Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (22 page)

Or there is a great soul like Dr. Leon Bernstein who will, if I ask it, take a
plane to visit a poverty-stricken devil who is in need of treatment, and not only will he do
everything that is needed (gratis) but he will see to it that the poor devil is provided for
during the long period of convalescence.

Is it any wonder that John Cowper Powys is forever extolling the Jews and the
Negroes? Without the latter, as I have often remarked, America would be a joyless, immaculate,
superabundant museum of monotonous specimens labelled “the white race.” Without the Jews,
charity would begin at home and stay there. Every artist, in America certainly, must be
indebted a hundred times over to his Jewish friends. And indebted not for material services
only. Think,
chers confrères
, who is the first among your friends to give
encouragement, to read your work, look at your paintings, show your work around,
buy
your work (on the instalment plan, if necessary).
Buy
it, I say, and not beg off with
the lame excuse—“If only I could afford it!” Who lends you money to carry on, even when he has
no money to spare? Who else but the Jew will say: “I know where to borrow it for you, don’t
you do a thing!” Who is it thinks to send you food, clothing, and the other vital necessities
of daily life? No, the artist—in America, at least—cannot
avoid coming
into contact with the Jew, becoming friends with him, imitating him, imbibing from him the
courage, the patience, the tolerance, the persistence and the tenacity which this people has
in its blood, because, to be an artist is to lead a dog’s life, and most Jews begin life that
way. Others do too, certainly, but they seem to forget it as they rise in life. The Jew seldom
forgets. How can he, living in the midst of a drama which is endlessly repeated?

And now I think of the letters which come regularly from Palestine, from Lilik
Schatz, son of Boris, who has become my brother-in-law. Lilik lived for several years at
Krenkel Corners, which is a sunken hollow midway between Partington Ridge and Anderson Creek.
While living in Berkeley he made a trip to Big Sur one day expressly to induce me to do a
silk-screen book with him, which we did, after much labor and struggle, and from scratch.
*
This
book,
Into the Night Life
, the conception, the making, and its sale (which remains
steadily at zero), was the beginning of a great friendship. It was only after he had returned
to his home in Jerusalem that I got to know his wife’s sister, Eve, and married her. If I
hadn’t found Eve I would be a dead duck today.

But the letters…. To begin with, know ye all that Lilik, the son of Boris, who
was the son of Bezalel as built the Ark, has the extraordinary gift of being able to talk in
any tongue. Not that he is a linguist, though he does know half a dozen languages moderately
well, including his native Hebrew. It is not knowledge of a language that he needs in order to
communicate with his neighbor, be that man a Turk, an Arab, a Ceylonese, a Peruvian of the
Andes, a pygmy or a Chinese mandarin. Lilik’s procedure is to start talking at once—with
tongue, hands, feet and ears—explicating mimetically as he goes along by grunts and squeals,
dance steps, Indian signs, Morse code and so on. It’s all sustained and borne along by an
overflowing current of sympathy, empathy, identity, or whatever you wish to call that
fundament of good will, good nature,
brotherhood, sisterhood, divine
benevolence and understanding which is his special heritage. Yes, Lilik can talk to a stone
wall and get a response from it. Some of the living tombstones I have seen him plead with,
when he desperately needed to sell a painting or an
objet d’art
from his father’s
collection, were more deaf, more impenetrable, than any stone wall. There are human beings, as
we all know, who freeze at the mere mention of a painting for sale. There are some who turn to
stone whenever there is the slightest hint that they may be called upon to relinquish so much
as a moldy crust of bread.

If Lilik had a rough time of it in Big Sur, he’s having an equally rough time
of it in his home town, Jerusalem. But his letters never sound that way. No, Lilik
begins—invariably—with himself seated on the terrace of a noisy cafe and some poor devil
begging to shine his shoes or sell him a rug which he doesn’t need. (It varies … sometimes
it’s the dessicated toenail of a saint that’s being offered to him.) Even if it’s raining, the
sun is always out (in his heart) and he, the professor
(cher mâitre, cher ami)
, is in
particularly fine fettle, either because he is just about to tackle a new series of oils or
because he has just ended a bout of work. His letters start with the place, the moment, the
immediate thought, the way he feels—whether short of breath, constipated, or delighted with
his warm beer. In a few lines he manages to evoke the atmosphere of the crowd, the market
place, the cemetery hard by, the waiters running to and fro, the peddlers and mendicants
wheedling and whining, the chickens being plucked (by toothless hags), the mountebanks
performing their stunts, the smell of food, grime, sweat and drink, the clove he just
swallowed by mistake, yesterday’s delicious garlic (we used to airmail him a clove of garlic
at a time), the juicy colors which he will squeeze on to his palette the moment he gets home.
Und so weiter
.

Every other word is mispelled, whether written in English, German, Russian or
French. It would take a mental acrobat to deliberately distort, or transmogrify, words the way
Lilik does unwittingly.
Only a homely word like fart comes off intact, so
to say. And there is lots of farting in his jubilant epistles—on his own part and on the part
of those around him. The Israelis apparently do not blush or hasten to excuse themselves when
they “break wind,” as we say in polite literature.

“At this moment,” he will write, “we are having trouble again with the Arabs,
or the Arabs with us.” Homeward bound, he may have to duck into a doorway several times in
order to escape stray bullets. Every time he leaves the house his wife, Louise, wonders if he
will come back dead or alive. But Lilik, from all accounts, doesn’t give much heed to these
goings on; it’s all part of the daily routine. What interests him, what makes him
chuckle
—there’s a word he could never succeed in spelling if he went to school for
three solid years!—is the news from the outside world. Perhaps getting it in Hebrew makes it
appear even more complicated than it does to us. From that sunny café (even if it’s raining)
where he sits leisurely sipping his warm beer, leisurely nibbling at a piece of stale cheese,
the world outside seems what it truly is—absolutely cockeyed. Sure, he says, we may be having
our troubles with the Arabs—he never says “with the bloody Arabs”—but what about Formosa, what
about China, Indonesia, Russia, Japan, North Africa and South Africa, West Germany and East
Germany, and so on, meaning up and down, back and forth, round and about the grisly gridiron
on which the “civilized” nations of the world are matching wits, stoking fires, pushing each
other around, shoving, grabbing, scrambling, lying to one another and insulting one another,
jeering or menacing, patching up coalitions here, breaking down alliances there, disarming
some nations and arming others to the teeth, talking peace and progress and preparing to
murder
en masse
, promising this group of devil dogs the latest models in all-out
destruction while cautiously limiting others to obsolete fleets, tanks, bombers, rifles,
machine guns, hand grenades and flame-throwers, which were once effective in “saving
civilization” but are now scarcely more destructive than Fourth of July firecrackers, and
firecrackers may soon be eliminated altogether, even for Fourth of
July
celebrations, because they are dangerous for children to handle, whereas atom bombs, when kept
neatly in stockpiles, wouldn’t hurt a fly. As he slyly puts it, quoting Professor Slivovitz,
“the analects of logistics, when fed through I.B.M. machines, add up to little more than
matzoth balls.” What Lilik implies, talking through his dummy professor, is that the voice of
insanity can be heard above the evening call to prayer. What we need, as the professor would
say, are not more amplifiers, or better amplifiers, but reductors, filters, screens, which
will enable us to distinguish between the maudlin ravings of a statesman and the cooing of a
turtle dove…. I must leave him, dear Lilik, in the peace and serenity of four in the afternoon
when bullfighters meet their death and diplomats stab us in the back over their atom bomb
cocktails.

(So you grew a peenus, Mrs. Feitelbaum?
Nu
, what else is new?)

Other voices, other rooms; other worries, other microbes. I don’t know why,
but speaking of the lack of garlic brings to mind the image of that forlorn Basque girl whom I
found standing on the road outside our house one late afternoon in winter, her thin, busted
shoes waterlogged, her hands numb with cold, too timid to knock at the door but determined to
see me if she had to stand there in the rain all night.

What was her urgent mission? To inquire if I were acquainted with Nietzsche’s
philosophy of “peace and disarmament” as given in the second volume of
Thoughts Out of
Season
. The poor girl, what she needed was nourishment, not more “peace and
dismemberment.” I brought her in, sat her by the fire, dried her skirt and stockings, and had
my wife throw a good meal into her. Then, after I had listened to as much as I could take for
one evening, I drove her down to Emil White’s and begged him to put her up for the night and
see that she got a lift in the morning. (She was headed for L.A. No money, no car. All the
nuts and crackpots seem headed for L.A. And they all travel light, like the birds of the
air.)

Finding the atmosphere congenial at Anderson Creek—the old
story!—she lingered on for a week before hitting the road. She offered Emil a lay before
leaving, to show her gratitude, but he wasn’t tempted. Too much “peace and dismemberment.”

Three or four weeks later I received a letter from her—she was now in
Montana—giving me a detailed account of the troubles which a certain tribe of Indians was
having with our Federal government and conveying an earnest message from the head of the tribe
to come immediately so that I might be informed at first hand of the complicated situation.
She stated that they, the headmen of the tribe, would endeavor to persuade me to act as
intermediary for them in Washington, D. C. I
of course
immediately chartered a
private plane and, flying low over Duck Creek, impressed into my service a secretary,
interpreter and full-fledged stenotypist.

Lying awake that night, I thought of a humorous episode which took place in
that make-believe world of Washington, D. C., shortly after my return from Europe. Someone in
the upper circles, whose acquaintance I had made by hazard in another part of the world, had
invited me to a luncheon at a famous club in the heart of our spotless capital. I thought I
would be dining with a few of his intimate friends, the usual devotees of “tropical”
literature. As one guest after another swept through the revolving door, I noticed that they
all had under their arms packages which looked suspiciously alike. It also seemed to me that
these guests were one and all men of standing. They were, indeed, as I soon learned. Each one
was an official from those departments of the government whose duty it is to be on the lookout
for, track down, and bring to just punishment the culprits who deal in pornographic
literature. As I was at that time the chief culprit in the government’s eye, these
representatives of truth and enlightenment were paying me a signal honor in bringing the
offending books to be autographed. I must say that they all seemed like good fellows well met,
not one of them deranged or undermined, damaged or deteriorated, by my “filthy” books. After
apologies for being engaged in such unclean work—apologies given sincerely and accepted
sincerely—they pressed
me, each in turn, to think of something “original”
to inscribe above my signature.

When I thought I had signed them all, an official more imposing looking than
the others unwrapped a special package and, dumping a few copies (of this same “tropical”
literature), said to me in low tones: “This one, if you will be so kind, I would like
inscribed to Secretary So-and-So.” When I had faithfully done as bidden, he murmured in an
even lower tone of voice: “And this one is for President So-and-So.” As he reached for the
third copy, I said to myself: “This must be for his Most Holy Eminence, the Pope of Rome!” But
it wasn’t. It was for one of the nonentities in the Cabinet. The last one he asked me to
inscribe, always with the same polite “if you will be so kind!”, was destined for the
Ambassador from Soviet Russia. It developed that this emissary had requested his wife, who was
then visiting Washington, to bring back the most obscene work of mine she could lay hands on.
She was to bring it back in person, not entrust it to the diplomatic pouch. At this point, my
gorge rising, I excused myself and went to the men’s room to throw up. I succeeded only in
bringing up some bile….

Not a word of all this is true, of course. Just the ravings of “a Brooklyn
boy.”

Speaking of this same “tropical” literature, I must add a word about the
filthy, tattered, chewed up copies which are sent me from time to time by fans who, in the
course of dumping antiquated phonographs and water pistols upon the unsuspecting aborigines of
the hinterlands, make occasional visits to bordels and other “slaughterhouses of love” in
order, no doubt, to wash away their sins. Since living here in Big Sur I must have received at
least a dozen copies of the banned books which these nonchalant marauders filched from the
private libraries which are (naturally) to be found in these unorthodox retreats. One wonders
who the readers are—the madam, the girls, or the clients? Whoever had read the copies sent me
had read them attentively, assiduously and often
with a critical eye.
Some corrected my spelling, some improved my punctuation, some added phrases here and there
which would have thrilled a James Joyce or a Rabelais by their inventiveness. Others, under
the influence of drink, no doubt, littered the margins with epithets such as I have never seen
anywhere, neither in our own public toilets nor in the toilets of French newspapers, where
invention and ribaldry run riot.