STEPHEN BERGMAN TALKS ABOUT THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE Carole Osterink ccSCOOP Editor The group that gathered at the Hudson Opera House on Sunday afternoon, November 23, to discuss The Spirit of the Place with the book’s author, Samuel Shem (the pen name of Dr. Stephen Bergman) was a mix of native Hudsonians (Bergman being one of them), folks who’d lived in Hudson for a decade or more (this writer being one of them), and people who’d only recently moved here. From the start, the group seemed more interested in talking about perceptions of Hudson than discussing the book as a work of literature.

The Spirit of the Place is set in 1983 in a Hudson River town called Columbia—a place easily recognized by anyone familiar with the city as Hudson. Bergman grew up here and lived here until he went off to college—to Harvard—in 1962. It was around the time of Hudson’s Bicentennial in 1985—more than twenty years later—that Bergman became interested in the history of the quirky town where he had grown up and started learning about it. It was about this time too that he started writing the book that eventually evolved into The Spirit of the Place. Published earlier this year, The Spirit of the Place recently won a National Best Books 2008 Award.  

Breakage is a major theme in the book and a major theme of Bergman’s experience growing up in Hudson. He began the discussion on Sunday by reading the passage that introduces the theme early on in the book:  

Columbia, he knew all too well, was a town of breakage. At public events things would unerringly break. School microphones would consistently give out just after someone said, “Testing, testing.” On Memorial Days in Columbian cemeteries, just as the Gettysburg began, viewing stands would collapse. . . . Columbians learned to talk affectionately about past breakages, such as “the Great Breakage of ’37,” when, in the Thanksgiving Day parade, a massive five-axle Universal Atlas cement truck disguised as a turkey exploded in front of the Niagara Mohawk power station, knocking out lights and heat for weeks. Or “the Dinosaur Breakage of ’52,” when the Paul Jonas life-sized sculpture of the brontosaurus bound for the New York World’s Fair broke the back of its barge and sank, its neck poking out of the Hudson River in the most lifelike way.

The Great Breakage of ’37 was the stuff of legend for Bergman, but he was witness to the Dinosaur Breakage of ’52.

Bergman talked about growing up in Hudson "with the sense that something wasn’t quite right.” He described the Hudson of his childhood and youth as a “hard town”—a place where it was hard to get things done. As he began learning about the history of the place, he came to the conclusion that “whenever they had the choice to do something for the common good, they did the wrong thing.” He cited as examples selling off the part of the city that is now Greenport in 1837, effectively ensuring that the city could never grow and increase its tax base, and rejecting a Carnegie Library in the 1930s, giving Hudson the distinction, until 1959, of being the only city in New York—perhaps in the entire country—without a public library.

The Spirit of the Place is fiction but very autobiographical fiction. Stephen Bergman is a doctor—a psychiatrist and a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty for three decades. The main character in the book, Orville Rose, is also a doctor—a member of Médecins Sans Frontières and an expatriate. Orville returns to his hometown of Columbia after the death of his mother and discovers that she has left him everything—nearly a million dollars, the family house on Courthouse Square, and a 1981 Chrysler New Yorker, “the biggest Chrysler makes.” But the legacy is not given without conditions. To take possession of his inheritance, Orville, who is eager to return to Italy and his current love, Celestina Polo, must live in the house on Courthouse Square continuously for a year and thirteen days, starting on the day he arrives back in Columbia. The Spirit of the Place is the story of that year and thirteen days.

Like Bergman himself, who became an avid student of Hudson history, Orville begins to learn about Columbia. Like Hudson, Columbia has whale icons on its street signs, and Orville’s research begins with the question, which he asks many people before getting a satisfactory answer, “Why whales?” Bergman recalled that he’d been taught in school that Hudson had been a whaling port because they used to catch whales in the river. He grew up not knowing why Rope Alley had that name. Through his research, Bergman came to understand that the Quakers who founded Hudson in 1785 intended it to be a kind of Utopia, but two hundred years later “the cultural aspects of the city were forgotten and in disrepair.” When he was growing up, “the cement plants were the only thing that kept the city going.” By the time of the Bicentennial, those were gone, too.

Bergman started writing the book twenty-five years ago as “a way of making peace with the town and his family—with his past.” The first version was a “big, large book” written in first-person. After writing it, he put it away for years, not sure that he wanted his mother to read it. Bergman’s mother was the model for Orville’s mother, Selma Ariel Fleischer Rose, who although dead is a dominating presence in the book. Letters from her arrive with mysterious regularity. She also appears to Orville—hovering outside the window, floating past the flagpole in Courthouse Square, “flapping her arms in that cobalt-blue satin ball gown, flying away over the green copper dome of the courthouse toward St. Mary’s, a vision straight out of Chagall, or Marquez.” Gabriel Garcia Márquez, master of Magical Realism, is, Bergman admits, his favorite author.

In 1995, the first version of the book, which took the main story of his longer work and turned it into a third-person narrative, was published in Germany, but it wasn’t until this year—a year after his mother’s death—that The Spirit of the Place was published in the United States.

Having discovered Hudson’s history, Bergman remains fascinated with the city. He has a subscription to the Register-Star, which is mailed to him in Boston. His anachronistic use in the book of the acronym CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) was picked up from the Register-Star where it was used in a letter to the editor to describe those who opposed the construction of a massive new coal-fired cement plant in nearby Greenport.

Soon there will be another book set in the fictional city of Columbia—the events of this one taking place twenty years later, in 2003. Bergman describes the new book as “a House of God of business and politics in Hudson.” The House of God is Bergman’s first novel, about the life of a medical intern, which, according to one reviewer, “does for the practice of medicine what Catch-22 and M*A*S*H* did for the practice of warfare.”

The central historic event in The Spirit of the Place was the failed campaign to save the General Worth Hotel and its ultimate demolition. (Something that actually happened in 1969 not 1983.) The central historic event in Bergman’s new book is the arrest and trial of Ansar Mahmood, the Pakistani pizza deliverer who was suspected of terrorism when he made the mistake of going up to the water treatment plant at the top of Rossman Avenue to admire the view.

Although they are not the main characters, Orville, Miranda, and Cray from The Spirit of the Place reappear in the new book. Bergman didn’t mention Henry Schooner, the playground bully who terrorized Orville in seventh grade and grew up to be a successful Columbia businessman, developer, and a candidate for Congress, but I hope he reappears in the new book, too. It will be interesting to see what he’s up to in 2003. And since I was here in 2003, it will be intriguing to look for characters based on people Bergman read about in the Register-Star.