In Other Words Two new books by Lucia Berlin
Tucked away in Lucia Berlin’s book of autobiographical sketches, is an Easter egg for the Berlin aficionado. It’s a list the fiction writer, who died in 2004, made in the 1980s, titled “The Trouble with All the Houses I’ve Lived In.” Its annotated hardships sum up the way stations of Berlin’s turbulent life — from Alaska and Chile to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, with stints in New York, Mexico, and Oakland thrown in — in all their bohemian decrepitude. Lead Street, Albuquerque, New Mexico—House Edward Abbey had lived in. Only one burner worked. Filthy. Mesa Street by the airport, Albuquerque, New Mexico—Airplanes. Corrales Road, Alameda, New Mexico—No running water, no electricity, no bathroom. Two kids in diapers. Two kids. Berlin’s shorthand is a cryptogram for members of her fan club. (Those ranks have swelled considerably since the publication of the previously unsung writer’s short story collection, A Manual for which the New York Times Book named as one of the Ten Best Books of 2015.) Embedded in her matter-of-fact descriptions are the faint contours of Berlin’s many autobiographical short stories.
It is a gift, then, that Farrar, Straus and Giroux chose to publish Welcome Home concurrently with Evening in Paradise, a collection, selected from a trove of uncompiled Berlin stories, that brings these biographical notes into glittering relief. The stories in hop from El Paso, where Berlin lived with her mother and younger sister during World War II, to Santiago, Chile, where an adolescent Berlin attended cotillions and hosted society gatherings for her father, a bigwig in the mining industry. Several are set in Albuquerque, where Berlin attended the University of New Mexico, studying with Spanish novelist Ramón José Sender, then married and had two sons before her sculptor husband left her.
That event might mark the inciting incident that unleashed the crystalline dysfunction of Berlin’s fiction. is riddled with troubled marriages, providing extreme close-ups of borderline hostile housewives who are saddled with artistic and often absent men. The women knit baby booties and buy receiving blankets at Sears, contorting themselves into the ideal of the slightly beatnik midcentury woman as welcome mat. Here’s the protagonist of “Lead Street, Albuquerque”: “Is there a word opposite of Or a word to describe how I saw my whole future flash before my eyes? I saw that I’d stay at the Albuquerque National Bank and Bernie would get his doctorate and keep on painting bad paintings and making muddy pottery and would get tenure. We would have two daughters and one would be a dentist and the other a cocaine addict. … And I knew that years and years from then Bernie would probably leave me for one of his students and I’d be devastated but then would go back to school and when I was fifty I’d finally do things I wanted to do, but I would be tired.”
In readers are rewarded with a “Lead Street” revelation — the character Berlin based on herself is not the story’s protagonist, but her friend and neighbor Maria, who worships her own sculptor husband, Rex. In the story, Maria’s friend observes, “One winter morning I went to borrow some coffee and she was actually ironing his jockey shorts so they would be warm when he got out of the shower.” In Berlin writes of her first husband, “I held the hot part of the cup and gave him the handle. I ironed his jockey shorts so they would be warm.” Both Maria and Lucia’s spouses make them sleep lying facedown on the pillow in order to correct a turned-up nose.
The true and fictional stories end the same way — the husband, learning of the wife’s second pregnancy, leaves town for a fellowship. Twenty minutes later, his car having broken down, he returns to the house, finding that she has torn down his Mondrian prints and replaced them with an Elvis poster, changed the classical music on the radio to Buddy Holly, put her feet up on the table, lit a cigarette, and let the baby crawl around on the dirty floor. In each case, it is the last time the woman sees her husband for years.
Berlin’s rebellious, radiant stories make it clear that though the author would experience greater depths of despair — an unsuccessful marriage to a jazz pianist, two more sons with a heroin addict, and a lifelong struggle with alcoholism — she never failed to bear witness to beauty. Her characters find transcendence and opportunity amid their grimy environs, as did their author. In Albuquerque, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gerry Mulligan, John Chamberlain, and Stan Brakhage all passed through Berlin’s orbit, and she palled around with poets Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn. The latter became a lifelong friend and eventually brought her to teach at the University of Colorado in the 1990s.
Her observational dissonance extended to all locales. Set in Puerto Vallarta, the story “Evening in Paradise” begins from the perspective of a Mexican bartender, whose thoughts might stand in for those of the itinerant Berlin: “Sometimes years later you look back and say that was the beginning of … or we were so happy then … before … after … Or you think I’ll be happy when … once I get … if we …”
— Molly Boyle