Chance Meetings Read online

  He studied me a moment, and then spoke rather kindly.

  He’s been dead now forty years or more, I suppose. He died young enough, but not nearly famous enough, and he did answer my letter and speak kindly to me. I honor therefore Charles Caldwell Dobie.

  Chapter 20

  The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably. I don’t believe you can say you understood him favorably. In short, the best that can be said of anybody is probably the consequence of a favorable misunderstanding. Some people, frequently scoundrels, are impossible not to like, for some reason, and this reason isn’t based upon their corruption, or their corruptibility, their easy proneness to being diminished from a potential virtue to a demonstrated vice. It is something else, entirely.

  One of my friends in Fresno was a dark boy called Rum, for Rustom, although nobody but the immediate members of his family knew his name was in fact Rustom, a name famous in Persian lyric poetry. He was a sturdy Armenian boy from big, strong, hearty parents.

  He was the boy who in a recess fight with me did not understand that my striking him only on the shoulder was deliberate, so that I would not commit the offense of striking another human being in the face. But this big idiot, a man I could have destroyed, did what all big idiots in all areas of human activity do when given quarter. He accepted and gave none in return, but proceeded to strike me in the face.

  I was outraged and astonished, not to say hurt, and would perhaps have had to lay into him in the same manner, which I really didn’t want to do, had not one of the teachers in the schoolgrounds, a Mr. Cagney, flushed of face and outraged by what he had seen, stopped the fight, to tell me, rather than Rum, that I had no business getting into a fight with anybody, on any account.

  Rum, being the idiot he was, gloried in the fine showing he thought he had made, smirking and pretending not to need to listen to this rather sissy teacher: what kind of a man is it who teaches the fourth grade at Emerson School, where all of the other teachers are women?

  One of my best friends came to me after the breakup and said, “For God’s sake, why didn’t you hit him in the mouth? Why did you keep hitting him on the shoulders and arms?—your jaw is swelling up. Are you crazy?”

  And of course I didn’t quite know how to tell this friend, not an Armenian, an American, well, almost an American, a son of Irish people, as a matter of fact, I didn’t know how to tell him I refused to hit another person in the face.

  Now, the way the world goes is amusing.

  The scene changes from the playground at Emerson School in Fresno to the Barrel House on Third Street in San Francisco. Rum and I are now twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and Fresno is far in the past, forgotten almost, and even our little fight is forgotten, almost.

  He sees me at a table playing rummy for money. After the hand, I quit the game and have a beer with him at the bar, and we begin to meet there, or at the Kentucky just down the street, or at Breen’s across the street, and to loaf around together in San Francisco.

  Well, I had always known that Rum was an idiot, for it was a fact, but I rather liked him just the same, believing that since he didn’t know he was an idiot, didn’t even suspect that he might be, he was innocent.

  But as I came to know him and learned a little more about him, I found out that he was also a pimp, that he pretended to be legally married to each of his girls, of whom he had had about half a dozen every year, and had sold them to other pimps, or to houses. And yet I did not drop him, or avoid him. We went right on being old friends from Fresno, loafing around together in the Tenderloin of San Francisco: until the world changed and I got drafted and he didn’t, and years later I heard he had died, that’s all.

  Chapter 21

  I have frequently misunderstood things. Forgetting everything I had learned from so much painful experience, I have stood years later in dumb disbelief, remembering, and laughed at myself, and wondered.

  Lord, why have I always been such a fool? Is this true of everybody, or is it that you have chosen me for the honor? If so, why? Because I have a natural aptitude? Or as a lesson? If a lesson, what is it that you want me to learn?

  But who can speak to God, or rather who can’t? The question is, who can get an answer? Or at any rate an answer that isn’t from himself?

  Here, now I stand and laugh at myself, because I find that I can’t think of anybody whom I have ever been half-enchanted to meet. I have surely met, one by one, at least a million people, for I am in my sixty-fourth year, so why am I still unable to choose one?

  What am I waiting for? Am I afraid I am going to run out of people to write about? Write about Henry Miller, one of the most successful producers of fashionable plays on Broadway. I met him just as he was starting his decline, and we sat at a table in 21 with his old pal George Jean Nathan. And we talked about the New York theatre, and the theatre in London, and I told him about the real theatre, the theatre inside the home of every family, especially every American family.

  Or if you don’t want to write about that cheerful gentleman, why not write about Bennett Cerf, he was the publisher of your first book. Say a few kind words about a man who got a lot done in the way of moving from one place to another every day of his life, and at the same time amassed a fortune of—well, let’s say eight cool million mother dollars, and let it go at that. Some of this fortune was made by joke books he had other publishers bring out. Each of these books was a best-seller and made big money both for the publisher and for the collector of jokes, for that is what Bennett Cerf was, as well as a maker of puns.

  When we did a little loafing around together in New York in 1935 on my way to, and upon my return from, my first visit to Europe, he did so many puns that I finally said, “Hasn’t any friend of yours ever told you that if you make another pun he is going to kill you?” To which Bennett Cerf replied, “Everyone has, friends and enemies alike.” Only he put the reply into a pun, which I thank God I cannot remember.

  Well, why not write about Bennett Cerf?

  Well, I don’t want to.

  All right, write about somebody who isn’t famous, or somebody who didn’t make eight million dollars.

  All right, I’ll write about a young man standing in the entrance to a vacant store on Market Street in San Francisco in 1929, selling a book about the mysteries of the universe.

  He had the mightiest mouth I had ever seen: it was tireless in its muscular action, so that everything he said was also performed, by his mouth. My brother Henry, standing with me to hear his whole pitch, about four minutes in duration, said, “Let’s go back and watch him again.”

  He didn’t say hear him, he said watch him.

  And the second time, he was even better, but we didn’t buy the book, although it was only twenty-five cents, reduced from one dollar.

  Chapter 22

  I have never known a great many first-rate writers, not even after I became published, but I have known a few.

  I think I have always known more painters than writers.

  There is something about a painter that I find not easy to understand. They almost invariably try to explain themselves, and they almost never are any good at it. They make a mess of what is in the painting, in its own language, which does not need any word of explanation at all.

  Now, when I lived at 348 Carl Street in San Francisco and was twenty-four years of age and still writing and not selling anything, it came to pass that my brother Henry during a walk one evening after a big supper of bulghour pilaf said, “Right there in that house is a woman who works at Western Union, and she says her son is a great painter, shall we stop and say hello?”

  So we did. The lady was a southern lady, and spoke a little like all of the southern ladies in so many of the southern novels, and movies, and plays, but not all of them.

  Her manner seemed to suggest that she knew she was making quite an impression by her manner of speech, along the lines of the southern tradition, and she wanted to know, silently of c
ourse, if Henry and I appreciated her performance.

  Well, I didn’t know about Henry, but I really enjoyed hearing her, and for that matter seeing her.

  Instead of being a slim matronly prim woman, she was large, overweight, warm, and given to ripples of pleasant laughter every ten or fifteen seconds.

  “Well, now,” she said, “you young men of ideas, like my own boy, Claiborne—he’s a baby, my dear, only twenty-four, and how old are you?—twenty-four, too, how nice it is, you must stay and meet him, he will be home very soon, I’m sure you’re not here to meet me and hear me rattle on and on, so just let me see that you are comfortable and I’ll go fetch refreshment, I’ll do my best, and I have an idea you will be perfect gentlemen and adore it, or at any rate say so.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen, and after a moment a very young man came out of there, and I said, “Are you Claiborne?”

  And the boy said, “No, he’s twenty-four, I’m eighteen, I’m Farragut, my mother just kicked me out of the kitchen.”

  After we had introduced ourselves, we asked Farragut about his brother Claiborne, and Farragut said, “Well, I can’t say for sure, but it seems to me he must be some kind of wonder of the world, for he can look at somebody and look at him and start drawing and then painting, and after a while you will see that man on the canvas, and he will have something more in his face than anybody except Claiborne ever saw.”

  I was now more interested than ever both in meeting Claiborne and in having him let us look at some of his work, which his mother had assured us he would do, but which she herself absolutely would not do, as it would be sacrilegious.

  Was there any real justification for the astonishment in the mother and brother about Claiborne’s talent, whatever it might turn out to be?

  At length the refreshment came out on a big metal tray: orange pekoe tea with lemon, gingerbread baked in the shape of little people, and cucumber sandwiches on very soft white bread without crusts.

  I had a good go at the stuff, eating much more than my share, but as there was an enormous amount of it, and Henry ate only one of each, and Farragut only drank tea, it wasn’t possible to notice how much I put away, unless you made a point of it, which I did. Four gingerbread people, eight cucumber sandwiches.

  Then, at last, into the parlor came Claiborne himself, a sober, lean, rather touching figure of a young man, who immediately after the introduction said softly, “Would you sit for me, I’d like to try to paint you?”

  And so I sat for Claiborne Tattersall twice a week for four weeks, whereupon he gave up.

  “You’re different every day, I swear.”

  Later, I heard he’d had a nervous breakdown. And at the time of the national draft I heard he was a conscientious objector and was put in jail.

  But not everybody I ever met had a nervous breakdown, or was a conscientious objector.

  Chapter 23

  A neighborhood has a kind of mystical identity which one scarcely suspects let alone notices while one is living there, for living uses up all of a man’s time and attention. But in retrospect sooner or later a man remembers an old neighborhood and suddenly notices that there was something fantastic about the place.

  Well, the neighborhood just south and east of Emerson School in Fresno was instantly recognized as an Armenian neighborhood, even though Syrians, Assyrians, Slovenians, Portuguese, Irish, and Serbs also lived there, and just at the edge of Armenian Town there was a Basque hotel, complete with a jai alai court. The Basques were shepherds come to the San Joaquin Valley to earn enough money in four or five years to go home rich, buy a farm, take a wife, and raise a family. They did not tend to marry in Fresno. There was a continuous arrival and departure of shepherds at and from the Yturria Hotel near the Santa Fe depot. In town for a week or two, they sat and ate the hearty meals that came with the rooms they rented, gossiped, sang Basque songs, and availed themselves of the professional women.

  One did not see a Basque boy or girl at school, but sooner or later, as all such things must, it happened. Many Basques did not go home rich, they stayed in California poor, or comparatively poor. And then some stayed rich, and others became very rich. And they took wives, and brought up families. Most of them took Basque wives, although quite a few took women of the region, of many nationalities.

  Now, it may be impossible not to notice that the people who lived in Armenian Town were all members of other small nations. It may be fancied that my own high regard for these people, especially for the Irish and the Portuguese, was the consequence of Ireland and Portugal being small nations, but that is probably not the explanation.

  I liked all of these people because they were quite simply part of the mystery of my neighborhood, because I saw them daily for quite a few years, and because they had a quality about them that both amazed and amused me.

  Now, in the rest of Fresno, I knew members of other nationalities: Italians, Greeks, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Chinese, Japanese, Hindus, Mexicans, American Indians, and a few Blacks, apparently not from the South, however—probably from places like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle—that is, people without a southern accent.

  The sons of not all of these people came to the press room of the Fresno Evening Herald to take papers and to run to town with them to sell them, many of the sons of such people came to the Herald just to be with friends, to visit, as it were, and now and then one or two of them tried selling papers but soon grew tired of it and dropped out.

  The only real hustlers of newspapers, the only real headline hollerers were indeed Armenians and Italians. They meant business, and the money they earned was needed at home, both to keep families going, and to enable these families to save money enough to make down payments on homes of their own.

  There were others who regularly sold papers, but just a few of each: Greeks, Germans, and Americans.

  Years after the neighborhood lost its identity and was as good as gone forever, I suddenly understood its mystery—it had been populated by willing exiles who nevertheless had deeply longed for a place they knew they would never see again.

  Chapter 24

  The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?

  Invariably the answer is this: because they were rude, they hurt your feelings, they hurt you, they tried to make you feel worthless, they nearly destroyed the self you had been working on for so long, they drove you to a kind of desperation.

  Don’t bully me anymore, old buddy, don’t stand in my way, don’t call me names, don’t threaten me, I’m here, I’m moving, I’m not going to be stopped by you, so here I come, and if you try to stop me I’m not going to let you stop me.

  This began very early in my story, in the streets of Fresno. It took the form of fights with other newsboys, or with boys of the streets. I had set out to be decent with everybody, but I soon noticed that if I was decent, this was interpreted as weakness, and somebody would decide to exploit my reluctance to stand fast, my willingness to move around the opposition. But doing this so deeply annoyed and humiliated me that when the bully arrived again, to continue the game, I said, “All right, fight, then.” And stood fast, with clenched fists, and waited for him to come in, but he didn’t, he was afraid to come in, he wanted to be tough, but he didn’t want to get hurt, and he went away.

  And so, soon again I became decent, and was aware of another’s struggle inside himself, but sure enough was exploited again. This time, however, I didn’t permit any humiliation to make me red in the face, but said, “I think you want a fight—well, I’m ready.”

  After a year or two of that, it almost never happened that anybody—boy or adult—misunderstood my preference to be decent with everybody. And I was not obliged to try to be some kind of tough guy who had no time for such sissy things as civility and goodwill.

  But of course I’ve told it at least partly wrong, and in my favor, for to this day I am very easily willing to keep silent and to walk around what looks like totally meaningless
, useless, ridiculous trouble. Don’t hate—ignore. Don’t kill—live and let live.

  Chapter 25

  Up at number 4 bis Rue Chateaudun four blocks from my four-room flat on Rue Taitbout, is a small square room on the street, which is a shoemaker’s shop, not far from the entrance to a hotel with a name like Baltic. This hotel, according to a conscientious objector who did a little time in a pen somewhere in the United States for that private bravery, during the year 1944 was also a whorehouse, because he and his bride on their honeymoon took a room there, and the first thing they noticed was that there were a lot of men coming in and going out of the place, especially from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M., especially to and from the first and second floors, which in America would be the second and third floors.

  In this little shoemaker’s shop, which has a high ceiling and a steep corkscrew metal stairway that goes to a basement precisely the same size and shape as the shop, there is a large brown owl.

  This bird has the freedom of the shop, the door of which is sometimes kept open on the street, and yet the owl has never ventured out of the shop.

  There is no telling (by me) why this is so, but I do know the story, however sketchily, of the owl and its adjustment to life in the shoeshop.

  A nice lady back from the country, whose apartment is two doors from the shoemaker’s shop, brought into the shop one morning eight years ago two helpless infant owl chicks, both apparently near death.

  She asked the shoemaker if he understood such birds.

  He didn’t, he said, but he suggested that she improvise a system of feeding them and keeping them warm. She in turn insisted that he keep one of the chicks for himself.