INTEGRITY IS NOT A CONDITIONAL WORD _ TALES OF MEILORI'S

 

INTEGRITY

"To write all you have to do is follow your own instinct or judgement ...

 

disregard what is said ...

 

convey the absolute  bottom quality of each person, situation, and thing.

 

Isn't writing simple?"

 - Maxwell Perkins in a letter to Hemingway.

 

A soft voice spoke above me as I typed on my laptop in the haunted jazz club, Meilori's.

 

"The utterly real thing in writing is the only thing that counts."

 

I looked up and stiffened. 

The ghost of Maxwell Perkins.

 

 

He was unknown to the public

 

even while he mentored Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe into literary legend.

 

He staked his career on them,

 

defying what the establishment felt was the only way to publishing success.

 

Why?

 

He once wrote Thomas Wolfe:

"There could be nothing so important as a book can be."

 

He had made his publisher, Scribners,

 

lend Fitzgerald many thousands of dollars and rescued him from his breakdown

 

He agreed to publish Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, sight unseen

 

and then had to fight to keep his own job.

 

 when the manuscript arrived with off-color language.

 

How many modern editors would do those things?

 "Might I sit down?" he asked.

 

"Of course. But why me?"

 

"You do not give up in your dreams."

 

"That's important?"

 

He spoke carefully, with that hollow timbre of the hard of hearing,

 

as if he were surprised at the sound of his own voice. 

 

"If you want to be a writer it is."

 

Perkins smiled sadly. 

 

"At Clemens' insistence, I have read your The Not-So-Innocents Abroad."

 

He cocked his head. 

 

"It possesses what I call the 'real thing'  ...

 

though now I fear what I find excellent would not be considered so today."

 

Perkins patted the back of my hand.

 

"I stopped to merely encourage you not to stop if you will forgive my play on words.

 

Do not heed the low sales or low recognition."

 

Perkins glanced at the ghost of Hemingway booming off to the distance on our right,

 

his blue pastel eyes seeing scenes of the past denied me.

 

"Real self-esteem is not derived from the great things you have done,

 

the awards you have won, or the mark you made."

 

Perkins turned his eyes back to me. 

 

"It comes from an appreciation of yourself for what and who you are."

 

He rose and walked into the shadows of the haunted jazz club. 

 

"A sense of self is much better than pride and will carry you farther."

 

As the swirling mists swallowed him, his words came faintly to me.

 

"It is called integrity, your inner image of yourself.  Integrity is not the search for rewards nor is it a conditional word.

 

Maybe all you will get is the biggest kick in the pants the world can provide.

 

But you will have earned them by being true to yourself."

 

Though I could no longer see Perkins, I thought Wolfe had it right when he described his eyes:

 

"They were full of a strange misty light, a kind of far weather of the sea in them,

 

 eyes of a New England sailor long months outbound for China on a clipper ship,

 

with something drowned, sea-sunken in them.”

HELLO FROM HEMINGWAY_ TALES OF MEILORI'S

 

Want to know why I, Ernest Hemingway,  am still talked about as a writer when so many of my contemporaries are forgotten?

 

I started out my adult life on the battlefield.

 

Life is a battle. Victory is not to the swift, to the valiant, or the brave.

 

(Though that is often the way to bet.)

 

It is to the one who fights smart.

 

Long ago Siv Maria wrote to Roland what many of you feel:

 

"I think I was born too late or too early. In the world we live in today there just is nothing new anymore."

 

I felt the same way when I was struggling to find the title to my new novel. I returned to the giants of the past.

 

Out of the verses of John Donne, I picked ...

 FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.

We can prevail if we do not give up. If we assail a knot until we loosen it, we will succeed.

 

The Turkish author, Selim Yeniceri, wrote me:

 

"A great work of art comes through talent which you bring from birth,

 

but to make it successful in worldly terms, you have to be a strategist, because business world is really like a battleground."

 

Just an hour ago, I was talking with the ghost of Gore Vidal.

 

 

We were talking about how politicians love to dissemble with words.

 

 

 Take Syrian President Bashar Assad who once said:

 

"We will be forgiving only to those who renounce terrorism.

 

When a surgeon in an operating room cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him,

 

'Your hands are stained with blood?' "

 

 

This after the massacre in Houla, where more than 100 people--many of them children--were killed.

 

 

I mentioned Roland's past posts about the internet craze of writing an entire novel in a month this last November.

 

 

 

He rolled those Luciferian eyes of his and sighed,

 

"Ernest, it comes down to whether one wants to be a carpenter or a woodpecker."

 

He scowled, "With novels, as with erecting buildings, it all comes down to design. And proper design takes time as does everything done with quality in mind."

 

I nodded, "Of course. Kidnap a woman's child and demand she write a novel within a month. She will write that novel."

 

Vidal chuckled, "Any Philistine could, but would it be a good novel? It is a truism of human nature that what one practices, one becomes.

 

If they practice slovenly writing, it is a certainty that they will become slovenly writers."

 

He smiled evilly. "Now, has Roland's penchant for getting into trouble gotten any less? And if not, do present me with the gory details."

 

And so I did. But Roland is a friend, so you will have to imagine the lurid tales I told Vidal.

*Remember to buy Heather McCorkle's latest: Honoring A Witch's Heart - 

https://www.amazon.com/Honoring-Witchs-Heart-Emerald-Witches-ebook/dp/B0BTTRC1QW?fbclid=IwAR3AGPA4uMSWrvW2smKNDZCZHHNEsQlW9evD8Y0lX9fgY3pivUqGiQn0jIU

OSCAR WILDE VS. GORE VIDAL

 

I was writing in the dim interior of the haunted jazz club, Meilori's.

 

I heard a mellow yet deep voice to my right. "Dear boy, don't tell me you still write?"

 

I looked up.

 

Gore Vidal.

 

Or rather his ghost, looking rather dapper and as young as Adam with the rays of the first dawn on his face.

 

He sat down, leaned next to me, reading what I had just written on NO RESHOOTS FOR DEATH, and shook his head.

 

"Roland, half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President."

 

I smiled. "Let's hope it's the same half."

 

He slapped my arm. "You're stealing from me!"

 

"Steal from the best Oscar Wilde always said."

 

He leaned and scanned my laptop screen again, nodding. 

"You have your own distinct style. Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

 

I made a face. "And it's gotten me so far."

 

Gore raised a long forefinger in admonition. "I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on or move out.”

 

I nodded and sighed, "It's just that sometimes I get depressed."

 

Gore smiled sadly. "As do I, my boy. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too.

 

Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action:

 

you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

 

He tapped my laptop screen. 

"But words like those of your friends and you give me hope. How marvelous good books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

 

I asked, "What would be your advice to my writing friends, sir?"

 

He smiled wickedly, 

“Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”

 

He winked at me. “You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big.

 

It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account.

 

You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. The trick is to write one after another.”

 

He looked off into the bronze mists of Meilori's. 

“The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time.

 

Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise.

 

I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page.

 

Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences.

 

Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences you write will be.”

 A tall ghost sat down on the other side of me. Oscar Wilde. He laughed.

 

"Roland, as a young man in the South ...."

"I'm hardly young anymore, sir."

He gently patted the back of my hand. 

"To the dead, all the living are young. Where was I? Oh, yes ... you are in a splendid position to write great novels. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.”

 

Gore's right eyebrow rose. "I said that!"

 

Oscar smiled wide. "As I have been quoted: if you are going to steal, steal from the best. Go on. Admit it. I'm your hero, Gore."

 

Gore gave Oscar a look that would have curdled vinegar. 

" Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me, thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behavior ... rather I expect it."

 

Oscar pouted, "You think me nothing but a gossip."

 

Gore relented, "Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."

 

Oscar laughed deeply, "Oh, the gossip about me is definitely true ... if it is bad."

 

Gore looked sadly at my laptop screen again. "It is all a waste, you know."

 

"What, sir?"

 

"Your striving for quality, for uniqueness. In the case of the new writers, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant,

 

we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books,

 

pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

 

I said, "People still read, sir."

 

Gore nodded grimly, "The fad of the moment is what they read. Not to think, not to reflect, but to be aroused."

 

Oscar shook his head firmly. “The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death.

 

The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men.

 

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.”

 

Gore grumbled, "You just stole my words again!"

 

Oscar nodded, "Because you seemed to have forgotten them. We writers exist to be the 300 Spartans in the tide of ignorance and hopelessness."

 

I raised an eyebrow. "I thought it was to be on the best seller list."

 

Oscar laughed, "That, too!"

***

What favorite author(s) of yours would you like to chat with in a haunted jazz club?  

What would you ask him/her?  What do you think they would think of today's books and publishing industry?

HAPPY SURPRISES_ IWEG Post

 

https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

"Surprise is the greatest gift

that life can grant us."

Boris Oasternak

I never have been a fan of Gore Vidal's historical novels, but I love his perceptive essays with their razor wit and humor.

nhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QF9FYH9

I even had him accompany Victor Standish in zombie infested Detroit in my historical fantasy above.

His ghost still rails at me for that by the way.

His knowledge of American history was encyclopedic as his historical novels reflect.

Imagine my surprise when I bought an autographed copy of his THE SMITHONIAN INSTITUTION and found it was a historical FANTASY!!

In it, his hero is the true great love of his life who died on Iwo Jima.

Mr. Vidal goes back in time to when his love is 14 and devises a tale that saves him from dying on that Japanese volcanic island.

The teenage math genius is mysteriously summoned to the Smithsonian Institution, 

where a crash program to develop the atomic bomb is being conducted in the basement. 

Surrounded by figures from American history, the boy battles to save not just himself, but humanity.

I did not mind the surprise.

Things never go the way you expect them to. That's both the joy and frustration in life. 

I'm finding as I get older that I don't mind, though. It's the surprises that tickle me the most, the things you don't see coming.

Have you ever been surprised

by a book from one of your 

favorite authors

or

an idea for one of your

own books?

UNSELFING

 

That's what the ghost of Bertrand Russell called it when he looked at Midnight staring at himself in the mirror.

Ghost pipe smoke doesn't smell by the way, though Midnight still sneezes at it.

 

Anyway, he explained that "unselfing" was "some instinctive wakefulness to an aspect of the world other than myself: a helping hand extended to someone else’s struggle."

Something beyond the bruising boundaries

of ego.

He ruffled my hair (what little is left of it) with his ghost fingers ... it ticked.

"The world is vast and our own powers are limited. 

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. 

And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible."

Midnight coughed up a fur-ball at his feet.

He smiled thinly, "He obviously spends too much time with the ghost of Mark Twain."

He sighed, "They would both profit if they learned that the secret of happiness is this: 

let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

What do you think?

GONE WITH THE WIND_ You Only Think You Know This Film_ WEP Post

https://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/

 

Controversy stormed about this film long before HBOMax removed it from its inventory.

The fact that Hattie McDaniel would be unable to attend the premiere in racially segregated Atlanta outraged Clark Gable so much

that he threatened to boycott the premiere unless she could attend. He later relented when she convinced him to go.

The Los Angeles Sentinel called for a boycott of “every other Selznick picture, present and future.”

Under that pressure, Selznick agreed to the N.A.A.C.P.’s suggestion of hiring a technical adviser “to watch the entire treatment of the Negroes.”

In fact, he hired two — both of them white.

Hattie McDaniel became the first black person to be nominated for - and win - an Academy Award.

Hattie McDaniel was criticized by some African-Americans for playing in a supposedly racist film.

She responded that she would "rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one".

STRANGE FACTS:

Vivien Leigh later said that she hated kissing Clark Gable because of his bad breath, rumored to be caused by his false teeth, a result of excessive smoking.

According to Frank Buckingham, a technician who observed the film being made, Gable would sometimes eat garlic before his kissing scenes with Vivien Leigh!

Vivien Leigh worked for 125 days and received about $25,000. Clark Gable worked for 71 days and received over $120,000.

Because of those ”garlic” kissing scenes alone she should have been paid $100,000!

Max Steiner was given only three months to compose the music, considering that 1939 was the busiest year of his career!

 In that year he wrote the music for 12 films.

In order to meet deadline, Steiner sometimes worked for 20 hours straight and took Benzedrine pills to stay awake.

(Selznick insisted that the director and actors of his THIRD MAN do the same to make the film’s hectic schedule.)

With almost three hours of music, "Gone with the Wind" had the longest film score ever composed up to that time.

The character of Ashley Wilkes was based on Margaret Mitchell's cousin by marriage John "Doc" Holliday.

Melanie was based on Mitchell's third cousin, and Doc's first cousin and close friend, Mattie "Sister Melanie" Holliday.

Doc moved West and became the gambler and gunfighter of "Gunfight at the OK Corral" fame.

Mattie joined a convent and became a nun, but maintained a correspondence with Doc, who died of tuberculosis in 1887, 13 years before Margaret Mitchell was born.

AND HERE YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ALL ABOUT GONE WITH THE WIND!

(Amazing the things I’ve learned while doing research for my DARK HOLLYWOOD series.)

 

Are We Capable of Love Any More?

 

The bronze mists of the haunted jazz club, 

Meilori's,

curled and creamed like

 a dreaded thought 

trying to form itself 

on the fevered edge of consciousness.

"I fold," sighed the ghost of Ray Bradbury, laying his cards gently upon the rune-etched table.

"You folded your cards a long time ago," drily smiled the ghost of William Faulkner, 

"as our friend, Roland, almost did last November."

"What month is it, anyway?" asked Ray Bradbury.

"It's Valentine's Day, sir," I smiled sadly having lost my Kathleen decades that seemed only months ago.

Faulkner laid down his cigar. "Your living friends these days are incapable of love."

"Here, I find myself standing outside the window of the storefront of humanity, still observing as a writer but unable to reach out and touch with fingers of new prose"

He shook his head.

"Because of the darkness in this world , the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing

 

because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat of wresting something from nothing.

 

You must learn them again. You must teach yourself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

 And teaching yourself that, 

forget it forever,

 leaving no room in your writing for anything but the old truths of the heart,

 the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - 

love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

 Until you do so, you labor under a curse.

 You write not of love but of lust,

 of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,

 of victories without hope and,

 worst of all, without pity or compassion. Your griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

 You write not of the heart but of the sex glands."

He turned, "What do you think, Ray?"

The last breath of winter sighed down my spine, for Mr. Bradbury looked as young as a high school senior.

"What is Love? 

Perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to ourselves when we thought ourselves truly lost forever. 

Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering, handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream we could ever be again.”

He turned to me. "What do you think, Roland."

"I think, sir, that it is, indeed, a dark world. But if we find love, we don't have to walk it alone. Because even if we lose the source of that warmth, its memory will light the way before us."

William Faulkner said, "You trouble me, Roland. You surely do."

"Me, too, sir. Me, too."

***

So, my friends, what do you think about love?