[In the following interview, Berriault discusses her writing and motivation.]

Gina Berriault has been writing stories, novels, and screenplays for more than three decades. Best known and most honored as a short story writer, she has published two volumes of stories, The Mistress and Other Stories (1965) and The Infinite Passion of Expectations: Twenty-Five Stories (1982). Called "exquisitely crafted," and "without exception, nearly flawless," her stories are remarkable for their subtle craft and the variety of characters, settings, and subject.

Her first novel, The Descent (1960), is about a Midwestern college professor appointed the first Secretary for Humanity, a Cabinet position designed to help prevent nuclear war. A plea for disarmament, The Descent depicts politicians militarizing the economy, harassing dissidents and promoting theories of winnable nuclear wars. Conference of Victims (1962), her second novel, explores the effects of the suicide of Hal Costigan on his family and mistress. The Son (1966), Berriault's third novel, is the account of the devastating effects of a woman's dependence on men for meaning in her life. This need to attract men eventually leads to a disastrous seduction of her teenage son. Her fourth novel, The Lights of Earth (1984), focuses on Ilona Lewis, a writer whose sense of self is undermined by the end of her relationship with a lover who has recently become a celebrity. Initially feeling unmoored, Ilona is finally drawn back into the world by the death of her brother, whom she has neglected.

In response to critics who have referred to Berriault's stories as "miniatures" or "watercolors," Berriault has said, "whenever I was referred to as a miniaturist or a watercolorist, I wondered if those labels were a way of diminishing a woman's writing. I believe that, now, because of the feminist movement, no reviewer would use those comparisons without hesitation." She added, "I hope my stories reveal some depths and some strengths, but if those virtues are not to be found in my work, then at least the intentions and the effort ought to call up a comparison with 12′ × 12′ acrylic."

Berriault also rejects any category more limited than "writer," saying, "I found my sustenance in the outward, the wealth of humankind everywhere, and do not wish to be thought of as a Jewish writer or a feminist writer or as a California writer or as a left-wing writer or categorized by any interpretation. I found it liberating to roam wherever my heart and my mind guided me, each story I've ever written."

Although she has received many fellowships and awards, is currently under contract with Pantheon for another story collection, and The Infinite Passion of Expectation has been called "the best book of short stories by a living American writer," we believe that Berriault's work has yet to receive the attention it deserves.

We talked with Gina Berriault in the Sausalito apartment of her daughter, Julie Elena. Although she was initially reticent about talking about herself and her work, her comments have the same honesty, depth, and humanity as her fiction.

[Lyons and Oliver:] How do you think your childhood reading affected you as a writer?

[Berriault:] That little girl who was me was a restless spirit, confined in a classroom and yearning to be out and roaming, either in the landscape or in her own imagination, and that restlessness was channeled into reading. I read more books than any other student in grammar school, roaming everywhere the persons in the stories roamed; I was those persons. Among the earliest books was Water Babies (that one belonged to the family across the alley and I remember climbing in through their kitchen window when they were away on vacation, reading it over and over, sitting on the floor in a corner) and George McDonald's great-hearted books, especially At the Back of the Northwind about a poor family and their love for one another. That deepened me. I began to know who I was, and that kids in poor families were worthy of books about them. And A. A. Milne, who wakened in me a delight in dialogue, an intuitive ear for what goes on between us and our beloved small animals—conversations of pretend naivete and subtle wit, that can make a child feel she knows more than adults think she knows. And later, in the novels of I. Zangwill, who wrote about Jewish families in Europe, I found a secret kinship, and I found that Jewish persons were worthy of being in novels. No one, all through my school years (except for a teacher who must have felt a kinship with Hitler) suspected that I was Jewish, and I must have been one-of-a-kind in that small California town. An insatiable reader, I began early to write my own stories, because, when you find yourself enthralled by their marvelous manipulation of language, when you find your wits sharpened, your heart stirred, your conscience revealed, then those writers become your guardian angels. They bring you to see your own existence as valuable—why else would they write their stories for you?—and they seem to be giving you their blessing to write your own. They seem to be blessing all children, even those who can't read a word.

Do you remember how you actually began writing?

My father was a free-lance writer for trade magazines and he had one of those old, stand-up-high typewriters. So I began to write my stories on it.

So you began writing when you were very young?

Yes, I began to write on that typewriter when I was in grammar school. I also wanted to be an artist and an actress. A drama teacher in high school offered to pay my tuition to an excellent drama school, but just at that time my father died and it was necessary for me to support my mother, brother, and sister. I never had any formal training as a writer, either.

Do you remember anything specific about how you taught yourself to write?

I simply wrote and wrote, and I was an avid reader. One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and then I'd type out a beautiful and moving paragraph or page and see those sentences rising up before my eyes from my own typewriter, and I would think "Someday maybe I can write like that."

You mean you'd type the words of someone else's story?

Yes, to see the words coming up out of my typewriter. It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for that sentence and that paragraph to be and arouse the same feeling. The someone whose words were rising from that typewriter became like a mentor for me. And when I went on with my own work, I'd strive to attain the same qualities I loved in that other person's work. Reading and writing are collaborations. When you read someone you truly love, their writing reaches your innermost self. You're soulmates.

How old were you when you did that experiment with your father's typewriter?

In my teens. I did it a few times. You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own.

Could you talk a bit more about how you began writing and publishing?

My experiment with my father's typewriter was going on at the same time I was writing my own stories. Rejection cards and letters with hastily scribbled encouragement helped to convince me that I existed. I remember a letter from an elegant, slick magazine, asking me to make a change or two and offer the story again. I did that, and when it was returned I cried for hours. By that time my parents had lost their house and the orange tree and the roses, and I wanted to earn enough with my writing to buy a farm for them. (I'd always wanted to live on a farm.) My father died before I could be of any help to him with my stories.

Elsewhere you mentioned that your mother began to go blind when you were fourteen. Could you talk about how that affected you as a person and as a writer?

As I wrote in my essay for Confidence Women, my blind mother sat by her little radio, listening to those serial romances and waving her hand before her eyes, hoping to see it take shape out of the dark. That could be a metaphor for my attempt to write, hoping to bring forth some light from out of the dark. I haven't yet.

How much formal education did you have?

After high school I took over my father's job. Then after work I'd roam through the Los Angeles public library and pick out whatever names or titles intrigued me. Having no mentor to guide me through that libráry, I just found writers by myself.

Do you regret not having a mentor?

My father was mentor for my spirit, I can say, and there were others from whom I learned about the world. I regret not having a formal, organized education. I wish I'd studied world history, philosophy, comparative literature, and I wish I'd learned several languages. Really, there is no excuse for my lack of those attainments, of that intellectual exploring, except as it is with every unschooled person—the circumstances of each one's life.

You don't say you regret not having gone through a creative writing program. Suppose a young writer wrote to you and said, "I admire your work and I want to write, Should I get a degree in creative writing?" What would you say?

I'd tell that person to learn more about everything, to rove, to be curious, and to read great writers from everywhere. If there's a true compulsion to write, a deep need, that person will write against all odds. And if that person enters a creative writing program, it would be for the purpose of learning how to shape what's already known and felt. Sometimes, when I taught workshops, I was glad I hadn't subjected myself to the unkind criticism of strangers. There's so much competitiveness, concealed and overt, among those who want to be writers and those who are writers. In Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life he speaks about poets' desperate longing to be remembered, to be immortal. I think that concept of immortality is long past, long gone from our consciousness. Such immense change going on in the world, so much that will be irretrievable. So now the vying with one another is only for present gain. When I asked the students if they'd read this-or-that great writer, most had read only contemporary writers, and if the ads and the reviews praised those writers, the students accepted that evaluation. Ivan Bunin, for example, has been almost forgotten, and what a writer he was!

Speaking of contemporary writers, whose work do you admire?

Nabokov, Primo Levi, Jean Rhys—aren't they contemporary still? And to go a little further back, but still within my view contemporary, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, Bunin. They are my first and last deep loves. I liked Raymond Carver's first collection best. Those stories were like underground poetry. He must have felt that the reader possessed an intuitiveness like his own, and picked up on the meaning, just as with poetry.

Isn't that a way of taking your reader as equal?

And when you take the reader as your equal, your work isn't affected or false. You establish that collaboration, that shared intuitiveness.

In your career there's a big gap between The Son and The Infinite Passion of Expectation. Why?

That's a question that should never be asked. It opens a wound. What can a writer say about gaps and silence? The question can't be answered because the answer involves the circumstances of a lifetime and the condition of the psyche at one time and another. How can a writer possibly answer it without the shame of pleading for understanding of one's confusions and limitations and fears? You call it a gap, but that's the time between publications. There is no measurable gap. I never ceased writing, but I destroy much of what I write or I can't work out what I want to say and I put the piece aside. The longing to write and the writing never cease. When I taught to make a living, evenings and years were given over to guiding students through their own imagination, to the neglect of my own. And there's the disbelief, so often at my elbow as I write, that I can write at all.

Do you see yourself primarily as a short story writer rather than a novelist?

Oh, yes. When my first stories were published, there was a lot of enticement from editors to write novels. But I wish I'd written twenty stories to one novel, instead. Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry, with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

Many critics have praised your work for the extraordinary variety of characters and settings, including characters of various races and classes. Do you think your life experience was important in developing that wide scope?

I never thought I had a wide scope. The way to escape from the person who you figure you may be is to become many others in your imagination. And that way you can't be categorized as a regional writer or a Jewish writer or a feminist writer, and even though you may be confined by the circumstances of your life, you're roaming out in the world, your imagination as your guide. I haven't roamed far enough.

You've said, "Between the lines of every story, readers write their own lines, shaping up the story as a collaborative effort." As the writer, are you concerned about controlling or directing the reader's lines, with the question of a "correct" interpretation?

Of course the writer wishes to compel and persuade and entice and guide the reader to a comprehension of the story, but there's no such thing as a "correct" interpretation of a piece of fiction. That's demanding a scientific precision of the writer. Each reader's interpretation originates in his or her life's experiences, in feelings and emotions of intensely personal history. You get more from what you read as you grow older, and your choices change, and, wiser, you bring more to that collaborative effort.

How about screenplays?

They're so mechanical to write, and you must leave out the depths you try to reach when you're writing your stories. A screenplay is a simplification and an exaggeration at the same time. By contrast, if you slip in a false note in a story, the whole thing falls. But a film can be packed with other persons' demands upon it, become a falsification of the writer's original idea, and then be hailed as one of the year's best—the usual. What makes a film work are the magnified, publicized, idolized actors moving around up there on the screen. And because the influence and the gain from movies are made to seem more real than from your obscure small stories, so many young writers think it's the highest achievement in life to write a movie script.

Were any of the interviews you wrote for Esquire in the Sixties memorable to you? To whom did you talk? In addition to your story "God and the Article Writer" did they have any lasting influence or effect?

Whom did I interview? I interviewed the topless dancers, the first nightclub topless dancers, not first in the world, of course, but in San Francisco. I remember that an editor at Esquire asked me to write an article; they had published some stories of mine, and he said that fiction writers write better articles. So I offered the idea of the topless dancers, who had only recently stepped out onto the stages in North Beach. His "Okay" sounded tentative to me, and so I was very surprised when he phoned a few weeks later wanting to know where the article was. I had only a week in which to research and write, and I got it to them in time. Synchronicity is at work when you're writing an article. Pertinent things—overheard conversations, random meetings—are attracted by your task as by a magnet, and the article shapes up in a surprising way. That's not always the case, but it happens. Then an editor at Esquire asked me to interview someone or two who were fallen from the heights and so I found a very elderly couple, man and wife, who had been Broadway entertainers in their youth, and, in their shabby apartment, I looked through their piles of old newspaper clippings and photos; I was moved. I interviewed the student at Stanford who was a leader of demonstrations opposed to the Vietnam War, and I interviewed the men who were the firing squad executioners in Utah, the last firing squad that wasn't, after all, the last. They all wanted anonymity—shame, I suppose—and the photographer took their picture together in silhouette, dark, against a yellow sunset, out in a field. Since I am an outsider, an observer at heart, not an interrogator, I'm not facile at asking people about themselves. And protective as I am of my own secret self, my own personal life, I am reluctant to inquire of others, even though I find that some others don't mind at all telling about themselves. Pride intervenes, too; you feel subservient, at times, to the person you're interviewing, and it was this attitude, this uneasiness, this feeling of being an intruder, that brought about the story "God and the Article Writer," wherein the lowly article writer transcends himself by becoming one with God. It's a bit of a satire and it amused me as I wrote it.

In the more than thirty years you've been writing and teaching, what do you think has been the most significant change in fiction?

One thing that dismays is the cruel pornography of recent novels and how they're considered an honest probe of these desecrating times. What's inspiring is the work of more Black writers and Hispanic writers, and the availability of the small presses and quarterlies. But most of the short stories in most of the large circulation magazines seem about the same as they always were—about the middle class, their mishaps and misapprehensions. An elitism in a vacuum. There's no sorrow and no pity. We're far from writers like Steinbeck and Dos Passos and Nelson Algren. I remember reading In Dubious Battle all through the night, I remember just where I was and what period of my life—like a vivid fragment. There's been an intimidation of writers in this country. We write to be acceptable. Some things I wanted to write about, I haven't because I was afraid I wouldn't be published, and writing has been and is my livelihood. I supported myself and my child with my writing. I like to believe that I never misled and that I wrote truthfully, but I've always felt the presence of anonymous and not-so-anonymous authority.

Do you think there is a connection between the superficiality you find in so much writing today and the fact that many writers are academically trained and remain in academia as teachers?

It may be that superficiality results from covert or implicit censorship of our work. The academe isn't to blame, I think. Some very fine writers, prose and poetry, are teaching in universities to keep a roof over their heads and to find pleasure in teaching. Superficial writers seem to make a good living and don't need to teach.

Right now, a first person, present tense style is very popular. How do you feel about it?

I imagine that the first person, present tense is the easiest way to write. But to me it seems to contain the most emptiness. It brings a sense of immediacy, and with immediacy you think you've got hold of the truth and the real, and so there's a touch of satisfaction about it, a conceit. Just recently I was looking at Sebastiao Salgado's book of photos, An Uncertain Grace, and there was a short introduction by Eduardo Galeano, who wrote "Salgado shows us that concealed within the pain of living and the tragedy of dying there is a potent magic, a luminous mystery that redeems the human adventure in the world." When I read that I thought that's what great writers have always done. Salgado lived in Africa with those suffering people and he lived in Central America. He was right there, where the truth and the real and that luminous mystery are found. It can all be found in this country.

Do you see yourself as a woman writer or as a writer who happens to be a woman? And has your gender affected your career at all, caused you any difficulties?

I've known and still know a fear of men's judgments and ridicule and rejection. At the same time I've been acutely aware of the oppression and abuse and humiliation that men endure and struggle against, the same that women endure and now know they don't have to endure. In other words, I'm a humanist, I guess.

How do you think of your work in relationship to the Women's Movement?

Most of my stories, early ones and later ones, are about women. My wonder and my concern over women are present always in the natural course of my writing.

When you look at your own work, do you think there are recurring themes?

I don't look over my past work, or I don't like to. I want to look over my future work. If there is a recurring theme, it's an attempt at compassionate understanding. Judgment is the prevalent theme in our society, but it's from fiction we learn compassion and comprehension. In Gogol's great story, "The Overcoat," there's a description of the poor copying clerk's threadbare overcoat, how the cold wind got in across his back. I don't know why those lines move me so much, except when you visualize how the cloth has worn out without his knowing until suddenly one day he's surprised by that cold invasion—isn't that a description of an entire life? That copying clerk is always ridiculed and insulted by the younger clerks. I guess that in my work, in my way, I attempt to rouse compassion for those who are called demented or alien or absurd or ridiculous, for those who are beyond the pale.

I think you do that wonderfully well in your work, especially with the brother in The Lights of Earth.

That was my brother, and though I told only part of the story, it was the most grueling work I've ever attempted.

Because it is about a woman writer, set in California, and many of the details seem to parallel your life, Lights of Earth seems to be autobiographical. How autobiographical is that novel?

Lights of Earth was an attempt to redeem and forgive myself, and maybe that's what autobiographical novels are all about. But it's impossible that characters and situations and scenes and plots be absolutely true to life. If you attempt that truth then you may be false to your creative spirit which knows how to handle truths in its own way.

Toward the end of Lights of Earth when Ilona receives that healing letter from her daughter, Antonia, the narrator says "For a moment now the earth was hers to know, even as it was known to everyone to whom the earth with all its wonders appeared to belong. A child out in the world can do that for you, can bring you to belong in the world yourself." That second sentence seems to leave Ilona and speak to the reader about life in general in your own personal voice. Is that so?

Yes, I suppose, and that's probably why, when you first came in and before the interview began, I spoke about my daughter. My child and my writing and others' writings and everyone I've loved, all have brought me to belong in the world.

It seems to me that although your writing is never propaganda, it is indirectly quite political and that you see social or political engagement as essential to serious literature. Do you agree?

Engagement is the only word you need, because it explains why some of us must write. And political engagement is essential to serious literature as design or perspective or materials are essential to any work of art, but only as an integral part of that engagement, that dedication.

What do you make of the idea, popular in some circles today, that writers should only write about people like themselves, people of their own ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual preference?

How limiting that is—to write only of your own ethnicity, class, gender, sexual preference. Your imagination is left to hang around the sidelines. Say that you're crammed in at a restaurant table with your ethnic friends or friends of the same preferences as yourself, all speaking the same language, and you notice someone, a stranger, out on the street, who's glancing through the window, and your eyes meet his, and you want to get up and go out and say to that stranger, "Don't I know you?"