In the introduction to Raymond Carver’s book of poetry A New Path to the Waterfall, the late poet’s wife, Tess Gallagher, explains the collection’s organizing principle. In the days and weeks following Carver’s diagnosis of terminal cancer the two immersed themselves in Anton Chekhov’s work. She writes,
One night I looked at certain passages I had bracketed in the stories and realized that they seemed to be speaking toward poems of Ray’s which I’d been helping him revise and typing into the computer. On impulse I went to the typewriter and shaped some of these excerpts into lines and gave them titles. When I showed the results to Ray, it was as if we’d discovered another Chekhov inside Chekhov.
These “poems” by Chekhov punctuate Waterfalls and create a kind of call and response, a back and forth between Chekhov and Carver. It is a dialogue between the past and the present, between prose and poetry, between two men born a century apart who, through their work, have become contemporaries. The effect is one of inhalation and exhalation. Chekhov, Carver, Chekhov, Carver. One cannot help but notice the beauty of this in light of the fact that Chekhov died of Tuberculosis and Carver of lung cancer, each breathing new life into the other.
By including Chekhov’s work in Waterfall, by giving him a new identity as a poet, Carver proves that there can be life for a writer after death. It is this idea that anchors the collection and, one can only imagine, gives the writer in his last days and the reader a certain degree of comfort.
The reader calls on this comfort to navigate the sixth section of the book, which according to Gallagher, “deals with the stages of [Carver’s] awareness as his health worsened and he moved toward death.” The first poem, “Quiet Nights,” begins the section hopefully.
I go to sleep on one beach,
wake up on another.
Boat all fitted out,
tugging against its rope.
Carver uses the idyllic imagery of a beach to represent different stages of consciousness, different planes of existence. The boat, his body, is ready to take him there. Racked with tumors, as he knows it to be, it is “fitted out” for the journey into the next life. This boat imagery is echoed later in “No Need:”
I see an empty place at the table.
Whose? Who else’s? Who am I kidding?
The boat’s waiting. No need for oars
or wind.
This time it lends a feeling of urgency, of someone being called against his wishes, of someone who wants to sit down at the banquet table and feast but who is instead being taken away. Carver’s poems fluctuate between resistance and acceptance, another dialogue, which happens between poems and also within poems. “No Need” begins on the inhalation of resistance and ends on the exhalation of acceptance:
Now
let me go, my dearest. Let me go.
We shall not meet again in this life,
so kiss me goodbye now. Here, kiss me again.
Once more. There. That’s enough. Now, my dearest. let me go.
It’s time to be on my way.
Ultimately, we get the sense that in addition to a great deal of reflection, this time in Carver’s life is filled with a lot of living. In “Proposal,” Carver tells of his and Gallagher’s elopement after finding out the news of his illness, a hopeful gesture in the face of a hopeless prognosis. It is preceded by an excerpt from Chekhov’s “Across Siberia:”
To scream with pain, to cry, to summon help, to call
generally—all that is described here as “roaring.”
In Siberia not only bears roar, but sparrows and mice as well.
“The cat got it, and it’s roaring,” they say of a mouse.
This deliberation of life and death in Waterfall is Carver’s roar. He uses his last breaths to continue working, to continue writing, to give himself, as he did for Chekhov, a chance at rebirth—a life after death.
