Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (21 page)

With the letters,
bien entendu
, arrive manuscripts, beautifully
printed poems, books of indescribable variety, checks, wedding and funeral announcements (why
not divorce notices also?), photos of newborn infants (the spawn of my fans), theses (dozens
of them), lecture programs, excerpts from books, clippings, reviews in a dozen different
languages, requests for photos or autographs, plans for a new world, appeals for funds, pleas
to help stop the execution of this or that innocent one, pamphlets and monographs ranging in
subject matter from dietary cures to the true nature of Zoroastrianism.

It is assumed that I am vitally interested in all these subjects, projects and
proposals. What I am most interested in, naturally, is checks. If I see an envelope which
bears promise of containing a check, that is the one I open first. Next in order come those
which bear the postmark of exotic countries. The ones I put away to read some rainy day are
the thick envelopes which I know in
advance contain abortive stories,
essays or poems which I am generally told that I may consign to the waste basket if I
choose—the sender never has the courage to do this himself! On the other hand, a real fat one
from someone I adore I may save until I go to the sulphur baths, there to enjoy it in peace
and quiet. But how rare are these in comparison with the slew of crap which pours in day in
and day out!

Sometimes it is a very brief letter, in an exquisite or else an execrable
hand, which will “send” me. It is usually from a foreigner who is also a writer. A writer I
have never heard of before. The short letters which exasperate me are from ultralucid spirits
to whom I have presented a knotty, complicated, usually legal or ethical, problem, and who are
adept in cutting through fog and grease with three or four scimitar-like lines which always
leave me exactly where I was before posing the problem. The type I have in mind is the
judicial type. The better the lawyer, the bigger the judge, the briefer and more bewildering
the reply.

Let me say at the outset that the most vapid letter writers are the British.
Even their handwriting seems to reveal a paucity of spirit which is glaring. From a
calligraphic standpoint, they appear to be crouching behind their own shadows—skulking like
poltroons. They are congenitally incapable of coming out with it, whatever it may be that
impelled them to write me. (Usually I discover that it is about themselves, their spiritual
poverty, their crushed spirits, their lowered horizon.) There are exceptions, to be sure.
Splendid, remarkable exceptions. As epistolary virtuosi, no one can equal Lawrence Durrell,
the poet, or John Cowper Powys, the returned Welshman. Durrell’s letters awaken the same sure
delight which comes with viewing a Persian miniature or a Japanese wood-block print. I am not
thinking of the physical aspect of his letters, though this too plays a part, but the language
itself. Here is a happy master of prose whose style is pure and limpid, whose lines sing,
bubble, effervesce, whether writing a letter or writing a treatise. From wherever he sits
penning his letter there is wafted the fragrance,
the wonder and the
eternality of landscape, to which is added the spice of fable and myth, of legend and
folklore, of customs, ritual and architecture. He has written me, Lawrence Durrell, from such
places as Cos, Patmos, Knossus, Syracuse, Rhodes, Sparta, Delphi, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem,
Cyprus. The very names of these stopping places make my mouth water. And he has put them all
in his books and in his poems….

As for “Friar John,” as Powys sometimes styles himself, the very look of his
letters puts me in ecstasy. He probably writes with a pad on his knee, a pad which is pivoted
on invisible ball bearings. His lines flow in a labyrinthian curve which permits them to be
read upside down, swinging from a chandelier or climbing a wall. He is always exalted. Always.
Trifles become monumental. And this despite the fact that he has lost the use of one eye, has
no teeth to chew with, and until fairly recently—he is now in his eighties—suffered
unremittingly from gastric or duodenal ulcers. The oldest of all my correspondents (excepting
Al Jennings), he is also the youngest and the gayest, the most liberal, the most tolerant, the
most enthusiastic of all. Like William Blake, I feel certain that he will die singing and
clapping his hands.

Few are they who are able to write freely and effortlessly about anything and
everything—as Chesterton and Belloc did. The name of the sender usually apprises me of the
nature of the contents of a letter. One writes perpetually about his ailments, another about
his financial difficulties, another about his domestic problems, another about his run-ins
with publisher or dealer; one guy is hepped on pornography and obscenity, can never get off
the subject; another talks only about Rimbaud or about William Blake; another about the
Essenes; another about the stratospheric complexities of Indian metaphysics; another about
Rudolf Steiner or the “masters” in the Himalayas; some are Dianetic bloodhounds, others Zen
enthusiasts; some write only of Jesus, Buddha, Socrates and Pythagoras. You might suppose the
latter breed to be stimulating minds. On the contrary, they are the dullest, the windiest,
the dryest of all. Genuine “gaseous vertebrates.” They are only surpassed
in dullness by the nimble wits who are always ready to relay the latest joke overheard at the
office or in a public toilet.

The letters that really set me up for a few days are the “isotopes” which come
by carrier pigeon—from cranks, freaks, nuts and plain lunatics. What a splendid insight into
an author’s life we would have if such missives were collected and published occasionally.
Whenever a celebrated author dies there is a stampede to unearth the correspondence exchanged
between him and other world-wide celebrities. Sometimes these make good reading, often not. As
a devotee of French literary weeklies, I often find myself reading snatches of correspondence
between men like Valéry and Gide, for example, and wondering all the while why I am so
sleepy.

Some of those I roughly classify as “nuts” are not wacky at all but eccentric,
raffish, perverse and, being genuine solipsists, all of them, of course at odds with the
world. I find them most humorous when they are pathetically whining about the cruelty of fate.
This may sound malicious, but it is a fact that nothing is more hilarious to read about than
the troubles of a person who is “somehow” always in trouble. What seem like mountains to this
type are always molehills to us. A man who can enlarge on the tragedy of a hangnail, who can
elaborate on it for five and six pages, is a comedian from heaven sent. Or a man who can take
your work apart with hammer and tong, analyze it to nothingness, and hand you the missing
members in an old-fashioned
bidet
which he normally uses for serving spaghetti.

There was one sly coyote who used to write me direct from the asylum, a chap
to whom in a moment of weakness I had sent a photograph and who for weeks thereafter bombarded
me with letters ten, twenty, thirty pages long, in pencil, crayon and celery stalks—always
about my supposed kidney trouble. He had noticed the pouches under my eyes (an inheritance
from Franz Josef on the paternal side) and he had deduced that I was destined for a speedy
end.
Unless
I followed his recommendations for the care
and
preservation of the bladder, which required a number of instalments to elucidate. The regimen
he prescribed began with physical exercises of a highly unorthodox character and were to be
performed without the slightest deviation six times a day, one of these times being in the
middle of the night. Any one of these exercises would have tied the perfect gymnast into a
sailor’s knot. The exercises were to be accompanied by dietary feats which only a madman could
think up. For example….

“Eat only the stem of the spinach plant, but grind first with a pestle, then
mix in chickweed, parsley, dandelion that has gone to seed, nutmeg and the tail of any rodent
which has not been domesticated.

“Eschew all meats except the flesh of the guinea pig, the wild boar, the
kangaroo (now put up in tins), the onager of Asiatic origin—not the European variety!—the
muskrat and the garter snake. All small birds are good for the bladder, excepting the finch,
the dart and the miner bird.”

He counseled strongly against standing on one’s head, which he described as an
atavistic praxis of supernatural origin. Instead, he recommended walking on all fours,
particularly over precipitous terrain. He thought it advisable, nay indispensable, to nibble
between meals, particularly to nibble minute particles of caraway seeds, sunflower seeds,
watermelon seeds, or even gravel and bird seed. I was not to take much water, nor tea, coffee,
cocoa and tisanes, but to drink as much whiskey, vodka, gin as I could—a teaspoonful at a
time. All liqueurs were taboo, and sherry, no matter what the origin, was to be shunned as one
would a witch’s brew. He explained in a footnote that he had to be stringent in this regard
because, after years of research (in a laboratory, supposedly) he had discovered that sherry,
however and wherever manufactured, contained traces of the arnica root, liverwort and henbane,
all poisonous to the human organism though rarely deleterious when given to convicts in the
death-cell or to micro-organisms employed in approved formulae for the making of antibiotics.
Even if I were
at the point of death, I was not to resort to any of the
sulfa drugs, penicillin or any of the allied miracle drug family based on mud, urine and
fungus.

Aside from the rapidity with which time flies, unbelievably so!, there is
another aspect of life at Big Sur which always stupefies me,
viz
., the amount of
trash which accumulates daily. The trash has to do with my correspondents. For, in addition to
photographs, theses, manuscripts and so on which accompany the letters, come articles of
clothing, stationery, talismans and amulets, albums of records, rare coins, rubbings
(frottages)
, medallions, ornamental trays, Japanese lanterns and Japanese
gimcrackery, art supplies, catalogues and almanacs, statuettes, seeds from exotic blooms,
exquisite tins of cigarettes, neckties galore, hand-winding phonographs, carpet slippers from
Jugoslavia, leather pantouffles from India, pocketknives with multiple accessories, cigarette
lighters (none that ever work!), magazines, stock market reports, paintings (huge ones
sometimes, which cost time and money to return), Turkish and Greek pastries, imported candies,
rosaries, fountain pens, wines and liqueurs, occasionally a bottle of Pernod, pipes which I
never smoke (but never cigars!), books of course, sometimes complete sets, and food: salami,
lachs, smoked fish, cheeses, jars of olives, preserves, jams, sweet and sour pickles, corn
bread (the Jewish variety), and now and then a bit of ginger. There is hardly a thing I need
which my correspondents cannot supply me with. Often, when short of cash, they send me postage
stamps—filched from the till, no doubt. The children also receive their share of gifts, from
toys of all kinds to delicious sweets and exquisite items of wearing apparel. Whenever I make
a new friend in some outlandish part of the world I invariably remind him to send the children
something “exotic.” One such, a student in Lebanon, sent me the Koran in Arabic, a diminutive
volume in fine print, which he urged me to teach the youngsters when they came of age.

One can easily see, therefore, why we always have plenty with
which to start a fire. Why we always have enough paper, cardboard and twine to wrap books
and parcels. In the old days, when I had to walk up and down the hill, the gift business
presented a problem. Now, with a Jeep station wagon, I can haul a cartload if need be.

Certain individuals who write me regularly never fail to repeat like a
refrain—“Be sure to let me know if you need anything. If I don’t have it or can’t get it, I
know someone who can and will. Don’t hesitate to call on me—for anything!” (Only Americans
write this way. Europeans are more conservative, so to speak. As for the Russians—the exiled
ones—they will offer you heaven too.) In this group there are certain individuals who by any
standard of measurement are exceptional. One is a radio operator for an air line, another is a
biochemist who runs a laboratory in Los Angeles, another is a student of Greek parentage,
another is a young script writer from Beverly Hills. When a package comes from V., the radio
operator, I am apt to find literally anything in it, barring an elephant. The main item in the
package is always carefully wrapped in wads of newspaper (newspapers from India, Japan,
Israel, Egypt, anywhere he happens to be at the time) together with French, German and Italian
illustrated weeklies. In the French weeklies I am always certain to find at least one text on
a subject which I happen to be interested in at that moment. It’s as if he divined my need!
Anyway, sandwiched in and around the precious object he has sent will be Turkish delight,
fresh dates from the Orient, sardines from Portugal, smoked Japanese oysters and other little
delicacies he thought up at the last minute. … F., the laboratory man, when shipping
typewriter paper, carbon or ribbons that I am in need of, never fails to include a newfangled
pen or pencil, a bottle of extra-ultra vitamins, a jar of lachs, a huge salami and a loaf or
two of genuine corn bread, the one and only bread, as far as I am concerned, and now getting
to be as scarce, and almost as expensive, as sturgeon. He would send sweet butter, too, if it
traveled well…. K. and M., the other two, always offer to type my scripts or get things
printed for me. If I
ask for one or two tubes of water colors they send
me a year’s supply, to say nothing of blocks of excellent water-color paper. K. used to keep
his grandmother busy knitting socks and sweaters for me—and making loukoumi for the
children.

Some, like Dante Z., render service by doing research work for me. Dante will
go through the thickest tomes and give me a summary of the contents, or track down a buried
passage which, at the moment, I deem important to have on tap in my files, or translate
difficult passages from obscure works, or find out if such and such an author wrote such and
such a work and why, or dig into ancient medical treatises for data which I may never use but
which I like to have on hand in the event that I engage in dispute with some learned ass.