But there’s another aspect to the namelessness of husband and wife. And Robert needs to have a name for the husband, but instead calls him “Bub,” no name at all, even though on two occasions the husband listens for Robert to use his name. The people who are very familiar to him-himself, his wife, even his wife’s first husband-are unnamed, but these strangers coming into his life, Robert and Beulah, have to be named. In fact, he thinks the name “Beaulah” sounds like a black name, and his image of Robert’s wife as possibly being black contributes to their otherness for him.
Carver died of lung cancer at age 50 in 1988.Robert and Beaulah, however, are unknown to the husband, and so their names are more a part of his impression of them. Carver also wrote poetry and published three collections of his verse from 1976 through 1986. Over the course of the 1980s, he published three collections of short stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), the Pulitzer Prize finalist Cathedral (1983), and Where I’m Calling From (1988). By the late 1970s, Carver was able to get a handle on his disease and then took teaching appointments at the University of Texas at El Paso and Syracuse. From 1967 through the late 1970s, Carver battled alcoholism and was hospitalized multiple times.
A few of Carver’s stories were published by magazines but it was not until 1976 that his work was first published in a book-length collection called Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The book was a finalist for the 1977 National Book Award in fiction.
Carver continued to work on his short fiction while studying at California’s Humboldt State University, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1963. Carver did not begin writing seriously until 1958, when he took a college creative writing course taught by the celebrated mid-century writer John Gardner. The son of a sawmill worker, Raymond Carver graduated from high school and worked a number of blue-collar jobs (janitor, gas-station attendant, delivery man) to support his wife and children.
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