Read any of his stories and you'll appreciate the constraint of style, the terse dialogue and the way you're left with a feeling of gloomy enigma. His stories finish but they never end. Deliberately, their resonance lingers on.

Read a whole book and you'll realise that this effect is painstakingly reconstructed in all his stories. In some ways, all his stories are the same story (save for 'What's in Alaska' which is the funniest dope story ever written).

Pan recently gathered together his three books; 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please', 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' and 'Cathedral' into one volume – 'The Stories Of Raymond Carver'.

They flew him into London to do interviews and he stayed at the oddly shaped Belgravia Sheraton. I met him here. He was fifteen minutes late. He apologised. This is what we talked about when we talked about Raymond Carver.

"There were no books in the house when I grew up but I liked listening to my dad's stories and I wanted to write stories. I did make attempts to write stories but I don't suppose I really tried seriously to write until I was 20 or 21.

"I felt if I wanted to write badly enough, somehow I would wake up when I was 30 and find myself a writer. Then I began to understand that, for things to happen, I was going to have to write something first. I've wanted to write for as long as I can remember."

He tells me how he began "hanging around" the local library in his small home town in crimson-necked middle America. Raymond Carver was missing out. He discovered books and wanted in. "If I was to take an exciting fishing trip with my dad, I'd try to write about it. I didn't know how to use a typewriter. I remember my family rented a typewriter and nobody knew how to type. My mother tried to type it up. It all ended in tears and frustration."

His describing that made me sad. Raymond Carver lets a deep sadness bubble away in his stories. Also, it seems during my short time in his company, a sadness lurks within the man. Not that he breaks down and cries but his memories are tinged with pathos. Much like a character in one of his stories.

He married young and started a family. He still wanted to write. He took a succession of grisly low paid jobs to put himself through college and support his family (for a full account of this phase, read 'Fires', published by Collins which contains poems and some autobiographical essays).

"Then somebody offered me a job as an editor at a textbook publishing firm. I had an office and a telephone and a desk. I felt respectable and grown up. The job provided health insurance for me, my wife and the children. Yes, it was a great relief."

The 22 stories in his first collection took twelve years to write. "Because of the crazy life I was living at that time. The second book came together much quicker and 'Cathedral' was written in about 3 months."

The crazy life? He was an alcoholic.

"To all intents and purposes, I was finished as a writer and as a human being. I've had two lives. My second life began on June 2nd 1977 when I quit drinking."

Our gain. The distillers loss.

(A hotel employee comes in to tend to the plants in Carver's suite. Raymond jumps up and points out which ones need water the most urgently. Caring. I wonder what the staff think of him? Meanwhile he's wide-eyed for London, it's his first visit. Next week his wife arrives and he's relishing the sight-seeing they will do.)

Are your stories about people? Or about Americans?

"Gee, I've never thought to differentiate in that way. They're certainly representative of a large group of American people. They're often stories about dispossessed people, people whose luck has run out, they happen to be American. The people I write about are the people grew up with. That's a curious question. . . "

Non-Americans may perceive the stories differently from Americans, being less familiar with the settings, that constant flicker of the TV.

"There's a lot of TV watching done in America, of course but there's a whole submerged population we don't hear much from. Little cities and rural areas where people have a hard time with their lives and things just don't add up. That's a problem in every country. It's hard for some people to get along in this life ...I don't have any answers."

Raymond Carver's stories chronicle the inner America, not the political high profile of a world super-power. His people are not to much part of a 'Victorious' nation but victims of it.

During Carver's life the USA has changed a great deal. From the optimism of the early 60s, the anti-Government movements of the late 60s and early 70s into the present grey dawn of Reagan and a missile silo on every back lawn.

"There's an attitude now which I deplore. The poor and dispossessed have had backs turned on them and the social problems. I don't like this turn to the Right ... this political thing... "

Yet this change has had no overt influence on his writing.

"The things that had the most profound effect on me happened in my 20s and 30s (he's now 46). I quite often go back to that time in my writing even now. People having trouble getting along in the world, that hasn't changed."

Where do his stories begin? An essay in 'Fires' talks of writing as a great voyage of discovery. The first sentence a step into the unknown.

"I have some vague notion when I start but it's like being in a dark room looking for the light switch. If you keep on searching you'll find it. I don't always know where a story is going, I'm constantly surprised. At the time of writing that essay I believed very strongly that writing is discovery. How did I know what I wanted to say until I'd seen what I said?

"I'm not a writer who carries stories around in his head. I don't carry anything at all in my head, I don't go around with stories in my head. But the habit of going to the desk is a good one. Something will happen when you're at your desk. When I'm at my desk, I don't waste any time. Even between leaving the table when I've had my coffee and getting to my desk, there'll be something there."

He probably has eggs with that coffee. The American breakfast. Does he have favourite stories? Yes, he has favourite stories. His favourite stories are those where:

"Something in the story was so exciting that it made my hair stand up, my blood run faster. I couldn't sustain that. It wouldn't be with me forever but somehow I felt I was with the angels on that particular story. That feeling might go away with all the hard work but the stories tend to be my favourites, yeah."

Raymond Carver stories are best dipped into sparingly. The cumulative effect, as outlined above, can be a diminished one. But, yes, some of Carver's stories edge beyond well executed precise prose and get quite intensely lively. They do make the blood run and the heart beat faster, just sometimes. just often enough.

Reviewers have responded enthusiastically. One or two have hailed the author as a genius.

"That kind of talk makes me uncomfortable."

Thought so.

Kathy Acker (the high priestess of post-punk and utterly non-rural, very NYC artsy to boot), has considered him merely the product of the American writing schools. Which, in essence, is true.

"She's not my favourite literary artist" says Carver of the blood and guts Kathy. "There's room for everybody and I don't want to tell people what they should stack their houses with. It will all got sorted out in the end. Or it won't. I don't know."

"There was a time in the 60s and early 70s when the so-called avant garde American writing was shouldering everybody out of the way. That stuff had the field and some of the people are still publishing but I can tell you nobody takes them seriously now. Something obviously speaks to you, connects up with you in some way. Kathy Acker speaks to other people. I don't mind."

William Burroughs? Cut-ups? Raymond Carver would regard cutups as sacrilege, I'm sure. Scythe through one of his pages and you'll be struck by a thunderbolt. Scissors are banned from his study.

"Gosh, I don't know what to say about these things. I have a hard time with Burroughs. I admired 'Naked Lunch' from a distance. That cut-up thing is ... something else. How can you talk about that in one breath and in the next talk about Leo Tolstoy? Or Ernest Hemingway? Or William Faulkner? Or V.S. Pritchett?"

I ask him how he'd like to be remembered. There follows much spluttering and half finished sentences. This lasts approximately seven and a half minutes. Finally ...

"I feel maybe I cleared the path a little for some people ... I want to be remembered as an explorer. Put that on my tombstone."

I think he'd like to be remembered by having his name on a shelf alongside Tolstoy, Hemingway & Co in that same library he hung around in his adolescence. Thereby completing a cycle.

Raymond Carver – the man who wrote stories. He lived with a constraint of style and carried an air of gloomy enigma. Just like one of his characters.