"Women in Their Beds" Gina Berriault

This collection is the last by the highly acclaimed Berriault, a writer's writer - I would never have heard of it without the offices of my first term mfa advisor, Jess Row, himself a dedicated, life-long practitioner of the black art. This one is a real find: I felt a guilty pleasure in reading writing so good and so relatively unknown.

Several things are noticeable about the collection as a whole. Berriault does not alter the basic parameters of her approach all that much from story to story. Almost all of the stories are told from a limited omniscient, close 3rd point of view, all but one in the past tense (there is an epistolary story, a series of diary entries).She has a curious way with narrative distance - for the most part, she fixes a distance between the narrator and protagonist even as she has access to the many, many ruminations of her main characters, but she will freely dip in and write directly as the character (as she does very powerfully at the climax of "Women in Their Beds").

I get a sense that for some characters, especially Angela Anson in the title story, the narrator is almost merged with the protagonist, while for many of the others, the narrator - and the reader - watch them as though in a fish bowl. If there is a pattern, here, it is that the latter characters are usually male, while the former are female. I'm not sure how she effects this, since the grosser parameters (as mentioned above) are not changing.

"Women in Their Beds"

The first story, rather than a plot based on events, has an arc that traces a growing realization on the part of Angela Anson, a young woman who has gotten temporary work (using falsified credentials) as a social worker in a ward for indigent women in a city hospital. As she watches the women in their strange, institutional, and temporary beds, beds they can never make their own, this realization builds and then emerges in the climax of the story, a beautiful and insightful soliloquy. Angela, making ready to lie in her own bed, comes to an understanding of women in the beds in general, and at this moment,  the narrator drops away altogether and Angela addresses the women directly, almost as a prayer to and for those women. She speaks of the central importance of beds in the lives of women, how women come to make them their own, to center their lives around them either as young lovers, mothers (she calls out the troubled bed of Hamlet's mother in particular), and then, later aging matriarchs. And in this moment she reveals an affecting empathy for her would-be audience, these women who can longer lie in beds that are their own, and she reminds them that she herself knows that she may well be in their place one day. "Just remember the beds where you wished you weren't and the beds where you wished you were, and then name any spot on earth that's a bed for some woman at this very hour. A bed of stones and a bed of earth trampled by soldiers and and a bed of ashes, and where you're lying now, where you never wanted to imagine yourselves. If I'd wished for a bed or roses, and I did, I did, now I don't want it so much anymore".

There is another pattern I notice here: that in this story, as in several others, the character moves, almost in haste, from one episode to another, in between, troubled ruminations that create an effect of distance. What is being seen, shown, is disturbing but yet there is no strong felt sense of it. And then there is that moment of empathy and she seems to focus the force of all of the scattered images and thought-streams that have gone before into that powerful moment.

There were two structural devices that caught my eye in reading this piece: the first being the serial episodes with the women she talks to, the story focusing in on only one at a time, women whom Angela can connect either to her own self at an earlier time (a young woman who, like she once did, attempted suicide) or to others in her life (a fifty year old with pink champagne colored hair that recalls her own Aunt Ida whom she could never bring herself to love). The second framing device, much more quiet, acts as a complement that allows the story to avoid feeling too solidly framed around a procession of those episodes with the patients. It is the use of pages to doctors who are characters from fiction. These pages are woven in conspicuously but with a less regular rhythm. Her actor friends who are her co-workers page these fictional doctors to tease each other and call each other out cigarette breaks; but there is also an illumination in the names chosen, the sense that these names reflect how she is being seen in that moment: Paging Dr. Jekyl, then paging Dr. Zhivago, then doctors Caliguri, Mabuse, Freud, and Curie. I thought - quite nice: there is an author, the story has a design, but this musical interweaving of motifs and episodes doesn't make me forget it's a story as much as revel in it and still get drawn into its life.

"Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?"

Berriault is not ready to put the idea of bed down when she gets to this story.

Here, a young man, homeless, appears before a city librarian with a poem by the South American poet Ruben Dario, a poem that challenges its readers to face whatever circumstances they are in with good cheer and appreciation for their own lives. The homeless man demands to know where the poet was lying when he woke up the morning he wrote the poem.He says to the libararian, “I'll bet you wake up in your own bed. That's what I'm saying. What's-his-name wouldn't've thought up that poem if he woke up where he was lying on sidewalk.” 

The perishable constructions of identity pay such a central role in this story I'm tempted to say it would deserve pride of place in any anthology of so-called Buddhist fiction (and I wonder that it is not in such an anthology, actually).

There is a passage remarkably similar to Angela's soliloquy in “Women”. The librarian is nearing the end of his own carefully constructed existence and we have by now been shown the losses, major and minor, that have eaten away at that construction, not the least of which is the loss of his cognitive functions:  There is a certainty in degradation. You can puzzle over lines your whole life and never be satisfied with the meanings you get. Until, slushing onward, you've got, at last, one meaning for sure, because now its time had come, bringing proof by the thousands wherever they were this night in their concrete burrows and dens.


The librarian is both repelled and haunted by the specter of this homeless man who insists on the librarian's being his confederate in determining who or what this bundle of sensations is. In the end, the homeless man is found dead in the library, and as a crowd massed around the body, for the librarian, Humans speaking were unbearable to hear and abominable to see, himself among the rest. Worse, was all that was written down instead, the never-ending outpouring, given print and given covers, given shelves up and down and everywhere in this warehouse of fathomless darkness.

Up until now, I as a reader, have felt the same distance from this material as the librarian himself has felt from his own world, and it may be in this managing of this distance that this story is most powerful. Nothing has hit me emotionally in the story, but it's all vivid and disturbing. And then, the final paragraph, where the librarian has scattered the scraps of paper from the homeless man's pockets onto his desktop and tries to examine them with shaking hands, tore at my heart with surprising force. It was for me the single most powerful moment in the collection.

The narrator now becomes the librarian and asks,  had the fellow hoped to impress upon himself his likeness to other humans? A break-in of a different sort. A young man breaking into a home of his own.


"Soul and Money"

I begin to notice in this story a certain rhythm in Berriault's prose, a pattern of moving from general summary to specific episodes, and then, within those episodes, moving from summary scenes to specific scenes with dialogue, with a great deal of rumination interspersed.

I notice her facility for analepsis, as in this passage that in a sentence, describes the effect on his first son of the loss of his mother: "A Winter evening, Rachel and their little son crossing the icy street, a skidding car, and Rachel leaping to push the boy out of the way. Their son, growing up, wandered the world on his own, barefoot amonth the hordes of India and the hashish squatters of Morrocco, then, regaining himself or an altered self, he'd put himself through law school. A public defender, wearing decent shoes." It is  powerful moment, for it shines a light that reveals a new depth and sorrow in the life of the protagonist, Walter.

Walter was from the hard left and wrote columns for Arise, a newspaper that, for the true believers, was "a prescription nobody went and got filled." When we meet him, he is an apostate, wondering if he hadn't gambled away his life on a bet that could never pay off, his much younger second wife has "at last and yet too soon" taken on a younger lover herself, and Walter, at loose ends, is on his way to Las Vegas, a place he's been to often.

I found myself at this point scribbling questions in the margin: I don't understand, for instance, whether in an episode between Walter and his brother whether I'm supposed to have felt a change in Walter. In the event, I did not, but it's structural placement in the story makes me feel it's a key part of the setup. What I wind up feeling is that he withstands this challenge, hidebound and untouched, but then his meeting with a fellow apostate at the casino, something like two defrocked priests meeting in a veritable brothel, does shock him into a different way of seeing.Walter has thought he could catch the demon money out in its own game and instead, believes he comes to see it as "God's circulatory system". It seems, in the end, he gets a glimpse of the futility of his project in the Casino and flees.


"Lives of Saints"

Brief precis: artist constructs an image of himself as a celibate, spiritual-seeker whose life work is a series of statues of saints. Inconveniently for this image, he does have a child whom he does not acknowledge. The story follows the child, humiliated by his father's denial of his existence, as he visits each of his father's saints in an attempt either to avenge himself on his father by revealing his art for the sham work that is is, or to commune with his father's life work. It seems a bit of both happens. 

This one echos the first two stories in that bedding down, sleeping, becomes a central, repeated element in the story. The boy winds up sleeping near most of the statues, and it's when he wakes up that he's able to dismiss each in turn. There is something mysterious in the climax, after he's heard his father has died, he realizes that he, the living man, is something his father has left that actually has life, that is connected directly to real life and its billions of generations, as opposed to the dead, abstract representations that were his father's statues, artifacts removed from the eternal stream of real, living, cellular life.  "Contrary to that old saw about art being long and life being short, it was the other way around. He lay facedown under the tree and bit off some grass near the roots, chewing to distract his smile, but it would not give in, and so he lay there the entire day, smiling into the earth."

This one is mysterious: I don't kid myself that this scribbled summary in any way captures all or even most of its meanings, and I'm feeling that, despite its comic tone, it will stick, I'll want to revisit and question it again.