Inhabiting the World of Somone you Never Met
Bernardine Szold and 1930s Shanghai, as observed by Susan Blumberg-Kason
I think of myself as a connector, someone who enjoys bringing people together, often internationally, who might not otherwise have met. From these connections, book projects have grown, conferences, film projects and scores of other collaborations. Connectors, as a rule, don’t get a lot of attention or gratitude. One must enjoy doing this for its own sake and not for any other perceived gain. There is no gain other than the satisfaction of knowing that one has done something worthwhile in bringing creative people together with one another. One such connector who received almost no credit and who has been virtually unknown until now is Bernardine Szold, a cultural maven of Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s. In some ways, she was a bit of a Zelig figure – she knew everyone: Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Charlie Chaplin, Anna May Wong, and many other stars of literature and the screen of her day. Ernest Hemingway once read an entire novel to her in a Paris café, which parodied the work of a mentor to them both, Sherwood Anderson (she was disgusted by the attack). But she was more than a social butterfly – when she and her wealthy husband settled in the bustling Shanghai of the early Twentieth Century, she set about creating opportunities for cultural and artistic exchanges between Chinese and Western artists, befriending and championing along the way the leading Chinese poets and scholars of the time. She loved artists as much as the art they produced, and her salons were legendary. Her family and love life were a mess, and it was here that she sometimes made mistakes with tragic consequences.
I learned about Bernardine when I worked with Susan Blumberg-Kason through Authors at Large (Authorsatlarge.com) on her biography of this forgotten connector. I loved working with her on the project and was delighted when it was recently published.
I decided to put a few questions to Susan about her book and about her interest in and affinity with Bernardine. Four questions, to be exact. I wanted at least one of my questions to be something that she has never been asked before.
Susan, what interested you in Bernardine and why did you think she deserved a biography? Did you feel a personal connection to her?
I first came across Bernardine's name about 25 years ago when I read Emily Hahn's memoir, China to Me. She seemed important and at the center of the Shanghai arts scene, yet Emily only mentioned her a few times. Over the next two decades, I came across Bernardine's name here and there and those portrayals were not very positive. I wanted to know more and thought she deserved a biography because there have been so many books written about the people she connected in Shanghai and or about the plays she produced there, but she was never given credit. As long as people are still writing about 1930s Shanghai, shouldn't she get her due credit? And when I learned Bernardine was also Jewish from Illinois, I definitely felt a personal connection with her!
Why do you think others should be interested in her?
There is so much emphasis these days on being leaders but that can happen in subtler ways like the way Bernardine brought people together around the arts. And she didn't just bring other artists together, but welcomed politicians, industrialists, and diplomats in her salon. When I think of how she included in her theater company the Soviet foreign minister and the head of Jardine's, a huge Hong Kong-based conglomerate, and that they were fine working together on these productions, I think readers will be interested, especially those of us who are desperate for ways to bridge our widening differences.
As this Substack also involves the blending of nonfiction and fiction, are there any ways in which you felt you were using speculation or your own imagination to enter Bernardine's life, and if so, could you give us an idea of how you did this, perhaps with a specific example?
One scene that comes to mind is when Bernardine is waiting for Emily and Helen Hahn to dock in Shanghai. As she waits, she looks around at the cityscape and thinks back to when she met other friends, family, and friends of friends on that very pier. I didn't know what she was thinking while she was waiting for the Hahn sisters to disembark so I used my own experience from when I lived in Hong Kong and would meet friends, family, and friends of friends at Kai Tak airport, day or night. Sometimes I was excited to see family come through to the arrivals hall, while other times I didn't know the friends of friends I was waiting for and was just hoping we'd find each other. So I tapped into those memories when I wrote this scene. Also, sometimes I'd take the train down to the Hong Kong harbourfront to look across at the famous skyline on Hong Kong Island. I felt like I was the luckiest person in the world to be able to do that on a whim. So again I tapped into that feeling when I wrote about Bernardine looking around at the skyline in Shanghai as she waited for Emily Hahn.
If you were able to have a drink with her at a bar in Shanghai, what would you like to chat with her about?
I love this question and would take her to the Long Bar along the Bund, where women weren't allowed during Bernardine's time. So we'd right that wrong. Bernardine wasn't a big drinker and neither am I, so maybe it'd be over tea! I think a lot of people would be tempted to ask her about regrets with her daughter Rosemary, but I would instead want to ask about Victor Sasson, the Jewish Baghdadi real estate tycoon who was both Bernardine's best friend and a huge thorn in her side. Bernardine wrote a lot about him in her unpublished papers and in letters to friends, and I always thought she was holding back a bit! I'd want to know more!
Thank you, Susan! Those are great answers. I think I’m especially drawn to this technique of embodying a nonfictional character whom you never met by thinking of a comparable time when you experienced a similar event. I think that that kind of sympathetic imagination is as crucial to biographers as it is to fiction writers. If you don’t feel permission to enter inhabit the person you’re profiling, as it were, as well as their time and place, then you are missing an opportunity to bring your readers fully into the world you’re creating. I love it when biographers make this leap.
I wonder if anyone reading this has had a similar experience in their own writing about a real person they never met. If so, please let us know in the comments below.
I remember reading Susan's wonderful writing on the life of Bernadine in Shanghai, when we worked together at one workshop for Authors at Large. What a delight to see her book out there now in print. It's such a wonderful thing you do, Robin, bringing writers together. It can otherwise be a lonely life