Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (8 page)

It took some firmness on my part to make Harvey run off, just like that, and
not “go into it,” as he was dying to do. But he did ease himself out. In fact, he was almost
on the trot by the time he reached the car.

A week or two passed, then three or four, but no sign of Harvey. I was
beginning to think my idea was not such a brilliant one after all. Then one day he showed
up.

“Well, well!” I exclaimed. “So you’re still alive! Tell me, did it work?”

“It sure did,” he said. “I’ve been writing steadily ever since you put the bug
in my head that day.” He went on to explain that
he was throwing up the
job at Lucia. He was going back East where he came from.

“When I leave I’ll put that bundle of manuscript in your mailbox. Take a
glance at it if you ever have the time, will you?”

I promised faithfully that I would. Some few days later Harvey picked up and
moved. But there was no bundle of manuscript in my mailbox. After a few weeks I received a
letter from him in which he explained that he hadn’t left the manuscript in my mailbox because
he didn’t think it was worth bothering me about. It was much too long, for one thing. Besides,
he had given up the idea of becoming a writer. He didn’t say what he was going to do for a
living but I had the impression that he was going back to the teaching profession. That’s the
usual way out. When everything else fails, teach!

I’ve never heard from Harvey since. I’ve no idea what he’s doing today. I’m
still convinced that he’s a writer; still convinced that one day he’ll go back to it and stick
to it. Why I speak with such conviction I don’t know.

The tragic thing today is that, in the case of men like Harvey, even when they
do break through the “sound barrier” they are killed off almost immediately. Either they write
too well or not bad enough. Because of their great knowledge and familiarity with good
literature, because of their innate taste and discrimination, they have difficulty in finding
the level on which to reach the reading public. They particularly lack that liberating
instinct so well formulated by the Zen masters:
“Kill the Buddha!”
They want to
become another Dostoevsky, another Gide, another Melville.

On sober thought, my advice to Harvey (and to all who find themselves in
Harvey’s boots) struck me as being sound and sensible. If you can’t give the is-ness of a
thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound
off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. It often works.

Once traction is established, the most important thing—how to
reach the public, or better, how to create your own public!—still remains to be faced.
Without a public it’s suicide. No matter how small, there has to be an audience. I mean, an
appreciative, enthusiastic audience, a selective audience.

What few young writers realize, it seems to me, is that they must find—create,
invent!—the way to reach their readers. It isn’t enough to write a good book, a beautiful
book, or even a better book than most. It isn’t enough even to write an “original” book! One
has to establish, or re-establish, a unity which has been broken and which is felt just as
keenly by the reader, who is a potential artist, as by the writer, who believes himself to be
an artist. The theme of separation and isolation—“atomization,” it’s now called—has as many
facets to it as there are unique individuals. And we are all unique. The longing to be
reunited, with a common purpose and an all-embracing significance, is now universal. The
writer who wants to communicate with his fellow-man, and thereby establish communion with him,
has only to speak with sincerity and directness. He has not to think about literary
standards—he will make them as he goes along—he has not to think about trends, vogues,
markets, acceptable ideas or unacceptable ideas: he has only to deliver himself, naked and
vulnerable. All that constricts and restricts him, to use the language of not-ness, his
fellow-reader, even though he may not be an artist, feels with equal despair and bewilderment.
The world presses down on all alike. Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature,
good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to
become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more
shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and
artist. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary, moving force in their
lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they
can go their way, lead their lives, without art. They never dream—or they behave as if they
never realize—that the reason why they feel
sterile, frustrated and
joyless is because art (and with it the artist) has been ruled out of their lives. For every
artist who has been assassinated thus (unwittingly?) thousands of ordinary citizens, who might
have known a normal joyous life, are condemned to lead the purgatorial existence of neurotics,
psychotics, schizophrenics. No, the man who is about to blow his top does not have to fix his
eye on the
Iliad
, the
Divine Comedy
or any other great model; he has only to
give us, in his own language, the saga of his woes and tribulations, the saga of his
non-existentialism. In this mirror of not-ness everyone will recognize himself for what he is
as well as what he is not. He will no longer be able to hold his head up either before his
children or before his neighbors; he will have to admit that he—not the other fellow—is that
terrible person who is contributing, wittingly or unwittingly, to the speedy downfall and
disintegration of his own people. He will know, when he resumes work in the morning, that
everything he does, everything he says, everything he touches, pertains to the invisible
poisonous web which holds us all in its mesh and which is slowly but surely crushing the life
out of us. It does not matter what high office the reader may hold—he is as much a villain and
a victim as the outlaw and the outcast.

Who will print such books, who will publish and disseminate them?

No one!

You will have to do it yourself, dear man. Or, do as Homer did: travel the
highways and byways with a white cane, singing your song as you go. You may have to pay people
to listen to you, but that isn’t an insuperable feat either. Carry a little “tea” with you and
you’ll soon have an audience.

“The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end: it had operatic
grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station like a Judgment Day.”

In 1945 Poetry-London brought out a slim book by Elizabeth Smart bearing the
title:
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
. It is a very unusual little
book, “a love story,” the jacket says. The romance which inspired the book took place at
Anderson Creek in the days when Varda ruled the roost. It must have been written about the
same time as
The Stranger
, by Lillian Bos Ross, which will probably go on selling as
long as there is a Big Sur.

Says Elizabeth Smart: “The legends here are all of blood-feuds and suicide,
uncanny foresight and supernatural knowledge.” She was probably thinking of Robinson Jeffers’
narative poems. By the time Emil White arrived at Anderson Creek (1944), via the Yukon, there
wasn’t an artist in sight and all the convict shacks were deserted, even by the rats. There
were no feuds, no gun fights, no stabbings, no suicides: it was quiet along the Coast. The war
was drawing to a close, the floaters were drifting in. Soon the longhaired artists would
appear and broken romances begin all over again. At night, as the creek rushed to the sea, the
rocks and boulders gave out garbled, hallucinating versions of the calamities which lend spice
to the place. The “Colony,” made up of transient artists, would rehearse in the space of a few
short years all but the bloody aspects of the legends.

Emil White’s shack—it was indeed a shack!—was on the highway, hidden by a
tall, overgrown hedge invaded by roses and morning-glories. We sat down one noon in the shade
of this hedge to have
a bite. I had been helping him clean out the joint,
which was gloomy, mildewed, reeking with the smell of rat dirt, garbage and worse. The little
table at which we were having coffee and sandwiches was only a foot or two from the road. A
car pulled up, a man and his wife got out. Throwing a half-dollar on the table, the man
ordered coffee and sandwiches; he took it for granted that we were running a roadside
café.

In those days, when Emil managed on seven dollars a week, everything included,
I used to urge him to make a few pennies by serving coffee and sandwiches. Cafés were few and
far between; gas stations were fifty miles apart. Many a time Emil was routed out of bed at
two or three in the morning by a tourist looking for gas or water.

Then, one after another, the artists happened along: poets, painters, dancers,
musicians, sculptors, novelists … everything but slack-wire artists. All poor, all trying to
live on nothing, all struggling to express themselves.

Up to this time the only writer I had met, aside from Lillian Ross, was Lynda
Sargent. Lynda had everything that goes to make a writer except that one indispensable
thing—belief in one’s self. She also suffered from ergophobia, a disease common to writers. A
novel which she had been working on for years, a formidable one, was unfortunately destroyed
by fire (and the house with it) shortly after she completed it. During the time I was her
guest she showed me stories and novelettes, some finished, some unfinished, which were
altogether remarkable. They were largely about New England characters whom she had known as a
girl. It was a New England more like the legendary Big Sur: full of violence, horror, incest,
broken dreams, despair, loneliness, insanity and frustration of every sort. Lynda related
these stories with a granite-like indifference to the reader’s emotions. Her language was
rich, heavily brocaded, tumultuous and torrential. She had command of the whole keyboard. In
some ways she reminded me of that strange woman from East Africa who wrote under the name
of Isak Dinesen. Only Lynda was more real, more earthy, more bloodcurdling.
She is still writing, I should add. The last word I had from her, written from a lonely
lookout station in the mountains, was that she was just finishing another book.

Norman Mini, whom I have already mentioned, was—and still is—“another writer
of promise,” as publishers love to say. He was much more, indeed. He had in him the makings of
a von Moltke, a Big Bill Haywood, a Kafka—and a Brillat-Savarin. I first met him at the home
of Kenneth Rexroth, in San Francisco. He impressed me immediately. I sensed that he had
suffered deep humiliations. I did not look upon him then as a writer but as a strategist. A
military strategist. A “failed” strategist, who had now made life his battleground. That was
Norman to me—a fascinating Norman, whom I could listen to indefinitely, and do still.

A year or two after this meeting Norman arrived in Big Sur with a wife and
child, determined to write a book which had been germinating in his crop for years. I no
longer remember the title of this work, which he finally consummated at Lucia, but I do
remember the flavor of it. It might well have been entitled—
The Unspeakable Horror of this
Man-made Universe
. There wasn’t a flaw in it, unless the work itself was a flaw. It
moved on ruthlessly, relentlessly and inexorably, a chthonian drama mirroring the nightmare of
our daytime world.

How we sweated over that book! I say “we” because, along about the middle,
Norman began to visit me frequently for injections. Moral injections, of course. Now the
strategist came to the fore sharply. Faced with a stalemate, his military cunning—that is the
best I can describe it—came into play. His forces were beautifully aligned, his powers had not
deserted him, victory was within his grasp, but he could not make, or rather bring about, the
move which would unleash the decisive battle.

I had not yet read a line of the book, nor in fact had he bothered to give me
a clear outline of its plot. He talked about it as if it were a mash. He wanted no help in
making the brew: what he
wanted was deeper insight into the processes of
fermentation. I ought to say here that Norman was the type who writes from phrase to phrase,
line to line, feeling his way cautiously, critically, painfully, laboriously. The pattern was
clear to him, probably stamped in geometrical fashion in his brain cells, but the writing came
only in short spurts, mostly in trickles. He could not understand why, surcharged as he was,
the flow should be blocked. Perhaps he had the wrong approach to the craft. Perhaps he ought
to close his (critical) eyes and just put down anything, whatever came to mind. How did I
manage to write as fast and as freely as I did? Was he afraid of himself or of what he was
saying? Was he really a writer or did he only imagine it? Everyone had talent, and with
cultivation, could produce something. But was that enough? There should be fire, passion, an
obsessive urge. One should not be concerned whether a book turn out good or bad. One should
write, think of nothing else. Write, write, write….

Had his abode been Europe I doubt that Norman would have had such a struggle
to express himself. For one thing, there he would have been able to make himself understood.
His humility was genuine and touching. One felt that he was cut out for bigger things, that he
had taken to writing in desperation, after all other avenues had been closed off. He was too
sincere, too earnest, too truthful, to ever be a worldly success. His integrity was such, in
fact, that it inspired fear and suspicion.

After making a few lame efforts to place his book with a publisher he gave up.
Soon the job at Lucia petered out and he was obliged to return to the city. The next thing I
knew, he had taken a job as janitor in the University of California at Berkeley. It was a
night job and it gave him the opportunity to write during the day. Now and then he sat in on a
lecture. Ironic to think that our humble janitor was possibly better equipped to lecture on
such subjects as mathematics, history, economics, sociology, literature, than the professors
he dropped in to listen to occasionally. What wonderful lectures he could have given on the
art of being a janitor, I
often thought. For, whatever Norman tackled he
made an art of. That was his greatest fault, in the eyes of the worldly, this insistence on
making an art of everything.