Both marital conflict and alcohol abuse emerged during Carver’s early years of menial jobs, bankruptcy, and of his first publishing and socializing in the West Coast literary underground. John Gardner at Chico State was an early mentor. The appearance of his work in literary magazines and small presses led to an association with Gordon Lish, and after Lish moved to New York and became fiction editor for Esquire, to appearances in Esquire (and thanks to Lish, in other national magazines). When Lish joined McGraw-Hill as an imprint editor, he published and promoted Carver’s breakthrough collection of stories, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?’’ (1976), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and established Carver as a master of “minimalism’’ (a term that Carver disliked).
By this time Carver’s alcoholism was at its worst, and rumors spread about “bad Ray,’’ even as he won awards and got prestigious teaching appointments. Both he and Maryann had affairs. They fought, bloodying each other, and his stories reflect their marital hell, where ambition seemed stifled by penury and parenting. “The basis of Carver’s stories in real despair . . . is one source of their power,’’ Sklenicka argues. “He would learn to use stories as a tool for emotional survival, a means for negotiating the terrifying waters of his own psyche.’’
In his essay “Fires,’’ Carver writes that: “Everything my wife and I held sacred, every spiritual value, crumbled away.’’ He had affairs with Diane Cecily (who was an editor at the University of Montana and later married Carver’s novelist friend Chuck Kinder); with fellow writers Joanne Meschery and Linda McCarriston; and finally with the soul mate of his recovery and his later fiction and poetry, poet Tess Gallagher, with whom he lived for his last nine years, and whom he married just before his death.
