Decline of first marriage
The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll's review[11] of Maryann Burk Carver's 2006 memoir[12] describes the decline of her and Raymond's marriage.
The fall began with Ray's trip to Missoula, Mont., in '72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge's birthday party. "That's when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything."
"By fall of '74", writes Carver, "he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the PhD program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes". Over the next several years, Maryann's husband physically abused her. Friends urged her to leave Raymond.
"But I couldn't. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I'd do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always."
Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. "It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving." So he wrote a letter instead.
"I thought, I've gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him."
After being hospitalized three times between June 1976 and February or March 1977, Carver began his "second life" and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.[5] While he continued to regularly smoke cannabis and later experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 had he not overcome his drinking.[13]
Second marriage
In November 1977, Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas. Gallagher later remembered feeling "as if my life until then had simply been a rehearsal for meeting him."[14] Beginning in January 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas, in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, Washington, and in Tucson, Arizona.
In 1980, the two moved to Syracuse, New York, where Gallagher had been appointed the coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University; Carver taught as a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read "Writers At Work" in order to be left alone. In 1982, he and his first wife, Maryann, were divorced.[12]
In 1988, six weeks prior to his death, Carver and Gallagher married in Reno, Nevada.
Death
On August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[15] He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. The inscription on his tombstone reads:[16]
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.
His poem "Gravy" is also inscribed.
As Carver's will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of his literary estate.[5]
