Rare among her contemporaries and, it would seem, against the grain of her own unassertive nature, Didion has forced herself to explore subjects that put her at considerable physical risk, involving travel to the sorts of febrile revolutionary-prone Central American countries that have figured in her fiction (“Boca Grande,” for instance, of A Book of Common Prayer, the purposefully unnamed island of The Last Thing He Wanted) and a seeming restlessness with staying in one place for long: “If I have to die, I’d rather die up against a wall someplace. . . . On the case, yes.” [“Didion & Dunne: The Rewards of a Literary Marriage” by Leslie Garis, New York Times Magazine, February 8, 1987]
The Last Love Song:
A Biography of Joan Didion
By Tracy Daugherty
OTHER BOOKS CONSULTED IN THIS REVIEW
Run River
By Joan Didion
Vintage, 272 pp.
Play It as It Lays
By Joan Didion
FSG Classics, 240 pp.
A Book of Common Prayer
By Joan Didion
Vintage, 272 pp.
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live:
Collected Nonfiction
By Joan Didion
Everyman’s Library, 1160 pp.
The Last Thing He Wanted
By Joan Didion
Vintage Books, 227 pp.
The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion
Vintage Books, 272 pp.
Blue Nights
By Joan Didion
Vintage, 188 pp.
UNFLINCHING ABOUT WOMEN:
THE SHORT STORIES OF LUCIA BERLIN
What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can’t help but feel for her.
Lucia Berlin, “Point of View”
In “Point of View,” Lucia Berlin’s most intricately imagined short story, a woman writer confides in us, her readers, her intentions in writing a story, which will turn out to be not quite the story she intends to tell us, or, indeed, the story we finally absorb, with a belated pang of emotion at the final line—a surreptitious erasure. We are told by Berlin’s fictitious woman writer that she prefers writing in a voice that emulates “Chekhov’s impartial voice” in order to imbue her (fictitious) woman character with a modicum of dignity; if the character, a “single woman in her fifties” were to tell her own story, complete with “all the compulsive, obsessive boring little details of . . . life,” we would be likely to feel embarrassment, discomfort, “even bored.”
However, Berlin’s woman writer assures us: “But my story begins with, ‘Every Saturday, after the laundromat and the grocery store, she bought the Sunday Chronicle”—that is, the writer has strategically altered point of view so that it appears to be in the “third person” and not the first. Not the self’s self-pity but a writerly impartiality is the ruse that will draw us into the story of a “dreary creature” for whom otherwise, she thinks, we would feel little sympathy.
Is this Lucia Berlin confiding in us, or an entirely “other” woman writer who resembles Lucia Berlin to an unnerving degree? Is this writer proud of being so clever, or is such cleverness, so advertised, an oblique form of despair, even rage at the diminished circumstances of her life? Whoever she is, she tells us, somewhat boastfully:
Most writers use props and scenery from their own lives. For example, my Henrietta eats her meager little dinner every night on a blue place mat, using exquisite heavy Italian stainless steel cutlery. An odd detail, inconsistent, it may seem, with this woman who cuts out coupons for Brawny towels, but it engages the reader’s curiosity. At least I hope it will.
Not surprisingly the writer goes on to tell us that she too eats with such “elegant cutlery”—as she once worked for the nephrologist with whom her character Henrietta is hopelessly in love; but the writer herself was “certainly not in love with him.”
Planning her story, the writer recalls working for Dr. B., though she is careful to distinguish between herself and Henrietta, a figure of pathos. We are privy to the writer’s self-doubt: “I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.”
Following (fictitious) Henrietta through her meager life, we are moved to pity her: “no matter how nasty [Dr. B] is to her Henrietta believes there is a bond between them.” The nephrologist has a clubfoot, while Henrietta (like Lucia Berlin) has scoliosis, a curvature—“A hunchback, in fact.” In a brilliant and heartrending sleight of hand at the story’s end author Berlin, the (unnamed) narrator, and Henrietta blur into a single poignant voice of loss:
Henrietta turns off the light, raises the blind by her bed, just a little. The window is steamed. The car radio plays Lester Young . . . I lean against the cool windowsill and watch him. . . . In the steam of the glass I write a word. What? My name? A man’s name? Henrietta? Love? Whatever it is I erase it quickly before anyone can see.
ZESTFULLY WRITTEN, SEEMINGLY ARTLESS, drawn from eight previously published collections, the forty-three stories of the posthumously published A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) seek to persuade us of their authenticity by this quick, deft, unerring selection of “intricate detail” while making no claim at all for “impartiality”—that may be Chekhov’s way, and perhaps it is an ideal—(masculine?) way of literature—but it is not the way of Lucia Berlin, whose voice suggests the taut vernacularisms of Raymond Carver as well as the engaging warmth and authority of Grace Paley; the serio-comic frankness of Charles Bukowski (like Berlin for much of her publishing career a mainstay of John Martin’s avant-garde Black Sparrow Press of Santa Barbara, California) and a younger contemporary Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son). Like these, Berlin has a predilection for first-person narrations about those whom life has battered, but not defeated; like these she is led to record, in the most minute and unsparing detail, the degradations of alcohol/drug addiction; she is most comfortable at the edge of proper middle-class life, or a little below, like the highly articulate cleaning-woman protagonist of the title story whose “alcoholic husband has just died, leaving me and the four kids” and whose thefts from her employers are petty—sleeping pills, a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds. Despite her gritty life Berlin’s protagonists rarely complain. “I like working in Emergency—you meet men there, anyway. Real men, heroes. Firemen and jockeys.” A ride from Oakland to a county jail, that might be an ignominious experience, is given an aura of beauty in the hippy-addict-protagonist’s imagination: “The avenue is lined with trees and that last morning it was foggy, like an old Chinese painting.”
As a teenager in the 1950s Berlin lived in an affluent household, in Santiago, Chile, where her father worked as a mining engineer and her mother became a reclusive alcoholic, eventually a suicide; here, if we are to trust the reminiscences of the unnamed narrator of “Good and Bad,” who attends a Catholic school in Santiago in the early 1950s and falls under the spell of an idealistic Communist lay teacher named Miss Dawson, she first becomes aware of social injustice and its tragic consequences for the poor.
“What if I asked you to give me your Saturdays, for one month, would you do it? See a part of Santiago that you don’t know.” “Why do you want me?” “Because, basically, I think you are a good person. I think you could learn from it.” [Miss Dawson] clasped both my hands. “Give it a try.” Good person. But she had caught me earlier, with the word revolutionary. I did want to meet revolutionaries, because they were bad.
Despite such mixed motives Berlin’s protagonist does become sympathetic with the impoverished living in a shantytown at the Santiago dump (“they were the color of the dung, their rags just like the refuse they crawled in. No one stood up, they scurried on all fours like wet rats.”) and takes up her teacher’s courageous but quixotic cause, until her bullying father intervenes and has the teacher fired. But Berlin’s protagonists are invariably sympathetic with that class of persons n
ow called the working poor, in these stories both Americans and Mexicans. (The collection’s strongest story is “Mijito,” a devastating account of a young Mexican mother adrift amid drug dealers and petty criminals in an Oakland, California, slum, whom well-intentioned Caucasians cannot save.) The author’s writerly eye is unsparing, but it is not a cold eye, that casts a glimmering sort of light on even the most sordid of situations, and moves us to identify with her hapless protagonists, virtually all of them women, if not indeed variants of the same, singular woman.
A Manual for Cleaning Women is a catchy but not perhaps the most appropriate title for this collection of memoirist stories and prose pieces about a hard-drinking, hard-living, unsentimental and unself-pitying woman who is indeed a cleaning woman, but only briefly, in Oakland and Berkeley; more often, Berlin’s protagonist is a teacher (in a Catholic school), a doctor’s receptionist, an emergency room attendant, a hospital switchboard operator and, above all, a writer either actively engaged in writing, or preparing to write. (Even in the throes of advanced alcoholism, in the mordantly narrated “Let Me See You Smile,” the woman writer manages to write; her admiring lawyer says: “Ben handed me an Atlantic Monthly with a story of hers in it. I . . . thought it was great.”) Like Lucia Berlin this woman has lived, as young girl, in a mining settlement near Juneau, Alaska, as well as in Santiago; as a girl she had to wear a painful back brace, to correct a curvature of the spine. Her parents divorced when she and her sister were young, and her mother was an alcoholic, severely depressed and suicidal, though wickedly funny (at times), mourned belatedly after her death as a woman deeply and mysteriously unhappy with her life, seeking isolation so that she could drink uninterrupted in (as her daughter recalls in a grim inventory): “Deerlodge, Montana; Marion, Kentucky; Patagonia, Arizona; Santiago, Chile; Lima, Peru.” With this mother, as a girl, Berlin’s woman-protagonist has lived for a while in El Paso, Texas, in the home of her dentist-grandfather Dr. H. A. Moynihan, a thoroughly repellent figure hated by virtually everyone who knows him, who places a sign in large gold letters in a window looking out onto the street: DR. H. A. MOYNIHAN. I DON’T WORK FOR NEGROES. The abysmally awful grandfather is a memorable character—“filthy, slopping food and spitting, leaving wet cigarettes everywhere. Plaster from teeth molds covered him with white specks, like he was a painter or a statue.” An alcoholic like others in his family, Dr. Moynihan is revealed in a later story as a crude sexual molester of his own granddaughters. Sleeping, he is observed with “teeth bared in a Bela Lugosi grin.”
Like the author, Berlin’s typical woman protagonist has had several (failed) marriages, one of them to a sculptor who left her with young children, and another with a musician (“‘Marry me,’ he said. ‘Give me a reason to live’”) who turned out to be a heroin addict; she has had numerous love affairs, some of which are very brief (in “Toda Luna, Toda Ano,” the coupling is undersea: “When he left her his sperm drifted up between them like pale octopus ink.”) She has had four sons with two of these husbands, boys whom she loves very much and who appear to love her despite their disapproval of her alcoholism and carelessly lived life: “Everything was somehow always okay. She was a good teacher and a good mother really. . . . If they awakened [in the night], her sons would stumble upon her madness which, then, only occasionally spilled over into morning.”
Berlin’s strongest stories, verging upon the surreal, are those that deal frankly with her alcoholism. Sometimes the tone is comic-grotesque, in the Bukowski mode, as in this glimpse of the physician’s assistant helping the “painfully shy” Dr. B. do a cervical examination of a patient who is “obese, with difficult access”:
He squatted on a stool, his eyes level with their vagina, with a light on his forehead. I handed him the (warmed) speculum and, after a few minutes, with the patient gasping and sweating, the long cotton-tipped stick. He held it, waving it like a baton, as he disappeared beneath the sheet, toward the woman. At last his hand emerged with the stick, now a dizzy metronome aimed at my waiting slide. I still drank in those days, so my hand, holding the slide, shook visibly as it tried to meet his. But in a nervous up-and-down tremble. His was back and forth. Slap, at last. This procedure took so long that he often missed important telephone calls. . . . Once [an associate] knocked on the door and Dr. B was so startled he dropped the stick. We had to start all over again.
Berlin is unflinching in self-castigation, which is not to be confused with self-loathing; as she forgives others, with a readiness that may surprise the reader at times, so she forgives herself for her chronic bad behavior. (It is related more than once how, in a drunken state, the Berlin protagonist forgets to secure her car on a steep street in Oakland, causing the car to detach itself from the curb, roll downhill with gathering momentum, and crash into a parked vehicle.) Despite the gritty nature of her subject matter the tone of her writing is often uplifting, even ebullient; here is a writer, again like Bukowski, who can write about being a drunk, about the very poetry of drunkenness, with something like a surprised pleasure in the unexpected camaraderie of alcoholics. In “Her First Detox” a woman wakes in a county detox ward remembering only “handcuffs, a straitjacket.” She learns that she’d wrecked her car against a wall and been violent when apprehended, but police officers had brought her to detox “instead of to jail when they found out she was a teacher, had four sons, no husband.”
Carlotta had a good time in the detox ward. The men were awkwardly gallant toward her. She was the only woman, she was pretty, didn’t “look like a lush. . . .” Most of the men were street winos.
A later story, “Unmanageable,” begins: “In the deep dark night of the soul the liquor stores and bars are closed. She reached under the mattress; the pint bottle of vodka was empty.” The focus of this very short story is a simple one: how to get through the night until the liquor stores open, in Oakland at 6:00 A.M., in Berkeley not until 7:00 A.M.
She was panting and faint by the time she got to the Uptown [liquor store] on Shattuck. It wasn’t open yet. Seven black men, all old except for one young boy, stood outside on the curb. . . . On the sidewalk two men were sharing a bottle of NyQuil cough syrup. Blue death, you could buy that all night long. An old man they called Champ smiled at her. “Say, mama, you be sick? Your hair hurt?” She nodded. That’s how it felt, your hair, your eyeballs, your bones.
The unnamed woman is in such distress that Champ will have to help her drink the wine she has purchased, pouring it into her mouth. Later, alone, able to drink at last, she cries “with relief that she had not died.” Yet the story ends with her sons kissing her good-bye in the morning as they rush off to school.
Elsewhere Berlin writes with sympathy and without condemnation of the addictions of others, in particular heroin addiction; the husband she seems to have loved most, a musician named Max with whom she’d run away to Mexico, is discovered soon after their elopement injecting himself with heroin:
That sounds like the end of a story, or the beginning, when really it was just part of the years that were to come. Times of technicolor happiness and times that were sordid and frightening. . . . We were happy, all of us, for a long time and then it became hard and lonely because he loved heroin much more.
In another ill-fated relationship, with a fellow alcoholic named Jesse, a composer and street musician, the protagonist (here called Carlotta) acknowledges that “I was so poisoned with alcohol that a drink wouldn’t work, didn’t make me stop shaking. I was terrified, panicked.” Having decided that Jesse is a failure as a musician, and Carlotta is a failure as a mother, they decide to commit suicide together, but nothing comes of this decision and the last we see of the besotted lovers they are walking off together in drenching rain, “each of them deliberately stomping in puddles, bumping gently into each other.”
It is not surprising to be told by one of Berlin’s narrators: “I don’t like Diane Arbus”—meaning that she has a deep sympathy for the freaks and outcasts who populate her stories, and she is slow to judge e
ven unconscionable behavior:
I tried to hide when Grandpa was drunk because he would catch me and rock me. He was doing it once in the big rocker, holding me tight, the chair bouncing off the ground inches from the red-hot stove, his thing jabbing jabbing my behind. He was Singing “Old Tin Pan with a Hole in the Bottom.” Loud. Panting and grunting. Only a few feet away Mamie [grandmother] sat reading the Bible while I screamed, “Mamie! Help me!”
The sexually abused child does nothing to prevent the grandfather from abusing her younger sister Sally: “I had watched with a mixture of feelings: fear, sex, jealousy, anger.” Later, as an older child, she will say of her abuser, “Everybody hated Grandpa but Mamie, and me, I guess.” In a grotesquely protracted, blood-splattered scene in “Dr. H. A. Moynihan,” the granddaughter helps the old man pull out his rotted teeth so that he can fit himself with false teeth he has prepared.
“Pull them!” he gasped. I was afraid, wondered quickly if it would be murder if I pulled them and he died. “Pull them!” He spat a thin red waterfall down his chin. I pumped the chair way back. He was limp, did not seem to feel me twist the back top teeth sideways and out. He fainted, his lips closing like gray clamshells. I opened his mouth and shoved a paper towel into one side so that I could get the three teeth that remained.