Somewhat disappointed, Cushman who felt that "Cathedral" was a "brilliant re-write" of "The Blind Man," accepted Carver's explanations. But he couldn't ignore the resemblance between the two tales and wrote his paper anyway. Now, more than a decade later, Cushman says that, "At the time I had to take [Carver] at face value ... Though I can make a case for his not lying, it's easier to imagine he was."

It certainly seems that Carver was a bit more interested in D.H. Lawrence than he let on during the course of his correspondence with Professor Cushman: Journalist Jim Naughton, a former student of Carver's, wrote a commemorative article in "The Washington Post" shortly after Carver died, reminiscing about the famous short-story writer: "I wanted [Carver] to be a literary guru, I suppose, but I think he lacked the ego for it. I remember only two occasions on which he spoke with any heat. On the first he said that D.H. Lawrence was one of the best writers in the language and one of the worst, and sometimes in the same story ..."

Naughton also dates Carver's short European fiction course at Syracuse University in the fall of '81. Carver told Cushman that he first read the story and distributed it to his class in 1982. (Syracuse University confirms Naughton's account.) In addition, poet Tess Gallagher, Carver's wife, says that she first showed her husband "The Blind Man" in 1980: "I showed it to Ray after we had finished working on his story ["Cathedral"] ... there were some correspondences between the stories that meant he would have to know about it." While perhaps Carver's vagueness about dates isn't significant, it is notable that he never mentioned to Cushman that his wife had shown him Lawrence's story because she, too, thought that it had similar elements to "Cathedral."

However, although Gallagher thought there were similarities between the two stories, she did not think they were significant. She says definitively that Carver had not read or heard of "The Blind Man" until after he wrote "Cathedral." To top it off, she adds, "I think I liked it ["The Blind Man"] more than Ray did."

Carver himself identified "Cathedral" as "totally different in conception and execution from any [of his] stories that have come before" to Mona Simpson in a 1983 interview in the Paris Review. He went on to describe writing "Cathedral" as an almost rapturous experience: "When I wrote 'Cathedral' I experienced this rush and I felt, 'This is what it's all about, this is the reason we do this.' It was different than the stories that had come before. There was an opening up when I wrote the story. I knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any further in that direction and I'd be at a dead end -- writing stuff ...I wouldn't want to read myself, and that's the truth." He went on to explain, "In a review of the last book, somebody called me a 'minimalist' writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn't like it. There's something about 'minimalism' that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don't like."

But can the startling similarities between "The Blind Man" and Carver's breakthrough masterpiece really be a matter of pure coincidence? And if so, why did Carver pretend that no one else had noticed them before Cushman did? Dr. Paul Skenazy, professor of American Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who worked with Carver in the early 1970s, says, "The similarities [between the two stories] -- the temporal frame is exactly the same, there are other parallels and a kind of echoing of Lawrence in the Carver story that makes it clear that somewhere in the back of his mind was this story. So why deny it? 'Cathedral' represents the move Ray made to open up. It was his first major story after he stopped drinking, after he was with Tess -- it's a major transition." And if Carver intended to make a deliberate departure from "minimalism," who better to inspire him than Lawrence?

Once the similarities had been brought to his attention by as unconfrontational a scholar as Professor Cushman, it's hard to see why Carver would stonewall. "Cathedral" was an immensely successful, influential story and there were and are many people who couldn't care less whether Carver had lifted "Lawrence's scaffolding" in Cushman's words. Perhaps Carver felt pressured to maintain that the piece was uninfluenced, aware that, as Professor Bloom has written, it is originality that marks artistic genius, that marked Carver's own literary heroes like Lawrence, Joyce and Chekhov. Or perhaps Carver truly could not see how closely his story resembled Lawrence's. Whatever the case, writers are notoriously unreliable commentators on their own writing. "An artist is usually a damned liar," D.H. Lawrence wrote in "Studies in Classic American Literature." "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale."

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