C****a
发帖数: 7186 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 俱乐部 】
发信人: sasa (灰巴笼耸), 信区:
标 题: My Father's Life - Raymond Carver
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue Oct 14 23:48:57 2014, 美东)
这篇很多人觉得很感人，我没有觉得。就觉得写得很平实，结尾有点不必要的煽情，感
觉carver没有想好怎么结尾这篇回忆文章。
Raymond Carver： My Father's Life
________________________________________
My dad's name was Clevie Raymond Carver. His family called him Raymond and
friends called him C. R. I was named Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. I hated the
"Junior" part. When I was little my dad called me Frog, which was okay. But
later, like everybody else in the family, he began calling me Junior. He
went on calling me this until I was thirteen or fourteen and announced that
I wouldn't answer to that name any longer. So he began calling me Doc. From
then until his death, on June 17, 1967, he called me Doc, or else Son.
When he died, my mother telephoned my wife with the news. I was away from my
family at the time, between lives, trying to enroll in the School of
Library Science at the University of Iowa. When my wife answered the phone,
my mother blurted out, "Raymond's dead!" For a moment, my wife thought my
mother was telling her that I was dead. Then my mother made it clear which
Raymond she was talking about and my wife said, "Thank God. I thought you
meant my Raymond."
My dad walked, hitched rides, and rode in empty boxcars when he went from
Arkansas to Washington State in 1934, looking for work. I don't know whether
he was pursuing a dream when he went out to Washington. I doubt it. I don't
think he dreamed much. I believe he was simply looking for steady work at
decent pay. Steady work was meaningful work. He picked apples for a time and
then landed a construction laborer's job on the Grand Coulee Dam. After he'
d put aside a little money, he bought a car and drove back to Arkansas to
help his folks, my grandparents, pack up for the move west. He said later
that they were about to starve down there, and this wasn't meant as a figure
of speech. It was during that short while in Arkansas, in a town called
Leola, that my mother met my dad on the sidewalk as he came out of a tavern.
"He was drunk," she said. "I don't know why I let him talk to me. His eyes
were glittery. I wish I'd had a crystal ball." They'd met once, a year or so
before, at a dance. He'd had girlfriends before her, my mother told me. "
Your dad always had a girlfriend, even after we married. He was my first and
last. I never had another man. But I didn't miss anything."
They were married by a justice of the peace on the day they left for
Washington, this big, tall country girl and a farmhand-turned-construction
worker. My mother spent her wedding night with my dad and his folks, all of
them camped beside the road in Arkansas.
In Omak, Washington, my dad and mother lived in a little place not much
bigger than a cabin. My grandparents lived next door. My dad was still
working on the dam, and later, with the huge turbines producing electricity
and the water backed up for a hundred miles into Canada, he stood in the
crowd and heard Franklin D. Roosevelt when he spoke at the construction site
. "He never mentioned those guys who died building that dam," my dad said.
Some of his friends had died there, men from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and
Missouri.
He then took a job in a sawmill in Clatskanie, Oregon, a little town
alongside the Columbia River. I was born there, and my mother has a picture
of my dad star~ding in front of the gate to the mill, proudly holding me up
to face the camera. My bonnet is on crooked and about to come untied. His
hat is pushed back on his forehead, and he's wearing a big grin. Was he
going in to work or just finishing his shift? It doesn't matter. In either
case, he had a job and a family. These were his salad days.
In 1941 we moved to Yakima, Washington, where my dad went to work as a saw
filer, a skilled trade he'd learned in Clatskanie. When war broke out, he
was given a deferment because his work was considered necessary to the war
effort. Finished lumber was in demand by the armed services, and he kept his
saws so sharp they could shave the hair off your arm.
After my dad had moved us to Yakima, he moved his folks into the same
neighborhood. By the mid-1940s the rest of my dad's family--his brother, his
sister, and her husband, as well as uncles, cousins, nephews, and most of
their extended family and friends--had come out from Arkansas. All because
my dad came out first. The men went to work at Boise Cascade, where my dad
worked, and the women packed apples in the canneries. And in just a little
while, it seemed--according to my mother--everybody was better off than my
dad. "Your dad couldn't keep money," my mother said. "Money burned a hole in
his pocket. He was always doing for others."
The first house I clearly remember living in, at 1515 South Fifteenth 10
Street, in Yakima, had an outdoor toilet. On Halloween night, or just any
night, for the hell of it, neighbor kids, kids in their early teens, would
carry our toilet away and leave it next to the road. My dad would have to
get somebody to help him bring it home. Or these kids would take the toilet
and stand it in somebody else's backyard. Once they actually set it on fire.
But ours wasn't the only house that had an outdoor toilet. When I was old
enough to know what I was doing, I threw rocks at the other toilets when I'd
see someone go inside. This was called bombing the toilets. After a while,
though, everyone went to indoor plumbing until, suddenly, our toilet was the
last outdoor one in the neighborhood. I remember the shame I felt when my
third-grade teacher, Mr. Wise, drove me home from school one day. I asked
him to stop at the house just before ours, claiming I lived there.
I can recall what happened one night when my dad came home late to find that
my mother had locked all the doors on him from the inside. He was drunk,
and we could feel the house shudder as he rattled the door. When he'd
managed to force open a window, she hit him between the eyes with a colander
and knocked him out. We could see him down there on the grass. For years
afterward, I used to pick up this colander--it was as heavy as a rolling pin
--and imagine what it would feel like to be hit in the head with something
like that.
It was during this period that I remember my dad taking me into the bedroom,
sitting me down on the bed, and telling me that I might have to go live
with my Aunt LaVon for a while. I couldn't understand what I'd done that
meant I'd have to go away from home to live. But this, too--whatever
prompted it--must have blown over, more or less, anyway, because we stayed
together, and I didn't have to go live with her or anyone else.
I remember my mother pouring his whiskey down the sink. Sometimes she'd pour
it all out and sometimes, if she was afraid of getting caught, she'd only
pour half of it out and then add water to the rest. I tasted some of his
whiskey once myself. It was terrible stuff, and I don't see how anybody
could drink it.
After a long time without one, we finally got a car, in 1949 or 1950, a 1938
Ford. But it threw a rod the first week we had it, and my dad had to have
the motor rebuilt.
"We drove the oldest car in town," my mother said. "We could have had a
Cadillac for all he spent on car repairs." One time she found someone else's
tube of lipstick on the floorboard, along with a lacy handker~ chief. "See
this?" she said to me. "Some floozy left this in the car."
Once I saw her take a pan of warm water into the bedroom where my dad was
sleeping. She took his hand from under the covers and held it in the water.
I stood in the doorway and watched. I wanted to know what was going on. This
would make him talk in his sleep, she told me. There were things she needed
to know, things she was sure he was keeping from her.
Every year or so, when I was little, we would take the North Coast Limited
across the Cascade Range from Yakima to Seattle and stay in the Vance Hotel
and eat, I remember, at a place called the Dinner Bell Cafe. Once we went to
Ivar's Acres of Clams and drank glasses of warm clam broth.
In 1956, the year I was to graduate from high school, my dad quit his job at
the mill in Yakima and took a job in Chester, a little sawmill town in
northern California. The reasons given at the time for his taking the job
had to do with a higher hourly wage and the vague promise that he might, in
a few years' time, succeed to the job of head filer in this new mill. But I
think, in the main, that my dad had grown restless and simply wanted to try
his luck elsewhere. Things had gotten a little too predictable for him in
Yakima. Also, the year before, there had been the deaths, within six months
of each other, of both his parents.
But just a few days after graduation, when my mother and I were packed to
move to Chester, my dad penciled a letter to say he'd been sick for a while.
He didn't want us to worry, he said, but he'd cut himself on a saw. Maybe
he'd got a tiny sliver of steel in his blood. Anyway, something had happened
and he'd had to miss work, he said. In the same mail was an unsigned
postcard from somebody down there telling my mother that my dad was about to
die and that he was drinking "raw whiskey."
When we arrived in Chester, my dad was living in a trailer that belonged to
the company. I didn't recognize him immediately. I guess for a moment I didn
't want to recognize him. He was skinny and pale and looked bewildered. His
pants wouldn't stay up. He didn't look like my dad. My mother began to cry.
My dad put his arm around her and patted her shoulder vaguely,- like he didn
't know what this was all about, either. The three of us took up life
together in the trailer, and we looked after him as best we could. But my
dad was sick, and he couldn't get any better. I worked with him in the mill
that summer and part of the fall. We'd get up in the mornings and eat eggs
and toast while we listened to the radio, and then go out the door with our
lunch pails. We'd pass through the gate together at eight in the morning,
and I wouldn't see him again until quitting time. In November I went back to
Yakima to be closer to my girlfriend, the girl I'd made up my mind I was
going to marry.
He worked at the mill in Chester until the following February, when he
collapsed on the job and was taken to the hospital. My mother asked if I
would come down there and help. I caught a bus from Yakima to Chester,
intending to drive them back to Yakima. But now, in addition to being
physically sick, my dad was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, though none
of us knew to call it that at the time. During the entire trip back to
Yakima, he didn't speak, not even when asked a direct question. ("How do you
feel, Raymond?" "You okay, Dad?") He'd communicate, if he communicated at
all, by moving his head or by turning his palms up as if to say he didn't
know or care. The only time he said anything on the trip, and for nearly a
month afterward, was when I was speeding down a gravel road in Oregon and
the car muffler came loose. "You were going too fast," he said.
Back in Yakima a doctor saw to it that my dad went to a psychiatrist. My
mother and dad had to go on relief, as it was called, and the county paid
for the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist asked my dad, "Who is the President?"
He'd had a question put to him that he could answer. "Ike," my dad said.
Nevertheless, they put him on the fifth floor of Valley Memorial Hospital
and began giving him electroshock treatment. I was married by then and about
to start my own family. My dad was still locked up when my wife went into
this same hospital, just one floor down, to have our first baby. After she
had delivered, I went upstairs to give my dad the news. They let me in
through a steel door and showed me where I could find him. He was sitting on
a couch with a blanket over his lap. Hey, I thought. What in hell is
happening to my dad? I sat down next to him and told him he was a
grandfather. He waited a minute and then he said, "I feel like a grandfather
." That's all he said. He didn't smile or move. He was in a big room with a
lot of other people. Then I hugged him, and he began to cry.
Somehow he got out of there. But now came the years when he couldn't work
and just sat around the house trying to figure what next and what he'd done
wrong in his life that he'd wound up like this. My mother went from job to
crummy job. Much later she referred to that time he was in the hospital, and
those years just afterward, as "when Raymond was sick." The word sick was
never the same for me again.
In 1964, through the help of a friend, he was lucky enough to be hired on at
a mill in Klamath, California. He moved down there by himself to see if he
could hack it. He lived not far from the mill, in a oneroom cabin not much
different from the place he and my mother had started out living in when
they went west. He scrawled letters to my mother, and if I called she'd read
them aloud to me over the phone. In the letters, he said it was touch and
go. Every day that he went to work, he felt like it was the most important
day of his life. But every day, he told her, made the next day that much
easier. He said for her to tell me he said hello. If he couldn't sleep at
night, he said, he thought about me and the good times we used to have.
Finally, after a couple of months, he regained some of his confidence. He
could do the work and didn't think he had to worry that he'd let anybody
down ever again. When he was sure, he sent for my mother.
He'd been off from work for six years and had lost everything in that time--
home, car, furniture, and appliances, including the big freezer that had
been my mother's pride and joy. He'd lost his good name too--Raymond Carver
was someone who couldn't pay his bills--and his self respect was gone. He'd
even lost his virility. My mother told my wife, "All during that time
Raymond was sick we slept together in the same bed, but we didn't have
relations. He wanted to a few times, but nothing happened. I didn't miss it,
but I think he wanted to, you know."
During those years I was trying to raise my own family and earn a living.
But, one thing and another, we found ourselves having to move a lot. I
couldn't keep track of what was going down in my dad's life. But I did have
a chance one Christmas to tell him I wanted to be a writer. I might as well
have told him I wanted to become a plastic surgeon. "What are you going to
write about?" he wanted to know. Then, as if to help me out, he said, "Write
about stuff you know about. Write about some of those fishing trips we took
." I said I would, but I knew I wouldn't. "Send me what you write," he said.
I said I'd do that, but then I didn't. I wasn't writing anything about
fishing, and I didn't think he'd particularly care about, or even
necessarily understand, what I was writing in those days. Besides, he wasn't
a reader. Not the sort, anyway, I imagined I was writing for.
Then he died. I was a long way off, in Iowa City, with things still to say
to him. I didn't have the chance to tell him goodbye, or that I thought he
was doing great at his new job. That I was proud of him for making a
comeback.
My mother said he came in from work that night and ate a big supper. Then he
sat at the table by himself and finished what was left of a bottle of
whiskey, a bottle she found hidden in the bottom of the garbage under some
coffee grounds a day or so later. Then he got up and went to bed, where my
mother joined him a little later. But in the night she had to get,~up and
make a bed for herself on the couch. "He was snoring so loud I couldn't
sleep," she said. The next morning when she looked in on him, he was on his
back with his mouth open, his cheeks caved in. Graylookirlg, she said. She
knew he was dead--she didn't need a doctor to tell her that. But she called
one anyway, and thcn shc called my wife.
Among the pictures my mother kept of my dad and herself during those early
days in Washington was a photograph of him standing in front of a car,
holding a beer and a stringer of fish. In the photograph he is wearing his
hat back on his forehead and has this awkward grin on his face. I asked her
for it and she gave it to me, along with some others. I put it up on my wall
, and each time we moved, I took the picture along and put it up on another
wall. I looked at it carefully from time to time, trying to figure out some
things about my dad, and maybe myself in the process. But I couldn't. My dad
just kept moving further and further away from me and back into time.
Finally, in the course of another move, I lost the photograph. It was then
that I tried to recall it, and at the same time make an attempt to say
something about my dad, and how I thought that in some important ways we
might be alike. I wrote the poem when I was living in an apartment house in
an urban area south of San Francisco, at a time when I found myself, like my
dad, having trouble with alcohol. The poem was a way of trying to connect
up with him.
PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FATHER IN HIS TWENTY SECOND YEAR
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsberg beer.
In jeans and flannel shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose hrave and hearty for his posterity,
wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either and don't
even know the places to fish.
The poem is true in its particulars, except that my dad died in June and not
October, as the first word of the poem says. I wanted a word with more than
one syllable to it to make it linger a little. But more than that, I wanted
a month appropriate to what I felt at the time I wrote the poem--a month of
short days and failing light, smoke in the air, things perishing. June was
summer nights and days, graduations, my wedding anniversary, the birthday of
one of my children. June wasn't a month your father died in.
After the service at the funeral home, after we had moved outside, a woman I
didn't know came over to me and said, "He's happier where he is now." I
stared at this woman until she moved away. I still remember the little knob
of a hat she was wearing. Then one of my dad's cousins--I didn't know the
man's name--reached out and took my hand. "We all miss him," he said, and I
knew he wasn't saying it just to be polite.
I began to weep for the first time since receiving the news. I hadn't been
able to before. I hadn't had the time, for one thing Now, suddenly, I couldn
't stop. I held my wife and wept while she said and did what she could do to
comfort me there in the middle of that summer afternoon.
I listened to people say consoling things to my mother, and I was glad that
my dad's family had turned up, had come to where he was. I thought I'd
remember everything that was said and done that day and maybe find a way to
tell it sometime. But I didn't. I forgot it all, or nearly. What I do
remember is that I heard our name used a lot that afternoon, my dad's name
and mine. But I knew they were talking about my dad. Raymond, these people
kept saying in their beautiful voices out of my childhood. Raymond. | x*****g
发帖数: 2498 | 2 interesting
the
But
【在 C****a 的大作中提到】
: 【 以下文字转载自 俱乐部 】
: 发信人: sasa (灰巴笼耸), 信区:
: 标 题: My Father's Life - Raymond Carver
: 发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue Oct 14 23:48:57 2014, 美东)
: 这篇很多人觉得很感人，我没有觉得。就觉得写得很平实，结尾有点不必要的煽情，感
: 觉carver没有想好怎么结尾这篇回忆文章。
: Raymond Carver： My Father's Life
: ________________________________________
: My dad's name was Clevie Raymond Carver. His family called him Raymond and
: friends called him C. R. I was named Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. I hated the
|
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