Carol Bergman

Discovering a new writer is always a surprise, especially as I consider myself well-read. Is this hubris? And how could I have missed Lydia Davis, not heard of her at all until I read the New Yorker profile in late March. She seemed instantly familiar, someone I might have chatted with for hours about her process—how she decides on a story, works just a few hours a day, has raised two boys, been married twice, makes use of the quotidian, makes use of people she knows and their conversations, always has a notebook in her purse to jot bits of dialogue, and so on. “I’m kind of always working in a sense,” she told Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker interview, “sitting and talking to my neighbors, I’m not really working, but I’m always sort of alert to things.”

Her work is not easily categorized, yet she won the 2013 Man Booker for fiction, fiction of just a few sentences, or a paragraph or two. Some have argued that they are prose poems? Are they?

Storytelling is problematic, explains Dave Eggars, who published Davis’ quirky stories in McSweeney’s before anyone. The sentences seem “handmade,” or “unmade,” or a “cool thing from an old junkyard.”

On the level of the words choices and sentences, Davis was admired by other writers before she had a lay audience, and now I know why; I have read a few of her sentences. They are precise, even cold in their precision. And they have an odd cumulative effect—restrained and compelling, restrained and funny. More so when she is reading aloud, as she did at NYU’s Writers House on Thursday night, part of the PEN World Voices Festival. I arrived late and grabbed a seat at the back behind a mirror, no line of sight at all, but a good loudspeaker. And within minutes I was laughing; I had become a fan.

Lydia Davis is an authentic and transparent writer who persists in writing without consideration for what is good for her career. She allows her readers to know her. She allows them to feel her mind. Whether she would have been published had she not been a translator with contacts in publishing, and had a first husband by the name of Paul Auster, is an open question. Somehow, I doubt it. Still, I am more than grateful that she has been published.

Discovering Lydia Davis has been exciting for me. Some years ago, I wrote similar stories and didn’t know what to call them, or what to do with them. A few were published, most are stored in my filing cabinet and on CD’s. Occasionally I add to the collection. Now I’m going to pull them out and have another look, and keep going with titles I’ve scribbled at the back of my journals. There has to be more than one writer like Lydia Davis who deserves to have her unconventional stories published. Maybe one of them is me.  Read More 

I noticed a woman on the elliptical reading a well-worn Penguin classic. Unusual as it is these days to read paperbacks, I asked her what she was reading and, between breaths, she said “Trollope.” I had never read Trollope—this was a few years ago—though he was on my list of authors I “should” read. My husband’s cousin in Seattle belongs to a “Trollope Club,” of which Trollope himself would have approved, except that there are women members. (They don’t wear crinolines, however.) The club studies all of Trollope’s 47 novels and his nonfiction (like Dickens, he traveled to America). The books are read in rotation, themes for discussion are assigned, biographies—new and old—perused. (The best is by Victoria Glendenning. ) Though nearly exact contemporaries, Dickens may or may not be mentioned; Trollopians consider him the lesser writer, and the lesser man. What they meant by this, I did not know, until I read Claire Tomalin’s riveting biography of Nelly Ternan, “The Invisible Woman,” now an inconsequential film directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes as Dickens.

Nelly Ternan was Dickens’ mistress of thirteen years, the woman for whom he persecuted and exiled his wife, and tormented his nine children. She was an actress, all of 18 when Dickens was first smitten, who gave up her career to become a well-kept woman, could never admit her benefactor/lover, probably did not love Dickens very much, and died without revealing their secret. Dickens' wife, Catherine, was equally enslaved, and then cruelly diminished, in a screed published by Dickens in London to wide circulation.

Strange, or perhaps not so strange, that I have never been able to read a Dickens novel with any pleasure or admiration, whereas Trollope satisfied instantly. Dickens’ women are Victorian stereotypes, for starters. Though unconventional and defiant in his personal and political life, and a man with a strong social conscience, Dickens was unable to release his women from their separate sphere into full personhood. Trollope’s women, on the other hand, are fully characterized in the most modern way. It was evident that he loved women, understood them, and experienced them as equals.

That all said, here is a writer—Charles Dickens—his name so well known it is iconic, a writer prolix and imaginative to the point of genius, the most famous, revered, best-selling author of his time, and beyond. Two of his books— “Great Expectations” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” a failed novel—are very often on the literature curriculum in the United States, well-placed in the classical canon, if we can believe in such a canon, which is questionable.

Had Claire Tomalin treated him fairly in her biography of Nellie Ternan? Yes and no. Are the man and the work inseparable? Yes and no. These questions surfaced as I was finishing the Nelly Ternan biography. Now its author has written a biography of Dickens himself. Obviously Tomalin had gathered a lot of material, but what else might have motivated her? Perhaps the issue of fairness, the challenge of understanding Dickens better, and the opportunity to give him voice and space in a re-assessment. It’s a touching effort especially when she describes his fulminating, fierce, afflicted temperament. He walked for miles and miles every day to release his tensions. He was a frantic worker, unable to settle in one home, always traveling and reveling, gregarious to exhaustion. And he was a performer; he loved the crowd.

Tomalin even reframes Dickens’ infatuation with Nellie. Was it a breakdown of sorts? It certainly seems that way as he never recovered from his furtive addiction. Even his appearance changed—his eyes and cheeks sunken, his brow furrowed. It was a sad ending to a fascinating life, and he died too young. Trollope, in contented domesticity, a kind man and equally prolix writer, outlived him by twelve years.

According to Tomalin, Dickens wrote three masterpieces: “David Copperfield,” “Bleak House,” and “Great Expectations.” The first two are psychically and factually autobiographical, narrated in the first person, close to Dicken’s heart and the wounded childhood he survived. They are much more than his usual money-making serialized entertainments, and I plan to return to them.  Read More 

I met my next door neighbor in the Laundromat, the perfect venue to talk about the struggles of the writing life—yes, we do our own laundry—and what we are currently working on. He didn’t have a book with him, which was unusual, because his most recent writing gig—when he is not casting Broadway shows—has been as a book reviewer for a well known newspaper which shall remain anonymous to protect the identity of my writer neighbor. I wouldn’t want him to lose his gig because of some of his remarks. He reviews nonfiction, mostly books about New York, because he wrote two books about New York himself, so now he is an expert according to his editor. I began my writing career in the same way: writing book reviews for The Times Educational Supplement in London. My husband got me the gig; he was writing feature articles. My editor, like my neighbor’s editor, was relieved to have an expert (an American teacher) in his stable of writers, in my case to review all the books about America, particularly American education, that arrived in his office. I didn’t consider myself an expert—far from—but my editor thought I was an expert. I did develop a vocabulary to talk about education and, after a while, this vocabulary and the subject itself, important as it is, bored me. As grateful as I was for the gig and the discipline of deadline and word count, I moved on, as I am sure my neighbor will also.

My husband was a movie reviewer for The City magazine in New York, and had to go to two or three movies a day for a couple of years. Having to sit through mostly terrible junk movies, he lost his appetite, his enthusiasm, his perspective and his sense of humor about the business. After he got thoroughly burned, he began to write his own screenplays, which was healing. He sold one and he is about to sell another. Screenplays have their own frustrations and challenges, however. They become, ultimately, so collaborative that the original writing gets lost. There are no editors in Hollywood, only producers, aka money men and women. Will the original script still convey the original writer’s intention? Will its armature disappear?

Books that don’t have decent editors can have the same de-humanizing, emasculating effect; they become junk books. Says my neighbor: “I feel as though most of the books I’m reading these days aren’t edited at all. Data is collected and dumped into the text. I am supposed to comment, to write something intelligible and informative, but all I want to do is dump them in the dumpster.”

I suppose that is no surprise given the bottom line malaise of the publishing industry these days. Where have all the editors gone? Outsourced to Dubai, unfortunately. I had a fabulous, attentive editor in Robert Ellsberg (Daniel’s son) for “Another Day in Paradise,” but that was nearly a decade ago now. Sometimes my agent tries to edit, but she’s a literary lawyer whose expertise is negotiation and contracts. I have to take her advice if I want her to try to sell a project, but she’s not an editor. I ask writer friends to edit, but they are not editors. I ask my husband. He’s a fabulous editor—in fact we have a small publishing business—Mediacs—and he is Editor in Chief, a real editor—but he is very busy with other projects and his time is limited.

I anticipate more changes in the industry, big versus small, small consortiums of writers, designers, editors, and publicists, small businesses that care about their clients and the quality of the books they write. Conglomerate publishing houses won’t wipe us out because what matters is the work itself, the attention we give to the words on the page, and the writer who put them there.  Read More 

My mother had not wanted me to write the book; she was frightened. Frightened we would be sued, or threatened, or embarrassed, or exposed. She had become as secretive about Fritzi Burger, the Olympic ice skating champion, as Fritzi was about herself. They were cousins and had grown up together in Vienna. Two years between them, related through their grandmother, they looked like twins. They ice skated together, attended family gatherings, giggled together.

By her early teens, Fritzi had become a competitive ice skater and traveled a lot. She fell in love with a German tobaggoner and then met and married a Japanese businessman, a grandson of the Mikimoto pearl family. She disappeared as WW II began.

When I started an oral history with my mother, Fritzi’s name came up, and I started to search for her. I found her in Maine living with her second husband who had met her at the Tokyo Tennis Club in the 1960's. Fritzi had spent the war years in Japan, secure and protected even after the American occupation began and those close to the Emperor and the military were indicted for war crimes. The Mikimoto/Ishikawa clan were interviewed, but not indicted, probably because they were close to the Emperor. Fritzi’s collaboration with America’s enemies was amplified by her connection to the Reich; she entertained German officers when they came to visit the Japanese High Command to discuss armaments and strategies of global conquest. Had she dared, she might have been in a position to save some of our family, but there is no evidence that she revealed her Jewish ancestry, or mentioned the slaughter of her family. Did she know about it? Most certainly.

I didn't know all of Fritzi's story by the time I published “Searching for Fritzi” in 1999; there were many open questions about her. But some years later, thanks to the internet, I began receiving intriguing emails from Michael Ramsey, a former soldier in General MacArthur's occupation army. He had met Fritzi in Tokyo in 1947 and wondered about her. Why was she there? Why was her Japanese family immune to prosecution? Trolling the internet, Michael found my book and we became collaborators of a different sort. Together, we pieced together more details , and I hired a researcher in Tokyo. I wrote an addendum to the book, republished it as an e-book, and placed an article in a magazine in Austria published by the U. of Salzburg. After that, I began getting queries from German and Austrian historians. They still arrive, the most recent just a couple of weeks ago from a historian based in Berlin who lived in Japan for many years and can therefore make good use of the archives there. He told me that his quest began when he found “Searching for Fritzi" in his university library in Berlin. That surprised and pleased me.

In the journalism trade, we say that this has been a project “with legs.” One modest book, an attempt to trace a family story, and years later, I am still fielding emails, and meeting scholars and faraway relations for lunch when they travel to New York. Last week I met Fritzi Burger’s step-daughter, an interesting encounter. Working on her own memoirs, she had found the book on amazon and read it with interest, and astonishment. She had had no idea about Fritzi’s “Jewish” ancestry. What a surprise! How awful that she never even mentioned this, she said.

Indeed.

Sometimes a German academic is puzzled by my "friendliness," though we are colleagues, and so many years have passed. Perhaps there is guilt at their own family's actions during the war. I am not interested. What's important is what they are doing now, all of it in the spirit of historical accuracy, and reconciliation.

I think my mother would be pleased that "Searching for Fritzi" has done so well. Despite her initial resistance, she was proud of my accomplishment and relieved that we had exposed Fritzi Burger. What she anticipated did come to pass: I was threatened with legal action by Fritzi, but it came to nothing, and for good reason: I had written the truth.

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Every so often I google myself, which may or may not be obscene, depending upon my obsession with the depth and reach of the search engine. How many minutes or hours I spend “googling”—a relatively new verb in our lexicon thanks to the corporation Google—will determine the innocence, practicality, or obsession of the activity. Googling –and of course even though there are other search engines, we are still “googling,”—is recommended for published writers, artists and musicians: Is anyone stealing our work? And because theft is almost impossible to track on the internet, it is gratifying to discover a perpetrator and demand payment. Gratifying, but rare. Usually a college professor somewhere has scanned something I’ve written to use in class. This is both a compliment and “fair use.” I do the same even though the university where I work has warned against it. In fact, so stern has been their mandate, that I feel guilty. Legally, I needn’t worry, but what about ethically? Am I cheating an author out of a royalty? Apparently not. The doctrine of fair use states that copies “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research, is not considered an infringement of copyright.”

Good. I’ll stop googling myself.

However, just for fun, before I go: I googled Google. Apparently, it’s a play on the word “googol,”coined by Milton Sirotta, nine-year-old nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeroes.

Is this an apocryphal story? Is there any way I can find out...by googling?

One more entry, then. In British slang, to “throw a googly,” a word borrowed from cricket, means to ask a hard or unanswerable question. This conjures an image of the founders of Google—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—playing cricket at Stanford as they designed this quite miraculous tool, which has become a verb, and an obsession, in less than two decades.  Read More 

I have just finished reading Katherine Boo’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece of narrative immersion journalism, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” It took me much longer than I expected—more than a month—as the story is so unbearably vivid that I had to alternate reading the book with other things. The clack of the subway was the easiest venue for me to read, not really a venue, but a moving, incessant, underground dystopian universe.

Indeed, the only way I could finish reading the story was back to front. There, in the final pages, I learned the fate of the a troubling trial in a corrupt judicial system, and I found Katherine Boo’s voice in an acknowledgment and an author’s note. In the preceding chapters, she had chosen to use a third person omniscient narration—to eclipse her presence she writes on her website—and focus entirely on her subjects. I understood the intention, but also missed the knowledgeable reporter’s mediating presence. Over a period of four years, Boo had used three indigenous interpreters and their observations had clearly been folded into the narrative, all of it so raw, I felt undone.

No tragedy or trauma is analagous and I do not mean here to compare in any way the travails of New York urban life--the beggars and homeless people on our subways, or the men and women scavenging for plastic water bottles in our garbage pails--with Mumbai. But reading the book underground, and then back to front so I wouldn’t worry so much about the children, afforded me a touchstone of awareness about what I am observing in my own enviornment. There is so much to report on wherever we reside—fugitive, precarious lives we cannot ignore.  Read More 

Plus ca change. I spent a decade teaching and writing in London at a time when the influx of immigrants from the Caribbean was challenging the antiquated post-colonial school system, its antiquated text books, and its racist assumptions. No people of color anywhere, no history of the colonized countries, whatsover. There were still golliwogs on Robertson jam when I arrived and a black and white minstrel show on television. I was in culture shock all the time, took notes incessantly, and started writing op-ed pieces and feature articles. Eventually, I gathered a few of my students’ stories and persuaded Heinemann Educationl Books to publish them as“Naomi,” “Paul,” and “Donnovan.” Combined with articles I’d written for the Times Educational Supplement, I was denounced in the House of Lords and told to return to America, where I belonged. I even received hate mail and one death threat.

And though England changed rapidly—the EU with its open borders and influx of educated, forward thinking “foreigners,” immediately put the UK on notice—I still thought America, land of my birth, beacon of democracy and opportunity, had evolved beyond the legacy of slavery more successfully. I was wrong. England has transmorgrified into a multi-ethnic society. Any lingering racism these days is reserved for the Muslim population. It’s not pretty, but these retro attitudes appear to be encapsulated in one backward-looking enclave. In fact, it’s an embarrassment to walk the streets of London today and feel the shock of realization that we, here in America, are struggling with our educational system and walled-in, albeit invisibly walled-in, homogeneous neighborhoods. Worse, the great economic/racial divide can be seen in every school, in every classroom. At NYU, where I teach, I have very few indigenous people of color in my classroom. From overseas, yes, but not from the United States. When I person of color enrolls in my workshop, it’s noticeable, because it is so unusual.

And now we learn that the children of color are still under-represented in children’s books. In 2014! What are the publishers thinking? Their mission statements are well intended, writes Christopher Myers, in a New York Times article on the front page of the Review section last Sunday. Lots of promises and commitments to diversity. But the reality is different: “an apartheid of literature.” And why? The Marketplace. Are these publishing houses out of touch or is it really true that no white adolescent boy wants to see a black boy on the cover of the book he is reading. Is this even possible?

In a companion piece, Christopher Myers’ father, Walter Dean Myers, says, “In 1969, when I first entered the world of writing children’s literature...children of color were not represented, nor were children from the lower economic classes. Today, when about 40 percent of public school students nationwhide are black and Latino, the disparity of representation is even more egregious. In the middle of the night, I ask myself if anyone cares.”

All children, all adults for that matter, and certainly all writers, deserve an expansive, inclusive landscape in which to dream and write and publish.  Read More 

Julia Angwin, an award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter who now works for the independent news organization ProPublica, signs the flyleaf of her recently published book: “It’s an honor to be caught in the dragnet with you.”

Like several investigative journalists these days, she is concerned for the safety of her sources, many of whom are whistleblowers who may very well lose their jobs if they talk. The safeguards for Federal whistleblowers are nearly non-existent so Ms. Angwin is constantly searching for unorthodox ways to set up meetings. She sends snail letters, buys burner phones, uses secure electronic drop boxes and Duck Duck Go as her search engine.

Snail mail is cumbersome and problematic for a reporter working to deadline. On a recent trip to Washington DC, some sources didn’t answer her burner phone because they didn’t recognize the number. Several appointments fizzled. And this is one of many frustrations for journalists since dragnet data collection and other new technologies have outpaced our understanding of their damaging effects to the free flow of information in our democracy.

And what does this data collection consist of? Everything and nothing. And this is a paradox, of sorts. We release information to the cybersphere but have little knowledge of the day to day lives of many in our neighborhoods, in our country, and elsewhere. How many Indians know about the poor people behind the retainer wall next to the airport in Mumbai? There are 90,000 of them, collecting recyclable garbage from the airport hotels. It took a reporter, Katherine Boo, to expose the corruption and disdain of the Indian government in her Pulitzer Prize winning book: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” I am just reading it now. I had no idea. I was blind and ignorant of this horror on the other side of the world. So, yes, drag the net and collect data—which costs billions by the way—and then--is it asking too much?-- do something with it for the common good.

Should all writers be concerned? The answer is yes. Should all citizens? Yes.

These rhetorical questions were addressed on Tuesday night at Fordham Law School by Ms. Angwin and a distinguished panel moderated by Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN American Center. Unlike other in this series, “Balancing Security and Social Justice,” the audience was a bit sparse. True, the weather was balmy, spring in the air, but I worried that the 24-hour-news cycle’s interest had waned. It would pick-up again if Edward Snowden returned to the US, was arrested and indicted. Hero or traitor? The arguments on both sides are fraught and heated. But at least we won’t be tossed into jail for arguing.

And that is the point, or one of the points, so far as I am concerned. Now that dragnet surveillance of both our trivial and important “information” has been exposed, we are able to talk about it, write about it, and attend panel discussions. For this basic human Constitutional right, we have to thank our Founding Fathers, and Benjamin Franklin, one of our first whistleblowers:

http://allthingsliberty.com/2013/12/benjamin-franklin-americas-first-whistleblower/.

Venceremos.  Read More 

1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.
4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two
evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After 10 hours in school, teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Every teacher should lay aside from each day’s pay a goodly sum of his earning for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.
8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

Taken from One-Room Schools of Knox County, by the Knox County Retired Teachers Association


I started my teaching career in an Oakland, Ca high school, far from 19th Century Knox County, KY in time and place, far from the contemporary one-room or open-air schoolhouses in Afghanistan or Central Africa, their orthodoxy, their restraints, their children studying earnestly by rote and recitation. Most of my registered students were either football players, cheerleaders, truants, or members of gangs. They were privileged, if only they had known it. Far from war zones. Far, still, from economic hard times. Yet they were accustomed to boredom at school, and rage at their teachers, expressed as belligerence, or indifference. They cheated, threatened, fled. The words effort and self-respect were lost to them.

According to my California State Teaching License (Secondary) I was qualified to teach English and American History. There were required text books, a state curriculum, and too many desks crammed into a box-shaped room, albeit a clean one. It was before the days of high security, but there were incidences--kids packing, kids threatening, kids expelled. I took a look at my contract, consulted with the beleagured principal, the brain-dead, burned out heads of my departments and my union, and decided I could risk doing what I wanted. The kids—and I was still nearly a kid—were restive. I was over-confident, politicized. I knew I’d only be at the school for a year; my husband and I were headed to Europe, graduate school, travel, writing. So I tore the envelope, I made my own plans. The challenge was to make theater out of the classroom, to bring it alive, to make it real.

All that year, I went to bed at 9 p.m. and woke at 3 a.m. to read what my students had written; they submitted 500 words a day. Needless to say, I had more than one class and each class had more than 25 students. Because I was so young, I dressed in suits and pulled my hair up into a sophisticated “do.” I carried a bag lunch and never left the classroom; my door was always open for conversation and consultation—with other skeptical teachers, with students. In my English class I broke the desks out of rows into a seminar style and placed a Socratic stool at the center. I read up on Socratic dialogue and danced patterns onto the chalk board. I invested in an anthology of short stories and began the term with Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” I insisted that my students write all day long, that they take notes on what they were thinking as they worked and talked, what occurred to them. And not just in my classroom, in every classroom. In my American History class, we made costumes and conducted a Constitutional Convention. The ancestors of my students would have been slaves. So how to deal with that? More conversation. Word got out and some of the truants returned. Here was a teacher—little ole me—who understood something the “ school system” didn’t. No test at the end of the year could measure this. Most of all I was touched by the effort the students made, how much they wanted to learn. I had heard they were lazy—far from it. They worked to exhaustion, and so did I.

And it is with the memory of this wonderful early teaching experience—and many others since—that I enter my classroom at NYU every term. I am always so happy to be there, to meet my new students: who will they be? What will they be interested in? Will they commit, make effort, respond well to the constantly evolving, dynamic classroom? Will they continue writing when the workshop is over?
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A friend gave me “The Gorgeous Nothings,” an art book and scholarly work I would not have bought for myself, therefore, the perfect gift. I never liked Emily Dickinson’s poems when I was forced to read them at school; now I adore them. “The Gorgeous Nothings” is a collection of 52 poems, or drafts of poems, scrawled on opened envelopes. The hypothesis is that Dickinson was 1/being frugal and using whatever scraps of paper were to hand and/or 2/ creating visual as well as written poems. The distended and upended envelopes resemble birds in flight, birds migrating, resting, tension before flight. Dickinson loved birds. And these poetic notations, unlike the books (“bound fascicles”), are multi-media presentations.

For all her puritanical frugality and discipline, Emily Dickinson, we learn here, was a free-thinking artist; these are fugitive, ephemeral writings. She was courageous, she was inspiring. And she has inspired me. In her honor I created my own experiment last night: I asked my hard-working, earnest students to bring an envelope to our first workshop class to see what they would do with it when I asked them to use these fragile physical entities (that brown and brittle with age) to record three subjects they’d like to write about. I haven’t studied them all as yet, but a cursory glance suggests that the experiment came too early in the term and that everyone was attempting to stay within the confines of the closed envelopes without tearing them apart. I’ll have to conjure different instructions for the end of term. Or perhaps I won’t have to. By then the students will be as courageous and inventive as Emily Dickinson.
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