Not Wanting to Look Away – A Life of War Zone Witness and Writing

February 25, 2024 Leave a comment

The first time I heard about novelist, war correspondent, activist, pacifist, letter writer, and third wife of Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, was during a documentary about Hemingway. I became intrigued by the pluck of this woman, as I am about Maria Agnesi and Rose E. Livingston.

1944. To witness the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy during World War II, Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship (locked herself in a bathroom) and masqueraded as a medic. She impersonated a stretcher bearer.

All night she labored, with blisters on her hands, her mind and heart seared with images of pain and death she would never forget. Later she would learn that every one of the hundreds of credentialed journalists, including her husband, sat poised behind her in the Channel with binoculars, never making it to shore. Hemingway’s story soon appeared in Collier’s alongside hers, with top billing and more dazzle, but the truth had already been written on the sand. There were 160,000 men on that beach and one woman. Gellhorn.

– PAULA MCLAIN writing about The Extraordinary Life of Martha Gellhorn, the Woman Ernest Hemingway Tried to Erase ~A maverick war correspondent, Hemingway’s third wife was the only woman at D-Day and saw the liberation of Dachau. Her husband wanted her home in his bed.

Gellhorn’s reporting from the front lines of every major international conflict in six decades distinguishes her as one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. Her war coverage spanned from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the Vietnam War.

Martha would go to great lengths to get a good story. During the Second World War she rode with British pilots on night raids over Germany.  She was one of the first journalists to report on Dachau once it was liberated by the Allies. She paid her own way to go to Viet Nam and cover the war.  

I followed the war wherever I could reach it. I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the woman’s angle. –  Martha Gellhorn

From Martha Gellhorn: ‘A Twentieth Century Life’ : NPR:

Caroline Moorehead, author of Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life, says Gellhorn remained undaunted for most of her 90 years. “I think she was fearless but she knew what it was like to be frightened,” a toughness she got from her upbringing, Moorehead says.

Gellhorn covered wars in a different way than other journalists. “She didn’t write about battles and she didn’t know about military tactics,” Moorehead says. “What she was really interested in was describing what war does to civilians, does to ordinary people.”

Background

Gellhorn was born in Missouri in 1908. Her independent and determined nature along with the desire to champion the cause of the oppressed was formed in her by the examples of her father and mother. George Gellhorn, a German-born Jew, was a reputable gynecologist and social reformer in St. Louis. Edna Fischel Gellhorn championed women’s suffrage, child welfare laws, and free health clinics. Both parents were reformers, advocating for the disenfranchised.

Gellhorn was an activist early on. At age 7, she participated in “The Golden Lane,” a rally for women’s suffrage at the Democratic Party’s 1916 national convention in St. Louis. (Source)

She later attended Bryn Mawr College, a women’s liberal arts school. Her first published articles appeared in The New Republic. “In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years, where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris, but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency.” (Source)

 In the fall of 1934 Martha would go on to work for FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration). There, she documented the lives of the unemployed, the hungry, and the homeless during the Great Depression, alongside photographer Dorothea Lange. Gellhorn became close to Eleanor Roosevelt during that time.

Gellhorn’s began her journalist career during the Spanish Civil War. She arrived in Madrid in 1937 to cover the conflict for Collier’s Weekly. There she met Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain as a correspondent. They married in 1940. The marriage lasted five years. Gellhorn left Hemingway. The breakup was due to Hemingway’s unhappiness about Gellhorn’s’ absence when she was on assignment and his drinking and infidelity.

From Paula McLain, author of a biographical novel about Martha Gellhorn titled Love and Ruin :

She saw herself as a champion of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and worked hard, all her life, to give voice to the voiceless. She never wanted to be famous, and was enraged to know that the larger world knew her mostly through her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, which lasted from 1940-1945. “Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life,” she noted ruefully in an interview, pointing out that she’d been her own woman and writer before meeting him, and would go on being just that. She in fact went on to publish for nearly fifty years after leaving him, writing a total of five novels, fourteen novellas, two short story collections and three books of essays.

While many consider Hemingway a better fiction writer, many consider Gellhorn a better journalist. Two of Gellhorn’s writings – an article and a letter – show how she analyzed what she witnessed in terms of what man is capable of doing to man. Her writing, biting and eye-opening, reveals her conscience.

Given the evil of ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrats and judges and the globalist tyranny that would make slaves of us all and the toxic air of nihilism, Gellhorn’s writing should serve as a warning to us all.

The Article

Martha Gellhorn was present at the Trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, as was Hannah Arendt, who wrote the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Gellhorn, in a February 1962 The Atlantic article titled Eichmann and the Private Conscience, writes “on some of the facts and some of the lessons to be learned from this Trial, which is unique in the history of the world”. The following quotes about Eichmann are from that article:

This is a sane man, and a sane man is capable of unrepentant, unlimited, planned evil. He was the genius bureaucrat, he was the powerful frozen mind which directed a gigantic organization; he is the perfect model of inhumanness; but he was not alone. Eager thousands obeyed him. Everyone could not have his special talents; many people were needed to smash a baby’s head against the pavement before the mother’s eyes, to urge a sick old man to rest and shoot him in the back of the head; there was endless work for willing hands. How many more like these exist everywhere? What produced them — all sane, all inhuman?

We consider this man, and everything he stands for, with justified fear. We belong to the same species. Is the human race able — at any time, anywhere — to spew up others like him? Why not? Adolf Eichmann is the most dire warning to us all. He is a warning to guard our souls; to refuse utterly and forever to give allegiance without question, to obey orders silently, to scream slogans. He is a warning that the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world. (Emphasis mine.)

…

In a single sentence, Eichmann divided the world into the powers of light and darkness. He chose the doctrine of darkness, as did the majority of his countrymen, as did thousands throughout Europe — men with slave minds, pig-greedy for power: the Vichy police, the Iron Guard, big and little Quislings everywhere. He stated their creed in one line: “The question of conscience is a matter for the head of the state, the sovereign.”

Gellhorn’s Letter Writing

“She wrote several a day, often describing the same episodes to different people, sending letters by boat, sometimes adding to them over days until they stretched to 50 pages. Letters were, as her friend Bill Buford put it in his introduction to Gellhorn’s book, Travels With Myself and Another, her main form of social life. . ..  Gellhorn’s friend George Brennan once suggested to her that letters were her ‘real genre, and it is where you yourself come through most genuinely and convincingly’.” (Source) (We have lost touch with hand-written humanness – our own and others – with email and texting.)

While Gellhorn’s wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century, her personal letters are their equal: as vivid and fascinating as anything she ever published.

Gellhorn’s correspondence from 1930 to 1996–chronicling friendships with figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H. G. Wells, as well as her tempestuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway–paint a vivid picture of the twentieth century as she lived it. (Source)

Gellhorn’s connection to Leonard Bernstein:

“While traveling in Israel in 1949, Gellhorn met Leonard Bernstein by chance in a “scruffy bar” in Tel Aviv. A few months later, Bernstein turned up unannounced (with a grand piano in tow, no less!), in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she was living and proposed he move in with her for a while. She convinced him to rent a house up the road instead. One night, he persuaded her to try marijuana with him for the first time, having heard from local musicians that it “helped the music flow.” They were both sick all night, with “appalling nightmares.” While never romantic, the two remained close friends and confidants for decades.” (Source)

Gellhorn’s wrote to Bernstein after viewing West Side Story. She was affected by Cool, the most disturbing number (relentless unresolved tritones) of the musical.

“But what stays in my mind, as the very picture of terror, is the scene in the drug store, when the Jets sing a song called “Keep Cool, Man.” I think I have never heard or seen anything more frightening. (It goes without saying that I think the music so brilliant I have no words to use for it.) I found that a sort of indicator of madness: the mad obsession with nothing, the nerves insanely and constantly stretched–with no way to rest, no place to go; the emptiness of the undirected minds, whose only occupation could be violence and a terrible macabre play-acting. If a man can be nothing, he can pretend to be a hoodlum and feel like a somebody. I couldn’t breathe, watching and hearing that; it looks to me like doom, as much as these repeated H-bomb tests, with the atmosphere of the world steadily more and more irrevocably poisoned. I think that drug store and the H-bomb tests are of the same family.

“What now baffles me is that all the reviews, and everyone who has seen the show, has not talked of this and this only: the mirror held up to nature, and what nature. I do not feel anything to be exaggerated or falsified; we accept that art renders beautiful, and refines the shapeless raw material of life. The music and the dancing, the plan, the allegory of the story do that; but nature is there, in strength; and surely this musical tragedy is a warning. . ..” (Emphasis mine.)

The complete letter is here: Notes and Letters — West Side Story

Though I’ve not read of any religious practice in Gellhorn’s life and though her hard-drinking way of life is not something I would recommend – New York Times writer Rick Lyman described Gellhorn as “a cocky, raspy-voiced, chain-smoking maverick”; Gellhorn was a self-made woman who took cyanide to end her life at 90 – still, there is much to commend about Martha Gellhorn: her devotion to humanity and the eyewitness conscience-driven writing of her dauntless war zone life.

Gellhorn, who had a distrust of politicians, documented what the politicians’ war did to civilians. “I followed the war wherever I could reach it,” said Gellhorn. Hers was the Samaritan’s attitude of not wanting to look away. “I wrote very fast, as I had to,” she says, “afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place.” 

Paula McLain, Gellhorn’s biographer, writes that Gellhorn saw herself as a champion of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and worked hard, all her life, to give voice to the voiceless

Gellhorn said of herself “The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

Gellhorn’s reporting was widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women.

There is a hard, shining, almost cruel honesty to Gellhorn’s work that brings back shellshocked Barcelona, Helsinki, Canton and Bastogne – the prelude and crashing symphony of World War II – with almost unbearable vividness.

–The Guardian, reviewing Gellhorn’s book The Face of War

In a journalism career that spanned 60 years, Gellhorn’s particular brand of nerve was rare as radium. Fear seemed to activate rather than suppress her, and it taught her courage in the face of injustice instead of despair. Sharpened by rage and wielded in the service of others, her voice became a sword. I’m not sure I have encountered its equal, even today. We could use an army of such voices, in fact. And precisely now. – Paula McLain (Emphasis mine.)

~~~~~

Martha Gellhorn Quotes:

“Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience – war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.”

“I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else’s life.” (Regarding her marriage to Hemingway.)

“Stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.”

“From the earliest wars of men to our last heart-breaking worldwide effort, all we could do was kill ourselves. Now we are able to kill the future.”

“In more than half the nations of our world, torture certifies that the form of government is tyranny. Only tyranny, no matter how camouflaged, needs and employs torturers. Torture has no ideology.”

“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

“War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.”

“On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.”

“Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved…stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men.”

“Democracy is dying. It’s a disease called cowardice.” (From a 1938 letter.)

~~~~~

Janet Somerville, author of Yours, for Probably Always, talks about novelist, war correspondent, activist, and iconoclast Martha Gellhorn.

Janet Somerville on Martha Gellhorn | The Hemingway Society

Janet Somerville on Martha Gellhorn | The Hemingway Society

~~~~~

A different war, a different correspondent:

Exposing abuse and corruption can be a thankless job. Powerful figures doing wrong often deny and attack those exposing them. And their supporters often join suit—attacking the messenger, rather than holding their leader accountable. . . why continue reporting, advocating, and shining a light when doing so comes at such a high personal cost?

Why Not Quit – Julie Roys

Why Not Quit? | The Roys Report (julieroys.com)

~~~~~

More on Martha:

1981, Martha Gellhorn Unedited Interview, War correspondent, Ernest Hemingway, Spanish Civil War (youtube.com)

Martha Gellhorn. ‘Face to Face’ interview with Jeremy Isaacs. 1995. – YouTube

The Face Of War: Gellhorn, Martha: 9780871132116: Books – Amazon.ca

Married to Her Writing | The National Endowment for the Humanities (neh.gov)

Get to Know Martha Gellhorn – Paula McLain

Gellhorn at war | Books | The Guardian

Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway) | EH@JFK | JFK Library

Martha Gellhorn: Writer, Warrior, Witness (historynet.com)

Martha Gellhorn: The World’s Greatest War Correspondent (youtube.com)

Martha Gellhorn’s Career as a War Correspondent and Marriage to Ernest Hemingway (townandcountrymag.com)

Martha Gellhorn, War Correspondent, Novelist, & Memoirist (literaryladiesguide.com)

Great Lives – Martha Gellhorn – BBC Sounds

Martha Gellhorn: Eyewitness to War | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (nationalww2museum.org)

A Line from Linda: Martha Gellhorn’s “Eichmann and the Private Conscience”

Leonard Bernstein Asked About Hemingway, So Martha Gellhorn Set the Record Straight (thedailybeast.com)

Filed under journalism, war, Women of Note Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Nothing More Than Alright

February 11, 2024 Leave a comment

A short story . . .

My father, on the nights when my mother goes to bridge club, makes creamed chipped beef with peas on toast for supper. He told me one time that in the military it’s called “shit on a shingle” or SOS for short. He makes me eat it even though I can’t stomach peas or the dried beef or the gravy and I’m not a soldier. Tonight again, my mother is at bridge club and I’m sitting here with SOS.

After looking at my plate for a long time, I move the peas out of the gravy, off the toast and onto the plate with my knife. I’m hoping I won’t have to eat them. The kitchen phone rings and I jump to answer it. My best friend Janey wants to know if I want to go with her and her boyfriend Nick to watch West Side Story at the Sky-Hi Drive-In. I say I sure do and hang up. My father doesn’t want me on the phone during supper.

The peas are cold and clammy now and I say I they’re cold and clammy and I can’t eat them. My father tilts his head down and tells me to eat them. I want to say no but I need his okay to go to the movie. So, I stab some peas with my fork and swirl them in the flour gravy and then I eat the green-grey mush with a bite of toast. I gag. I drink some milk and wash it down. My father lifts his head and says “alright”. I clear the dishes and wash them. I’ve done what he wanted, so now I can ask him about Friday night. But I wait until he’s sitting in front of the TV.

An hour later, my father is in the basement watching TV. I sit with him and ask about his movie. He says troops have been ordered to risk their lives and retake a hill that’s not important in the battle. I ask him why. He says it shows the enemy their resolve to continue to fight if an agreement is not reached in negotiations.

A Marlboro commercial comes on and I ask him about Friday night. He wants to know about the movie. I tell him it’s a musical about people fighting, dancing and falling in love and he says “Okay. Ask your mother when she come home from playing bridge.”

My mother finally gets home and I tell her about Friday night. She says she knows the movie. “Saw it with a friend when it came out in ’61,” she says. She knows Janey and Nick and she says it’s okay with her that I go.

Saturday night Nick’s car pulls into the driveway. He honks the horn and I yell “They’re here”. My father yells from the basement “Have a good time honey. Call if there is a problem.” Mom, on the phone with someone, yells for me to come straight home after the movie. I yell back “I will.”

I get in the back seat of Nick’s Chevy and we drive off – but not in the direction of the Sky-Hi. I ask where we’re going. Janey turns to me and says that Nick asked his friend Tom to come along. He had nothing to do, Nick says. I immediately panic. I wonder if I look alright.

I have a face full of pimples and a bony nose that’s too big for my face. I wonder if I used enough concealer. The green top I’m wearing is wrinkled. It was at the bottom of my closet. And the jeans I’m wearing are worn thin. I was expecting to sit in the dark and watch a movie with Nick and Janey.

We pull up to a ranch house on the other side of town. Nick honks the horn. A skinny blonde-haired guy walks out the front door and down the front walk. “Here’s Tom,” Janey says.

Tom gets in the back seat. Janey introduces Tom. I don’t know him from school. I give him a quick smile and then give Janey a stare. She just winks back at me. She knows I don’t have a boyfriend.

Tom is neatly dressed. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, khaki pants and loafers. His boxy glasses make him look like a bookworm. In junior high school he’d be called “a climber” and Nick “a greaser.”

The Twin Theater Sky-Hi Drive In is on the west end of our town. On the way we listen to the AM radio. A Chicago station plays Born to Be Wild and I Will Always Think About You. Tom and I sit quietly in the back. I suck in my lips and look out my window. The cloudy sky looks like flour gravy.

We arrive at Sky-Hi and pay for our tickets. Nick drives over to a center spot in the East Theater. Nick and Tom say they’re going to the concession stand. They ask what we want. Janey and I ask for Cokes and popcorn. I hand Nick some money and they head off. The guys return after twenty minutes just as the coming attractions start. I roll down my window and Tom hands me the Coke and popcorn. I say thank you. He gets into the back seat on the other side of the car.

Janey’s been sitting next to Nick the whole time he’s been driving. Now Nick puts his arm around Janey’s shoulder and they snuggle together. Janey asks “are you guys okay back there?” I say I have to move over to see the screen. I look at Tom and he gives me a nod that says it’s okay. I scooch over to the middle of the back seat and put my legs to the left side of the floor hump. “That’s better,” I say.

Finally, the movie begins. There’s an overture and then the Jets sing about being a Jet and beating up other gangs. The Jets and the Sharks want to fight each other for control of the streets. But first they go to a dance. It’s a musical, so I guess it doesn’t have to make sense.

At the dance, Tony of the Jets meets Maria, Bernardo’s sister. Bernardo is the head of the Puerto Rican Shark gang. Tony and Maria fall in love at first sight. Nobody is happy about that except Tony and Maria. Tony’s half in half out about the gang stuff but he’s all in on Maria. He wants to run away with her.

Tony and Maria start singing Tonight and I stop eating popcorn. I put my hand down on the car seat so I can lean forward and hear what’s coming from the speaker. My little finger touches Tom’s little finger. He takes my hand into his. We stay this way, looking at the movie and holding hands, until the movie ends and headlights turn on.

It’s past midnight when we leave Sky-HI. Nick says he’ll drive me home first. I go back and sit behind Nick. Tom looks out his window. Everyone is quiet. Nick turns on the radio. Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing comes on. I suck in my lips and look out my window. On the way home I see a car with one headlight and say “perdiddle.”  Janey and Nick kiss.

At home I get out of the car and say thanks to Janey and Nick and goodnight to Tom. Tom says good night looking at Nick and Janey.

I go inside and hear the TV on in the basement. I walk down the hallway to my bedroom. My mother is sitting in her bed reading her magazines. She sees me and asks “Susan, how was it?” I poke my head into the room and tell her it was alright.

“Just alright? Nothing more?” she asks.

“Nothing more than alright” I say.

“Okay,” she says. “Now go to bed. It’s late. Tomorrow’s another day.”

As I walk away she reminds me that she has bridge club again tomorrow night. I say okay.

In my room I take the ticket stub out of my jeans pocket. I find a pen and write on the back of the stub West Side Story Tom. I pull my keepsake box out from under the bed and put the ticket stub inside along with the Valentine cards from third grade and my second-place medals from clarinet solo contests and some poems I wrote. I close the box and put it back.

I go to bed thinking about the movie and Tom and peas on my plate.

©Jennifer Ann Johnson, Kingdom Venturers, 2024, All Rights Reserved

Filed under Short Story, short story, Valentines Day, Writing Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Somewhere in the Lost World of Love

February 4, 2024 Leave a comment

Love. Is it die-cut like the Valentine cards of grade school? Is it cliché like pop music? Is it a potion we constantly thirst for? Is it intoxication and under its influence we are not in our right minds? Is love passion? Sentimental? Carnal? Absolute? “What do any of us really know about love?” 

The last question is raised during a conversation between two couples. Their dialog and the juxtaposition of the couple’s ideas about love are found in Raymond Carver’s 1981 short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver has us listen in.

We learn from narrator Nick that he and his wife Laura are spending the afternoon at Mel and Terri’s home. Both couples live in Albuquerque, but as Nick says and the ‘love’ dialog relates, they “were all from somewhere else”.

Nick tells us that Mel McGinnis is a forty-five-year-old cardiologist who, before medical school, spent five years in seminary. Terri is his second wife. We later learn that Mel was married before to Majorie and has two children. His movements are usually precise when he hasn’t been drinking. 

Terri, we learn, was previously in an abusive relationship with a guy named Ed. He would beat her and drag her around the room by her ankles, all the while professing his love for her.

Mel and Terri have been married for four years.

Nick tells us about Laura and their relationship: she’s a legal secretary who’s thirty-five and three years younger than he is. He says they’re in love, they like each other and enjoy each other’s company. “She’s easy to be with.” They’ve been married for eighteen months. 

Beside the four adults, sunlight and gin figure in the story.

As the story begins, the four are sitting around a kitchen table. Sunlight fills the room. Gin and tonic water are being passed around. The subject of love comes up.

(I get the sense that the older couple have argued a lot about what love is and now want to air it all again in front of the younger couple. It seems they have things they want to get off their chest. Is that why the cheap gin is being passed around? Are Nick and Laura in place to be the arbiters of who’s right and who’s wrong?)

The heart doctor Mel, based on “the most important years of his life” in seminary, thinks that “real love was nothing less than spiritual love”.  (This signals that love’s definition may not be solid.)

Terri believes that Ed, the man who tried to kill her, loved her. She asks “What do you do with love like that? Mel responds that Ed’s treatment could not be called love.

Terri then makes excuses for Ed’s behavior – “People are different”. She defends him – “he may have acted crazy. Okay. But he loved me.”

We begin to notice a growing tension between Mel and Terri. (There has been tension in their marriage about Ed and Marjorie before this.)

Mel relates that Ed threatened to kill him. Mel reaches for more gin and becomes antagonistic himself. He calls Terri a romantic for wanting brutal reminders of Ed’s love. Then he smiles at her hoping she won’t get mad. Terri responds to Mel, not with a rejection of his or of Ed’s behavior, but with what might have been her leave-the-door-open enabling response to Ed after one of his physical attacks: “Now he wants to make up.” Her past relationship reveals the continuous nature of Terri’s emotional deficit.

(Does Mel know how to land verbal blows on Terri like Ed did physically?)

Mel tries to soften the blow by calling Terri “honey” and by saying again that what Ed did wasn’t love. He then asks Nick and Laura what they think.

Nick says he doesn’t know the man or the situation to make a decision. Laura says the same and adds “who can judge anyone else’s situation?” Nick touches her hand and she smiles.

Nick picks up her “warm” hand, looks at the polished and manicured nails and then holds her hand. With this display of affection, Nick shows his love and respect for Laura, the opposite of the emotional and physical abuse Terri suffered at the hands of Ed.

Mel posits that his kind of love is absolute and nonviolent. (Then again, emotional abuse doesn’t kill or leave physical bruises.)

Terri and Mel describe Ed’s two attempts at suicide. Terri talks with sympathy for the guy. “Poor Ed” she says. Mel won’t have any of it: “He was dangerous.” Mel says they were constantly threatened by Ed. They lived like fugitives, he says. Mel bought a gun.

Terri stands by her illusion that Ed loved her – just not the same way that Mel loves her.

They go to relate that Ed’s first suicide attempt -drinking rat poison – was “bungled”. This puts him in the hospital. Ed recovers. The second attempt is a shot in the mouth in a hotel room. Mel and Terri fight over whether she will sit at his hospital bedside. She ends up there.

Mel reiterates that Ed was dangerous. Terri admits they were afraid of Ed. Mel wants nothing to do with Ed’s kind of love. Terri, on the other hand, reiterates that Ed loved her – in an odd way perhaps but he was willing to die for it. He does die.

Mel grabs another bottle of gin.

Laura says that she and Nick know what love is. She bumps Nick’s knee for his response. He makes a show of kissing Laura’s hand. The two bump knees under the table. Nick strokes Laura’s thigh.

Terri teases them, saying that things will be different after the honeymoon period of their relationship. Then, with a glass of gin in hand, she says “only kidding”. Mel opens a new bottle of gin and proposes a toast “to true love.”

The glow of the afternoon sun and of young love in the room makes them feel warm and playful, like kids up to something.

Matters-of-the-heart Mel wants to tell them “what real love is”. He goes on about what happens to the love between couples who break up. After all, he once loved his ex-wife, Marjorie, and Terri once loved Ed. Nick and Laura were also both married to other people before they met each other.

He pours himself more gin and wipes the “love is” slate clean with “What do any of us really know about love?” He – the gin Mel – talks about physical love, attraction, carnal love, sentimental love, and memory of past love. Terri wonders if Mel is drunk. Mel says he’s just talking. Laura tries to cheer Mel by saying she and Nick love him. Mel responds saying he loves them too. He picks up his glass of gin.

Mel now gets around to his example of love, an example that he says should shame anyone who thinks they know what they are talking about when they talk about love. Terri asks him to not talk drunk. (Is Mel, focused only on himself and his gin, becoming a slurring, stammering and cursing drunk?) He tells her to shut up.

Mel begins his story of an old couple in a major car wreck brought on by a kid. Terri looks over at Nick and Laura for their reaction. Nick thinks Terri looks anxious. Mel hands the bottle of gin around the table.

Mel was on call that night. He details the extensive wounds. The couple is barely alive. After saying that seat belts saved the lives of the couple, he then makes a joke of it. Terri responds affirmatively to Mel and they kiss.

Mel goes on about the old couple. Despite their serious injuries, he says, they had “incredible reserves” – they had a 50/50 chance of making it.

Mel wants everyone to drink up the cheap gin and then go to dinner. He talks about a place he knows. Terri says they haven’t eaten there yet. The heart doctor’s coherence dissipates with each drink.

He says he likes food and that he’d be a chef if he had to do things all over again. Then he says he wants to come back in another life as a medieval knight. Knights, he says, were safe in armor and they had their ladies. As he talks, Mel uses the word “vessels”. Terri corrects him with “vassals”. Mel dismisses her correction with some profanity and false modesty.

Nick counters the heart doctors fantasy by saying that knights could suffer a heart attack in the hot armor and they could fall of a horse and not get back up because it is heavy.  

Mel responds to Nick and Terri, acknowledging it would be terrible to be a knight, that some “vassal” would spear him in the name of love. More profanity. More gin.

Laura wants Mel to return to old couple story. The sunlight in the room is thinning. (And so is “love’s” illumination.)

Terri gets on Mel’s nerves with something she said jokingly. Mel hits on Laura saying he could easily fall in love with her if Terri and Nick weren’t in the picture. He’d carry her off knight-like. (Terri and Nick, of course, are sitting right there.)

Mel, with more vulgarity, finally returns to his anecdote. The old couple are covered head to toe in casts and bandages with little eye, nose and mouth holes. The husband is depressed, but not about his extensive injuries. He’s depressed because he cannot see his wife through his little eye holes. Mel is clearly blown away by this kind of love. He asks the other three if they see what he’s talking about. They just stare at him.

Sunlight is leaving the room. Nick acknowledges that they were all “a little drunk”.

Mel wants everyone to finish off the gin and then go eat. Terri says he’s depressed, needs a pill. Mel wants to call his kids, who live with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend.  Teri cautions Mel about taking to Marjorie – it’ll make him more depressed.

Terris says that Marjorie, because she isn’t remarried, is bankrupting them. Mel, who says he once loved Marjorie, fantasizes about Majorie dying after being stung by a swarm of bees, as she’s allergic to bees. Mel then shows with his hands on Terri’s neck how it would happen to “vicious” Marjorie.

Mel decides against phoning his children and mentions about going out to eat again. Nick is OK with eating or drinking more. Laura is hungry. Terri mentions putting out cheese and crackers put she never gets up to do this. Mel spills his glass of gin on the table – “Gin’s gone”. Terri wonders what’s next.

As the story ends, daylight (illumination) is gone from the kitchen. The four are ‘in the dark’ about what love really is. The conversation is also gone after Mel’s futile attempts to talk about love in any satisfying way and the inability of two characters to move on from the past and with two characters wondering what’s next.

The only sound Nick hears is the sound of human hearts beating (somewhere in the Lost World of Love).

~~~~

This story, though not of “Christian” genre, certainly would resonate with many readers. Do you relate to anyone in the story?

Terri understood Ed’s abusive and suicidal behavior as him being passionate about love. Mel, the heart doctor and would-be knight, showed himself idealistic and ignorant about the realities of the ‘heart’ and not loving towards Terri. Nick and Laura revealed the affection and passion of the heady first days of romance love. The old couple possessed an enduring love for each other after many years of marriage.

Why would I, as a Christian, gravitate to a ‘worldly’ author like Raymond Carver, especially when his stories are filled with alcohol? One reason is that I recognize myself in many of his stories. I see elements of myself at various stages of my life in each of the characters above. I could pretend to see myself otherwise, as I think some Christians do.

Another reason is that Carver writes about working class people. He doesn’t write down to people. His writes stories of domestic American life with its passions, fears, foibles, and fantasies. He writes with realism about human nature, revealing the old self that I must recognize in myself to put away.

I find his writing sobering, as in his story Where I’m Calling From.

~~~~~

RARE: Raymond Carver Reads “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (youtube.com)

what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love-carver-by-raymond-carver-1Download

~~~~~

Men need sex. And it’s their wives’ job to give it to them—unconditionally, whenever they want it, or these husbands will come under Satanic attack.

Stunningly, that’s the message contained in many Christian marriage books. Yet, research shows that instead of increasing intimacy in marriages, messages like these are promoting abuse.

In this edition of The Roys Report, featuring a talk from our recent Restore Conference, author Sheila Wray Gregoire provides eye-opening insights based on her and her team’s extensive research on evangelicalism and sex.

How Christian Teachings on Sex Enable Abuse | The Roys Report (julieroys.com)

How Christian Teachings on Sex Enable Abuse | The Roys Report

Filed under Literature, Raymond Carver, Valentines Day Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Nobody Does It Better

October 27, 2017 Leave a comment

 

It was almost 5 AM when Carl finished his workout. Carl headed for FoodNation to buy groceries for the day. Once inside, there was no mistaking the smell of freshly baked carbs. Carl smiled. He remembered an old cartoon where an enticing aroma was shown to lift a character off of his feet, draw him along and then place him in front of its enticing source. Carl decided not to be a cartoon character today.

Carl walked past his wafting imagination. He walked past the aisle of styrene-encased carbs and the men in knee pads reshuffling and restocking dated poly-packaged carbs. He walked past the sugar-covered carbs.

Carl walked past the frozen carbs, the cryopreserved carbs.

Carl walked past the aisle of processed ethnic food stuffs. Carl walked past the aisle of colorful billboard-boxed carbs. Each box proclaiming vast health benefits with every “great” bite. Carl walked past the cardboard-boxed dried carbs. Carl walked past the aisle of unembarrassed in-the-bag sugar. Carl walked past the aisles of incarcerated-canned vegetables and the hitting-the-bottle jars of preserved condiments.

And Carl walked past the fashionable colors of carbonation in the liquid sugar aisle.

Carl reached the water aisle and pulled a bottle of drinking water off the shelf. He smiled. Like James Bond he would live to die another day.

 

Carl had come to his health care senses a while back. At that time, he didn’t feel good or look the part of 00Carl. So, there was no doubt – he had to make some changes. And beside his own topology concerns there was one, no, there were many other prompters that changed his health habits.

Carl couldn’t help notice that many men and women were no longer walking. Instead, they were waddling. To go forward they would rock back and forth, shifting weight from one bad knee to the other in a slow, plodding fashion, as if pulling a sled full of lumber. Some of the living dead weight moved though FoodNation driving their immense form around in the motorized shopping carts with the appearance of a parody parade float.

When Carl reached the checkout counter that day he waited while up ahead liters of soft drinks, boxes and boxes of cereal, bags of treats and goodies and packaged preservatives force-fed the conveyor belts.

Once the motorized cart had been emptied of its contents, Carl placed the divider down on the conveyor. Behind the divider he placed his bottled water, a bag of walnuts, a carton of eggs, a bag of mixed greens and a salmon fillet for dinner. Carl had decided to invest in his future. He needed his legs to make a go of it.

 

The end. (But not for Carl.)

 

 

 

© Jennifer A. Johnson, 2017, All Rights Reserved

~~~

When will a grocery store be designed for health instead of consumerism? Along the same line, have you noticed the horrible and often offensive background music?

Mission Impossible Theme>>>

Filed under Health, Health Care, Short Story Tagged with , , ,

The Housekeepers

August 13, 2016 Leave a comment

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The five-day conference, “Alethea Lit Conference – Form without Substance? brought Irene to town. She was to lead the symposium O Still Voice of Calm on day three.

On Sunday evening Irene checked into room 351 and got settled. Pulling back the drapes she could see a terrace and beyond that the wooded campus of Indiana U. The late evening August sun etched the campuses’ limestone buildings with long sepia shadows; the heat of the day was receding.

After unpacking Irene went down for dinner. She returned an hour later anxious to kick off her shoes and put her feet up. Before retiring Irene was in the habit of reading. She chose Paul’s letter to the Romans for this week. But soon the day’s travel caught up to Irene and she fell asleep in the armchair. She awoke later with a terrible kink in her neck. She moved to the bed for the rest of the night.

 

Irene woke at the sound of her alarm clock, at 5:30. She showered, dried her hair and put on a jersey tank, an A-line skirt and a pair of flats. She was to meet her publisher Mark for breakfast. She gathered her loose belongings into her suitcase, left her open Bible on the desk and headed downstairs.

Antonia knocked. When she heard no answer she entered 351 and began her routine. Hotel housekeeping began at 7:30 during the week with the previous day’s laundry to clean. When finished, Antonia would then clean rooms until 2:00.

As was her habit Antonia turned on the TV when she cleaned a room.  She switched the station to her favorite talk show.  “Today, two couples each recount the loss of their child,” announced the host. Antonia’s turned up the volume and headed into the bathroom to grab the wet towels.

While dusting, Antonia saw the open Bible and moved it to the bed to wipe the desk top. She then changed the bed sheets after replacing the Bible.

“My son was eighteen when his car flipped over and he was killed,” the mother of one of the couples related.  The police found nothing to cause the accident. There was no rain, no alcohol, no other car – nothing! It just happened!”

Antonia watched the husband put his arm around his wife as she began to wipe her eyes. Tears welled in Antonia’s eyes.

Antonia adjusted the sheers and then went in to finish the bathroom. Seeing the makeup kit on the sink reminded her of what had happened the other day.

After work last Tuesday Antonia headed to her car. She grabbed her car keys from her purse loaded her soiled uniforms into the back seat and then drove off, leaving her bag sitting on the pavement. When she got home she couldn’t find her glasses and suddenly realized what she had done. She raced back to the parking spot and found that the bag was gone. Now she was frantic. The bag contained her wallet. The wallet held her ID, 40 dollars in cash, her credit cards and her hotel pass card.

Not finding the bag in the parking lot, Antonia went to the front desk to see if her bag had been turned in. It had. With that she breathed a huge sigh of relief, but then made sure everything was still there. It was. Antonia shuddered at the memory. Finished, she grabbed her cart, turned off the room lights and headed to room 353.

 

Tuesday morning Irene woke with her alarm at 5:30. She washed her face and then slipped on a pale blue dress and a pair of flats. After making a cup of coffee she sat with her Bible. This morning she would meet author Janice Fillmore for breakfast. Seeing it was 6:30 Irene placed her open Bible on the desk, gathered her loose belongings into her suitcase and headed down to breakfast.

Antonia knocked. When she heard no answer she entered 351 and began her routine. She turned on the TV and found she didn’t have to change the channel. After turning up the volume she proceeded to vacuum the floor.

“Today we have Chance Parlance, Senior Pastor of Broadway Church here to talk to us about his new book, “The Power of You.  Before we talk about your book, our viewers would like to know…You are asking each of your 200,000 followers to donate $300.00 so that you can purchase a luxury jet?”

“Yes. We want to safely and swiftly share the Good news of the Gospel worldwide…I declared it and God will do it!”

Antonia moved the Bible from the desk to the bed and began to dust.  As she gathered the garbage she noticed a brochure in the desk trash bin. She lifted it out and read the title out loud. “Alethea Lit Conference – Form without Substance?  Monday – Birthing The New Creation in Christian Lit.”

Looking at the time, Antonia put the leaflet into her apron and finished her cleaning. She had been given several more rooms to clean today. She turned out the lights and headed to the next room.

 

Wednesday morning Irene awoke before her alarm.  She showered, dried her hair and carefully applied her makeup. This morning she would lead a symposium before three hundred people. She put on a gray suit while coffee streamed into a cup.

Irene sat down with the coffee, her Bible and her notes. She had chosen her topic, O Still Voice of Calm, after spending several years practicing listening prayer. It had become her habit to sit in silence and to let God speak to her. She expected God to speak to her; God was constantly streaming His words to her. And Irene had come to realize that her creativity, her art, was born out of such times. Today she would introduce authors and publishers to listening prayer. At 6:30 she gathered her things and headed down to breakfast.

Antonia knocked. When she heard no answer she entered 351 and began her routine. She turned on the TV and found she didn’t have to change the channel. The volume was the same so she turned it down.  But she didn’t feel much like listening today. Monday’s program had left her unsettled, like she had lost something she couldn’t afford to lose. She even discussed the show with her best friend Lily, a biology major at IU, the day before.

Lily’s dogmatic reply came out of nowhere: “Now, how could any god permit the death of any child? You saw the pain those families had to deal with! And there is so much injustice in the world. My god, it’s like the gods are off somewhere uninvolved and angry and just waiting to jump all over us with patriarchal oppression. The god nonsense is a placebo for the weak.  These things happen, you know.  Just live, laugh and party on if you can before you leave.  Make the most of your time. And who knows, maybe when you die you will be reincarnated as a god and you can do some good in the world.  And don’t forget about me, your best friend.”

That conversation had left Antonia more unsettled.

Antonia moved the open Bible from the desk to the bed and began to dust.  As she gathered the garbage from the bins she noticed another brochure in the desk trash bin. She read the title out loud. “Alethea Lit Conference – Form without Substance? Tuesday– Uncommon Grace: The Life of Flannery O’Connor, a documentary film and discussion

Looking at the time, Antonia put the leaflet into her apron and finished her cleaning. She then turned out the lights and headed to the next room. Her work for this week ended at 2:00.  She would start work again on Sunday morning.

 

Bonita knocked. When she heard no one answer she entered 351 and called out “Housekeeping!” No answer. She began her routine. Bonita would clean the hotel rooms until 2:00. Then, her kids would need to be picked up from her mother’s house. Little Alphonso and his older sister Lupe would be anxiously awaiting mom.

Bonita had worked for six years as a hotel housekeeper. The housekeeping hours allowed her to work while her kids were in school and then be home for them in the afternoon. During the spring and summer months Bonita’s husband, Alonzo, a landscaper, was gone from six in the morning until eight at night. During those times Bonita would bring her two kids to her mother’s house.

While dusting, Bonita saw the open Bible. She carefully lifted the Bible and read out loud, “In the same way, too, the spirit comes alongside and helps us in our weakness. We don’t know what to pray for as we ought to; but that same spirit pleads on our behalf, with groaning too deep for words.”

Bonita set the Bible down on the bed. She wiped the desk top. She then changed the bed sheets after replacing the Bible. She turned her attention to the bathroom.

On the bathroom ledge was a makeup kit. Bonita cringed. It was twelve years ago, in Sonora Mexico, that Bonita lost her first child Esperanza. The child died from pneumonia six months after her baptism.  For the funeral the mortuary had applied rouge to the Esperanza’ cheeks. Bonita’s eyes welled with tears as she cleaned the sink.

After Esperanza’s death, Bonita grieved for many months. After coming to live in Indiana she decided to remember Esperanza in a painting. Bonita had become a watercolorist after leaving Mexico.  She had seen many art fairs in her new home town. It was the water color portraits that had so moved her.

Bonita painted Esperanza in a white Easter dress, purchased in Mexico. Bonita applied a faint Cadmium red to Esperanza’s cheeks.

Bonita dried her eyes with a towel, gathered the towels, tossed them into her cart and sighed.

Being at home with two kids every day, Bonita appreciated the room’s silence. It felt like she was in the presence of something much more than herself.

Bonita turned out the lights and headed to the next room.

 

Friday morning Irene awoke before her alarm.  She showered, dried her hair and carefully applied her makeup. She would participate in a final symposium this morning and then head out. While coffee streamed into a cup Irene put on a jersey tank, an A-line skirt and a pair of flats. She gathered her belongings into her suitcase. When she reached for her Bible she noticed what looked to be a watermark on one of the pages. She closed the Bible, placed it into her suitcase, took one last look around, shut off the lights and went down to breakfast.

 

 

 

 

 

© Sally Paradise, 2016, All Rights Reserved

Filed under Christianity, short story Tagged with , ,

The Tradeoff

July 28, 2016 Leave a comment

 

Ezra grabbed his pipe and headed out the door. He walked behind the garage and out of the wind.  Holding the bowl of the briar pipe, he filled it with Cavendish from a pouch. The flame of his lighter bent into the bowl as he inhaled in short gasps. The glowing tobacco soon released a familiar otherworld aroma that pleased Ezra at times like this.

Only moments before Delores had been yelling, nose to nose, at Ezra, her white spittle flecking his face.  “You’re a mealy-mouth pea brain,” she told him.

Now no matter how he figured, Ezra was never sure about what it was that added up to make Delores so furious almost every night. She did find him once looking at a woman posed in a two-piece bathing suit on the internet.  And that night she accused him of adultery. And after that night Ezra wouldn’t be allowed to ever to forget the error of his way. Delores’ slurred ‘reminders’ of that day were so often and so vivid that Ezra became a serial “adulterer” by proxy.

But Ezra was sure that the Margaritas and wine Delores had been drinking before he came home from work had taken possession of her. There would be no reasoning with Delores that night. Time and a safe distance would be required to maintain Ezra’s sanity, but face to face rebukes and then a full-throated rejection would have to come first.

Burning with alcohol fueled anger Delores would declare, on more than one occasion, “I am going to my mother’s house for the night!”

And so off she went. And each time she did Ezra wanted to call the police and tell them that Delores had been drinking and shouldn’t be driving. But he did not call. What if she accused Ezra of abuse or something else just as crazy as what he was hearing night after night? Her amplified “righteous” indignation seemed to know no bounds. And though he hated himself for not calling the police he also wanted to be rid of the madness for a few hours. In the still house Ezra thought of his kids, asleep in the car, and cried.

Though Ezra couldn’t define what ignited Delores’ anger for days on end, he did know what irked him. When asked by a marriage counselor what each of them wanted from the other, Delores said “words of affirmation.” Ezra took this to mean “show Delores that he loved her.”  And though he awoke early and had taken her coffee and chocolates to her bed in the morning before going to work and had often given her flowers, he wasn’t verbal to the extent Delores was. He had to work out the words of love.

In the same counseling session, Ezra had asked Delores to have coffee with him in the morning before he left for work. The afternoon return home would be filled with the kids and Delores wanting attention from him. But time spent with Ezra in the morning would never happen. Delores’ late night wine drinking and movie habit had her sleeping in past the time Ezra went off to work. Ezra never did work out the words to say what bothered him, though each day came and went as before. But Ezra didn’t need words for a pipe in his hand and the smell of pipe tobacco in the air. On his fiftieth birthday he had bought a pipe.

Reflecting night after night with pipe and a briar of glowing Cavendish and at a distance from the incendiary, Ezra soon came to realize that his fallible existence was Delores’ problem.  Delores had come into the marriage hoping that Ezra would make all things new. She wanted someone to take her in, to cover her mortality with a cloak of look-the-other-way love and be the transcendent one – a kinsman redeemer. But the Fallible One turned out to be a “mealy-mouth pea brain” that could do no right. The Fallible was to be put out, the embers dumped and scattered. After a year of paralyzing quarrels and unrelenting verbal abuse, Delores told Ezra that she wanted a separation. “Get out or I will force you out!”

Upon hearing these words, Ezra grabbed his pipe and headed out the door. He walked behind the garage and out of the wind. Holding the bowl of the briar pipe, he filled it with Cavendish from a pouch. The flame of his lighter bent into the bowl as he inhaled in short gasps. The glowing tobacco soon released a familiar otherworld aroma that pleased Ezra at times like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Sally Paradise, 2016, All Rights Reserved

Filed under Short Story, sketch Tagged with , ,

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