His books are available from indie bookstores and Amazon.In March of 1897 Chekhov was dining at an elegant restaurant in Moscow when blood began gushing from his mouth. Eddie Stack teaches at UC Berkeley, California. He has recorded spoken word versions of his stories with music by Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill. His fiction has also been published in inflight magazines, and newspapers and magazines of Irish interest in North America. He has stories in several anthologies including - State of the Art: Stories from NewIrish Writers Bloomsbury Irish Christmas Stories The Clare Anthology and Fiction in the Classroom. His work has appeared in literary reviews internationally, including: Fiction, Confrontation, Whispers & Shouts, South Circular, American Eagle, The Island, Crannóg, Southword and Criterion. He has received an ‘American Small Press Publisher of the Year Award’ and a ‘Top 100 Irish American-Award’ for his fiction. He is the author of three collections of short stories, several novellas and a novel. He passed away in August 1988, aged 50.Įddie Stack is from County Clare, Ireland. Like Chekhov, he died of respiratory disease. As fate would have it, ‘Errands’ was the last story Raymond Carver wrote and that makes it all the more meaningful and poignant. After all he said, ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on the broken glass.’ Carver did that and more. Fade out.Ĭhekov would have approved of such ending. He finally bends down and closes it in his fist. Olga was sending him on an errand to the mortician, he sees Chekhov in the bed, but he’s fixated on the bottle cork beside his boot. The cork was still on the floor the following morning, when the porter came to the room. There was only beauty, peace, and the grandeur of death. She wrote: There were no human voices, no everyday sounds. The champagne cork popped and foam spilled on the table. The doctor left and Olga sat beside Chekhov, holding his hand. He finished the glass, sighed and turned on his side. “It’s been so long since I had champagne.” There was no toast and Olga put a glass in Chekhov’s hands. (This is the historical fact that led Carver to write the story.) The doctor filled three flutes of champagne and put the cork back in the bottle.
He gets the bedroom phone and calls for a bottle of champagne and three glasses. He realised Chekhov was in his final hour and treatments would be pointless. Schwohrer, a noted local physician to their hotel. Midnight a few weeks later, Olga summonsed Dr. Carver quotes a journalist who saw him leave Berlin by train - Chekhov’s days are numbered…He had trouble making his way up the small staircase at the (railway) station. In June 1904, Chekhov and Olga went to Badenweiler, a spa resort near the Black Forest in Germany. He kept writing, but was barely able to finish The Orchard, and by 1903, had lost his appetite for literary work. By then he was seeing top specialists and had a dogged determination to throw off the disease. Or, how Anton met his future wife, Olga, during rehearsals for The Seagull in 1898. Documented historical events are the ‘dirt realism’ that glues it together- like when Tolstoy visits Chekov in hospital and talks about immortality of the soul. Carver’s pace and the unfolding of the story are perfect. ‘Errand’ charts Chekhov’s declining health, and his blinkered optimism or denial of his state. He was also fragile as Chekhov in ‘Errand’, though we didn’t know it then. Carver was the ‘comeback kid’ of writers and we all rooted for him. He was human, vulnerable, and a highly accomplished artist. He beat alcoholism, smoked marijuana and maybe did more. He was as American as Kerouac and had demons too. Old Beat writers I knew in San Francisco cafes gave him the nod and called his style ‘dirt realism’. He was king of American short story writers and wrote about the marginalized, of tough love and hard times, bad deals and lonely bedrooms. It was his homage to Chekhov, one master writing about another. I read on, it was very real, and immediate and a radical departure from Carver’s other stories. At this dinner, Anton Chekhov shows the first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would later kill him. Carver had swapped contemporary blue collar America for literary Moscow of the late 1890’s.
On the evening of March 22, 1897, he went to dinner in Moscow with his friend and confidant, Alexi Suvorin. Raymond Carver’s story,‘Errand’, was published in The New Yorker magazine in June 1987 and I read it on a flight from JFK to San Francisco.