contain the story.
If I’d read the story on the page, rather than hearing someone say “beat off” and “goddamn” aloud, I would have been able to metabolize it easier. One of the shocking things about the story, in retrospect, was that I first heard it on BYU’s campus. Mormons were not supposed to take the name of God in vain, and that was particularly true of BYU students. Indeed, we had a strict code of conduct that concerned not only the language we were allowed to use but every aspect of our lives. To attend BYU you had to remain worthy members of the Mormon church and have your worthiness periodically affirmed by your ecclesiastical leaders. You could not drink alcohol, drink coffee, or smoke. You could not have sex (or, well, you could as long as both you and the person you were having sex with kept it a secret). Boys were supposed to report if they masturbated to their Bishop and had to strive to stop, and could in fact be suspended from the university if the practice continued. You were not allowed to take the name of the Lord in vain—if I’d said the word “goddamn” in front of the wrong person (I said this and more, of course, but always with great awareness of who was in earshot) I would have been reported for a conduct violation.
In addition, you had to live in BYU-approved housing. The dormitories, where I lived as a freshman, were strictly divided by gender. You were not allowed to visit the room of someone from the opposite gender except for a few hours on Sunday, when visits were strictly monitored and doors always left wide open. If you snuck into the room of someone of the opposite gender at another time, you could be suspended.
There was more. Men’s hair had to be cut short, off the back of their collar with the ears not covered by hair. If you violated this, or had what was judged an extreme hairstyle, you could get reported. There was a strict dress code you would get reported for violating as well—no tank tops for either men or women, no shirts that would reveal the belly, and all shorts had to fall at least to the middle of the knee. This had to do with the particulars of the Mormon garment, the sacred underwear that Mormons who had been on a mission wore underneath their clothing.
Mormonism is a strangely bifurcated religion. On the surface, it seems largely protestant: a secular ministry with weekly church services at a local meeting house that are open to anyone. But there’s a second, ritualized layer to Mormonism, consisting of what goes on in the Mormon temple. In 1984–85, when I was a freshman at BYU, this involved a sacred (and consequently secret) Masonic-style passion play made up of watching movies, putting on and rearranging ritual clothing, engaging in promises and handshakes, and exchanging ritual phrases. You made promises not to reveal the secrets, and then mimed how you would kill yourself if you did.3 To participate in the Mormon temple ceremonies, you have to receive your “temple endowment,” a particular ceremony where you are first introduced to the mysteries of the temple and are given a new name that you are told you must keep secret.4 To receive your endowment, you have to be a member in exceptionally good standing, and I’d guess well over half the people on the active rolls of the Mormon church have never gone, so it’s as if there’s a secret society hidden within the Mormon church.
In 1985, as a freshman, I hadn’t been endowed yet—I would be endowed a year or so later as I prepared to go on a Mormon mission to Switzerland. But I’d been raised Mormon all my life. I knew there were disjunctions between how Mormons acted in private and public. I wasn’t averse to swearing or privately violating boundaries that I publically seemed to affirm. But despite that, I was stunned to see it being done in class at a Mormon-controlled university. One part of me felt it was deeply inappropriate. Another part of me was simply amazed and eager for more.
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Looking back, I can’t help but be impressed by the risk Professor Bell took. If any student had chosen to report the story as “inappropriate”—code for a range of things objectionable to Mormon culture—she would have had a lot to answer for. At the very least, she would have had her hands slapped. When I returned to teach at BYU almost a decade later, I discovered that there was a committee that quietly looked over the books you assigned to your class. If one of your books had been the subject of past controversy or complaint, the committee chair would “helpfully” call you and let you know. If a book you were planning to teach was unfamiliar to the committee, the chair would call—as, indeed, he did with me—and ask you to “vouch for it.” “We’re not telling you you can’t teach it,” I was told about one of the books I was teaching, “that would be censorship.” But my guess is that that feeling of being monitored alone was enough to encourage most BYU professors to self-censor.
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Unsettled by “Nobody Said Anything,” I felt I had two choices: either to reject the story wholesale or to scrutinize it and try to crack the code of how it did what it did to me. I don’t know why I chose to opt for the latter. Perhaps it was partly because I was ashamed of not having been able to articulate a response to the story. Perhaps it went back to something I remembered Mormon prophet Brigham Young saying: “I mean to learn all that is in heaven, earth, and hell.”5 I wanted to know more than I wanted to be comfortable. Or perhaps it was just sheer cussedness.
In any case, after class I went to check the book that contained “Nobody Said Anything” out of the BYU library. There was only one copy and it was already checked out. So I went to the bookstore and bought it, and then, instead of studying for the following day’s classes, read it straight through. On the page, “Nobody Said Anything” felt more poignant and painful than shocking, but there were other stories that had a similar effect for me. “Fat,” the second story I ever read by Carver, struck me nearly as hard, and “Neighbors” had a kind of oddness to it that appealed to me very much—not the same emotional impact, but there was something damaged about it that was nonetheless profoundly human. “They’re Not Your Husband” reminded me of how one of my high school friends used to act when he was drunk and had lost all of his filters. “Why, Honey?”—a story about a politician with a vicious hidden past, told by his mother after she’s been tracked down by a reporter, worked away at me long after I had finished it. Critic Adam Meyer rightly calls it “one of the most technically dazzling stories in the collection.”6 Indeed, all of the stories, even the ones I didn’t like as well, struck me as different from anything else I’d read.
And so, as soon as I’d finished, still hungry for more, I went back to the bookstore. I managed to get there just a few moments before it closed. They had two other Carver books in paperback: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and the newer paperback, Cathedral. Because the repetition in the title of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love reminded me of the repeated “Please” in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and because the book was two dollars cheaper than Cathedral, I bought that one.
2. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 74–75.
3. This portion of the Mormon temple ceremony, the “penalties” phase, was dropped a few years later.
4. I’ve described some of this in more detail in the middle of my novel The Open Curtain, feeling that now that I’m an excommunicated Mormon the promise of secrecy no longer applies.
5. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 2 (Liverpool: F.D. Richards, 1855). Discourse 2, page 94.
6. Adam Meyer, Raymond Carver (New York: Twayne, 1995), 58.
IT’S FUNNY TO THINK OF THOSE MOMENTS WHEN A PATH forks, when you make a choice, without knowing it at the time, that ends up having a profound impact on your writing or your life. And to think, too, of the missed chances, the moments when we made a wrong choice and perhaps will never know what could have happened, what we missed. A good many of Carver’s stories involve characters who seem to have been so drunk that they didn’t even know they were on a path to begin with, let alone that the path had forked. Or maybe they drink because they sense those missed moments, those old wounds, rising to the surface again, and want to try to push them back down.
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Later,