Slices from a Hard Life

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. Picador. 403 pp. $17.00. ****1/2

It would seem there should be nothing easier than to do what Lucia Berlin did in a short story career than spanned four decades. Lead an adventurous, somewhat screwed-up life, full of addiction and bad marriages, write up little slices of it, sometimes not apparently changing things at all, and publish them as short stories. It’s the kind of thing that Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver did at one end of the artistic scale, and Charles Bukowski at the other (though I would insist that Bukowski is quite unique, and better than a lot of people give him credit for)[1].

If you think that’s true, just try it, with your own screwed-up life. Write stories and see if anyone wants to read them. See if you even want to read them when you finish. There’s a talent to doing this kind of work—seeing the moments in a life that tell a much larger story—that few people have. I had never actually heard of Lucia Berlin before reading about her in a Dwight Garner column. But I would say now, on the basis of this one book, that I’d put her at the top of this small heap. I like her better than Johnson, Carver, and Bukowski.

I don’t know what separates her from these others. There’s a longing for the sacred in her stories, an ability to see the sacred in even the sordid, that I don’t find in any of them (though other people find it in Johnson. And his writing may be more poetic than Berlin’s). There’s a clear-eyed appreciation of life even at its worst.

But just because her stories do seem so much to be drawn from her life, the biographical note at the end of the volume is important. Her father was in the mining industry, and for that reason they moved around a lot when she was young, and he was often absent, leaving her in the presence of a neglectful and alcoholic mother. She developed scoliosis at the age of ten and had to endure painful therapy, and wear a metal brace. For a period during the Second World War she lived with her grandfather, a dentist and another drunk (a theme is emerging) who also sexually abused her and her sister. After the war her father moved the family to a much more prosperous life in Chile. It was quite the change from Idaho, Kentucky, and El Paso.

She attended the University of New Mexico, and began to move in artistic and literary circles; by the time she was 32, she had been married and divorced three times, to three different artists, and was the single parent of four boys. She worked various kinds of odd jobs to support herself and her boys—including as a cleaning woman—and went through a long period of serious alcoholism. She finally got off booze and became more productive as an artist, publishing her three books with Black Sparrow in the nineties. She spent a couple years early in that decade in Mexico City, where she cared for her dying sister. She died herself in 2004, at the age of 68.

There are stories in this book that have stayed with me for their overwhelming power. There is a very short story about an alcoholic woman waiting for the liquor store to open in the morning, wishing she didn’t have to go there, hardly able to get there, arriving in the presence of a group of skid row bums who know what she is going through, and getting through the day with the use of a pint of vodka, that is as harrowing a story of addiction as I’ve ever read, worse than anything in Denis Johnson or Bukowski.[2] There is a story in which she meets her third husband, and he seems to be a dream come true, takes her and her four boys out of a sordid situation into something much better, loves the boys, deeply loves her, then one day she finds him shooting up in the bathroom. That’s how she discovered he was a heroin addict. There are three stories at least about caring for her sister in Mexico City, not doing much of anything, really, just being with the woman, praying with her, singing with her, becoming re-acquainted after they had been estranged for years. Those are among the sweetest stories in the book.

But there are a host of other stories about those difficult periods of her life, including her manual for cleaning women (she reveals the way cleaning women see a whole other side of the people they work for) and various other poorly paid jobs. What is unusual is not just that the woman writing these stories once lived the high life in Santiago, Chile (that part of her life appears in this volume almost not at all). We seldom hear from a cleaning woman who has this kind of artistic sensibility. She isn’t an artist trying to imagine what it’s like to be a cleaning woman. She’s a cleaning woman who happens to be a sensitive artist.

I keep asking myself what Lucia Berlin has that makes her rise above other short story writers. She writes great sentences, though she is not at all fancy; her style is straightforward and clear. But she unerringly locates the emotional center of her stories, even when virtually nothing happens, when there is no plot at all. That one whole story is about a shaky alcoholic getting a pint of vodka to make it through the day. But it’s heartbreaking. Just that.

I do wish I knew which volume each story comes from, and when it was written, and how the editor—writer Stephen Emerson—chose the order of the stories. I’m wondering how much is left out (a new volume has just been published). But this volume somehow gives the impression of an entire life, a kind of memoir in fragments. It stays with you long after you’ve read it.

[1] The publisher that was founded to publish Bukowski’s work, Black Sparrow Press, also published three books of Berlin’s stories. John Martin had a real eye for talent.

[2] Bukowski seems to be the one person in this quartet who was an unrepentant alcoholic until the end of his life. He knew he had the problem but didn’t seem to care, or didn’t see any chance of changing. There is therefore a kind of humor to his work, the humor of the unrepentant drunk telling stories about his goofy life, that the others don’t have.