Carol Bergman

I don't know why I picked up “East of Eden” the other day, an unconscious motivation perhaps. Consciously, I was weary of reading on my Kindle and longing for the sensory experience of paper, paper page turning, and heft. 601 pages of Penguin’s centennial edition—in celebration of Steinbeck’s birth—is heft. The design of the paperback cover echoes the original hardback edition: It has flaps, there is an evocative etching on the top of the cover, and the edges of the pages are scored. This creates an illusion of freshly cut pages, the obligation of the reader in the past. Once cut and turned, the pages feel “thumbed.”

But what about the story and the writing? Has it held up? Has it stood the test of time? Is it now a classic?

Like most American school children of my generation, I had read “Of Mice and Men” in school at an age when it would have meant absolutely nothing to me. I think this was true of many classics on the curriculum in those days. (The other that comes to mind is Wharton’s “Ethan Frome.”) I have no recollection of how the book was taught, what it was about, or the questions we were supposed to answer for homework. I thought it curious that my parents had “Cannery Row” on their shelves, but was not curious enough myself to pull it down. A yellow cover with blue lettering, I remember, and the fact that my mother had read it in one sitting. Much later, the year I got married, I read “Grapes of Wrath” as we traveled across the country and loved it. But I never returned to Steinbeck after that. So why now? A third into the book, and unable to put it down—the writing and the story both compelling—I went online to the Nobel Prize site to listen to Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Banquet Speech in which he says:

“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”

Inspiring thoughts for me as I have just published a novel—“What Returns to Us”—set in 1945, the beginning of the Atomic Age. I do feel, too strongly at times I know, that writers and artists have an obligation to tell the truth, to illuminate, and to write from the heart as well as the head.

“East of Eden” was published in 1952, soon after the end of World War II and the unleashing of America’s weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb. Steinbeck traces America’s history in this epic, beautifully written novel from the 19th century onward. It raises many questions about our frontier history, the loss of civility and a higher purpose, the origins of evil, and what it means to be human. The book is loaded with gorgeous descriptions, deep character portraits, humor, and compassion.

We can’t all be working on such a large canvas all the time, or even some of the time; that would be hubris. And we cannot sit down to write with the intention of creating the great American novel—Mailer’s ambition—or the great anything. Our writing lives are a daily practice, keen observation, and the quest for psychological and historical truths.  Read More 

I spoke to two cousins on the telephone this week. What a treat to have long conversations, to hear their voices, and then to follow-up with a real correspondence using long, descriptive sentences—not just snippet thought- bytes and sentence fragments. I write my letters in Word files with the email off, and then send them as attachments, or paste them into the body of the email. The computer has a pulse and it quickens us. It’s time to slow down.

Both of my cousins live on the west coast, one in Seattle, the other on Gabriola Island off the coast of Vancouver. Apart from family lore and gossip, shared memories and anecdotes, two of us are writers, the third has started writing poetry and is contemplating a memoir workshop. And though there was a lot to discuss, I found myself becoming impatient and wanting to get off the phone. Not good. I had picked up the phone ready to talk, to tell my stories and listen to theirs. If I hadn’t wanted to talk, I should have let the phone go into voice mail. But I didn’t. It is as though I had momentarily lost the habit of conversing.

It’s our mandate as writers to resist the electronic “pidgin” English we’ve developed to communicate quickly and virtually. I believe that it erodes our language and is not good for any of us, writers in particular. I know it’s not good for me. I’m as glued to my iPhone as anyone, addicted to Facebook and text. But I also resist. I resist by writing long texts in full sentences and using the Facebook status as an opportunity to weave a mini-story. When I went off Facebook for a couple of weeks a while back, and announced that I was doing so, my “friends” objected. I was touched that they were enjoying my stories, but I also wanted to talk to all of them and to meet at a cafe for a chat over a coffee, totally impractical in our trans-national lives. And so I am grateful that our timelines bring us closer.

I always suggest to my students to make calls to friends and family on their cells after 9 p.m. when minutes are free and they can spin their stories. Or to have “talking” dinner parties around a table with a few selected friends. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes of oral story-telling and listening every day is gold bullion for the writer. Our minds clarify, the words glisten, and our solitary writing lives return to balance.  Read More 

I can’t think of a better way to end this writing year than an appreciation of the beautiful sentences I’ve jotted in my journal in recent weeks, such as this one:

“The afternoon was golden and the wisteria vine on the porch was in full unshattered bloom.”

--Carson McCullers, “The Haunted Boy”

As the term drew to a close and my own creative energies returned, I began reading and rereading McCullers, Carver, Wharton and Munro. I treated myself to a hard copy of “Best American Short Stories, 2013,” a well-curated collection by Elizabeth Strout. Despite many years of experience and publication, I need reminding: What makes a good short story?

My less rushed non-teaching days are a tapestry of reading, writing, walking, swimming, seeing friends, cultural activity, doing the laundry. I try not to get too wound up by holiday obligations of any kind—particularly gift and greeting card frenzy—as to do so would cut into whatever free time I have between terms, not to mention my budget. Simplicity at this time of year is my friend. Yes, it is a new year, but a writer’s life unfolds on a different continuum. My journal, unlike a date book, is ongoing. It doesn’t end because the year, we are told, has ended. And the long, retrospective, generic letters from far away don’t satisfy; I prefer the effort of consistent, personal contact on email, Facebook, or telephone. I still have two friends who send me snail postcards and letters. Brava, a correspondence! A party or two is fine, with people I enjoy talking to. Otherwise, I’m not a party person. I need to recover from the chatter of a party and to settle down again into my own thoughts. My husband is a screenwriter—a collaborative medium—and doesn’t require as much quiet as I do to write. He’s always sharing ideas, dialogue, and plots. I keep mine to myself for a very long time. He is social and solitary , I am solitary and social. True, I am looking forward to a getaway at Christmas, and to spending time with our daughter and son-in-law, but the draft of a new story and my journal will be in my bag.

Dear reader, I’m not Scrooge, just a writer.  Read More 

Because it was the end of the summer and I had been upstate and it was a bad mosquito season, I thought I still had mosquito bites. It took a while to put two and two and four together as I examined a cluster of three-in-a-row (breakfast, lunch, dinner) wheals on my body early one autumn morning. My husband had nothing, lucky fellow; I am allergic to the bites.

We hadn’t been told by anyone that the building we had just moved into had a recent bed bug history and, though many apartments in the building were empty at the same time, we hadn’t thought to ask why. So we moved in, anticipating with pleasure the quiet of our new neighborhood, two offices, fresher air, some plants on the windowsills, items out of storage decorating our new home, the books we carried laid out neatly on shelves. Three months later, all the boxes were unpacked, new travel routines established, we were feeling more settled. Until that morning.

I remembered a student telling me once that she had bed bugs and had just moved to Brooklyn. And that it had been an exhausting nightmare. Those two words are not an understatement. Dear Reader, it has not been easy: friends are loath to come over (who can blame them?), and our apartment is not a home.

It’s now been two months since the ordeal started. I write on the eve of another fumigation, this time of the beloved books we carried with us to be reread or consulted. How fitting for two writers that the pages of books and journals might host the eggs of these creatures. I hope they are having a good read.  Read More 

I have just re-read the “Online Scrabble” blog entry I wrote back in May. To reiterate here, I stopped playing with the daughter of a friend who lives in Italy because she was scoring 400 points plus each game and, though she is smart, no one is that smart. So I asked her if she was using tools of some sort to find words and she replied that she was. It was no fun to be beaten in this way, especially as she hadn’t disclaimed her reliance on these tools, which I considered dishonest.

But now I have a different problem. I am still playing with my old high school friend and, for the most part, enjoying our games. But every once in a while, she puts down a word that I can’t find in any dictionary, or an abbreviation, or a slang word, and she beats me consistently with these small non-words. As a writer, I am always searching for an interesting word, one that means something, the longer the better.

“What is ZA?” I asked her on the phone one day.
“As in piz-za.”
“So slang is now permitted? Abbreviations?”
“Yes.”
“I guess I am a Scrabble purist. It doesn’t bother you to put down a slice of a word?”
“No. I put down a word and if the electronic dictionary accepts it, fine. If not, not, I’ll find something else. I never spend more than a minute or two as I am playing with several people.”

This surprised me. My friend is an avid, thoughtful reader. In fact, she is one of my readers. What explains her game strategy?

“Do you think she is playing only for points?” I asked my husband, a very competitive Scrabble player.
“She’s probably playing just to relax,” he said.
“Well so do I. But I am not going to change my game.”
“You’ll keep losing,” he said.
“So be it. I’m a writer. Words matter.”
“Consider a small word or two once in a while,” he said. “It will give you an edge.”
“I don’t want an edge,” I said.

Then one night, late at night, tired and frustrated, my resistance faltered. I used ZA, and won. It didn’t make me happy. The word “downy” made me happy.  Read More 

We went to a gala fundraiser for the United Palace of Cultural Arts on 175th Street and Broadway. This is one of the last movie “palaces,” built before the Great Depression ended the indulgence of such vast “wonder theaters”—pure Hollywood. The palace, serving upper Manhattan, was owned by the Loew’s Corporation. Faux Abyssinian in design, filtered through the kitsch sensibility of a well-paid architect, it seats more than 3,000. It’s hard to imagine what the cost of heating or cooling the place might be today. Yet it still stands, a neighborhood landmark. Derelict for a long time, the building was saved from demolition in 1969 by the Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II. Better known as Reverend Ike, Eikerenkoetter bought the building for more than a half-million dollars and used it as the headquarters for his United Church Science of Living Institute. It now also houses the Cultural Arts Center which is outreaching to the community and presenting concerts, programs for kids, and films. Sunday night was “Casablanca” night screened on a spiffed- up gigantic screen. What a treat! What a script! The audience was asked to dress up for the occasion, dance to 1940’s music, and pose next to a cardboard cut-out of Bogey. It was a festive evening, attended by over 1000, not quite a theater-full, but full enough. After opening remarks and a rendition of "As Time Goes By," by Reverend Ike's son, the screen lit up with "Casablana." For the next 90 minutes, cinematic rapture.

Years ago, I took Robert McKee’s one-day intensive screenwriting course . The last two hours of the seminar were devoted to “Casablanca,” analyzed frame by frame. Why does this film work? How is the story made? And though I have seen the film several times on my large flat-screen TV, I had never seen it on the big screen, as it was intended. Shot in black and white, without special effects, the story, the script, and the acting are in high relief.

Unlike narrative prose, a screen writer is forced to relinquish his or her work to a director and actors. The film takes on a life apart from the writer’s control, and is often re-written by a team of new writers. I am sure this is not easy for the writer. In the case of “Casablanca,” two writers wrote the original stage play, and two more worked on the film script. Yet, the film became a classic. And though no one expected such success, it’s obvious that the acting and the script had something to do with it. The script is available online for study:

http://www.weeklyscript.com/Casablanca.txt.

It’s a “Wonder Script."

 Read More 

I met a 100-worder at a birthday party for an old friend who is now, literally, old or older—an octogenarian, but still vibrant, funny, alive, a person who encourages all her artist, writer and musician friends, of all ages. She is not an artist, but there is something about her uninhibited persona and challenging political riffs that attracts and inspires artists. All art is acknowledged and celebrated at her parties: a new book, a new canvas, a handmade scarf, an unusual appetizer, a photograph. Whether the work succeeds or fails is not important. It may be good, or brilliant, or good enough, marketable or unmarketable, a work-in-progress, a work revised, a work discarded on the pathway to another work.

The party itself is a creative event as it unfolds. And it becomes a story, as this one here. It was during a lull—after the food and wine had settled—that the conversations slowed and hummed. The 100-worder was listening to me talk to a visual artist who lives in Westbeth, a utopian community of artists on the lower West Side of Manhattan. I was commenting on her 1940’s dress/costume, when I remembered that I’d worn something similar to a reading from my book of novellas, “Sitting for Klimt,” based on the lives of five artists. She had invited me to Westbeth to read, though I knew that painters, in particular, might object to my fictionalized rendering of Klimt. I was not mistaken: the Q & A was heated. I had been inspired by a great artist and his work, it was as simple as that, and my audience that day was offended by my “distortions.” I reminded them that I am not an art historian, I am writer. But we couldn’t understand one another at all. Impasse.

“Ah, you are a writer," the 100-worder said as I was finishing my reminiscence about the frustrations of reading at Westbeth.

“Yes, I am. Are you?”

“I write a hundred words every Monday,” he said.

“That qualifies you for attendance at this party,” I said facetiously.

I was bristling at the thought of a dilettante attending my friend’s party. Was he a pretender to the throne of artistry? No he was not; he was deadly earnest. He pulled out his phone and called up his email to show me a thread of 100-word mini-stories. “Most of us are businessmen. We enjoy the freedom of writing about anything we want. We have to stay in the word count," he said.

Well, this was very intriguing. How did this get started? I asked.

“By invitation only,” he said. “We’ve never even met. We’re planning a party, though. It will be interesting.”

“Indeed,” I said. “But I don’t think it will make any difference. It’s the work that’s important.”

“Are 100-word stories considered a ‘work’?” he asked as I disengaged from my writer-pedestal. I was suddenly moved to welcome my new 100-worder friend into the pantheon of writers.

“Of course,” I said. “Remember Hemingway’s five-word memoir: FOR SALE, BABY SHOES, NEVER WORN.”

“Oh, I’ll have to try that,” he said. And he took out his little notebook and began to write.  Read More 

Is there any artist, writer or performer who does not want to create a masterwork? Who does not hope that sometime in our lifetime, such a masterwork will emerge, Medusa-like, from the painstaking disciplined years of artistic toil? Will any of our efforts remain in print, become part of a canon, be remembered even slightly as a good read, a fine landscape, a well-crafted performance? Chances are slim for most of us. Yet, in the struggle, the artist finds joy and purpose most of the time.

Such were my thoughts at the reconstruction of the 1913 Armory Show at the NY Historical Society. There were a few highlights—Matisse, Redon, Duchamp, John Sloan and Robert Henri, a Whistler—artists whose reputations have survived the decades. But for the rest: flawed and unimpressive work.

This realization-- that the Armory Show today would be no big deal-- made me self-conscious about my own work. How good is it? How will it be judged fifty, one-hundred years from now, assuming that it would be judged or enjoyed at all?

I don’t often suffer from such self-doubts; no matter what is going on in my personal and professional life, I keep writing. Day after day, I journal, devise new projects, revise old ones, teach and encourage.

I have a big birthday approaching, perhaps that is why I am having a meltdown today. How much time do I have left to improve? To get it right? How much time do any of us have?

“Stories,” Richard Ford has said, “should point toward what’s important in life.” For a serious artist, no matter how famous or infamous, “time spent on earth is not wasted.”  Read More 

Luis works in a laundry in my neighborhood, a laundry where the machines work well and there are comfortable chairs to sit on. Short, with long hair, caramel skin and a ready smile, Luis saw me reading my students’ papers one day and, in his elementary English, tried to start a conversation. Was I a teacher?

“Yes,” I said, “I teach writing at a university.”
“I would like a book,” he said.
“What kind of book?”
“To help my English,” he said.

Luis is forty-four and once had been a good student with ambitions to become a teacher himself, but there was no money in his large Mexican family to continue his schooling. He married, had two children, and migrated to America to earn money for his family. I didn’t dare ask when he last saw them. If he is illegal, he can’t leave the US and get back in. So many complications.

“This is my life,” he said, sadly.

Then I returned to his request for a book. Had he ever taken ESL classes? Yes. Would he consider trying to improve his English as a first step to more education? Yes. And I told him about other immigrants and refugees I knew who had to restart their lives late in their lives. It’s difficult, but not impossible. “Go back to the ESL class,” I said. “Study hard. Make effort.”

Luis smiled. Then Elena, his co-worker, came over and smiled. And we cooked up a plan. I would talk to them and correct their English every time I came to do my laundry and, in the interim, Luis would be a teacher of English, correcting Elena, using his dictionary, and talking to customers whenever possible—in English. No Spanish language soap operas on the TV as they folded laundry. Only English language soap operas. Okay? They agreed.

I found this encounter very touching. The impulse to learn, to improve, to study, is universal, even among migrant workers. To deliver some hope—that made my day.  Read More 

A student—I shall call her L here—arrived about forty-five minutes late to my first Wednesday NYU class. She hadn’t received my emails with attached documents and went to the wrong building, a good mile away from where we were meeting. I had left text and voice messages for everyone on my roster telling them to check their emails, but there were blank spaces next to L’s name, and all my efforts to track her down before class had failed. Now here she was, our mystery guest I was already calling her, exhausted, frustrated, and embarrassed. When we talked during the break she told me that she had only recently bought a computer and a cell phone. “I know I am far behind,” she said. “But I want to write so badly.” She had bought an Apple laptop and an iPhone and was taking every class offered at the Apple store, but she was still learning how to negotiate email and the internet. Oh dear, I thought, I don’t hand out anything, I’ve gone completely virtual. And then the thought: If a student is not electronically connected, are we discriminating?

I believe the answer is yes. After all, if a student enrolls, it is our job to make sure that the class works for them even if that means printing out materials to hand them in class. Which is what I offered to do. I called my student at home over the weekend to reassure her again but, unfortunately, and to my great dismay, she had already withdrawn. Then another student wrote to ask if I could start a class Facebook page so that work could be posted and shared with ease. Most assuredly, the answer to that question is no, for all the discriminatory reasons stated above.

As a mentor, I have to protect and serve every member of my workshop, to make them and their writing efforts welcome and valued, whether they have gone virtual, or not. In the past, I have had students submit manuscripts etched in longhand on lined paper and then photocopied for everyone to read. It didn’t matter. Only the writing matters. Read More