FIRES
by Raymond Carver
Designed by Frans Masereel
Picador 1986

In the 1980s, Raymond Carver’s sparse, honest short stories and poems were labelled ”dirty realism”. The term referred to a no-frills, Hemingway-influenced form of writing: lots of fishing, booze and miserable suburban marriages.

This 1986 paperback is a British edition whose cover gets Carver strikingly wrong. The illustration is by Frans Masereel (1889-1972), a Belgian-born woodcut artist who specialised in nightmarish expressionist visions of urban life. Called ”Okay!” and made in 1968, it is an ambivalent fantasy of an American city, all grotesque bustle and neon, the artist suspended between admiration for its energy and abhorrence for its dehumanisation.

Masereel was an interesting character. Now largely forgotten, in his lifetime he was renowned for devising ”novels without words” such as Die Stadt (The City), published in 1925, which uses a series of woodcut images to depict scenes from a claustrophobic Weimar-era metropolis. Thomas Mann, whose books Masereel illustrated, likened his prototype graphic novels to silent film.

The picture on the cover of Fires is clearly meant to chime with the disconnected characters who people Carver’s writings.

However Masereel’s urban phantasmagoria is a world away from Carver’s dirty realism and suburban focus. Whoever chose it made an inspired mistake.