The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  “He told me of his childhood in Poland, and of the time he and his parents were exiled into the remote Russian north, cold gray months he never forgot; he said he still awoke sometimes at sea, especially in storms, believing he was again imprisoned on the taiga, watching his parents cough themselves to death. He told me of being orphaned at age eleven, and of going to sea for the first time at age sixteen, first with coasters from Marseilles, and then finally with English ships. He loved life at sea, he said, loved everything about it, even the arduous work and the weeks of wet clothing, for ‘on the ship, on the sea,’ he said, ‘you are plunged into the stories, the stories are everywhere about you, waiting so anxiously; I ask the men, and they tell me every story they know, liking me for listening so attentively, and when we land, away I go into the docks and streets and lanes, and there are more stories waiting for me than there are pebbles in the road; and stories in lands other than your own, you know, are delighted to see a stranger, for he will be interested in the stories that the natives think common and shallow, and no longer tell, or hear; it is as if their ears are stopped, but mine, having never been touched by words in that place, are a fresh harbor; never have I heard so many stories as I have in foreign ports. I could write a hundred books of the stories I have been told on and around the sea, and that is what I mean to do, Mr Carson, when my voyages are finished at last.’

  “He had a plan, you see; he was intent on it, and he knew the end of the first part of his life and the advent of the second almost to the day, it seemed. ‘Ten more years, Mr Carson, perhaps fifteen, for I wish to rise from seaman to mate to master, and command sailing ships from one end of the compass to the other, and then begin to write my books, and never stop doing so, until I am dead, and can be returned to the mud, to be of use only in driving flowers upward in the spring. The stories must out, you see; and if I am granted time and energy, out they will come, a whole shelf of them, and at least I will have saved a hundred or a thousand from the darkness. And I will have sailed the whole blue wilderness of the world, too, a great thing.’

  “It wasn’t all him, of course, over those hours; he had a wonderful capacity for alert silence, a sort of active hunger for what you would say next, so that you felt, once embarked on a story, that it was almost being pulled from you bodily by his nervous energy; this was not a man with whom you could wander off on tangents, and shuffle here and there in the forest of a tale; no, with him you must tell it straight, as deeply and honestly as you can, leaving nothing out but neither straying off the main path, until you came to the end.

  “It took me a while to realize that what he listened most assiduously for was not action, or plot, but emotion and character; what happened was less interesting to him than why it happened, and that in turn was less interesting than who; his whole orientation was personality and character, who people really were under their intricate masks and disguises, appurtenances and appearances, habits and excuses. I think now that what fascinated him was how people conducted themselves in a world he thought was without pity and direction, set in motion and then abandoned to its own devices; and I think too that what fascinated him most deeply was how people managed their lives, knowing that all the things we use as compasses and safeguards are less substantial than shadows. He did not believe in gods, governments, moral laws, or any rules in the universe other than the undeniable physics that spins the earth around the sun and sends starlight toward us through uncountable time; so that his whole interest in life was how we manage to go on, what ephemera and ritual we construct as support, what poses we assume with others of our kind, and how true we are to that which we hope ourselves to be.

  “It was not all him speaking, as I said, and over the course of our time on the bench I believe he heard every voyage I had ever had, every adventure, every expedition, every journey; he soaked up every detail of my ships and sailing, and he knew every obscure part of our mutual profession, too, I must say; and when finally the time came for him to join his crewmates at dinner, and for me to be about looking for my next berth, I had come to believe that here before me, young as he was, was a great man in the making. Someday the world will sing the praises of that young man, I am convinced; in quite the same way, Mr Stevenson, as songs may well be sung of you; who is to say what is possible and what is not, when so much of who we are is invisible and yet to come? Are we not like ships, as my young Polish friend said, with so much unseen beneath the waterline, and so much of that unseen material densely packed and intricately built, and crammed with stories and dreams? So to look at a man’s face and clothing and boots, or to ask after his nativity and parentage and occupation, and draw from those small clues any substantive knowledge of his ambition and will, his character and possibility, the revolution and grace of his mind, his destination and fate, is a foolish mistake, albeit one made all day every day by most of the world.

  “We finally rose from our remarkable bench, him to dine with his mates, and me to set about finding a ship, and we shook hands for a long while with real affection, and something like reverence; I think both of us were startled and moved to have found something like a brother, here at the other end of the world; and, too, there is a deep feeling in all of us, I think, when we feel we have been thoroughly and carefully listened to, by a perceptive soul; this is the brilliance of the idea of religious confession, is it not, that a burden is eased simply by being conveyed in words to another set of willing shoulders, or ears? And of course very often when we carefully explain ourselves to another, we hear something in ourselves that had been hidden. Quod locutus est verus—that which is spoken is real.

  “Something like that must have happened in me, for as we turned to go, he turned back, and took me by the arm—he had a grip like a wrestler, for all that he was a slight youth—and he said that I must find the girl now; that no more time could be allowed to pass before I bent every iota of my energy in the search. I was startled, I can tell you, for I had not realized I had so unburdened my heart about the girl on Sliabh Mór, but he had heard, and heard too not just what I said, but what I had left unsaid, even to myself.

  “‘I cannot guess at what will happen when you do find her,’ he said, ‘although I can say with confidence that you will; and lest you think I am inserting myself into your private affairs, allow me to say that I am only articulating what you have said to me today with all your heart and mind and soul. That girl’s face glows behind every word you said to me; and I think you know this, and you know what you must do, and perhaps you have only been waiting until someone issued you an order to set sail upon that journey. I am only a seaman today, Mr Carson, a mere able-body at the bottom of the manifest; but I will command a ship someday, and I will issue my first order today, to a man I will always think of henceforth as a friend. Go and get you a ship, and find that girl from the empty stone village, and then who knows what will happen? Not God, for there is no such thing, much as we yearn and dream; but something better, perhaps; something for which no writer has yet found the suitable word.’

  “And away he went up the hill toward The Rocks, where sailors have congregated since the first ships found the vast continent of the antipodes. I stood there a long while, transfixed, and then, Mr Stevenson, I set about the last of my adventures in several quarters of the world; but who is this waving us to dinner but the estimable Mrs Carson herself, and I believe that the alluring smell slipping out from behind her is oysters baked and broiled. I would walk many miles for oysters baked and broiled, Mr Stevenson, many miles; and if you are wise, you will walk these few feet to the kitchen with me, and we shall fall upon the luckless bivalves, and annihilate them utterly, and count ourselves the luckiest men in the world tonight, for these oysters have passed through Mrs Carson’s hands on the way to the table, and that passage makes all the difference between mere eating and fine dining. Also we will have excellent wine, and our companion at table will be Mrs Carson, and you can take it from me that there is no table companion quite as excellent as Mrs Carson�
��but you know for yourself now, I am sure.…”

  6

  February 6, 1880, Bush Street, San Francisco

  My dear Colvin,

  I write this letter first to thank you for so assiduously and energetically shopping my inky creations in the streets of dirty old London; you are in no uncertain terms keeping body and soul together, not only for the scarecrowish undersigned but in large part for Fanny and the children—her children, I should say, editor-careful, though I hope with all my heart that someday they will say that they are in some way mine also—I do hope to be a decent stepfather, though there is not much of me, and what rags and bones there are always a-wrack with cough. Still, if I but continue to exist corporeally, and show up at table with them every day, and make the slightest effort on their behalf, I will be ten times the father they had before—the original paternal issue, though according to Fanny he issued right out the door as soon as the children were born.

  But I cannot lambaste the lieutenant, for it is he who must give Fanny the deed to the cottage in Oakland, or she will have not a farthing with which to feed and house her chicks—our plan is to marry the instant she owns the document, and is a woman of property and means, and then sell the house instanter, and embark on the briefest of honeymoons in the vineyards north of the city. After that I do not know; we talk of summer in Scotland, so that she can meet my mother and father, and you, and so many other dear friends. A careful man would lay his plans like railroad ties along the path ahead, but I cannot see that far, and cannot afford the timbers; I hoist only my trusty pen all day, and write as fast and fiercely as I can, and haunt the post office, where they know me too well as the Author from Scotland who so desperately wishes for mail from his friends, reporting on another sale to another magazine—news like that, when it comes, sends me capering up Bush Street like a minstrel, singing and roistering as once I did in the lanes and alleys of Auld Reekie, when I was a university man in the Athens of the North.

  So long ago those days seem to me, Colvin, so very far behind me, though that was but ten years ago; it seems incomprehensible that I was a roaring boy with a tankard in one hand and a maid in the other, a scandal and a scoundrel, a rascal and an abject lesson; but I knew myself even then it was merely a performance, a shout against what my father and family wished me to be—engineer, lawyer, pillar of Presbyterianism, sober stalwart of Edinburgh society. The problem, though, was that I knew quite clearly what I was not, and could never be, but did not know at all what I was, and could be; but I know that now, and I have set my face like flint, as old Isaiah sayeth, and I shall not be confounded, and I shall not be ashamed.

  But I am a-wander in memory and the King James here, Colvin my dear, and I return posthaste to reporting my life on Bush Street, where I live like a sailor on the sea, working all the day from dawn to dusk, and sleeping four hours of every sixteen, and eating ravenously whatever appears in front of me from the ship’s cook—although here I must tell you that never was there such a cook in the history of the world, and it will be a miracle if ever another cook ariseth to compare to her. It is my landlady of whom I speak, the estimable and incomparable Mrs Carson, and while a thousand songs might be sung of her culinary gifts, and rightfully and heartily they would be sung too, it is the soul of the woman that has a genius even greater than her way with viand and victual. For all my way with words, here I will stammer and stutter when I try to describe her fairly. Beautiful? Yes, but that is the last thing you would notice in her, though the first thing you would notice in another. Graceful? Yes—but again her grace is part and parcel of her being, and her physical grace is only an expression of a deeper thing that need express itself in this world somehow; you know what I mean, that the deepest things must find vessels in order to assume shape and enter this world; otherwise they would float and wander too freely, and always be hint and suggestion and intuition, rather than something we see and hear and touch, to our amazement. So very many things there are like this; and sometimes I think the deepest of all pleasures is encountering them, and sensing and recognizing them, and standing there awed and delighted, grateful that you were given the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

  My own ears are well used these days also, in the evenings, as I with great pleasure and mounting amazement pry an endless series of stories from Mrs Carson’s husband John, who has been all over the world in various ships, and has had adventures of every conceivable sort, in dense jungles and remote islands and terrible battlefields, and, he says, in blazing deserts and dripping forests and under the sea, though he has not told me those stories whole as yet; but there is time, I daresay, for I cannot imagine Fanny will come into possession of the cottage until March at the earliest, and until that moment we must continue our odd existence, me working as hard as I possibly can to get money on which to support my prospective family, and Fanny taking the ferry over from Oakland once a week, so that we can kiss on the dock, and share a sparse meal, and then back she goes on the ferry, with me yearning as the boat steams away, for she must be home to her boy, who is only eleven years old; as he has no father, he cannot bear to have no mother even for a night. I can understand him, for I was that same boy at his age, and the night was filled with spirits and terrors; I sometimes wonder if that sort of fervid imagination as a child fed the Author from Scotland, and created him, and feeds him still; for there are times when I am writing my stories now that the people and hills and swords and horses and dark tides in them are so real and vivid to me that I am startled back into this world when the candle gutters, and I look up and see the swirling mist of the city below, and hear the sorrowful moans of ships in the bay, and remember that I am here at the edge of America. And here I should conclude this bumbling letter, for even I, the most energetic of children, must sleep a few hours here and there, or else fall headlong into one of my own stories and never return—“all that was found of the missing Scotsman was his tattered coat, his trusty cigarettes, and the wedding ring he was to have slipped onto the finger of a lady in Oakland, who much mourns his disappearance.”

  Ever your most affectionate and

  grateful friend,

  R.L.S.

  I have not been as assiduous as I should be in reporting the actual scents and sounds and sensory verve of the great city in which I found myself that year; for San Francisco in 1880 was a wild world unto itself, unlike any city I had ever known.

  My native Edinburgh, cold and wet and windy and swirling with snow, resonant with bells, wracked by prim greed and cold opinion, crowned by its ancient castle, lapped by green fields and hills, was surely and relentlessly Scottish, but it was also a great city of Europe, peer to Oslo and Brussels, cousin to London and Berlin and Moscow; for all its Caledonian character, Edinburgh is of a piece with the other stern grand cities of the continent, from Dublin to Prague, the old capitals of worn stone and soldiers’ boots, of dark slums and inbred gentry; as were the other cities in which I had spent some time, from London to Paris to Zurich. Each was its own densely woven tale, of course, constructed over centuries or millennia by war and money and love and loss; but even in the sunniest cities of Europe there was the faint scent of ancient blood, and grim walls of stone that kept kings from slaves, and the smirk of churchmen long allied with the nobles who paid them to beseech heaven on their behalf.

  But I found little of this in San Francisco. Yes, there were bastions of power, streets of old and new money, and forts where one could hear the rattle of weapons and the tramp of sergeants; but the true lifeblood of the city was its triple waterfront, from which came and went ships of every description from every part and corner of the world, and it seemed to me that the maritime nature of the city, thrust like a thumb into the eye of the sea, defined and dictated its character. Certainly it dictated its weather, so often mist and fog, and sheeting tides of rain, and a wind so steady you could steer by it in the street, blown due east in the morning and true west again at night; I always half-expected to see residents erect small personal sail
s, and whirl their way to work or school, tacking here and there as necessary with rigging made of string.

  But the sea-soaked nature of the city also meant, it seems to me, that its residents were always facing great waters, and great waters are forces bigger than we are, for all we seek to control and channel them; so that there was perhaps less arrogance and braggadocio in San Francisco than in some other cities, less of the urge to dominate and enslave anything and everything, to create empires, to bring all things to heel. This is not to say there was any lack of greed and violence, which were as common tongues there as anywhere else; but if we can speak of the residents of a city as a whole, and say something true of many thousands of souls at once—a dangerous enterprise—I would say that San Franciscans then were busier with travel and transaction than with avid acquisition. They were constantly in motion, always about to leave, or just arrived home; and even the latter were already contemplating their next voyage, so that no sooner did you meet a friend in the street, and hear of his adventures in Alaska or Albuquerque, but he was away again, this time to Vladivostok, or Veracruz.

  It was a city of soaring dreams, in one way, and of peaceful dreams, in another. It seemed to me that it was a launching-spot for a tremendous number of souls headed west and south and north, though never east; if ever there was a city facing in one direction and wholly uninterested in another, it was San Francisco then; in the four months I lived there I heard only two references to anything east of Oakland, and both those remarks were awed stories of the Sierra Nevada, the tremendous snowy mountains that rose along the border of California like the ramparts of heaven.

  Yet the city was also a final refuge for many who had roamed the world, and finally found the home of their hearts; Mr and Mrs Carson, I thought, were two of these, and I met many more, in my time. And while I heard every sort of prosaic answer when I asked those people what brought and kept them here, each somehow also hinted at a deeper reason, having something to do with freedom from expectations, freedom from the past, often freedom from their families; we do not admit much that families can be a kind of prison from which we yearn to escape, yet this is incontrovertibly so, as I know too well myself.