Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (16 page)

There is another family I cannot pass over without a word or two, since here,
once again, the children dominate the scene. I mean the Fassett family whose abode is
“Nepenthe,” one of the show places along the Coast. Lolly and Bill, the parents, are busy
seven months of the year running the establishment, which specializes in food, drink and
dancing. The kids—up until recently, at any rate—specialized in raising hell. All five of
them.

The point about the Fassett youngsters is this—they give the impression of
playing
at being children. They revel in the fact that they are just kids, and that
it’s the business of kids to have a good time. For inventiveness they are hard to match.
Entering their quarters, if it’s an unexpected call, you have the feeling of being introduced
to a simian world. It’s not only the chatter, the monkeyshines, the acrobatic, hair-raising
stunts they put on, it’s the
pandemonium they know so well how to create,
and delight in creating—particularly when papa and mamma are not hitting it off so well. But
who would think of raising the word discipline in their presence? Discipline would be the
death of them. All they need is space, more and more space. As it is, they have a wonderful
roller-skating rink in the dance floor, which adjoins the dining room and bar outdoors.
Evenings, before the place gets too crowded, the whole gang of them entertain the guests doing
folk dances. They have a repertoire which would do credit to a professional dancer. To watch
Kim, the youngest, who is still only a bit of a tot, is a delight. She floats about as if she
were in heaven. They need no supervision and they get none. When they’re weary they retire, to
listen in quiet to a Beethoven quartet, Sibelius or an album of Shankar.

The parents, of course, are sometimes puzzled by the various problems this
brood presents. Particularly Bill, the provider, who, before he hit on the brilliant idea of
opening “Nepenthe,” used to sit up nights wondering how to feed and clothe such a tribe. But
those days are past. His chief problem now is: should Griff, the oldest one, be sent to Europe
to have his fling or should he be permitted to stay in Big Sur and become a Jack of all
trades. The major problem is—where will they all go to live, what part of the world, when Bill
has made his pile?

A rather pleasant problem, I should say.
Why not Capri?

“Henry was always a good boy!” That’s a phrase of my mother’s which is
relayed to me at odd moments. I’ll tell you why in a moment.

Jack Morgenrath has a son, Helmut, who is about three years younger than Tony.
Nobody calls him Helmut. “Pookie” is the moniker he’s been saddled with. And it fits him, for
some strange reason. The difference in age between Pookie and Tony has made for a strange and
touching relationship between them. To begin with, they live about six miles apart and so only
get to see one
another at fairly long intervals. (Long for a child.)
Tony, it appears, is a sort of little god to Pookie. All the latter thinks about is—when will
we go see Tony again? And Tony, who is a rather rough playmate, invariably reveals his tender,
solicitous side when Pookie shows up. Like a big dog playing with a puppy.

Now and then I catch Pookie looking up at Tony with an expression compounded
of love, admiration and wonder. It may be that he has just opened wide his mouth to say
something and, in the fraction of a second which it takes for thought to reach tongue, Pookie
undergoes a transformation which, if I am fortunate enough to witness it, always moves me
deeply. Ever since a tiny child, Pookie has manifested this state of rapture which we almost
never see any more in the countenance of an adult. It explains—to me, at least—why there is
always this peculiar pause or hesitancy when Pookie opens his mouth to make an exclamatory
remark. Evidently, the emotion which fills him is much greater than his ability to verbalize
it. He wells up, is ready to spill over, and then—for a moment or two, a long moment or two—he
is blocked. (Fra Angelico has captured the phenomenon again and again.)

Fascinatedly, my gaze travels from his mouth to his eyes. Suddenly the eyes
become two liquescent pools of light. Gazing into them, I find myself looking up at the boy I
so idolized as a child: Eddie Carney. There was just about the same difference in age between
Eddie Carney and myself as there is between Tony and Pookie. Eddie was a demigod for whom I
would lie, steal or commit murder, if he had asked it of me.

I have written about all these companions of the street (the old 14th Ward,
Brooklyn) in
Black Spring
. I have mentioned all these chivalrous comrades by name:
Eddie Carney, Lester Reardon, Johnny Paul, Jimmy Short, Stanley Borowski, and others. Their
images are just as alive in my memory as if it were yesterday or the day before that I left
that grand old neighborhood.

Recently, hoping to get some photographs of the streets in this old
neighborhood as they looked in the 1890’s, I inserted a letter in
“The
Old Timers” column of a Brooklyn daily. To my joy and astonishment, some of my playmates were
still alive, I discovered. Most of them, of course, had gone to the Elysian fields. The
relatives of some who had passed away were kind enough to write me and enclose photographs of
“my little chums,” all going on seventy now. (“Time is running out,” wrote one of the boys. I
suppose he meant clock time.)

One of these letters came from the elder sister of my idol, Eddie Carney. She
had inserted several photographs of Eddie—one as a boy of sixteen (in which he seemed hardly
changed from the lad of ten that I knew), another in uniform, as a corporal in World War I,
and a third after he had been demobilized, his lungs contaminated by poison gas. It’s the one
in uniform which stands out vividly in my mind. Such sadness, such resignation, such a sense
of utter forsakenness is registered in his face! How could “they” have done that to the
shining hero of my boyhood? The whole cruel, senseless story of war was written into this
unrecognizable visage.

Reading his sister’s letter over again, I discovered that Eddie had died just
a few months before my letter appeared in the paper. Then my eye suddenly leaped to this
phrase:
“Eddie was always a good boy.”
With it a great flood of emotion swept over
me. I wondered, deeply wondered, if
I
had always been “a good boy,” as my mother was
fond of telling people. It was probably true, all things considered, for I had no great
remembrance of scoldings, naggings, beatings, and so forth. Not as a boy! The image of another
“good boy” came to mind: Jack Lawton. At least, everybody thought him that.

Jack Lawton was one of the first pals I made in the new neighborhood—“the
street of early sorrows”—which I have always compared unfavorably with the old neighborhood.
What I recall particularly about this chum is that he seemed so much wiser, so much more
sophisticated than I. It was he who initiated me into “the secrets of life,” though we were of
the same age. It was he
who pointed out to me the defects, the
stupidities, the vices of our elders. The good boy, no less! Entering his home, which was
always in a state of disorder and filthy to boot, I would receive a welcome reserved only for
angelic beings. His mother, a charming slovenly Englishwoman, who always invited the minister,
the school principal and such “dignitaries” to tea, doted on me almost as though I were her
own son. There was only this difference, and it registered deep in me: when she looked at
Jack, even if it were to reprimand him, it was with eyes of love. That look I never
encountered in the eyes of other mothers. In the homes of my other little friends I was ever
aware of the scolding, the nagging, the cuffing that went on. All these disciplinary measures,
to be sure, had anything but the desired effect.

No, thought I to myself, you must have had it pretty easy, my lad. You were
never obliged to get out and hustle, in order to swell the family budget. You did as you
pleased and went where you pleased.
Until
…. Until you decided of your own volition to
go to work. You could have continued your studies, you could have prepared yourself for a
career, you could have married the right woman and all that. Instead…. Well, those who have
read my books know my life. I haven’t glossed over the ugly parts. Up all the wrong alleys,
down all the wrong streets—yet how right I was!—until I came to the end of my tether.

If it was a mistake not to finish school (it wasn’t!), it was an even worse
mistake to go to work. (“Work! The word was so painful he couldn’t bring himself to pronounce
it,” says a character in one of Cossery’s books.) Until I was almost eighteen I had known
freedom, a relative freedom, which is more than most people ever get to know. (It included
“freedom of speech,” which has hung over into my writing.) Then, like an idiot, I entered the
lists. Overnight, as it were, the bit was put in my mouth, I was saddled, and the cruel rowels
were dug into my tender flanks. It didn’t take long to realize what a shithouse I had let
myself into. Every new job I took was a step further in the direction of “murder, death
and blight.” I think of them still as prisons, whorehouses, lunatic
asylums: the Atlas Portland Cement Co., the Federal Reserve Bank, the Bureau of Economic
Research, the Charles Williams Mail Order House, the Western Union Telegraph Co., etc. To
think that I wasted ten years of my life serving these anonymous lords and masters! That look
of rapture in Pookie’s eyes, that look of supreme admiration which I reserved for such as
Eddie Carney, Lester Reardon, Johnny Paul: it was gone, lost, buried. It returned only when,
much later, I reached the point where I was completely cut off, thoroughly destitute, utterly
abandoned. When I became the nameless one, wandering as a mendicant through the streets of my
own home town. Then I began to see again, to look with eyes of wonder, eyes of love, into the
eyes of my fellow-man. Perhaps because all the pride, the vanity, the arrogance with which I
had been puffed up fell away. Possibly my “lords and masters” had unwittingly done me a good
turn.
Possibly
….

Anyway, in the interim since I turned writer—a good thirty years—I have
hobnobbed with all varieties of man, from the highest to the lowest. I have known intimately
saints and seers as well as those whom we disdainfully refer to as “the dregs of humanity.” I
don’t know to which group I am the more indebted. But I do know this—if we were suddenly faced
with an overwhelming calamity, if I had to choose just one man with whom I would share the
rest of my life in the midst of chaos and destruction, I would pick that unknown Mexican peon
whom my friend Doner brought one day to clear the weeds in our garden. I no longer remember
his name, for he was truly without name.

He, more than any saint, was the truly selfless individual. He was also the
most handsome, in a spiritual sense. In behavior and appearance he was what the Christ would
be like, I imagine, if He were to appear again on earth. (Has He ever left it?) There was that
look in his eyes, and it never left him—not even in sleep, I would hazard—which Pookie
displays on occasion. He was a gem, of the human realm, for which we have ceased to search. A
gem
we tread upon unthinkingly, as we would a weed or a stone, whilst
hunting for uranium or some other currently “rare” mineral which will give us, idiots that we
are, priority over the rest of the human race in the race toward annihilation.

I had no way of communicating with this Mexican—my Spanish is nil—except by
looks and gestures. But that was no handicap. On the contrary, it was a boon. All that any man
could wish to communicate with another this “peon” communicated with his eyes. Whenever
Gilbert Neiman wished to tell me about “the goodness and the nobility of man,” he would talk
about the Mexicans. The Mexican Indians. He seemed to know them from way back. Indeed, his
going to Mexico, where he had intended to stay forever, was in the nature of a fulfillment,
fulfillment of some beautiful experience which had begun in a previous incarnation. I remember
so well how Gilbert, eloquent as could be when it came to Mexico and things Mexican, would
suddenly grow speechless, would stutter and stammer, then grow even more eloquently silent, in
trying to describe “his friend”—the one and only—Eusebio Celón.

“You don’t know,” he would say, “you have no idea, you can’t
possibly
imagine, what these people are like until you go there and live with them.”

I believed him then, I believe him even more today. All the grace, all the
dignity, all the tenderness and loving kindness of the people of these two continents seems to
be epitomized in the despised “Indio.”

And how did my good friend, who was a “wet-back,” naturally, come off after
three years of backbreaking labor and little pay in this glorious State of California? Did he
accumulate a small fortune (the bait we hold out to them) to bring back to his family below
the Rio Grande? Did he save enough, at least, to permit himself a month’s holiday with his
loved ones?

He returned as he came, with a torn shirt and a ragged coat, his pockets
empty, his shoes busted, his skin tanned a little deeper from exposure to wind and sun, his
spirit unquenchable but
bruised, grateful, let us proudly assume, for the
poor food he had been handed and for the lousy mattress he had been privileged to sleep on. He
had one treasure which he could produce as evidence of the rewards of sweat and toil: a
certificate for a cemetery plot which some smart aleck had sold him. How he would return to
occupy this plot, at the appointed time, nobody had explained to him. Nobody could. He will
never occupy it, we who sold it to him know. His place, gem that he is, is not in the Monterey
Cemetery but in the bed of a fevered river, in the ruins of an ancient civilization, in the
waste of a scorched earth.

It was at Anderson Creek that I completed the essay on Rimbaud,
*
which was born of an unsuccessful attempt to translate
A Season in Hell
. It was the
beginning of my own third or fourth “Season in Hell,” though at the time I wasn’t fully aware
of it. George Leite, from whom I had inherited the shack we occupied at the edge of a cliff,
had just published a fragment of this essay in
Circle
. It was the part dealing with
“analogies, affinities, correspondences and repercussions.”