Carol Bergman

I’m back in the city for a few days in search of quiet spaces—both internal and external—to think, read, and write. Usually, the atelier in my apartment is very quiet. It’s a room at the back, off the street. The doves coo on the roof and there is mechanical ambient sound, but it falls into the background as I work. Today, the air has cooled and the screened window is wide open to the surrounding brick walls. There isn’t much light but I don’t need light at the computer. I’ll find that later when I take a break and go swimming in a glass enclosed pool. Yet later, I’ll take another break from a revision I’m starting to meet a friend for a coffee. Alas, some of the quietude I rely on here has been broken and the quiet space is not quiet this week. We had a bad fire in our building.

It happened at 4 a.m. last Monday morning. When we arrived from upstate later that afternoon, the fire was over but there was still a lot of activity—police, restoration crews, fire trucks. About fifteen apartments were effected—not ours thankfully—the whole roof destroyed as well as two apartments in the adjacent building. Fortunately, no one was hurt though several families have lost their homes. Most of the damage was water damage. In the aftermath, the building is busy with insurer adjusters and crews and machines drying out the walls. So, yesterday morning, I escaped across town to a writer’s room I used to belong to and thought I’d rejoin for a few months until the building is back in shape. It was a difficult trip to the other side of town in sheeting rain. The building, an old library, had been closed for renovation over the summer. Now it was reopened but still busy with workers. None of this was mentioned on their website. I regretted not calling ahead but I was desperate to find a quiet space to work. I hadn’t done a stick of work all morning and was feeling mighty frustrated.

In the end, it was my own mood that did me in. Obstacles in every direction, I hated the city in that moment. I had to calm down. I returned home, ate some lunch, and watched a recorded Antiques Roadshow with my husband for an hour. Then I returned to my desk.

I got locked out of my car yesterday, my keys in my backpack on the seat together with: my wallet with AAA card, my cell phone, my reading glasses, my two pads of paper and pens, water, my Kindle, a New Yorker. It was a hot, muggy day and something had gone wrong with the electronics; the car is not supposed to lock automatically. As soon as it happened, without pen and paper, I started writing a story about the adventure in my head. It had a plot, characters, descriptive detail, each of which were added in a rapidly unfolding melodrama. It was the only way I could stay focused and sane because I wasn’t in a very congenial place when this happened.

I’d been in the local library working all afternoon and then had the brainy idea that I’d vacuum the car at a self-serve car wash next to a Stewart’s before heading back to the house. There is a prison nearby and this particular Stewart’s attracts released inmates and families of inmates, motorcycle gangs, burly corrections officers carrying mega-weapons, and me.

I put my backpack on my back, locked the car, headed for the change machine, returned to the car, put the coins into the machine, opened the door, put my backpack on the seat, let the door slide shut for a minute, and that was it. I had to go into the Stewart’s and ask for help. It was not forthcoming. I had my silver jewelry on and long earrings, city girl, all of which made me more vulnerable because the folks up this way don’t like city people. In fact, their hatred of city people is more intense than I have experienced anywhere.

It all goes back to 1905 when the City of New York asked the State of New York, to grant eminent domain to build a reservoir, the Ashokan Reservoir. Ten towns were “removed” and two others destroyed. Most of the residents of these towns had been there for generations. I had just finished a novella based on this story and it was fresh in my mind. I saw the unfriendly faces at Stewart’s and I understood, but that didn’t make my situation any easier: the manager refused to call the police or to lend me a quarter for the pay phone. I couldn’t even dial 911 without a quarter.

So I took a deep, long breath and looked around. At least it is cool in here, I thought to myself. And there are water bottles. Then a young man behind the ice cream counter smiled at me, a good sign. So I asked him, directly, if he could lend me a quarter. He came over with four. This was brave as he had, in a way, defied his manager. I smiled at him, and thanked him, and he gave me a big, long, knowing smile right back. I asked his name: Jack. Lone dissenter, I thought. Not only is he defying the manager, he’s defying history.

By now, all the customers were paying attention, including those sitting at a couple of tables eating sandwiches. A young man had lead the way into kindness. Then an old woman came up to me and offered me her glasses, a piece of paper, and a pen to write down important phone numbers, she said. She stayed close to me in a very protective way until I reached the Sheriff and then the AAA.

I probably was only in Stewart’s for thirty minutes before the Sheriff arrived. He was a big, burly, sweet-faced Deputy wearing a Stetson hat. He didn't say much, just took out the yellow metal rod and got to it. Within minutes, the door was open. I thanked him, he smiled, and had me sign a piece of paper.

Back inside Stewart’s, I repaid the quarters to Jack and offered him a “reward,” but he refused to take my money apart from what he’d loaned me. And so I announced, to all who were present, that Jack was a fine young man and his parents should be proud of him. He had helped me without expectation of reward.

By this time, the guardian angel who had loaned me her glasses had left. I still have the pen and paper she gave me in the glove compartment of my car where I will keep it as a memento of my day.

I walked Willow down to the pond yesterday morning. I left the house around 8:30 hoping to beat the heat and humidity. Willow, a frisky, intelligent German Short-Haired Pointer, knew better—it was already hot and humid—and balked when I tried to leash her. A Paul Newman peanut butter treat persuaded her, more or less. My daughter had mentioned that she needed exercise—two days languishing in the house because of the weather—and all of us too busy working to take her for a long walk or a swim in the river. So off we went.

We don’t always walk to the pond—about two miles away and up and down some challenging hills—but I was curious to see if the movie shoot was underway and whether or not Winn’s garden was completely destroyed or only partially destroyed. She and her partner, Chuck, have owned their farmhouse for more than two decades, and they are weekenders, city people. So they can stay home or travel during the two months or so of disruption. And they are being paid a facility fee. I had asked Winn if she thought it would be worth it and she had said, “yes,” but I didn’t mention what I knew about film crews descending, literally. My husband and I had agreed to a James Bond shoot in our flat in London years ago, so I knew. A crew is meticulous, caring, concerned, attentive. But they do not want you around to see the havoc they wreak and then, when they are done, how they try to fix it as best they can. Winn said, “It will become part of the history of the house.” Well, that’s something, I thought. At least memory and history are sustainable.

I carried water and promised Willow we’d stop at the stream where she could dip her mattress-ticked ankles into the water. I would pour water over my head, as needed.

As soon as we rounded the bend leading to the meadow I saw cars, trucks, and movement. The barn door opposite Chuck and Winn’s farmhouse was open. This had become the prop room. There were about five crew prepping for the day, a movie called “Peace, Love and Misunderstanding,” with Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener. The stars had not yet arrived. I said good morning to the crew—who barely noticed my presence—and turned back up the road. I noticed that Winn’s furniture was on the porch, that her native garden had been replaced with another, more flowery, garden, and that the newly painted frontage was already scratched and chipped.

On the hot trek home I got to thinking about the presence of this movie crew in what has become a much more sustainable neighborhood. Several young couples, including my daughter and son-in-law, have become environmental activists. They don’t grow anything that can’t be eaten, they share vegetables from their gardens, and they replenish the soil with compost. They are devoted to understanding the degradation of the earth by the industrial food chain, and to repairing it. I contribute in small ways when I am here. On walks, I clean up beer cans and other debris. I’ve learned how to compost and to eat modestly. I’ve learned how to let the chickens out of their coop though I usually let my husband do that. “Buy Local,” is one of the mottos on signage in the area so I buy local. The screenwriter is a local boy, as is the scout, so that seems like a good thing. Chuck and Winn are being paid and that’s good, too. But what else is the film company doing to “give back” to this neighborhood? To sustain it? Even before the recession, there was a lot of poverty in upstate New York, families in trailers, unemployed, or enlisted in the army. There are more yellow ribbons on the houses and trees around here than I have seen anywhere else recently.

Two mornings ago, a scout working for the local scout came by the house and offered $500 to place two dumpsters at the end of the driveway.”We have too many vehicles so we have no space down at the farmhouse,” he explained. The request--softened by the offer of money—felt audacious, intrusive, and unsustainable. When the crew has come and gone, and the movie stars have been escorted home in their vans and limos, what will be left behind?

Last night, I watched “The Most Dangerous Man in America; Daniel Ellsberg & The Pentagon Papers,” based on Dr. Ellsberg’s memoir, “Secrets; A Memoir of Vietnam and The Pentagon Papers.” http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Memoir-Vietnam-Pentagon-Papers/dp/0670030309. The documentary is up for an Oscar this year.

Both the film and the book are formidable. They are important historical documents and riveting stories, filled with fascinating characters and dramatic tension. After watching the documentary with my daughter and son-in-law, I was so wound up I could not sleep. I cleaned up the kitchen, checked my email, began writing this blog entry, checked the New York Times. The Wikileaks leak is in the papers. Secrets revealed. What will become of this war? When will it end? What will become of the Afghan people? How voluntary is a volunteer army in a time of economic recession? How many more body bags will be shipped home? What does the President know that we don’t know?

My husband served in the Seventh Fleet during the Vietnam War, many friends were war resisters, and our home in London was a salon and sometime dormitory for AWOL soldiers and expatriates. The Vietnam War was a very personal war for me. And Daniel Ellsberg's story, a very important story. And I have another connection to him. His son, Robert, was my editor on “Another Day in Paradise; International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories.” He’s the editor-in-chief at Orbis Books, owned by the Maryknolls who are dedicated to humanitarian work all over the world.

I never discussed the Pentagon Papers with Robert when I was working with him on the book. And I never knew his part in the story. He was thirteen-years-old when his father invited him to help photocopy the Pentagon Papers. These documents were leaked to seventeen newspapers in the United States and were in large part responsible for ending the war and Nixon’s presidency.

I’m working on a historical novella that, like my murder mystery, “Say Nothing,” is set in upstate New York. I’ve started making the rounds of the libraries on the west side of the river in Ulster County to 1./donate a copy of my book 2./meet the local librarians and 3./ do some research. I’ve been to two libraries since I began commuting in June—Ellenville and Rosendale—and have been impressed by the helpfulness of the librarians, their friendliness and generosity. I find these qualities to be true of most librarians I have met over the years. As internet access became a resource, I missed libraries and librarians.

When I arrived at the Rosendale library last week I was greeted warmly by Ann Sarrantino and when I told her what I was doing, she steered me to a collection of history books about Ulster county curated by another librarian, Linda Tantillo. All libraries are blissfully quiet, cool and wi-fi’d these days so I sat myself at a table and began to forage through this outstanding collection of books. I then gave Ann copies of two of my books and when I showed her “Sitting for Klimt,” and she said that her husband was a painter, she went to get a copy of Barbara Kingslover’s new book, “Lacuna," which just won the Orange Prize. Our conversation about books and writers continued.

Not having a local address, I could not join the library, but I am free to use it. The freedom of the library systems throughout our country are a great freedom indeed. I told Ann I would download Kingslover’s book onto my Kindle. Happy to say, she did not seem the least bit alarmed knowing, as I do, that librarians will never be obsolete.

Linda Tantillo returned from her lunch break and we chatted for a while, also. Like all good librarians, she listened patiently and attentively to a description of my project before making a suggestion. She told me that the Kingston Freeman, a local newspaper, had recently been scanned and gave me a website address that I had not, as yet, come across. I’m back in the city this week reading newspapers online from 1905, thanks to Linda. The combination of online research and F2F interaction with insightful and informed librarians has deepened the treasure trove of information available to writers.

A private student of mine wrote to say that she’s been sick for the past few weeks and wasn’t writing. She’s nearly finished a memoir and was hoping that the summer hiatus from her teaching job might afford enough time to write every day. But now she’s behind, frustrated and melancholy, and wondered if I had any suggestions. The first seemed obvious: Rest and get well. The second: Do as much as you can even if it is in small spurts.

I’m not sure if men and/or women have an easier time working in small spurts or not. I certainly learned to use my time well when I became a mother. I had no choice. Raymond Carver did the same when he became a parent, one reason his short stories are very short stories. He wrote the early stories in one breath as he was taking care of his children. And when a writer friend of mine developed repetitive strain injury, she wrote poetry—by hand—and segments of essays. Some of the essays stayed short, some she worked on incrementally and slowly. Not only did this force her to find new rhythms of working, it also enabled her to explore a new genre; she’d never written poetry before.

I’m commuting a lot this summer in a long-winded triangle: the city to upstate to Ct. to see my venerable mother, to the city, back upstate, and so on. Though I appreciate my laptop, my cell phone, and my car, the nomadic life is both tiring and unsettling. I do the best I can with the time I have and I’ve changed my goals: I’m working on a revision of a failed novel instead of generating an idea for a second murder mystery. That’s the adaptation I’ve settled on to the present demands and challenges of my life. Tomorrow and next week may be different and I’ll have to adapt again. But the writing continues unabated.

I am about to abandon an essay I have been working on since the end of term. It’s not working. Needless to say, I prefer to finish what I begin, to find an armature, and a market. But, sometimes, my initial intuition about a story falters as I realize there isn’t enough story to tell, or not enough information available to write about it.

I do feel somewhat discouraged this morning. I’ve been writing to people all over the world and receiving timely replies few of which have added much to the story. Despite the dearth of information, I have laboriously written ten pages. The laborious effort should have been a key. Something was wrong from the outset.

I didn’t choose the story; it came to me in the form of a dress handed to me during Shoah week by the mother of a good friend of mine. The dress--one of more than a hundred extant in America-- is made out of linen and beautifully embroidered. It comes from a village that no longer exists—Antopol in Polesia. Over the centuries, Antopol was occupied by the Swedes, the Russians, the Germans, the Russians—not necessarily in that order, and was finally “liquidated” by the Germans in 1942. A few villagers escaped to Israel, a few to America. A memorial book was written in the 1970’s and published privately. This is even available online. But the answers to my questions about the dress: Who made it? Why was it sent to America? Why wasn’t it sold? How did the relatives from the town living more affluently in America respond to the request to sell the dress? These questions and many others could not be answered and my story mutated into a screed about indifference to suffering. It was painful to write. My own Holocaust story kept spilling into it.

I also had to consider the feelings of my friend and her mother. They did not expect my curiosity or investigative spirit. And my friend’s mother is old and frail.

And so I have let this story go. I will donate the dress to the Smithsonian. And I will move on to my next project. As Natalie Goldberg says in her book, Old Friend From Far Away, “The point here is to go on. Don’t get stuck where you have not succeeded. Go on to something else. You don’t know what will unfold. None of us have as much time as we think.”

An invitation arrived from The Author’s Guild to attend three days of Book Expo at the Javits Center in New York. As I am a longtime devoted member of The Authors Guild (they host this site), I decided to go. I am a friendly author and thought the event would be author friendly. It was not. Unless you were Michael Connelly. I am not.

I had been invited to such an event at Atlantic City some years ago. The gambling and indoor waterfalls were more of a draw than my book or my non-celebrity. The man next to me, Arthur Frommer, signed a lot of books. I signed two or three. Who wants to read about war and humanitarian workers? All told, none of my appearances in the United States did much to sell my book. In London, however, where authors are interviewed in depth, I was able to talk about the project on the radio. That sold books.

So what is an American Expo for exactly? A place to schmooze and "take meetings,” just like in Hollywood, it seems. Sadly, there was no central location for non block-buster authors to gather and have meetings with one another whereas the agents and sales representatives had meetings in specially designated café-like enclaves while the book collector/fans stood on long lines to get their free, autographed copies, their neon green and orange bags filled to overflowing with giveaways.

Aren't Expos--historically--meditations on past, present and future? Plus ça change and plus is changing, but where were the changes in the book industry evident? On the periphery, in the margins, way down at the Southern-most end of the Convention Center near the Children’s Books and Toys and on the long lines leading to the women’s restrooms where people spoke off the record: It’s sleight of hand, a stage set, the industry is in trouble. Why are the electronic media companies down at the far end?

And so on.

I didn’t go on the first day—Tuesday—because a warning email said that the booths were not yet installed. Obviously, people had arrived, found the cavernous space empty, and were annoyed. Some of the overseas attendees were still erecting their sites when I arrived on Wednesday afternoon, to be struck, like stage sets, at the end of the next day. The Vietnamese Cultural Ministry and The Chinese Cultural Ministry were still setting up, or were they already leaving? No matter, they are not publishers, they are propaganda arms of the state. Their booths remained sans visitors, except for me. I sat down with Yang Xiaohe of the Shanghai Press & Publishing Development Co. She was in New York for four days, she explained, and was very tired from the long journey. Dressed in a summer khaki suit, she looked pert, her expression serious but friendly, about thirty I’d say. Her English was impeccable. She had two helpers, also young women, equally pert, pretty and friendly. I think I was their first guest.

There were about fifty books arrayed on the wobbly shelving. As I picked them up and replaced them, they kept falling to the floor through the cracks. Yang was disoriented. I had taken the liberty to browse and she wanted to pick up the books herself and hand them to me. I was most interested in a series of stories, translated into English, by contemporary writers from Shanghai. When I told Yang I was a professor, she gave me a book by a professor called “His One and Only.” It’s about a boy from a poor family. When his mother forces him to marry an older girl, he flees home. It’s a picture of life in China before Communism and after. I suppose I will read it, out of curiosity, though I know already that it’s a moral tale about the importance and necessity of Communism. I thanked Yang for the sample copy and answered her questions about what Americans like me want to know about China. There was a book about gardening on the shelf and I pointed to that. “Gardening,” I said.

"Do you have an agent?" Yang asked.
"I do. She is here somewhere. It would be nice to run into her."
We exchanged cards, a global protocol, and I wished her a safe journey home.

Next stop was The Authors Guild booth where I was offered beer and hot dogs and talked briefly to staff about negotiations with Google. I thanked them for their hard work. Across the aisle, I spotted an old friend from Gotham Writer’s Workshop in their booth. The familiarity was heartening. At last, a place for a non-block buster writer to schmooze and rest.

There are writers who continue to polish their work even after it has been published. Louise Erdrich revised her first novel, “Love Medicine,” and published it a second time, many years later. And, if memory serves, the poet Seamus Heaney did the same with one of his collections. I may revise “Say Nothing,” after I have written another book in the series, evolved the main character, and also my own definition of the mystery genre.

The great and famous British mystery writer, P.D.James, has given me courage to continue to experiment and to risk approbation and perplexed responses when “real” mystery genre fans read my book. Nearly ninety-years-old, James has written an extended essay, “Talking About Detective Fiction,” in which she says, “We may not always believe in the details of the plot, but we always believe in the man himself and the world he inhabits.” Plot challenged, most of my fiction is character driven. The mystery genre challenges this weakness or, better said, preference. That said, it is quite possible, according to James, that plot will become less and less important to some mystery writers as the world we inhabit becomes increasingly disordered and less re-ordering or "solving" at the end of a story is possible. To live as an agnostic, without absolute solutions or certainties, is our existential condition. And that is what I tried to illuminate for myself in my unconventional wartime murder mystery. I also worked hard on the language itself, the description, and the political backdrop.

It isn’t absolutely successful; it was an experiment. I sent it out into the world as an experiment. Readers have offered feedback that will be helpful to me in my next attempt. I look forward to the continuing process of deepening my writing and making it better. Not every work can be a master work.

Like P.D.James, I hope I am still writing at age 90. Indeed, I hope I live to 90 in good health with full creative power. That said, every writer knows that the master work is in the writing life itself.

I took a much needed lunch break yesterday and traveled to the Gogosian Gallery on 21st Street to see Monet’s “late” paintings. I had read an article about the exhibition in the New York Times. The accompanying image was very different than the restrained, atmospheric paintings that have become a mainstay of so many museum collections. The pastel palette and soft focus haystacks, cathedrals and gardens always draw a crowd; they are pleasing and accessible. These late paintings are provocative and have rarely been seen by Monet’s admiring public. He had changed course; he was experimenting.

How does an artist (or writer), successful in his own lifetime, restore his creative energy without risking sales? This is the question that surfaced as I entered the well-appointed gallery with its capacious rooms. The paintings were not for sale, they were displayed to be seen, a receptionist explained, disingenuously, as every exhibition (especially one so generously reviewed) increases the value of the work.

A few of the paintings were familiar but most were not. Monet had transformed both his palette and his brushstroke. Both were looser, more layered, and expressive. Monet had become what we would call today an “abstract expressionist.” True, he was older, his eyesight was failing, and he was financially secure. But he was also contemplating the end of his life, the vertiginous unknown beyond. And this was brave and compelling.

The lily ponds, benign in earlier renderings, had become dark protected whirlpools spanned by a bridge in the near distance, then swirling away into an ominous tunnel under a bridge before exploding again into color and light. A dapple of sparkle in a lily head here, another there. These paintings are sublime.

It is my observation that the subject of most art is impermanence, that in the art we attempt to capture the present moment and hold it, knowing full well that before we have done so, it has disappeared. Out of this keen realization, which can give both pleasure and pain, we make our work.