moral imperative. “Right now my responsibility is to make known exactly what kind of writer he was. He very much resented being called a minimalist and being shoved in a category where he didn’t believe he belonged. I think it’s important to see the whole shape of a writer’s career and to see it truly. He can’t see to that, and so that’s the charge I have.”
“If I mandated something and Ray didn’t use it, so what? It’s his work, I never felt any possessiveness.” —Tess Gallagher
Gallagher has felt a new urgency in this project since being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002. She’s quite open about it—she even mentions her doctors and the “crack crew in Blood Draw” in the acknowledgements of her most recent book. “When I got cancer I really had a list of things I wanted to do. I suppose it was my bucket list.” She laughed. “Publishing Beginners was on there. I wanted to bring forward those things which allowed people to know Ray.” She continues to make poems; at the same time, she continues to treat Carver’s career as a vital force that must be managed. “I work on Ray’s things in the morning and my own in the afternoon,” she told me.
And let’s face it: As executor, Tess Gallagher has done a very good job of honoring Carver’s legacy. A 2000 collection of previously unpublished stories, Call If You Need Me, was a valuable addition to the Carver canon. (Full disclosure: I reviewed the book for The New York Times Book Review and loved revisiting Carver’s work afresh.) She didn’t get some hack to adapt Carver’s stories for the screen; when Robert Altman called, she answered. And now, with Beginners, she’s raising the level of interest in Carver’s work to a pitch that’s surprising, given the fact that he’s been gone 20 years. She’s not taking the job lightly, either. She’s enlisted the superagent Andrew Wylie to represent Carver’s estate, and the two of them hope and plan to see Beginners published. Knopf retains the rights to the stories as they appeared in What We Talk About, but whether or not the company will agree to publish the unedited stories is unknown.
Carver is just one of Gallagher’s responsibilities. She produces her own work but can’t resist midwifing the work of others. For years, the man in her life has been the Irish painter Josie Gray. As a frequent visitor to Ireland, Gallagher made it sound inevitable that she and Gray would find each other. “When I met Josie Gray,” she told me, “one of the most amusing and wonderful aspects to his character was his storytelling. I decided I was going to try to tape-record it.” Record it she did, and then she published it in a new book titled Barnacle Soup, out this year from Eastern Washington University Press. “It required of me some self-erasure,” she said. “But collaborating is so fun that you wonder why more people don’t discover it.”
Getting Gray’s stories down on paper thrilled her and fed her enduring interest in teaching other people how to write. Referencing her abiding attraction to Buddhism, she said, “I think an interesting thing about Buddhism is that it encourages you to believe that everyone has an incredible capacity to discover new capabilities within themselves.”
Gallagher’s 1987 collection, Amplitude, includes a poem titled “Bonfire.” In it she writes, “Once in Quebec I drank cognac in the snow and / on a dare / ice skated with my friend’s violin…How many times I saved myself on behalf of / that borrowed / that shuddering / violin!” The poem is centered around the image of this borrowed violin, “a perishable, fragile beauty / that belongs to someone else.”
I asked Gallagher about the poem and she said, “We have all been charged with the beauty and fragility of another life. We have all been ice skating with the borrowed violin.”
The poem appears to be about Gallagher’s relationship with Carver. The violin could be Carver’s love; it could be his talent; it could be his sobriety. It could simply be his life. In these years following his death, we can think of another meaning for the violin. Gallagher, the widow, is now the protector, the carrier, of Carver’s work.
Published: May 2008
