Lenny Bruce died 35 years ago defending his art instead of practicing it.

After many years of talking to crowds at sold out nightclubs, he was forced to begin talking to judges in courtrooms, defending himself against charges of obscenity. He was finally found with a needle in his arm at the age of 40, just a dead junkie lying naked on the bathroom floor. Only upon reflection many years later did mainstream culture understand that he was a genius and was just ahead of his time.

I started thinking about Bruce because I was thinking of Raymond Carver. He died at the age of 50, just when he was beginning to realize his dream of acceptance into the canon of literature. The whole reason I am bringing this up is that I was talking to one of my professors the other day and it turns out he knew the man. They hung out.

Carver was part of the poetry scene at Sacramento State in the mid-60s while he was working nights as a janitor at Mercy Hospital so he could write and take care of his kids during the day.Carver has been immortalized in obscure college memoirs and is part of the curriculum of any fiction, short story or poetry class worth taking. But what surprised me most was that this professor told me Carver was somewhat bitter about the lack of attention and accolades he was receiving before his untimely death.

Naively, I assumed that Carver wrote merely for the sake of writing, a predecessor to the likes of Kurt Cobain, the anti-hero who struck it big by accident. But apparently this too is a lie if the reports of the diaries and writings that are rumored to be released are true.

A couple semesters ago, I took a deep breath and walked into the archives here at Sac State. I thought they would bring me out a box of stuff, like they do at the Hoover Institute at Stanford (Who am I kidding?). They gave me a New York Times obit and a collection of poetry that was produced in the late 60s. I was confused. Sure, Carver is not Tom Hanks, but he had something that was more beautiful, even if it is less identifiable, than the majority of actors and stars whose asses the public kiss at every opportunity.

I never knew Carver, but after reading his stories you get a sense of what he was like. And I think he was a good man who was compelled to write and studied the craft intensely. He was also a man who had to conquer the demons of alcoholism, but by the time he won a series of small battles, he lost the war when he died of cancer on Aug. 2, 1988. He never got to see Robert Altman?s film, “Short Cuts,” made in 1994, which was based on his short stories. He never got to see his work translated into hundreds of languages and read by people all over the world.Hopefully someday this school will find a fitting way to the honor one of the greatest short story writers of the century, we weren?t smart enough to do this 15 years ago, but maybe we are now.

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