by Lydia Davis
It takes one sort of linguistic sensitivity to stay close to the original in a pleasing way, another to bring a certain inventiveness to one’s choices without being unfaithful. Ashbery’s ingenuity is evident at many moments in the book, and an especially lovely example occurs in the same poem: he has translated Qu’on me loue enfin ce tombeau, blanchi à la chaux as “Let someone finally rent me this tomb, whited with quicklime.” Here, his “whited with quicklime” (rather than “whitewashed,” the choice of all the other translations I found) at once exploits the possibilities of assonance and introduces the echo of the King James “whited sepulchre” without betraying the meaning of the original.
The translations of some of the poems in this book have appeared previously in literary journals one by one over the past two years or so—evidently done slowly over time, as translations ought to be, especially of poems, and especially of these poems, given their extreme compression, their tonal and stylistic shifts, their liberating importance in the history of poetry. We are fortunate that John Ashbery has turned his attention to a text he knows so well, and brought to it such care and imaginative resourcefulness.
2011
Young Pynchon
The books I’m thinking about today, of Thomas Pynchon’s, are the smaller, earlier ones: The Crying of Lot 49 and Slow Learner, the collection of stories written when he was very young—four when he was still in college. I am curious to see how he writes particularly when he is just beginning, rawly instilled with his influences and full of a heady sense of a smart college boy’s power over language. All of these stories were published in magazines—one in The Kenyon Review and one in The Saturday Evening Post—and he is indeed a very impressive writer for that age. The stories are well structured; the characters are present, if not very fully realized or deeply sympathetic; the details believable; and the vocabulary rich, wide-ranging, and well used. The characters are mostly men and boys, with occasional appearances in secondary roles by such females as “coeds,” mothers, “chicks,” and “brown-haired beauties.” The situations for several of the stories draw upon life in the army and/or the navy, while the last one centers on a gang of schoolboy practical jokers. The language is casually tough: “lousy,” etc. There are the tics of a young writer, such as an overuse of explanatory verbs in dialogue—something that carries over, too, into Crying (“remembered Oedipa,” “squinted Di Presso,” “allowed Di Presso,” “Metzger explained”)—and there are skilled epithets and descriptions (“When he spoke it was with a precise, dry Beacon Hill accent”), colorful names, and economical dialogue (“He went over to where Picnic was eating and said, ‘Guess what.’ ‘I figured,’ Picnic said”).
What is interesting is the complex position of the author/narrator in relation to the book, characters, language itself, and reader at this stage in Pynchon’s writing career. With both books, he is working in the traditional mode: author adopts persona of narrator (third person omniscient) narrating in a certain tone and vocabulary the events of a collection of characters. In the stories, the author/narrator stays more in the background, less noticeable for his verbal flair; the illusion of some sort of familiar but alternative reality is maintained. In The Crying of Lot 49 he comes more to the fore, and we are constantly aware of the clever narrator and, through or behind him, the playful author, partly because of the easy mix of highly educated vocabulary (“annular corridor,” “radial aisles,” “moue”) with pop-cultural references (Road Runner), and especially because of his clever punning in the naming of his characters: we know we are not being asked to believe in a woman named Oedipa Maas or a man named Stanley Koteks, and our attention is distracted from the story to the artifice and artificer. What is shared by the two books is a sense of tight control by the author over the characters, the language, the book, and probably the reader. Sometimes the control is achieved through his mastery of a graceful prose style or an appealing notion (“Creaking, or echoing, or left as dark-ribbed sneaker-prints in a fine layer of damp, the footsteps of the Junta carried them into King Yrjö’s house, past pier glasses that gave them back their images dark and faded, as if some part were being kept as the price of admission”): here is control by persuasion. Sometimes, on the other hand, the young author goes beyond eloquence to a kind of hyper-eloquence that becomes a display of power over language itself that perhaps borders on control by coercion.
I chose to read the stories before reading the introduction by Pynchon himself (beyond the first sentences explaining how old the stories were: they were more than twenty years old at the time they were collected, and that publication is now twenty years in the past, so we are looking at stories well back in time). The introduction is fairly substantial and perhaps preempts our own reaction to the stories if we read it first, as perhaps it is meant to. Because of the existence of such an extensive introduction, in fact, we have, in this book, the author explicitly in the foreground as well as implicitly in the background, behind the narrator. If we wonder about the dominance of male characters in the stories, the men being powerful doers, the women mostly decorative and/or useful to the men (the coed serving food, the ballet dancer with frostbitten toes), which tends to some degree to exclude or daunt a fully sympathetic female readership, Pynchon himself explains it in part by naming the very male roster of some of his influences in those days: Eliot, Hemingway, Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer.
If we look for more than mere competence or even skill in these young stories, if we look for the fresh experience or the transcendent image that holds promise for the future of the young writer, we are regularly rewarded, as in this image from the last story in his collection, “The Secret Integration”: “Each lot was only fifty by a hundred feet, nowhere near the size of the old Gilded Age estates, real ones, that surrounded the old town the way creatures in dreams surround your bed.”
A rather appealing specimen of early Pynchon, “The Secret Integration” was first published in The Saturday Evening Post more than forty years ago (one year after V. appeared) and places its gang of schoolboy jokesters in a setting rich in possibilities for the childish imagination: an old town with a new development, a sprawling estate with a derelict mansion, a natural landscape open to exploration, a downtown complete with a seedy hotel. In a deftly described scene, the boys coast on their bikes down a long hill in the early evening toward the hotel, “leaving behind two pages of arithmetic homework and a chapter of science” as well as “a lousy movie, some romantic comedy” on TV. Because all the televisions in town receive only one channel, the boys, as they fly by, can follow the progress of the movie from house to house, through doors and windows “still open for the dark’s first coolness,” as it advances.
In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon remarks rather diffidently that he likes more than he dislikes the story. In fact, it is so likable that one envies the boys their comfortable society and the fields, streams, street corners, and alleyways of their games. Their collaboration and apportioning of assignments is charming—develop an arsenal for sabotaging the railroad, enlist malcontent first-graders for destroying the boys’ latrine, infiltrate PTA meetings. The elaborateness of their schemes is impressive, as are some of their successes, and the animation of the central character, Grover, the boy genius, particularly savory, with his enormous vocabulary, fund of information, and flights of hilarity.
The pranks they plan are potentially devastating to the community, yet, as Pynchon lets us know, the boys would never actually take “any clear or irreversible step” because “everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody’s mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.” There is a quiet lyrical humanity in this story, an almost unapologetic gentleness, inviting and inclusive, that contrasts wit
h the weightier complex pessimism and bravado of the later novels, in which perhaps it is more difficult for the characters to go home and be comforted at the end of the day.
2005
The Story Is the Thing: Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women
Lucia Berlin’s stories are electric; they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch. And in response, the reader’s mind, too, beguiled, enraptured, comes alive, all synapses firing. This is the way we like to be when we’re reading—using our brains, feeling our hearts beat.
Part of the vibrancy of Lucia Berlin’s prose is in the pacing—sometimes fluent and calm, balanced, ambling and easy; and sometimes staccato, notational, speedy. Part of it is in her specific naming of things: Piggly Wiggly (a supermarket), Beenie-Weenie Wonder (a strange culinary creation), Big Mama panty hose (a way to tell us how large the narrator is). It is in the dialogue. What are those exclamations? “Jesus wept.” “Well, I’m blamed!” The characterizations—the boss of the switchboard operators says she can tell when it’s close to quitting time by the behavior of Thelma: “Your wig gets crooked and you start talking dirty.”
And there is the language itself, word by word. Lucia Berlin is always listening, hearing. Her sensitivity to the sounds of the language is always awake, and we, too, savor the rhythms of the syllables, or the perfect coincidence of sound and sense. Another switchboard operator, this one angry, moves “with much slamming and slapping of her things.” At another moment, in a different story, Berlin describes the cries of the “gawky raucous crows.” In a letter she wrote to me from Colorado in 2000, the language was just as vital: “Branches heavy with snow break and crack against my roof and the wind shakes the walls. Snug though, like being in a good sturdy boat, a scow or a tug.” (Hear those monosyllables, and that rhyme.)
* * *
Her stories are also full of surprises: unexpected phrases, insights, turns of events, and humor, as in “So Long,” whose narrator is living in Mexico and speaking mostly Spanish, and comments a little sadly, “Of course I have a self here, and a new family, new cats, new jokes. But I keep trying to remember who I was in English.”
In “Panteón de Dolores,” the narrator, as child, is contending with a difficult mother—as she will in several more stories:
One night after he had gone home she came in, to the bedroom where I slept with her. She kept on drinking and crying and scribbling, literally scribbling, in her diary.
“Are you okay?” I finally asked her, and she slapped me.
In “Dear Conchi,” the narrator is a wry, smart college student:
Ella, my roommate … I wish we got along better. Her mother mails her her Kotex from Oklahoma every month. She’s a drama major. God, how can she ever play Lady Macbeth if she can’t relax about a little blood?
Or the surprise can come in a simile—and her stories are rich in similes:
In “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” she writes, “Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue.”
She goes right on to another, even more surprising comparison: “He was like the Berkeley dump.”
And she is just as lyrical describing a dump (whether in Berkeley or in Chile) as she is describing a field of wildflowers:
I wish there was a bus to the dump. We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs.
Always embedding the stories in a real physical world is just this kind of concrete physical imagery: the trucks “thunder,” the dust “billows.” Sometimes the imagery is beautiful; at other times, it is not beautiful but intensely palpable: we experience each story not only with our intellects and our hearts but also through our senses. The smell of the history teacher, her sweat and mildewed clothing, in “Good and Bad.” Or, in another story, “the sinking soft tarmac … the dirt and sage.” The cranes flying up “with the sound of shuffling cards.” The “Caliche dust and oleander.” The “wild sunflowers and purple weed” in yet another story; and crowds of poplars, planted years before in better times, thriving in a slum. She was always watching, even if only out the window (when it became hard for her to move): in that same letter to me from Boulder, magpies “dive-bomb” for the apple pulp—“quick flashes of aqua and black against the snow.”
A description can start out romantic—“the parroquia in Veracruz, palm trees, lanterns in the moonlight”—but the romanticism is cut, as in real life, by the realistic Flaubertian detail, so sharply observed by her: “dogs and cats among the dancers’ polished shoes.” A writer’s embrace of the world is all the more evident when she sees the ordinary along with the extraordinary, the commonplace or the ugly along with the beautiful.
She credits her mother, or one of her narrators does, with teaching her that observant eye:
We have remembered … your way of looking, never missing a thing. You gave us that. Looking.
Not listening though. You’d give us maybe five minutes, to tell you about something, and then you’d say, “Enough.”
The mother stayed in her bedroom drinking. The grandfather stayed in his bedroom drinking. The girl heard the separate gurgling of their bottles from the porch where she slept. This was in a story, but maybe also in reality—or the story is an exaggeration of the reality, so acutely witnessed, so funny, that even as we feel the pain of it, we have that paradoxical pleasure in the way it is told, and the pleasure is greater than the pain.
* * *
Lucia Berlin based many of her stories on events in her own life. One of her sons said, after her death, “Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes.”
Although people nowadays in literary circles talk, as though it were a new thing, about the form of fiction known in France as auto-fiction (“self-fiction”), the narration of one’s own life, lifted almost unchanged from the reality, selected and judiciously, artfully told, Lucia Berlin has been doing this, or a version of this, as far as I can see, from the beginning, back in the 1960s. Her son went on to say, “Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.”
For the sake of balance, or color, she changed whatever she had to, in shaping her stories—details of events and descriptions, chronology. She admitted to exaggerating. One of her narrators says, “I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don’t actually ever lie.”
Certainly she invented. For example, Alastair Johnston, the publisher of one of her early, small-press collections, reports the following conversation he had with her: “I love that description of your aunt at the airport,” he said to her, “how you sank into her great body like a chaise.” Her answer was: “The truth is … no one met me. I thought of that image the other day and as I was writing that story just worked it in.” In fact, some of her stories were entirely made up, as she explains in an interview. A person could not think he knew her just because he had read her stories.
* * *
Her life was rich and full of incident, and the material she took from it for her stories was colorful, dramatic, and wide-ranging. The places she and her family lived in her childhood and youth were determined by her father—where he worked in her early years, then his going off to serve in World War II, and then his job when he returned from the war. Thus, she was born in Alaska and grew up first in mining camps in the west of the United States; then lived with her mother’s family in El Paso while her father was gone; then was transplanted south into a very different life in Chile, one of wealth and privilege, which is portrayed in her stories about a teenage girl in Santiago, about Catholic school there, about political turbulence, yacht clubs, dressmakers, slums, revolution. As an adult she continued to lead a restless life, geographically, living in Mexico, Arizona,
New Mexico, New York City; one of her sons remembers moving about every nine months as a child. Later in her life she taught in Boulder, Colorado, and at the very end of it she moved closer to her sons, to Los Angeles.
She writes about her sons—she had four—and the jobs she worked to support them, often on her own. Or, we should say, she writes about a woman with four sons, and jobs like her jobs—cleaning woman, ER nurse, hospital ward clerk, hospital switchboard operator, teacher.
She lived in so many places, experienced so much—it was enough to fill several lives. We have, most of us, known at least some part of what she went through: children in trouble, a rapturous love affair; or early molestation, struggles with addiction, a difficult illness or disability, an unexpected bond with a sibling; or a tedious job, difficult fellow workers, a demanding boss; or a deceitful friend; not to speak of awe in the presence of the natural world—Hereford cattle knee-deep in Indian paintbrush, a field of bluebonnets, a pink rocket flower growing in the alley behind a hospital. Because we have known some part of it, or something like it, we are right there with her as she takes us through it.
* * *
Things actually happen in the stories—a whole mouthful of teeth gets pulled at once; a little girl gets expelled from school for striking a nun; an old man dies in a mountaintop cabin, his goats and his dog in bed with him; the history teacher with her mildewed sweater is dismissed for being a Communist—“That’s all it took. Three words to my father. She was fired sometime that weekend and we never saw her again.”