The Californiacs | Page 5

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,