Heaven on the Half Shell - 18 October 2002

From time to time an old acquaintance will call me just before I'm about to do my talk and say "Well, I think we all know what you're going to talk about this time".

I tend to say "That's right" or "You've got it" - because I know in my bones, from years of such calls, that they haven't got it.

It's always about some natural disaster - a fire, an earthquake, perhaps the assassination of a foreign statesman.

In any case I find no occasion for intelligent comment about the lamentable snipings in the Virginia/Maryland country or even about the appalling nightclub bombing on the once island paradise of Bali.

The only reaction must be: isn't it awful.

But now there is a topic which is not to be guessed at and was dictated quite simply by my looking at the calendar and reflecting, "Ah yes, the third week in October" - which has meant for so many years San Francisco time.

Certainly for the past 30 years or so I used to go four times a year to my favourite city to see how America - its life and affairs - looked from the Pacific coast.

Visually the first thing that struck me from the start was the Oriental connection.

It's been there since the first Chinese labourers were brought in by the Central Pacific Company to work their way east and meet the Irish working west together to create the first transatlantic railroad.

By the time I first came into San Francisco - which is just on 70 years ago - the California Oriental connection was strong and civilised and detectable everywhere - from the old Chinese in the early morning on Nob Hill doing their slow motion graceful exercises, to the furniture, the porcelain, the murals and other Chinese decorations in friends' houses and hotels.

Just along the block from the first hotel I ever stayed in was a glittering metallic stature of Sun Yat Sen, for many decades a cult figure among Californians.

He'd been a revolutionary who overthrew the last dynasty and was the first president of a Chinese republic.

By the late 1930s China, overrun by the Japanese in Manchuria, had become California's favourite victim state.

However, at that time the ranking villain, to Californians as well as to all other Americans, was Adolf Hitler.

Only experts at the State Department worried about Japan. Only experts.

And one Californian - William Randolph Hearst, a national newspaper tycoon, who sat in his castle overlooking the Pacific and rang editorial alarm bells, warning about the "Yellow Peril", about an actual threat of the Japanese to the security to the shores of his beloved California.

To visiting Easterners and Europeans these foaming outbursts were always thought fanciful to the point of absurdity.

Until 7 December 1941 when the Japanese destroyed half the United States Pacific fleet and its air arm, at its base in the Pacific, which most Americans, or for that matter ranking members of the British embassy and yours truly, had never heard of. It was called Pearl Harbour.

By now, of course, everything has gone into reverse.

Japan is, has been, the great modern trading partner and China, though vilified and warily watched since it went Communist, is being wooed to be the second largest Pacific trader.

But in San Francisco the Oriental, or as we must now say, the Asian presence is as triumphant as anywhere in the country.

A medical office building I know which 20, 30 years ago was inhabited by doctors with American European names now has a third of its tenants Asian.

They are refugees from the Communist takeover of Vietnam, or Hong Kong Chinese who came to this country say 25 years ago without a word of English. Today they are young medical specialists.

These things I shall miss but most the daily sights and sounds that are San Francisco and nowhere else.

First of course the nine tumbling hills and how remarkably the people bent over troop up and down them like one of the great race migrations of the Middle Ages.

The white city seen from across the bay as a vast pyramid of confetti.

The genial sun - most of the year. The bafflement, verging on outrage, of the summer tourists, shivering atop a hilly street, not having been told that July and August are the coldest months.

But also memorable for the arrival from the Pacific in the late afternoon are vast plumes of white fog moving in on the city with the motion of a slow freight train.

The double moan of the fog horn at night.

The deceptively blue waters under the Golden Gate Bridge, from whose icy, thrashing currents no Alcatraz escapee has ever been known to survive.

Over and again I recall a short piece of Mark Twain's which says so much about San Francisco in so little.

It was written, by the way, only 10 years after a bloodletting massacre in Utah between the two opposing crews building the railroad.

In it Mark Twain reports his arrival in San Francisco after he'd been thrown out of the silver mining town of Virginia city, Nevada, for having written that "in the noble city there are two churches and 76 saloons, which is just about the right proportion."

This line aroused such fury in the local church matrons that Mark Twain thought it was time "to get lost - so I absquatulated." Here it is:

"After the sage brush and the alkali desert of Nevada, San Francisco was heaven on the half shell.

"I lived at the best hotel, I exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, I infested the opera.

"I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was just after noon on a bright Sunday in October and I was coming down Third Street. As I turned a corner there came a terrific shock - the entire front of a four-storey brick building sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the street.

"The ground rolled under me in waves. The street cars stopped - their horses were rearing and plunging. Every door of every house was vomiting a stream of human beings.

"The first shock brought down three or four organ pipes in one of the churches and the next instant in the atmosphere where the minister had stood there was a vacancy. In another church, after the first shock, the minister said: 'Brethren keep your seats, there is no better place to die than here.'

"After the third shock he waved his flock goodbye and added: 'But outside is good enough for me.'

"After a time I had to cease being an onlooker at the peculiar life of San Francisco and get down to earning a livelihood. My first job was with the Enquirer and my first assignment was accidental. A set-to between a Chinaman and some Irish.

"Now the Chinese are a harmless race when white men let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs. Their chief employment is to wash clothes, which they do at low prices with their usual patience and industry.

"One day I saw a bunch of Irish toughs descend on an old Chinaman on his way home after laundering the clothes of his Christian clientele. They sat on him and beat him up.

"I went back to the office in a state of high indignation and I wrote my fill of this miserable incident. But the editor refused to print it. 'Our paper,' he said, 'was printed for the poor and in San Francisco the Irish were the poor.' In time I cooled off. I was lofty in those days. I have survived."

More poignantly I recall and miss most a contemporary writer, long gone - a columnist for the San Francisco daily paper.

I often wonder if San Franciscans deserve him, for he never received any special tribute as the best writer ever to come out of that city.

His name was Charles McCabe, a funny, beautiful writer of great simplicity, by which I mean he felt deeply and he thought clearly.

He was never syndicated outside that one city, that one paper.

"Why not?" I once asked the editor.

"Well," he said, "who's going to buy a man who's more of a meditator than a columnist?"

It's true. One day he wrote about the pain of being jilted, next day on Cicero, next a dangerously funny swipe at the women's libbers, next day the life of St Thomas Aquinas.

McCabe looked like a giant, dignified WC Fields, with a similarly glowing nose, it came at you like a beacon. But before you sighted it your nostrils picked up the unmistakable odour of "the poteen".

At the end of his life Charlie McCabe became aware of the one thing that makes any life worth living.

"These days," he wrote, "the love I give and the love I get seems spread around rather thin.

"I'm often lonely but seldom bored anymore. There's a lot of peace and quiet but I now know it would not be possible without friends. Without friends! I can hardly bare to think about it."

Nor can I. They're the San Franciscans it will hurt to miss.

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