Raymond Carver: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976)

Raymond Carver’s first collection of short stories doesn’t fully exhibit the stern, reductive, stylistic purity of his second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? also steers clear of the sentimentality occasionally found in his third collection, Cathedral. It is tempting to see that sentimental turn as a reaction to the excessive editorial purges of his second collection. A better approach might consider how the stylistic, even syntactical, neutralization of affect, Carver’s mastery of terse, expressive inexpressivity, which was accomplished in his second collection, cleared a field for the later reintroduction of relatively direct expressions of feeling. Economic distress and broken marriages are persistent issues in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and many of the stories open with blunt statements about unemployment and empty households. As usual, Carver painfully illustrates his characters’ efforts to reverse their slow decline. For example, in “Jerry and Molly and Sam,” the protagonist, Al, “was drifting, and he knew he was drifting, and where it was all going to end he could not guess at. But he was beginning to feel he was losing control over everything. Everything.” So he makes a decision to take action: “He had to start someplace – setting things in order, sorting all this out. It was time to do something, time for some straight thinking for a change.” He later walks around muttering to himself, “Order, order,” but his plans cruelly involve getting rid of the family dog by dropping it off in a strange neighborhood, hardly a solution to his problems. In “Collectors,” the effort to establish personal order is figured as a fight against subjective entropy. A man who is separated from his wife finds his home invaded one day by a vacuum cleaner salesman, who tells the man, “Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where!” The salesman proceeds to clean the man’s home, introducing a burst of ordering energy into the man’s decaying domestic system. “What Is It?” is unique in focusing on a case of over-consumption, and illustrates how Carver’s characters (and perhaps Carver himself) are able to think about economics only on a personal, moral, level. The story focuses on a couple that has over-indulged in luxuries, leading to impending bankruptcy: “They buy what they want. If they can’t pay, they charge. They sign up.” When asked to sell their car before it is reclaimed in foreclosure, the wife cheats on the husband with a car salesman who tells her, “personally he’d rather be classified a robber or a rapist than a bankrupt.” She apparently internalizes this moral argument about money, and responds to her husband’s fury over her affair by repeatedly yelling at him what she considers a label of individual worthlessness: “Bankrupt!” A number of these stories involve characters who are or desire to be writers, leading to a high degree of reflexivity about the writing process that edges the works toward metafiction (On Carver and the writing program, see Mark McGurl’s The Program Era). The protagonist of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” is a teacher who talks with his wife while using his red pen on a stack of student papers. The repetition of “Please” in the story’s title emphasizes the man’s feelings of emotional desperation, but also resembles the linguistic circularity and play one might find in a Barth or Barthelme story. Although it doesn’t focus on the act of writing, “What Do You Do in San Francisco?” foregrounds what Bernhard Siegert calls literature’s “postal a priori” by taking as its narrator a postman who observes a young Beatnik couple that has moved into his rural, working class town and whose relationship hinges on letters the postman drops off in their mailbox. More than any of the other stories, “Put Yourself in My Shoes” takes writing as its explicit focus and indulges in a dizzying foray into self-reflexivity. During the Christmas season, a writer and his wife visit an older couple from whom they once rented a house. Each of their hosts tells a (melo)dramatic story, assuming it will be of use as “raw material” for the budding author. When the writer laughs at them, the older man says, “The real story is here, Mr. Myers,” and proceeds to recount how the younger couple were bad tenants who broke the rules of their lease. “That’s the real story that is waiting to be written. . . . It doesn’t need Tolstoy.” Yet the shifter “here” is more complicated than the man realizes. While he uses it to shift his story’s frame to include their present scene, in which the two couples face off, he doesn’t go far enough, he doesn’t realize there is still another frame above this story. He fails to realize that he is a character in a story himself, that the story “that is waiting to be written” has already been written, and that the word “here” is printed in a material book present in front of the reader’s eyes. But as “Put Yourself in My Shoes” ends with the younger couple making a quick exit from the house, Carver offers up a prototypically metafictional last line: “He was at the very end of a story.”