Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (7 page)

With this I got up and walked to the door. Ralph followed us to the car and,
with one foot on the running board, continued to plead his case. I took off my coat, put it
around his shoulders, and told Lilik to start the motor.

“You’re on your own, Ralph!” I shouted, as we waved good-bye.

He seemed rooted to the spot, his lips still moving.

A few days later I heard that he had been picked up for being a vagrant and
shipped home to his parents. That was the last I heard of him.

There’s a knock at the door. I open it to find a clump of visitors wreathed
in smiles. The usual declarations—“Just passing through. Thought we would look you up.”

I don’t know them from Adam. However … “Come on in!”

The usual preliminaries … “Beautiful place you have … How did you find it? … I
thought you had children … Not disturbing you, I hope?”

Out of a clear sky one of them, a woman, pipes up: “Do you have any water
colors for sale? I’ve always thought I’d like to own a Henry Miller water color.”

I jumped. “Are you serious?”

She was indeed. “Where are they? Where are they?” she cried, hopping about
from one corner of the room to the other.

I trot out the few I have on hand and spread them on the couch. As she looks
through the pile I busy myself fixing drinks and preparing the dogs’ meals. (First the dogs,
then the visitors.)

I can hear them moving about, examining the paintings on
the walls, none of them mine. I give no heed.

Finally the woman who expressed a desire to buy takes me by the sleeve and
leads me to a door where my wife’s work is tacked up. It’s a carnival scene, blazing with
color, full of people and things. A really jolly picture, but not a water color.

“Haven’t you any more like
this?”
she asks. “It’s just enchanting. A
fantasy, isn’t it?”

“No,” I reply, not bothering to explain, “but I have one with a rainbow, did
you notice? How about
rocks?
I’ve just discovered how to make rocks … not easy, you
know.” And with this I go into a long discourse as to how each picture represents a theme, or
to put it another way, a problem. “A pleasure problem,” I add. “I’d be a fool to give myself
torture problems, wouldn’t I?”

Carried away by these glib remarks, I then endeavored to explain that my work
was nothing but an attempt to paint my own evolution as a painter. A highly dubious
explanation which I scotched by adding: “Most of the time I just make pictures.” Which must
have sounded equally foolish and sententious.

Since she showed no signs of wilting or crumpling, I went on to say that only
a year or so ago I painted nothing but buildings, crowds of buildings … so many, indeed, that
sometimes the paper wasn’t large enough to hold them all.

“I always began with the Potala,” I said.

“The
Potala?”

“Yes, in Lhasa. You must have seen it in the movies. The edifice with a
thousand rooms—where the Dalai Lama lives. Built long before the Commodore Hotel.”

At this point I am aware that the other visitors are not altogether at ease.
Another drink would do the trick, but I’m not getting off my horse yet. Even if I ruin the
sale, which is what I usually do, I’ve got to carry on. I take another tack, just as a feeler.
A long, utterly irrelevant disquisition on some little-known French painter whose jungle
scenes have haunted me for years. (How he
could intermingle, interweave,
intertwine boughs, leaves, heads, limbs, spears, pieces of sky—even rain, if he chose to—all
with perfect clarity. And why not geometric precision? “And with geometric precision,” I throw
in.) Once again I feel that everyone is growing restive. Harassed, I make a feeble joke about
jungle scenes being so delicious because, if you lose your touch, you can just scramble
things. (I meant, of course, that it has always been easier, more instinctive, for me to make
scrambled eggs than clear-cut trunks, boughs, leaves, flowers, shrubs.) “In the old
days”—making a frantic switch—“I did nothing but portraits. I called them self-portraits
because they all turned out like
me.”
(Nobody laughs.) “Yes, I must have made over a
hundred….”

“Excuse me, but could I look at that painting on the door again?” It’s my
buyer.

“Certainly, certainly.”

“I like it
so
much!”

“It’s not mine, you know. My wife did it.”

“I thought so. I mean, I knew it wasn’t yours.” It was said simply, with no
malicious overtone.

She takes a good, thirsty look, then walks over to the bed over which the
water colors are strewn and, selecting my favorite, one I had hoped to keep, she asks: “Would
you let me have
this?”

“I’d rather not, to be frank. But if you insist….”

“Is there something wrong with it?” She let it fall on the bed like a dead
leaf.

“No, not exactly.” I picked it up, almost tenderly. “It’s merely that I hoped
to keep it for myself. It’s the one
I
like best.”

I made the
I
prominent to give her a way out. I was convinced that by
this time
my
views on art must have impressed her as being screwy. To make doubly
sure, I added that my friend Emil, a painter down the road, didn’t think very much of it. “Too
subjective.”

The effect this had, unfortunately, was to make her eager to examine the
painting more thoroughly. She bent over it, studied
it, as if she had a
magnifying glass to her eye. She turned it around several times. Apparently it looked good to
her upside down, for suddenly she said: “I’ll take it. That is, if I can afford it.”

I could have doubled my price and scared her off, but I didn’t have the heart
for it. My feeling was that she had earned it—by trial and ordeal. So I made an even lower
price than I had originally thought to ask and we sealed the bargain. She would have liked a
frame to go with it, but unfortunately I had none to offer.

As they were about to leave she asked if I thought my wife would care to sell
the one she liked so much. “It’s a possibility,” I replied. Then, impulsively, she stepped
inside the doorway, took a quick look around, and said: “Maybe I ought to take another one
along. Do you mind if I look through them again?”

I didn’t mind too much. All I thought was—
how long?

Fumbling through the pile once again she paused—appreciatively, I thought—to
look more closely at one which nobody in his right senses would look at twice.

“What on earth can
this
be?” she cried, holding the painting aloft
and struggling to repress her laughter.

“El Alamein, I call it. Where Rommel tricked the British—wasn’t that it?”

(I had previously given her a windy spiel about another title, “The Battle of
Trafalgar,” so named because it was full of battered, capsized boats. I had had trouble making
waves, hence the battered, capsized boats.)

“Did you say Rommel?” she asked.

“Yes, Rommel. That’s him there in the foreground.” I indicated where with my
index finger.

She smiled benignly. “I thought it was a scarecrow.”

“Cancer—schmanser, what’s the difference?” Might as well put a good face on
it.

“And what are those dark spots, those blobs, up near the hills? They
are
hills, aren’t they?”

“Tombstones. After the battle, you see … I’m going to put
inscriptions on them. Yes, I thought to write the inscriptions in white. They’ll be hard
to decipher, of course. Besides, they’ll be in Hebrew.”

“In Hebrew?”

“Why not? Who reads inscriptions on tombstones anyway?”

By this time her friends were calling for her. They were hoping to find time
to visit another celebrity, in Watsonville.

“I’d better run,” she said. “Maybe I’ll write and ask you to send me one by
mail. One less … less esoteric.” She giggled.

As she flew up the steps she waved her hand. “Ta-ta!” she cried.

“Ta-ta!” I echoed. “If you don’t like the one you bought, just mail it back.
It’ll have a good home here.”

After dinner that evening, thinking to empty my mind of images, I took the
lantern and, going to a spot in the garden where the poison oak was thick, I hung the lantern
to the bough of a tree and fell to. What a pleasure, what a ferocious pleasure, to pull up
long, vicious roots of poison oak! (With gloves on.) Better than making water colors,
sometimes. Better than
selling
water colors, certainly. But, as with painting, you
can never be sure of the outcome. You may think you have a Rommel, only to find out it is
nothing but a scarecrow. And now and then, in your ferocious haste, you pull up pomegranates
instead of camphor weed.

Down at Lucia, some time after Norman Mini decamped, a chap named Harvey took
over—as chief cook and bottle-washer. He pitched a tent right in the midst of the brush, the
poison oak, the rattlesnakes, the fog and the bottle-flies, and there he made his abode with a
wife and two small children. In this tent he tried to paint, to practice the violin and to
write. He wanted most of all to write.

If ever I spotted a born writer, this fellow Harvey was certainly it. When he
talked, and he was a good talker, a wonderful storyteller, it sounded as if he were reading
from a book. Everything he related had form, structure, clarity and meaning.

But Harvey wasn’t satisfied with this gift. He wanted to
write.

Occasionally, on his day off, he would drop in on me. He was always apologetic
about taking up my time—which didn’t prevent him from lingering for hours—but his excuse was,
and he meant it sincerely, that he had need of me. To be honest, he was one man I always
enjoyed listening to. For one thing, he possessed a profound knowledge of English literature,
beginning from the beginning. I believe he had once been a teacher of English literature. He
had been many other things too. He had taken a job as cook and handy man at Lucia, a lonely
spot, because he thought it would give him a chance to try his hand at writing. Why he thought
so I don’t know. The job afforded him little spare time and the overcrowded tent was hardly an
ideal work place. Besides, with the violin exercises and the easel painting only a da Vinci
could have hoped to write too. But that was Harvey’s way of going about it.

“I
want
to write,” he would say, “and I just can’t. It won’t come. I
sit at the machine for hours at a stretch and all I can produce is a few lines. And even these
few lines are no good.”

Every time he took leave of me he would remark how good he felt, how buoyed
up. “Tomorrow,” he would say, “I feel that it will go like a breeze.” And then he would thank
me warmly.

It went on like this for weeks and weeks, with only a trickle coming out
despite our peptonic talks.

One of the fascinating things about Harvey, whose case is by no means unique,
is that despite all the blockage, the paralysis (before the machine), he could relate the
contents of a long novel—one of Dostoevsky’s, for instance—with uncanny accuracy of detail,
emphasizing and underlining the most complicated passages in a manner such as one imagines
only writers can. In a single session Harvey could cover analytically, didactically and
ecstatically such a string of writers as Henry James, Melville, Fielding, Laurence Sterne,
Stendhal, Jonathan Swift, Hart Crane. Listening to Harvey talking books and authors was far
more absorbing (to me) than listening to a celebrated professor of literature. He had a way of
identifying
himself with each and every author, a way of insinuating his
own agonies into what probably were once theirs. He knew how to select, evaluate and
elucidate, no gainsaying it.

But this ability, as one can readily surmise, came all too easy for our friend
Harvey. It was as nothing for him to discuss the fine points of an intricate Henry James story
while cooking and recooking a penguin. (He did actually carry off a wounded penguin which he
found one day on the highway, and after three days and nights of wrestling with it, he did
serve up a delicious meal!)

One afternoon, in the midst of a lengthy disquisition on the merits and
demerits of Walter Pater, I suddenly put up my hand. An intriguing idea had flashed through my
mind. An idea, needless to say, not even remotely connected with Walter Pater.

“Hold it, Harvey!” I cried and, reaching for his glass, I filled it to the
brim. “Harvey, my good man, I think I’ve got something for you.”

Harvey hadn’t the least idea of what was going through my head. He looked at
me blankly.

“Look here,” I began, almost trembling with inner excitement, “to begin with,
forget Walter Pater—and Henry James and Stendhal and all the other birds you like to shoot at.
Fuck them! You’re finished with them … they’re just dead ducks. Your trouble is that you know
too much … too much for your own good, I mean. I want you to bury these guys, wipe them out of
your consciousness. Don’t open another book, nor a magazine. Not even the dictionary. At
least, not until you’ve tried what I’m about to suggest.”

Harvey stared at me in a puzzled way, patiently waiting for the clue.

“You’re always saying that you can’t write. You tell me that every time you
come. I’m sick of hearing it. What’s more, I don’t believe it. Maybe you can’t write as you
would like to write, but write you can! Even an idiot can learn to write, if he sticks at it
long enough. Now here’s my thought … I want you to leave soon”—I said this because I knew that
if he started inquiring into
my scheme it would all evaporate in
talk—“yes, I want you to go home, get a good night’s rest, and tomorrow, before breakfast, if
possible, sit down to the machine and explain to it why it is that you can’t write. Nothing
more, nothing else. Is that clear? Don’t ask me why I urge it, just try it out!”

I was surprised that he made no attempt to interrupt me. He had a queer
expression on his face, as if he had just been given a jolt.

“Harvey,” I continued, “even though the two are not the same—I mean talking
and writing—I’ve noticed that you can talk most eloquently about anything under the sun. And
you can talk about yourself, your own problems, just as brilliantly as you can about the next
fellow. In fact, you’re even better when you’re talking about yourself. And that’s what you’re
doing all the time, anyway, even when you pretend to be talking about Henry James or Herman
Melville or Leigh Hunt. A man who has the verbal gift—and you certainly have it—shouldn’t be
stymied by a piece of white paper. Forget that it’s a piece of white paper … pretend that it’s
an ear. Talk to it! Talk into it! With your fingers, of course….
Can’t write!
What
nonsense! Of course you can write. You’re a Niagara…. Now go home and do as I say. Let’s end
it right here. And remember, you’re to write only about why you can’t write. See what
happens….”