Tosh Berman on George Mikes' "How To Be A Brit"

 

Tosh on George Mikes' "How To Be A Brit"

On The Island of Lost Souls by Tosh Berman

 

"On The Island of Lost Souls" by Tosh Berman

Read it Here

January 29, 2021, by Tosh Berman

 

January 29, 2021

Usually, but frankly, not always, I hear a voice as I'm about to drift off into sleep. Mostly in the morning hours, as I struggle to get back to sleep, and I'm about to go under, I hear "Tosh!" In my memory, it's either my wife or mom calling out to me. When it is not a voice calling me, I hear a loud bang. Both times startles me back to the awakened world, and it takes me a few seconds to realize that the voice or the banging in my head is part of a dream. Although I recognize my wife's voice, it has an echo effect, doesn't sound l like real life. It's almost like it's coming from another world. The truth is, my wife has always been asleep by my side. 

French psychiatrist Jules-Gabriel-Francois Ballarger was the first to write about this condition in 1840. He studied the hypnagogic state, which is the stage between wakefulness and sleep. I have experienced sleep paralysis, which is when you are awakened but can't move or speak. My memory of that state is like going through levels of an awakened life, but not instantly. Sometimes I have a lucid dream, a dream where you realize you are aware of your dreams. As a teenager, I had the sensation of being dragged out of bed by some invisible force. I remember sleeping with my girlfriend at the time, and I would hold onto her so I won't be easily pulled away. Or I had a hallucination of a shadowy figure in the darkroom, and soon as I gather my senses, it will disappear. 

One thing consistent in my life is feeling like I lead two separate lives—one in the awakened world and the other in the world of sleep. My dreams are so intense and textural that I recall newspaper headlines, original melodies of songs, detail on clothing, as well as sharp observations of buildings and rooms. I often dream of traveling, and it is always the same cities. London, Tokyo, Paris, and Manhattan. I dream of the town I live in, Los Angeles, but it often turns into Tokyo. Also, I tend to be naked in a crowd of young people. Usually, I'm trying to sleep at a very active party or in bed with several people. It sounds sexual, but it is often me trying to sleep among the action. 

I'm often tired during the day, and I need to nap around 2 in the afternoon. When I sleep in the afternoon, it's good and deep sleep. Rarely do I dream, or I'm not aware of having dreams in the daylight. The night, of course, is a different matter. As I turn the lights off and try to fall asleep, I often see spots behind my closed eyes. It's like my eyelids are a movie screen, and they are showing some abstract films. The scientific term is phosphenes: sparkles, lines, or geometrical patterns that show up when you're awake but eyes closed. 

It's the auditory effects that I find most disturbing. Besides hearing my name being called out, I hear doorbells (my actual doorbell ring), the telephone ringing outside the bedroom, and so forth. I dream, therefore I exist. 

January 26, 2021, by Tosh Berman

My favorite writers tend to encounter with the culture around them. Robert Benchley, who I have mentioned before in other essays, wrote a regular column about the absurdness of everyday life. He made the usual into something exotic, which stays in my mind as I do my writings. Isolation is useful for some writers, but some can do their work in the heat of the upheaval or in times of great distress. I tend to need both the vacancy of an empty and quiet room, as well as the roar of the public world. 

I have the romantic notion of a writer working from his bed in the middle-of-the-night and relying on nothing except memories and tea. Marcel Proust, of course, but also I have seen a series of photos of Yukio Mishima. Their writing hours were from Midnight to dawn. Vampires at work, but not at play, at least not beyond their workspace. 

I don't have the energy to write at night because I'm either drinking, eating, watching a film, or thinking about what nightmares lay ahead of me. I tend to do my work before even my first cup of coffee. I first look at the news, and then I study the calendar's current day to see if there is anything important that happens historically or someone born on this particular date. I meditate on the words and images in front of me until I write my first sentence. Afterward, it is like being a passenger on a train going from point A to B. I don't look back and move forward. Failure and success don't mean that much to me other than the journey itself.  

Tosh's Journal: September 15

TOSH’S JOURNAL

September 15

“A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. “I have always been known to friends and foes to be the go-to-guy with respect to having a martini always near me. In all seriousness, “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.” I have trouble sleeping at night, so I find having a chilled glass of martini at the bedside helps me sleep better. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I just reached the cooler, and take another sip, and I’m off to dreamland, where I try to imagine my life as a memoir. Which also keeps me up at nights, because I’m so damn busy remembering every little incident that went through my world from age 1 to 20. Youth is significant, but the memory of childhood is much more important. Luckily there have been substantial changes in the world of writing, one that “the biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.” With the miracle machine, the laptop, I don’t have to worry about that. Now I can write till my fingers run off to the side, where the martini glass resides.

My life changed when I found out that I’m a distant relative of Gilles de Rais, perhaps the first serial killer on record. The Frenchman was alleged to killing up to 600 children from 1432 to the spring of 1433. I personally don’t believe the number is that high, more likely 200. Nevertheless, being related to such a brute (although a refined one, according to historians) hasn’t helped me much. The dark cloud that follows me I think came from my distant relative. I try to think and behave like François de La Rochefoucauld, who seemed to be a reasonable gentleman of nobility. I bear that in mind while writing my memoirs and sipping my drink. He wrote that “true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” I had a dream the other night that I was on an island, and I came upon a sophisticated party, full of beautiful women - one of them looked like Louise Brooks. When I approached her, it was like I wasn’t there. She didn’t acknowledge me, and I had the feeling that either I wasn’t there, or she wasn’t there as well. The whole party appeared to be projected from someone’s dreams, but, to me, it wasn’t from my dream.

“There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.” So perhaps my dream the other night was my experience of falling in love, but the girl didn’t even exist. Can one love just an idea of being in love? The other part of the dream that I remember quite clearly is when I heard someone from the party saying “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?” At that moment, I woke up and reached for my chilled martini.

"Love Conquers All" by Robert Benchley (The Akadine Press)

ISBN 9781888173710

For the last ten years or so, when I think of writers who are important to me, as a writer, I think of Robert Benchley.  Which may be an odd choice, but the reasons why I like him are very sane to me.  I have to presume that Benchley had to write his essays/reviews regularly and all due to the deadline.  I sense that is what inspired his work (and his paycheck) and opened up his imagination.  He also writes about everything under the sun and stars.  Social manners, theater, eating, family life, and so on.  His topics are vast, yet, he covers it all with his 'character,' and that's important for a writer to have a certain amount of character when one writes. I learned from his books. 

And even more critical, Benchley is a great prose writer as well as a fantastic wit.  I'm a fan of literature that was written in the 1920s/1930s that come off charming, but I damn know well that things were for sure not charming outside Benchley's world or mind.  Yet, he made a choice to write about his subject matters with a strong subjective point-of-view that doesn't show him being smarty-pants, but one with an intense curiosity of how things work.   I think of him often when I type on a blank screen or a pen on paper.  If he can come up with the goods, then so can I!

"Wine, Women, and Words" by Billy Rose

As a reader and a writer, I'm very much influenced by authors from the golden era of New York Manhattan.  Robert Benchley is my top favorite, but then I like other writers such as James Thurber and Dorothy Parker as well.  It isn't their subject matter, or even their love for Manhattan life, but more to the fact that they had to produce a certain amount of words per month or day, and usually, they have to be funny, or at least amusing.   In 2014, for my blog, I wrote a story a day, and I loved the discipline and the ability to do something like that.   To be honest, I could care less if the story was good, I was just happy I did it.  For the historical record, I do love those pieces.  So, with that in mind, and again, especially Benchley, I use him and others as a role model to study their sentence structures, and how to tell a joke.  The joke part I'm not good at, and only readers and critics can decide if my work is worth merit or not.  Still, I found this fascinating and cheap paperback from the late 1940s by Billy Rose, called "Wine, Women, and Words." 

Rose was a very successful Broadway producer of spectacular shows and musicals.  He was also a songwriter of some note, writing the lyrics to Me and My Shadow," "Great Day" (with Edward Eliscu), "Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight" (with Marty Bloom), "I Found a Million Dollar Baby" (with Mort Dixon) and "It's Only a Paper Moon."  Some observed that he may have been there when these songs were written, and his real talent is selling the song.  Nevertheless, a classic Broadway hustler.   What is not known about him in detail is that he also wrote for a newspaper column, and "Wine, Women, and Words" are a collection of these writings, mostly from the late 1940s.  He was at the time a total success and very wealthy man, so I suspect he didn't need to write for money but did it because he's a very talented prose stylist.  I always believed a true writer has to write, no matter what.  

Not everything he wrote was gold, but sometimes an excellent bronze piece.  He had a genius for capturing a character, which was plenty in Manhattan in those days, and I admire his stance and sense of history about the location (Broadway) and his egotism, which is not off-putting.    Throughout the book, he writes about his wife Eleanor Holm, who seemed to be a character of great wit and interest as well.  Reading about her after reading this book, I was a tad depressed that they had a costly divorce.  Still, I think for a writer who writes a column, and for a showbiz figure, life is lived by the moment.  And usually, they use that moment for their work.  It's a nice payoff. 

"How To Be A Brit" by George Mikes (illustrations by Nicolas Bentley) - (Penguin)

ISBN: 978-0-241-97500-8 Penguin

I'm attracted to the Penguin classic design book and when I saw "How To Be a Brit" at the Last Bookstore in Downtown Los Angeles, it brought back memories of me going to used bookstores in London and finding old Penguin paperbacks from the 1940s.  That it has illustrations going through the entire book is an additional plus.  I didn't buy it.  Two weeks later I saw it at a Tokyo bookstore that has an English language section, and they had a stack of this title.  For sure, the perfect book for the foreigner visiting another country.  Still, I didn't buy it.  It wasn't until I got back from Japan that I went back to The Last Bookstore, to locate this damn book. I did and went to the library to get other titles by George Mikes.

I have a fascination with books by foreigners writing about another culture. Mikes originally came from Hungary and lived in London for most of his life.   In a sense, he became more British than the British, and on top of that, he knew there is a cultural difference between the British and everyone else.   Some of the commentaries are out-of-fashion, but for me, that's not a problem.  Even the subject matter is not that important to me.  What's important is Mikes' language and his funny observations that border on being stereotyping, but that's OK. 

"How To be a Brit" is actually three short books put together.  "How to be an Alien," How to be Inimitable, and "How to be Decadent," which sadly has no Sadian touches, but more with how the every day British treat themselves. Nicolas Bentley's illustrations throughout the book are charming, funny, and a reminder of Robert Benchley's world.  In fact, there are traces of Benchley in Mikes' work.  Both are the absurd humorists commenting on the everyday life of... well, people. 

The Evening Series: Monday, July 31, 2017

I’m pretty happy-go-lucky middle aged man till the evening comes rowing on toward the end of the daylight hours.  It is then, while drinking my first glass of wine, that my thoughts turn inward, expressing the dread that is very much not noticeable during the daylight hours.  Each sip I take brings me to a place that is more real than my mornings.  It is if I have been avoiding the surf, and finally, I can get on the wave, and let it ride me to a place that’s home.  Which by any terminology will be called despair. 

I spend most of the daylight hours at the Central Library here in Los Angeles.  I have been working on a novel about a writer who based his life on the presence of Robert Benchley.  Not being him exactly, but a character who approaches the sensibility of a Benchley in his life and writing.  When I show my novel-in-progress to others, they have all commented on Benchley - why and who?   I’m mostly interested in the “what” than the who or why of such commentary.  Benchley represents the humor of the world that is not funny.  I don’t see the joke during the daylight hours, but when in the home or at a bar nearby the library I often focus my thoughts on the world that exists in front of me, and how one can be funny inside that particular landscape.   It’s no joke, you know?

As the tick-tock of the moments go on, and I’m in front of my laptop, which has to be the most unromantic method to writing, I think of the family unit and what it means to a writer describing the moments as they pass.  Impossible to capture the fleeting thoughts as I drink more.  Truman Capote, a well-known lover of the sauce that takes one to other places, wrote that it is impossible to write when drunk.  Like his commentary that Kerouac wasn’t writing, just typing, he is clearly wrong.  As the cloud becomes thick with deep insight into a memory that comes and goes, like a humming refrigerator in the middle of the night that keeps one awake.  The thought comes back to the family and what that means to me, and therefore the world.  I come to a conclusion after looking at this page for an hour that the family could care less about the world. 

If you can see me now, one would notice a downturn frown on my face.  Happiness is now a distance, and as I look outside the darkness, it seems to me to be a portrait of yours truly.  Handsome yes, but sad as well.   My time spent in hell, which looks very much like heaven, is my prison. I made these four walls with additional space for windows all around me, and I have no one else to blame except yours truly.   I read Benchley to get insight and reflect on a time when social drinking was looked upon as an active series of steps to one’s betterment.  Now, I can see the false footsteps to that ladder to success.  It’s a myth or image supplied by my ego and taste.  I remember reading a quote by a wise older man.  He said:  “Look down at me, and you see a fool; look up at me, and you see a god; look straight at me, and you see yourself.”   Which proves that one should at first, be standing up than sitting down.   And second, never look at someone straight on.  It’s best to study that person perhaps behind their back. 

I will sit here, drink wine, till the bottle is empty.  Then I will go to bed.  I will dream. Everything will be fine and dandy in the morning.  Till the evening comes again (and again). 

September 15, 2014

September 15, 2014

“A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. “ I have always been known to friends and foes to be the go-to-guy with respect of having a martini always near me.  In all seriousness, “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.” I have trouble sleeping at night, so I find having a chilled glass of martini at the bedside helps me sleep better. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I just reached the cooler, and take another sip, and I’m off to dream land, where I try to imagine my life as a memoir.  Which also keeps me up at nights, because I’m so damn busy remembering every little incident that went through my world from age 1 to 20.  Youth is significant, but the memory of youth is much more important.  Luckily there have been major changes in the world of writing, one that “the biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.” With the miracle machine, the laptop, I don’t have to worry about that.  Now I can write till my fingers run off to the side, where the martini glass resides. 

My life changed when I found out that I’m a distant relative of Gilles de Rais, perhaps the first serial killer on record.  The Frenchman was alleged to killing up to 600 children from 1432 to the spring of 1433.  I personally don’t believe the number is that high, more likely 200.  Nevertheless, being related to such a brute (although a refined one, according to historians) hasn’t helped me much.   The dark cloud that follows me, I think came from my distant relative.  I try to think and behave like François de La Rochefoucauld, who seemed to be a reasonable gentleman of nobility.   I bear that in mind while writing my memoirs and sipping my drink.   He wrote that “true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” I had a dream the other night that I was on an island, and I came upon a sophisticated party, full of beautiful woman - one of them actually looked like Louise Brooks.  When I approached her, it was like I wasn’t there.  She didn’t acknowledge me, and I had the feeling that either I wasn’t there, or she wasn’t there as well.  In fact, the whole party appeared to be projected from someone’s dreams, but clearly to me, it wasn’t from my dream. 

“There is is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.” So perhaps my dream the other night was my experience of falling in love, but the girl didn’t even exist.  Can one love just an idea of being in love?  The other part of the dream that I remember quite clearly is when I heard someone from the party saying “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”  At that moment, I woke up and reached for my chilled martini.