Boryanabooks Catalogue & News

By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)

Last week, my grandson Ethan, aged eleven, and I went to Santa Cruz on the north end of the Monterey Bay for a few days. From the beach, where I stood watching him as he swam into the waves, I saw the pale blue uneven line on the southern end, which is Monterey.

I rode the Hurricane and Logger’s Revenge on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with him. I also rented a little car from the hotel that went forty miles an hour and we drove through cold thick fog up to the University past startled deer and two or three complaisantly beautiful students. The car was open, it was too small for drivers in other cars to see even though it was canary yellow, it didn’t have a steering wheel but a thing like a motorcycle steering mechanism, and Ethan frequently put his long strong young fingers over my hands and tried to take control of the steering and screamed in my ear, “Faster Grandma! Faster!” I think Ethan may not be a contemplative child but he may be contemplative at a rate of speed so I am incapable of seeing it, as people are incapable of hearing sounds that dogs hear.

On the drive back to return him to his parents and little brother, Ethan and I stopped in Aptos at the Rummonds Building. Jim Rummonds bought the building when I was working for him in the mid 1980s. He wasn’t in his office when Ethan and I stopped by but his wife Sue and assistant Chansonette were there, and we lied to each other and said we had not changed. Actually, Sue hadn’t changed and she didn’t lie about anything.

Back in the 1980s, a group of investors sued the Rummonds’ firm clients, Dean Witter Reynolds, and the brother of one of our clients, David Nevis. A Monterey County Superior Court judge led us through a three-year long court trial before dismissing the action. One plaintiff died of old age and one defendant died by flying into a mountain during those three years. The wealthier defendants videotaped the depositions that preceded the trial and the trial itself.

We took some of the depositions in Dallas – for a related case – and some in Vermont, and some in Kinross, Michigan, some place I’d never heard about before the DWR case. When we were in Michigan, we took a ferry to Grand Island and rode bicycles with David Black and David Gomes and Jeff Cole and I pretended we were old WASPs and rocked on chairs in front of the Grand Hotel. I was in Jeff Tidus’s firm’s floor in a West Los Angeles building when I saw JFK, Jr.’s silhouette talking on the phone in his office but declined the opportunity to meet him because what would I say.

Lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, secretaries, the judge, bailiffs and clerks all watched ourselves age on the tapes. The plaintiffs’ attorney David Hollingsworth eventually submitted a 280 page Tenth Amended Consolidated and Supplemental Complaint that weighed seven pounds, and to which were attached sections of California law on fire hydrants. He told the local journalists – who apparently believed him – that not only were our clients guilty but so were we.

Last January, Jeff Tidus stepped from his house in Rolling Hills to get his laptop from his car, and someone shot him in the head. I checked Attorney Search on the California State Bar website. All of the other defense and the plaintiff attorneys in the DWR case are alive and are still licensed to practice law. Two of those attorneys were admitted in 1965 and 1966. It looks like you have to shoot lawyers to stop us from practicing law.

I spent a lot of time in Monterey during those years, and part of it I spent in the Hollingsworth waiting room looking down at a bank on Alvarado and the bank parking lot behind it.

One day, I realized that the bank stood where Fanny Osbourne’s house had stood, and that her son Lloyd had chased cows over the ground the parking lot occupied when he was a little boy.

Fanny van der Grift married Lloyd Osbourne when she was seventeen. Lloyd served in the Civil War and then went to the Nevada silver mines. His wife and little girl Isobel took a ship through the Isthmus of Panama to San Francisco, and then they took wagons and a stagecoach through the mountains. Not many women lived in Lander County. Fanny learned how to roll her own cigarettes and shot a pistol. Lloyd went to Coeur d’Ilene and sent word to Fanny that a bear had eaten him, probably because he was engaged in one of his many amorous adventures with prostitutes, and then they had another child, and Fanny left him because of the prostitutes, and then they re-united in Oakland. She left him again and went to Paris with her children to study art, and in an artists’ colony outside of Paris 1876, she met Robert Louis Stevenson, who was ten years younger than she was but looked as if he was going to expire at any moment. She then re-united with Lloyd Osbourne, who must have had what the Turks call “devil’s fur” to keep Fanny returning, and sent Stevenson a telegram calling things off between them. In 1879, broke, RLS followed her back to the United States.

He lived in a flea-ridden rooming house in Monterey (This building is now called “The Robert Louis Stevenson house”), hoping Fanny would divorce Lloyd. He nearly died of a high fever when he went camping alone in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

In his “Simoneau’s At Monterey,” RLS described his landlord in the boarding house:

“All this time I have said nothing of papa Simoneau himself; always in his waistcoat and shirt sleeves, upright as a boy, with a rough, trooper-like smartness, vaunting his dishes if they were good, himself the first to condemn them if they were unsuccessful; now red hot in a discussion now playing his flute with antique graces, now shamelessly hurrying off the other boarders that he might sit down to chess with me: a man who had been most things from a man in business to a navy, and kept his spirit and his kind heart through all.”

He and young Sam Osbourne went walking in Pt. Lobos during the time he was very ill. Together, they drew a map of a treasure island, and RLS composed the story when walking with the boy along the beach.

Fanny and Stevenson married in May 1880 (Divorce was still a scandal, even in California, even in San Francisco, in those days, so she did not even mention that she had been divorced.) and honeymooned in an old miner’s cottage outside of Calistoga. The bridegroom was skeletal. He was always very ill, since he was a small boy. He spent a lot of time in bed and a lot of time with a fever, and he had little else to occupy him but to write.

RLS, Fanny and Fanny’s children lived in Europe for a time – John Singer Sargent painted a wonderful oil of RLS pacing in front of seascapes and an open door, with Fanny hiding in a white shimmering mantilla to one side — and then they moved back to the United States. In 1881, a friend arranged for Treasure Island to be published in a juvenile magazine, Young Folks.

Stevenson’s most enduring works are Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Black Arrow (1888).

I loved them all growing up but when I was a child — and sick for a long time, living down the hill from where I live now, on West Silver Lake Drive — I loved most A Child’s Garden of Verse (1885).

“The land on counterpane

“I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed clothes, through the hills;

“And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets; or
Brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.”

After his death, Virginia Wolfe condemned Stevenson’s writing as genre horror and juvenilia, and not literature. Jekyll and Hyde initiated generations of horror but followed Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Both books illuminate the dual nature of modern science – one side of it beneficial, and the other capable of destroying us all.

His writing style is not Victorian. It is transparent. Although he arrived in California not too long after you could get to it by train, Stevenson comes across as a modern Californian.

If his – and later his and Lloyd’s – writing is aimed at children, then all right, but I still read it.

In the elevator on the way to meet the others for lunch at a restaurant surrounded by glass that was on top of a Monterey hotel, I told Tidus, “Hollingsworth’s office overlooks the house where Fanny Osbourne used to live.” I was very excited by my discovery.

A man standing behind us in the elevator said, “Lady, who the fuck cares?”

“Who the fuck cares! Who the fuck cares!” I screamed at him. “Haven’t you read Treasure Island?”

“No,” he said pushing past us and then said something about getting the fuck away from the crazy lady. I hate it when people say that.

“What about the first Disney live-action film Treasure Island?” I demanded he tell me. The man’s feet scrambled frantically on the polished and mechanically buffed floor as he ran down the hall.

“Well,” I said, outraged, as we sat down with the other lawyers. “We met a man in the elevator who has not read Treasure Island.”

“Imagine,” Dave Black said. “But then, many people haven’t heard of Houyhnhnms.”

“Houyhnhnms are the rulers and the deformed creatures — ‘Yahoos’ — are human beings in their base form,” I said. David Black nodded over his menu.

You could see all of Monterey from the restaurant windows, all the way down to Point Lobos where Robert walked with a ten-year old boy whose mother he loved and made up stories for him.

Stevenson managed to live until he was forty-four. Fanny lived until 1914. She died in Santa Barbara, California. Her daughter Isobel brought her ashes to Samoa where they were interred next to Stevenson’s on top of Mount Vaea. Lloyd, the little boy who chased cows behind his mother’s rented house in Monterey, died in California in 1947, at the age of 79.

http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/ is the RLS website, but, of course, you can Google Fanny Osbourne and Lloyd Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson and find information on many websites.

James D. Hart, editor, From Scotland to Silverado, (Cambridge, 1966)

Anne Roller Issler, Our Mountain Hermitage ( Standford University Press, 1950)

Mickey Friedman, “The Silverado Sojourn of Robert Louis Stevenson, San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, May 11, 1980).

By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)

My older daughter Feride and granddaughter Emma and I arrived at the Sierra Club’s Clair Tappaan Lodge, which is on the old Lincoln Highway – the first coast-to-coast automobile route in the country (1912-1913) – a little west of Donner Lake, at about midnight on July 3rd, after an incident that revealed to me that Feride had indeed inherited my parallel parking gene. (The parking event occurred when a total stranger opened my daughter’s car door and yelled, “I can’t stand it!” and made her get out so he could park the car for her. The first time someone did this to her, she thought she was being carjacked. Now she just tips them, which can be unnerving when the intervener turns out to be a surgeon.)

We took the I-80, which was backed up most of the way, although the backup didn’t affect us because it took her so long to pack. My daughter packs very well. She packs everything. The Volvo whimpered as the last suitcase went into the trunk.

Thirty years earlier, Feride learned how to drive on the I-80. We hadn’t intended that she would learn how to drive on the I-80. She had her learner’s permit, so I pulled off the highway into the parking lot of a coffee shop (It’s no longer there.) Neither of us knew the parking lot exited into the Interstate. Burned into my retinas is the image of my teenager clutching the steering wheel of my rental car with unnaturally white hands as big rigs surrounded us and escorted us towards the portal of eternity. Burned into her retinas is the image of me with my mouth opened like the fellow in Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.” I promised God I’d give up Marxism if my daughter survived. Fortunately, I hadn’t promised God I’d give up drinking.

In the 1930s, Sierra Club volunteers built the lodge because it was on the Lincoln Highway and also because passenger trains stopped at the station in Truckee. Before Interstate 80 bypassed the lodge in 1956, it must have taken a very long time to drive along the twisting Lincoln Highway from the Bay area, about as long as it took us on 80 the Friday of this Fourth of July weekend. (more…)

By Honey van Blossom

My older grandson Ethan always wants to go to Chinatown in San Francisco. I insist we take a long time to get to Chinatown because, once there, my interest in our adventure wanes.

In Chinatown stores, he examines cellophane wrapped packages of exploding cigars, Mao’s Little Red Book, mechanical masturbating orangutans, caps that blow up in the street, porcelain ash trays formed in the shape of copulating couples, and playing cards with images of naked women. None of the store clerks will sell him any of these things although I can’t imagine who would want these items except for eleven-year-old boys. Once, he came away with a midnight blue silk smoking jacket. I gave in and got him a battery-operated cigar to go with the jacket – but that was in exchange for his not asking me how many times in my life I had had sex – and he walked insouciantly down Grant Avenue in his smoking jacket smoking his pretend cigar.
On one excursion, we rode a cable car past Chinatown, and then he ran up and down hills on a beautiful windy day trying to find Chinatown but I wouldn’t tell him where it was and so he had to wait for me on quite a few hilltops while I admired the view of the San Francisco Bay. I steered him past Taylor Street but did not then, nor have I since, gotten him to Ina Coolbrith Park, with its icon of the poet that looks like a chimpanzee in a Victorian dress.

We moved rapidly downhill on Broadway. He smelled Chinese food in the wind and followed the scent.

I said, “Ina Coolbrith lived in that house. Do you see that house? Will you buy me that house when you are grown up? Members of the Bohemian Club bought it for her after she lost her house in the Great Earthquake. She was one of two women allowed to be members of the Bohemian Club — when real artists and writers belonged to it rather than the heads of multi-national corporations who belong to it now. She lived in a tent with her two white Persian cats, and she wore a white mantilla and her hair was white. She became California’s first Poet Laureate in 1917. I want to live in her house.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “A scout already saw me play baseball. He comes every year to watch me, although I may be a great artist instead, or a L.A. City cop.”

“Not,” I said, “a cop. You kill innocent people on violent video games. I won’t let you be a cop – I’ll tell. I also won’t let you enter the armed services.”

He spotted a German tourist.

I ran after my grandson, rapidly reciting part of Coolbrith’s poem from “On Russian Hill,”

“Night and the hill to me!
Silence no sound that jars;
Above, of stars a sea;
Below, a sea of stars!

“Tranced in slumber’s sway,
The city at its feet.
A tang of salty spray
Blends with the odors sweet

“From garden-close and wall,
Where the madrona stood,
And tangled chaparral,
In the old solitude.

“Here, from the Long Ago,
Rezanov’s sailors sleep;
There, the Presidio;
Beyond, the plumed steep;

“The waters, mile on mile,
Foam-fringed with feathery white;
The beaconed fortress isle,
And Yerba Buena’s light. …”

Ethan approached the young German and politely said, “Where’s Chinatown?”

The young man looked up at the towering child and said he thought it was at the end of the stairs, and so we went to Chinatown again, which is grandma-hell, and then to North Beach for lunch.

Ethan ate something with chicken in it. He always eats chicken except when he eats dessert. He doesn’t usually eat dessert because it doesn’t have chicken in it.

Once, I went with him to Disneyland and he ran pell-mell for fourteen hours, his running punctuated by waits in lines and a few minutes spent on terrifying rides, one of which – California Screamin’ — involves going upside down inside the silhouette of a mouse. At dinner that night, he ate chicken and almost got to the dessert but he abruptly fell asleep with his face in chocolate cake.

“Ina Coolbrith,” I said, as he ate chicken in the North Beach restaurant, “was the first white child to cross Beckwourth Pass in the Sierra Mountains.

“She didn’t know how to read or write until her family reached Los Angeles and she went to school for the first time. “ Ethan’s Shrek-like ears creaked in their sockets signaling interest. He’s dyslexic. He goes to a school in Oakland for students with learning disabilities. None of them can tell time. None of them can tie their shoelaces. They are all deep thinkers.

“How old was she?”

“Ten.”

“The Los Angeles Star/Estrella published her first poem when she was fifteen. She, like all Los Angeles children, spoke English and Spanish. The newspaper journalists wrote in English and Spanish. She was a beautiful girl. She danced the fandango, and she played the guitar. At Christmas, she walked in a long procession with the Los Feliz family.

“Los Angeles then did not look like the city looks now. The people built low buildings made of adobe, surrounded by farms and orchards and natural land. Cows and sheep and goats grazed on the hills.”

“Were there chickens?”

“Everywhere.

“When she was old, she wrote, sitting in the window of the house I want you to buy for me, about the year she was a seventeen year old married woman living in the Mexican city of Los Angeles:

‘We roamed through fruited avenues of odorous limes,
of citron and banana – where the air seemed swooning
with its weight of rifled sweets – or down the spectral
glen where the black stream over jagged gashes of gray
rocks whirled shriekingly.

’Long, crimson blossoms of pomegranate boughs swung
censor-like above us, and we saw afar in the dim south
the long castellated rocks piercing the silver-veined tissues
of the night. We caught blue glimpses of the hills beyond
and like a diamond set in the cleft art of an emerald, the
tiny lake shone out its unshadowed crystal miroring a
sky aflame with stars. We heard the low soft plashing
of the waves against the shore and caught snow-gleamings
of an odorous weight of milk-white lilies, stirred by
the slow tide.’

We took the BART back to the Concord station, and Ethan sat opposite me. A chintz covered immense woman’s butt hung over me. I wondered if her butt was so vast she no feeling in it because the butt touched me from time to time. It was as if a floral couch intervened in things. Perhaps the butt could not move like ordinary flesh. It occupied the entire space between Ethan and me, and it should have at least flinched.

When the car emptied a bit, Ethan hung from a metal bar and swung back and forth.

“She was the first librarian in Oakland’s first free library. When the writer Jack London was a little boy, only five years old, she helped him choose books. In 1906, after the earthquake, he wrote to her ‘No woman has so affected me to the extent you did. I was only a little lad. I knew absolutely nothing about you. Yet in all the years that have passed I have met no woman so noble as you.’ We debouched from the train.

Ethan sat at the computer as soon as we got to his house and typed in a few words and said, “Look, Grandma,” and he showed me a film of Market Street a few days before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, shot from the top of a trolley, which showed bicyclists and horse-drawn carts and bulky Imperialist buildings. Then he pulled up a YouTube film of the same street the day after the earthquake, and the film showed smoky, silent ruins.

See, Ina Coolbrith: Librarian and Laureate, by Josephine DeWitt Rhodehamal, Brigham Young University Press, 1973. Many of Coolbrith’s poems – but not all of them – can be read on-line at Poemhunter.com.

By Honey van Blossom

The Baron and I saw The Last Station, a film with Helen Mirren acting as Tolstoy’s wife, the day before the Baron filed for divorce. At the end of the film, when actors playing ordinary people followed Tolstoy’s casket weeping, I cried with them. The Baron, who had been silent, and who had not wept, said that he hadn’t thought such a plain story could be so moving, but that I was exactly like Tolstoy’s wife.

A difference between us may be that I was not married to the best writer in the world, I said. The Countess had not only had thirteen children with her husband, she had also copied and re-copied and re-copied his manuscripts. She had added the dimension of another voice to his work, a woman’s voice, so that Tolstoy’s writing soared above anything he could have written without her.

At just about two years before the events played out in The Last Station, a woman with secretarial skills and who was able to type, living near Santa Rosa, California, also affected her husband’s writing by editing and typing it. If she affected the quality of his writing – he may have – it would have been to cheapen it. Charmian Kiteridge London was a sentimental, hypocritical writer and her voice in print was always false. Charmian helped create the myth of Jack London, but that myth sold books, and they always needed money.

Whatever influence she had, of course, changed Jack London’s writing. They shared a life for years. I thought about the journey Jack was supposed to write about, and which he did not write about. Over twenty years ago, I followed that trip and came to what should not have been a surprising conclusion: it was not Jack London’s magic trail. It was Charmian’s.

On a summer morning in 1989, I had been sharpening knife after knife on a whetstone, lining them side by side and stroking their edges with my thumb, measuring the knife-edges with my eye and then staring at the back of Marvelous Marv’s neck as he drank his coffee and read the San Francisco Chronicle.

Marvelous was then in his early sixties: a chain smoking barfly Beatnik who identified with Jack London and thought he looked like Jack London but he did not. He despised the Hippies who lived in the Yokayo Valley beneath his mountain because they smoked marijuana. He walked, both sober and not, with a rolling gait as if he were a sailor walking on solid ground after a long voyage on a sailing ship, and he walked with his knees turned a little outward and his hands flailed at the wrists to keep balance. He moved really fast this way.

Marvelous rapidly rolled and flailed out of my kitchen, then across the living room to the front door and out to the street and got in the Volvo, which he always called the Vulva without seeing anything odd about saying that because he spent his childhood in a German village in the middle of the country where no one had spoken English like a normal person. People from that village named Dick don’t even change their names.

From inside his car, he looked at me one last time. I stood at the window and grimaced maniacally and held one of the knives up for him to see.

I last saw Marvelous Marv in 1993.

He had rented a trailer on top of a mountain in Mendocino County and phoned me; this was before most people had cell phones and you had to find the person at home to talk with her — to ask me drive up to his mountain because he had an emergency.

I drove up a gravely road to the trailer. His aged Volvo was rusting in a weeds and rocks out at the edge of a steep precipice. I pulled in next to it.

It turned out he wanted me to explain why his hummingbird feeder did not attract hummingbirds. I explained the reason was that only raptors flew at that elevation. I left and never saw him again, but we had once shared Jack London’s Magic Trail, and I’ll never forget him.

Although Internet began with the introduction of personal computers in the 1970s, and people began to use it more commonly by 1988, neither Marvelous nor I knew about this. When I was a graduate student, I had used a computer terminal that was connected to a computer that occupied an entire room in UCLA’s Department of Engineering.

I used libraries, the photograph collection in the State’s Department of Parks and Recreation in Santa Rosa, the City of Santa Rosa’s map library, local museums, and Charmian London’s biography to document our route.

I typed up our notes on IBM Selectric.

Marvelous’ job was to have had the idea in the first place and tell me about it and then to sit with his skinny old butt placed on his well worn bar stool in The Ark, a restaurant that looked out at the bay that Jack London had sailed when he was a teenage oyster pirate. Marvelous told the other men that were hunkered over their whiskies about our travels, and on the other side of the Ark’s plate glass window the shallow turquoise Bay shone in faint sunlight that arrived through vaporous clouds.

The Londons started their trip at Wake Robin Lodge. The Lodge deserves some explanation because some London aficionados confuse it with the Kohler Frohling cottage, which is in Jack London State Park where Jack and Charmian lived from 1911 to 1915. Jack died in one of the two sun porches of the Kohler Frohling cottage. By then neither Jack nor Charmian spoke with Netta or her husbands, and she didn’t come to the memorial service, and
Charmian did not mention her existence in her hagiography of Jack London. My money has always been on Netta as the person who burned down Wolf House, poisoned his horses, and murdered him.

Charmian’s aunt Netta Eames and her two husbands — Roscoe Eames, a shorthand reporter who bankrupted the Overland Monthly as its accountant and the Reverend Edward Biron Payne, a defrocked Unitarian minister who also worked on the Overland Monthly — rented Wake Robin and ran a Chautauqua on the Wake Robin grounds, and this is where Charmian seduced Jack when he was married to his first wife Bessie, with the approval of Netta and the
husbands, because Jack was going to be their breadwinner, and that is how things turned out.

In The Book of Jack London, Charmian wrote about the place as “”Here a congenial company of acquaintances met in the summers, making merry in the incomparable woods bordering Graham and Sonoma Creeks, swimming in the pools, tramping, boxing, fencing, kiting, and gathering about the campfire at dusk for discussion and reading.” Jack wrote Sea Wolf at a table outside of Wake Robin by Graham Creek. He called the Lodge “Trillium Convert” in
his Valley of the Moon. (Trillium and Wake Robin are different names for the same plant.)

After Jack’s death one of the husbands, the Rev. Payne, wrote The Soul of Jack London (1933), which contains messages a clairvoyant received from Jack London, e.g., Jack cries from the grave, “I am evil!” and in this book Payne claims to have been shocked by Jack and Charmian’s affair and writes that if he had known about it, he would have expressed his disapproval. Victorian morality claptrap didn’t apply to the Payne-Eames menagerie.
They did what they wanted, and what they wanted was to get their hands on Jack London’s income. (For a gentler take on Netta, read Clarice Stasz’s American Dreamers (1988).)

At the Santa Rosa office of the State of California Department of Parks and Recreation, I saw a collection of photographs that included Jack and his friends, cross-dressed, on a boat in the Delta. Jack wrote he tried marijuana once and ended up behind a couch having paranoid delusions, but his description reveals that lots of people he knew were smoking dope as well as wearing women’s dresses in those years. For all of Charmian’s prissy
lady-writer disguises, and for all of Netta’s and the Reverend’s late in life moralizing, this crew was morally adventurous.

Jack married Charmian a day after divorcing Bessie, and they moved into Wake Robin with the Payne-Eames ménage-a-trois. Jack bought Wake Robin for Netta and several ranches for himself that he put together to create “Beauty Ranch,” (now Jack London State Park), through which runs Graham Creek, formerly called “Wildwater Creek.” Ranchers had overgrazed the land, and Jack wanted to return the property to ecological balance.

I catalog the plants and animals on Beauty Ranch to illuminate its grandeur: the California oak woodland, which has a canopy of coast live oak, Garry oak, Black oak, Pacific Madrone, Bigleaf maple and California laurel. In some of the steeper, cooler riparian zones are small groves of Sequoia sempervirens and under the trees grow blackberry, western poison-oak and in occasional drier patches some coyote brush. There are black-tailed deer, gray squirrel, raccoon, skunk and opossum, bobcat and mountain lion and scrub jay, Steller’s jay, Acorn woodpecker and junco.

The Magic Trail began in April 1906, when an earthquake shook Glen Ellen (The Book of Jack London, by Charmian London, 1922. Charmian London wrote:

“A few minutes before five, on the morning of the 18th, upstairs at Wake Robin, my eyes flew open inexplicably, and I wondered what had stirred me so early. I curled down for a morning nap, when suddenly the earth began to heave, with a sickening onrush of motion for an eternity of seconds. An abrupt pause, and then it seemed as if some great force laid hold of the globe and shook it like a Gargantuan rat. It was the longest half-minute I
ever lived throug; I lay quite still, watching the tree-tops thrash crazily, as if all the winds of all quarters were at loggerheads.”

Charmian and Jack got on their horses and rode up the side of Mount Sonoma and stopped to watch dust rising from the Napa State Hospital for the Infirm.

“Why, Mate Woman, ” Jack cried, his eyes big with surmise, “I shouldn’t wonder if San Francisco had sunk. That was some earthquake. We don’t know but the Atlantic may be washing up at the feet of the Rocky Mountains!” Charmian wrote.

When they reached the top of the mountain, they saw smoke rising from both San Francisco and from Santa Rosa. Most of the buildings in San Francisco did not collapse in the earthquake: they burned when gas lines burst. Santa Rosa’s buildings collapsed, and the city burned.

Marvelous and I walked up Mount Sonoma and we saw San Francisco in the distance. Its buildings looked white in the sunlight. As we descended through the oak trees, I talked about the water lawsuit Netta filed against Jack and Charmian in 1915 as revenge for Jack’s having replaced her with his sister as his manager.

I had gone to the Sonoma County courthouse and checked out the file on this case, but someone had removed all of the interior documents. Irving Stone wrote about the lawsuit in his extraordinarily defective Sailor on Horseback (1938). I was saying that my money was on Irving Stone as the purloiner of government documents because Charmian burned many of Jack’s papers before Stone could get his hands on them, and I was looking at my feet
and did not see what was ahead of me: a black behemoth weighing about 500 pounds. The monster bull saw me and blinked as if not believing his good fortune and then he struck the ground with his right front hoof and bellowed, yes.

I backed away and turned to run like hell down the mountain and saw that Marvelous was already a miniature figure at the base of the mountain, hands flailing, bandy-legged and rolling in the direction of the parking lot.

We stopped after that at Russ and Winnie Kingman’s bookstore in Glen Ellen. Russ had been responsible for moving the cabin Jack London lived in when he lived in the Yukon down to Jack London Square. Russ’s office in Glen Ellen was a Jack London museum. He had drawers full of index cards on which he had typed references to moments in the Londons’ lives, but he did not have anything on the Magic Trail.

The Londons had commissioned a ship to be built at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco. On that ship, the “Snark,” they would one day sail the South Seas. (See, American Dreamers by Clarice Stasz, 1988) They wanted to follow the route taken by another famous couple, Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny Osborne on their voyage to the South Seas twenty years earlier. Because of the earthquake, the Snark’s keel was to remain unfinished for a long time, so they saddled their houses and rode instead into northern California.

Hatless, with toilet accessories and reading matter stowed in saddle-bags hehind our Australian saddles, we set out northerly to see what the quake had wreaked upon rural California. At this and that resort, we would feel one or another of the many lighter tremblers that followed the big shake, marking the subsidence of the “Fault” that is supposed to enter from the sea-bed at Fort Bragg, and zigzag southeasterly across the state.

“From Glen Ellen, to Rincon Valley road, through Petrified Forest to Calistoga to Napa Valley. Calistoga to The Geysers. Thence to Lakeport, on Clear Lake, a by way of Highland Springs. We sailed on Clear Lake.

“Lakeport to Ukiah, via Laurel Dell, Blue Lakes. Ukiah to Willits. Through grandeurs of mountains and redwood forest to logging camp, `Alpine.’ Thence to Fort Bragg, on the coast.

“From Fort Bragg, down the coast, sleeping at lumber villages. Navarro, Albion, Greenwood. Thence to Booneville with luncheon at Philo. Philo to Cloverdale, thence to Brooke Sanitorium. Thence to Santa Rosa, and on down to Glen Ellen.

There was, in 1987, a Rincon Valley Road, and no such road shows on the old maps kept in the Santa Rosa library collection. There is an area called Rincon Valley, and there was once a Rincon Valley school.

Charmian’s diary for those days kept in the Jack London collection in The Huntington Library only reports that, on May 3, 1906, they rode 30 miles to
Calistoga. I figured the Londons rode over what is now called Calistoga Road into Calistoga, and then to Healdsburg. The Calistoga Road begins on Highway 12, and it passes the Petrified Forest, which Robert Louis Stevenson had also visited when he and Fanny honeymooned in an old miner’s lodge in 1880. The lodge is now part of Robert Louis Stevenson State Park on Saint Helena Highway.

On May 4, 1906, Jack and Charmian rode up from Healdsburg to The Geysers at the top of the Mayacamas range, where they experienced an aftershock.

In the nineteenth century, stagecoach drivers drove tourists up the precipitous road to a hotel at the top. The hotel and resort are gone, and the geysers are now part of a PG&E plant.

According to a travel article in the August 31, 1869 Boston Journal, the trip was “perilous” and the driver “General Foss” took the road descending from the summit with break neck speed. In 1987, PG&E trucks pulled into side routes to rest their brakes.

East of the Geyser Peak range is a canyon more than a thousand feet deep. A sharp transverse ridge, just wide enough on its narrow crest to afford a carriage road, bridged the chasm. The Boston Journal writer observed:

“Trees fly past like the wind; bushes dash angrily against the wheels; the passengers hold on as if for dear life; the ladies shut their eyes and grasp the arm of some male passenger; and speed down the declivity with lightning rapidity, the horses on a life jump, and General Foss, whip in hand, cracking it about their heads to urge them on. At every lurch of the coach one feels an instinctive dread of being tossed high in air and landed far below in a gorge, or, perchance, spitted upon the top of a sharp pine.”

In Silverado Squatters, (1888) Stevenson wrote:

“Along the unfenced abominable mountain roads, he (Foss) launches his team with small regard for human life or the doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travelers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at the driver’s huge, impassive, fleshy countenance.”

In Valley of the Moon (1913), Jack London fictionalized their journey in an episode in which Billy and Saxon – modeled physically on Jack and Charmian — tramp around northern California. In Healdsburg, Billy hires on as a coach driver.

“Each day the train disgorged passengers for the geysers, and Billy, as if accustomed to it all his life, took the reins of six horses and drove a full load over the mountains in stage time. The second trip he had Saxon beside him on the high box-seat.”

When Marvelous drove the Vulva down that road, the brakes overheated. I jumped out and Marvelous sailed further downhill calling to me, “Help. Help.” I didn’t know what I thought I could do – lasso him? The car went up a little hill and slowed, coming to rest an inch away from a domestic gas tank.

For the next leg of the journey, we camped in the state park at Sugar Loaf Ridge State Park, which Robert Louis Stevenson described as follows:

“A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity. It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful. The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath. Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the valley … There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the lowlands seems like scaling heaven.” (Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1901)

Neither Marvelous nor I were nature people. We had rented camping equipment from Sears but Marvelous thought it a waste of time to unfold the tent so we drove around with it tied to the Vulva’s roof, where it, collapsed, so we slept in the car. After the experience of sleeping on the backseat with my head wedged under the door handle, I decided I would prefer not to be buried when I die but instead to be cremated. A large family of skunks entered our campsite. I spent long minutes standing on the car hood until they decided to leave.

In Calistoga, we visited the Petrified Forest, a place Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about in The Silverado Squatters. Three million years ago, glassy lava flowed over redwood trees and buried them. In time silica carried by ash filled every particle of the trees. They are now stones.

According to Charmian’s journal, they crossed on horseback over the mountain into fields of wild flowers, and there was snow on the mountains opposite. On the other side of those mountains lies California’s Central Valley.

Marvelous and I stayed at the State Park at its edge of Clearlake and we walked along the Pomo trail.

In 1850, California entered the Union as a Free State, a state without slavery, but the State legislature enacted laws legalizing Indian slavery. Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone enslaved 50 members of the Hoolanapoo clan and made them mine for gold without food rations. Two survived. Stone and Kelsey raped the Hoolanapoo women and killed anyone who asked for food. After they raped the wife of Chief Augustine, members of this clan rebelled and killed both Stone and Kelsey and brought food back to their starving people.

The First Dragoons Regiment of the United States Cavalry rode north to seek revenge for Stone and Kelsey. They could not find Chief Augustine nor his people, so they murdered about 100 men, women and children who lived on an island in Clearlake.

One six-year old girl, Ni’ka, or Lucy Moore survived by hiding underwater and breathing through a tule reed. Her descendants formed the Lucy Moore Foundation to work for better relations between the Pomo and residents of California. The State of California honored Andrew Kelsey by naming Kelseyville after him. Key, Karen. Bloody Island (Bo-no-po-ti). The Historical Marker Database. 18 June 2007 (retrieved 27 Feb 2009)

I went to the Historic Courthouse Museum in Lakeport while Marvelous looked for a bar where he could sit and look at whiskey bottles stacked against a mirror like a parakeet in a cage with a mirror for entertainment. I found a letter from an old woman who had been a child in May 1906. She wrote that she saw Jack and Charmian come into town on their horses, and said that they did not wear hats and that Charmian had long red hair.

The Highland Springs Resort, where Jack and Charmian stayed, burned down many years ago. People once took the stage up from San Francisco, wearing heavy woolen clothing, most of it black, and drank from the 23 springs. It was a Frisbee golf course when we found it.

We passed a portion of the Old State Road just after we left the Blue Lakes Lodge. It went under low hanging boughs, and I could just about imagine Charmian’s delighted laughter coming from that bit of road as Jack pulled her down from her horse so that they could find a place to make love.

This wasn’t really Jack London’s Magic Trail; it was Charmian’s. The route they took was one of the routes she had taken with her aunt Netta when Netta made a niggardly income as a travel writer.

In the 1960s, Ukiah photographer Robert Lee restored A.O. Carpenter’s copperplate photographs that had been found in the damp basement of the Sunhouse, which is now part of the Grace Hudson museum. The photographs include some of Charmian Kitteridge when she was a very young woman, and the good friend of Grace Carpenter, — later Grace Hudson — “The Artist Lady,” who painted portraits of Pomo Indians. See, Aurelius O. Carpenter: Photographer of the Mendocino Frontier.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Netta Kitteridge-Eames-Payne wrote travel stories for San Francisco readers in early travel magazines. The name of the photographer for those stories was A. O. Carpenter.

Grace and Charmian remained good friends all of their lives. When Dr. John Hudson died, Charmian wrote a sympathy letter to Grace, which I saw once on a mantel in the Sunhouse. They were then both widows. The Hudsons are buried in a madrone grove in the cemetery at the north end of Ukiah, and I went there and saw that Indian school children had painted pictures of rainbows and flowers and had placed them under the large rocks marking the Hudsons’ graves.

Marvelous decided we were next going to take the old Alpine Road from Willits to Fort Bragg. We stopped at the Willits police department and perhaps should have taken a measure of caution when the officer of the day laughed out loud when we asked if the road was passable.

It was a horrible trip. It was so horrible. Marvelous insisted on driving right through a muddy slough, and the Vulva sank it. We had to swim out the windows through mud and we stood there, looking around for water because we hadn’t taken any with us (There wasn’t any in the middle of the forest.), as the mud dried on our hair and clothing. Our eyes stared from mud masks.

In time, a couple named Jack and Jill came up the hill from Willits, and they stopped and introduced themselves, and I asked if they were really named Jack and Jill and if they had really come up the hill, and they said it was all true.

They had a thing called a winch on the back bumper of their truck, and they pulled the Vulva out of the muck and dragged it all the way through other sloughs in the forest until we reached Ft. Bragg, where we went to a car wash and checked into a hotel and took showers and rented washing machines. The Vulva’s underside was never the same. It remained mud encrusted until the day one of the trucks that people used to drive mounted on enormous tires with rifle racks in the back and I Love My Bible decaled to the bumper rammed it, ending its life.

We rode along the coast and then went through a back route into the Anderson Valley, where people once spoke a made up language called Boontling, and then down to Altruria a little north of Santa Rosa.

Edward Biron Payne and thirty of his followers founded Altruria in 1894. It only lasted a few months. The Altrurians were Christian Socialist utopians who kept orchards and gardens and sold their produce in a shop in San Francisco, whose manager was a young lawyer, Job Harriman.

Job Harriman later ran on the socialist ticket for mayor of Los Angeles and lost the election after the McNamara brothers pleaded guilty to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. The McNamaras had been union organizers, and Job Harriman had been one of their attorneys. Cary McWilliams, in Southern California: An Island on the Land, wrote that the Times bombing was a mortal blow to the labor movement in Los Angeles.

Job and his followers moved then to the Antelope Valley, where they founded Llano del Rio, a utopian community that lasted until an earthquake changed the course of the river they depended on for irrigation. The book to read about Job Harriman, the bombing of the Los Angeles Times, and Llano del Rio is, of course, Lionel Rolfe’s (with Nigey Lennon and Paul Greenstein) Bread & Hyacinths (1992)

Some of the old Altruria structures remained when Marvelous and I visited there. Burke’s Sanitarium, which Charmian wrote about in her description of Jack London’s Magic Trail, was on the same parcel of land. I suppose it’s all gone now.

NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND

By Honey van Blossom

One evening, I walked on the pedestrian path on the west side of Silver Lake. Several tall eucalyptus and conifers grew inside the fence. The reflections of streetlights on the other side of the lake looked like white and yellow poles in the almost black water.

A slender young man had his feet in the fence links and reached toward its top. A young woman stood on the path near him.

“There’s barbed wire on top,” I said to the man. “You can’t get over the fence.”

“I don’t want to get over the fence,” he said. “I want to be able to see the moon on the water without interference.”

I teach at a state university. Mostly, I like students so much because the young refresh my old soul. Also, the students arrive in my classroom after they spent years having learned nothing with any evident value in the Los Angeles Unified School District so that teaching makes me seem like a sorcerer. Once a young man told me he visited LA’s Skid Row and climbed a fence to get into an abandoned building to see if the homeless could be sheltered inside of it. “Proffesor,” he wrote in a message, “I am so exited!”

The moon came up over the hill — huge, yellow and misshapen as if it were itself watery — and a road of yellow light opened through the lake’s surface.

“It’s so big,” the woman said.

“The moon isn’t really bigger,” I said. “It’s an angular size illusion. The moon appears larger on the horizon than it does when it’s higher in the sky.”

I wanted to explain everything then, starting with the night I stood in the alley of windows outside of the compartments of the Orient Express at night in 1967 and saw moonlight reflected on the Maritsa River as the train passed it.

I had boarded the train at Haydar Pasha on a winter afternoon with my then husband, that one named Mohammed von Münchausen.

All of my husbands have been named Baron von Münchausen because all of them have been prodigious liars. There were three Richards — Richard the first, whom I no longer recall, Richard the second, a history professor, and Richard of the hairy tongue. I once had three Armenian husbands at the same time once simply because I got away with it. Marvelous Marv von Münchausen was a German baseball player who drove a Cadillac with a trunk that looked as if it contained bodies but which did not. My present husband tells me he is tired of being called von Münchausen.

Winters in Istanbul were mild, and I wore a light coat over a dark blue pants suit made with thin wool, and I wore fashionable snakeskin boots that went up to my knees.

Our finances were not good. Mohammed had borrowed money to start a construction business not far from Kars to build a dam for the Turkish government. The first thing he learned was there were no construction cranes, so he bought a book on cranes that was written in French.

He thought he spoke French because his mother Magda the Mendacious believed she spoke French. Actually, neither Mohammed nor his mother spoke any language well but instead mangled Greek, Turkish, German, English and French, sometimes mixing up all the languages. It was as if they had no native language. (My Greek is limited to words that sound like “Okie” and “American Gorl.”) My husband found a book written in French that explained how to build construction machinery.

Mohammed and I spoke Turkish with each other but my Turkish was flawed because I could not remember important distinctions between words. One Turkish word, for instance, that means “to wring” sounded to me the same as a similar looking word that means, “to fuck.” The word that means “cucumber” could not be used in polite company because cucumber meant “penis” in vernacular Turkish. Even when I attempted to curse on purpose, the words came out wrong, and I once said, “I shit in your grandfather’s mouth,” instead of “I jump into your grandfather’s mouth.”

One time, I had been leaning over the balcony that jutted over the Bosporus at the point where Helle fell from the Golden Fleece, when I saw a raggedy village man standing below me with a knife held in one of his grubby hands that glinted in the sunlight.

I correctly intuited that he was there for me, and that he felt he had to avenge someone’s honor for something I had misspoken, so I covered my head with a flowered scarf to conceal my blond hair and put on one of Magda the Mendacious’s trench coats, and I went down the stairs into the street and melted into the crowd of passers-by.

With the help of a dictionary, I translated the technical book, and Mohammed used it to design cranes for the project but he had to use donkeys to haul them to the project site.

Wolves ate the donkeys, and Mohammed bought his workers motorbikes, which were made in Turkey, and which did not work. Nothing stamped with the initials “TM,” for Turk Mali, served its intended function.

Buildings collapsed. Buttons fell off clothing. A Turkish factory made pantyhose that only fit women with one leg swollen by poliomyeltis and the other swollen with elephantiasis.

His creditors arrived at our apartment to find we had removed all the furniture but for one small table with a Koran lying on it. In frustrated outrage, they informed the customs official that our automobile – a 1966 Mercedes Benz – had arrived in Turkey without our having paid the customs duty. The police arranged to have the Mercedes taken on a flatcar and deposited in Svilengrad in Bulgaria.

The Mercedes had been our one remaining asset. We needed to sell it to pay for passage on a bus to Luxemburg to catch Air Icelandic to New York so we could start over. I called my old friends from my striptease artiste days in Belgium, who arranged for me to dance Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils for a nice sum of money in Bosnia-Herzogovina.

A taxi stopped in front of our building to pick us up. Magda ran out after us with a bucket of cold water to throw on the taxi, and she threw it calling out in her eldritch scream, “Go and come like water!” She threw it on me by mistake.

The train stopped in Svilengrad in the early morning. The station was empty when we arrived.

The customs official, a large woman with short hair wearing a heavy winter coat that had a tiny hammer and sickle badge pinned to its lapel, appeared from nowhere. She refused payment because we didn’t have any Bulgarian money.

Mohammed took a bus to the town and found a grocery store but the only things on the shelves were three jars of rose petal jelly and one jar of pickled vegetables, and a box of salt. He came across a bank, but only one teller was in it, and the teller had no money. The teller picked up the handle to a primitive black telephone and cranked it with a lever and yelled into it, “Sofia! Sofia!”

I waited in the station, sitting under an oil painting of a man carrying a loaf of bread. The sign next to me read, “Defense de fumer.”

It was very cold in Bulgaria, much colder than it had been in Istanbul, and my still wet clothing froze on me. I hadn’t had anything to eat for three days because we needed to use all of our money to retrieve the Mercedes.

The station filled with people. They wore odd clothes: hand sewn shoes, a World War I English Army uniform, towering wool hats. Trains arrived. No one got off them. Trains left, and no one got on them. The people sat opposite me patiently, staring.

I was, to say the least, disoriented by cold, hunger and a growing sense of unease, and I misread the sign to mean “Defend Smoking.” I assumed that Communists did everything the opposite of what Capitalists did, so that reading made sense to me. I chain smoked Marlboros furiously to show I was a Communist.

Mohammed sat on a return bus from the town. The entire remaining population of Svilengrad got on the bus with him. The man sharing the bus seat with Mohammed said in Turkish, “How could you be married to a Capitalist?”

Mohammed said I was a Russian, but the Bulgarian said, “Don’t lie. We’ve all seen her passport.”

“You’re right,” Mohammed said. “She’s a Capitalist pig. She lied to me and said she was a Russian.”

When we finally paid the customs official, she drove the Mercedes out behind the station and broke the side window with her fist.

Mohammed drove gently through the throng of people, and I held the pane of glass on the passenger side with my hands. The glass fell out and freezing air came into the car. He stopped and put his jacket over the front of the engine to keep the engine warm.

The police detained us twice before we left Bulgaria. Whenever they began to search me, I vomited on them, so they let us go after expressing their disgust.

On our return trip, Mohammed got out and hitched a ride with a drunken Turkish engineer who was smuggling a car. I could not then drive stick shift, so the Mercedes lurched in little humps, and the Turkish customs took the car apart with screwdrivers looking for drugs. I thought the cat in the customs building was an electric cat full of rainbows.

I explained in English that I was a Belgian dietician, and that no one smuggles drugs into Turkey. After seven hours, they raised the gate and let the car into Turkey, where I crashed and left it in a ditch and ran after a bus full of Turkish workers, who whispered they would rape me.

When the bus stopped in Edirne, I put my hair under a worker’s cap I’d stolen and ran from it to a hotel, where I thought Mohammed might find me. By then, I hadn’t eaten in two weeks and was as thin as a boy.

In the hotel room, I saw that the radiators were full of rainbows and knew I had lost my mind. I saw a mailman walking in the street below the hotel windows and I was afraid of him. I was afraid of mailmen for years after that.

When we returned home at last, Magda opened the apartment door and said in English, “The grandchildren taught me English. Hello How Are You Baby?”

I said in English, “I’m fine. How are you?”

“Twilight zone,” she said. “Thank you very mach Baby.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my younger daughter’s pigtail swing heavily from side to side as she ran to hide in a closet.

“Is she passing a wave over me?” Magda asked, because she was far from stupid.

“Oh, no,” I said. “That’s correct. That’s what you say.”

NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND

By Honey van Blossom

A year after my mother’s funeral, I spent Christmas Eve some years ago with my younger step-brother and stepfather at the home of an elderly Ukrainian man — John — in Cathedral City, which is near Palm Springs.

The funeral had been relatively horrible. My stepfather was a Jew but he got a priest to deliver the eulogy because, as he said, “You never know.” My brother wore movie star sunglasses indoors and took over for the priest and spoke for hours, all of it a lot of crap. Afterwards, my brother solemnly sat us down and said that the mourner who arrived dressed like Elvis Presley had put Voodoo beads in our mother’s casket to replace her rosary and for just a moment my father had wanted to go out and dig her up.

John had a heavy hand when he filled our glasses with a transparent alcohol.

Our father sat unnaturally upright in his chair. He had been misled by the apparent innocence of the white alcohol and had drunk three glasses of it. He had drunk one beer and one glass of Manischewitz Concord Grape wine in the eight-five years leading up to that dinner.

My brother’s face turned red. I had been through holidays with my brother before, so I started to get up to join the women in the kitchen who were cooking an enormous beast in the oven. I did not get up fast enough.

“Mom took me to Christmas mass,” he began. Our mother had not been inside a Catholic Church since 1945, when the Church excommunicated her for divorcing her first husband, the one she called What’s-His-Name, because he hit her a lot. For the remainder of her life, she believed everything she learned as a child, but she felt betrayed.

I edged closer to the kitchen door.

“The priest droned on and on,” my brother, who had never heard a priest’s homily in his life, said. “I felt a fart coming on.”

Our father tilted sideways. I went around the table and pushed him back up. He tilted the other direction.

John — almost ninety himself but with an enormous alcohol tolerance — looked at my brother with an expression of growing horror.

“Then it came: a monumental fart, a fart without parallel, a fart that stunk up the entire church. The windows stained glass windows rattled.”

I shore my stepfather’s rigid torso up with some pillows and went into the kitchen. I heard, “They threw us out of the church.” There was some rushing around noise after Dad hit the floor.

My brother’s girlfriend basted the beast, which was lying in a baking pan, with something brown and said, “Your brother’s been through a lot. He left home when he was thirteen to live with a stripper.”

“Funny,” I said. “I never noticed he was away.” I saw my brother’s ursine shadow cast against the kitchen door, with its pointed ear bent in our direction. “Maybe I wasn’t paying attention,” I said.

So last year, when I took Boryana Rolfe on a walk, and we walked on Hidalgo past Anais Nin’s house, and she said she wanted me to tell her everything about Nin, I didn’t want to do it: Anais Nin had something in common with my brother.
They could be the same person on a psychiatrist’s chart of histrionic personality disorder, the person with an asterisk after each criterion. Nin matched my brother’s self-absorbed grandiosity, all-teeth-shining and charming spider-in-the-web manipulation of all people, really rather remarkable number of sexual conquests and betrayals – surely even my brother had something else to do? – a consuming hatred of anyone he believed did not adequately admire him, including two farm laborers who walked across a parking lot where he stood waiting for me so that he felt he must shoot them with the revolver he kept in our father’s car in a tool box (He didn’t shoot them. I went back into the office and dialed 9-1-1. All that happened was that the farm workers moved quite a bit faster than they may have customarily done.).

Of course, there are differences. Anais Nin wrote well. My brother has read one book, Cinder the Cat, and he spells “night” n-i-t-e and is not kidding. Anais Nin was a feminist icon for some feminists, and some feminist idolaters.
The Nin hagiographers swallowed the Nin-spun myths without chewing. Robert Zaller, for instance, in his “Introduction” to A Casebook on Anais Nin, (New American Library 1974, “Casebook”) writes that she supported herself as a dancer and model. She never supported herself. Her legal husband, the ever patient Hugo, supported her and paid for dancing lessons for her but she took the lessons too late in life to become a professional dancer. The indulgent Hugo also supported her mother because her violent and abusive father abandoned his family when Nin was ten years old. (Nin and her father became lovers when she was thirty.) Hugo was a good artist, and he was a better dancer, yet he struggled to pay Nin’s enormous debts and payoffs to lovers working as a banker, and her response was to criticize the man for abandoning his own writing.

Nin supported her married boyfriend Henry Miller with Hugo’s money until Henry got old and pot-bellied, and she also took money Hugo intended for her mother’s rent to help Henry. Henry Miller writes about her famous journals, “The chief concern of the diarist is not with truth….” This is a circumlocution. Casebook, p. 6.) Nin lied all the time. Big lies. Small lies. A spectrum of medium-sized lies. See, Diedre Bair, Anais Nin A Biography, 1994, G.P. Putnam’s Sons). Also, see, Salon’s interview with Diedre Bair at http://www.salon.com/weekly/bair960729.html. (Retrieved March 7, 2010)

Salon asks Bair, “Why do you think Nin was so severely denounced for having lied in her own diaries?”

“,,,,’ (W)hen Nin’s diaries were published, women in the ’60s, in the dawning of the feminist movement, were reading these diaries and were saying, ‘Oh my God, here’s one woman who really had the perfect life. She went around the world independently, she lived independently, she did whatever she wanted, she was in charge of her own sexuality, her own finances, everything. We all want to be Anaïs Nin.’

“Many, many women I know left their partners, changed their sexual identity, just totally changed their lives, and in many instances really messed up their lives. And then it gradually filtered out, well, you know, she not only had one husband, she had two, and one of them was incredibly wealthy, and he paid for everything. She was never really doing anything on her own, there was always this big safety net of all these people. And so people turned against her, because the diary wasn’t the truth.”

Bair may have unintentionally omitted from her interview comment about the women — going back probably at least to Georges Sand (1804-1876), continuing with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1889), Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway, and A Room of One’s Own (1929), and Anne Desclos’ novel about sexual submission, The Story of O, (1954), who all wrote much better than Nin, and who wrote with dimensionality and insight, about women’s lives and struggles towards freedom.

That anyone believed Nin at all mystifies me. She wrote about her mental health that she was “sick, very sick,” and she was right. By sheer will power she turned her personality disorder into art, and that was obviously a perilous thing for her to have done to those who read her books. I had not believed her when I was ten years old, but, of course, I had always known my younger brother, and most adults did not have that advantage.

When I was ten, the year before Nin’s other husband Rupert Pole was my science teacher at King Junior High, my mother had her hair done at Elida Casteneda’s beauty salon and Elida colored her hair twice a month and permed it every two months. Before the 1960s, most Silver Lake women never went outdoors with regular looking hair. Between visits to Elida, my mother wore metal curling rods at night.

The women of that time did not have normal bodies. Neither women nor girls sweat. They rested. They baked things.
Ladies wore pointed brassieres that made their breasts resemble torpedoes during the hey-day of the military industrial complex, or like the grilles of Buick automobiles.

Ladies wore full body girdles that compacted the rest of their bodies and made them look like upended trout. Even skinny women wore girdles.

Fat women wore peach tinted corsets with shoe lace-like strings that drew them in.

In this context of 1950s conformity, Nin swam languidly to my attention, brought to me by Elida Casteneda, who smelled of ammonia from giving my mother another perm and from talc so she wouldn’t offend, with her hands open and in them five slender books.

“I have this client,” Elida said. “She prints her own books because no one will publish them. She doesn’t wear any underwear at all, and you can see through her clothes.”

“I hear you read,” Elida said. I was on a turquoise Naughehyde chair with chrome arms, and my head was poked under the shining metal hood that descended over women’s heads to dry their hair, only the hood was shut off. “I don’t understand these books and your mom says I can give them to you.”

As I sat there under the silent metal hood, I knew immediately that neither Elida nor my mother had read a word that was in those five books. They must have thought Children of the Albatross a book about children and a big sea bird. Ladders to the Fire — that must be a book about firemen. I have no idea what was going through their minds when they gave me House of Incest to read. Maybe its title had been stuck to the back of another book or something.

I spent the morning reading a story written monotonously in B minor about the time Nin’s abortionist removed the six-month old female fetus from the author so that Nin would not have to interrupt her creativity for long. I read about all kinds of sex, none of which involved penetration, but which sometimes involved men on their knees in front of the protagonist.

“It’s time to go,” My mother said.

“I am glad you liked the books,” Elida said.

“Really,” my mother said, “It’s time to get up?”

“Honey?” Elida said.