Carol Bergman

I first heard about the doorknob effect from a student who worked in a state hospital as a forensic psychiatrist. All day long she listened to the accused tell stories about their afflicted childhoods or confess their crimes. She wrote up her findings for the court. Every detail was on the record including the psychiatrist's hypothesis about the alleged perpetrator's conscious and unconscious motivations and his or her sanity. She conducted interviews using a recording device and taking careful notes. Questions were prepared beforehand but often the most useful and/or incriminating evidence surfaced during unscripted answers to questions or when the interviewee/patient/suspect thought the session was over and started to head out the door. Experienced psychiatrists keep the recorder running, my student said, as the words "oh by the way..." often signal a revelation. This is known as the "doorknob effect." Sound familiar? If so, it's because reporters experience the same phenomena.

How many times have I put on my coat and said goodbye when my "subject" begins the most telling anecdote I've heard in more than two hours? There's something about the informality and gentle patter of leave-taking that puts a person at ease. I usually stop, take out my notebook again, and write down what the person has just said. Or I make a follow-up phone call.

But what I've been thinking about today (after reading my students last submissions of the term) is a variation on this theme: We often inflict the doorknob effect on ourselves. How does this happen? I'm not a forensic psychiatrist much less a psychologist, so my best guess, based on my own experience, is that our unconscious fears reign us in. This can be a serious obstacle to our writing and leaves an ellipsis in the story the reader can't forget. Or, as Arthur Miller, said in 1953 after seeing a play by James Merrill, "You know, this guy's got a secret, and he's gonna keep it."

Tenacious reporters don't give up until they've got the story. And writers who use the material of their own lives as a story or in a story shouldn't either.



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My mother went to see “The Reader,” a David Hare adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s best-selling novel. She had loved the book but was disturbed by the film. She didn’t know what was different so I offered to see the film, read the screenplay, and then reread the book to find out how David Hare had changed the story either by omitting scenes, adding them, or changing what the characters say or don’t say. My mother was certain there had been changes but couldn’t articulate them. From her point of view—that of a Jewish Holocaust refugee—she didn’t feel the changes were for the better. The author’s quest for understanding in the book through an intelligent, humble narrative persona, had been distorted in the film, she thought.

”The Reader” reads well in English probably because its author, a constitutional judge and author of several crime novels, had studied in England and the United States and speaks English well. A translator will often work in collaboration with an author, more so if the author speaks, reads and writes the language. But I have read nothing to suggest that Bernard Schlink was invited to work with David Hare—a well known, knighted British playwright—during the process of adaptation. Typically, film companies buy the rights to a novel and send the novelist back into his cave. Usually, they hope he’ll stay there.

The adaptation of “The Reader” from book to film took a long time. Anthony Minghella had originally optioned the book with his co-producer, Sydney Pollack, soon after the book was published in English. Bernard Schlink must have been pleased; Anthony Minghella had a reputation for collaboration with authors. Michael Ondatjee had worked closely with him during the script development of “The English Patient.”

Time passed, the project remained dormant and then, finally, Minghella and Pollack –who felt they were letting Schlinck down with all the delays—granted the rights to David Hare and the director, Stephen Daldry. The two original producers returned to help out and then both died within weeks of each other, leaving the screenwriter without the mentors he badly needed. “Time and again, Sydney would draw us back to the question: What exactly is the metaphor of reading in the film? What is the function of literature?” Hare writes in the introduction to the screenplay. Sadly, it seems as though he could not answer these seminal questions without Sydney Pollack’s guidance.

Where does the film adaptation fail? Most obviously, in the choice of Kate Winslet as leading lady. Her husband, Sam Mendes, became the producer of the film, so obviously this led to her casting after another actress backed out because of pregnancy. It’s intriguing to wonder who this woman might have been. Someone a bit rougher? A bit less sweet? Kate Winslet is beautiful and her luminous presence on the screen—her innocence—is never shattered. We believe in the love affair because she is so attractive. Where is the scene from the book where Hanna strikes Michael with a belt? Where is Hanna’s dark cruelty? Absent. The leading lady has become a sympathetic Romantic Heroine.

Returning to the book after seeing the movie, I was struck by Schlink’s ability to work on several levels, beyond the love story and Hanna’s “illiteracy,” a complexity the film does not achieve. If Hanna is the old Germany and Michael the new Germany, the story becomes more interesting, deeper. And if her illiteracy is a metaphor for “not knowing,” the primary rationale the ordinary citizens of Germany have always voiced for their complicity and silence, then Schlink has succeeded where the film has not in condemning, not forgiving, his father’s generation. As the metaphors in the book are consistent, I am certain this was the author’s intent. Michael’s voice as a questioning narrator and interlocutor is obliterated in the film. The narration becomes casual, matter-of-fact. What remains is a story about a young man’s sexual initiation at a certain time in history. But that certain time in history is never fully examined.

Should a subject such as genocide ever be presented casually, as entertainment? Yes and no, or it depends on how well it’s done. Sometimes a new approach pierces the iconic imagery of the event and illuminates unexpectedly. Roberto Benigni ‘s “Life is Beautiful” is one such cinematic example. Although most of my family was murdered in the camps, that particular film made me laugh and cry at the same time. It was the first time in years I’d felt anything beyond numbness and resignation about “life” in the death camps.

When I finished the arduous task I’d set myself of comparing and contrasting the book, the screenplay and the film, I returned to my mother’s kitchen for a long conversation. My disappointment in the film was profound, my mother’s intuition correct, I had decided. The filmmakers had not honored the book’s message. During the Oscar night hoopla, Bernard Schlink, “The Reader’s” brave author, and the work he had created, was nearly forgotten.
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By the time I returned to the United States from a ten-year expatriate sojourn in England, I was in love with the English language, its provenance in the Old World and evolution in the New World along a different path, all the extant words, all the extinct words, the Latin and Greek roots, dialects and colloquialisms. As an American living in England, my New York accent was considered “quaint.” At parties I was often asked to do “Brooklyn” or “Bronx,” though I had grown up in Manhattan and spoke a more neutral New Yorkese. Eventually, I learned to speak British English so well that late in my stay few people appreciated that I had learned another language and was now bi-lingual.

Anyone with a good ear for language will pick up the cadences, stresses and expressions of the region where they live. I forgot to switch back into American English when my American friends called. They would comment on my strange way of speaking and not always in a complimentary way. I was leaving America behind and had become European, they said. This was a betrayal. Their comments echoed the chauvinism I experienced in Britain, in reverse.

I returned to America with a devotion to English though I was also weighed down by the cruelties of colonial history, the insistence that the English language was an Imperial Tool. Now that English has become a global language by force of internet rather than by arms, and the days of Empire are—hopefully—over, these worries have become moot. But the etymologies of the language, its history, is still of great interest to me.

I returned to America with several old dictionaries I’d picked up at flea markets and soon landed a job writing etymologies for a language arts textbook company. It was the perfect transition back to New York and the language of my childhood and young adulthood, which had already mutated into something else, as it does constantly. My dispatches to the Times Educational Supplement of London began to sound more and more American by the day. My editors weren’t happy and I eventually gave up writing for British publications. But I still am an Anglophile and read Trollope for relaxation. On my new Kindle2 I can look up quaint Victorian words such as quod and bespoke. One is extinct, the other is extant.

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I spent much of Sunday spring cleaning my computer; the files were a mess. I have seven completed manuscripts circulating—three essays, three short stories, two very long short stories—and before I start revising the stripped down murder mystery, I have to take a breather, assess the submissions I’ve already made, and send more manuscripts out before the summer hiatus. This is labor intensive work.

I’m trying to be more methodical about my submissions and keep careful notes and spread sheets with the names of editors, even if they have rejected my work. If they say they want to see more, I send them something else immediately. I want my byline and my writing to remain fresh in their mind.

Even after a long career as a writer, any word of encouragement from an editor, much less an acceptance, elevates my mood. That’s only natural, but it’s not necessary. I don’t rely on any admiring response of readers, editors, family or friends to keep working. And I let negative responses roll away. A negative response is not the same as a helpful comment or a deep critique. Once a friend told me she didn't think I was novelist. She may be right--I have never had a novel published--yet. But it was mean of her to speak to me in this way in the midst of my effort to make a novel work. Writers have to ignore such undermining remarks. We have no choice.

Taking an inventory of where we are with our work is comforting as the season changes. The work accumulates and some of it is publishable. We look back and realize we’ve done well over the winter. Our writing life is disciplined, constant. We have learned to ask ourselves the right questions: Is a revision working or should we set it aside for a while? Who is the audience for this piece? Am I working on a book or a short form essay? Is a piece ready to be sent out? Have I considered a recent critique? Why doesn’t my significant other or my best friend like what I’ve written? Does it matter? Am I building my strength as a writer? Attending to elements of craft? Reading and writing every day?

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I went to the Luna Stage out in Montclair, New Jersey to hear a play reading, “Puddin”” by Tia Dionne Hodge, a young, gifted playwright from Cleveland, Ohio who lives in Montclair, “the Park Slope of the suburbs,” according to New York Magazine except that 32% of the population is African American. In other words it’s a vibrant, multi-ethnic, economically mixed, artist’s enclave just forty minutes from the Lincoln Tunnel. As elsewhere, developers are lurking and driving the young artists out. Luna Stage, a spacious black-box theater, has lost their lease and will be moving four miles down the road to West Orange soon. It’s a loss for the community. “Puddin” will be one of their last readings in the Montclair space.

Play readings can be either boring or stimulating depending on the quality of the work, the skill of the actors, and the direction. Actors are thrilled to be asked to readings between gigs to keep their acting muscle supple and often a famous actor is present, to the delight of the audience. Tia lucked out with all the actors but especially with the four leads, all seasoned, including Frankie Faison in the role of Delroy Hudson. Recently, he appeared as Ervin Burrell on the HBO series, “The Wire.” I am sure he was challenged by the complexity of the role Tia has written. The play is rich and powerful.

A reading is much like a writing workshop. The author gets to hear her work come to life as the actors perform and can watch the audience react. Playwrights may have several readings before the script is considered finished, up to and including changes made during rehearsal and previews. In other words, they revise continuously. As Tia is transforming “Puddin,” from a one-act play into a full-length drama—it will be part of a trilogy—she had questions for the audience about the plot and the characters. In a feedback session after the reading, the director of the theater asked the questions as Tia remained in The Glass Box taking notes.

Tia also writes poems and short stories so it surprised me at first that she had decided to tell this particular story using the dramatic form. But then I thought of Eugene O'Neill, Tennesse Williams and August Wilson. Tia is in good company, or they are.


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I last wrote about Facebook on January 12, 2009 (see archived entry). Since that time, I have accumulated some “friends,” a still modest thirty-three at this writing, and I have gone onto the site now and again each week. I enjoy aspects of the experience—lighthearted banter, photos—as I have written before, but remain disheartened at the phenomena as a vehicle for writers to express themselves and/or stay in touch. I don’t think Facebook really keeps us in touch except in the most superficial ways. In that sense, the phenomena is very American. We have the reputation (in Europe) of making friends quickly without constancy or deep commitment.

Like the sound-byte culture of market-driven television, there is no opportunity for reflective thought on Facebook. My commentary stands out in the threads as too long for the medium. It’s an impatient, ephemeral medium. The email function is available as an enhancement, but it is boxed and replies tend to be short, too.

As writers,we need to linger, to take it slow, to expand our verbal capacity. It takes time to struggle every day with the complexities of human psychology and experience. Facebook does not encourage such thoughtfulness or complexity; it demands contraction,distillation, and speed, the very opposite of what writers must do to write well.


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My husband surprised me with a Kindle-2 for my birthday. I buy a lot of books, I read a lot of books, I carry around a lot of books and half my duffel is filled with books when I travel. Not good for my back.

So, it arrived, we opened it, we registered it, and within minutes I was smitten. Even when the Kindle is asleep, it is captivating. Portraits of famous writers as delicate as etchings appear, like magic, on the opening “page.” Every time I open the Kindle a new writer greets me. At the moment, it is Lewis Carroll. Last night it was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

I sent my husband out to dinner and downloaded books. Three of them: Best American Poetry, 2008, Anne Enright’s new collection of short stories, Anthony Trollope’s, “The Way We Live Now,” an 800-page tome I cannot ever carry with me but absolutely love to read at the end of the day or when I’m mentally “resting.” 600 pages to go and now it’s on the Kindle. Poetry, contemporary fiction, classic fiction. I’ll order a nonfiction book, too, but haven’t decided which one.

This is the way I read—four books at once at the very least—which makes Kindle the perfect tool for my literary habits: I can toggle between the books as much as I like. And, when I travel, I’ll have them all.

And did I mention the clarity of the reading screen? It is clear and I can increase or decrease the size of the font instantly. And there’s a clipping and note keeping function I’ve yet to explore.

When I told my niece, also an avid reader, about my gift, she was skeptical. “What if the battery dies and you are not near an electrical outlet and you have nothing to read? You’ll have to carry at least one back-up book or the New Yorker or something,” she said.

Well, of course. I’ll still own books, keep books, admire them, feel comforted by their physical presence, neatly organized by author and genre on my book shelves. And I’ll carry a small amount of (paper) reading material with me where ‘ere I go. But I won’t be loaded down any more and I can be selective. I have piles of book I give away every month to friends or to my local thrift store. I never keep books I don’t think I’ll read again. Now I can simply delete them from my Kindle. But I'll have to watch my budget. The price of the download is discounted off the hardcover price. Except for the classics, there are no bargains. Hopefully, this will change soon.

There’s no new technology without challenges. Kindle-2 has an audio component that threatens the livelihood of authors. Unlike audio books that provide royalties, the electronic voice activation on Kindle-2 does not. Here’s a recent message from the Author’s Guild, host of my site, on this issue:


"At the end of the business day on Friday, Amazon announced that it would allow publishers (and thereby many authors) to block text-to-speech audio functionality on a title-by-title basis for its Kindle 2 reading device.

This is a good first step. Amazon's Kindle 2 can convert text to audio through text-to-speech (TTS) software, making it a combination e-book reader and low-quality audiobook device. (The quality of the audio will improve, of course, as TTS software is refined.) Amazon's initial implementation of Kindle 2 would have added audio playback to your e-book regardless of whether Amazon had properly acquired audio rights. For most of you, Amazon's announcement means that it will now respect your contractual right to authorize (or not) the addition of computer-generated audio to your e-books sold for the Kindle. We will be sending recommendations to you shortly on your TTS audio rights.

One important consideration in those recommendations will be to ensure that visually impaired people have access to this technology. Book authors have traditionally authorized royalty-free copies in specialized formats intended for the visually impaired, and copyright law has long provided a means to distribute recordings to the blind. We can work this out.

Wall Street Journal on Amazon's announcement: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123577886475897701.html "

I remain confident that this issue will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, amazon and authors alike.

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I was upstate for four days this past weekend and have just returned to the city. I finished reading two books, started another, wrote in my new observational journal, took notes for an essay I plan to begin this week, took three long hike-walks, played with the dog in the back garden, went out to eat twice, spent hours talking with my daughter, son-in-law and husband, swept the deck, cooked, ate leisurely breakfasts, cut up avocado and banana peels for the worm farm, read again, took naps, went back out onto the deck, watched an eagle soar, a red cardinal on a branch, sat on the deck in the warm sun and watched the ice recede and the nutrients from the thawing earth percolate up to the muddy surface. My son-in-law roamed his four-plus acres and did some tree culling, returned to report that the daffodils were coming up around the oak tree. My daughter roamed her four-plus acres and found a long-buried dog Frisbee. The dog wandered her four-plus acres and found long-buried sticks still saturated with winter’s moisture.

The days seemed unhurried, endless, spacious and capacious. I was at peace in minutes after my arrival and able to work and play with an ease I never feel in the city.

It’s not just that we all need a “getaway,” I’ve decided. It’s not just that a getaway “restores” city dwellers. It’s that city dwellers live in un-natural—literally “against” nature—environments, and that our bodies and spirits adapt to this environment in un-natural ways.

I have always thought of myself, happily, as a city dweller. I have persuaded myself that the buzz of the city is necessary to my work, that I cannot write well in quiet surroundings. I wonder if this is true or just another adaptation. I wonder what is best for me and for artists in general. Even stranger this morning, I wonder if cities should exist at all. I hear my students complain endlessly about the stresses of their lives in the city. Beyond making a living, stressful enough these days, they search for quiet spaces in which to work and struggle to find the time to become writers.

I will write another time about city life, its pleasure as well as its challenges. But right now, right here, as winter recedes and I sit in my atelier peering out at a brick wall, I wonder what on earth we have done to ourselves and our creative spirit.

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I had a conversation today with Xiujing , a new swimming friend at the gym where I work out. She had finished swimming, I was about to swim, so we chatted at first about the water temperature and the number of other polar bears in our neighborhood braving the waters. Xiujing’s English is very good so I assumed, correctly, that she’s been in the United States for a number of years. She has a very hip haircut and wears funky glasses, a middle-aged hipster, I’d say. And why is she in America with China in the ascendant?

“I’ve wanted to live and work in America since I was a child,” she told me. "My family suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution. I wanted to read great literature, but reading was prohibited. I snuck books into the house, so dangerous, and read them under my covers at night. My parents are still in Bejing. My sister and I are both here and we go to visit them, but we will never live there again.”

I don’t know what Xiujing does for a living—we didn’t get that far—but I did ask if she’d ever heard of Ha Jin, one of China’s expatriate writers, and a great one (“In the Pond,” “Waiting”). She had heard of him but had never read his books. He, too, suffered during the Cultural Revolution and writes eloquently about it. During the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, he was in the US studying. He never returned home and began writing solely in English.

As I write, there are about 44 writers and journalists in jail in China, some of them enduring long sentences. Quite often, the “Freedom to Write Committee” of American Pen Center( http://www.pen.org) part of International Pen, sends out a request for letters to be written to the Chinese Government on behalf of these incarcerated writers. Amnesty International works in a similar way. Often a writer is released, often not, or not right away. No one thought that the Berlin wall or apartheid would fall either.
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I’m reading a page-tuner, Nathaniel Philbrick’s National Book Award winner, “In The Heart of the Sea; The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex,” the 1819-1820 whaling expedition that inspired Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Philbrick’s history is based on many sources including the first-hand account of a survivor, Thomas Nickerson, a cabin boy.

In between squalls and the rigors of the butchery known euphemistically as whaling, working men and passengers on 19th century ships had ample time to ruminate, philosophize, and write observational notes in journals. Without this written record, historians would not be able to reconstruct a story as Philbrick has done so vividly.

This set me to thinking about the historical narrative of our time and how it will be researched by future generations. Assuming that most of the primary source material/data will be electronic or electronically scanned, will historians find it easier or more difficult to do their research? Is it important for all of us to maintain a record of our lives in some form: blogs, journals and notebooks, stories? What happens if we don’t?

Most writers and artists are vexed by these questions. It’s one of the many reasons we struggle to create a lasting body of work. But lasting in what way? And why is it that writers and artists assume their/our stories are worth preserving? I suppose it’s because we are different than most people in one essential way: We are participants but also observers in events, slightly marginalized, peripheral narrators of our lives in our own historic time and place.

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