Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (54 page)

It was in March 1948 when we parted. How he lasted until the fall of 1949,
when he was deported by the immigration authorities, remains a mystery. Not even Briant could
tell me much about this period. It was a black one,
évidemment
. Toward the end of
September he appeared at Briant’s home in Brittany, where he had been offered refuge. Here he
lasted only six weks. As Briant
tactfully put it in his letter, “I
perceived all too quickly that a life in common could not be prolonged indefinitely.” Thus,
the 17th of November his faithful friend drove him to Paris—and installed him in the same old
Hotel Modial. Here, though he held out for some time, things went rapidly from bad to worse.
Finally, in utter despair, fate decreed that he should accept the last humiliation, that is,
apply for admission to a Swiss retreat for the aged on the Avenue de St. Mandé, Paris. It was
an institution founded by his own parents. Here he chose a small cell giving on the courtyard,
where from his window he could see the plaque commemorating the inauguration of the
establishment by his mother and his brother, Dr. Ivan Moricand.

“Tous ses amis,”
writes Briant,
“sauf moi, l’avaient abandonné.
Ses nombreux manuscrits étaient refoulés chez les éditeurs. Et bien entendu, des drames
épais surgirent bientôt entre lui et les directrices de l’Asile. Je m’efforcai de le calmer,
lui représentant que cette cellule, qu’il avait d’ailleurs merveilleusement aménagée,
constituait son ultime havre de grâce.”

The end came quite suddenly. According to Briant’s obituary article in
Le
Goéland
, on the morning of the day he died Moricand received a visit from a dear
friend, a woman. This was towards noon. As they parted he informed her quite simply that she
would never see him again. As he seemed to be in good health and good spirits, and since
nothing in their conversation had warranted such a remark, she dismissed it as a
boutade
. That very afternoon, towards four o’clock, he had a heart attack. He went
to the kitchen for aid, but despite his grave condition no one saw any reason for alarm. A
doctor was called but he was busy. He would come later, when he was free. When he did arrive
it was too late. There was nothing to do but rush poor Moricand, already breathing his last,
to the hospital. He was unconscious when they delivered him to the Hospital St. Antoine. At
ten-thirty that evening he died without regaining consciousness. August 31st, 1954.

In his last moments, writes Briant, he was
“seul comme un rat, nu comme le
dernier des clochards.”

Some years ago I came across these words of Milarepa,
the Tibetan saint: “It was written; and it had to be. Behold to where it has led.”

I often think of these words when the mail arrives. The mail! It is an event
which happens three times a week along this coast. It means, to begin with, that the day is
shot. You have hardly time to finish your lunch when you hear Jake, the mailman, honking his
horn. You scramble up the cliff to the highway, dragging your mailbag, laundry, parcels,
books, kerosene tin and anything you wish repaired, replaced or refilled. The mailman and his
wife begin to unload from the truck. Everyone clamors for butter, eggs, cigarettes, bread,
cake, milk, newspapers, all of which Jake brings together with the mail, express packages,
trunks, mattresses, firewood, bags of coal, and other things. It takes a half hour or so to
collect your things, during which time the gossip is disseminated free of charge.

Sometimes you have to wait an hour or two for Jake to arrive. Sometimes there
is a washout on the road, or his truck breaks down.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, rain or shine, you can think of nothing
but the arrival of the mail truck.

When it leaves there comes the business of transporting your things back to
the house, of sliding down a slippery bank with coal and wood, kerosene, laundry, mailbag,
express packages, books, newspapers, food, and supplies from the druggist or the hardware
store. This necessitates several trips. If you live on the mountain, instead of by the sea,
each trip means an hour lost.

Finally you sit down, and as you sip another cup of coffee and sample a slice
of store cake or a doughnut which will be too stale to eat the next day, you slowly open the
mail. Soon the floor is
littered with envelopes, wrappers, cardboard,
string, excelsior, etc. Oftimes I am the last one to read my own mail. By the time I get to it
the most exciting communications have already been transmitted to me
viva voce
. I
sift through the letters like a man looking for a lost glove in dead coals. A review of one of
my books is thrust under my nose. Usually it’s an unfavorable one. Some of the letters lie
unopened; they are from the bores who persist in writing fat letters even though I never
answer them. Someone is now reading the newspaper. There is a shout. “Listen to
this!”
And with one eye on a half-read letter, I listen to some unsavory piece of
news dealing with the outside world. Now the packages have been opened and we begin to glance
at the books, records, magazines and pamphlets which arrived. Sometimes there is something
good in these and you find yourself riveted to the chair for an hour or so. Suddenly you look
up and you see it is already five o’clock. You get panic-stricken. “Must get to work,” you
mumble to yourself. But then there is a knock at the door, and who should be standing there
but three or four people whom you don’t know, visitors who heard that you were living in this
charming region and decided to call on you and see just how you live. You open the wine which
some friendly soul from Minnesota or Oregon sent you and you pretend that you are not so busy
after all. “Do stay and have dinner,” you say, “it will soon be time to eat.”

When the visitors have left, when you are thoroughly exhausted with food, wine
and talk, you grope for the mail again. It is about time for bed, but you remember that there
was one letter you had started to read and which you would like to finish. Then you discover
in the pile a telegram which had been mislaid. It demands immediate answer, perhaps by cable,
but the mailman has long since returned to town and there is no telephone, no car. You must
wait until the mailman comes again—or get up early next morning, stand on the highway to
signal a passing car, and beg the driver to stop in Monterey and send the message for you.
(Whether he does as you ask or not you won’t discover for several weeks.)
Next morning, just as you are sitting down to work, you glance quickly at the mail once
again. You see that there are three or four letters which must be answered at once. You begin
to answer them. Perhaps you have to dig into a trunk to get out a manuscript or a photo, to
look up the reference in a book or pamphlet which is demanded. You have a filing system, of
course, but it never works. Just as you are upturning everything in the place a neighbor
knocks to ask if you could lend him a hand … he wants to repair the roof or shift the water
line, or put up a new stove. Three hours later you go back to your work table. The mail is
still staring you in the face. You push it aside. The fading light warns you to hurry, hurry,
hurry.

What can you work on in the hour or so that is left? You tackle this, then
that. Nothing goes right. You are all too conscious of the speed with which the light is
fading. Soon it will be time to chop wood, break coal, fill the kerosene lamps, hold the baby
while it squawks. Perhaps there are no more clean diapers. Then it’s a rush to the sulphur
baths three miles down the road. Sometimes you get a hitch, sometimes not. To walk six miles
with a bucketful of diapers is no joke. Especially if it’s raining. Thoroughly done in and
hoping to throw yourself on the couch and take a little snooze, what do you find on arriving
but an old friend, someone who came a thousand miles or more to see you!

On the way home, despite the hard trudge, despite the rain, ideas had been
streaming in on you. You thought you knew just how to go on from where you had left off a few
hours ago. You tell yourself over and over to remember it—a word, a phrase, sometimes a whole
paragraph. You must hold on to this little item or the thought will fall apart. (You never
have pencil and paper with you, of course.) So you keep repeating some idiotic key words over
and over as you plod wearily along. At the same time you wonder if there is enough coal and
wood to last should the storm continue for several days or weeks. Did you close the window
in the studio where your manuscript was lying? Don’t forget to drop so and
so a line….

Of course it is mail day again before you get round to answering those
important letters. Time presses. The mornings are always short, what with one thing and
another. There is no time to write the letter you intended to write; it will have to be just a
scratch, a postcard perhaps. “More anon … in haste as always, your friend, etc.” Again Jake is
honking the horn, and again you rush up for a new batch of agony. Every Monday, Wednesday and
Friday, sure as fate itself.

One can work at night, of course. Certainly. I try that too. When it is
impossible to work any longer in the studio I drag my papers to the house. I have hardly
spread them out, it seems, when it is time to set the table for dinner. I push the papers
aside. We eat. Then we clear the table, wash the dishes, spread the papers out again. Strange,
but I feel sleepy. I look at the clock. It is only nine-thirty. In New York, Paris, or any big
city, I would be wide awake and wondering what movie to go to. But at Big Sur I have only one
thought—to hit the hay. I curse myself for being a slacker, crawl into bed, and try to prepare
myself, mentally, to jump out of bed at the crack of dawn.

Sometimes I do get up with the dawn, by God. Then it’s so beautiful that I
must first take a walk. I was never one to start work first thing in the morning, and never on
an empty stomach.

Well, the walk was wonderful. I have a thousand new ideas, all of them
brilliant, extraordinary. I am almost on the trot by the time I near the house. So many ideas,
I don’t know what to tackle first. Shall I go on with the Rimbaud opus or revise the Rattner
script? Or shall I tackle
The Rosy Crucifixion
this morning, seeing as how the day
began so auspiciously? No one is awake yet. I tiptoe about, get the fire started, make
breakfast, and between times spend long minutes standing over the baby’s crib. She looks just
like an angel when asleep. Soon she will be cooing and chirping and gurgling. I can’t rush to
work immediately after break
fast; I want to see her being bathed and
dressed, I want to hold her in my arms a while, talk to her in her bird and dog language.
After that, just because the day has begun so well, I decide that I won’t write after all …
I’ll paint. It’s too lovely a day to waste time writing books which will only be condemned.
No, I’ll do something I really enjoy. I’ll make a water color or two.

Now the six-foot table on which all my papers are carefully arranged has to be
cleared. I make ready for the carnival, moistening the sheets, cleaning my palette, squeezing
out bright new pigments which I have never used before. Then it’s on, it’s got me, the
water-color mania. It may last a few days or a few weeks. Everything else is forgotten
meanwhile. I am a painter again.
The only life!
Why in hell was I born a writer?
Maybe I’m not a writer any more. But deep down I know that, after I have had my fling, I will
go back to the typewriter. I will die sitting at the typewriter, in all probability. I know
it. But now and then I allow myself the luxury of thinking that one day I will chuck it all. I
will do nothing.
Just live
.

But what does that mean, to just live? To live without creating, to live only
in the imagination …
is that living?
No, I know it isn’t. I am not quite at this
stage of renunciation. Too many urges still, too many desires, too great a need of
communicating with the world. “But couldn’t you slow up?” I ask myself. “Why not take it easy
for a while?”

It is at such moments that I think of the unanswered letters, of the many who
are clamoring for just a little word—of advice, of appreciation, of encouragement, of
criticism, of this, of that. I think first of
their
problem, mind you. And then I
think of the unfinished books. And then of the places I would still love to visit: China,
India, Java, Burma, Tahiti, Peru, Persia, Afghanistan, Arabia, Tibet, Haiti, the Carolines.
But will there be time for all that? I try to figure out how many years may be allotted me. I
give it up. Maybe I will live to be a hundred. Maybe now, in my fifties, I am passing through
a second youth. When I get to be
seventy, perhaps then I will have the
time to do all the things I want to do…. So it goes.

And then I hear Jake honking his horn! Mail day! It begins all over again.
There’s no use, I’m licked.

With all this caterwauling I haven’t said a word about my friend Emil White
who has been trying to lift me out of the rut these last two years. What would I have done
without him? Ever since he came to Big Sur he has been giving unstintingly of his time and
strength. The loads he carried up and down Partington Ridge, where I lived before, were enough
to slay a donkey. Day after day he has gone to the forest, gathered wood for us, chopped it,
dragged the coal sacks up the hill, fixed whatever was falling apart or leaking or tottering.
And as if all that were not enough, on leaving he would take with him the letters I hadn’t
found time to answer and he would answer them for me. He has mailed out hundreds of books and
water colors for me; he built me a studio out of thin air; he cooked my meals for me when my
wife was away; he even bought a car so that he could drive to town and buy more cheaply for
us, and then the car ran away with him and he almost lost two fingers of his good right hand.
How can I begin to enumerate the thousand and one services he rendered me?