The Californiacs

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The Californiacs.

By Inez Haynes Irwin

California, which produces the maximum of scenery and the minimum of
weather; California, which grows the biggest men, trees, vegetables and
fleas in the world, and the most beautiful women, babies, flowers and
fruits; California, which, on the side, delivers a yearly crop of
athletes, boxers, tennis players, swimmers, runners and a yearly crop of
geniuses, painters, sculptors, architects, authors, musicians, actors,
producers and photographers; California, where every business man writes
novels, or plays, or poetry, or all three; California, which has spawned
the Coppa, Carmel and San Quentin schools of literature; California,
where all the ex-pugs become statesmen and all the ex-cons become
literateurs; California, the home of the movie, the Spanish mission, the
golden poppy, the militant labor leader, the turkey-trot, the
grizzly-bear, the bunny-hug, progressive politics and most American
slang; California, which can at a moment's notice produce an earthquake,
a volcano, a geyser; California, where the spring comes in the fall and
the fall comes in the summer and the summer comes in the winter and the
winter never comes at all; California, where everybody is born beautiful
and nobody grows old - that California is populated mainly with
Californiacs.

California, I repeat, is populated mainly with Californiacs; but the
Californiacs are by no means confined to California. They have, indeed,
wandered far afield. New York, for instance, has a colony so large that
the average New Yorker is well acquainted with the symptoms of
California. The Californiac is unable to talk about anything but
California, except when he interrupts himself to knock every other place
on the face of the earth. He looks with pity on anybody born outside of
California and he believes that no one who has ever seen California
willingly lives elsewhere. He himself often lives elsewhere, but he
never admits that it is from choice. He refers to California always as
"God's country", and if you permit him to start his God's country line
of talk, it is all up with intelligent conversation for the rest of the
day. He will discourse on California scenery, climate, crops, athletes,
women, art-sense, etc., ad libitum, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. He is a
walking compendium of those Who's Whosers who were born in California.
He can reel off statistics which flatter California, not by the yard,
but by the mile. And although he is proud enough of the ease and
abundance with which things grow in California, he is even more proud of
the size to which they attain. Gibes do not stop the Californiac, nor
jeers give him pause. He believes that he was appointed to talk about
California. And Heaven knows, he does. He has plenty of sense of humor
otherwise, but mention California and it is as though he were conducting
a revival meeting.

Once a party which included a Californiac were taking an evening stroll.
Presently a huge full moon cut loose from the horizon and began a tour
of the sky. Admiring comments were made. "I suppose you have them bigger
in California," a young woman observed slyly to the Californiac. He did
not smile; he only looked serious. Again, a Californiac mentioned to me
that he had married an eastern woman. "Any eastern woman who marries a
Californian," I observed in the spirit of badinage, "really takes a very
great risk. Her husband must always be comparing her with the beautiful
women of his native state." "Yes," he answered, "I've often said to my
wife, 'Lucy, you're a very pretty woman, but you ought to see some of
our San Francisco girls.'" "I hope," I replied, "that she boxed your
ears." He did not smile; he only looked pained. Once only have I seen
the Californiac silenced. A dinner party which included a globe-trotter,
were listening to a victim of an advanced stage of Californoia. He had
just disposed of the East, South and Middle West with a few caustic
phrases and had started on his favorite subject. "You are certainly a
wonderful people," the globe-trotter said, when he had finished. "Every
large city in Europe has a colony of Californians, all rooting for
California as hard as they can, and all living as far away as they can
possibly get."

Myself, Californoia did not bother me for a long time after I first went
to California. I am not only accustomed to an offensive insular
patriotism on the part of my countrymen, but, in addition, all my life I
have had to apologize to them for being a New Englander. The statement
that I was brought up in Boston always produces a sad silence in my
listeners, and a long look of pity. Soft-hearted strangers do their best
to conceal their tears, but they rarely succeed. I have reached the
point now, however, where I no longer apologize for being a Bostonian; I
proffer no explanations. I make the damaging admission the instant I
meet people and leave the matter of further recognition to them. If they
choose to consider that Boston bringing-up a social bar sinister, so be
it. I have discovered recently that the fact that I happened to be born
in Rio Janeiro offers some amelioration. But nothing can entirely remove
the handicap. So, I reiterate, indurated as I am to pity, the
contemptuous attitude of the average Californiac did not at first annoy
me. But after a while even I, calloused New Englander that I am, began
to resent it.

This, for instance, may happen to you at any time in California - it is
the Californiac's way of paying the greatest tribute he knows:

"Do you know," somebody says, "I should never guess that you were an
Eastener. You're quite like one of us - cordial and simple and natural."

"But-but," you say, trying to collect your wits against this left-handed
compliment, "I don't think I differ from the average Easterner."

"Oh, yes, you do. You don't notice it yourself, of course. But I give
you my word, nobody will ever suspect that you are an Easterner unless
you tell it yourself. They really won't."

"But-but," you say, beginning to come back, "I have no objection
whatever to being known as an Easterner."

That holds her for a moment. And while she is casting about for phrases
with which to meet this extraordinary condition, you rally gallantly.
"In fact, I am Proud of being an Easterner."

That ends the conversation.

Or somebody in a group asks you what part of the East you're from.

"New York," perhaps you reply.

"New York. My husband came from New York," she goes on. "He was brought
up there. But he's lived in California for twenty years. He got the idea
a few years ago that he wanted to go back East. I said to him, 'All
right, we'll go back and visit for a while and see how you like it.' One
month was enough for him. The people there are so cold and formal and
conventional, and then, my dear, your climate!"

"Yes," another takes it up. "When I was in the East, a friend invited me
out to his place in the country. He wanted me to see his pine grove. My
dears, if you could have seen those little sticks of trees."

"I went to New York once," a third chimes in. "I never could get
accustomed to carrying an ice umbrella - I couldn't close it when I got
home. I'd come to stay for a month but I left in a week.

And so it goes. No feeling on anybody's part of your sense of outrage.
In fact, Californiacs always use the word eastern in your presence as a
synonym for cold, conventional, dull, stupid, humorless.

Sometimes it actually casts a blight - this Californoia - on those who
come to live in California. I remember saying once to a young man - just
in passing and merely to make conversation: "Are you a native son?"

His face at once grew very serious. "No," he admitted reluctantly. "You
see, it was my misfortune to be born in Iowa, but I came out here to
college. After I'd graduated I made up my mind to go into business here.
And now I feel that all my interests are in California. Of course it
isn't quite the same as being born here. But sometimes I feel as though
I really were a native son. Everybody is so kind. They do everything in
their power to make you forget -"

"Good heavens," I interrupted, "are you apologizing to me for being born
in Iowa? I've never been in Iowa, but nothing could convince me that it
isn't just as good a place as any other place, including California. The
trouble with you is that you've let these Californiacs buffalo you. What
you want to do is to throw out your chest and insist that God made Iowa
first and the rest of the world out of the leavings."

If you mention the eastern winter to a Californiac, he tells you with
great particularity of the dreadful storms he encountered there. Nothing
whatever about the beauty of the snow. To a Californiac, snow and ice
are more to be dreaded than hell-fire and brimstone. If you mention the
eastern summer, he refers in scathing terms to the puny trees we
produce, the inadequate fruits and vegetables. Nothing at all about
their delicious flavor. To a Californiac, beauty is measured only by
size. Nothing that England or France has to offer makes any impression
on the Californiac because it's different from California. As for the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, he simply never
sees it. The Netherlands are dismissed with one adjective - flat. For a
country to be flat is, in the opinion of the Californiac, to relinquish
its final claim to beauty. A Californiac once made the statement to me
that Californians considered themselves a little better than the rest of
the country. I considered that the prize Californiacism until I heard
the following from a woman-Californiac in Europe: "I saw nothing in all
Italy," she said, "to compare with the Italian quarter of San
Francisco."

Now I am by no means a rabid New Englander. I love the New England scene
and I have the feeling for it that we all have for the place in which we
played as children. Most New Englanders have a kind of temperamental
shyness. They are still like the English from whom they are descended.
It is difficult for them to talk about the things on which they feel
most deeply. The typical New Englander would discuss his native place
with no more ease than he would discuss his father and mother. In
California I often had the impulse to break through that inhibiting
silence - to talk about Massachusetts; the lovely, tender, tamed,
domesticated country; its rolling, softly-contoured, maternal-looking
hills; its forests like great green cathedral chapels; its broad, placid
rivers, its little turbulent ones; its springs and runnels and
waterfalls and rivulets all silver-shining and silver-sounding; the
myriads of lakes and countless ponds that make the world look as though
the blue sky had broken and fallen in pieces over the landscape; the
spring when first the arbutus comes up pink and delicate through the
snow and later the fields begin to glimmer with the white of white
violets, to flash with the purple of purple ones, and the children hang
May baskets at your door; the summer when the fields are buried
knee-deep under a white drift of daisies or sealed by the gold planes of
buttercups, and the old lichened stone walls are smothered in blackberry
vines; the autumn with the goldenrod and blue asters; the woods like
conflagrations burning gold and orange, flaming crimson and scarlet; and
especially that fifth season, the Indian summer, when the vistas are
tunnels of blue haze and the air tastes of honey and wine; then winter
and the first snow (does anybody, brought up in snow country, ever
outgrow the thrill of the first fluttering flakes?) the marvel of the
fairy frost world into which the whole country turns.

Do you suppose I ever talked about Massachusetts? Not once. And so I
have one criticism to bring against the Californiac. He is a person to
whom you cannot talk about home. He grows restive the instant you get
off the subject of California. Praise of any other place to his mind
implies a criticism of California.

On the other hand, that frenzied patriotism has its wonderful and its
beautiful side. It is a result partly of the startling beauty and
fecundity of California and partly of a geographical remoteness and
sequestration which turned the Californians in on themselves for
everything. To it is due much of the extraordinary development of
California. For to the average Californian, the best is not only none
too good for California, but she can have nothing else. Californians
even those not suffering from an offensive case of Californoia - speak
of their State in reverential terms. To hear Maud Younger - known
everywhere as the "millionaire waitress" and the most devoted labor-fan
in the country - pronounce the word California, should be a lesson to
any actor in emotional sound values. The thing that struck me most on my
first visit to California was that boosting instinct. In store windows
everywhere, I saw signs begging the passer-by to root for this
development project or that. Several years ago, passing down Market
street, I ran into a huge crowd gathered at the Lotta Fountain. I
stopped to investigate. Moving steadily from a top to a lower window of
one of the newspaper offices, as though unwound from a reel, ran a long
strip of paper covered with a list of figures. To this list, new figures
were constantly added. They were the sums of money being subscribed at
that very moment for the Exposition. Applause and cheers greeted each
additional sum. That was the financial germ from which grew the
wonderful Arabian Nights city by the bay. It was typically Californian -
that scene - and typically Californian the spirit back of it. And four
years later, when the outbreak of the war brought temporary panic, there
was no diminution in that spirit. Whether it was a "Buying-Day," a
"Beach Day," an "Automomobile Parade," a "Prosperity Dinner," San
Francisco was always ready to insist that everything was going well. It
was the same spirit which inspired a whole city, the day the Exposition
opened, to rise early to walk to the grounds, and to stand, an avalanche
of humanity, waiting for the gates to part. It was the same spirit which
inspired the whole city, the night the Exposition ended, to stay for the
closing ceremonies until midnight, and then, without even picking a
flower from the abundance they were abandoning, silently and sorrowfully
to walk home.

Let's look into the claims of these Californiacs.

I can unfortunately say little about the State of California. For with
the exception of a few short trips away from San Francisco, and one
meager few days' trip into the South, I have never explored it. Nobody
warned me of the danger of such a proceeding, and so I innocently went
straight to San Francisco the first time I visited the coast. Stranger,
let me warn you now. If ever you start for California with the intention
of seeing anything of the State, do that before you enter San Francisco.
If you must land in San Francisco first, jump into a taxi, pull down the
curtains, drive through the city, breaking every speed law, to "Third
and Townsend," sit in the station until a train, - some train, any train
- pulls out, and go with it. If in crossing Market street, you raise
that taxi-curtain as much as an inch, believe me, stranger, it's all
off; you're lost. You'll never leave San Francisco. Myself, both times I
have gone to California, I have vowed to see Yosemite, the big trees,
the string of beautiful old missions which dot the state, some of the
quaint, languid, semi-tropical towns of the south, some of the brisk,
brilliant, bustling towns of the north. But I have never really done it
because I saw San Francisco first.

I treasure my few impressions of the state, however. Towns and cities,
comparatively new, might be three centuries old, so beautifully have
they sunk into the colorful, deeply configurated background that the
country provides. Even a city as thriving and wide-awake as Stockton has
about its plaza an air so venerable that it is a little like the ancient
hill-cities of Italy; more like, I have no doubt, the ancient
plain-cities of Spain. And San Juan Bautista - with its history-haunted
old Inn, its ghost-haunted old Mission and its rose-filled old Mission
garden where everything, even the sundial, seems to sleep - is as old as
Babylon or Tyre.

You will be constantly reminded of Italy, although California is not
quite so vividly colored, and perhaps of Japan, for you are always
coming on places that are startlingly like scenes in Japanese prints.
Certain aspects from the bay of the town of Sausalito, with strangely
shaped and softly tinted houses tumbling down the hillside, certain
aspects of the bay from the heights of Berkeley, with the expanses of
hills and water and the inevitable fog smudging a smoky streak here and
there, are more like the picture-country of the Japanese masters than
any American reality.

If I were to pick the time when I should travel in California, it would
be in the early summer. All the rest of the world at that moment is
green. California alone is sheer gold. One composite picture remains in
my memory-the residuum of that single trip into the south. On one side
the Pacific - tigerish, calm, powerfully palpitant, stretching into
eternity in enormous bronze-gold, foam-laced planes. On the other side,
great, bare, voluptuously - contoured hills, running parallel with the
train and winding serpentinely on for hours and hours of express speed;
hills that look, not as though they were covered with yellow grass, but
as though they were carved from massy gold. At intervals come ravines
filled with a heavy green growth. Occasionally on those golden
hill-surfaces appear trees.

Oh, the trees of California!

If they be live-oaks - and on the hills they are most likely to be
live-oaks - they are semi-globular in shape like our apple trees, only
huge, of a clamant, virile, poisonous green. They grow alone, and each
one of them seems to be standing knee-deep in shadow so thick and moist
that it is like a deep pool of purple paint.

Occasionally, on the flat stretches, eucalyptus hedges film the
distance. And the eucalyptus - tall, straight, of a uniform slender
size, the baby leaves of one shape and color, misted with a strange
bluish fog-powder, the mature leaves of another shape and color,
deep-green on one side, purple on the other, curved and carved like a
scimitar of Damascus steel, the blossoms hanging in great soft bunches,
white or shell-pink, delicate as frost-stars - the eucalyptus is the
most beautiful tree in the world. Standing in groups, they seem to color
the atmosphere. Under them the air is like a green bubble. Standing
alone, the long trailing scarfs of bark blowing away from their
bodies - they are like ragged, tragic gypsy queens.

Then there is the madrone. The wonder of the madrone is its bole. Of a
tawny red-gold - glossy - it contributes an arresting coppery note to
green forest vistas. Somebody has said that in the distance they look
like naked Indians slipping through the woods.

Last, there is the redwood tree! And the redwood is more beautiful even
than the stone-pine of Italy. Gray lavender in color, hard as though cut
from stone, swelling at the base to an incredible bulk, shooting
straight to an incredible height and tapering exquisitely as it soars,
it drops not foliage but plumage. To walk in a redwood forest at night
and to look up at the stars tangled in the tree-tops, to watch the
moonlight sift through the masses of soft black-green feathers, down,
down, until strained to a diaphanous tenuity it lies a faint silver
gossamer at your feet, is to feel that you are living in one of the old
woodcuts which illustrate Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Most people in first visiting California are obsessed with the flowers,
the abundant callas, the monstrous roses, the giant geraniums. But I
never ceased to wonder at the beauty of the trees. And remember, I have
not as yet seen what they call the "big" trees.

Yes, California is quite as beautiful as her poets insist and her
painters prove. It turns everybody who goes there into a poet, at least
temporarily. Babes lisp in numbers and those of the native population
who don't actually write poetry, talk it - no matter what the subject
is. Take the case of Sam Berger. Sam Berger - I will explain for the
benefit of my women readers - was first a distinguished amateur
heavyweight boxer who later became sparring partner for Bob Fitzimmons
and manager to Jim Jeffries. In an interview on the subject of boxing,
Mr. Berger said, "Boxing is an art - just as much so as music. To excel
in it you must have a conception of time, of balance, of distance. The
man who attempts to box without such a conception is like a person who
tries to be a musician without having an ear for music."

Is it not evident from this that Mr. Berger would have become a poet if
a more valiant art had not claimed him?

In that ideal future state in which all the world-parts are assembled
and perfectly coordinated into one vast self-governing machine, I hope
that California will be turned into a great international reservation,
given over entirely to poets, lovers and honeymoon couples. It is too
beautiful to waste on mere bromidic residential or business interests.

So much for the State of California. I confess with shame that that is
all I know about it, although I reiterate that that ignorance is not my
fault. So now for San Francisco.

San Francisco!

San Francisco!

Many people do not realize that San Francisco tips a peninsula
projecting west and north from the coast of California. Between that
peninsula and the mainland lies a blue arm of the blue San Francisco
bay. So that when you have bisected the continent and come to what
appears to be the edge of the western world, you must take a ferry to
get to the city itself.

I hope you will cross that bay first at night, for there is no more
romantic hour in which to enter San Francisco; the bay spreading out
back of you a-plash with all kinds of illuminated water craft and the
city lifting up before you ablaze with thousands of pin point lights;
for San Francisco's site is a hilly one and the city lies like a
jewelled mantle thrown carelessly over many peaks. You land at the Ferry
building - surely the most welcoming station in the world - walk through
it, come out at the other side on a circular place which is one end of
Market street, the main artery of the city. If this is by day, you can
see that the other end of Market street is Twin Peaks - a pair of hills
that imprint bare, exquisitely shaped contours of gold on a blue sky -
with the effect somehow of a stage-drop. If you come by night, you will
find Market street crowded with people, lighted with a display of
electric signs second only in size, number, brilliancy and ingenuity to
those on Broadway. But whether you come by day or by night, the instant
you emerge from the Ferry building, San Francisco gets you. Market
street is one of the most entertaining main-traveled urban roads in the
world. Newspaper offices in a cluster, store windows flooded with light,
filled with advertising devices of the most amusing originality, cars,
taxis, crowds, it has all the earmarks of the main street of any big
American city, with the addition, at intervals, of the pretty "islands"
so typical of the boulevards of Paris and with, last of all, a zip and a
zest, a pep and a punch, a go and a ginger that is distinctively
Californian. I repeat that California throws her first tentacle into
your heart as you stand there wondering whether you'll go to your hotel
or, plunging headforemost into the crowds, swim with the current.

Imagine a city built not on seven but a hundred hills. I am sure there
are no less than a hundred and probably there are more. Certainly I
climbed a hundred. On three sides the sea laps the very hem of this city
and on one side the forest reaches down to its very toes. That is, when
all is said, the most marvelous thing about San Francisco - that the
sea and forest come straight to its borders. And as, because of its
peninsula situation they form the only roads out, sea and forest are
integral parts of the city life. It accounts for the fact that you see
no city pallor in the faces on the streets and perhaps for the fact that
you see so little unhappiness on them. On Sundays and holidays, crowds
pour across the bay all day long and then, loaded with flowers and
greens, pour back all the evening long. As for flowers and greens, the
hotels, shops, cafes, the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants are full
of them. They are so cheap on the streets that everybody wears them.
Everybody seems to play as much as possible out of doors. Everybody
seems to sleep out of doors. Everybody has just come from a hike or is
just going off on one. Imagine a climate rainless three-quarters of the
year, which permits the workingman to tramp all through his vacation
with the impedimenta only of a blanket, moneyless if he will, but with
the certainty always that the orchards and gardens will provide-him with
food.

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