A year after his death, the recurring image I associate with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening. He mumbled. T. S. Eliot once described Ezra Pound, qua mentor, as ''a man trying to convey to a very deaf person the fact that the house is on fire.'' Raymond Carver had precisely the opposite manner. The smoke could be filling the room, flames streaking across the carpet, before Carver would ask, ''Is it, uh, getting a little hot in here, maybe?'' And you would be sitting in your chair, bent achingly forward at the waist, saying, ''Beg pardon, Ray?'' Never insisting, rarely asserting, he was an unlikely teacher. I once sat in and listened while Carver was interviewed for two and a half hours. The writer conducting the interview moved the tape recorder closer and closer and finally asked if Carver would put it in his lap. A few days later the interviewer called up, near despair: Ray's voice on the tapes was nearly inaudible. The word ''soft-spoken'' hardly begins to do justice to his speech; this condition was aggravated whenever he was pressed into the regions of generality or prescription.

As I say, he mumbled, and if it once seemed merely a physical tic, akin to cracking knuckles or the drumming of a foot, I now think it was a function of a deep humility and a respect for the language bordering on awe, a reflection of his sense that words should be handled very, very gingerly. As if it might be almost impossible to say what you wanted to say. As if it might be dangerous, even. Listening to him talking about writing in the classroom or in the living room of the big Victorian house he shared with Tess Gallagher in Syracuse, you sensed a writer who loved the words of the masters who had handed the language down to him, and who was concerned that he might not be worthy to pick up the instrument. You feel this respect for the language - humility bordering on dread - in every sentence of his work.


One aspect of what Carver seemed to say to us - even to someone who had never been inside a lumber mill or a trailer park - was that literature could be fashioned out of strict observation of real life, wherever and however it was lived, even if it was lived with a bottle of Heinz ketchup on the table and the television set droning. This was news at a time when academic metafiction was the regnant mode. His example reinvigorated realism as well as the short-story form.

Though he was a teacher for much of his life, Carver never consciously gathered a band of disciples around himself. But when I was knocking around between graduate schools and the New York publishing world in the late 1970's and early 80's, no other writer was as much discussed and mimicked by the writers one met at readings and writers' conferences. Probably not since Donald Barthelme began publishing in the 1960's had a story writer generated such a buzz in the literary world.

Having fallen under Carver's spell on reading his first collection, ''Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,'' a book I would have bought on the basis of the title alone, I was lucky enough to meet him a few years later and eventually to become his student at Syracuse University in the early 80's. Despite the existence of several thousand creative writing programs around the country, there is probably no good answer to the question of whether writing can be taught. Saying that Faulkner and Fitzgerald never got M.F.A.'s is beside the point. Novelists and short-story writers like to eat as much as anyone else, and tend to sniff out subsidies while they pursue their creative work. For writers in the 20's, the exchange rate was favorable in Paris, and in the 30's there was the W.P.A., and a gold rush of sorts in Hollywood. The universities have become the creative writers' W.P.A. in recent years.

Carver was himself a product of the new system, having studied writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and at Stanford, and later earned a living teaching. It was something he did out of necessity, a role he was uncomfortable with. He did it to make a living, because it was easier than the other jobs he'd had - working at a sawmill and a hospital, working as a service station attendant, a janitor, a delivery boy, a textbook editor. Though grateful for genteel employment, he didn't really see why people who had a gift for writing should necessarily be able to teach. And he was very shy. The idea of facing a class made him nervous every time. On the days he had to teach he would get agitated, as if he himself were a student on the day of the final exam.