Janet Berliner

Aftermath

by
Janet Berliner

NOTE: This story was originally written at the request of Richard Dansky for Jerusalem at Night, a Vampire: The Dark Ages supplemental rulebook.

In Canaan, which was also known as the land of Israel, in the spring of the year Christians called 1197, Moslems prayed openly but with a sense of unease. Jews, for whom the spring coincided with the celebration of Passover, called the year 4957. They prayed, too, in secret and with no less nervousness. Moslems and Jews alike were people whose families had endured and survived the injustices and cruelties of three Crusades. They knew, to a man and to a woman, that this brief respite from war would not last; a fourth Crusade would follow the third as surely as camels carried their own water across the desert.

The first three Crusades had been devastating. Entire Moslem families had been decimated; Jews, falsely accused of engaging in blood rites too horrific to contemplate, refused to convert to Christianity, to deny ha-rachamim, their Merciful Father, and laid down their lives for the sanctification of His name.

The Crusades denied fathers the pleasure of seeing their sons grow up; they denuded both communities of single men who could marry their daughters, so that they could no longer obey the Lord’s or Allah’s instruction to go forth and multiply.

And so it was that Meyer ben Joseph and Hamid el Faisir, who were the leaders of their communities and knew that they all needed protection against the evil to come, befriended each other. “If we are destroyed, it will not matter to the few survivors which God we worshipped,” Meyer said.

Hamid assented.

On the first night of Passover, in the same spirit of cooperation, Hamid agreed to be present at the religious meal which his new friend Meyer called the Seder. “In this way,” Hamid told his people, “I shall be an eye witness to their rituals. If they do not drink of the blood of Christian children, as has been reported, then we shall defend our City together against the soldiers when they come.”

And so it came to be that Hamid and his family joined Meyer, his wife, Rose, and their only surviving child Devora on the first night of Passover. They reclined and listened with respect as Meyer told the story of his people’s journey across the desert in search of the Promised Land, they enjoyed the melodic songs, and they bowed their heads respectfully during the prayers.

“Pour the last of the wine, Meyer,” Rose said, finally. “I sense that our guests are growing hungry.”

Meyer poured a small amount of prayer wine for each person, though he knew that his Moslem guests did not drink. He was emptying the last of the carafe into into a large goblet set aside for the Prophet Elijah, when there came a knock at the door. Meyer’s hand jerked in surprise and a few drops missed the large goblet and landed on his wife’s handwoven tablecloth. He grimaced; there was little more where that had come from. The extra glass of wine they poured each year–the extra place setting at the table–was a tradition he would never have ignored. But for a stranger to know the exact moment in the Seder bordered on miraculous.

“Timing is everything,” he said, thinking, the Prophet has a good nose.

“Go, Devora. Open the door for our visitor,” he said, addressing his sixteen-year-old daughter.

She was not surprised, for each year at Passover her father had not so subtly knocked under the table and instructed her youngest brother to open the door and welcome the Prophet Elijah. Of course, there had never been anyone there, though her father said that Elijah’s spirit entered.

Not so this time.

Standing at the door in the darkness was a robed stranger, a tall man whose handsome face spoke of unbearable weariness. Slightly behind him stood a second man whose appearance and bearing cast him in the role of manservant.

“Welcome to our home,” Meyer said, beckoning the strangers to the table and thinking that Rose would have to set yet another place at the table. “It may not be much, but it is one of the best in Mea Shearim.”

Gesturing first to his manservant in such a manner that it was apparent he would remain outside, the Stranger entered Meyer’s house. He did not remove his robe, nor did he look into the eyes of his host.

“Will you pray with us over the wine?” Meyer asked, thinking that he must remember later to have Devora take food and wine outside to the manservant

The man sat but did not speak, neither did he eat or drink, even after the prayers were done. He was dark and swarthy, but did not seem to be of Jerusalem.

“What road have you travelled, Stranger?” Meyer asked, wondering if the man had been sent to observe the blood rites of which the Jews were accused. If so, he would leave disappointed.

“I travel the Road of Humanitatis,” the man said.

Those were all the words he spoke.

When the meal was over, there was one more tradition to be observed before the final song could be sung. Earlier, Devora–the oldest and the youngest–had hidden a piece of unleavened bread known as the Afikomen. Now she was sent to retrieve it.

“Let our daughter also take food and wine to the man who is outside in the moonlight,” Meyer said to Rose. “She will be rewarded for returning the Afikomen to the table,” Meyer explained to his guests, “for without it the Seder cannot be completed. It will not take long for her to find it. Rose and I watched her hide it in the garden.”

After a few moments, when Devora had not returned, the Stranger stood as if to leave. Meyer bade him Godspeed and glanced at the family of Hamid el Faisir, wishing they too would depart. Despite his best efforts it had been a strained night; he wanted it to be over.

When their daughter still did not return with the Afikomen, which fairly translated meant Aftermath, Rose said, “I am worried about our daughter. It is that time of the month for her. She should not be outside alone and in the dark for so long.”

Meyer excused himself and went to find his daughter.

He found her in the small arbor which stood permanently in the garden, ready to be decorated each Autumn in thanks for G-d’s bounty. She held the Afikomen in her hand. Silently, she gave it to her father.

Silently, he took it.

“We have been waiting for you,” Meyer said. “All but the Stranger, who came out of the night and has returned to it.”

“I have been with him,” Devora responded. “And I have fed his manservant.”

* * *

Devora, daughter of Rose and of Meyer ben Joseph, never spoke again of the two men or even of the child of the manservant, conceived that Passover during her time of bleeding and growing in her womb. More and more, she became morose. Each time she passed a mirror, it was spotted with droplets of blood and she was shamed before her father, the remaining man of her family. Soon she ceased to be obedient to him or to any man. As if she wished to die in childbirth, she baked challahs and deliberately neglected to take from the dough and give what she had taken to a priest in tithing.

Meyer did not like his daughter’s behaviors but he accepted them as part of the changes wrought by childbearing, a process he did not pretend to understand. Rose was more frightened than angered. Though it was the word of God and of Allah that Their followers go forth and multiply, it was also His word that no child be conceived during niddah–menstruation–and for good reason.

She feared for the life of her daughter and trembled for her daughter’s child, lest that child–conceived in blood–be claimed by the demon queen, Lilith.

* * *

The child, a girl, grew strong inside the womb of her mother, Devora. Like all embryos growing into the fullness of their heritage, this one saw the history of her people by the light of a candle which burned in the womb, a white glow which allowed her to see the beginning and the end of the universe.

Inside the womb, an angel kept watch over her, teaching her the torah; outside the womb, Lilith–overpowered by the remembrance of her own childless and unhappy marriage–watched the angel and seethed with jealousy of Devora’s motherhood. She bided her time, smiling evily as Rose constructed an amulet from the Sefer Raziel to protect the mother and child after birth and hung amulets aplenty around the walls and on the birth-bed to discourage the demonic queen from claiming the child.

Just before birth, when–as it was written–the angel readied itself to touch the child lightly on her top lip so that the cleavage on her upper lip could be formed and she could forget all she had learned, Lilith interfered. Dousing the light in the womb, she pushed the infant into the birth canal.

In that moment, Devora’s soul took leave of its earthly body. In that moment, Marisa was born. She emerged from her mother’s womb with a collective consciousness and with an arrogance which, in combination with her facial flaw, set her apart from the other children in Mea Shearim.

* * *

Of the 613 Laws of the Torah, Rekhilut–the first, though the least prohibitive, law against bad-of-mouth gossip–was the most frequently disobeyed in the quarter where Marisa was born. In the case of this girl-child, the gossip derived more from fear than from any intent to do harm. It was no secret that she had been conceived during niddah, nor could it be kept secret that the child had no cleavage on her upper lip. Since her mother had died in childbirth, it was logical to assume that she had been claimed as the daughter and servant of Lilith. But the greatest fear was the one spoken in whispers, that because of the circumstances of her conception and birth, Marisa could be infected with the most dreaded of all diseases, leprosy.

Meyer and Rose showered all of their love upon their granddaughter, whom they called Marisa Devora and who was the last of their living kin. Unfortunately, no amount of their goodwill could change the nervousness of a community which had been so badly hurt by the passage of the years that they feared anything which might bring more trouble into their midst.

Again, Hamid el Faisir, who had reported favorably on the household ben Joseph, came together with Meyer. This time they joined forces to try to protect Marisa from those who, driven by unreasoned anxiety, threatened harm to the fatherless child.

The strength of the two proved to be sadly insufficient against the many. One evening, when it was almost sundown, Marisa was wrest from them and taken into the desert. There, a dried water-hole had been filled with the blood of several lambs and a meager shelter had been built to shield the child from the last rays of the desert sun.

As if she were being baptised in blood, the little girl was submerged and held there until nightfall. Being barely six years old, she could certainly not fight her way out of the grasp of strong adults. She could have cried out, but she did not even do that and appeared, instead, to submit herself to the wishes of the good people of Jerusalem.

In the house in the district of Mea Shearim, Hamid said in an anguished voice, “Surely they intend to dry her off and carry her home at the rise of the moon.”

“Surely they do,” Meyer agreed, his eyes filled with tears for his granddaughter. “What do you say, Rose?”

Rose said nothing. She left the house and walked into the desert. Even had she wanted to speak, her anger and foreboding would have prevented the words from forming on her tongue. As the rim of the moon appeared on the horizon, she came upon the child.

She stood at a distance, her gaze was riveted upon the little girl.

The child had never looked more contented. She dabbled happily in the red pond, drinking from her cupped hand with an eagerness she had never shown for her grandmother’s chicken soup.

Looking up, Rose saw the Stranger, tall and hooded, riding a camel led by his manservant. “No,” she cried out, as the townsfolk stepped aside and he laid claim to Marisa Devora.

The child raised her arms and the manservant lifted her up. The Stranger took her, seated her astride the camel with him, and rode away.

Rose wept, but she did nothing to try to stop him.

* * *

At dawn, the people of Jerusalem returned to their daily business and to gossiping of other things. Only then did Rose cease her weeping and make her report to Meyer ben Joseph and Hamid el Faisir. She did not tell them that she had heard a female voice, calling the man and the child to join her. She did not say that Lilith had taken the man and the child to her bosom.

Meyer and his friend Hamid embraced each other. Now it was their turn to weep. Then they dried their tears and waited as the message of Marisa Devora and the dark stranger travelled to Cyprus and reached the ears of Amalric; “Beware,” the messenger said. “In the land of Canaan, there is a daughter of Lilith who is loved by man and God and Allah and marked by the Devil. Do not cause her to be angry, for her anger could devour you all.”

* * * * *

by Janet Berliner

This will be a very short blog, not because I’m lazy but because it’s something I feel strongly about, something that needs to be said in a short and pointed manner.

We write and talk a lot about success–the yearning for it, the fear of it and the acceptance of it when it comes. That’s all good stuff and necessary for our wellbeing. What we don’t discuss is the attitude change that happens all-too-frequently in our friends and colleagues.

Here’s my theory, based on my own experience and that of many others:

There are people who are what I call ‘Funeral Followers’. They get warm and fuzzy coming to the aid of their sick, struggling friends. They love to commiserate. But here’s what happens when those friends have something good to share. The Funeral Followers disappear. Or they come up with things they would change in a book already out. Or they write reviews–most often for nothing–where they bury the lead and start with something negative like: “This book arguably has the worst cover blurb I’ve ever read.”

Sure, they ultimately praise the author as a genius, but they know full well that it’s the first sentence that counts, in a Google search for example. It’s that whole first impression thing. Think of it this way. I’m dressed by a designer for a black tie affair. I go to the bathroom before making my grand entrance and the unthinkable happens: Trailing toilet paper adheres to the back of my outfit.

On the way into the grand ballroom, I meet a lot of people I know. Does one tell me about it? Noooo. Of course not.

I remember once, waiting at Michael’s in New York to have breakfast with Larry Ashmead. A well-dressed woman sat down across me. She had neglected to take the dry cleaning tag off her designer jacket. The moment I noticed, I told her how great she looked and told her about the tag. She was grateful almost to the point of tears.

Michael’s being the place where publishing makes many of its deals, I could have thought, ‘Hey, don’t say a word. She may be after the same book deal you want.’

Sad to say, many if not most people do take the latter route.

At this point, if you’re still with me, you’re probably getting your panties in a knot and asking why I’d be saying this to you when you would never do such things.

I’m writing this as a warning, thus the title.

Here’s one personal example. If I’d been warned, I’d have shed fewer tears and felt less betrayed.

I started a Writers Workshop, which lasted for six years. The writers were my peers and my friends, or so I believed. My first breakthrough novel launched the day before our monthly meeting, which I thought would be something of a celebration. Only it wasn’t. One person of the nine who attended brought a cake. He was a guest who had not yet written anything. As for the rest, they ignored the entire event.

For me, that was the end of the workshop and the end of any kind of real friendship with all but one of the members . . . the one who couldn’t make it that Sunday.

Does this matter in the scheme of the Universe? Of course not. Did it matter to me? Absolutely.

And when your first book comes out, or you first see your name in a New York Times Book Review ad or even on “the List”, remember my warning. Not everyone you call friend will be happy for you.

by Janet Berliner

As I began to write my memoir–which may or may not ever see the light of day–I tried to get a fix on what that meant. Is a memoir “Just the facts, Ma’am?” or is it, as Gore Vidal wrote in Point To Point Navigation, “…how one remembers one’s life.”

More than whether or not it was fact or interpretation, I realized that my memories were circular, joined together like a Slinky toy, and that I had to begin with how I became obsessed by words–

By the time I began to realize that I would have to leave South Africa, I was nineteen. Words were already my passion. I had been reading fluently since before I was four, a skill derived mainly from the upside-down-study of newspapers, flowing in place of a tablecloth over a card table in my father’s kitchen. Upside-down because I read them from the floor beneath the table, sharing my space with a cat whose very existence terrified me almost as much as I scared it when I grew hungry and ate from its bowl. That’s where I sat one day out of every week, fulfilling my father’s visitation rights. Only he was never there. Not with the track open and the horses at the starting gate.

While he played the ponies, I was left in the care of his demented red-haired wife, Iris. She took me straight from the front door to the card table, prepared with its newspaper cover beneath a lot of bottles of beer which I knew would be consumed by the time I was picked up at the end of the day. As she drank, she paced around the table, talking about my family and about me. Cursing us with words such as I had never heard. Each bottle she emptied was thrown into a mounting pile in the corner, accompanied by a loud belch and the crash of glass against glass.

I lasted six months before I told my mother. She applied for the visitation rights to be rescinded and, after I testified in court, there were no more visits.

By then I had realized that the words I’d learned to read had meaning. Quickly, books became my constant and often my only companions. My mother and I moved from place to place. I was transferred from one school to another. Making friends didn’t seem like a good idea under the circumstances. I read while walking to school, learning how to glance up and back fast to avoid losing my place. I read under my blankets with a flashlight, except on the nights The Creaking Door or Mandrake the Magician were on the radio I kept hidden under my pillow. I knew that they clapped together coconut shells to make the sound of horses’ hooves but it spoiled nothing because, for me, it was all about storytelling. Even at that early age, I wanted to be the person who wrote the stories. When something bad happened, I thought it’s okay because I can use this one day in a story. When something good happened, I thought, I have to remember this so that one day I will use it in a story.

When nothing happened, and I was between books, I went out looking for story material–and generally found it. At school, I did well academically but was constantly reprimanded for asking too many questions. One teacher had me write “Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles me” three hundred times.

Probably the only person who understood any of this was my grandmother who quickly turned whatever happened to me into a story, leaving spaces for me to fill in as we went along. Like old Sophia in The Golden Girls, she had a story to cover every eventuality. I never grew tired of her tales, nor did it occur to me that she might be embellishing the truth. She was the essential pragmatist who provided me with a tough core as I moved from father to father–four in all, not counting the “uncles”–school to school, thirteen of them before I matriculated, and house to flat to boarding house.

It was she who taught me to turn those experiences and the myriad that followed into stories as a tool to hold onto my sanity. Without her, I might have fallen apart before I found out not what but who I was.

A writer.

For that, I am extremely grateful, because it has allowed me to live my life to its fullest. I have run without fear toward gunshots in a marketplace in Jerusalem, stopped to tear up and throw away my Press credentials in East Berlin when a Russian soldier with a rifle bore down upon me, argued myself out of being shot by Algerian rebels at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

My life has been exciting and fun and horrific. But never, ever has it been dull.

I decided that I was a writer when I was eight and won a National writing competition with a poem called Brotherhood. I carried the congratulatory note in the pocket of my hand-me-down pants but didn’t mention it to anybody in my family. They were impressed by practical achievements, not airy-fairy stuff like that. I didn’t mind because I figured that, too, was the way it was in all families. My grandparents owned a small haberdashery in the Indian quarter of the Southern Suburbs. Next door there was a shop that sold fruits and vegetables and smelled of curry from the house behind it where the owners lived. My grandfather, an artist but not a linguist, made signs for their shop and for his: Poor Wool Suit. 7 Pounds. With the 7 struck through. I worked there on Sundays, covering hollow shells with fabric to turn them into buttons, something at which I had gained expertise at four or so, standing on a carton to reach the button machine.

My mother did not make buttons. She had been a film star and a singer and a model in Berlin and spoke seven languages. After I was born, she joined the South African army and worked at Cape Town Castle as a bookkeeper. I don’t remember much about that time, but I do recall the street photographers who wandered around Cape Town. They took Brownie snapshots, developed them, and pinned them up on the inside walls of little houses that looked like the forerunners of Photomat. I have one photograph that was taken of me at about three, cute as can be, holding the hands of my mother and grandmother. The photo was used for the cover of SNAPSHOTS, an anthology of mother-daughter fiction I edited with Joyce Carol Oates.

When I was older, my mother–Mutti, as I called her–became South Africa’s first travelling saleslady. Every day was a battle to make a living, to pay bills, to put a little aside just in case. I was afraid to ask just in case what. Already, I was being possessed by two muses, the writing muse, and the one that drove me to believe that while not all Men were born good, philosophically all people were born equal in the community of Man.

Born into Brotherhood and with the potential to communicate with words in a universe of infinite variety where the hand that rocks the cradle is also capable of rocking the world–the voice that sings lullabies can be a Janis Joplin, wailing for life and pleading for meaning; the hand that pounds porridge in a clay pot can pound a drum, remove a brain tumour . . ..

To me, music and words are inseparable. I was born a writer in my consciousness, a filmmaker in my head, a dancer in my pulse. I hear syncopation in the sound of words, rhythm in their meaning. I see scenes choreographed, my characters come fleshed and fully formed–breathing and hating, sweating and loving, the blood in their veins singing the music of words.

They are the blood in my veins, the stuff of my survival.

By Janet Berliner

Last night, I reread some of the stories in David Niall Wilson’s short story collection, DEFINING MOMENTS. The stories are written from the inside out. That’s why they’re brilliant. You’re IN the characters, at the place, feeling the pain and the pleasure. The book is a limited edition, so why am I promoting it here by using it as the title of this essay?

As a tribute to Dave, in thanks for the work he’s done keeping Storytellers Unplugged healthy. Thank you, Dave.

Since DEFINING MOMENTS may be hard to get your hands on, I also wanted to make mention of Dave’s next book, ANCIENT EYES, which conveniently comes out in a couple weeks (and sports equally beautiful cover art by Dave’s friend Don Paresi).

I planned to write a long review myself, when Dave’s and my agent pointed out this review from Nate Kenyon that appeared on Horror World last August.

–
Deep in the hills, there are different rules. Things shift, boundaries blur and time warps with the sudden, powerful draw of blood.

Although this sentence opens chapter nine of Wilson’s latest, Ancient Eyes, it could serve as the introduction to this stunningly surreal and deeply poetic work. When Abe Carlson’s nightmares lead to violent outbursts, and the strange phone calls increase in frequency, he knows that something is terribly wrong. Then a cryptic letter arrives from his mother back home in the mountains, and he must return to the place he grew up-and where, many years before, a great battle was staged. With his father’s help, goodness and light triumphed over evil back then; but now Abe fears that evil has returned to the little mountain town, and he is the only one who can protect the family he has left behind, and the place he once called home.

Meanwhile, two powerful spirits have lured Silas Greene and many of his neighbors from the mountain into the deep woods, where they are baptized by fire into the spirits’ service. They work quickly to rebuild one of two old churches in town, the home of many dark and cruel rituals many years before. As Abe arrives to take his place at the head of the second church, the one that his own father built years before, a new battle is already beginning, one as old as the mountain itself. Abe must risk his life and those of everyone he holds dear in a showdown that pits Silas Greene and his followers against those who still believe in goodness, and the ancient rituals that have ruled their lives from the moment their blood ancestors settled the land.

In a return to his horror roots, Wilson is in top form with Ancient Eyes. The story is compelling and the writing is beautiful, rhythmic and hypnotic, building slowly to a breathless end. Wilson has always straddled the line between poetry and prose, and he is known for exploring humankind’s darkest and most complex histories, and this novel is no different. But Ancient Eyes contains a more straightforward horror-style plot than his previous Deep Blue or The Mote in Andrea’s Eye.

In the novel Wilson uses wilderness as character, a constant presence that humankind is barely holding at bay. The very vegetation is alive, vines and weeds snaking around ankles and holding fast, while the mountain looms over all as if ready to pounce at any moment. Even the people who populate the backwoods town are often closer to animal than human. Rage, lust and instinct rule over civilized thought. Whether this kind of behavior is the result of possession is almost beside the point; for the spirit that possesses is really the animal within all of us, the id of human experience.

There is religion here too, but it is not the whitewashed, sterile, hushed-toned modern kind; rather, it is the raw, rough and gritty sort of centuries past, where a love of God was linked to a love of the land, and sex, blood and death was as much a part of life as anything else. Satan is a physical presence, and the threat is as much to life and limb as it is to the spiritual soul.

Ancient Eyes explores the concept that an older way still exists within the modern world. This life is full of the fear of the unknown, and rife with the rituals that evolve to compensate for it. In this world blood is indeed thicker than water; and bloodlines are tied to the mountain, rooted as firmly as the trees in the endless forest.
–

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Check out the Bloodletting Press web site, where you can get a free copy of Dave’s THIS IS MY BLOOD with your copy of ANCIENT EYES for a limited time.

by Janet Berliner

During a variety of moves, I’ve given away more than 6,000 books, but not to worry. Between what I kept and what I’ve accumulated, I still have a few thousand more. Every now and then, I wander around my personal library and allow myself to be carried away by the memories of the books: where I bought them; why I bought them; what made them special enough to keep. My shelving system would, upon examination by a stranger, seem entirely haphazard, but to me there is an internal order to it. In my bedroom, I have three small racks. Two of them hold the books I must always have close enough to touch, like “Tale of Two Cities,” “The Idiot,” and “Madame Bovary.” The third is jammed with the next books I intend to read after Vonnegut’s “Timequake” and Adichie’s “Half a Yellow Sun.”

The last time I sallied forth into library lane, I stopped at a particular cluster of books that had no reason to be shelved together except for this. Stepping backwards in time. . .

Some years before his suicide, on a blustery November Saturday, I interviewed writer Jerzy Kosinski at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. The C.P.A. is usually a gathering place for balletomanes, opera buffs, chamber music enthusiasts and soft shoe fans. The auditorium holds close to three thousand people. I thought there would be seats to spare, but almost the full three thousand showed up to pay homage to books and authors during a free “creative encounter” between contemporary authors and their reading public. I had been to one of these happenings before and had been fortunate enough to meet Louis L’Amour, a man with a grand sense of humor, Jessica Mitford, a proper lady, and Wallace Stegner whose literary reputation scared me half to death.

My second time around, I stood in line at eight in the morning, twisting my body to grab the rays of the sun as it struggled to break through the early fog. There was a line of people a mile long behind me, made up of the very young and the very old, and those who, like me, fell somewhere in-between. I looked at them and rejoiced at the victory of books over Saturday morning cartoons and electric blankets.

Perhaps, I thought, library shelves would continue to hold paper visions of Man after all.

The day’s motivation was to sell books, with the promise of being able to get them autographed. Kosinski was by no means the only scheduled author. Irving Stone was there, too, and, among others, Sydney Sheldon, and Melvin Belli, attorney turned author. I was determined to meet all of them–Irving Stone because the only book I had taken with me to read on my journey from South Africa was The Agony and the Ecstasy, Sydney Sheldon because of his extraordinary sales numbers, and Jerzy Kosinski because his writing seemed to speak directly to me.

Walking into the first autographing session, it was impossible to overlook the fact that the line for Belli was a steady five people, while the one for Mr. Stone went twice around the room. As I stood there, wondering whether or not to return later, it was impossible not to notice Belli’s strident response to the people in his line. Mr. Stone, on the other hand, though almost blind, was ever the gracious, soft-spoken gentleman.

My ornery streak burst forth.

I stood in line, waiting to see Melvin Belli. In my hand, I held Irving Stone’s book. Reaching Belli’s table, I put the Stone novel in front of him, held out my hand, and said, “Nice to meet you Mr. Stone.”

He half rose from his seat. “I’m Melvin Belli,” he roared.

Everyone turned to look and listen.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, as sweetly as I could. “I should have known the long line was for Irving Stone.”

An hour or so later, I met the real Mr. Stone. He graciously signed his book and talked to me about his longstanding writing and marriage partnership with his wife, who sat protectively close at his side. He told me that she was, at the very least, his personal editor, his partner, and–now that his eyesight was failing–his eyes as well.

Sydney Sheldon said to me, “I lie on the sofa in semi-darkness and wait for the voices to come down from the ceiling. When they do, I snap my fingers and the first of four secretaries with empty notebooks files into the room. When I have finished dictating, they type up my words, clean them up, and send out the next best seller.” I had recently read one of his books and had commented in a review that it felt as if it had been written by five people. Hearing what Sheldon said, I understood my reaction and felt vindicated.

Neither Sheldon nor Stone were particularly exciting speakers. Kosinski, however, was a painted bird of another color. Everything about him was, if not distorted, then deliberately larger than life. In fact even his signature included an exaggerated profile of his prominent proboscis. Much of his time on stage was spent in an effort to clear himself of the accusation of seeking out or manufacturing horrors in his life for the purposes of sensational writing. He did so by stringing together a series of true-to-life anachronisms: edible panties; colored contraceptives; a listening device sold to children over eight for the express purpose of eavesdropping at a distance of up to 200 yards; and another device, this time for children over twelve, claiming to allow them to see through walls.

“If Kosinski had written these things into his books,” the author said, talking about himself in the third person, his tone of voice was surprisingly lacking in bitterness, “his critics would throw up their hands and declare him a fiend.”

Finally, this Technicolor man told the following story against himself. One time, he said, he stood in a Manhattan bookstore and watched a woman choose one of his books and hand it to the salesman to be rung up.

“I’m the author,” he said, walking up to the woman. “She took the book back, flipped it over, compared me with my photograph and decided against it. Pity,” he went on. “She was a handsome woman.”

Later, I asked Kosinski why he hadn’t asked the woman what had changed her mind. His answer was to shrug and repeat, “Pity. She was a handsome woman.”

With the exception of “Being There,” Kosinski resisted allowing his books to be translated into movies. I asked him why. “Because my characters are too deep and complex to be transferred correctly to the screen,” he said. His work would not translate to the screen, he insisted, until he decided to write about “A character without character.”

He reached out for the book I held in my hand, drew the familiar caricature, signed the book, and closed it. Before handing it to me, he pulled a card out of his pocket and slipped it into the signature page. “My private number,” he said. “If you’re ever in New York, call me.” He looked up at me intently. “You won’t call, will you?”

I shook my head.

“Who are you anyway?” he asked.

I handed him my card. It had a book in the top, left hand corner and read, Professional Media Services: Editing, consulting, teaching, ghostwriting. Under my actual name it read, writer.

“Yes,” he said, placing the card on the table. “But who are you?”

I took the card back, turned it over, and wrote the letters WFA-AJI. Beneath that I added, White female African-American Jewish Immigrant. As I handed it to him I said, “I’m a writer, an immigrant, and one of your greatest admirers.”

“Me, too,” he quipped.

It would be unfair to him not to add that he laughed and corrected himself, though I think he really is one of his own greatest admirers.

Either way, I found his discussions, both on stage and off, witty, intellectual, and indicative of a man whose ego insisted he expose his own and humanity’s weaknesses to the world.

So there it is, the reason behind that cluster of books by those pa
rticular authors. Now that I’ve written this, maybe I’ll shelve the blog and give away those books.

Or not.

by Janet Berliner

Last month in my column Bradbury And I, I left you dangling, wondering where Ray Bradbury would say he wanted to play next.

“The world knows you best as the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and of innumerable short stories and film scripts,” I said. “You’re in love with France, in love with life, in love with Chambord, a spired castle that grew out of the imaginations of kings. You’ve slept among tapestries and danced in the halls of monarchs. Where would you like to play next?”

I don’t know what I expected to hear, but Ray’s answer took me by surprise.

“Mary Poppins. I’d love to camp out on the roof among all those wonderful chimneys and spend all night there. I’d love to shoot a film up there. We’d have a ball and invite people and have all the foods among all the chimneys. I’m going to have to live forever to explore everything that fascinates me. Earth’s past, for example. It sparks my creative imagination every bit as much as the untapped future. It’s like you begin to suffer from the Thomas Wolfe syndrome once you hit any country. You find out a little bit, then find out how dumb you really are in every other area. Then you run over there and discover how stupid you are about over there, so you start reading about Francis I. Then you discover you don’t know a damn thing about the Hundred Years War, then you discover that you don’t know enough about England because they’re going back and forth all the time.”

It is Bradbury the writer speaking now, effortlessly integrating research and experience. Mentioning England reminds him of Blenheim Palace, which he visited during a lightning and thunder storm. “Boy, what a way to visit that place! Because the Battle of Blenheim is going on around you outside while you’re inside looking at history. Wonderful!”

The word “history” wrenched him back to France.

“I started reading books on Francis I, which got me hooked on Lafayette. I discovered how important the French were in the American Revolution and became involved with Lafayette as a fantastic character. He arrived here when he was twenty, about the same age as Thomas Jefferson–you forget how young these people were–and this vital young man helped our revolution and then went home and started the French revolution. I hadn’t realized how intimately he was connected to both.”

Clearly, wherever Bradbury went, he remained fascinated by the concept of time, how the past and future affect the present.

“I went leaping all around through time,” he said, “reading about Ben Franklin…that whole history about Franklin is amazing, makes you wish we had a man like that alive today. We’ve never had a president as smart as Franklin. He was a real Renaissance man.”

Asked how he felt about socialistic attitudes in France, Bradbury answered emphatically. “You can’t tax people and have a society, that’s all. As I said, I’m a liberal democrat, but I admire ideas, not parties. Otherwise, we’ll have another depression.”

Bradbury’s trips to France have become trysts in a continuing love affair with that country. “Most of all, I just like to travel around,” he said. “I hire a car and driver so we can enjoy ourselves. We don’t look at the bills, we just pay.”

I asked Ray whether, like Heinlein, he might find the Monterey coast an inspiring place to live and write. His imagination immediately flew to the Cote d’Azur, of which the Monterey coastline reminds him. It is not the brilliant blue of France’s coastline that captures his imagination, he said, but the creative environment, which has existed there since the early sixteenth century. “Francis I brought da Vinci to his court from Italy in his last years and gave him security and allowed him to create there. That, to me, is a fabulous king.”

With that, Ray Bradbury stood up and made his exit speech, leaving us with his leftover dumpling and with the task of analyzing the answer to the question we had originally posed: What kind of inner world does a man like that inhabit?

We had interviewed a Perseus with vertigo, a man compelled to fly on the wings of words, yet afraid to fly any other way. The interview had taken us from the Monterey coast to the Cote d’Azur, from Heinlein to Ellison, from the virtues of Chinese cooking to the vicissitudes of politics.

The answer eluded us until weeks later, when I ran away from the world of grown-ups to take a ride on a boardwalk carousel. The timpani of the merry-go-round connected with the child in me, as it inevitably does, and I found myself circling into the never-never land of childhood promise, where everything is possible.

That’s where Ray Bradbury lives.

Many years after that interview, I had the pleasure of getting a story from Ray for the first of two anthologies I edited with David Copperfield. “Quicker Than The Eye” was a marvelous story of a man who sees his doppleganger at a magician’s performance, but I thought there were some points where it could have been better. I called Ray (in those days, I could still hear a little bit on telephones) and said, “It’s a good first draft, Ray.”

“That’s a fourth draft, Berliner,” he replied, the chuckle evident in his voice.

“Well, it could use another.”

He laughed heartily then. “Only you, Berliner. Go ahead, bloody it up and send it back to me.”

That story, of course, became the title piece of one of his collections a couple of years later, and Ray made one of his rare appearances at a group signing in Los Angeles with me, David, Ray Feist, and S.P. Somtow.

by Janet Berliner

As often as I’ve met Ray Bradbury, he’s always said, “Do I know you?” each time. I’ve seen him riding around Santa Monica on his bicycle. I wave and he waves back, but I imagine him saying to himself, “Have I met her?”

The first time I officially interviewed Ray was in Santa Cruz, around the mid-eighties. Since many people had interviewed him before, I decided to keep one question paramount: What kind of inner world does a man like this inhabit? I knew that it would be difficult it was going to be to sort out the emotional overload of an hour with him, so my I asked my psychiatrist friend, Stancil, the one we had met in Santa Barbara, to design and ask the questions. My motives multiple and selfish. Stancil has an unusual perspective on human behavior. We were working together on an annotated Winnie-the-Pooh. He’d never done an interview or had anything published (since then he’s the proud author of the definitive book on Frisbees–I am not kidding) but he wanted to learn and I thought his knowledge of behavior might come in handy.

We had arranged the interview for lunchtime, at a Chinese food restaurant. Lunch with Ray Bradbury is definitely an event. His creative unconscious, that which psychiatrists call the “primary process,” bubbles like a flowing artesian well, no matter where he is. What makes it fun is that, while this “primary process” pours forth, it sweeps his listeners–and at times Bradbury himself–into uncharted waters. Though a virgin to Chinese food, or so he said, he attacked the food zealously. When one last Szechuan dumpling lay on his plate, he looked at it regretfully and stood up. “Every once in a while, when I am at someone’s house or at a party,” he said, “my enthusiasm runs away from me. I hear my voice ricochet off the far wall, and I know it’s time to leave.”

His timing was magical. We had run out of tape and out of energy. Not so Ray. Ready to tackle the afternoon session of a day-long seminar, he headed for the limousine that had sparked our first questions of the interview: Why does a man who is part space traveler and an architect of arcane worlds refuse to drive, and why is he afraid to fly?

Ray doesn’t believe in short-form answers. “I’ve flown for the first time within the last five years, but I was terribly drunk when I did it. When I was young, I was too poor to own a car because my income didn’t start to go up until I was 35, or at least 32. Gradually over the years, I realized I didn’t miss it. You know, you don’t miss it because you’ve never had it. And then I saw a lot of people killed on the highway when I was young. I don’t like high places, either, and I think imagination makes things worse than they really are. I think I was afraid of being afraid.”

I had told Stan to jump in at any time, preferably with something more sophisticated than standard psycho-babble. Jump in he did. “In psychiatric treatment today, it’s suggested that the way to overcome a fear is to face it…behavior therapy, you know,” Stan said. “What about the fear that many writers have of being successful? How did you overcome that?”

My first reaction was to think the question rather too simplistic but, always happy to find a way to talk about his mentor, Robert Heinlein, Ray launched into his answer.

“I had someone to encourage me–Bob Heinlein. He was my teacher. I met him when I was 18. I joined the Science Fiction/Fantasy Society in L.A. We had meetings at Clifton’s Cafeteria every Thursday night because we were all poor and you could eat there cheap, or you could eat there free too. Mr. Clifton had a rule, and it’s still there today. He’s given away millions of free meals over a period of 45 years or so. I met Heinlein there and Kuttner and Edmund Hamilton and Leigh Bracket, Ross Rockman. All of them became my friends and teachers. I used to go to Heinlein’s house and watch him type, which was exciting because I’d never sold anything myself.”

Bradbury added that life in general, and the war in particular, contrived to keep him from seeing Heinlein for thirty or so years. They finally had a chance to talk at Jet Propulsion Lab, a couple of years before Heinlein’s death.

Joseph Mugnaini, artist, filmmaker, teacher, writer and, that day, part of Ray’s entourage, offered the information that Heinlein had his place in Santa Cruz electronically protected, which meant that he was imprisoned every time the electricity went off. He considered that to be “…a wonderful Science Fiction irony.”

We had been introduced to Joe as a special man whose friendship and work had long been a part of Ray’s life. He had a wonderfully craggy face and an intensity that rivaled Ray’s. I determined that I would arrange to interview him, too, at another time and place, and asked Ray if he had any ties to SFWA–The Science Fiction Writers of America

“Oh, I belong,” he said, “but there’s no time to get involved in any of their fights or arguments. I can’t keep up with all the writing. It’s impossible, so then I just feel ignorant. If I kept up with the writing, I’d have to quit writing myself.”

Hoping to find someone we knew in common, I asked him if he had read much Harlan Ellison.

“Yeah,” Ray said, “I’ve known Harlan for years. I haven’t read all that much, but a certain number of his short stories, which I like. And Harlan is great fun. A lot of people hate him, but I love him. We’re totally different…totally different people. Maybe that’s why we get on so well. I find him very funny. Yes, I’ve played pool with him at his house. He’s an enthusiast, you see. And I respond to someone who’s that manic about things. It’s Harlan who’s rebuilt his house and put caves in it and rabbit holes…he has Vivaldi on half the time, which is super.”

Ellison and Bradbury! Harnessed, they could replace the Diablo Canyon reactor, I thought.

In a matter of a few minutes, we had moved from Heinlein to Ellison, from mushu pork to rabbit holes. We were staying ahead of the cataract that is Ray Bradbury only with great effort.

I looked for a change of pace. “We’ve heard you’re a Francophile. How’s the Science Fiction there? Any outstanding writers?”

Ray was off and running. “Oh, they’re mad for it. They’ve got a lot of Science Fiction bookstores. There are no contemporary French Science Fiction writers that I know of. I think there were a couple of Russian boys living in Paris that write. I can’t think of their names, I think they’re twins. There are very few good Science Fiction writers in the world in general, and they’re all Americans with a few English, but there are no French. The Russians write it, but boy are they stodgy.

“You know what motivated our first trip to France? The French government invited me over to celebrate Jules Verne’s birthday. So we got a free trip over and a car and a driver, and all the best hotels, all the three-star restaurants for three weeks. We went down to the South of France. The French government asked, ‘Who do you want to meet?’ My wife said Charles Asnavour, so we spent a day with him.”

Asnavour! I practically melted. Ray laughed. “So you’re in love with him, too.”

I nodded. “What about you?” I asked. “What did you want?”

“Two things. First of all, I wanted to stay at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the 17th-century chateau built by Nicolas Fouquet. Tourists come there in the daytime and look around, but it is owned by a private family. No one is allowed to stay there. They gave me what I requested, but I had to arrange it myself. I wrote to Connoisseur Magazine editor Thomas Hoving, with whom I’d once lectured in San Jose. Hoving arranged an overnight stay in exchange for an article. Fouquet, you know, was Louis XIV’s finance minister. When Louis came out to see vaux-le-Vicomte, he was infernally jealous that it was better than anything he, Louis, had. He suspected that maybe the money had come out of France’s treasury, which it hadn’t, and
sent D’Artagnan to arrest Fouquet, who was jailed for the rest of his life, fifteen years. The legend of the man in the iron mask grew up around Fouquet. So the whole thing is full of romance as well as horror. There’s a room with a tapestry screen with all of Fontaine’s animals worked into it. Fontaine slept there. The sculptured ceilings and the bas reliefs are all so beautiful and warm. There is an amorous, frivolous touch to it. The angels are just a little more than angels. You feel you could really pinch them.

“As for which living person I wanted to meet, it was Jean Louis Barrot. See, I was supposed to do The Martian Chronicles directed by Barrot in 1968, and then the students ruined the theater. I’ll never forgive them. When revolutions run over my projects, I get very illiberal sometimes. To hell with them. Why would they close down a theater? We weren’t doing anything political.

“I’m a liberal democrat, but I admire ideas, not parties.”

“The world knows you best as the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and of innumerable short stories and film scripts,” I said. “You’re in love with France, in love with life, in love with Chambord, a spired castle that grew out of the imaginations of kings. You’ve slept among tapestries and danced in the halls of monarchs. Where would you like to play next?”

I don’t know what I expected to hear, but Ray’s answer took me by surprise.

I’ll tell you about it next month.

By Janet Berliner

Once upon a time, when I was a lot younger, I came up with a term to describe how I feel about astrology. I am an astrological agnostic. It would seem more sane to say that I’m a non-believer, but the fact is that I’m too close to the classic description of a Libra to do that. My life is governed by the scales, by Justice and Balance. When those two states of being are out of sync in my life, I am unhappy. My writing is almost always about Justice and the days and nights of my life are about creating harmony out of absurdity.

Publishing is the greatest absurdity of all, and so I am a seeker of balance there, too. When I was seventeen, I wrote a children’s book and sent it from South Africa to a British publisher. It was rejected because I had illustrations. They were done by a friend who is today a well-known graphic artist. They rejected the manuscript because I wouldn’t let go of the drawings and they wanted to use a house artist. I didn’t send out the manuscript again and in the vagaries of my life, it was mislaid. If I ever find that book, I’ll send it out again with the same illustrations because the fact of my loyalty to the artist is what, for me, balances the rejection.

When I received my first rejection of a serious work, I was a wreck. One writer friend said, “You’ll get used to it.” Another said, “Think of it as their loss.” A third told me, “They’re rejecting the story, not you.” Yet another papers his bathroom with them.

The truth of it, for me, is that rejections still hurt. Less when I’m told why, but I have not become inured to them. In itself, that’s irrational after thirty years of fulltime writing, yet more famous writers than me, by far, have gone to battle about the subject.

Rumor has it that Nadine Gordimer, angered by the stupidity of editorial decision-making, wrote a book and sent it out to market under a pseudonym. It was resoundingly rejected until one astute editor said, “This sounds a lot like Nadine Gordimer. Maybe we should take a chance with it.” She knew full well that, had she sent it out under her own name, it would have been greeted with cries of “A brilliant work” and wanted to make a statement on behalf of the rest of us.

Stephen King recently wrote of a writer published in England and not in America that she was a fantastic scribe. He could not, he said, understand why her books had not been picked up in the USA. Predictably, a bidding war ensued for her current book and backlist.

Back in the ancient days when I was a stringer, I had a handshake contract for a series of essays. I wrote one about a spa in Miami and made an indelicate comment about looking at women over 250 lbs. being massaged. It was a good essay but, sigh, my editor–whom I had never seen–was one of those large ladies. Handshake be damned, I never wrote another word for that publication.

No matter what editors tell you they do and do not want, there is simply no way to outguess what the acquisition editor’s mindset will be at the moment in time your contribution is read. There are rules to be followed: Don’t send erotica to Scholastic; Read the magazine before you submit to it; Make certain your work follows standard formatting. Write as well as you can. Other than that, there’s no outguessing the world of publishing and, with rare exceptions–bless you, Koontz, King, et al–we will get rejections.

I remember the time I got two letters in the same mail about the same story. One rudely rejected the story; the second sent a check and a request for more.

Here’s a really bad one: When I was first agenting, I occasionally marketed a short story by one of my more literary clients. The one I remember most clearly–a beautiful piece–came back from a small literary magazine with the following scrawled note: “This is so bad I refuse to read it.”

Think about that.

I’m told the editor who wrote the note is now in acquisitions at one of the large publishers. I’m told he has lost his arrogance. But has he lost his stupidity?

My most recent asinine rejection was by a publisher who rejected a proposal because, “We don’t do anything that smells of chick lit.” The protagonist of the book in question is a retired tennis pro in her fifties. Chick lit? I don’t think so.

Then there’s, “We can’t do a novel that says anything bad about Nazis. We might offend our German readers.” True story! And the infamous, “Great writing. Loved the characters. Sadly it’s not right for our list. I’ll probably shoot myself when I see it’s a bestseller.” Not right for your list? I studied your list.

Or the one where the editor reads my direct quote from one of Hitler’s speeches and writes across it, “No one would say something like this.”

Really? How old are you?

What I tell my students about rejection is, don’t read between the lines and take note only if there’s a theme to the rejections.

So where’s the balance?

It lies in the letter from a Holocaust survivor who wrote to thank me for MADAGASCAR MANIFESTO and tell me I got it right and in the letters from some of our troops who wrote to tell me they wished they could have helped and thanked me for my books. It sits in the laps of the homeless who asked me for books and get boxes of them from me each year and it rests in the small hands of my grandson who asked for a children’s book and takes each installment to class for Show and Tell.

I’m too stubborn to listen to rejections. I’ll just keep doing what I do and trying to do it better each time.

There are twenty-eight books bearing my name in the Library of Congress. So, go ahead, New York. Reject me.

by Janet Berliner

Thank you, Mr. Steinberg for being so gutsy and so gracious. (See “Pain.”) I proffer you a wobbly curtsy and dare here to embark upon a journey into the same territory as your last
essay.

My journey into the twin topics of pain and exercise takes a circuitus route, beginning with two of the most absolute tenets of Judaism:

1. “Do not gossip; no good can ever come of it.”
2. “Do not proseltyze,” to which I would add: especially if you’re a writer.

What does #2 mean? It means do NOT attempt to induce someone to join your own belief system.

Mostly, the law deals with religion, but it also deals with
obsessive zeal. For the purposes of this piece, it applies particularly to exercise and to aspiration as in Hope, Ambition, & Breathing.

For those of you who can and do find exercise to be an imperative for creation, bless you and may you always be
able to do it. For me, here’s my story. It begins with the words Rick showed me, written by Jim Morrison:

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. … Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. …Pain is meant to wake us up…You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel
your pain.”

Easy to say, Mr. Morrison, and oh, so hard to do.

When I was young–and I was young once–they called me Gypsy.
Aside from writing and reading, my passions were dancing, tennis, traveling, the ocean, and the feel of warm sand between my toes. And I loved to eat, everything from peasant food to pheasant under glass, from bananas and mangoes to figs and grapes warm off the vine. I never knew boredom or depression. I walked my own walk to my own beat and, as Piaf sang, Je regrette rien. I regret nothing.

I’d be doing all of it still, but along came myasthenia. For those not in the know, it’s an orphan neuromuscular disease–orphan because too few people have it to make research financially feasible. In short form, an enzyme that carries messages from the brain to the (mostly) small motor functions dries up and goes away. There is sometimes a helpful surgical process, but it’s mostly a question of constant replacement therapy–if you’re lucky. There is no cure. There can be remission, but even then, the more you use your muscles, the weaker they get. The heck with pecs. Think eyes, bowels, throat.

“You’ll be better tomorrow.” No.
“Get those muscles pumping. It’ll strengthen them.” No.

Myasthenia also attacks your immune system. You have to take cortisone, which can be both a miracle and the devil. There are many other side issues, more as you survive–if you do. None of them are pleasant.

I was lucky and stubborn. I already had two lovely daughters, my passion for writing, and a greedy need to live. So I had no choice, really. I had to develop the patience to withstand chronic pain and keep relearning the physical functions I needed for survival.

That was around 1980, about the time my first novel came out. For a while I was too ill to write or take risks. Whatever I did was in slow motion. Slowly my courage returned and I started taking risks again. Many of them sent me to ICU, but I kept on keeping on.

And then my immune system, what was left of it, broke down still further and I developed COPD. I am on oxygen 24/7, confined to quarters, not allowed to fly except in my mind and my memory. My immune system is so depleted that the sound of a sneeze sends me into panic. I spent most of 2004 on a vent, two years of not knowing who I was or where, a year relearning how to walk, how to write the alphabet and talk, how to find a way to hear something out of ears whose nerves died.

I’m in chronic pain. Even if I could, I’m not allowed to travel anywhere except to see physicians. I can’t visit my beloved daughters and grandchildren. Since that last stay in ICU when I once again confronted my Maker, I take 30 pills on a good day, breathing treatments three times a day, and see five physicians in luckier months. Every day I contend with up to twelve hours of nausea, headaches and dizziness.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst thing is having to contemplate the probability of giving up my dreams.

How do I dance like a gypsy, explore islands that aren’t on any map, swim with the barracuda when I am imprisoned by my body and by the walls of my room? How do I not grow angry?

The truth is I do get angry, but I also write, and I count my blessings a lot. My memories sustain me, like the one of the woman I met in St. Croix. She was ninety-eight and went scuba diving every day to visit her pet octopus and feed him cooked chicken. Her contention was, as is mine, that since we are unique, we must claim ourselves–pleasure and pain, warts and all.

That’s what I try to do, while I search for a Pea Green Boat to take me back to the sea again.

by Janet Berliner

For those of you who have not seen “Singing in the Rain,” abandon this essay at once and buy, rent, borrow or steal it. Pay particular attention to the incomparable Gene Kelly’s “Gotta Dance.” It’s about passion.

Which has what to do with writing?

Everything.

The late film reviewer and interviewer Stu Kobak wrote:

“Creative juices can flow in most any circumstance. … Today, waiting in the hospital’s ambulatory surgery wing… an old woman limped by with a walker. She bumped into my wheelchair. I noticed she was wearing red shoes. I thought, The Red Shoes, what a fantastic dance movie. Dance, movies, inspiration._..[for] an old woman trying to capture the flair of youth with a pair of colorful shoes. I whipped out my notebook like a gunslinger in a B western, ready to take on the world with words.”

Like Kobak, I am captured by artistic dedication, whether or not it requires sacrifice–as it most often does.

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

Tourist to New Yorker: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
New Yorker to Tourist: “Practice, Man. Practice.”

To which I would add, be passionate about what you do.

Out of passion and practice grow the flowers of skill. I cry equally when I listen to Chopin’s Preludes, hear Jascha Heifetz play the violin, watch Baryshnikov fly across a stage or see a master carpenter run his fingers over a piece of his finished work.

Talent, you say. How lucky to be so blessed.

Yes, but–

Frédéric François Chopin lived for only 39 years. By the time he was seven, he was composing and by eight he played his first concert. While his love affairs are well known, it is his passion for the piano that lives on.

Jascha Heifetz started violin lessons at age five. It is said that, around the age of 25, he told Groucho Marx he had been earning a living as a musician since his debut at the age of seven. Groucho apparently answered, “And I suppose before that you were just a bum.”

Ah, but these were geniuses, you say. Perhaps so. In no way do I compare myself with them, but I have passion a’plenty. And I “Practice, Man, practice.”

Example: Ten years or so ago, I was in intensive care, tubes coming out of every orifice; doctors Saying, “Get ready for your Maker.” I covered my bases and asked for a Rabbi, a priest, a Jesuit monk. I also asked for my computer. I had a deadline to meet. At any time I was vaguely compos, I pounded away, which was a good thing because the doctors were wrong.

Another time, confined in an old hospital near a beach in South Africa, I had an idea that wouldn’t let go — an idea born of Morpheus, morphine, my own wheezing and the machinery keeping me alive? Again, I asked for my computer. The story itself died. The passion that drove me to write under those circumstances kept me alive.

No matter what else happens or doesn’t happen in my life, I remain compelled — PASSIONATE — which segues back to where I began with “Singing in the Rain?”

If you wake up in the morning and sing out, “Gotta Dance,” put on your dancing shoes; if your first thought, before sex or food or going to the bathroom is, “Gotta Write,” DO IT. When the dark times attack, DO IT. If you don’t, you’ll lose your passion, and without that, there is nothing.