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….”
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.
2.
“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 chthonia
n 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.