Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (12 page)

“A live corpse?”
screamed Val. “What’s
that?”

“It’s a corpse that isn’t quite cold,” I said. I could see immediately that that explained nothing.

“Oh well, let’s skip it,” said I, and I had the plane land right in the center of a band of Indians dressed in full regalia, war paint, feathers, bells, drums, and everything.

Why Indians? First, to eradicate the live corpse, which was an error on my part, and second, to give Chama a rousing welcome from the true sons of the Far West. I told them that her father, Merle, had once lived with the Indians, that he had brought Caruso, Tetrazzini, Melba, Titta Ruffo, Gigli and other celebrities to meet the Indians—at exactly this spot.

“Who are they?” said Val. “The Cazzinis and Ruffios?”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you that. They were all famous opera singers.”

“Yeah, soap opera,” said Tony.

“I don’t get it,” said Val.

“Neither do I, except that Chama’s father, this man Merle … you remember him! … he was once an impresario, a very famous one, too.”

“Is it something like emperor?”

“Almost, dear Val, but not quite. An impresario is a man who finds places for singers to sing in—like Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House.”

“You never took
us
there!” piped Tony.

“He’s a man”—I ignored the interruption—“who makes a living taking famous singers around the world. He gets paid for finding them jobs, do you see?” (They didn’t see, but they swallowed it.) “Look,” I said, hoping to make it
very
clear, “supposing that you, Val, became a great singer one day. (I always told you you had a lovely voice, didn’t I?) Well, you would have to find a hall to sing in, wouldn’t you?”

“Why?”

“Why, so that people could listen to you.”

She shook her head as if she agreed, but I could tell that she was still nonplused.

“Couldn’t I just sing over the radio?” she asked.

“Sure you could, but first someone would have to get you the job. Not everybody can sing over the radio.”

“Did they travel all together?” asked Tony.

“When?” said I.

“When they went around the world like you said.”

“Of course! Sure they did! That’s how Merle got to know the Zulus and the Pygmies. …”

“Did they sing for the Zulus too?” Tony was real excited now. He remembered the Zulus because one of my fans, a woman living in Pretoria, had sent him a Zulu gun—a wooden one—as well as some other curious gifts of Zulu make. I had done my utmost, at the time, to play up the Zulus. A wonderful people, the Zulus. It’s not every day that you get a chance to put in a good word for them.

However. … By this time they had forgotten where the hell we were. So had I.

Well, there’s always Africa. Why not Africa? (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) It was a wonderful buggy ride, with side trips to the gold mines and a vain search for the Queen of Sheba’s lost kingdom. I took them as far as Timbuctoo, an adventure which entailed a number of wild escapes from the hands of the bloody, fearsome Touaregs. The desert impressed them most of all, probably because there was no end to it; also because we got terribly thirsty and there was not a drop of water in sight. Every now and then we saw cities hanging upside down in the sky. That was fascinating too. Very. And finally we came to the animal kingdom: the lions and tigers, the elephants, the zebras, the ostriches, the gazelles, the giraffes, the apes, the champanzees, the gorillas…. They were all moving together, silently, peacefully, as in a choir. There was plenty of room for all, even for the crickets and the grasshoppers.

We might have gone on with the story to this day had not Paul Rink begun that Inch Connecticut yarn. Paul, being a teller of tales, knew how to put more oomph in his serial than I. He knew
better how to create suspense. Besides, Inch Connecticut was right out of “Superman.” As for my narrative, it belonged in the archives, along with Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and such like. The wilds of Africa are nothing where Superman is concerned. And Inch Connecticut, from all I was able to gather, was a cut above Superman. So there I was, out on a limb. But happy for the experience. I had learned something. I learned one little thing which holds good even for holding the attention of adults. It’s this: you can’t feed it to them all at once. Even a lion has to take it piecemeal. A writer ought to know this from the start, but writers are funny animals: they have to learn things backwards sometimes.

Another thing…. When, for example, my son Tony remonstrates because I am about to grab a horror story out of his hand, when he says, “But little boys like murder once in a while!” one must never take such a remark seriously. Of course he isn’t able to
read
the texts, he gets it from the pictures, and the pictures, as we all know, are thoroughly realistic. But it’s one thing to look at picture books (the comics and the horrors) and it’s another thing to sit through a bloodthirsty movie with a five-year-old who says he likes murder once in a while.
Kids don’t like murder
. At least, not the way our movie heroes dish it out. They adore figures like King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, as I discovered to my joy and amazement. These heroes give fair fight. They don’t beat men’s brains to a pulp with a rock or a hunk of iron. They don’t kick a man in the teeth when he’s down. They charge with long bright lances, and when they use the broad sword it is a battle of skill as well as of strength. Usually a knight hands his opponent back his broken sword, if in the heat of the fray it is wrenched from his grip. Knights, the knights of old anyway, didn’t stoop to pick up a broken bottle and mutilate a man’s face with it. They fought according to a code, and even five-year-olds are susceptible to the glamour which surrounds codes of honor.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe city kids, even at the tender age of five, enjoy gangster films and all that goes into the making of them. But not country kids….

Every now and then, especially if there are no visitors for a spell, the water color mania comes over me. The “mania,” as I call it, began in 1929, just a year before I left for France. Over the years I must have made about two thousand, most of which I have given away.

I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating, that the desire to paint was born one night when walking the deserted back streets of Brooklyn. My pal, O’Regan, was with me. We hadn’t a cent between us and we were as hungry as wolves. (We had gone for a walk in the hope of meeting a “friendly face.”) Passing the rear show window of a department store, we were arrested by a display of Turner’s water colors. Reproductions, of course. That started it….

I had never displayed the least ability to draw; at school, in fact, I was so hopelessly untalented that they used to permit me to skip the drawing class. I’m still bad at it, but it doesn’t bother me much any more. Whenever I sit down to paint I feel happy; as I feel my way along I whistle and hum and sing and shout. Sometimes I put down the brush and do a jig.

I talk to myself too, as I paint. Aloud. (To encourage myself, I suppose.) Yes, I talk a blue streak. Crazy talk, what I mean. Friends have often said to me: “I like to drop in on you when you’re painting, you make me feel good.” (It’s the contrary when I write. Then I’m usually withdrawn, abstracted, silent—often glum—neither a good host nor a good friend, nor even an “object” to communicate with.)

I say it was Turner’s water colors which started it. But George Grosz had much to do with it too. Just a month or two before we
stood in front of that department-store window my wife, June, had brought back from Paris an album of George Grosz’ work called
Ecce Homo
. It had a self-portrait on the cover. When we came home from our jaunt that night, O’Regan and I, I sat down to copy that self-portrait. The resemblance I succeeded in achieving excited me so much that then and there I lost all my fears and inhibitions about drawing. It was only a year later that I arrived in Paris, where I soon got to know Hilaire Hiler and Hans Reichel. (Both Hiler and Reichel tried to give me instruction with regard to water color technique; they failed, naturally, because I am incapable of “taking lessons.”) A little later I got to know Abe Rattner; watching him work, I was inspired to continue my efforts. Returning to America, in 1940, I had a few shows, none of them of much importance except the one in Hollywood where I almost sold out! It was at Beverly Glen, in “the green house,” with John Dudley observing and criticizing over my shoulder as I worked on into the wee hours of the morning, that I began—in my own estimation, at least—to make real headway.

But the man I owe most to, in this connection, is my old boyhood friend, Emil Schnellock, who began as a commercial artist and now teaches art in a Southern college for girls. Back in 1929, it was Emil who encouraged me, guided me, inspired me. Droll now to think that he used to say then: “I wish I had the courage to paint like you, Henry.” Meaning “wild and loose.” Meaning with utter disregard for anatomy, perspective, structural composition, dynamic symmetry, and so forth. Naturally it was fun to paint as one pleased. Much better than doing realistic cans of tomatoes, milk bottles, sliced bananas and cream, or even pineapples.

Even in those days Emil had a wonderful familiarity with the world of art. It gave him tremendous pleasure to bring with him, when he visited me for a session, precious albums of reproductions of the masters. Often we spent the whole evening studying an album. Sometimes it would be a single reproduction of a master which would engage us in conversation of an evening. Say a
painter like Cimabue, or Piero della Francesca. At that time my taste was thoroughly eclectic. I liked them all, it seemed, the good and the bad. The walls were always covered with cheap reproductions—Hokusai, Hiroshige, Bakst, Memling, Cranach, Goya, El Greco, Matisse, Modigliani, Seurat, Rouault, Breughel, Bosch.

Even that far back I was violently drawn to the work of children and of the insane. Today, if I were to choose—if I could afford the choice!—I would rather be surrounded by the work of children and the insane than by such “masters” as Picasso, Rouault, Dali or Cézanne. At various times I have endeavored to copy the work of a child or of a maniac. Studying, with intent to imitate, one of Tasha Doner’s “masterpieces”—she was then a child of seven!—I made one of the best bridges ever. At that, it was not nearly as good as the bridge which Tasha had dashed off in my presence. As for the work of the insane, it takes a master (in my humble opinion) to even approach their style and technique. On days when the zany in me gets the upper hand, I make the attempt-but it never comes off. One has to get really insane to do it!

Sometimes I feel as if I must be slightly cracked, if not insane, to painstakingly copy a picture postcard which happens to strike my fancy. These picture postcards are continually arriving from all quarters of the globe. (Now and then I get a real jolt, as the day, for instance, when I received one from Mecca showing the Kaaba.) Often these cards are signed by people I don’t know, by fans living in outlandish parts. (“Just read the
Colossus
. Wish you were here.”)

By now I’ve accumulated a rather amazing collection of scenes: holy places, skyscrapers, ports and harbors, medieval castles and cathedrals, Chinese pagodas, donjons, exotic animals, the great rivers of the world, famous tombs, ancient scripts, Hindu gods and goddesses, primitive costumes, Oriental types, ruins, codices, celebrated nudes, the apples of Cézanne, the sunflowers of Van Gogh, every Crucifixion imaginable, the beasts and jungles of Rousseau, the monsters (“great men”) of the Renaissance, the women of Bali, the samurai of old Japan, the rocks and waterfalls of old China,
Persian miniatures, the suburbs of Utrillo, Leda and the Swan (in all variations), the Pissing Boy (of Brussels), the odalisques of Manet, Goya, Modigliani, and, perhaps more than the works of any other painter, the magical themes of Paul Klee.

I honestly believe I have learned more—if I have learned at all—from looking at the work of other painters than in any other way. As with a book, I can look at a painting with the eyes of an aesthete as well as with the eyes of a man who is still struggling with the medium. Even bad paintings, I have found—even commercial art-yield food for thought. Nothing is bad when you look at it hungrily. (The first step in the art of appreciation.) Riding the subway in New York, how attentively—in those early days—I studied the folds and wrinkles of those Arrow Collar men!

Whether studying Nature is a help I am not so sure. Everyone will tell you that it is. But I’m speaking for my own incorrigible self. Certainly I’ve spent considerable time doing just this, particularly since living here in Big Sur. I doubt, though, that anyone looking at my landscapes (or seascapes) would be aware of the time and thought I give Mother Nature. Some are bewildered, some clap their hands (whether in glee or affright, I never know) when studying these compositions from Nature. Usually there is something in them which does not belong, something horrendous and unnatural which sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps these “flaws” are the result of an unconscious effort to insert my “trade-mark.” To be quite honest, I’m never satisfied with doing plain Nature. Not in a painting, that is. It’s quite otherwise when I’m alone with Nature, when I’m taking a walk in the forest or over the hills, or just paddling about on a deserted beach. Then Nature is all, and I, what’s left of me, but an infinitesimal part of what I’m looking at. There’s never any end to what one can see—just looking, not trying to observe anything in particular. Always, in such moods, comes that sublime moment when you “suddenly see.” And you laugh all over, as we so aptly say. Does not Douanier Rousseau give us this sensation every time we look at his work? I mean, sudden
sight and brimming laughter? Nearly all the “primitives” give us this sense of joy and wonder. With these masters of reality, who are usually anything but primitive, we are less concerned with how they viewed the world than how they felt toward it. They make us leap forward to embrace what we see; they make things almost unbearably real.

Here at Big Sur, at a certain time of the year and a certain time of the day only, a pale blue-green hue pervades the distant hills; it is an old, nostalgic hue which one sees only in the works of the old Flemish and Italian masters. It is not only the tone and color of distance, abetted by the magic fall of light, it is a mystical phenomenon, or so I like to think, born of a certain way of looking at the world. It is observable in the works of the older Breughel, for one. Strikingly present in the painting called “The Fall of Icarus,” in which the peasant with his plough dominates the foreground, his costume just as enchanting and obsessional as the enchanting and obsessive sea far below him.