Chance Meetings Page 4
It was to that large body that my father’s kid brother Mihran once wrote; or said he had written; or went to a lawyer, possibly Manouk Hampar, to ask that the lawyer write on his behalf. Wasn’t it enough for a man to be honest and upright, did he also have to be deprived of the very faith in himself which finally is the only excuse for a man to go on living?
And on he would go, saying things that had no apparent meaning, but seemed reasonable to him, and possibly even to members of his immediate family, and perhaps even to Manouk Hampar, that great soul, who had a policy of hearing out all madmen, especially of the Saroyan family, knowing they were unwilling to go to a lawyer in the family, of whom there were two, one specializing in loud criminal law, the other in quiet business law, one an actor and world-winner, the other a money-seeking bore. After hearing out the mad Saroyan, Manouk Hampar would say, deliberately using English, “This matter is now under official advisement. That will be one dollar.”
For he knew that no sick Saroyan would make himself sicker haggling over a legal fee of only one dollar, and also that it permitted the Saroyan to feel that the matter was indeed now at last in the works, and the world was going to know about this fellow’s lonely agony.
And then going down the hall of the Bank of Italy building, built in 1917, the fault-finder would say to the walls, “There is a matter of honor in these things, and the man who does not act on behalf of honor—well, how can he consider himself a real humanitarian?”
In his office, the lawyer might perhaps think about a kind of report to make to the Supreme Court, simply for the amusement of it, to mention to his fellow lawyers at lunch at the Mayflower the following day. “Dear Supreme Court. My client, one Mihran Saroyan, has commissioned me to inform you that his head which is usually as hard as a rock has lately suffered a certain amount of softening, so that he feels you have discriminated against him in some mystic, secret and nefarious manner. Don’t do that anymore. Yours truly: signed, Pastabon Pastabonian.” Or, Lawyer of Lawyers.
Chapter 16
Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled. And of course a sort of spoiling is the one thing that seems to be inevitable in an enduring friendship—new aspects of the person become revealed, and that which one had believed to be the truth about a person must be revised. The whole reality of the person must be frequently reconsidered, and so instead of having the stability of art or anything like art there is a constant flux, a continuous procedure of change and surprise, which at its best, if both people are lucky, is far more appealing than art, for this is the stuff from which art is to be made, from which art is to be continuously enlarged and renewed.
An acquaintanceship, if all goes well, can linger in the memory like an appealing chord of music, while a friendship, or even a friendship that deteriorates into an enemyship, so to put it, is like a whole symphony, even if the music is frequently unacceptable, broken, loud, and in other ways painful to hear.
One encounters acquaintances endlessly, especially on one’s travels.
There is always somebody on the train, ship, bus, or airplane, who wants to tell you his story, and in turn is willing to let you tell yours, and so you exchange roles as you listen and tell. If the duet works well, you say so long at the end of the ride, and you remember the occasion with a pleasant satisfaction with yourself and with this other person who was suddenly a part of your story and of yourself.
Now, if you play your cards right, and this acquaintance is a pretty girl or a handsome woman, you can risk trying to extend the chance meeting to a non-chance meeting, but the rules of this sort of thing, although unwritten and unstated, do not tend to even permit either party to think in terms of anything less than absolute purity, absolute impersonality, total awareness that each represents the whole human race at its courteous best.
You have been thrown together accidentally, total strangers, in order to pass along as if to Truth itself, or to God, or to Memory, or even to Yourself and to Your Family, the essence of your own story and reality. You are not there to acquire more story, to have more material to carry with the rest of the material that still hasn’t been really understood, or certainly hasn’t been used, and you are there anonymously.
The game does not work if you let the other acquaintance know your name or who the people are in your inner life.
What you share is a kind of gentility, sympathy, and charity, not so much for one another, not so much each of you for the other, but rather for the unnamed people in your lives who have been stupid, wrong, unfair, cruel, and altogether human.
And so while the carrier moves steadily toward where you are going, you speak to one another, and you say things you wouldn’t say to any other people, and you know everything you say is understood and will not be used against you, and then when the carrier arrives you look at each other and smile, and say good-bye, good luck, and you move along, and that’s it, and you aren’t sorry that that’s it, you are pleased that it is.
I have had many such acquaintances—literally hundreds, but I remember best going back to San Francisco from New York in January of the year 1929, after I had failed to take the big city by storm, after I had not started my career as a writer just twenty years old. I traveled chair car the whole distance and the whole time, about eight days, I believe it was, it might have been even longer. And then all of a sudden during the last two hours of that long train ride a little girl joined me in a sip of coffee from the Candy Butcher’s urn in the corner of the parlor car, and we got to talking. She was married, she was pregnant, her husband was an office worker in Denver, they had no money, she was on her way home to her mother in San Francisco until he could get a proper one-room apartment, with bath and kitchenette, but she was in love with everything, especially the baby, and her husband, and life. And with me, as well, as I was in love with her. And I may say passionately if also totally impersonally.
Chapter 17
And of course there are always one’s enemies.
Many thoughtful men have spoken about their enemies with contempt, with absolute hatred, but also now and then with admiration, and sometimes even with warmth, especially when speaking of friends who went sour. No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend, and there are many more of these than one would suspect.
The worst enemy is the one who knows you and knows what hurts you most, and if he also has skills that you do not have, your situation is not very good.
Lawyers have skills many people do not have, although there have been, and there are, lawyers who in spite of their skills are fair game to people without legal skills who nevertheless know how to make even a lawyer know fear, and how to make him suffer pain.
There was a lawyer in New York who was more nearly a café society personality than an office man, for he did legal work of various kinds for people who earned enormous incomes in show biz, as they themselves put it. They needed to know how to prevent the government from taking all of their annual money and going on an Asiatic war spree of one sort or another.
And this man, demonstrating to these people year after year a sure skill in not allowing the government to rob them of their money, became a very popular member of their crowd.
He knew everybody, and he knew me, but I didn’t join his happy, bustling, busy friends, who in the very manner in which they greeted him exhibited their fondness for him, or should I say their fondness for his ability to prevent the government from stealing their money?
I was in fact only just able to conceal my contempt for him, and also for his clients, the brisk, bouncing bastards, all athrill by their success in show biz, all aglow by the love and applause of the common people, as they put it, all of them dismal frauds, for whom at the very most one’s contempt can be tempered by a little amusement, and that’s all.
And this lawyer wanted me to be just a litt
le less hostile, because hostility was his business.
Among his clients, and friends, were a number of people whom I was unavoidably obliged to have dealings with for a while, like a wife, and sometimes it happened that, when I was with these people, he was summoned, and a group formed around a table in a bar, to sit and discuss with him both business and pleasure.
And everybody responded to the lawyer fondly, and I didn’t.
And he didn’t like that.
Furthermore, I didn’t do what everybody else had done.
I didn’t tell him, “Now, look, I think the tax collector’s taking too big a chunk out of my income every year. I couldn’t help overhearing since I am right here at this table what you just told Joe Haffamann about the way you saved him a fortune of money, as the saying is, last year. Do you suppose you could do the same thing for me?”
The main reason I didn’t say anything of that sort is that I wasn’t interested in forming a fake corporation, and I didn’t have, and I wasn’t earning, and I wasn’t ever likely to earn the kind of money that would make forming such a corporation worthwhile. How much could the well-loved lawyer keep from the tax collector when my entire income for a year was only around ten thousand dollars? Sometimes even less? Ah, but with his know-how and friends, I would soon be earning ten or twenty times as much, wouldn’t I? Even so, I wasn’t even slightly interested. If I were, I would probably choose to go into counterfeiting U.S. currency.
And so there he was, and there I was, and there were his friends, some of whom I had unavoidable and desperate dealings with.
Finally, one day one of these friends brought a legal action against me for a lot of money, and her lawyer was this well-loved bouncing boy.
What happened was that we were all at a fashionable bar having a couple of drinks and somebody asked where I was stopping in New York on this visit, and I mentioned the hotel, and an hour later, two minutes after my arrival there, I answered a knock at the door, and a young man handed me a summons.
I examined it and telephoned the lawyer.
Yes, he said, his client was suing me for all that money.
“Well, this is ridiculous,” I said. “If anybody ought to sue, it ought be me, but I never sue.”
The lawyer said, “No, I’ve read the papers involved, and you will lose in court.”
And after about four years of dragging on and on, I did lose.
As for the lawyer, he died. But what fun, what fun for him while he was like in show biz itself.
Chapter 18
And I’ve met a great many writers, most of them unpublished, quite a few slightly published, and a handful actually published. And they are, all of them, a fascinating lot.
There was the Finn who wrote for the pulps in the early 1930s. I used to see him at the Turk Street Poker Club in San Francisco, but writers aren’t really poker players, although they are gamblers.
Poker players cultivate not being gamblers, they cultivate not risking money, they wait for the nuts, as the saying is, and then they display ferocious bravery and bet everything they have, as if at last they had gone mad, bluffing, which is the way a writer interprets their behavior, and calls, and loses.
I can’t even remember the Finn’s name, was it Larsen? Well, anyway he was a slim fellow, quiet, slightly brooding, as one now and then notices that a Finn is, and there was just a touch of comedy in him, as when he would make a kind of wild and hysterical gesture, as if to shove in his stack to a man with the nuts, and the man would imagine for an instant that he had made another killing, whereupon the Finn would smile and throw away his cards.
And then there were the many writers who enjoyed drinking and eating, laughing and talking, singing and dancing, especially at Izzy’s on Pacific Street in San Francisco in those same years, the 1930s—and what years they were.
Well, weren’t we all young, and wasn’t it therefore proper that the years should be glorious? What girls, what sweet girls had come down to the big city from villages and towns in Oregon and Washington, Montana and Idaho: and how we fed them but didn’t marry them because who needed it, who wanted to spoil the fun?
One of the writers who used to come to Izzy’s in those days was a man of about twenty-six, about my age, and like myself not yet published, although I was about to be, my first book had been accepted, as the saying is. And with him was always a slim flower-like beauty from a village somewhere in Utah, probably a Mormon girl. The whole saloon noticed her. Every man noticed how rare a flower she was, and how wrong it was for her to be going around with this rather pompous, stiff, pale, ineffectual, bloodless fellow who couldn’t jump and holler and sing and drink a dozen grappa fizzes and feel great, this Anglo-Saxon fraud of a man.
And so everybody was concerned about this flower of a girl and this fraud of a man, including myself, and everybody tried to understand why the little girl continued to stay with such a weird fish.
The second time he arrived at Izzy’s with the girl, he said to me, “Can I speak to you a minute, please? I know you’re wondering about Delfina and me. Well, please keep this to yourself. I met her at the bus station a month ago. She was broke, not very well, and homesick. I looked after her. The idea was to send her home as soon as I could raise the money. In the meantime, I developed a cough and was examined. The trouble is she was there at the time, and the doctor believing we were married told her I have cancer of the lungs, and at best I’ve got six months to live. I tried to force her to go home, but she just won’t hear of it. She is going to look after me—to my dying day. Don’t let this get around, but I know you like Delfina and I can see that she likes you, but look at it this way. I mean, what the hell.”
Well, of course that was something else again, and the writer and his Delfina were treated by me with great warmth and courtesy ever after. But suddenly one day I wondered how had everybody found out what he had told me in confidence?
Six months later the writer and Delfina disappeared.
A year later, however, they were seen together at another bar, and then thirty years later I saw them in one of the most hidden-away bars I have ever visited in San Francisco, and for a flash we recognized one another. He was about to call out my name, and I was about to greet him, and her, but I decided, Ah no, let him be. That lie was the best writing he ever did, let him enjoy it in peace.
And who knows what he had told the girl to keep her devoted to him? Well, now, that is writing, isn’t it? The dirty little coward, bespoiling a sweet shy wild-flower like Delfina.
Chapter 19
I have had a policy all of my professional life to write about the people in my stories with the largest possible sympathy, large enough at any rate for them not to appear to be monsters, even when they had in reality been monsters. Some of the originals of the people in my stories I both hated and wanted to kill, precisely as St. George had killed the dragon.
There weren’t a great many of them, however.
And there were quite a few people who had once seemed to be monsters who later on seemed to be ordinary, and even amusing.
I hated D. D. Davis, the Principal at Emerson School, for instance, and considered him both a monster and a fraud, for he was the man who stalked about in the halls, and looked mean. And he was the man the teachers continuously threatened me with, saying, “You behave now, or I’ll send you to Mr. Davis.”
And every time they did send me, he gave me a strapping with a leather belt.
Why shouldn’t I hate him?
But as time went by, I let it go. He had eleven children. He and his wife never lost a child. Armenian husbands and wives with that many children always lost four or five, in between. He was just another big stupid fellow, and so I have no intention of hating D. D. Davis, dead at the age of eighty-eight these many years. Now, his boys and girls are parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of surely enormous numbers of more boys and girls.
Let him rest in peace, a man who had no business having any connection with any school at all.
He was a big laugh when in front of a whole class whose teacher he had surprised by an unannounced visit, he got himself uncaught on the other side of his winter underwear by squatting, lifting suddenly, and kicking out a right leg.
Walter Huston used to do the same thing when he was standing with people who were talking big, and it invariably made me fall down with laughter, for hadn’t I long ago seen old D. D. Davis do it, but in pure innocence, while Walter Huston did it as editorial comment, so to put it.
I once asked him about it, and he said, “Oh, that’s a little something I noticed as a kid, and then there was a famous vaudeville act called Rosalinda and Harry, and Harry used to do that all the time standing and chatting with Rosalinda, who was of course absolutely gorgeous—and Harry never seemed to suspect that Rosalinda might consider it odd that he kept doing exercises while chatting with her.”
In January of the year 1929, when I returned to San Francisco after four months in New York, the only living writer in San Francisco I had ever heard about had the name of Charles Caldwell Dobie. I looked him up in the phone book, dropped him a line, and he replied, asking me to visit his “office” on Montgomery Street in a building I came to know years later as the Monkey Block, which was its nickname.
He had a cubbyhole containing a bare table containing an enormous typewriter.
He himself was a rather clerkish-looking man of perhaps forty-four to my twenty:
“This is a writer?” I thought.
And he said, “Now, what seems to be the problem?”
Well, of course, this just wouldn’t do at all, but I decided to be polite at any rate, so I said, “Well, I’m a writer, and I wanted to ask another writer, ‘Does it help if a writer is a writer?’ I’m doing other work for a living, but I don’t like doing that work instead of writing. That’s all.”