The Native Son | Page 9

and now San Francisco is a real man's town", he said. "I
don't know so much about the women, but the men certainly can have a
better time here than in any other city in the country. And then again, a
poor man can live in a way and do things in a style that would be
impossible in New York. At my club I meet all kinds of men. Many of
them are prominent citizens and many of them have large fortunes. I
mix with them all. I don't mean to say I run constantly with the prom.
cits. and the millionaires. I don't. I cant afford that. But they
occasionally entertain me. And I as often entertain them. So many
restaurants here are both inexpensive and good that I can return their
hospitality self-respectingly and without undue expense. In New York I
would not only never meet that type of man, but I could not afford to
entertain him if I did."
Allied to this, perhaps, is a quality, typical of San Francisco, which I
can describe only as promiscuity. That promiscuity is in its best phase a

frankness; a fearlessness; a gorgeous candor which made possible the
epigram that San Francisco has every vice but hypocrisy. Civically, two
cross currents cut through the city's life; one of, a high visioned
enlightenment which astounds the visiting stranger by its force, its
white-fire enthusiasm; the other a black sordidness and soddenness
which displays but one redeeming quality - the characteristic San
Franciscan candor. That openness is physical as well as spiritual. The
city, dropped over its many hills like a great loose cobweb weighted
thickly with the pearl cubes of buildings, with its wide streets; its
frequent parks; its broad-spaced residential areas; its gardened houses
in which high windows crystallize every view and sun parlors or
sleeping porches catch both the first and last hint of daylight - the city
itself has the effect of living in the open. Everybody is frankly
interested in everybody else and in what is going on. Of all the cities
the country, San Francisco is by weather and temperament, most
adapted to the pleasant French habit of open-air eating. The clients in
the barber shops, lathered like clowns and trussed up in what is perhaps
the least heroic posture and costume possible for man, are seated at the
windows, where they may enjoy the outside procession during the
boresome processes of the shave and the hair-cut. In the windows of the
downtown shops, with no pretence whatever of the curtains customary
in the East, men clerks disrobe and re-robe life-sized female models of
an appalling nude flesh-likeness. They dress these helpless ladies in all
the fripperies of femininity from the wax out, oblivious to the flippant
comments of gathering crowds. It's all a part of that civic candor
somehow. Nowhere I think are eyes so clear, glances so direct and
expressions so frank as in California. Nowhere is conversation and
discussion more straightforward and courageous.
All that I have written thus far is only by way of preliminary to
showing you what the background of the Native Son has been and to
explaining why Europe does not dazzle him much and the East not at
all. Remember that he is instinctively an athlete and that he has never
dissipated his magnificent strength in fighting weather. If he is a little -
mind you, I say only a little - inclined to use that strength on more
entertaining dissipation, he is as likely to restore the balance by much
physical exercise.

There I go again! Enormous! Superb! Splendid! Spacious! You see
how impossible it is to keep your vocabulary down when California is
your subject. Another moment and I shall be saying more unique.
Remember that all his life he has gazed on beauty - beauty tragic and
haunting, beauty gorgeous and gay. Remember he is accustomed to
enormous sizes; superb heights; splendid distances; spacious vistas.
That California does not produce an annual crop of megalo-maniacs is
the best argument I know for the superiority of heredity over
environment.
Remember, too, that all his life the Native Son has soaked in an art
atmosphere potentially as strong and individual as ancient Greece or
renaisance Italy. The dazzling country side, the sulphitic brew of races,
the cosmopolitan "city" have taken care of that. That art-spirit accounts
for such minor California phenomena as photography raised to
unequalled art levels and shops whose simple beautiful interiors
resemble the private galleries of art collectors; it accounts for such
major phenomena as the Stevenson monument, the "Lark", the annual
Grove Play of the Bohemian Club, and the Exposition of 1915.
The tiny monument to Stevenson, tucked away in a corner soaked with
romantic memories - Portsmouth Square - compares favorably with