by Lucia Berlin
Yes we went to Goodman’s—we had been hectic and nervous and worried about place to live and money and had talked with some friends who were older members of Beat Generation and it was pretty depressing. When we went into their (Goodman’s) house, Jeff went over to Mitch, leaned on him, and smiled and almost fell asleep and that’s the way I felt—it was so calm and we sat around and talked and laughed—too much, just sitting around. Mitch is lovely—such a warm strong person—Denise was a good surprise in every way—much nicer than I had imagined, much less complicated and also nice to be around and talk with. She’s very efficient, which was not a surprise. I wonder at her attitude toward their son—they don’t leave him at night because the building might catch on fire—but otherwise she seems pretty quiet about things—not insistent—which is a pleasure. If there is anything I hate it’s insistence!
Now I am sitting in our window looking at the trees and there are some morning glories on a trellis.
Mark and Jeff really like it here—Mark just because of the boats and trains and other conveyances. He really dug the country and trees and water—was so happy there—but Jeff is a rake, a dandy and N.Y. is his—he seriously believes that the whole scene is for his benefit and is very appreciative and gracious—like Castro from a convertible, he waves and shouts, acknowledging the lights and buildings and pigeons and noise.
What torture your letter of green chilis and piñon nuts! Oh, Ai—the other day I was walking—we never used to walk very much, Race and I, in the country—it’s too much, walking— and I passed by a frozen food plant on a little street and smelled a groovy smell and went inside. Lo and behold, some lady was making 1000s of empanadas with refried beans—so I bought some and they were groovy, only there wasn’t any chili on it.
But the delicatessens and Hero sandwiches—I am going out of my head, so much good food everywhere.
Martinson’s Coffee is 83 cents and we think of you, drinking it.
We think of you all a great lot actually. Please write.
Greenwich Village—too much—like Claude’s, spilling out onto the streets and into cellars with burlap café curtains. But the people, the ponytailed ones and ivy league haircutted men in bulky olive green sweaters—they are young and so hopeful. It’s nice.
Except for the little toy dogs—little poodles and chihuahuas and big weimaraners awful awful. They crap in the street while their owner, not master, waits. Poor dogs, what an indignity to shit in the street.
Heinz—oh that was awful until we went back to Little Falls to get our things and saw him—he is exactly where he should be, guarding a manor-type place rustling around in leaves (It’s Autumn!) and barking and carrying on. The tradespeople are terrified of him. Race’s mother gives him constant attention which he also likes and eggs and steak and chicken livers and broth and stew and chocolate cream cookies and SNACKS all day. He is FAT and shining—looks beautiful and happy.
How about that worthless POT! I should have known—Bobbie Creeley told me it was “extremely valuable.” She also told me that the rat poison had a built-in chemical that made the mice all go outside and die and not smell.
Your job sounds good, Edw.—you like it? What are you writing? Isn’t autumn in Santa Fe fantastic?
I think I’d better wait to write until something happens to tell you, otherwise I will just go on and on. Wish you were all here—we could walk around and go to the pier and DIG things and talk and laugh.
—Love, Lucia
P.S. Mark uses his fist for a phone and calls Fred and Paul and Chanee and then he takes them out of the phone and plays with them. How about TV! Don’t you like Rawhide—Mr. Favor is so good and moral and strong. Mark on the trip, looking out of the back window, kept turning dials pretending to watch television.
1959 [November]
106 West 13th Street,
New York, New York
Dorns
501 Camino Sin Nombre
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Dear Dorns,
How about the chocolate! It is crazy—all wrapped up like a Hershey and then you open it and it’s Mexican crumbly and good—we drank it on a rainy nite. It’s raining here now, drizzling and downpouring—not today but in general. Today is Sunday, shining like a Fred Astaire movie—Marco and Jeff and I walked for blocks, a GAS. Pigeons and a cat sitting in a bowl and the weird selection of people who are up on Sunday morning—especially this morning since it’s daylight savings time but M & J don’t know it yet and are up at 6. Race came home from playing about 7:30 with a Sunday paper and CHEESE DANISHES.
Pretty groovy. We’re relaxing with all the excitement. I DIG N.Y. Really do, after decay and old dying dust of Albuquerque, even the greed and aggressiveness is refreshing.
The wariness is only thing that bugs me—count your change—everyone does that in every way—I see it in everyone here, even the Goodmans, with their friends, let me see your hand first. It’s so much more (positive) to accept or reject all the way, even if you’re wrong.
Home Industry is making it. $90 in one week ($45 each), which is very groovy, since we have orders for more stoles and ponchos and 50 men’s velvet bathrobes (!!!!) and A CAPE, and it is a GAS, to have somebody say design and make a CAPE.
Sewing time is almost nothing and buying time is FUN. I love the stores and storerooms. It has become such a pleasure for me, looking for fabrics—I dig it—the cloth and weaves and colors—the whole scene. Mr. Astrid who saves little pieces, short ends, just to be nice, but still bitches and haggles over the price. Our main retail outlet (!) is GLAD RAGS—a real L.A. type store—jazzy—but not the sophisticated, polished N.Y. jazz—sort of vulgar and pretentious. Marty owns it, and where Santa Fe is run by Claude’s Margaret, Greenwich Village is run by Martys. Caricatures of virility. Magnificent-looking men who fling off their mohair sweaters. “Never was my type, it’s rather cheap.” He’s OK tho, very straight—not much polish etc.—gives us $7.50 for stoles, sells them for $15—but we make $5 so everybody is happy—except his young partner in his mohair sweater who thinks all stoles are cheap and all women are cheap. “Isn’t there something rather cheap,” he says, hanging up some Continental corduroy trousers, “about men who will let themselves have a 34-inch waist?” His name is A. Pompeii, that’s how he signs our orders.
Except for dealing with him, everything is groovy. Most of all because our products are truly nice and pretty. What a ball to walk down street and see them in shop windows.
Hey, I’m glad you met Vlahos. Say hello to him. How do you like job? Sounds very good—in spite of jaded and electric eyes. What of the Nebraska thing?
Max Finstein asked for your address. Apparently many people here have been hearing your taped poems. Max has “contacts” with Noonday—wants to have some of your poems. He’s writing to you anyway.
I’m having lunch with my agent next week. I wish the day wouldn’t come. I think it is so funny to say “I’m having lunch…” I mean it really is.
Was learning how to be a Fashion Model from friend of Denise & Mitch. They think I could make it but doubt if I’ll do it. It is a real Stanislavsky Art. First you believe you are a magnificent, conceited, arrogant, elegant Bitch and when you feel this way your cheeks suck in and your neck juts out and your shoulders drop and your pelvis slouches and your toes point and your umbrella gestures and you look like this:
and they say “Perfect! Hold it,” for half an hour.
Wish you, both, all, would write.
Love, Lucia
P.S. Did you ever read A High Wind in Jamaica (The Innocent Voyage). It’s crazy. He writes about tons of things happening at once or in a sequence like nobody ever could. It is too much, if one is a parent, to read it.
1959 [November]
106 West 13th Street,
New York, New York
Dorns
501 Camino Sin Nombre
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Hi Dorns— Today we went for a walk—Race is gone and we are aimless. Nothing
for us to do but hang around. I MISS him so we walk in spite of the rain and today we went to Lower East Side and with the rain and being aimless it was very sad and depressing. Soggy pushcarts.
We came back tired, so tired we stopped to rest, in a restaurant.
Sat down at a table and waited politely. An elderly man in black with silver hair and foreign accent came up and said,
“What is it you wish?”
“Coffee with cream. Two milks, no, one milk and two glasses, and some kind of donuts.”
“Blueberry muffins?”
“Yes, fine, thank you,” I said.
He came back with a tray and poured the milks, undid the paper from around the muffins, lit my cigarette, and said, “That will be forty cents.” All I had was 50 so I gave it to him murmuring, “Keep the change.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, and he went over to another table, picked up his umbrella and put on a bowler hat and left, bowing to us. We were in a cafeteria!
Flower stores are pushing wheat, orange berries, yellow and brown mums, and deep rust asters and in the back are these gentle violet spring flowers. They are heather. Have you ever seen HEATHER?
Race wrote, such a crazy letter, and it sounds good, his gig, if only because it is such a GAS. They broadcast every night from the Persian Terrace of the Syracuse Hotel with 4 trombones playing “Shine on Harvest Moon” and those revolving domes of broken mirrors in the middle of the ballroom. Ferns.
A customer dug one of the capes in our major retail outlet so much she ordered 2 more—which was crazy—altho last 2 checks from major retail outlet bounced, leaving us hung for $90. He’s going bankrupt. He paid for last order by trading for a suit with a fur collar—just like Proust’s.
What about Nebraska and the long-named lady? What’s happening? Hey H., it would be groovy to get another long letter.
Mark calls you all the time, you five and Mary Lou and Lourdes and LeRoy and Pete. They are the people I miss too.
I can’t think of anything else to say!
Love, Lucia
February 5, 1960
106 West 13th Street,
New York, New York
Dorns
501 Camino Sin Nombre
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Dear Helene,
Keep waiting for spirits enough to write you a letter, don’t come so I will just tell you how fine it was to get your good letter, to hear about your happy birthday and the birds, and (damn!) New Mexico, that sounds pretty good nonetheless. Hey, it is really great that you know about sleet storms. How come we never talked about them? The drawing of Fred, I love very much the way it is done, clear and lightly and with all of his tenderness, like when he looks as if he were just going to cry or to laugh. I miss them, we all miss your children very much.
I would like to talk to you, with you. Things here not so very good at all. No work and we have been living on unemployment. Race is very worried and tense. It is taking all of the little strength I have, it’s as if this is the last play I can make, to make it by trying not to be petty, not to feel guilty or put down or jealous or inadequate. What have I been doing, fucking around all my life? It was only a few months ago, maybe weeks, that I began to learn about loving, about love. Now I’m suddenly understanding marriage and how lightly I treated it, and how hard it is (and simple).
There is a lot of pettiness around here. Lots and lots of downright cutthroat badness, mostly in the gig scene, but mostly pettiness. For a while it seemed that it was all revolving around Creeley, that everyone was dropping his name and their grievances. And suddenly I realized that I had done so too. Once when I was very little in the Grand Canyon there was a waitress with a huge tray of coffee in cups walking across the restaurant. One of the cups fell and smashed on the floor and she sort of looked up at heaven and said oh hell and tossed the whole tray onto the floor and split. That is what I do all the time. I felt so sorry for having said anything about Bob behind his back that I decided to say it to his face. So I wrote a horrid letter with all the awful things I could think of, and as you know, I could support none of them. I hurt him badly and disgusted him and myself. I think I more or less learned something else. I could think all those things about Bob, but never did they ever have anything to do with who he was, the very fine things that I respect in him and love him for. I had not realized how simple it is to destroy things. I keep trying to think of that thing of a man is his deeds and that this is not true. In a way, the point is which of the deeds are the man. Damn, I swore never to write you a bugged letter. But that is mostly what I am thinking about.
Spent the morning, a balmy day, with the Goodmans, and it was very great. Somehow a lot of the time we had talked about personal things, it’s impossible to be straight or personal about things. Yesterday was very groovy, everybody was finding how many things there were to dig and see and hear about. It was very nice and happy.
Spend a lot of time in this secondhand bookstore, The Blue Faun, where I found The Purple Land, and where I am trying to find the autobiography. “It’s light blue and torn on the bottom,” the guy says. He can’t see … hardly at all and knows all the books by the cover. He has an opinion about all of them, and everything, and I found out because he insisted that I buy his book. He is Guerney, the Russian translator. “They are beginning to rediscover me again.” Now I can see why Nabokov can say he is the only translator of Russian … because he is a boor. A buffoon. He is exactly like father Karamazov. He is probably the most literal person I have ever known, he boasts of translating Lorca without knowing a word of Spanish etc. I am impressed and it is nice because it is such a good example of what we were discussing about translators. And it isn’t even to get the “spirit” in addition to the words, this guy does that very well, I am sure. His grand inquisitor gives a much more blunt and “Russian” type sense, but it is not beautiful. He is pretty great to talk to, tho. He is conceited and dogmatic and stomps his foot and is ridiculous, and here is the deed thing too. God, he loves to read, he loves Russian and the things he translates, and the books he pushes … “If you like Hudson you’ll like this, buy this … No, oh what a fool!” he says and he is actually very sad and upset.
The poems are of course translations. And as for the novel, they paid a down payment on an option for the pages (once revised for the ninetieth time) of the one you had. They have read it but not as an “official” submission, since the ruddy thing isn’t finished and I hate it and maybe never will. But anyway, they dig it and say they will buy it, so why don’t I finish it or submit a complete enough outline ending and enough pages, so they can give me another advance. They and the agent keep writing about when we’re going to have lunch to talk about it, since it is a real cinemascope Tab Hunter on a horse in the wind type scene, about movie rights etc. I am back to where I started with it, and don’t want to send them more, even for the damn money, because at this point, that’s all I would send it for. So I’m starting it over, adding to almost every page. The nice thing is that most of the stuff that’s down I dig very much. The sad thing is that I wrote it when I was, well hell, yes, when I had a hell of a lot of joy in my ruddy heart, when I could write about all these characters and really feel kind toward them and care about what they would be doing in the next paragraph or how they would think something was funny or beautiful. Now when I try to go on with it I can’t do it. I have looked at myself for too long. So I’m looking around, trying to, and as I said, it is very hard to do it straight in the eye.
I saw Children of Paradise, did you?
Love, Lucia
February 6, 1960
106 West 13th Street,
New York, New York
Dorns
501 Camino Sin Nombre
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Dear Edw.,
The past few weeks I have written so many letters—some of them unfortunately I sent but can’t remember if I told you how great it was to get the poem. We both really
dug it. Delicately sure—beautiful.
Love, Lucia
* * *
(Four days later)
Dear Ed,
I would like very badly to talk to you. I think of you with a visual image, of clarity.
Honesty and all that jazz. How to be, I wish to be flippant now. Here, this is what has happened—Little, Brown and I are signing a contract—$250 to have first option on my novel—which they haven’t read, only five stories—$250 is to read it and publish the whole thing if they want (for $1000s or something more). If they don’t want it, I get to keep $125 (half) anyway.
I am so miserable. I have never been so afraid and unhappy—maybe you will see why. One is the mercantile ring of it—the business deal (which is a gas) with my stories, but with my novel it hurts that they should pay even before reading. Even before it is written. The other is that I am committed now to write it and I am afraid. I reread what I have done so far and read it in terms of what I think other people would like and I hate it, and reading it in terms of what I wish I had been able to say, I hate it even more.
This is what I have so longed for. A receipt—an acceptance, a justification—“I am a writer.” I am so ashamed. I forgot about the writing. But more than that—it’s as if I had been insisting that I was, even in my apologetic way, and now I have been taken up on it. Ed, do you see, it is a glorious thing, the permission for a commitment, in myself. Please understand this, that now I have to admit to myself that this is what I am going to do, all the way.
I’m completely incoherent. Nothing ever has hit me quite so hard, morally. Because you see, I believe, as I once wrote to you, that I am a writer, that I am not an amateur. I even believe that I am a good one. But the fact that I was not proud of anything I had done was unimportant, the writing was the important part. Now something has been demanded of me—now I must demand something of myself, my writing.
Oh, can you possibly see how marvelous and terrifying this is for me? I never had the faith, to write as an artist, as a writer must, to simply write, because I am too vain. Now that someone else has said, OK, you are a writer, I must begin at the beginning with the FAITH. I have to begin. Oh gosh, goddamn I wish you both were here. Race is on way to Syracuse again and I won’t be able to call him for 2 days. Goodmans don’t like me, Maggie likes $ and would simply think it crazy and would not see what is happening. I hope you do.
