Twain's Portrait - Chapter 2 - Petalumo
I had from Mr.Twain a handbill announcing his lecture, with hand-written details of time and place provided by the local literary society. My Castilian Spanish, with help from the Esperanto summary at the bottom, were sufficient to give me the gist. He would speak on “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands…Doors open at 7 o’clock, the trouble to begin at 8.”
I arrived at the lecture hall very soon after 7 to be sure of a good seat. At first the hall seemed dank and dreary, the stone floor cold, the walls, benches, and balcony of dark native redwood soaking up the light from smokey whale oil chandeliers. But people arrived, the air warmed, and my eye delighted in the ruddy complexions of the men and the colorful gowns of the women.
Mark Twain spoke in a twangy Spanish, referring frequently to a thick sheaf of notes in Spanish, translated from one of his London lectures. He threw in many English and Esperanto words, even a few Russian and French terms. Some of his jokes fell flat, victims of translation. But his enthusiasm and warm, lively delivery carried him and the audience over the rough spots:
"The Sandwich Islands comprise the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean. I first landed on the largest island of Hawaii, after a short, warm, pleasant sail across the gentle, stormless Pacific, as described by that infatuated old ass, Balboa. In the days before regular steamer service, the crossing to the Sandwich Islands by sailing ship was a long, cold, miserable voyage, beset by a constant northwest swell, squalls, head winds, stern winds, winds on the quarter, and winds that blow straight up from the bottom. It is anything but “Pacific,” whatever you have heard from that shameless humbug Balboa.
"I was to be met on the dock by King Kamehameha V. I staggered down the gangplank and was greeted by a stately gentleman, resplendent in a royal blue military uniform with red striped trousers, gold epaulets, and a dented top hat adorned with a peacock feather. After I performed an elaborate curtsey of obeisance, and he placed a wreath of flowers around my neck, I learned that this potentate was the king’s chauffeur. The king was perched on a barrel at the other end of the dock, fishing. King Kamehameha became my good friend. If every king was as unassuming, natural, levelheaded, and unimpressed with himself as this one, I would consider revising my opinion of monarchy. Forget your King Arthur and chivalry—give me Kamehameha and the spirit of aloha any day.
"Oahu is the capital island, and whenever I hear its name I suffer a spasm of painful memory. The most miserable six months of my life was the week I rode around Oahu on the back of a spavined mare of the same name. Oahu the horse had a head as shapely as a sack of doorknobs, ribs as broad as a barge, and a gait like a spastic kangaroo. She was so slow she took an eternity to get anywhere, and so uncomfortable it seemed somewhat longer. I had saddle boils on top of my saddle boils. I shall never be able to erase the horror of Oahu’s memory from my brain, nor the imprint of her left hind hoof from my backside. But rest assured she shall remember me just as fondly. I added to her limited vocabulary of Hawaiian words a rich stock of Anglo Saxon and Teutonic terms of emphasis, heavy on the guttural and explosive consonants that the Hawaiian language so sadly lacks. I never struck on such a poor tongue for cursing.
"Not all island horses are of Oahu’s stripe, and the islands do boast of a few extraordinary riders, more accomplished than even myself. Many of the best riders are young island women. They ride bareback and astraddle, naked heels kicking their mounts into a wild gallop, dense black hair and voluminous robes blowing in the wind of their progress. And yet, when these prodigious horsewomen dismount, they instantly become shy, giggling schoolgirls. Then as soon as you have let down your guard and begun to breathe normally, they leap back aboard their stallions and tear off like Polynesian Valkyries.
"The islands are not an unalloyed paradise. Ice water is unattainable. You cannot get an edible apple at any price, but must make do with oranges, bananas, pineapples, mangos, strawberries, papayas, guavas, and such truck. The islands are infested with insects, especially mosquitoes and missionaries. In the jungle at twilight, the mosquitoes will suck you dry as a life preserver. In church on Sunday morning the missionaries will make you wish you were back with the mosquitoes. There are more missionaries and more row about saving 60,000 islanders than would take to convert hell itself.
"Excuse me a moment while I light this excellent cigar, given me tonight at dinner by your gracious Alcalde. I must compliment you on the quality of your cigars. The only cigars smoked in the islands are trifling, insipid, tasteless, flavorless things called “Manilas”—ten for twenty-five cents; and it would take a thousand to be worth half the money. After you have smoked about thirty-five dollars worth of them in a forenoon you feel nothing but a desperate yearning to go out somewhere and take a smoke. Which I advise you to do now, during the fifteen minute intermission that is about to begin. For those of you who thought they were coming to the opera, this is your chance to rush off and catch the second act, leaving your seats free for those who arrived late, thinking this was a temperance meeting."
The applause for Mr. Twain was sustained and sincere. However, on the landing in front of the hall during the interval, I talked to two Serran clerics who took issue with his remarks about missionaries.
“He judges all missionaries by the Protestants,” priest number one said. He had large bushy eyebrows that caught the light from the torches lining the jetty and cast ever-changing shadows over his cheeks.
Priest number two had a prominent nose with a rat-like hump in the middle. He pointed to the entablature above the door to the lecture hall. “This hall is named after Junipero Serra,” he explained. “He was the founder of our order and the greatest missionary of all time.”
“Didn’t he become pope?” I asked
“Eventually, yes,” the priest with the eyebrows replied, “But at first he was a lowly Franciscan friar. Father Serra came to Mexico City in 1750, just another refugee like all the other religious dissidents, free thinkers, conversos Spanish Jews, and Moors fleeing the Inquisition in Spain.”
“He was washing the floor in a chapel in Mexico city,” Father Ratnose chimed in, “When he had a vision. A voice told him to travel north and bring the good news to the Indians.”
“Is it a vision,” I had to ask, “If you don’t see anything? If you just hear a voice?” They looked at me with pity, as if I had inadvertently made a scatological reference in an unfamiliar tongue.
“Serra was a different kind of missionary,” Father Eyebrows continued. “He considered the Indians people, just like white men. His idea of the good news included making sure the Indians had arable land, tools, and the time to use them. He fought the Viceroy’s friends who wanted to reserve the best land for themselves.”
Ratnose laughed. “Mexico city was very upset. The better he treated the Indians, the more he fell behind his superiors’ timetable. They wanted him to claim all of California for Spain, before Russia could grab it. Serra wanted to create heaven on earth. So naturally he was defrocked, excommunicated, and ordered back to Mexico City. And just as naturally, he declared himself Innocent I, the first western Pope.”
They cackled gleefully, savoring the joke.
I asked, “But how could he get away with that? Why didn’t they arrest him and drag him back?”
“You have to realize,” Eyebrows explained, “this was when Mexico was fighting for independence from Spain. Most of the Spanish soldiers in Alta California had been recalled to Mexico and replaced with native militia, who were loyal to Serra above all.”
“A posse was sent from Mexico City to arrest Serra,” said Ratnose, “But they mysteriously disappeared. While Mexico was busy breaking away from Spain, Serra quietly walked off with Alta California, proclaiming it a Republic. His militias seized the large ranchos and broke them up. Serra instituted land reforms and some canny ex-Jesuits set up our courts. Now anyone can own land or hold office—Indians, merchants, blackamoors, jews, cowboys, miners--whoever. There are even some white Protestant Americans farming the marshes down in San Rafael.”
“By the time Mexico City could spare troops to object,” Eyebrows concluded, “It was too late. They had been outflanked by the greatest missionary of all time.”
Henry James
Lamb House, the Willows
Rye, East Sussex
England
Dear Hank:
Thank you for your epistle of the 18th. You have no idea how your subtle wit and affirmations of affection buoy me up as I drift around this cold and lonely world. The more manly arts of love and comradeship seem almost unknown in the New World. The people I meet here, even the celebrated Mark Twain, are too coarse and insensitive to sustain for long the kind of refined discourse that I find so effortless and gratifying with you.
Last night I attended Mr. Twain’s South Sea Island Lecture, a pastiche of low humor, mockery, and sly wit that induced occasional paroxysms of mirth in the local Philistines. Twain spoke, or rather read, in barbarous Spanish, about the Sandwich Islands—their beauty, fecundity, and hilarity. He follows a simple but effective comic recipe consisting of equal parts exaggeration, misapprehension, vulgarity, foiled expectation, and animal antics.
His remarks about the similarities between missionaries and mosquitoes were coolly received. Alta Californians revere their missionary past. The Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra was not only the Saint Paul but also the Saint Peter of New Spain. As the founder of the Western Papacy and the architect of much of the Californian social experiment, he was the kind of rebel we both find so fascinating and alarming.
Although I appreciate the freedoms they have won here, they have paid a high price. In rejecting control by Mexico and Spain, they have also rejected their artistic and cultural heritage. With the exception of Francisco Goya, who immigrated to California in 1776, the painters of Alta California are little more than folk artists, decorating bull carts for farmers and painting murals in cantinas. The churches and public buildings such as last night’s lecture hall are plain and uninspired. Basket weaving is more respected as an art than oil painting.
During our voyage from the islands, I re-read your novel and enjoyed it even more the second time. I especially admire the way you allow your reader to eavesdrop on Daisy’s thoughts, as if one were inside her head. One comes to know her deeply and intimately, without exactly loving her, for she reveals more to the reader about her own foibles and failings than she knows herself. You are such a clever imp.
I strive to accomplish the same trick in portraiture, presenting my subject in a pose and setting and light so characteristic that he recognizes, approves of, and delights in the likeness. At the same time, the perceptive viewer can see beyond the surface, to the vanity, insecurity, and social pretensions that prompted the sitter to commission his portrait; or to the nobility and dignity of a genuinely great man; or to the affection or lack thereof that I myself feel for the subject. Heady stuff to be contained in a thin layer of pigment on canvas...
My letter to Henry was interrupted by Mark Twain, who pounded on my door, saying something about oysters in a loud voice.
“I’m writing a letter,” I protested, opening the door a crack.
“She can wait,” he said, elbowing his way into my room.
“It’s a he,” I explained. “You might even know of him—Henry James.”
“the story writer?” He craned his neck around to read my papers.
“and novelist,” I insisted, blotting the letter and sliding it under a sketchbook.
“Didn’t he write a story about an American gal in Europe? Maisie Dullard?”
“Daisy Miller.”
“Ah, yes,” he said dismissively. “It’s hard to keep those magazine writers straight.” He slumped onto my bed and began flipping through one of my sketchbooks.
“Henry is a serious writer,” I said.
“As opposed to myself?” he shot back.
“Oh no, I didn’t mean that.” But I did.
He turned the sketches around and around, as if not sure which way was right-side-up. He glanced up. “Let me tell you, there is nothing more serious than writing humor. It’s one short step away from obituaries.”
I tried a simple declarative sentence: “Some critics think Henry is breaking new ground in fiction.”
“Ha!” Twain snorted. “I think Henry is breaking wind in print. But he does it so refined and genteel he sounds like Jane Austen’s Granny passing the crumpets.”
Now I was angry, not caring if I insulted him. “I suppose you prefer fiction about bullfrogs and Injuns and boys with sore toes?”
“You bet, if that’s what people want.”
I sputtered, “I like to think…”
“…and I like to eat,” he interrupted. He put the sketchbook aside. “All literature is a bargain struck between author and reader: Dollars paid for entertainment delivered. All else is pretense.”
“Surely,” I tried again, “literature, as an art form…”
“Art doesn’t come into it,” Twain insisted. “Not until you’re dead. ‘Artist’ is a word that the critics might chisel on your tombstone eventually, but I wouldn’t put it on a shingle and hang it out for all to see. Not while I’m alive. Makes you a target. Might as well wear feathers to a turkey shoot.”
Twain was obviously more interested in lecturing me than in having a real conversation, so I changed the subject.
“What was that you said about oysters?”
“The world is mine, and James can have the breadcrumbs.”
I just rolled my eyes.
“All right, since you ask so politely. Some fellows from the drover’s hiring hall have offered us a wagon ride out to Tomales Bay for a luau—a picnic to you. They roast oysters and crabs and fish and whatnot in a big fire pit.” He tossed me the sketchbook. “You should grab your paints and come along for the local color.”
He was correct, the local color was splendid. Tomales bay is a long, shallow body of water running north to south, backlit behind hills to the west, with vast shimmering mudflats and rivulets of water at low tide.
I am always amazed how the simplest elements combine to create the most sublime effects, and how the worst weather makes the best pictures. It was a cold, blustery day, with clouds scudding through the sky on a diagonal bias to the landmasses. Dappled sunlight allowed me to place any object in light or shadow as needed. With scarcely a tree or shrub to catch the eye, there was nothing to look at but gray-green water and gray-brown mud dotted with brown-gray jetsam. But the light! The light turned it all to delicately chased gold and silver.
Against this simple, glorious background I sketched six figures of women and children gathering clams. Later I worked my sketches up into a small oil that is the freshest thing I have done in months. The cadmium yellow sunlight edges the clouds, is reflected by puddles on the sand, warms the highlights on the women’s white blouses, and caresses the bare legs of the little boys like honey. The luau was about what I expected: smoky, with lots of drinking and boasting around the fire. The middle ground of my painting featured a guitar player and Twain cavorting around a campfire.
The painting so captured my imagination that it was two days before I took up my pen again to finish my letter to Henry:
Henry, between the previous sentence and this one there is a gap of two days, in which I have been working on a small canvas called “Clam Gatherers.” I look on what I wrote about the layers upon layers of meaning in a portrait, then I look on the little canvas I have just completed and I see nothing but common folk at a common task, beatified by a celebration of light.
Sometimes I think I think too much. I am confused. There is so much here to love, and so much to hate. And what difference does it make in the end?
Your befuddled chum,
John
* * *
I prefered to study the society of Alta California not in the halls of power, but in the haunts of the common people. In the cafes and bodegas and cantinas the company was more congenial, the atmosphere more salubrious, and the liquor cheaper. My favorite laboratory was a canalside saloon that functioned as the hiring hall for ox drovers and mule skinners. It also served me as a classroom where various highly qualified professors of Spanish taught me the spicier words I needed to lend color and emphasis to my conversation.
My new best friend, Gabino the oxcart drover, invited me to a fiesta at Bahia de Tamales. At first I thought he was offering to bathe me in tamales, the fiery cornpone dumplings they served free on the bar. But no, he had in mind a Californian style luau on the beach.
We travelled from Petalumo to Tamales Bay in a beer wagon, a most congenial form of transportation that carries its own lubrication wherever it goes. I invited John Sargent along to have some English-speaking company, and to rescue him from his sycophantic courting of that stuffed shirt Henry James.
“This is real life,,” I said, spreading straw for us to sit on in the rear of the wagon. “You’d never catch a blue blood like Henry James riding in a beer wagon.”
John eyed the wagon dubiously. A pyramid of beer kegs towered above our nest, chocked and kept from rolling by oaken wedges, lashed tight with hempen lines to the scarred sideboard rails. A Conastoga type covering shaded the precious cargo. Four span of dusty oxen dozed in the traces. Gabino hopped up onto the drivers seat and waved us aboard.
“Hank could afford to hire a carriage,” John said.
“So could I,” I lied, “but this is more fun.”
We climbed up into the rear of the wagon and settled into the straw, our backs against the bottom row of kegs, our legs stretched out over the open tailgate like a chaise longue, and our gaze firmly fixed like the more reflective half of Janus, backwards on where we had been.
Gabino’s whip cracked, the oxen strained, the wagon and all its kegs creaked in protest, and we began to move, almost imperceptively at first, then picking up if not speed, at least a less immobile form of slowness that took us sure as Destiny out of Petalumo and into the west. Warehouses and stockyards slowly gave way to scattered ranchos, each with its small adobe hacienda, large pole barn, garden plot, windmill, and outlying pastures and fields of maize fenced against bears and bulls. The landholdings were small and many, thanks to Padre Serra’s land reforms that constituted the foundation of this young Republic, and guaranteed a different dog every mile to yap at passing traffic.
The sun warmed our legs, the canvas shaded our heads, and a pleasant breeze made me content as a civil servant on a pension. From under the straw I pulled a gallon pail of Gabino’s lager and a greased paper sack full of tamales. Senor Sargent’s alert posture and anxious frown eased gradually as we made our luncheon on the spicy comestibles and passed the pail back and forth to put out the fires.
“You know,” I said, feeling more charitable towards the Jamesian sort, “I do admire your friend Hank’s punctuation. He does know his periods and his commas, and he is a dab hand at the semicolon.”
“You are too kind, sir” John protested, peering at me owlishy.
“My quarrel,” I continued, “is with the words he packs between the punctuation. A paragraph of James’ prose lies on the page like a tombstone, heavy and unmoving and…and constipated. That’s it! He writes like a Mayfair matron on a diet of bon bons, cream cakes and laudanum.”
John snorted, beer erupting genteely from his nose. “And your own words?” He asked sweetly, pointing to a steaming pile of ox dung that had just appeared on the road unreeling beyond our toes, “do they drop more freely on the page?”
I retreated into dignified silence. You just can’t learn some people literature.
After a long upward grade which taxed the oxen sorely, Gabino pulled up at the crest of the hill to rest his team. We jumped down to stretch our legs and deliver the beer to its final resting place. I got out my camera to make a photograph of the oxen.
Being a more placid species, they stand stiller than humans and can be trusted not to twitch or blink in the second required to expose a negative plate in bright sunlight. And no ox ever expressed to me disappointment in its likeness.
Gabino was waving and mugging from the springboard seat, eager to have his photo made. I resorted to my old trick of the empty camera portrait. I despise photographing people. It is always a disaster, a lie, or both. If Jesus Christ himself were to travel forward in time to the finest photography studio this modern day can boast, his picture would entirely undo his reputation.
No photograph of a person ever was good. Hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who first pointed a camera at another person. Better to point a pistol and pull the trigger. Photography transforms the meekest of men into desperadoes. Depicts ruffians as sinless innocents; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look merely serious when he sits for his picture, the photograph makes him as pompous as an owl; if he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down an ass.
The sun never looks through the photographic intrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a “negative”—a contradition, a misrepresentation, a falsehood. I feel strongly about this matter from bitter personal experience, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Solomon, a missionary, a burglar, and an abject idiot, and I am neither.
John Sargent was no help in this matter. He encouraged our driver’s antics, climbing up to pose with Gabino, arm around his shoulder to give him a two-finger set of horns behind his head. One would think that a serious painter of portraits would distain photography, but that was not the case with John. He was very taken with my camera.
When we were back in our seats and under weigh once more, he held up the Submarine Box Camera admiringly. “It is so small,” he said, “I could take a camera like this with me everywhere, to make reference photographs for paintings.”
“Aren’t you afraid that photography will put you out of business?” I asked. “The camera can make dozens of photographic portraits in the time it takes you to paint one.”
“And my painting will be worth a hundred of your photographs.”
“You flatter yourself.”
“Not at all, “he said. “For one thing, or rather two things, the painting will be larger and in color.”
I protested, “But, surely it is only a matter of time before photographs can be made in color, and as large.”
“No matter,” he said, “the painting will still be superior. A color photograph the size of a boxcar would still be no more than one frozen slice of reality; whereas the painted portrait, even a miniature hung around a lady’s neck, will always be a work of the imagination, created over time out of many observations and insights into the sitter’s character.”
“In other words,” I said, “the painting is a fiction.”
“How so?”
“The painting is, at best, a fiction in that it picks and chooses which aspects of the subject to depict, and how much or how little to distort them. At best it is flattering fiction, and at worse a fraud, a lie.”
He shot me a sharp look and almost barked, “No, the photograph is a lie. A lie by omission.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “but isn’t the painting a lie by inclusion, by selection?”
John pouted and pondered a while, leaning back against his cask, staring at the rolling grasslands and shimmering waters of the Estero Americano.
Finally he said, “When a painting succeeds, it reveals a truth greater than reality, beneath and beyond mere appearances. If that is a lie, so be it. If painting is a lie, then life is a lie and there’s no hope for it.”
This philosophy was too deep for me, and too close to my own views to make for satisfying argument, so I laid off and took another pull from the pail of lager.
We arrived at Tamales Bay at dusk. The bay is long and narrow and calm, not at all like part of the turbulent Pacific Ocean. It put me in mind of the lower Mississippi, seen from the Missouri shore below Hannibal, looking across at the Illinois woods in the early morning. The escaping tide even minted a convincing counterfeit of a current.
Women and children dug for clams on the mudflats. Men stood in the cool sea breeze, warming themselves around pits of embers where fish and clams and abalones and whatnot were steaming under blankets of seaweed. They were passing around bottles of mescal and pails of beer, chewing tobacco and spitting into the coals. Three guitars and a trumpet played dance music and young bucks kicked up their heels on the sand. I felt frisky as a pup myself.
John Sargent went into some kind of artistic trance, muttering, “the light, the light.” He ripped out his sketchbook and sat crosslegged on the damp sand, soaking his pantaloons, drawing and scribbling furiously until it was too dark to see, too full to move, and too drunk to dance.