America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (22 page)

OH! WE HAD plenty of good holidays in Salinas when I was growing up, Christmas and May Day and the like, but none of them could compete for quiet violence with a certain day in the late spring. Marble season would be over and top season well along toward boredom when suddenly in a night the roadside barn walls would blossom with tigers and elephants, with clowns and lovely equestriennes.

Our insides would begin to churn and we would put our tops away and stare into space. Then our parents were likely to give us a spring tonic, not knowing that we were simply trying to remember how a circus was. And we could not because the old year's circus was as vague as a dream.

We didn't sleep the night before the DAY. It was the rule that we could not get up before we heard the train. The circus train blew a different whistle than ordinary trains, a WHEE-OO—Whee-oo WHEE-OO! sound in the first dawn.

Before the third repeat we had leaped fully clothed from bed and slammed out of the house and were pounding down Stone Street toward the Depot. As we ran, streams and eddies of kids joined us. By the time we reached the Catholic Church we were a river of kids and as we broke around Castroville Street we had become a torrent. And there it was on the siding, flat cars of cages and Calliopes and baggage and ticket wagons, stock cars of horses and elephants, passenger cars for performers and all painted in heady circus colors, yellows and blues and reds.

How they ever got the big tops up with us underfoot I will never know. I remember the rings of hammer men and the waterfall of sledges raining down so that the stakes seemed to swim into the ground. I remember the smells of lion and goat and wolf and torn grass and the smell of coffee from the cookhouse tent. Some of us, the lucky ones, were allowed to help, water carrying, horse holding and even leading certain of the more amiable animals in the parade, and as though just doing it weren't enough, we were rewarded with breakfast in the cookhouse and a free pass to the show. No honor since has compared with that pass held high to the ticket taker, held so everyone could see.

I had a pony in those days, part Shetland and part Cayuse and no great shucks for looks as I realize now, and every year those lovely circus men tried to buy my pony from me and offered fantastic prices. This would be whispered about for weeks and conferred a kind of holiness on both the pony and on me. Kids would pay a small sum just to stroke my pony on the neck. I have often wondered what those circus men would have done if I had consented to sell.

The circus itself was a dream that afterwards went in and out of memory. When we came home in the evening green-faced and swollen with hot dogs and cotton candy, our parents automatically gave us a physic and put us to bed, and we were too hypnotized to resist.

But that didn't end it. In the weeks that followed our dogs got a stretch of training that nearly killed them. It was a smart tomcat that was not put in a bird cage for display. My pony wearily resisted my attempts to make her kneel. It took a long time to get over the circus. We couldn't decide whether to be clowns or equestrians or acrobats but there was not any question that we were called. The circus was our future. Any other profession was a tacky substitute.

Well, that's the way the circus got into our blood as individuals.

But the circus is a mass emotion and has been for longer than any single thing we know. The circus was old when Rome was new. Elephants and lions and trained Thessaly horses in silver harness moved through the narrow streets of Carthage and Nîmes and Arles and Rome before the birth of things we consider ancient.

In the procession of the Roman Triumph, after the glory of the conqueror and the slaves and the spoils and the rare and beautiful animals, the clowns tumbled, making fun of everything that had gone before. Even then the little dog wore an elephant's head and the house cat a lion's mane. The acts so funny now were funny then, the huge man in a tiny chariot, the stilt man, the unaware clown with water spurting from his ears, the parodies of kings and heroes all designed to say: “Don't get too big, because you're very close to funny.”

The circus may have been more brutal then than now but it was essentially the same circus. It has changed very little because people do not want it to change. It is our oldest and deepest-rooted entertainment.

And the reason is that the circus is change of pace—beauty against our daily ugliness, excitement against our boredom. The lion tamer and the acrobat are brave and clever against our cowardice and clumsiness and the clowns make our selfish tragedy seem funny. Every man and woman and child comes from the circus refreshed and renewed and ready to survive. What doctor can do as much?

A VERY WISE MAN writing recently about the emergence and development of our species suggests that the domestication of the dog was of equal importance with the use of fire to first man. Through association with a dog, man doubled his perceptions, and besides this the dog—sleeping at dawn-man's feet—let him get a little rest undisturbed by creeping animals. The uses of the dog change. One of the first treatises on dogs in English was written by an abbess or a prioress in a great religious house. She lists the ban dog, the harrier, the dog from Spain called spaniel and used for reclaiming wounded birds, the dogs of “venerie,” etc., and finally she says, “There been those smalle whyte dogges carried by ladys to draw the fleas away to theirselves.” What wisdom was here. The lap dog was not a decoration but a necessity.

A dog has, in our day, changed his function. Of course, we still have hounds used for the chase and greyhounds for racing, and the pointers, setters, and spaniels for their intricate professions, but in our total dog population these are the minority. Many dogs are used as decorations but by far the greatest number are a sop for loneliness. A man's or a woman's confidant. An audience for the shy. A child to the childless. In the streets of New York between seven and nine in the morning you will see the slow procession of dog and owner proceeding from street to tree to hydrant to trashbasket. They are apartment dogs. They are taken out twice a day and, while it is cliché, it is truly amazing how owner and dog resemble each other. They grow to walk alike, have the same set of head.

In America styles and dogs change. A few years ago the Airedale was most popular. Now it is the Cocker, but the Poodle is coming up. A thousand years ago I can remember when the Pug was everywhere.

In America we tend to breed out nonworking dogs to extremes. We breed Collies with their heads so long and narrow that they can no longer find their way home. The ideal Dachshund is so long and low that his spine sags. Our Dobermen are paranoid. We have developed a Boston Bull with a head so large that the pups can only be born by Caesareans.

It is not wise to mourn for the apartment dog. His lifespan is nearly twice that of the country dog. His boredom is probably many times greater. One day I got in a cab and gave the address of an animal store. The driver asked, “Is it a dog you're after? Because I can let you have a dog. I got dogs.”

“It's not a dog, but how is it you have dogs?”

“It's this way,” the cabbie said. “It's Saturday night in an apartment and a man and his wife were lapping up a scoop of gin. About midnight they get to arguing. She says, ‘Your damn dog. Who has to clean up after him and walk him and feed him, and you just come home and pat him on the head.' And the guy says, ‘Don't you run down my dog.' ‘I hate him,' she says. ‘O.K., pal,' he says, ‘if that's the way you want it. Come on, Spot,' and he and the dog hit the street. The guy sits on a bench and holds the mutt in his arms and cries and then the two of them go to a bar and the guy tells everybody there no dame could treat his pal that way. Well, pretty soon they close the bar and it's late and the liquor begins to wear off and the guy wants to go home. So he gets in the cab and gives the dog to the cabbie. It happens to me every Saturday night.”

 

I have owned some astonishing dogs. One I remember with pleasure was a very large English Setter. He saw things unknowable. He would bark at a tree by the hour, but only at one tree. In grape season he ate nothing but grapes which he picked off the vine, one grape at a time. In pear season he subsisted on windfall pears, but he would not touch an apple. Over the years he became more and more otherworldly. I think he finally came to disbelieve in people. He thought he dreamed them. He gathered all the dogs in the neighborhood and gave them silent lectures or sermons, and one day he focused his attention on me for a full five minutes and then he walked away. I heard of him from different parts of the state. People tried to get him to stay, but in a day or so he would wander on. It is my opinion that he was a seer and that he had become a missionary. His name was T-Dog. Long later, and a hundred miles away, I saw a sign painted on a fence which said “T-God.” I am convinced that he had transposed the letters of his last name and gone out into the world to carry his message to all the dogs thereof.

I have owned all kinds of dogs but there is one I have always wanted and never had. I wonder if he still exists. There used to be in the world a white, English Bull Terrier. He was stocky, but quick. His muzzle was pointed and his eyes triangular so that his expression was that of cynical laughter. He was friendly and not quarrelsome, but forced into a fight he was very good at it. He had a fine, decent sense of himself and was never craven. He was a thoughtful, inward dog, and yet he had enormous curiosity. He was heavy of bone and shoulder. Had a fine arch to his neck. His ears were sometimes cropped, but his tail never. He was a good dog for a walk. An excellent dog to sleep beside a man's bed. He showed a delicacy of sentiment. I have always wanted one of him. I wonder whether he still exists in the world.

MY ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked, “How much longer do I have to go to school?”

“About fifteen years,” I said.

“Oh! Lord,” he said despondently. “Do I have to?”

“I'm afraid so. It's terrible and I'm not going to try to tell you it isn't. But I can tell you this—if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing.”

“Did you find one?”

“I found three,” I said.

It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull and long school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. My first was a science and math teacher in high school, my second a professor of creative writing at Stanford and my third was my friend and partner, Ed Ricketts.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

My three had these things in common—They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell—they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious.

I shall speak only of my first teacher because in addition to the other things, she brought discovery.

She aroused us to shouting, bookwaving discussions. She had the noisiest class in school and she didn't even seem to know it. We could never stick to the subject, geometry or the chanted recitation of the memorized phyla. Our speculation ranged the world. She breathed curiosity into us so that we brought in facts or truths shielded in our hands like captured fireflies.

She was fired and perhaps rightly so, for failing to teach the fundamentals. Such things must be learned. But she left a passion in us for the pure knowable world and me she inflamed with a curiosity which has never left me. I could not do simple arithmetic but through her I sensed that abstract mathematics was very like music. When she was removed, a sadness came over us but the light did not go out. She left her signature on us, the literature of the teacher who writes on minds. I have had many teachers who told me soon-forgotten facts but only three who created in me a new thing, a new attitude and a new hunger. I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that high school teacher. What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.

I can tell my son who looks forward with horror to fifteen years of drudgery that somewhere in the dusty dark a magic may happen that will light up the years . . . if he is very lucky.

IT IS a rare writer in any language who has not thought long and longingly of Joan of Arc as a subject. At any given time there are four new plays about her. There are any number of approaches to the story. One man is concerned with whether her voices were real voices or the inwardness of a pubescent girl; another writer becomes concerned with her confession and retraction, her choice between her conviction and orthodoxy.

I have read most of the histories, testimonies, novels, and plays which concern Joan and her times, and I think I know why writers in all times find her story such a magnetic theme. There is of course the factor of universality. Anyone can find some part of himself in Joan's story, some corroboration of his convictions, no matter what they may be. The tremendous and disparate literature proves this. But I wonder whether there is not another and more basic quality which has not been stated because it is perhaps too obvious.