America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (5 page)

Being born in Salinas, I do not recall as a child ever using the name San Francisco. She was The City, and I guess by that we meant all cities, which isn't a bad evaluation for a kid.

My first knowledge of The City was derived from my Uncle Joe Hamilton, who came from King City and ascended the Acropolis to work on the old San Francisco Wasp. At least that's what he said. He also said he had sat in the chairs once occupied by Mark Twain and Bret Harte. I was a little kid then and I learned The City from Uncle Joe on his infrequent visits.

I figure that Julius Caesar was stabbed near the arched entrance of the old Ferry Building, that Market Street led under the Arch of Titus, past the Forum which was of course the Palace Hotel, and went thence up the Capitoline or Nob Hill. It was obvious that Joan of Arc was burned in Union Square with her eyes fixed on the Fairmont, that Moses went up Twin Peaks to receive the Tables of the Law. You may understand that through my uncle's star-dusted eyes, I knew The City quite well before I ever went there.

My second level did not diminish the first although it was different. My mother was a lady with a high church attitude toward culture. She always knew what she liked and, to a surprising degree, what she liked turned out to be art. As a medium-sized kid I was taken to The City to be blooded with culture.

Music in Salinas was George Rowling on piano and his nice sister working away on a sweet and sour violin and never getting it sawed through, plus Joe Conner singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “The Rosary.” You must admit it was pretty heady to fall without preparation into Caruso, Melba, Tetrazzini, Scotti and the rest of that fantastic band of Archangels. And then a little later I saw, heard and felt Eleonora Duse and even though she played Ghosts in Italian, it didn't matter. Even at that age it seemed to me that she brought something to the theater that was lacking in our seasonal Chautauqua or the Salinas High School's version of Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh. There was no conflict of interests. Salinas was Salinas but The City was magic.

My third San Francisco came to me when I was going to Stanford. I was very broke and couldn't indulge in as much sweet-scented sin as I wished, but what I did manage to chisel in on was in San Francisco. Who needed Paris or the silken sewers of Rome when there were Bush Street apartments and the Pleasure Domes of Van Ness Avenue? Much later I found Pigalle and the glitter-works of the Right Bank kind of salt-less by comparison.

Finally, when I was what we used to call educated I moved up to San Francisco for my tour of duty as an intellectual bohemian. I don't remember all the places I lived in but they were many and they all had one thing in common, they were small and they were cheap. I remember a dark little attic on Powell Street. It was in the best tradition with unsheathed rafters and pigeons walking in and out of a small dormer window. Then there was a kind of cave in North Beach completely carpeted wall to wall with garlic. The rest, in my memory, were small pads whose only charm lay in cheapness.

We of that period might, or should have been called the Unfortunate Generation because we didn't have a Generation nor the sense to invent one. The Lost Generation, which preceded us, had become solvent and was no longer lost. The Beat Generation was far in the future. But we did have one thing they had. We were just as broke as they were, and we hated it just as much, and we gloried in it insofar as we were able. An acquaintance with money was fair game. We tried to trade our dubious talents for love and understanding and amazingly enough sometimes we succeeded. We pounded away at our deathless prose and even worse poetry, but if we had ever tried to read any of it aloud in a bar we would have been given the quickest A and C on record. Bars were for drinking, fighting, arguing and assignation, not poetry.

But in other ways we didn't let the side down. We lived on sardines and buns and doughnuts and coffee in the best tradition. Now and then we got sick and didn't know that what we had was a touch of scurvy. . . . Meanwhile I walked the streets absorbing life, yearned passionately toward the sidewalk flower stands, made friends with some dubious characters and was rejected by others. I even took jobs without shame, for I was ever a maverick. I did common labor at which I was very good, tried door-to-door selling at which I was lousy, worked in department stores during holidays, never enough though to lose my standing as free spirit and enlightened bum.

And what a place for it. My God! How beautiful it was and I knew then how beautiful. Saturday night with five silver dollars laughing and clapping their hands in your pocket. North Beach awakening with lights in a misty evening. Perhaps a girl with you, but if not then, surely later. Dinner at the Cafe Auvergne! I don't remember its real name but I remember the long tables clad in white oilcloth, the heaped baskets of sour bread, the pots de chambre of beautiful soup du jour, then fish and meat, fruit, cheese, coffee, 40 cents. With wine, and that means lots of wine, 50 cents.

And after dinner to the shining streets again with more wine to carry in your hand, superior wine not rot gut, a half gallon 38 cents. And then a night of Bacchic holiness, love perhaps behind a bush, and a streetcar ride to the Beach and lying breathless and dry-mouthed in the shelter of a rock while the fog-dancing dawn came up over you. How innocent we were and how clever, for we put up and took down our cynicisms like shutters.

And then, hungover and happy, back to the secret room with narrow bed, straight chair, typewriter and naked electric bulb with two sheets of copy paper pinned around it to shield the eyes. In such places we learned our trade, or tried to. We had to. Jobs were hard to get. Magazines didn't want our stories. Publishers were leery of first novels and rightly so. I wish they had been leerier of some of mine. No one ever offered me a job in advertising or motion pictures. I wonder whether I would have refused. I'll never know, but I suspect that I would have jumped at it—temporarily, of course, as they all do. It is true that we learned our trade because there were no better offers but we learned it in the magic heaped on the hills of San Francisco. And you know what it is? It's a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.

Ask anyone about San Francisco and the odds are that he'll tell you about himself and his eyes will be warm and inward—remembering.

SURE I remember the Nineteen Thirties, the terrible, troubled, triumphant, surging Thirties. I can't think of any decade in history when so much happened in so many directions. Violent changes took place. Our country was modeled, our lives remolded, our Government rebuilt, forced to functions, duties and responsibilities it never had before and can never relinquish. The most rabid, hysterical Roosevelt-hater would not dare to suggest removing the reforms, the safeguards and the new concept that the Government is responsible for all its citizens.

Looking back, the decade seems to have been as carefully designed as a play. It had beginning, middle and end, even a prologue—1929 gave contrast and tragic stature to the ensuing ten years.

I remember '29 very well. We had it made (I didn't but most people did). I remember the drugged and happy faces of people who built paper fortunes on stocks they couldn't possibly have paid for. “I made ten grand in ten minutes today. Let's see—that's eighty thousand for the week.”

In our little town bank presidents and track workers rushed to pay phones to call brokers. Everyone was a broker, more or less. At lunch hour, store clerks and stenographers munched sandwiches while they watched the stock boards and calculated their pyramiding fortunes. Their eyes had the look you see around the roulette table.

I saw it sharply because I was on the outside, writing books no one would buy. I didn't have even the margin to start my fortune. I saw the wild spending, the champagne and caviar through windows, smelled the heady perfumes on fur-draped ladies when they came warm and shining out of the theaters.

Then the bottom dropped out, and I could see that clearly too because I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss.

I remember how the Big Boys, the men in the know, were interviewed and re-interviewed. Some of them bought space to reassure the crumbling millionaires: “It's just a natural setback.” “Don't be afraid—buy—keep buying.” Meanwhile the Big Boys sold and the market fell on its face.

Then came panic, and panic changed to dull shock. When the market fell, the factories, mines, and steelworks closed and then no one could buy anything, not even food. People walked about looking as if they'd been slugged. The papers told of ruined men jumping from buildings. When they landed on the pavement, they were really ruined. The uncle of one of my friends was a very rich millionaire. From seven millions he dropped to two millions in a few weeks, but two millions cash. He complained that he didn't know how he was going to eat, cut himself down to one egg for breakfast. His cheeks grew gaunt and his eyes feverish. Finally he shot himself. He figured he would starve to death on two millions. That's how values were.

Then people remembered their little bank balances, the only certainties in a treacherous world. They rushed to draw the money out. There were fights and riots and lines of policemen. Some banks failed; rumors began to fly. Then frightened and angry people stormed the banks until the doors clanged shut.

I felt sorry for Mr. Hoover in the White House. He drew on his encyclopedic arsenal of obsolescence. His gift for ineptness with words amounted to genius. His suggestion that the unemployed sell apples became the “Let them eat cake” of the Thirties. His campaign slogans—“Prosperity is just around the corner; a chicken in every pot”—sounded satiric to the shuffling recruits on the bread lines. Visiting the Virgin Islands, recently purchased from Denmark, he called them the garbage dump of the Caribbean. The Islanders still remember that.

Brigades of Bonus Marchers converged on Washington. Congress had voted the bonus money, but for later. Some of these men might have been hustlers and perhaps there were a few Communists among them, but most were ex-soldiers who had served the nation, frightened men with hungry families. The ragged hordes blocked traffic, clung like swarming bees to the steps of the Capitol. They needed their money now. They built a shack town on the edge of Washington. Many had brought their wives and children. Contemporary reports mention the orderliness and discipline of these soldiers of misfortune.

What happened in the seats of power? It looked then and it still looks as though the Government got scared. The White House, roped off and surrounded by troops, was taken to indicate that the President was afraid of his own people. The rumor spread that Mr. Hoover had stocked his Santa Cruz Mountain estate with food for three years. It doesn't matter whether or not it was true. People believed it. And there must have been fear in the Administration because only the frightened fall back on force. The Army got called out to disperse the hungry and tattered ex-Army.

Four companies of infantry, four troops of cavalry, a machine-gun squadron and two tanks drove the petitioners from the streets of Washington, moved under a cloud of tear gas on the scrap-and-kindling shanty town and burned that pitiful citadel of misery. It is interesting that the commandant was General Douglas MacArthur. Of course he was under orders. They cleared the ragamuffins out.

I speak of this phase at length because it was symptomatic of many of the positions of leadership. Business leaders panicked, banks panicked. Workers demanded that factories stay open when their products were un-salable. People on all levels began hoarding nonperishable food as though for an invasion. Voices shrill with terror continued to tell the people that what was happening couldn't happen. The unfortunate Mr. Hoover was quoted as having said Prohibition was a noble experiment. He didn't say that; he said noble in intent.

The noble intention had created inner governments by gangster, little states which fought wars, committed murders, bought officials, issued patronage and sold liquor. Not only was this new aristocracy supported by any citizen who had the high price for a bottle of bad liquor, but successful gangsters were better-known, even more respected, than any other Americans save movie stars. Their lives, loves, felonies and funerals were fully reported and hungrily read. Important citizens courted their acquaintance and favor. They seemed the only people in the land who weren't confused nor afraid.

Then Mr. Hoover, running for reelection with a weary momentum, came up with another beauty. He said grass would grow in the streets if Roosevelt were elected. He should have looked. Grass was already growing in the streets. Farmers dumped milk, burned crops to keep prices from collapsing. Armed neighbors guarded homes against mortgage-foreclosing sheriffs. Grass was growing not only in the streets but between the rusting tracks of factory railroad sidings.

There wasn't much doubt of the election's outcome. In Dizzy Dean's immortal words, Franklin D. Roosevelt slud home.

I guess Mr. Roosevelt was called more names and accused of more crimes than any man in history, but no one ever thought or said he was afraid. Furthermore, he spread his fearlessness about among the whole people. Much later, when business picked up and business leaders howled with rage against Government control and Mr. Roosevelt, they seemed to forget that they had laid their heads in his lap and wept, begged him to take over, to tell them what to do and how to do it, that they had marched and shouted and fought for the Blue Eagle, that symbol of Government control—but they had.

There are whole libraries of books about the Thirties—millions of feet of films, still and moving. It is a completely recorded and documented period. But to those of us who lived through the period and perhaps were formed by it, the Thirties are a library of personal memories. My own recollections will not be exactly like others, but perhaps they will set you thinking and raise up your memories.