Carol Bergman

Why does a writer write, an artist paint, a singer sing? And do artists and writers have gifts that can be taught? Or not?

I do think that there are exceptionally talented people with very special gifts. Genius talent, shall we say. But when my opera singer friend, Carla Lopez-Speciale, said to me one day that most people can learn to sing, I was taken aback. Her voice is exceptional. I could learn to do that? I don't think so. I think she meant that I could learn to sing for pleasure though, obviously, I'd never be an opera singer. No, I'm a writer. My talent lies there. My effort lies there.

I find inspiration in writers I admire, study their sentences, parse their plots. And I know why I write: I write to connect with my readers, domestic, overseas and interplanetary :). I write to stay grounded, alert and actively engaged in the world. I love words and beautiful sentences. I love to talk. I love to listen. I love to elicit stories from others. I love books, newspapers, magazines, literary magazines, online and print. I have created a body of work: articles, essays, fiction, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screen treatment. I have admirers and detractors. I keep on writing regardless of opinion or the money I earn writing.

Some of my followers are family, some are friends, some are colleagues, some are strangers. Every now and again, one of these followers responds or “likes” what I’ve written to assure me they are following me, or agree with what I have said, or don’t agree with what I’ve said, or have something interesting to add to what I’ve said. Or they have been inspired to write their own posts and tweets and novels, which is gratifying. Or they remain silent. Sometimes, they thank me. I will always respond to whatever appears on my FB or Twitter posts. It’s a conversation, a discourse.

But like most writers, I work in a self-imposed solitary confinement 85-90% of the time. One reason, among many, I love FB, one reason among many I love to teach. Once a week at least, I am in the presence of other writers. The heat inside me and my students is too much to bear without an artistic outlet. We are hyper-sensitive and keenly observant. Personal suffering or intense joyful experience is transformed into words. The goal is to write from the heart with precision.

There is us—the writers—and the reading world out there—the consumers of writing—who buy our books, read our articles, essays and stories, then toss them away with “I liked it,” or “I didn’t like it.” Or a book club discusses a book in two hours, a book that took a year to write. And we wonder if that book will stay on the shelf or get quickly recycled. And then the wondering stops and we press on to the next project.

Who will remember the days, weeks and months of hard work to create a work? Only the writer, only the artist.

And so it came as a welcome surprise to learn that the Canadian Writers Union is sponsoring an international #whywritersmatter campaign. Strokes and appreciation for the day to day devotion of the writer to his or her work. Excellent, thank you. A reminder that what we are doing is worth doing, the ultimate reward.

Please pitch in. Say something on my posts if you are inclined and/or on the international campaign website. Let us know you’re out there reading what we write. Celebrate our free society with a playful or thoughtful response. We need our writers and our intelligent readers this American election year more than ever. There's a demagogue out there trying to get our attention.

http://www.writersunion.ca/news/writers-union-canada-launches-whywritersmatter-campaign

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Once again, it’s time for a Facebook assessment. I remember my reluctance to enter this virtual world, and my surrender. I’ve written about finding a college friend, the pleasure we’ve found in our posts, the constancy of our responses, the shared news about our creative lives. I enjoy the photographs my niece posts of her children and her husband posts of his new encaustic paintings. Yes, he’s painting again! We are separated by a continent but can eavesdrop on one another’s activities. This makes it easier to feel connected and to reconnect when we do see each other.

I post my website blog—this blog post that I am writing today—as a “note,” and the Facebook note feeds into Twitter which enhances my online profile and keeps my classes (mostly) filled. My prospective students check me out before signing up. Who can blame them? They are spending hard-earned money—a lot of it—and want to make sure it will not be wasted. I even use their Facebook posts and photographs as writing prompts in the workshop. Who would have ever thunk it? In fact, I encourage my students to write their hearts out on Facebook and in emails, not just sound bytes but long narratives: captions for every photograph, commentary in answer to every commentary. Facebook: yet another tool to keep the writing muscle supple.

But Facebook is more than a publicity or writing tool. It’s also a bulletin board, a graffiti wall, a communal well, a listening post. I find it particularly comforting when something awful is going on in the world which, alas, is all too frequent these days. People in the US and overseas post words of comfort or insight, and all at once the isolation, despair or frustration we feel is eased; we are a community. And, maybe just maybe, a shared link or two might suggest a way out of a conundrum: the refugee migration crisis, England’s imminent EU referendum, the US election. Or, more personally, a private woe expressed fleetingly on one particular day: “Dear FB Friends,” it might say, “I am not feeling so great today.” Incoming: lots of supportive messages and suggestions. And, for me, the impulse to pick up the phone and talk.

A dear friend, someone I see in the flesh in the city, once said to me that an old high school mate, now a FB friend, is ranting on his site. For some reason he won’t “unfollow,” him though this is easy enough to do now—a new, welcome function—without the finality of “unfriending.” Don’t we pick and choose our friends in the real world? So why not insist on civility on Facebook if that is our preference? The digital culture has evolved and so have we.

I can’t imagine my life these days without Facebook and I wonder, at times, whether friends and family who “don’t do Facebook” are missing out on this inclusive, global conversation. I intuit that they are and wish they’d consider joining.  Read More 

“How Does a Nation Turn to Hate?” That’s a tag line on the New York Historical Society website this month. I went to see their small exhibition, “Antisemitism 1919-1939,” and took lots of notes. It was the only way I could concentrate without becoming very upset.

First of all, as many of my readers know, my parents were genocide survivors. Secondly, the Nazi propaganda displayed in the vitrines felt eerily familiar in this 2016 election year. At first, Hitler was dismissed as a fringe crank. It didn’t take him long to become Chancellor.

So I’m weighing in on the “Trump Phenomena.” His campaign is not at all funny or entertaining. It’s terrifying. Like Hitler and his cohorts, he is a master of media manipulation and inflammatory, subliminal messages, nuanced enough to avoid accusations of “hate speech" yet remain within the realm of “free speech” protected by the First Amendment. It's incendiary nonetheless. Trump is the voice of bigotry and has given bigotry a voice. And if he now claims—cynically—that he’s just a regular guy and is going to calm down, that’s even worse. The damage has been done.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler had many “willing executioners,” as Harvard scholar Daniel Goldhagen wrote in a 1995 book of that title. Men and women who were acquiescent, men and women who obeyed. The Nazi killing machine revved up incrementally. It began by endlessly repeating words and images of dirty money-grabbing Jews who were “repulsive parasites,” the cause of all Germany’s problems since the beginning of time. There were even children’s books written to reinforce these messages and a couple of them are on display at the NY Historical Society exhibition. I had never seen them before. They are shocking.

The indoctrination of ordinary citizens ended in The Nuremberg Laws—the legal foundation of Hitler’s Holocaust—and the death camps. Where will Trump’s campaign lead us as a nation? His anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim epithets deny our citizens, asylees, refugees and applicants for American citizenship, the fundamental right to live without threat of violence. His language inflames those who hate, those who may carry guns; we are a well-armed nation. Hate crimes against Muslims have spiked in recent months. And no wonder.

We have had other demagogues running for office in the past, but that fact does not make Donald Trump any less dangerous. We must stop him for the sake of our children and our democracy.  Read More 

A writer/artist cousin wrote to ask: Who are your favorite poets? Oh, I had so much fun answering that question. Poetry is everywhere, as present as the clouds and the sky, or a sentence that someone throws out standing on the sidewalk chatting as the clouds roll by, or a tear for a sick friend, or the whiff of spring blossom, or the soft fur of a new puppy, or a lover’s touch, or a parent who has just died, or mortality and love in general, and so much more every day and night and through the night into the morning and the next day and the day after that.

I have created my own anthology of poetry and I try to memorize a poem now and again which I find difficult, but I do it anyway even if it takes me a long time, a line or two a day. Beyond that, I have a few poetry collections on my shelf, and I listen to Garrison Keillor recite and declaim poetry on “Writer’s Almanac,” and suddenly the poems in The New Yorker—which I read digitally—have little speaker clicks next to them and I can hear the poet (if s/he is alive) read his or her own poems. Not that poets necessarily read their own poems well. Sometimes, in fact, they are so portentous in their reading that I cannot understand what they are saying at all, I am just watching them or hearing them be portentous. If that happens, it’s on to the next one quickly as there are so many poems to enjoy. We don’t have to linger if a poem is obscure or we don’t like it. No one is grading us. We are not parsing anything as we were forced to parse in high school. And if we are at a poetry reading and the reading is boring as well as portentous (portentous is boring), we can space out or write our own poetry in a notebook which, if we are writers, we always carry with us.

I have a poetry app on my smart phone, smart enough to know that poetry is essential to daily life. I can look up any poet and find some examples of his or her work, or I can browse by subject—youth, aging, love, nature, work and play—depending on my mood. Or the poems “spin” and I can read whatever comes up like a wheel of fortune at an amusement park. The Poetry Foundation has created this app—it’s free—and I thank them.  Read More 

I don’t think any writer starting out on her career believes that she’ll be expected to promote herself—endlessly—as I am doing right here, right now, on Facebook which RSS feeds into Goodreads, my Amazon Authors Page and Twitter. I have missed-out on Instagram I learned the other day at the “I Wish To Say” PEN event in Bryant Park. I was one of the readers, a professional photographer working the event was snapping pictures, and she asked if she could tag me on my Instagram account. I have opened an account but I don’t use it, I told her. Not yet anyway. And if I continue on this path of social media advertising for and of myself, which is already so time-consuming, will there be any time or inclination left to write?

Innocently, at first, we assume that others will do the work of pimping and primping for us. Pimping is the selling part of the busines, primping the copy-editing and proofing of text. I don’t want to be doing any of that. All I want to do is teach and write. That’s hard work enough. And satisfying. And although the work comes to fruition with pimping and primping, I don’t like it, nor do most writers and artists I know. Not to mention that most of us are solitary creatures, solitude required for the writing endeavor. How else can ideas, sentences and words surface in us if we aren’t quiet?

Quietude, what a quaint idea.

Once, riding shotgun in a car in Geneva with the publicist for the International Committee for the Red Cross, he told me that if I wanted to get the book I was working on about humanitarian relief work “platformed,” he could introduce me to John le Carré’s agent. Perhaps he could write a preface for the book? Le Carré was immersed in humanitarian advocacy and said yes in two minutes. The preface was written—with not a word out of place I might add. We also landed a beautiful photo for the cover by James Nachtwey, a renowned war photojournalist. Platform “favors.” And though we had to pay for them, the price stayed low. Neither Nachtwey nor le Carré wanted a lot of money.

Was I pleased? Of course I was. This was a worthy project that took two years to complete. Did I promote the book like crazy in the US and the EU? You bet I did. But it wasn’t advertisement for myself (in the solipsistic sense), it was advertisement of the work itself, which is different. I’m not sure that what I am doing here in this blog is the same. True, I concentrate on writing and the writing life, and hope that what I write has some value for writers and students, but self-promotion per se makes me queasy.  Read More 

I had Googled myself which I do from time to time to find out where my writing might have drifted—without payment—and I found an entry for a Ziegfeld Girl, circa 1929, by the name of, yes, you guessed it: Carol Bergman aka Caryl Bergman. Had she changed the spelling of her first name? Or had a publicist done it for her? Needless to say, I was intrigued. There were two artful/saucy portraits of her online, one of which I include here. They were taken by Alfred Cheney Johnston, a well known theatrical portrait photographer and a favorite of Florenz Ziegfeld’s.

There were the regular photos for posters and front of the house display and then there was a private stash discovered in Johnston’s home after his death. According to Laurie Sanderson, the president of The Ziegfeld Club, this stash was not commissioned by Ziegfeld who championed women. Many, like Ms. Sanderson’s grandmother, Nanon Gardner, lived in the Hotel des Artistes where Johnston also had a studio. Did he pay the girls for posing after-hours? Did he give the photos away? Sell them as soft-porn postcards? And would it have been possible to decline the invitation to pose? Ms. Sanderson says that her grand-mother did not pose. Were there consequences? Many of the images are now available on eBay. Vintage Photos Hashtags: #SexyByNature #Health #Beauty #Fitness. I could go for those as applied to me, nude or clothed.

I’ve been reflecting on all this—the life of another Carol Bergman way back in the roaring 1920’s which we now know as The Jazz Age. Florenz Ziegfeld interviewed about 15,000 “glorious specimens of American womanhood” a year, and 3,000 were selected to be in his shows. Ms. Bergman made the cut. (I respectfully give her the modern moniker Ms.!) She starred in four musical comedies: “Sweet Adeline,” “Through The Years,” “Show Girl” and “Rosalie.” These girls could do anything: a bit of singing, a bit of dancing, a bit of acting. And they were very young. Caryl Bergman was just seventeen when the photo I have attached here was taken.

At first, roses arrived from “Flo” Ziegfeld with a note: “May I make you a star?” Later, roses and notes arrived from men in the audience. Some remained anonymous, some didn’t. These were showgirls. They were on parade. Was there an unwritten clause in their contracts, perhaps, to be cooperative with the photographer? Those photos. How could Ziegfeld not have known about them? And how were they used?

Here is photographer Johnston’s description of Caryl Bergman’s beauty:

“Her hair is of the natural hue one attributes to the Nordic race: not a golden blonde not a silver blonde, but that glorious shade between. Her eyes are blue—a gray blue, and her lashes long and darker than her hair. Her nose is small and straight, and her little mouth parts into a gracious smile more often than not—and shows an even rose of small, pearl-like teeth. Her skin is soft and creamy in coloring. It is skin not as white as the Gainbsborough blonde--not as peach-like in tone as the Greuze brunet. With her very light hair, it calls for a light rachel powder and medium shade of raspberry rouge . . . . "

And all I can say to that hyperbolic, evocative/provocative piece of writing is: really? Nordic? Well, it was the 1920’s.

From a Ziegfeld Girl's point of view it was a job like any other, or no other, and if I were asked to moonlight in Johnston’s studio for extra bucks, I surely would have done so. Aren’t all theater people happy to be employed? And to be a Ziegfeld Girl—I would have been proud.

Ziegfeld went bankrupt in the Depression and ended up working for Samuel Goldwyn in Hollywood. After he left New York, his employees scattered and found jobs elsewhere, if they were lucky. Caryl Bergman headed for Europe and in 1934—as reported in the Pittsburgh Gazette—she turned up in a “tent club” in that city. Later, she got married, wrote a novel and became a peace activist. There is no record of her death. Perhaps she is immortal or has returned—in spirit—to grace the cover of Vanity Fair.  Read More 

I have received another family tree from a scholar in Rome. It isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last. Someone Googles me, finds something I’ve written, finds out that my father had a valuable art collection (Egon Schiele), decides to be helpful, or cannot resist sharing years of meticulous research. This person may or may not be a relative though usually they claim that they are. I need only study the tree, they suggest, to find us both on a branch connected by squiggly or straight lines.

I should be interested but I’m not. I glaze over and barely look at the carefully researched trees. I usually send a thank you note and that’s it. Maybe some day, I tell myself, when I am writing one thing or another, I’ll be able to make use of that tree. I do save them, or gmail does. And if the historian/researcher turns up in New York, I graciously suggest that we meet for a coffee.

Most people adore genealogy—there are websites and TV programs devoted to it. So why don’t I care? Or, put another way, why do I shut down?

It has to do with ghosts. And having just finished Erik Larson’s masterpiece, “Dead Wake,” about the last Atlantic crossing of the Lusitania in 1915 before it was torpedoed by a German u-boat in the Irish Sea, I am even closer to an explanation. After that ship went down, killing more than 1,000 people, one of the survivors described a vision of his heavily pregnant mother giving birth in the water. That was the last he saw of her; he was haunted by the vision for the rest of his life.

I feel the same way when I glance at a family tree, especially as it nears the 20th century. Most of the people on that tree—on both sides of my family—were murdered. I never knew them, I could not save them, they are, simply, gone. Their names on a piece of paper, no matter how accurate or well drawn, will never bring them back to me.

Now I can say to myself, as I often do, that the unsolicited gift of a family tree has brought a new person into my life—perhaps a relative, perhaps not—who I did not know existed before. And that’s a good thing, for which I am grateful.  Read More 

I had been in the hospital visiting a friend, standing by the elevator waiting to leave, when two nurses rolled an incubator into the hallway.

Even a baby has a story. She had been taken downstairs for x-rays and was wrapped up inside the incubator, a little hat on her head, a striped blanket covering her and oxygen pumping through a tube into her nose. Such a small little baby. The two nurses had stethoscopes around their necks, one on each side of the incubator, like angels guarding the baby. A priest was standing next to them, and when the elevator arrived, everyone gave way for the procession: two nurses, the baby inside the incubator, the priest. “This baby gets right of way,” I said. Where were her parents? How could they have let their baby out of their sight? Why did she need an x-ray? I began to cry, just a soft, whispering cry. Then everyone in the elevator fell silent, and as it began to move, the priest raised his finger and pressed it against the glass near the baby’s head. He said a blessing. “This baby needs to be blessed,” the priest said. So we all blessed the baby.

Premature babies died until the incubator was invented; it was an adaptation of the chicken hatchery. And then came hucksterism, a freak show of “live babies" at World Fairs and Coney Island’s Dreamland, circa 1903. It was Dr. Martin Couney’s idea. Don’t people like an unusual story that pulls at their heartstrings, he asked? Entrance fee: 10 cents. Outside carnival barkers (including a very young Cary Grant) drew people into the exhibit. The sign over the entryway said, "All the World Loves a Baby." Ain’t it so, dear readers? Who can resist a story with a baby in it? Not I.

Back in 1903, desperate parents volunteered their babies willingly and who can fault them? If they hadn’t, they would have died. Dr. Couney never charged them any money.

Those who survived were called “Couney graduates.” I met one many years ago in Seattle and interviewed her. “Just imagine spending the first few weeks of your life in an incubator at Coney Island?” she said. Did she remember? Not really. But it sure made a good story.

The incubator exhibit at Coney Island closed down in 1941. Now, of course, incubators are commonplace in the developed world as are the survival rates of premature babies.  Read More 

Lest we ever forget the empathetic, imaginative genius of The Bard, we have another reminder in an up-and-coming digitalized archive at The British Museum Library. It’s a play, circa 1600 that was never produced. (The original playwright is unknown,) . The authorities were afraid it would incite riots. Why? Because the main character—Sir Thomas More—makes an impassioned plea for the humane treatment of French Hugenot refugees seeking asylum in London. Sound familiar?

Shakespeare was brought in as a script doctor, as were others, but scholars agree that his contribution is the most moving and well-written. Indeed, he fixed the script; many speeches have a distinctive Shakespearean signature.

For those who have not read “Wolf Hall,” or seen the adaptation on PBS, Sir Thomas More was Henry VIII’s councilor and lord chancellor. And by many accounts, including Hilary Mantel’s, he was not a particularly sympathetic figure. Shakespeare re-interprets Sir Thomas More, deepening his character in the rewrite of the script.

“At its heart it is really about empathy,” says the library’s curator, Zoe Wilcox, in an article in The Guardian on March 15, 2016. More is calling on the crowds to empathise with the immigrants or strangers as they are called in the text. He is asking them to imagine what it would be like if they went to Europe, if they went to Spain or Portugal, they would then be strangers. He is pleading with them against what he calls their ‘mountainous inhumanity’ ” :

“You’ll put down strangers,/ Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,/ And lead the majesty of law in lyam/ To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas! Say now the King/ As he is clement if th’offender mourn,/ Should so much come too short of your great trespass/ As but to banish you: whither would you go?/What country, by the nature of your error,/ Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,/ To any German province, Spain or Portugal,/ Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:/ Why, you must needs be strangers.”

We would do well to remember that these are not Sir Thomas More’s words, they are Shakespeare’s.  Read More 

Letters. Once upon a time my mailbox was chock-a-block with letters, not junk but letters. Envelopes with stamps, handwritten missives on all kinds of stationary, typed missives, laser printed missives, photographs. Now, every morning when I open my email I’m excited if personal messages await me. We live transnational lives, friends and relatives and colleagues everywhere. But only a few use the convenience of email to send long narrative “letters,” if we can still call them that. Certainly, writers send long narrative emails more than most. Not only does it keep our professional and personal relationships alive, it keeps our writing muscles supple.

After a decade of working in London, I’d made many friends and I was sad to leave. My friend, Norma, suggested that we correspond regularly. About once-a-month we exchanged huge envelopes filled with: news clippings, a written letter or tape, programs of plays, press releases (we are both journalists), gallery brochures and photographs. Now we do the same on email which is much cheaper, faster and environmentally correct though, somehow, not nearly as much fun. The arrival of these packages made me smile. I’d have days of browsing and reading ahead of me, the joy of hearing Norma’s voice telling stories on tape (she’s an actor as well as a journalist) and the sensation, illusory though it was, that I was still in London, if only for an hour or so a month. Skype, phone, Facetime, all wonderful and immediate, but not the same. And this is true of every technological advance: we gain and we lose.

So here’s a gain story:

My friend William moved to Singapore when he finished his PhD and couldn’t get a job in the U.S. He married and now has a baby. Settled, more or less, into a very interesting life abroad. He teaches, he writes hard-boiled novels, reviews books, travels. We had both taught ESL at a Japanese school in New York and although we are a generation apart became fast friends. Then he left. What to do? Stay in touch, of course. Recently, after he moved from Singapore to Jakarta, our email correspondence accelerated and deepened. A few days ago he attached some photos of his wife, his new baby girl, and a link to a blog post sketch of him made by a well known Indonesian graphic artist, Sheila Rooswitha. They were in a noodle cafe discussing a graphic novel adaptation of one of William’s Malaya trilogy, “Singapore Black” (Monsoon Books), when William’s phone went off. There’d just been a terror attack south of where they were sitting and he was trying to get some information. Sheila started to sketch him. The sketch was so vivid that I was right there with them.

Then there is my cousin, Cameron, a musician (French horn), who led a peripatetic life in the orchestra of “Phantom of the Opera” for many years—stayed in touch with everyone—and is now living in the woods of northern California with his husband, James. Cameron collects old typewriters and is an avid correspondent. To my shame, I discouraged him from writing me very long letters and I am sorry, truly, Cameron. Somehow the electronic revolution addled my brain. It made me impatient and dismissive of thick beautiful envelopes arriving in my snail mail box. So I’m contrite and repentant and by way of apology will post the link to your blog here so that others might enjoy it:

http://cameronkopf.blogspot.com/

All best,
Carol Bergman  Read More