Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (9 page)

To my mind it is utterly unimportant whether Norman Mini becomes a recognized
writer or not. What is important is that such an American continues to be in our midst.

The man who could write like a breeze was Walker Winslow. Walker had written
several books, under various names, before coming to Big Sur. He had also written heaps of
poems. But it was not until he began his autobiographical novel,
If a Man Be Mad,
*
that he
found his true vein. Every day he wrote fifteen, twenty or thirty pages. He was at the machine
from early morn till sundown. He never touched a drop of liquor during the few months it took
him to finish this book. He drank huge quantities of coffee and smoked several packs of
cigarettes a day. He did a lot of rewriting too, mostly condensation. While writing the book
he received commissions to do other books. At one time, I remember, he was trying to write
three books at once.

But, just as with Norman, writing was a secondary affair. Walker’s forte was
people. Most of his life he had been a tramp, a bum, a hobo, a beachcomber. With the soul of a
saint. When he was not getting into trouble he was helping others. There were no lengths to
which he would not go to aid a man in distress: he was a natural crutch for the weak and the
afflicted. Writing books could only be in the nature of an interlude for Walker. He was not a
Gorky, though in another society, one more receptive, more tolerant, more “reverent” of
misfits and outcasts, he might have become another Gorky. Certainly Walker knew and understood
the bottom dog as well as any Gorky. He also knew and understood John Barleycorn as few
writers ever have. His problem was, and still is, not to master the literary craft but to
master his own abysmal hunger for limitless experience.

Another writer with a great sense of humanity whom I feel
impelled to say a word about is Jake Kenney. Jake is not a resident of Big Sur, but he is
limitrophe to it. He is a Russian at heart—Dostoevskian, in a large sense. Like so many
potentially great writers, Jake is unable to get a look-in with the publishers. I read the
manuscript of his first novel several times.
The Falling Sleep
he calls it. A
marvelous title, when one knows the book. The only title. In spite of its faults—minor
faults—the book has qualities one does not often encounter in American literature:
sensitivity, passion, brotherhood. Too warm-blooded, no doubt. Makes one laugh and weep in a
way that Americans resent, because they are ashamed to laugh and weep unrestrainedly.

Unfortunately, Jake Kenney is a capable man with his hands. He is a carpenter
and builder as well as writer. Most unfortunate. Because, failing to earn a living with the
pen, he can always earn it with his bare hands. And “we” who care not much how a man makes his
living will never know what we have lost. Besides, do we really want
The Falling
Sleep?
Or do we not prefer the “Put Me to Sleep” kind of literature?

Paul Rink, a near neighbor, is a similar “unfortunate.” Being a jack of all
trades, he’s even worse off. He too has written his novel, and it has gone a-begging—to over
twenty-five publishers. “Too good,” they say. “Too this, too that.” Foolishly, in my opinion,
he has rewritten his opus several times. One publisher will accept it if he will reduce the
first section of the book; another will take it if he will change the ending; a third will
“consider” it if he will develop this character, this incident, this that and this other.
Paul, believing them to be well-meaning, struggles to fit into the straitjacket—without being
untrue to himself. Hopeless task! One should never, never do as publishers request. Put your
manuscripts aside, write another and another and another. When they finally accept you, throw
the first one at them again. Then they will say: “Why didn’t you ever show us
this
work? It’s a masterpiece!” Editors frequently forget what they’ve read, or what they’ve
rejected.
Somebody else read it, not me, they will say. Or, “we had a
different policy then.” With publishers the climate is always changing. However, to tell a
writer who has yet to get his first book accepted that editors and publishers are idiotic and
as lacking in judgment as other mortals, that they are not interested in literature per se,
that their standards of value are as shifting as the sands, is useless.
Some where, some
how, some day
, reasons the author. Good! “Advance always!” as Rimbaud says.

Near the Little Sur River, in a windy cove—a bitch of a place!—Eric Barker, an
English poet, works as caretaker for the owner of a large cattle ranch.
*
The pay is meager, the
task light, the hours are his own. In the morning he takes a dip in the icy canyon stream, in
the afternoon in the sea. Between times he wards off fishermen, hunters, drunks—and rustlers,
presumably. Sounds divine, if only the wind didn’t blow steadily twenty-four hours of the day
nine months of the year.

Eric has been writing poetry, nothing but poetry, for twenty-five years. He is
a good poet. A modest, humble one, who never pushes himself. Men like John Cowper Powys and
Robinson Jeffers esteem his work. Not until a few months ago did Eric receive his first
recognition, in the shape of an award. It may be another twenty-five years before he receives
another award. Eric doesn’t seem to mind. He knows how to live with himself and with his
fellowman. When he gets an inspiration he puts it down on paper. If he doesn’t feel inspired
he doesn’t worry. He is a poet and he lives like a poet. Few writers can do it.

Hugh O’Neill is another poet. He lived at Anderson Creek for several years.
Lived on less than a shoestring, I might say. I never saw him other than serene. As a rule he
was silent; sometimes it was a grim silence he gave off, but usually it was pleasant, not
deadening. Until he came to Big Sur, Hugh O’Neill had never done a thing with his hands. He
was the scholarly type. Suddenly,
out of necessity no doubt, he discovered
that he could do all manner of work. He even hired himself out as carpenter, plumber, mason.
He made fireplaces for his neighbors; some worked, some didn’t. But they were all beautiful
and sturdy to behold. Then he took to gardening—maintained an enormous patch of vegetables,
meant for a single family, but sufficient to feed the entire colony at Anderson Creek. He took
to fishing and hunting. He made pottery. He painted pictures. He learned how to put patches in
his pants, darn his own socks, iron his clothes. Never have I seen a poet blossom into such a
useful creature as did Hugh O’Neill. And remain poor at the same time. Deliberately so. He
would say that he hated work. Yet there was no more active worker, no more industrious being,
than this same Hugh O’Neill. What he hated was the workaday world, work that was meaningless.
He preferred to starve rather than join up. And he could starve just as beautifully as he
could labor. He did it graciously, almost as if to prove that starving was a pastime. He
seemed to live on air. His walk too was a sort of walking on air. He was swift and
noiseless.

Like Harvey, he could expatiate on a book with all the charm, subtlety and
penetration of a professional lecturer. Being Irish, he could also twist a subject to
fantastic proportions. One had to go back and reread the novel he was describing to find out
how much of it was Hugh O’Neill’s and how much the author’s. He did the same with his own
stories—I mean stories out of his life. Each time he told them he gave them a new angle. The
best ones were about the war, about his days as a German prisoner. They were very much in the
tone and spirit of the man who wrote
Men in War:
Andreas Latzko. They stressed the
ridiculous—and the sublime-aspects which men reveal even in the worst situations. Hugh O’Neill
was always laughing at himself, at the predicaments he found himself in. As if they were
happening to someone else. Even in Germany, as a prisoner of war, ragged, hungry, wounded,
hardly able to see, he found life amusing, grotesque, ridiculous.
There
was not an ounce of hatred in him. He told of his humiliations almost as if he were sorry for
the Germans, sorry that they, being men and no more, were put in the position they were.

But Hugh O’Neill could never put these stories to paper. He had material
enough to make (at least) another great war novel. He always promised to write this book but
he never did. Instead he would write stories, essays, poems, none of them anything like the
yarns which captivated us. The war had marked him; it made ordinary life seem drab and
senseless. He was happy doing nothing of importance. He loved to idle his time away, and to me
it was a pleasure to watch him do it. Why should he write, after all? Would it not entrain the
same bedevilment which other pursuits land men in, the men who keep the wheels turning?

There was a period when he owned an Irish harp. It suited him perfectly. It
would have suited him even better could he have picked up his harp and wandered over the
earth, singing his chanties, telling his tales, repairing a fence here, building a walk there,
and so on. He was so light on his feet, so airy, so blithe, so absolutely unconcerned about
the work of the world! What a pity that ours is not a society which permits a man to squander
his days and rewards him—with a crust of bread and a thimbleful of whisky—for keeping his tail
clear of trouble and ennui.

Some take it easy and get there just the same, some belabor themselves and
make life hell for wife and children, some sweat it out, some have only to turn on the faucet
and let it pour out, some start and never finish, and some are finished before they start. In
the long run it doesn’t make much difference, I suppose. Certainly not to publishers, and even
less to the great reading public. If we don’t produce Gorkys, Pushkins and Dostoevskys we
produce Hemingways, Steinbecks and Tennessee Williamses. Nobody suffers. Only literature
suffers. Stendhal wrote his
Chartreuse de Parme
in less than sixty days; Goethe took
a lifetime to finish
Faust
. The comics and the Bible sell better than either of
these.

Now and then I hear from Georges Simenon, one of the most
prolific writers alive, and the best in his genre. When he gets ready to write another
book—the task of a few weeks—he notifies his friends that he will be obliged to neglect his
correspondence for a while. Often I think to myself how wonderful it would be to complete a
book in just a few months. How wonderful to notify all and sundry that you will be “off the
air” for a time!

But to get back to the slave coast…. One man who seemed to have no trouble
whatever turning it out was Rog Rogaway. Rogaway lived in the abandoned schoolhouse near
Krenkel Corners; he lived there by permission of Ben Bufano who, in turn, had received
permission from the authorities to use the place as a studio.

Rogaway was a tall, easygoing, sailorman type, with bones of rubber. He
suffered from a serious intestinal ailment which he had contracted as a result of being blown
up, along with his ship, by a submarine. He was so happy to receive the absurd pension which
gave him leisure to paint that I’m sure he wouldn’t have complained had his legs been blown
off. He was a fool about dancing and about painting. He cultivated a sort of “Shuffle off to
Buffalo” swing which, when combined with just the right (dirty) leer, gave him the look of
Priapus with a cannon cracker up his ass.

Rogaway turned out a finished canvas every day, sometimes two or three. None
ever seemed to give him satisfaction. Nevertheless he continued to turn them out day after
day, and faster and faster, convinced that one day he would strike oil. When he ran out of
canvas he took the ones that were a month old and painted over them. There was a gay, musical
quality to all his work. Perhaps his paintings were no more than exercises, but they were not
Swedish exercises.

The impressive thing about these “exercises” was where he practiced them. He
might have worked in the schoolhouse—it was large enough—but Rog had a wife and two children,
one an infant, and children drove him crazy. Bright and early every morning he disappeared
behind the schoolhouse to follow a hidden trail which led him, after a few hundred yards, to
what looked like an out-house.
This contraption which Rog had hastily
slapped together later served Bufano as a place of meditation. No one rambling through the
hills would ever have suspected that hidden in the brush was this den austerely decorated with
Chinese silk paintings, Tibetan scrolls, pre-Columbian figurines and so forth, which Bufano
had collected in his travels. Nor would the straggler ever dream that a painter, particularly
one the size of Rogaway, had fashioned such a cubicle to work in. Bufano, who is short, had to
make an opening in the wall, through which he stuck his feet, before he could stretch out full
length to take a nap.

Even now I can see Rogaway in the fever of excitement which always seized him
when tackling a fresh canvas. To take a squint at his work he was obliged to back out the
doorway. Stepping inside again, he could see nothing but black spots. Now and then, backing
out too ecstatically, he would trip on a strip of greasewood and tumble ass backwards into the
brambles and nettles. He never bothered to brush himself off: the sting and prickle helped
speed up his tempo. Rogaway’s one and only concern was to produce the maximum before the sun
lost its strength.

Evenings he relaxed. If there was no one to share the wine and the music, he
drank and danced by himself. Wine was bad for his complaint; he drank it because there was
nothing better he could afford. It required only a cupful to put him in the mood. Sometimes he
danced without moving from the spot, just shaking his rubbery members like a deboned sardine.
At times he disarticulated so perfectly that he resembled an octopus in the throes of
ecstasy.

Rogaway’s obsession was to find a still warmer climate, an ocean you could
bathe in, and a rate of exchange that would permit him to live even more cheaply than he did
at Big Sur. He got off to Mexico one day, stayed a year or so, switched to Majorca, then to
the south of France, then Portugal. Of late he has been living—and painting of course!—in
Taos, which is certainly far from any ocean, has a mean climate in winter, and is overrun with
tourists.
Perhaps Rog has persuaded the Indians to let him join them in
their snake dances. That’s the only reason I can think of for such a move.