Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  Is this why it is almost impossible to stop reading a story of Lucia Berlin’s once you begin? Is it because things keep happening? Is it also the narrating voice, so engaging, so companionable? Along with the economy, the pacing, the imagery, the clarity? These stories make you forget what you were doing, where you are, and even who you are.

  “Wait,” begins one story. “Let me explain…” It is a voice close to Lucia’s own, though never identical. Her wit and her irony flow through the stories and overflow in her letters, too: “She is taking her medication,” she told me once, in 2002, about a friend, “which makes a big difference! What did people do before Prozac? Beat up horses I guess.”

  Beat up horses. Where did that come from? The past was maybe as alive in her mind as were other cultures, other languages, politics, human foibles; the range of her reference so rich and even exotic that switchboard operators lean into their boards like milkmaids leaning into their cows; or a friend comes to the door, “her black hair … up in tin rollers, like a kabuki headdress.”

  The past—I read this paragraph from “Panteón de Dolores” a few times, with relish, with wonder, before I realized what she was doing:

  One night it was bitterly cold, Ben and Keith were sleeping with me, in snowsuits. The shutters banged in the wind, shutters as old as Herman Melville. It was Sunday so there were no cars. Below in the streets the sailmaker passed, in a horse-drawn cart. Clop clop. Sleet hissed cold against the windows and Max called. Hello, he said. I’m right around the corner in a phone booth.

  He came with roses, a bottle of brandy, and four tickets to Acapulco. I woke up the boys and we left.

  They were living in lower Manhattan, at a time when the heat would be turned off at the end of the working day if you lived in a loft. Maybe the shutters really were as old as Herman Melville, since in some parts of Manhattan buildings did date from the 1860s, back then, more of them than now, though now, too. Though it could be that she is exaggerating again—a beautiful exaggeration, if so, a beautiful flourish. She goes on: “It was Sunday so there were no cars.” That sounded realistic, so, then, I was fooled by the sailmaker and the horse-drawn cart, which came next—I believed it and accepted it, and only realized after another reading that she must have jumped back effortlessly into Melville’s time again. The “Clop clop,” too, is something she likes to do—waste no words, add a detail in note form. The sleet hissing took me in there, within those walls, and then the action accelerated and we were suddenly on our way to Acapulco.

  This is exhilarating writing.

  Another story begins with a typically straightforward and informative statement that I can easily believe is drawn directly from Berlin’s own life: “I’ve worked in hospitals for years now and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the sicker the patients are the less noise they make. That’s why I ignore the patient intercom.” Reading that, I’m reminded of the stories of William Carlos Williams when he wrote as the family doctor he was—his directness, his frank and knowledgeable details of medical conditions and treatment, his objective reporting. Even more than Williams, she also saw Chekhov (another doctor) as a model and teacher. In fact, she says in a letter to her friend and fellow writer Stephen Emerson that what gives life to their work is their physician’s detachment, combined with compassion. She goes on to mention their use of specific detail and their economy—“No words are written that aren’t necessary.” Detachment, compassion, specific detail, and economy—and we are well on the way to identifying some of the most important things in good writing. But there is always a little more to say.

  * * *

  How does she do it? It’s that we never know quite what is going to come next. Nothing is predictable. And yet everything is also natural, true to life, true to our expectations of psychology and emotion.

  At the end of “Dr. H. A. Moynihan,” the narrator’s mother seems to soften a bit toward her drunk, mean, bigoted old father: “‘He did a good job,’ my mother said.” This is the tail end of the story, and so we think—having been trained by all our years of reading stories—that now the mother will relent; people in troubled families can be reconciled, at least for a while. But when the daughter asks, “You don’t still hate him, do you Mama?” the answer, brutally honest, and in some way satisfying, is “Oh, yes … Yes I do.”

  Berlin is unflinching, pulls no punches, and yet the brutality of life is always tempered by her compassion for human frailty, the wit and intelligence of that narrating voice, and her gentle humor.

  In a story called “Silence,” the narrator says: “I don’t mind telling people awful things if I can make them funny.” (Though some things, she adds, just weren’t funny.)

  Sometimes the comedy is broad, as in “Sex Appeal,” where the pretty cousin Bella Lynn sets off in an airplane toward what she hopes will be a Hollywood career, her bust enhanced by an inflatable bra—but when the airplane reaches cruising altitude, the bra explodes. Usually the humor is more understated, a natural part of the narrative conversation—for instance, about the difficulty of buying alcoholic beverages in Boulder: “The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from DTs just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.” She goes on to inform us that “the best town is Albuquerque, where the liquor stores have drive-through windows, so you don’t even have to get out of your pajamas.”

  As in life, comedy can occur in the midst of tragedy: the younger sister, dying of cancer, wails, “I’ll never see donkeys again!” and both sisters eventually laugh and laugh, but the poignant exclamation stays with you. Death has become so immediate—no more donkeys, no more of so many things.

  * * *

  Did she learn her fantastic ability to tell a story from the storytellers she grew up with? Or was she always attracted to storytellers, did she seek them out, learn from them? Both, no doubt. She had a natural feel for the form, the structure of a story. Natural? What I mean is that a story of hers has a balanced, solid structure and yet moves with such an illusion of naturalness from one subject to another, or, in some stories, from present into past—even within a sentence, as in the following:

  I worked mechanically at my desk, answering phones, calling for oxygen and lab techs, drifting away into warm waves of pussywillows and sweet peas and trout pools. The pulleys and riggings of the mine at night, after the first snow. Queen Anne’s lace against the starry sky.

  And then, her endings. In so many stories, Wham! comes the end, at once surprising and yet inevitable, resulting organically from the material of the story. In “Mama,” the younger sister finds a way to sympathize, finally, with the difficult mother, but the last few words of the older sister, the narrator—talking to herself, now, or to us—take us by surprise: “Me … I have no mercy.”

  * * *

  How did a story come into being, for Lucia Berlin? Johnston has a possible answer: “She would start with something as simple as the line of a jaw, or a yellow mimosa.” She herself goes on to say: “But the image has to connect to a specific intense experience.” Elsewhere, in a letter to August Kleinzahler, she describes how she goes forward: “I get started, & then it’s just like writing this to you, only more legible.” Some part of her mind, at the same time, must always have been in control of the shape and sequence of the story, and the end of it.

  She said the story had to be real—whatever that meant for her. I think it meant not contrived, not incidental or gratuitous: it had to be deeply felt, emotionally important. She told a student of hers that the story he had written was too clever—don’t try to be clever, she said. She once typeset one of her own stories in hot metal on a linotype machine, and after three days of work threw all the slugs back into the melting pot, because, she said, the story was “false.”

  * * *

  What about the difficulty of the (real) material?

  “Silence” is a story she tells about some of the real events she also mentions more briefly to Kleinzahler in a kind of pained shorthand (“Fight
with Hope devastating”). In the story, the narrator’s uncle John, who is an alcoholic, is driving drunk with his little niece in the truck. He hits a boy and a dog, injuring both, the dog badly, and doesn’t stop. Lucia Berlin says, of the incident, to Kleinzahler: “The disillusion when he hit the kid and the dog was Awful for me.” The story, when she turns it into fiction, has the same incident, and the same pain, but there is a resolution of sorts. The narrator knows Uncle John later in his life, when, in a happy marriage, he is mild, gentle, and no longer drinking. Her last words, in the story, are “Of course by this time I had realized all the reasons why he couldn’t stop the truck, because by this time I was an alcoholic.”

  About handling the difficult material, she comments: “Somehow there must occur the most imperceptible alteration of reality. A transformation, not a distortion of the truth. The story itself becomes the truth, not just for the writer but for the reader. In any good piece of writing it is not an identification with a situation, but this recognition of truth that is thrilling.”

  A transformation, not a distortion of the truth.

  * * *

  I have known Lucia Berlin’s work for over thirty years—ever since I acquired the slim, beige 1981 Turtle Island paperback called Angels Laundromat. By the time of her third collection, I had come to know her personally, from a distance, though I can’t remember how. There on the flyleaf of the beautiful Safe & Sound (Poltroon Press, 1988) is her inscription. We never did meet face-to-face, though we nearly did once.

  Her publications eventually moved out of the small-press world and into the medium-press world of Black Sparrow and then, later, of Godine. One of her collections won the American Book Award. But even with that recognition, and hosts of dedicated fans, she had not yet found the wide readership she should have had by then.

  * * *

  I had always thought another story of hers included a mother and her children out picking the first wild asparagus of early spring, but I have found it only, so far, in another letter she wrote to me. I had sent her a description of asparagus by Proust. She replied:

  Only ones I ever saw growing were the thin crayon-green wild ones. In New Mexico, where we lived outside of Albuquerque, by the river. One day in spring they’d be up beneath the cotton woods. About six inches tall, just right to snap off. My four sons and I would gather dozens, while down the river would be Granma Price and her boys, up river all of the Waggoners. No one ever seemed to see them as one or two inch high, only at the perfect height. One of the boys would run in and shout “Asparagus!” just as somebody was doing the same at the Prices’ and Waggoners’.

  I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become as well-known as they should be—their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps now, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.

  * * *

  In closing, I could quote almost any part of any story of hers for contemplation, for enjoyment, but here is one last favorite:

  So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.

  2016

  A Close Look at Two Books by Rae Armantrout

  I. Precedence (1985)

  I begin with a close look at one poem:

  HOME FEDERAL

  A merchant is

  probing for us

  with his chintz curtain

  effect.

  •

  “Ha, ha, you missed me,”

  a dead person says.

  •

  There’s the bank’s

  Colonial balcony

  where no one has

  ever stood.

  “Home Federal” is a compact, clear poem, three stanzas that may or may not cluster around the bank or savings and loan referred to in the title: a bank probes for us, if its special conveniences are not usually chintz curtains, and a bank manager is a dubious sort of merchant; the dead person may be pleased to be out of reach of the enticements of merchants and bank managers; the balcony is almost certainly the balcony of this same bank or savings and loan, but also recalls the many other inaccessible balconies and blind windows and unused doors of American (federal) civic architecture, built to be symbolic as well as functional space.

  The poem opens with a chintz curtain at a window and closes with an un-stepped-on balcony, an illusion of a home beckoning but remaining stubbornly nonutilitarian as a living space. There are three characters in the poem—a merchant, a dead person, and “no one”—or three stages of being: living (though a merchant), dead, and not there.

  The title, “Home Federal,” is presumably part of the name of the bank, probably a savings bank or loan company. But truncated and isolated in its position as title, it reaches out for other contexts as well—which is what Rae Armantrout’s words often do, excised from their more usual context, held up for scrutiny. Just several associations—and it’s interesting to see how one poet’s tone will determine one set of associations and another’s will another, how Robert Frost’s associations around the word “home” could never be shared by Armantrout—might be “home free” in “all-ee all-ee home free”; “home on the range”; “home” in the real estate dealer’s “lovely home”; while “federal” can seem adjectival, qualifying “home” so that we say “home federal” as we would say “Prometheus Unbound,” referring more or less to a home in federal America. None of this imagery is out of place in Armantrout’s work, which draws fully from the well of America and all it has to offer—the American childhood, the American family, the American holiday, the American landscape, the American city, the American culture, American television, and the American language.

  But “home” has also become overridingly ironic, especially once we know Armantrout’s subjects and tone; it appears to be so simple a concept and in fact applies to such an extremely problematic complex of ideals and emotions—and some of the power of Armantrout’s work lies in the fact that she offers this sort of problematic idea without trying to explain it or draw any conclusions from it, so that it remains alive.

  The word “home” appears with the same force and irony in the first line of “Double,” the first poem in Precedence: “So these are the hills of home.” And here, it is the little word “So” that does all the work toward the way we hear “home.” Without it, the irony might drop away and the line might open a different kind of book, with a different tone, one that would say, as Armantrout does not say, that the world is a clear, explicable thing to which we all react with shared and acceptable emotions: “These are the hills of home.”

  In fact, “so” is an excellent word with which to open a book as permeated as this one by the three meanings of “so” that we see in that line: the positing “so,” meaning “in such a way”—“so do we live our lives,” “so is the landscape and the culture”; the climactic and slightly judgmental “so”—“So this is the little son I’ve been hearing about,” “So this is where you grew up,” “So these are the hills of home”; and the concluding “so”—“So this was what it all came to in the end.”

  The word “effect,” when standing by itself and coming after the careful merchant with his chintz, has the same power to ring associations as the word “home” divorced from its more comfortable contexts: we see all possible merchants, agents, managers—workers of a certain level in the American workforce—striving after a special “effect,” as so much of American commercial activity depends on response to “effect” as much as response to real need.

  Armantrout’s use of the phrase “chintz curtain” is slightly different: here she is not freshly creating the ironic overtone, as she does in the words “home,” “federal,” and “effect,” but counting on our familiarity with chintz curtains as a hackneyed symbol of hominess and then putting them in the hands of an artful bank manager (or other merchant). But since they don’t really belong in his hands—he and his type are not the bosomy
housewife associated with chintz curtains in the cliché—he becomes ridiculous in his dislocation and isolation, as do many of Armantrout’s characters.

  The word “merchant” itself, with its slightly archaic ring—“merchants’ guild,” The Merchant of Venice—here, with a hint of mockery, endowing a twentieth-century artful bank manager with the title of a member of the Hanseatic League, identifies his more generic function, makes him also in some sense an absurd historical figure, so that, for us, the man in the window and the word “merchant” borrow from each other an enhanced life.

  A couple of other incongruities create space around the word or image, or dislocate it so that we see it from a different angle:

  “probing”—a word taken from the vocabulary of medicine, and implying delicacy and skill. The slightly ridiculous merchant has the hands of a physician. We think of all the misplaced, wasted skills in the world of American commerce.

  and “Ha, ha, you missed me!”—the language of children, with overtones of meanness and rivalry, but spoken by “a dead person” (a descriptor that could also be heard as childish). The enticements of this homey, Hanseatic banker can at least be avoided by children, because they are unsophisticated, and by the dead, because they are not here anymore, no longer consumers.

  Why “there’s the”? Why that construction, in the last verse—“There’s the bank’s / Colonial balcony”? Nothing in Armantrout’s work is not placed with extreme deliberation, with a view to its “effect,” just as, in her hands, even or especially the most unpicturesque words, like “there” and “so,” become carriers of a wonderful burden of meaning. “There’s the” can be read in both of two ways, depending on where we let the accent fall: the poet is at once showing us certain particular features of the town—there’s the library’s rough stone facing, there’s Woolworth’s red sign, there’s the bank’s Colonial balcony—and listing some damning evidence about America, or America’s commercialism, or commercialism in general, or architecture, of which the bank’s Colonial balcony where no one has ever stood is the strongest.