Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (17 page)

As every lover of Rimbaud’s work knows, one of the minor annoyances which
afflicted him during his sojourn in Abyssinia was
the money which he
carried in his belt. In one of his letters he writes: “I always carry over 40,000 gold francs
about with me in my belt. They weigh about forty pounds, and I am beginning to get dysentery
from the load.”

Returning to America in 1940, with the war in full swing, I was cut off from
my French royalties. Jack Kahane, my original publisher (the Obelisk Press), died the day war
was declared, leaving an eighteen-year-old son, Maurice, who had absolutely no head for
business—so his family and friends thought—to take over. I remember well the cablegram I
received from Maurice while on the island of Corfu; it was to the effect that if I would
continue to write for the Obelisk Press he would be happy to send me a thousand francs a month
regularly. That was a decent sum in those days and I was only too happy to agree.

Of course I hadn’t the slightest notion then of returning to America. I was
planning to remain in Greece, which I already looked upon as home.

On the heels of this good news from Maurice came the fall of Paris, followed
by a complete blackout. I never received the first thousand francs he had intended to send me.
As the war dragged on I came to the conclusion that the Obelisk Press had folded up and that
Maurice, who had now taken the surname of Girodias, had been killed or else taken prisoner by
the Germans. That the G.I.’s were to buy my books as fast as they were thrown on the market
was something I never even dreamed of.

It was during the year 1946 that we lived at Anderson Creek. Ever since my
return from Europe I had waged a struggle to keep my head above water. Though we were paying
only five dollars a month rent for the hovel we occupied, we were always in debt to the
mailman who supplied us with food as well as other necessities. Sometimes we owed him as much
as two or three hundred dollars. We never bought any clothes for ourselves; even the baby used
castoff things. But we did enjoy good wines, thanks to Norman Mini whose cellar we almost
drained. Even the purchase of a cheap
second-hand car was out of the
question. To go to town, forty-five miles distant, we were obliged to hitchhike. In short, my
earnings were just about sufficient to keep a goat alive.

Anyway, it was a delightful hand-to-mouth situation, relieved only by the
thoughtful generosity of fans who divined our need. We might have gone on living like paupers
indefinitely. The war in Europe had ended, the one in the East was still flourishing, and the
cold war was in the bag, as they say. We had managed to acquire two important items: a stove
which didn’t smoke from every crack and crevice and a decent mattress to lie on, the latter a
gift from our neighbors, the Mac Collums. Valentine, our infant daughter, was still in her
first year and therefore did not need much in the way of food or clothing. Nor did I need a
car (as I now do) to dispose of the garbage and refuse which accumulated. The sea was right at
our back door, at the foot of a steep precipice. One had to be alert-minded, in dumping the
garbage, so as not to throw the baby over the cliff with the garbage. (“Change the water, not
the goldfish!”)

Then one fine foggy day, when all the green in Nature sang out in
chlorophyllic glee, there came a letter from Maurice Girodias. The envelope bore the postmark
Paris. I looked at the envelope some time before ripping it open.

The letter was a long one, and as I skimmed through it, rapidly, my eye fell
on this—

I threw the letter on the table and began to chuckle. I had read too hastily,
I thought. An optical illusion … I lit a cigarette, picked the letter up again, slowly,
cautiously, and read it carefully, word for word.

It was
not
an optical illusion. In the midst of a long explanation
about the difficulties he had encountered in keeping the press alive during the Occupation, in
a rapid account of the success my work was meeting with over there, was buried a sentence in
which he
explicitly stated that he, Maurice Girodias, was holding for me,
in accumulated royalties, a sum equivalent to
forty thousand dollars
.

I turned the letter over to my wife to read. She nearly fainted. To increase
our suspense and agitation, the letter made it all too clear that, under existing
circumstances, it was impossible to transfer this fabulous sum to my bank account (I had none)
in America. Would I not please come over and get it?

(“Dear Government,” Ahmed Safa began, “We wish to inform you by the enclosed
letter that our house is about to fall down, and that Si Khalil, the repulsive owner, doesn’t
want to repair it…. We hope that you will come and take a look at the house so you can see for
yourself, but if you can’t, we’ll bring the house to you….”)
*

If I was not able to come, the letter stated, he, Girodias, would endeavor by
one means or another to send me a thousand or two thousand dollars per month. He explained
that there were always travelers who wanted dollars for francs and vice versa.

I distinctly recall the panic which seized me at the prospect of receiving a
thousand or two thousand
dollars
per month. “No, not that!” I cried, “I’ll be
demoralized!”

“You could go to France, collect the money, invest it in a house and land, and
live there again.”

“You could buy a yacht and sail around the world.”

“You could buy up an old castle in the provinces … there are plenty for sale,
and dirt cheap.”

These were some of the suggestions my friends promptly made. The one thing I
could not do was to go to Paris, collect the money, and bring it home. That was taboo.

Now money is not one of the things which are conspicuous in my horoscope. When
I study it soberly, my destiny, I realize that it is a good one. It decrees, in effect, that I
shall always have what I
need, and no more. Where money is concerned, I
am to dance for it.
Soit!

Such were the thoughts running through my head during the exchange which went
on between my wife and myself. However true and sincere the letter sounded, I had a growing
suspicion that at bottom it was just a hoax. Cosmococcic flim-flam, in other words. The
conviction grew in me that I would never see those forty thousand dollars, neither in specie,
coin, bullion, nor script, nor even in zloty or piastres.

Impulsively I went to the doorway at the edge of the sunken kitchen and,
looking out toward the Land of the Rising Sun, I burst out laughing. I laughted so long and so
hard that my guts ached. And over and over I repeated: “It’s not for
me!
It’s not for
me!”
Then I’d laugh some more. I suppose it was my way of weeping. Between laughs I
could hear my mother’s words ringing in my ears.
“Why don’t you write something that will
sell?”

“If only he would send me a hundred a month, that would be swell,” I kept
saying to myself. A hundred a month—
regularly
—would have solved our problems. (It
would have
then
. Today no sum is large enough to solve anybody’s problems. The bombs
eat up everything.)

Since it weighed nothing, “my load,” I didn’t get dysentery. But I did suffer
nightmares and illusions of grandeur. At times I felt like the deposed hotel porter in
The
Last Laugh
, only instead of lavishing my fortune and my affections on a toilet
attendant, I lavished them on my friend Emil or, at times, on Eugene, the poor Russian who had
smiled at me from the top of the ladder one black day in the year 1930, when I was at the end
of my wits, just having made a futile tour of the outskirts of Paris in search of a crust or a
bone to stop the gnawing in my stomach.

Why I never did go to Paris in search of the fortune that awaited me is a
story in itself. Instead, I wrote letters suggesting this, then that, all useless suggestions
because, where money is involved, I have only the most impractical ideas. Before I had time to
be bored
dealing out imaginary checks, there came a devaluation of the
franc, followed in short order by another devaluation, an even “healthier” one, if I may say,
than the first. These cut my “fortune” to about one third of the original sum. Then Maurice,
my publisher, began having trouble with his creditors. He was living high—who wouldn’t?—had
bought a house in the country, rented luxurious offices in the rue de la Paix, drank only the
best wines, and invented situations, or so it seemed to me, which demanded that he make
frequent trips from one end of the continent to the other. But all this was nothing compared
to the fatal mistake he made when, at the height of his intoxication, he began “picking the
wrong horses.” What possessed him I don’t know, but for some insane reason he proceeded to
turn out one book after another which nobody wanted to read. In doing so, he was eating into
my fortune—what was left of it. He didn’t mean to, of course. But only pocket-book editors can
keep dead horses alive!

At the lowest ebb there occurred one of those “miracles” which are constantly
cropping up in my life and which I have almost grown to rely on when things get really tough.
We were still at Anderson Creek, and that hundred a month which I had been willing to settle
for was no more forthcoming than the thousand or two thousand a month which Girodias had
offered to transmit “in one way or another.” The whole business had taken on the flavor of a
bad dream. Something to joke about occasionally. (“Remember when you almost became a
millionaire?”)

One day Jean Wharton, whom I had met during my first days in Big Sur and with
whom we had become firm friends, came to visit us. She owned a cozy little house on Partington
Ridge, where we had dined with her a number of times. This day, apropos of nothing at all, she
calmly asked us if we wouldn’t like to have her house, and the land with it. She thought that
we had need of a place like hers, and that our need was greater than hers. After a few more
words she went on to say that it seemed to her as if her home really belonged to
us
.

We were, of course, dumbfounded, delighted, overwhelmed.
We would like nothing better,
but
, we sadly admitted, we hadn’t a penny. Nor did we
know, we hastened to add, when we
would
have any money worth speaking of. I made it
quite clear that we had no resources and no tangible prospects. The best I could hope for, as
a now “famous” writer, was to eke out a modest living.

Her answer to this, and I shall never forget it, was: “You don’t need money.
The place is yours, if you want it. You can move in any time. Pay me when your ship comes in.”
After a slight pause, she added: “I know the money
will
come to you—at the right
time.”

On that we sealed the bargain.

Here I must interrupt to relate what happened a few minutes ago when I was
taking a nap. I say “taking a nap,” but more truthfully I mean—when I was
trying
to
take a nap. In lieu of sleep I got messages. This business has been going on ever since I got
the happy thought about the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. This noon it was bad, very bad. I
could hardly taste the delicious lunch my wife, Eve, had prepared for me. As soon as I had
finished lunch, I threw a few sticks of wood on the fire, rolled myself up in a blanket, and
prepared to take my usual snooze before resuming work. (The more snoozes I take the more work
I do. It pays off.) I closed my eyes, but the messages kept on coming. When they became too
insistent, too clamorous, I would open my eyes and call out—“Eve, jot this down on the pad for
me, will you? Just say—‘abundance’… ‘pilfering’ … ‘Sandy Hook.’” I thought that in tabbing a
few key words I could turn off the current. But it didn’t work. Whole sentences poured in on
me. Then paragraphs. Then pages…. It’s a phenomenon that always astounds me, no matter how
often it happens. Try to bring it about and you fail miserably. Try to squelch it and you
become more victimized.

Forgive me, but I must go into it further…. The last time it happened was
while I was writing
Plexus
. During the year or so that I was occupied with this
work—one of the worst periods, in other respects, that I have ever lived through—the
inundation was
almost continuous. Huge blocks—particularly the dream
partscame to me just as they appear in print and without any effort on my part, except that of
equating my own rhythm with that of the mysterious dictator who had me in his thrall. In
retrospect I wonder about this period, for the reason that every morning on entering my little
studio I had first to quell the surge of anger, disgust and loathing which the daily drama
inevitably aroused. Quieting myself as best I could, reproving and admonishing myself aloud, I
would sit before the machine—and strike the tuning fork. Bang! Like a sack of coal it would
spill out. I could keep it up for three or four hours at a stretch, interrupted only by the
arrival of the mailman. At lunch more wrangling. Just sufficient to bring me to the boil. Then
back to my desk, where I would again tune in and race on until the next interruption.

When I had finished the book, a rather long one, I was so keyed up that I
confidently expected to write two more books—
pronto
. However, nothing worked out as I
had expected. The world went to smash about me. My own little world, I mean.

For three years thereafter I was unable to advance more than a page at a time,
with long intervals between these spurts. The book which I was endeavoring to write—getting up
the courage to write, would be better!—I had been thinking and dreaming about for over
twenty-five years. My despair reached such a point that I was almost convinced my writing days
were over. To make matters worse, my intimate friends seemed to take pleasure in insinuating
that I could write only when things were bad for me. It was true that seemingly I had no
longer anything to fight. I was only fighting myself, fighting the venom which I had
unconsciously stored up.