Some must endanger the life of the postman or watch the flame from a lantern set fire to a curtain just to feel alive. These wives hold the hot part of the cup when they pass the men their coffee, they iron their underwear so it’s warm when they wake up, but their pent-up frustration is never far from the surface. Time and again in Evening in Paradise, we encounter bohemian men who talk about poetry, jazz and painting but keep their wives stuck in crushing domestic routines.
But these comparisons don’t do justice to the wily humour she developed in dealing with a generation of male artists deeply invested in maintaining male status. It’s clear from her rather batty letters that Berlin’s mind was always skipping ahead and reversing on itselfīerlin is now often held up alongside her male coevals – and fellow alcoholics – Raymond Carver and Richard Yates, so-called “dirty realists”, who cast cold, appraising eyes at the underbelly of American life. Her stories were published by small journals and university presses from the 1960s to the 1980s, but her name remained a secret literary handshake among devotees such as Saul Bellow and Lydia Davis. She lived variously in Texas, Chile, New Mexico and New York, tried every kind of job from cleaner to university professor and experienced both wealth and poverty. She was married three times – to a work-obsessed sculptor, an uncommunicative jazz pianist and a charming drug addict – and had four sons before the age of 30. Evening in Paradise is a collection of 22 more raw, elliptical, devilishly funny tales that draw on her own precarious, peripatetic life.
Berlin died in 2004 and became something of a literary sensation in 2015 when 43 of her 77 stories were anthologised in A Manual for Cleaning Women.
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