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They’re Raymond Carver and John Cheever, two masters of the American short story (In the case of Carver we’ll have to read his recently-published Collected Stories, the versions he wrote before Gordon Lish took a cleaver to them), drinking buddies, and spectacularly unhappy men.

Stephen King reviews Carol Sklenicka’s biography of Raymond Carver, A Writer’s Life, in the NYT. “Writing talent often runs on its own clean circuit,” King writes, “but writers whose works shine with insight and mystery are often prosaic monsters at home.”

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. . .And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. “I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

Colm Toibin reviews Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey in the LRB.

Cheever was good at blaming people; so skilled did he become at it that he sometimes went as far as blaming himself. Since he never had a job or went out much, and mainly saw his family and his family only, he specialised in blaming them. He blamed his father and his brother for not playing ball with him when he was small. He blamed his father for losing his money, his brother for leaving home. He blamed his mother for many things, but mainly for opening a giftshop to keep the family going and making a success of it. . .When he read Freud, Cheever also discovered that his family was a ‘virtual paradigm for “that chain of relationships” (weak father, dominant mother) “that usually produces a male homosexual.”’ Thus they didn’t just make him poor, they made him queer, and he spent the rest of his life resenting them.

Carver was a violent drunk whose wife supported him for 25 years. She got nearly nothing in the divorce settlement, and even less in his will. Cheever was a mean drunk, a snob, and a secret homosexual who hated homosexuals. (Remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer accidentally burns down his girlfriend’s family’s cabin in the woods, and the only thing he manages to save is a box of explicit letters from John Cheever to his girlfriend’s father?)

I would’ve liked to listen in on their drunken sprees, but after the initial burst of alcoholic cleverness they were probably as tedious and boring as other drunks.

But their stories: Beautiful.