Tess Gallagher Books

This is a collection of very short stories (sometimes only a few hundred words long) recounted by an old guy from County Sligo and massaged into written form. Some of them are mysterious, some of them very funny, some are wise and humane, and others simply offer little insights into a way of life rapidly vanishing. The whole thing will take you about 90 minutes to read, and I can't think of a better way to pass a train journey than this little gem.

I believe that this was one of the greatest art books. This outstanding book displayed 59 of Hopper's greatest paintings with awesome detail and spectacular quotes. It not only showed the different ways Hopper defined and looked at life, but I could feel like I was the artist. Not only did the paintings create a perspective of life most people don't look at, but I could relate to his points of view.

It's likely that much (most?) of the audience interested in "Soul Barnacles," a collection of pieces written by Tess Gallagher about Raymond Carver in the years after his passing, are, like me, Carver fans looking for additional insight into the life of the writer and poet, rather than fans of Gallagher, his widow who is a writer and poet in her own right. With that assumption, Soul Barnacles is a bit of a mixed bag as it contains some great anecdotes about Ray (though most of them are taken from sources that Carver fans will likely already own), as well as some writing that is more topical to Tess.

We'll start with the gems... Gallagher's foreward to Carver's "No Heroics, Please," as well as "All of Us" are included - these are wonderful pieces that shed some light on Ray as a person and his "second life" with Tess. In the "All of Us" preface, Gallagher acknowledges the "transparency" and "guileless(ness)" of Ray's poetry, admitting that "overreach was natural and necessary" for him. For fans of course, this is what draws us to Carver, if to the chagrin of certain literary critics.

"Soul Making" is Tess' preface to "A New Path to the Waterfall," a posthumously published collection of poetry coauthored by the couple - it therefore mostly focuses on several of the poems from that work, but also mentions the origin of the "Ghost Fish" painting by Alfredo Arreguin that adorns its end pages. It also documents Ray and Tess' touching goodbye before he goes to sleep for the last time. And then there's the anecdote of Tess finding a shopping list in Ray's shirt during the time after doctors had let them know he only had a limited time before he would succumb to cancer. The list includes "eggs, peanut butter, hot choc" and then "Australia? Antartica?" Words to live by.

The foreward to "Carver Country," a photobook about Ray's Pacific Northwest writings, is here too. It's a great little mini-biography of Ray's years, visiting his upbringing, alcoholism, his wedding to Tess, and the story behind "Cathedral." Also included are "Unending," a two-page reflection on Tess' time before and after Ray's death (taken from "Heart of Marriage: Discovering the Secrets of Enduring Love" by Cathleen Rountree), and "A Nightshine beyond Memory," a longer piece about Tess' decade after Ray's passing. The latter includes some revealing anecdotes about the construction of a letter box at Ray's gravesite, Haruki Murakami's relationship to Ray as translator and friend, and a little snippet about two young Japanese men who visit Tess unannounced one day hoping for a touch of Ray. One of them writes in her guestbook, "Thank you very much Mr. Carver. You are my, believe it or not, you are my hero." It's that sentiment that makes the anthology of forewards and other writings in "Soul Barnacles" a treasured read for worshippers of Carver. Likewise, it's the little bits of Ray that she gave her Japanese guests and gives us, in this book, that make this a necessary volume for those who love Carver's work.

I could, and maybe should, stop with that reverence, but I'd be remiss if I left out a few words of criticism... "Soul Barnacles" also includes a travelogue written by Tess during her visit to Europe with Ray in 1987. There's some nice photos included and it's interesting to hear Ray turning down drinks in their escapades, but even though Carver had a hand in editing the first published version, the read is rather flat. By the same token, Part 2 of the book is dedicated to writings and personal letters surrounding the making and release of "Short Cuts," the Robert Altman movie of a handful of Carver's stories. Tess seems to have been highly involved as a consultant, and is a staunch defender of Altman's reinterpretation of Carver's writings in the face of criticism and poor box office numbers. But this section can be quite repetitive, such as with Tess' recurrent critique of women as "sexual playthings" in America. It's in this role as discussant and critic that Gallagher's writing tends to fall flat, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Part 3, where several interviews of Tess, mostly surrounding her published books "Moon Crossing Bridge" and "Portable Kisses," are collected. Students of literary criticism and fans of Gallagher's writing may very well find something of value here, but Tess's discussion of her own writing tends towards the high-brow, is repetitive (e.g., recounting on several occasions how she chose the title "Mood Crossing Bridge") and her use of invented hyphenated words (what she calls "word trains") and affection for words ending in "ness" (e.g., "aliveness, "blessedness," "place-ness," "not-coming-backness," etc., etc.) can be distracting. In fact, although we learn throughout "Soul Barnacles" that Tess and Ray reciprocally edited each other's writing (to the point that her influence on Carver's later writing was probably as profound as Gordon Lish's on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"), Gallagher's writing contains so much more imagery and metaphor than Carver's. As a result, it's quite likely that Carver fans aren't Gallagher-the-writer's fans, and therefore haven't even read "Moon Crossing Bridge," so this section seems expendable. And in general, when Gallagher strays from actually writing about Ray, she has the tendency to drift into obscurity and she often constructs bulky metaphors that seem to take away from the actual thing, in such stark contrast to Ray's "guileless" words.

But of course the reality is that "Soul Barnacles" isn't just Gallagher going through Ray's attic searching for Carver memories to dole out, but a book by Tess that focuses on her own life with, and especially after, Ray. That life includes mourning and moving on, and she does that honestly and in her own voice as an artist. The picture of Tess at Ray's gravesite in her eulogy published in Granta ("Raymond Carver, 1938 to 1988"), along with "Soul Barnacles" as a whole, show us how and how much Tess loved Ray, so we can hardly fault her for that. And the actual bits that she does gives us from her and Ray's attic are gifts, and well worth the price of admission.