Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (30 page)

“Haricot Vert!”
I shouted. “So that’s it?”

Only then had it dawned on me that he had been using as an alias the French
for “string bean.”

“So you’re French?”

“Not really,” he replied. “I’m Swiss. Or rather, I was born in Switzerland.”
He then gave me his real name.

When we got to the cabin and unloaded the food and wines he had brought along,
I asked as discreetly as I could what had brought him all the way to Big Sur.

His reply amused me. “I wanted to see how you were getting along.” He then
proceeded to give the cabin (which belonged to Keith Evans) a hasty inspection, pressed his
nose against the big plate-glass window facing the sea, took a step or two outdoors to glance
at the hills which were all gold, and, heaving a genuine sigh,
exclaimed:
“I see now why you didn’t go to Mexico. This is the next thing to Heaven.”

We sampled the Pernod he had brought and soon began exchanging confidences. I
was surprised to learn that he was not a rich man, though he was making a comfortable living
as an insurance agent. The son of wealthy parents, who had encouraged him to live the life of
a playboy, he had spent most of his bohemian life abroad, in France for the most part.

“I couldn’t resist helping you,” he said, “because I’ve always hankered to be
a writer myself.” He added quickly: “But I lack your guts. To starve is not in my line.”

As he continued to fill out the story of his life I discovered that his
present position was anything but rosy. He had made a bad marriage, was living beyond his
means, and hadn’t the slightest interest in the racket he had chosen for a livelihood. I began
to suspect that he had come to tell me that he would not be able to continue helping me much
longer. But I was wrong.

“What I’d really like to do,” he suddenly remarked, “is trade places with
you.”

I was utterly unprepared for such a statement. I must have jibbed a bit.

“I mean,” he continued, “that you’re one man who seems to know how fortunate
he is. As for me, I’m all mixed up.”

The visit lasted only a few hours. We parted the best of friends.

As for the payments, they lasted another few months and then a dead silence. A
prolonged silence. I thought possibly he had committed suicide. (He was the type to do it.)
When I finally heard from him again a year or more had passed. It was a pathetic, desperate
letter I received. He, the reckless benefactor, begged me to send him a substantial sum—and
the balance just as soon as I possibly could.

For once I kept my promise. I immediately sent him a good round sum and, in
the space of a few weeks, cleaned up the balance.

On receipt of the last payment he wrote me a long and fervent
letter, a letter which unnerved me somewhat. The gist of it was to the effect that he
could hardly believe what had happened. He confessed that he had never expectd me to come
through—and definitely not with such dispatch. Not very flattering, thought I to myself, and,
picking the letter up, I began rereading it. I stumbled on a passage which made me sit up. It
was where he was explaining that only since he had lost everything had he begun to see the
other fellow’s point of view. In searching for help he had naturally turned to his friends,
especially to those he had succored when in need. And they had failed him, every one of them.
It was in sheer desperation that he had finally written
me
. And I had come across! He
couldn’t get over it. He thanked me again—and threw in a blessing.

I put the letter down to ruminate on it, and then I noticed that a postscript
had been scrawled on the back of the last page. It said that now that he had touched bottom he
was going to stay there …
and write
. If I could do it, he could do it too. He had no
use for the world, no desire to ever make money again. Though miserable, he was glad things
had turned out the way they did. Anyway, I had restored his faith in human kind. It was now
his turn to prove that he was a man….

I can’t say that I felt flattered, reading these words. Nor did I have much
faith in his becoming a writer overnight. No, but what did interest me, and vitally, was the
admission he made that only when he had reached the end of his rope, when he had come to the
last among men, did he get a response. For many, many years now I have known and acted on the
belief that when truly desperate you must turn to the least of your fellow-men. You must
address yourself to the one who seems least likely to have what you are in need of. If we
realized what we were doing, in acting thus, we would know that we were taking ourselves to a
magician. The man with no resources is the one who possesses most resources. Or shall I say,
who possesses
real
resources? Such a man is never frightened by an unexpected demand.
Nor is he appalled or dismayed
because you are in a state of penury. For
him
it is a matter of rejoicing. Now he can demonstrate what it means to be a
friend. He behaves as if a privilege had been conferred upon him. He literally leaps to the
bait.

“A hundred dollars, you say?” (A fabulous sum to a man who hasn’t a pot to
piss in.) He scratches his head. “Let me think a moment!”

He does a think, then a smile lights up his face. Eureka! And he dismisses the
problem with a flourish, as if to say:
“A mere hundred?
I thought you were going to
say a thousand!”

With this he gives you a bite to eat, stuffs a few shekels in your pocket, and
tells you to go home and rest easy.

“You’ll have it in the morning. Ta-ta!”

During the night … let me say it in French, it sounds more concrete …
le
mirâcle se produit
.

Now to act with delicacy! To refrain from asking where the money came from,
how it happened, when must it be returned, etc., etc., etc. Take the money, bless the Lord,
embrace your friend who performed the miracle, shed a tear or two, and be off!

This is a homeopathic prescription for which no charge is made….

Money isn’t all
…. The day Raoul Bertrand turned up was a red-letter
day in my life. Not because he unlocked the door to my dwindled “fortune,” though that was a
timely performance, not because he made it a point to bring friends whom I enjoyed meeting as
well as rare victuals which his old French housekeeper prepared especially for these
occasions, not because he talked of things which were close to my heart and in a language I
love to hear, but because he was that rare sort of individual who knows how to create just the
right ambiance, an ambiance in which everything flourishes, sprouts, burgeons and promises
never to fade. Whenever he appeared,
ce cher
Raoul Bertrand, somewhere deep inside me
the music started up. Everything I had learned to appreciate in connection with the French way
of life he seemed to exemplify; every-thing
I had cherished as a result
of my ten-year sojourn in France he resuscitated, as if with a magic wand. It mattered little
whether we began with the bike races at the Vel d’Hiv, the dog cemetery at St. Ouen,
Napoleon’s last days at St. Helena, the mystery of the Basque tongue or the tragic history of
the
Albigeois
… it was always a symphonic journey which brought us nearer to the
heart and core of France.

I believe it was through Raoul Bertrand that Monsieur de Carmoy, of the Office
d’Echanges, Paris, came to visit me one day. It is through this bureau that payments to
foreign authors are controlled and regulated. Monsieur de Carmoy’s visit, though altogether
unofficial, made a deep impression on me: it was like receiving a visit from the government
itself. As he handed me his card, on leaving, this kind and gracious emissary of the Republic
of France informed me that if I ever encountered any difficulties in obtaining royalties due
me, I was to drop him a line. He said it as if it would give him great pleasure to jump a
plane and bring the money to me in person.

A few months later I had to take him at his word. The response was immediate,
almost electrical.

Merci encore une fois, cher Monsieur de Carmoy!

But to come back to Raoul Bertrand. The day he paid me that first visit he was
accompanied by a French journalist whom I had known in the Villa Seurat. Little more than a
boy at the time, he was now a roving correspondent for a big Paris newspaper. When they were
getting ready to leave, the journalist, who was flying back to Paris, asked if there was
anything he could do for me when he got back. Without a moment’s hestitation, I said: “Yes,
there is.” It was something which had popped into my head unbidden and which gushed out like a
jet of water. It had to do with that nest egg which was getting addled, that “fortune” which
had become a joke. It formulated itself in the shape of a question. The Pachoutinsky brothers:
Eugene, Anatol and Leon: what had become of them? had they survived the war? were they in
want? All
one big question mark in my mind. The next thought, a
corollary, was simple: Why not give them the key to the vault?

“Look,” I said, “there’s a little service you could render me. Put a small ad
in a few of the Paris newspapers saying that Henry Miller, author of the
Tropic of
Cancer
, wishes to locate his old friends, the Pachoutinsky brothers. Run it until there
is an answer.”

I then explained to him what these three brothers once meant to me, what they
had done for me in my hour of need.

Hardly a month elapsed before I received an airmail letter from Eugene, with
whom I had been the closest, telling me that they were all alive, in good spirits, and not in
dire need. As for himself, all he was praying for was that the government—always the bloody
government!—would give him the pension which he was entitled to for his services during the
war. He had a touch of tuberculosis, among other things, but after a year or two in a “sana”
he hoped to be his old self again.

I will skip the story of how he eventually received his pension—it sounds too
incredible—but will give the epilogue.

In Versailles he made the acquaintance of an elderly gentleman who wanted to
sell his home and remove to the provinces. Should Eugene succeed in finding a buyer, he
promised to give Eugene sufficient with which to buy himself a home in the country. Eugene
already had his eye on a village in the Midi called Rocquecor (Tarn-et-Garonne). By some
incredible fluke, Eugene, who knew nothing about real estate, netted a buyer for the house in
Versailles. The next thing I knew, he had purchased an abandoned schoolhouse in the village of
Rocquecor. It was a building with thirteen rooms and looked somewhat like an ancient fortress
converted into an insane asylum. On the picture postcard showing the schoolhouse, which was
jauntily perched on an eminence, he indicated the two rooms which he said he was remodelling
and setting aside for the use of my wife and self. They were to be ours exclusively—and
forever. A way of saying that thus we would always have a second home—in our beloved
France.

A
“pleurnicheur,”
as my friend Alf dubs me, I
could not resist shedding a few warm tears looking at the site of our new home. Again I
thought of that day when first I came upon Eugene outside the Cinema de Vanves: he was
standing on top of a tall ladder pasting up a billboard announcing the coming of a film
starring Olga Tchekova. Again I beheld the wretched piece of cardboard, properly
timbré
as even the most humble, wretched
“annonce”
must be in France,
staring at me from the window of the
bistrot
opposite the cinema, where Eugene and I
frequently repaired for a
“java”
and a game of chess. The announcement, which he had
written in his own hand, informed the passer-by that Henri Miller, of the Hotel Alba (a few
doors away) was available to teach English for the modest sum of ten francs an hour. Those who
have read the
Tropic of Cancer
will recall this good friend Eugene and his “old world
garden.” What a euphemism,
his garden!
It was a dump somewhere near the Impasse du
Thermopyle which they occupied, if I remember rightly. What connection there could be between
that celebrated battleground and the narrow, smelly, dingy alley named after it baffles me. As
for that “old world garden,” it was in Eugene’s heart, not outdoors anywhere.

As I sat there shedding a few warm tears, I thought how natural, logical and
inevitable it was that Eugene, who never had a sou except when I needed a coffee, should be
the man to make me such a royal gift….

And now let us pass on to
The Thirteen Crucified Saviours
and
The
Keys to the Apocalypse
. Such are the titles of two works I have been unable to lay
hands on, though I have been promised them again and again by friends who claimed they could
obtain them for me.

The first named is by Sir Godfrey Higgins, author of the celebrated
Anacalpysis
. Copies exist, I am told, but are difficult to find and exorbitant in
price. I no longer want it, thank God.

As for the other, by the extraordinary Lithuanian poet, Oscar Vladislas de
Lubicz Milosz (Milasius, in Lithuanian), there hangs
a curious tale. What
little I had read of and about Milosz intrigued me enormously.
*
I never spoke of my interest
in him to anyone; indeed, there was no one I knew to whom I might speak of him.

About five years ago, while trying to collect certain books which were
necessary for the work in hand,
†
I received a telegram signed Czeslaw Milosz,
who turned out to be the nephew of the deceased poet. The letter which followed had nothing to
do with the writer I was interested in; it was about the proposed visit of the director of the
Warsaw Museum of Art. There followed an exchange of two or three letters which threw cold
water on my enthusiasm for the poet’s work. Czeslaw Milosz, then an attaché of the Polish
Legation at Washington, was probably already at work upon the great novel which has since
earned him fame.