TO DANCE ON TABLETOPS_ TALES OF MEILORI'S

 

Samuel McCord owner of Meilori's, here.

 

The leaves of the potted palms by my table hiss through the shadows like claws through sand.

 

People sometimes ask me, "What is it like to have the blood of the Angel of Death in your veins?"

 

As if I could conjure nightmare with mere words.  No.  Rather I have images that give some small sense of what it is like.

 

Though it is March 9th outside. It is February 5th inside Meilori's ... for I will it so.  I remember one February 5th.

 

It was 1959.  Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke (Isak Dinesen) wanted to meet me, Hemingway, and Marilyn Monroe for lunch.

 

Hemingway was out of the country so I had to do double duty.

 

 Carson McCullers, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, hosted within Meilori's a small luncheon party for the Baroness whom she had long thought of as an imaginary friend.

 

Carson read OUT OF AFRICA at least once a year for most of her life.

The Baroness smiled upon hearing that, "Imaginary friends are by far the best.  They tend to always agree with you and never disappoint."

 

 

As I watched bemused as Carson McCullers pecked a kiss on a giggling Monroe, the Baroness fixed me with a strange look,

 

 

"I do believe what the natives told me, in the night Africa murmurs a song of you.

 

The air over the Serengeti plain quivers with the color of that lion's blood which you shed to save a small girl's life."

 

Her frail hand patted my gloved one.

 

"The children of her tribe invented a game in which your name is chanted as some demi-god's.  They say the full moon throws a shadow over the gravel of the road which makes the sound of your voice as if to hide from your memory."

 

Her eyes deepened as she sipped her champagne.

 

"It is said that the eagles of the Ngong Hills still look for you ... and that you can see when someone is near to dying.”

 

 She burned with the pale green color of a corpse to my eyes.   

She was still driven:

though increasingly debilitated by the syphilis she had contracted in her Out of Africa years, and reduced to about eighty pounds by her anorexic diet (oysters, grapes and champagne).

 

She would still stay up chain-smoking, taking amphetamines and telling her famous stories until there were no listeners, or she had talked herself into a trance.

 

"I would ask you if you see death in me.  But I already see the answer in your sad poet's eyes."

 

 I smiled sadly, "You have written:  The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.  That goes double for a cursed soul like myself."

 

I heard Carson tell Marilyn,

 

"We are homesick most for the places we have never known.  And I am homesick for the Africa the Baroness so deliciously described.  What are you homesick for, my friend?"

 

 Marilyn's eyes grew haunted, "Sleep.  The nicest thing for me is sleep, then at least I can dream.”

 

Carson nodded, "That is wise."

 

"Wise?" sighed Marilyn.  “A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left.”

 

And I wanted to weep, for I saw the corpse green promise of death over both their faces.

 

I closed my eyes but I could not blot out what I knew.

 

Partially paralyzed from a stroke, addicted to alcohol and pills, Carson would be an invalid at age 35. Her close friend, Tennessee Williams, said that Carson had known so much tragedy that it scared people.

 

He contended that it was her “nobility of spirit, and profound understanding of the lonely, searching heart that make her, in my opinion, the greatest living writer in our country, if not the world.”

 

The Baroness squeezed my hand.

 

"Do not grieve so.  Those two and I are casualties of our dreams.  For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.”

 

Champagne, white grapes, oysters and soufflé were laid out on my black marble table top.

 

Over lunch, Dinesen entertained the group with a story about the killing of her first lion in Africa and how she sent the skin to the king of Denmark.

 

She was a magnificent conversationalist and loved to talk. Marilyn, with her beautiful blue eyes, listened in a ‘once-upon-a-time-way.'

 

 Marilyn regaled us a story about her culinary adventures.

She was preparing home-made pasta for a party, but it was getting late, the guests were soon arriving, and the pasta wasn’t ready, so she attempted to finish it off with a hair dryer.

 

The Baroness leaned in close to me and whispered,

 

"It is not that she is pretty, although she is incredibly pretty – but that she radiates at the same time unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable innocence.

 

I have met the same in a lion cub that my native servants in African brought me. I would not keep her.”

 

Her breath smelled not of champagne, oysters, nor grapes ... but of death.

 

I watched as Carson struggled to dance with Marilyn to the music of Cole Porter. 

No, damn it.  I would give them all one night of girlish fun.

 

I could at least do that much.

 

I got up and in the guise of helping to steady Carson, I pressed certain acupressure points.  I walked back to "Tanya" as the Baroness insisted I call her and did the same for her.

 

The four of us laughed belly-deep as I did as they wished and boosted them to the black marble tabletop.  I watched the three soon-to-die women giggle, laugh, and dance in one another's arms.

 

For one brief moment, they were young girls, safe and happy.

 

Three days after the Nyack luncheon, Isak Dinesen was rushed to the hospital.

 

The doctors diagnosed her with acute malnutrition, noting that her medical condition was similar to that of a World War II concentration camp survivor.

 

Dinesen continued to waste away until she became so emaciated that her skin bruised when touched. She died in her sleep – from malnutrition – at age 77.

 

On August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead from an overdose of sleeping pills in her West Los Angeles home.

 

She was 36 years old.

 

Carson McCullers endured eight more years of deteriorating health. Then in August, 1967, she suffered a massive stroke and died.

 

So should you enter Meilori's any February 5th, do not sit at my table.

 

I am sitting in the shadows, remembering:

 

Three beautiful souls laughing despite the certainty of death and dancing on tabletops.

FOREVER IS COMPOSED OF NOW'S _ A TALE OF MEILORI'S

I walked to my table at Meilori's and paused. 

The ghost of Emily Dickinson was already sitting there, frowning at my open laptop.

She looked up.  "Dearest Roland, I am somewhat overwrought.  Could you help me?"

To my right, Mark Twain vigorously shook his head at me and gruffed, 

"Missy, you are always overwrought.  Why I declare most of your verses have hernias from being wrought over in knots."

Emily rolled her eyes at him and sighed, pointing to my laptop "Your words tear at me.  You ask: "Does the world need another writer?"

"I know how wretched and galling it feels to have one's carefully crafted words misunderstood or ignored."

{Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in a review of Emily Dickinson’s poetry published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, January, 1892:

"But the incoherence and formlessness of her —

I don't know how to designate them — versicles are fatal….

An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar." }

Mark knew how deeply those words had wounded Emily.

He snorted, "Emily, dear, whose name is familiar to the world today: yours or that jaybird Aldrich's?"

Mark bent over her slender shoulder and read my words.  

"Dang it all, why should we bother ourselves asking if our books are needed?  Is beauty needed?  Is humor needed?  Is love needed?"

The ghost of Hemingway paused beside us as Marlene Dietrich waited impatiently for him to pay attention to her again.

He said roughly.  "I see your point, Clemens.  We need to eat, sleep, and breathe ... all else is extra."

"No," Emily murmured.  

"For living souls must soar above mere appetite.  It is our yearning for beauty, for humor, for love that raises us above the level of an animal."

Marlene's ghost sat beside the poet and patted her hand.  

"As odd as it may appear after my spit-fire life, I agree with you.  

Why, one of your verses meant much to me my whole life --

 Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all."

Hemingway bent and read my words, too. Dang it all, I wrote those words to myself, not to all of Meilori's.

 Hemingway glared at me, "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.

He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.

For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

You know that fiction is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing.

You do not have the reference, the old important reference.

You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.

You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable 

and also have it seem normal so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."

Marlene rose abruptly, "Enough, Papa, you owe me a tango."

And off they went into the shadows.

Emily sighed, 

"Publication is the auction of the mind of man, and I prefer my bare-foot rank best as it affords me the freedom to write as I wish."

She looked off into the shadows that had swallowed Hemingway and Marlene.

"Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory!

As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear!"

Emily looked up at me.  "I wonder if your friends will continue to write should success elude them?  

Are the words burning within them, as they are with me, to find life on the written page?"

Emily squinted to make out the head of Marlene in the darkness as she finished the verse which meant so much to the actress:

"And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me."

CARL JUNG VS. MARK TWAIN _ TALES OFMEILORI'S

 

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
-C.G. Jung

Meilori's was much wider, higher, and deeper than seemed possible from how it looked on the outside.

Inside the haunted jazz club, I could see no walls, much less any torches that hung from them.


Only an endless array of tables whose candles pushed back the darkness only a little.

In this dark cavern of a saloon,

things vast, blind, and monstrous took shape in the bronze-hued mists that billowed all through the place.

They lumbered without notice of me. They became almost solid, fuzzed, then drifted apart only to re-form feet from where they had been.

I sat at my table and watched Dr. Freud suddenly depart.  What had that been all about?

A dance macabre formed in the mists to my far left.

Up high and almost lost in the billowing fog, sprites of dark ice spun on one leg, twirling slowly, their angular faces lost in some delirium of madness. They began to sing.

It was an invocation.

Abysses loathsome and endless yawned hungrily in the mists before me. I caught flashes, glimpses of alien voids and unholy dimensions beyond all human experience.

"May I sit down, young man?" said a deep voice.

I looked up. 

Carl Jung.  His ghost actually.  I reminded myself that to the dead all the living are young.

And Freud's sudden departure made sense.  The two of them had started out friends and ended up enemies.

"Of course, sir."

He smiled and sat down opposite me. "I wrote about the need for finding and living our myth, our story."

He sighed,
"As I grew older, I wrote my most important works and found my own unique ways to play."

He peered deep into my eyes.
"Young man, we need new stories that weave playfulness, gratitude, and compassion for self and others. Re-writing your myth or story can help you understand more fully your core values."

He smiled sadly.
"Your story reflects your uniqueness and the many gifts you have to offer others. You might ask your computer friends:


 If they fully expressed their values, how would others see them? Would it change their life in some way?"

Jung gazed into the bronze mists and murmured, "I had sick bed images, terrible and beautiful both at once."

His chin sunk to his chest,
"I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe---in a tremendous void, but filled with the highest possible feeling of happiness.

Everything around me seemed enchanted.... Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss, thronged round with images of all creation."

The ghost of Mark Twain in the seat beside me laughed,

"I had me some of those same dreams, there, Young. But soon as I gave up radishes, they cleared out."

Jung glared at Mark.
"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart not your stomach. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Mark smiled crooked,
"Wasn't you the pilgrim who said everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

Jung's scowl could have curdled vinegar.

"I also said I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. Must you be a jack daw, Clemens?”

Mark Twain smiled wide,
"You spout on about the secrets of life. I will tell you the Secret to Life:


 “Life is short, Break the Rules. Forgive quickly, Kiss SLOWLY.

Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret ANYTHING that makes you smile.”


Jung huffed, “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”

Twain snorted, "Maybe. Maybe not. When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

Jung rumbled,
"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. It is clear your mind has become mired in nonsense.”

Twain chuckled, "T'weren't you the gent who said:

'As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.'”

Jung shook his head,
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

Mark looked at me. "Suddenly, son, I'm afraid. I actually understood that."

***

What would say is your own personal myth? 

Are your core values reflected in what you write?

  In the last thing you wrote what would a stranger say are your core values, what you hold to be true about life?

MARK TWAIN VS. SIGMUND FREUD _ TALES OF MEILORI'S

 

"Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing events that interface with it."

 - Sigmund Freud

 

“I believe that words are strong, that they can conquer what we dread when fear seems more awful than life is good.”

- Mark Twain

 

 

 

 "Vienna," I said to Freud's question of what occurred to me at the letter V. 

 

"Berggasse 19 to be exact."

 

Freud sucked in a breath and nodded,

 

"Of course looking at me how could you not think of the address

 

where I lived for 47 years, seeing patients every working day for eight or more hours?"

 

Mark Twain and I joined Freud in sucking in our breaths. 

 

 

 As sometimes happened at the haunted jazz club, Meilori's, magic stirred echoes from the past atop our table.

 

In billowing mists, a scene from over 70 years ago in Vienna slowly took shape:

 

The sign on the building reading ''Prof. Dr. Freud/3-4'' had already been removed

 

and a swastika flag had been draped over the doorway.

 

Freud was one of many thousands of Jewish Viennese who were harassed

 

in the weeks and months after Hitler's triumphant entry into the Austrian capital in March 1938.

 

 When the Nazi commandos barged into the apartment, Freud's wife,

 

Martha, in her unflappable Hamburg way, asked them to leave their rifles in the hall.

 

Mark Twain smiled at the courage shown by the unbowed woman.

 

The leader of the intruders stiffly addressed the master of the house as ''Herr Professor."

 

In a brisk, rough manner, the commander, with his men, proceeded to search the vast apartment.

 

Finally the Nazis left.

 

Martha Freud, in quiet dignity, went from room to room, straightening up the shambles they left in their wake.

 

With only a slight tremor to her voice, Martha informed her husband they had seized an amount of money worth about $840.

 

 

 

''Dear me,'' Freud remarked, ''I have never taken that much for a single visit.''

 

Mark Twain sputtered a laugh and studied the man as the billowing scene evaporated atop our table. 

 

"Doctor, I don't much care for you.  But damn, you and your Mrs. had sand."

 

He cocked his head at Freud.  "And who would have thought you had a sense of humor?"

 

Freud smiled sadly,

 

"I have found humor to be a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing events that interface with it."

 

Mark grimaced, "Leave it to a Saw-Brains to take all the joy out of a laugh by dissecting it!"

 

 He looked at the table-top as if still seeing the Nazis invading the home of harmless citizens.

 

"What is it that strikes a spark of humor from a man?

 

It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us.

 

In youth we don't feel it, but as we grow to manhood we find the burden on our shoulders.

 

Humor?

 

It is nature's effort to harmonize conditions.

 

The further the pendulum swings out over woe the further it is bound to swing back over mirth." 

 

Freud nodded.

 

"Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever."

 

Mark Twain sat up straight.  "I wrote that!"

 

Freud smiled drily,

 

"Yes, eventually even fools get some things correct.  The law of averages always has its revenge."

 

I made a face.  "As apparently do professors."

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.

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