{"id":131776,"date":"2018-12-11T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-12-11T14:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131776"},"modified":"2018-12-11T16:35:17","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T21:35:17","slug":"but-i-dont-ever-lie-lucia-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/11\/but-i-dont-ever-lie-lucia-berlin\/","title":{"rendered":"But I Don\u2019t Ever Lie: On Lucia Berlin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

LUCIA BERLIN IN ALBUQUERQUE, 1961. PHOTO: BUDDY BERLIN\/LITERARY ESTATE OF LUCIA BERLIN<\/p><\/div>\n

There are masters of the paragraph and masters of the sentence; Lucia Berlin is the master of the fragment. Her deliberate abbreviations slipstream off one another. Less drag, high velocity; the story propels forward. Take this succession from the story \u201cStrays,\u201d set in a desolate rehab facility outside Albuquerque: \u201cFallen-down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pinups peeled off the walls. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.\u201d Rather than create pauses, her descriptions ignite the story, keep it in motion. Like this from \u201cThe Musical Vanity Boxes,\u201d as Ra\u00fal, a father from Juarez, leads young \u201cLucha\u201d and her Syrian best friend Hope back over the border to El Paso: \u201cGentle, like the pull of a dowser\u2019s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco<\/em> beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berlin\u2019s first posthumous collected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women <\/em>(2015), showcased her extraordinary and underappreciated talent and her fantastic range; the second, Evening in Paradise<\/em>, recently published alongside a companion volume of her memoir and letters, presumes to show us this and more: her life.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Lucia Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska in 1936 and died in 2004 on her own birthday at the age of sixty-eight, a full-circle distinction she shares with William Shakespeare and Merle Haggard. In Lucia Berlin years, sixty-eight must somehow be more than what it is for most human beings, for in just short of seven decades she filled her life with the kind of restless, electric fervor that ricochets through her short stories.<\/p>\n

Berlin forged her own idea of what a short story could be, yet she \u201cseemed to have read everything, and could talk about it with humor and passion,\u201d wrote her friend Michael Wolfe, who edited her 1984 collection Phantom Pain<\/em>. She once said she believed that Jane Austen\u2019s world \u201cwas as hard as some alcoholic in a motel room in a Raymond Carver story.\u201d She had lived high and low, in Alaska, Montana, Texas, Chile, New Mexico, New York City, Mexico, California, Colorado, looking out onto the northern lights, in tar-paper cabins and in mining camps and by walls of pink oleander and above factories that reeked of ham. She counted among her best friends jazz musicians, the Black Mountain poets, the mother of the Black Panther Huey P. Newton. She lived in so many places she was sometimes mistaken for being from them. Once, invited to speak on a panel of \u201cethnic female writers,\u201d she corrected the moderator: \u201cI\u2019m not a feminist and I\u2019m a WASP essentially, but I\u2019ve lived in other countries and I don\u2019t like to be categorized in any way.\u201d Though she bristled in particular at the word survivor<\/em>, she lived through numerous husbands and lovers (with whom she had four children); a succession of low-paying jobs (even as a teacher she preferred prison classrooms over academia); a lifelong battle with alcoholism and a hard-won sobriety. She published six collections of fiction, all of which drew heavily on those sixty-eight fully lived years, none of which got the recognition they deserved in her lifetime.<\/p>\n

A Manual for Cleaning Women<\/em>, which was spearheaded by Berlin\u2019s good friends Stephen Emerson, Barry Gifford, and Michael Wolfe, collected forty-three stories from Berlin\u2019s small-press editions. Its global acclaim far exceeded anyone\u2019s expectations. The collection was a best seller; it made the New York Times<\/em> annual top-ten list; it has been translated into twenty-one languages.<\/p>\n

One might assume that the simultaneous publication of two new posthumous works\u2014one a collection of previously published short stories, the other of letters, photographs, and a deeply evocative but unfinished memoir covering the first twenty-eight years of her life\u2014would serve to encourage readers to align her fiction with its biographical source material. But Evening in Paradise<\/em> and Welcome Home<\/em> serve instead as a testament to Berlin\u2019s powers of fiction and self-invention.<\/p>\n

\u201cI exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality messed up, but I don\u2019t ever lie,\u201d one of Berlin\u2019s protagonists says. As her friend Lydia Davis writes in the foreword to Manual<\/em>, Berlin\u2019s stories were transformations, not distortions, of the truth. \u201cMa wrote true stories, not exactly autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes,\u201d her son Mark wrote after her death and one year before his own, in the essay that now introduces Evening in Paradise<\/em>. Lucia\u2019s adventures were her sons\u2019 bedtime stories, and sometimes they found their way into the fiction she typed late into the night alongside a disappearing bottle of bourbon. Once she sent a manuscript page, riddled with wine rings, to The Paris Review<\/em> (\u201cbecause they\u2019re always printing \u2018the pages from the writer,\u2019 \u201d she said; her submission went unanswered). And yet, despite the mythologizing of her life, the majority of her stories were written after she became sober.<\/p>\n

Sometimes her sons\u2019 names appear in her stories; sometimes one or more of the four of them have different names; sometimes the protagonist is called Lucia. \u201cI don\u2019t know why I have my name in some stories and not in others,\u201d she told an interviewer in 1996. \u201cCome to think of it I don’t know why I don’t have my name in all of them. I can’t imagine what effect this has upon readers \u2026 I hope they feel that the story is true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Readers want to believe in a \u201creal\u201d character as much as children want to believe in the tooth fairy. And the people in most writers’ lives both want to be written about and they don\u2019t. As a writer who works in both fiction and nonfiction, I have said as much before to people in my life: you\u2019ll see yourself in short stories where you aren\u2019t and miss yourself where you are. Lucia Berlin worked this desire in her readers and her characters to supreme and devastating effect. I find Berlin\u2019s willful inconsistency both admirable and liberating.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it also the narrating voice, so engaging, so companionable?\u201d Davis writes, trying to decipher Berlin\u2019s charm. Berlin wrote like a friend, but one that will never lie to you; she possessed a graveside-bedside manner. In \u201cSilence,\u201d the character Lucha says, \u201cI don\u2019t mind saying awful things, as long as I can make them funny.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of the things I find so refreshing and revelatory about Lucia\u2019s stories, the way she used autobiography so naturally, so flexibly,\u201d I wrote to Emerson shortly after the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women<\/em>, curious to know more about Berlin\u2019s biography. Even though deep down I knew better. As Berlin herself said in a 1994 interview with Bonnie Tawse published in the journal Sniper Logic<\/em>, \u201cI read biographies incessantly, trying to get the secret: how would they do it \u2026 and I love to see manuscripts, and I\u2019ll read again that they worked from nine in the morning to five at night \u2026 oh God, that\u2019s how they do it! It\u2019s like how do people lose weight? We know how they lose weight, they don\u2019t eat. Writers write<\/em>? They write \u2026 oh God, there must be another way!\u201d<\/p>\n

Emerson\u2019s decades-long friendship with Berlin began in the seventies. She was living in a succession of Oakland and Berkeley apartments then (in Welcome Home<\/em>, in the evocative list titled \u201cThe Trouble with All the Houses I\u2019ve Lived In<\/a>,\u201d she includes eight from that time, among them two evictions and one roof fallen in). Emerson had recently arrived from North Carolina, where he had met Berlin\u2019s friend Robert Creeley at Duke. When Emerson\u2019s book Neighbors<\/em> was released, he remembers, Berlin came to a small celebratory dinner party at a Haitian restaurant in Oakland. \u201c<\/strong>I remember her coming up to me with great delight and saying, in a drawl she sometimes used, \u2018Break out the books\u2026\u2019As if they were champagne. By this time we seemed to be pals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/strong>I know you\u2019re speaking here of the way she used her life,\u201d Emerson responded when I first raised the question of her biography, \u201cbut I think the feeling has to do with the way the stories are written, as well.\u201d I agreed. It was not the actual life material\u2014however tantalizing\u2014but Berlin\u2019s openness to a narrative that often did not follow a traditional arc, to tales that revealed themselves in unusual forms. As a writer perhaps one of her greatest talents, aside from her deceptively breezy voice, those clipped fragments, her extrasensory language, was that she allowed herself to be receptive to the possibility of the story itself.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Reading her stories\u2014the rebellious romance of \u201cLet Me See You Smile,\u201d (a favorite of her friend Barry Gifford\u2019s) or the forthright hospital stories (\u201cMy Jockey,\u201d \u201cEmergency Room Notebook,\u201d \u201cTemps Perdu\u201d), it is hard to think of Lucia Berlin as shy, but apparently she could be. In a video that survives of a reading in Oakland in 1984, shortly before the publication of Phantom Pain<\/em>, she is soft-spoken at the lectern. That trace of anxiety jars with her Elizabeth Taylor beauty, her dramatic brows and ice-blue eyes. \u201cIt was as if she was afraid she was going to screw up, afraid she was going to act like an alcoholic: fall down, spew nonsense, act neurotic,\u201d Emerson, who shared a copy of the video with me, wrote in a note. \u201cVery different from how she was after she got sober.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the stories Berlin read that evening was \u201cThe Pony Bar, Oakland,\u201d which is reprinted in Evening in Paradise<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s a terrific piece, but I left it out [of A Manual for Cleaning Women<\/em>] because I thought it might scare people,\u201d Emerson said. \u201cA small one-page story that sounded kind of hostile and angry, even though it\u2019s also very humorous. I have on occasion regretted not including that one.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story features a narrator who comes from the terrain of tennis, golf, cricket, but gets \u201cdizzy at the sound of a perfect pool break \u2026 the caressing twist twist of chalk on the cue\u201d and a biker covered in tattoos of hinges. In the video, as Berlin reads the final exchange (\u201cYou need a hinge on your neck.\u201d \u201cYou need a screw up your ass\u201d), a little roar erupts from the room and she looks up, surprised and delighted. She cracks a smile. Then she allows herself to laugh with them.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In the end, the master of the fragment left behind a fragmented life story. Berlin lost two novels in her lifetime, one that she burned and later admitted \u201cwas probably pretty good \u2026 a real southern gothic about my terrible childhood and all these awful people.\u201d Another, she told Bonnie Tawse, was stolen in Mexico. No unpublished short stories have emerged since her death, Emerson told me. It was the same way he spoke of her unsparing prose: \u201cLucia wasted nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet her unfinished memoir Welcome Home<\/em> stops abruptly, in 1965, on a scene where her heroin-addicted third husband and great love, Buddy Berlin, is shaking from withdrawal. It ends without so much as a punctuation mark:<\/p>\n

Buddy lay curled up and shaking on the back seat<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Evening in Paradise<\/em>\u2019s short story \u201cLa Barca de la Ilus\u00edon,\u201d fiction permits revenge and deliverance: Berlin\u2019s protagonist is given the satisfaction of watching the drug dealer stalking her addicted husband die. Real life offered no such solace. Perhaps, as Jeff Berlin has suggested, her memory failed her. Perhaps, in memoir, it became simply too much for the writer to bear. Following the story of her own life to its biographical conclusion might not have given her the same level of truth as she found in fiction. As Berlin told Tawse, \u201cI do like feeling that life goes on and this is what happens\u2014life goes on.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rebecca Bengal writes fiction, essays, and long-form journalism and lives in New York City.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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