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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
Why is Raymond Carver's masterpiece, "Cathedral," so much like a little-known D.H. Lawrence story?
Jan 18, 2000 | What would you do if you made the uncomfortable discovery that the most imitated writer in America might have lifted the plot, characters and theme of one of his most famous stories?
Well, for starters, you might try to dismiss the charges. Any old literary saw would do the trick. After all, everyone knows that Shakespeare cribbed his plots, that good writers borrow and great ones steal, and that all literary artists struggle under what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence." Maybe, as some have said, there are really only a few basic narratives, and a writer can only come up with different ways of telling them. But what if the similarities between two stories by two acknowledged masters were just too close to be easily brushed aside? If you were D.H. Lawrence scholar Keith Cushman and believed you had stumbled upon a brilliant rewrite of one of the master's tales you might draft a letter to the most influential short-story writer of your time. And Raymond Carver just might write you back.
In 1918 the British author D.H. Lawrence wrote "The Blind Man," a brilliant short story that would eventually be published in a collection of his war-themed tales entitled "England, My England." Passionate and subtle examinations of the psyche, these stories can leave you astounded by the power of Lawrence's vision. And while perhaps not every reader reacts to the stories in "England, My England" with the intensity of intimate recognition, it seems that Carver most likely did. He must have been so moved by "The Blind Man" that it became lodged in his soul, only to reemerge when he started working on his masterpiece, "Cathedral," in 1980.
Recently while reading "The Blind Man," I was reminded of "Cathedral." Although at first the two authors seemed worlds apart, I wondered if Carver had read Lawrence. Superficially, at least, they share common biographical points, enough that I could imagine Carver being drawn to Lawrence's writing. Both were born into decidedly "unliterary" lives; raised in rural backwaters, they grew up in poor, working families headed by mostly absent fathers who labored at dangerous, back-breaking jobs: Lawrence's in the coal mines of Nottingham, England, and Carver's in the sawmills of Washington state. They both had a burning ambition to write that propelled them through difficult lives. And, ironically, both writers died on the brink of middle age from lung disease. However, although I suspected there might have been some influence at work, I wasn't prepared for the extraordinary similarity of "Cathedral" to "The Blind Man" when I read the two stories back-to-back. They have an almost identical plot, premise, construction, characters and timing of crucial narrative events.
Both tales involve a triangle: A husband and wife in a troubled marriage get a visit from the wife's close (but sexually unthreatening) male friend who takes a train to get to their house. In Carver's tale the friend is blind; in Lawrence's it's the husband, but in both stories the climax is the communion between the two men while the wife is absent: In "Cathedral" she's asleep, in "The Blind Man" she's in another room. "What is it?" the wife in Lawrence's story asks, rejoining the two men to usher in the denouement; "What's going on?" says Carver's. The slight action unfolds identically over the same time expanse in both stories: The wife's friend arrives from the train station, there's a strained greeting between the two men, at dinner they break the ice and after dinner the two men (at the blind one's instigation) touch and have an intense reaction to their contact, wherein lies the "epiphany" of the tales.
I was so surprised at the affinities of structure, plot and theme that "Cathedral" has to "The Blind Man" that I wondered why no one else had noticed it. After all, "Cathedral" is a very well-known story, considered the Jewel in the Crown in the opus of the most revered American writer of recent memory. But, of course, someone had. Professor Keith Cushman, a distinguished D.H. Lawrence scholar who teaches at the University of North Carolina- Greensboro, had corresponded with Carver about the two stories' similarities in 1987 and had published a paper about them in France in 1988.
Intriguingly, Carver wrote to Professor Cushman in the fall of 1987 that he hadn't read "The Blind Man" before writing "Cathedral," although he had "read those three or four stories of [Lawrence's] that are always anthologized -- 'The Horse Dealer's Daughter' and 'Tickets, Please' and one or two others." He further wrote that when he did finally read "The Blind Man," he liked it "a good deal" but did not "recall noticing any or many similarities" to "Cathedral." He even went on to supply Professor Cushman with an account of the genesis of "Cathedral": "The thing that sparked the story was the visit of a blind man to our house! It's true. Well, stories have to come from someplace, yes? Anyway, this blind man did pay a visit and even spent the night. But there all similarities end. The rest of the story was cobbled up from this and that, naturally."
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