Interview:In spite of her own literary achievements, it is her life with her late husband, writer Raymond Carver, that defines Tess Gallagher in the public mind. On one of her regular visits to Ireland, she talks to Rosita Boland.
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what
did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver
Of all the many words a writer uses in their books, the handful that make up a dedication can sometimes have a potency, a rawness and an anchoring to real people that makes the reader pause and think before entering a fictional world or one transmuted by poetry. Short-story writer and poet Raymond Carver's last book of poems, of which the final poem was Late Fragment, was A New Path to the Waterfall. The dedication reads simply "Tess. Tess. Tess. Tess."
The Tess of the dedication is Tess Gallagher, Carver's second wife, and the person who is the weft to every warp in the weave of Carver's last poems. Gallagher, herself a writer, is sitting by a turf fire in a borrowed stone cottage in Ballindoon, Co Sligo, where Lough Arrow laps at the bottom of the green garden. She has been coming to Sligo regularly since 1968 and her latest visit to Ireland is to promote her new book of poems, Dear Ghosts,.
The author photograph on the back of Dear Ghosts, depicts a shaven-headed Gallagher. Many of the poems in the book refer to her breast cancer. The woman sitting in the chair beside the fire does have hair: short grey hair that fluffs out round her head with bravado. She finished her cancer treatment last May, and all, she says, is now well, although she admits to being "in a watchful state". She knows more about cancer than most people: Carver, her third husband, died of lung cancer in 1988, aged only 50.
Gallagher was born in 1943, in Port Angeles, Washington, where she still lives for most of the year. As a teenager, she knew she wanted to write and, at 17, she was invited to participate in Theodore Roethke's poetry class at the University of Washington. It was to be Roethke's last class: he died the same year.
"He had a very unpredictable kind of energy and was very . . ." She pauses and looks at the fire, searching for the right word. "Dramatic!" she produces after a while. "Being in that class was like being at a great banquet. I would run out of class shaking from everything I had tried to take in, and I was scribbling down as fast as I could every name that I didn't know. I would make a beeline for the library and read. I was very ignorant then. I learned from Roethke what was worth holding, both in the mind and in the spirit."
Gallagher occupies her chair with a kind of confidence and solidity, answering questions in a voice that unfolds its sentences slowly and with the clarity of a newsreader. She's dressed for an Irish spring day: thick brown socks, fake-fur gilet, jumper, trousers. Her high, black-pencilled eyebrows are the only features that look slightly surreal in the rural setting, and suggest her other life, her American life. She laughs frequently, and despite - or perhaps because of - five years of cancer treatment, she seems to emanate energy, a visible hunger for life.
It's inevitable that every interview Gallagher gives also includes stories about her famous dead husband. Almost 20 years after his death, Carver's international reputation, already assured when he died, is still growing. It's difficult to find any account of his life and work which does not contain somewhere within it the phrase "the American Chekhov".
THERE WERE TWO other husbands before him, the first of whom was a pilot in the Vietnam war, the second another writer, a poet. They haven't remained in Gallagher's life, though. Today, she tells me she is not even sure if her second husband ever married again.
It is Carver, whose literary executor she is, who appears to have defined her life, both alive and dead. Her new book of poems contains several poems for and about him. Although she has a partner of 13 years, Sligo man Josie Gray, she still wears the rose-gold wedding ring Carver gave her, as well as the large silver and moss agate ring she originally gave him. You can't help wondering how her current partner feels about these tangible symbols of his predecessor.
"Ray," she says, indicating the silver ring, "was often photographed wearing this ring."
The connection with Ireland, and Sligo, dates back to 1968. At the time, she was working in theatres in London, selling chocolates and programmes in the intervals. It was in London that she met Dymphna Gray, Josie Gray's sister, and they became such good friends that Dymphna sent her to Sligo to stay with her family that summer, even though she herself was not free to travel. The Gray family have been her anchor in Ireland for close on 40 years now.
"This is Dymphna's house," Gallagher says, waving her hand to the ceiling.
Josie Gray spends part of the year with her in the US, and Gallagher comes over to Ireland for some weeks every year, but they don't live together all the time. While she has no children of her own, he has eight, though, like Gallagher, he also lost his former spouse to an early death. He farms and paints and is a storyteller: at present, they are looking for a publisher for a book of oral stories they collaborated on. After she has shown me her rings, she pulls out a necklace from under her jumper, a necklace of silver hearts, set with garnets.
"My Christmas present from Josie," she says, and then carefully places it inside her jumper again.
Gallagher first met Carver in 1977, in Dallas, Texas, where they were both attending a writers' conference.
"I had kept hearing about this Raymond Carver," she says. "That he was an awful alcoholic, but a great writer. He was only five months sober by then and he was very fragile."
They met again some months later, and from that point they were together, marrying just weeks before his death.
She brought him to Ireland once. "I thought it was impossible for him to really know me unless he knew these people who had been so important to me and the beauty of this place."
They stayed in the Ballindoon area, in a house owned by yet another member of the Gray family, then drove to Belfast.
"I introduced him to Michael Longley and Ciarán Carson, and we stayed in Paul Muldoon's flat," she recalls.
Carver did, she says, like Ireland greatly, but as a former alcoholic, he found the Irish tradition of combining socialising with enthusiastic drinking very difficult.
APART FROM COLLABORATING with Carver on screenplays, Gallagher also read drafts of his stories and suggested titles. "I saw his drafts earlier and earlier, the longer we were together." Together, they discussed drafts of Cathedral, Vitamins, Feathers, The Calm and So Much Water So Close to Home. It was she who named the stories A Small Good Thing and Whoever Was Using This Bed. And it was also Gallagher who suggested that Carver drop the "The" from the title of what became one of his most famous stories, Errand, about the death of Chekhov.
"I remember we had big discussions about that title, and I said if you take the 'The' off, it spills out more, it radiates and it's stronger. So he took it off," she says.
Gallagher built Carver a huge and elaborate memorial grave in the small Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles. Built of black granite, it incorporates a bench, wind chimes, flowers, two of his poems, Late Fragment and Gravy, as well as a photograph of the two of them and her own name and birth date spelled out on stone next to Carver's. She was criticised at the time for seeming to be hasty to include herself in the plot, when she herself was so very much alive. Again, you wonder what her current partner thinks of her arrangements for her final resting place.
There is also a wooden box at Carver's grave, which was made by prisoners in Oregon, the state where he was born. People leave notes and letters in it: tributes from admirers of his work; messages from people recovering from various addictions; and communications also to Gallagher. Ironically, the prisoners who made the box also made provision for a padlock, but she decided not to put one on, to leave the box open. "I had a big discussion with my sister about whether there should be a lock on it, and my sister said: 'No lock. Ray would enjoy people reading his mail at this stage.'"
Gallagher goes regularly to the grave to empty the box, and keeps all the pieces of paper she finds there, displaying them at home in plastic folders.
"It's general knowledge that I go and collect them," she says. "I have half a mind to publish some of them in a little memory book. Some of the things that people write are really moving."
In Port Angeles, Gallagher has two houses. One is Ridge House, which she lived in with Carver, the other is what she calls "the sky house", where there are seven skylights and where she goes to meditate and write. For years, she left Carver's study undisturbed in Ridge House, and there are still books on one table which are just as he left them. Most of his papers - 175 boxes' worth - were packed up in 2000 and taken to the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction, which is held in Ohio State University Libraries.
EVER SINCE ATTENDING Roethke's poetry class, Gallagher has spent her working life teaching and writing. There are eight books of poetry, two books of short stories and the two screenplays she co-wrote with Carver. She has also written introductions to some editions of Carver's books published after his death.
In 1992, in an extensive interview with the Los Angeles Times' magazine, the journalist who profiled her wrote: "Literary critic Harold Schweizer, a Bucknell University professor who has been a friend of both Gallagher and Carver, says: 'I think what happened in Tess's marriage and life with Ray was that she was both furthered by that contact and hindered. She probably came out even, finally. For whatever fame she gained on his coat-tails also belittled her own talent. The problem was that people cannot but think of a couple with one partner superior to the other. Tess was given that inferior role, which she was gracious enough to accept, but she also has tremendous talent.' "
Gallagher puts on glasses to read this paragraph. She laughs out loud halfway through, and again when she has finished.
"We had a really wonderful balance in our life," she says, "and we never really thought about it; about who was inferior or superior. That didn't belong to us inside the relationship. That was out there, for other people to discuss. We always supported each other." And then she looks down at the piece of paper and laughs again, a big confident laugh.