Word: writer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessy pointed out recently, the Red Sox lead the league in hitting, they're 2nd in defense and runs scored, they've got the most dominant pitcher in the game, and yet "they're effectively out of it at the All-Star break...
Raymond Carver has to find his danger somewhere, however, and he finds some of it on the delicate border between life and art. In "Put Yourself in My Shoes," Carver tells the story of a young writer named Myers who gets together with his wife on Christmas eve. He and his wife seem to be separated. For a lark, they visit their old landlords, the Morgans. The Morgans are a stodgy and selfish couple, who try to spin a few yarns for Myers, sententiously advising him to recycle the yarns as "material...
More revealing, however, is the story "Intimacy." A middle-aged man, a successful writer, visits his ex-wife out west. Over the years, he has sent her clippings of his stories, as they appeared in newspapers and magazines. He arrives unexpected, and she berates him mercilessly for having used their life together as "material" for his stories. She accuses him of betraying their tragedy and their love...
...same word, "material," returns after many years, to reveal to the mature writer a blindness in the younger writer's understanding of the problem. Young Carver knew that material was a dangerous idea. He knew that putting life into art could be a tool of the artist's selfishness, and that it could slip into manipulation, self-flattery or exhibitionism. But the young Carver believed that irony could help. He believed that if Myers-Carver laughed at the Morgans, it would be all right if Myers-Carver's wife and their separation also leaked into the story...
...interaction between life (non-fiction) and art (fiction) fascinated and troubled Chekhov as much as Carver. Chekhov's lover, Lydia Avilov, recorded in her memoirs that Chekhov's story, "About Love," was material stolen from their furtive affair. Ms. Avilov reproached Chekhov for his theft: "The colder the writer, the more sensitive and moving his story. Let the reader weep over it. That's what...