The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  I sit here in my study and write the words love and attraction and intimacy of heart and companion of the soul and they are the leakiest and most untrustworthy of vessels for what I mean. They cannot contain but a trace of my intent and they are instantly overthrown by the weight of intimation. Yet what have I to use but these poor tools? She is not pretty, by the estimation of this world, but she is beautiful. She is not charming, or so say some of my dearest friends, yet she is magnetic in ways that make me stammer. She never went near a university, but she is brilliant; she never had more than a few dollars on the table, yet she raised three children alone; she will never win accolades for her social sheen, yet she was instantly the alluring center of every social circle in which she found herself. She has a temper like a hurricane, a cyclone, a tornado, but you would endure that withering blast with a smile twice a day, just to be near her. To what can I compare her that would give you any true sense of her remarkable character and personality? The sun, I suppose—bright and hidden, warming and burning, as necessary as food, as mysterious as to its origins and purposes as the incomprehensible Imagination that spoke it into being and set it alight in the sky.

  All of which is to explain a little, perhaps, of how I felt, strolling up her cottage path in Oakland, past the riotous flowers, and calling for her, and catching young Lloyd as he sprinted headlong from the house and plowed into me, happy as a hound; and there she is in the doorway, smiling; and all is well, and all manner of things will be well.

  March 3, 1880, Oakland

  My dear Louis,

  This seems so strange to write a letter, when I could take the ferry across and see you in a few hours, or you could be here similarly swiftly, as a few days ago; but often I feel that I am more articulate on the page than anywhere else, and I want to try to say some things that are immensely important to me; things you know, but I want to get them down, get them onto the page and into your heart.

  You saved me, beloved; and not in any way the world will see, with money and houses and travels, though those things may someday come, given your extraordinary talents and relentless labors. You saved me. I was lost and you found me, and your love brought me back to life, and I can never thank you enough. I was dry, Louis; I was desiccated, and shriveled, and parched, and never again did I think it would rain, never again could I even imagine being loved for myself, as a woman, as a being who just wanted to be witnessed, apprehended, perceived, let alone savored and perhaps even loved; I was even happy alone, because I had the children, though we had lost blessed little Hervey. We meaning Isobel and Lloyd and me, the family of us three—I will not even speak or write his name who abandoned us so thoroughly, so continually, so smilingly, never again will I write his name, and if God is good to me I will someday forget it altogether—and then smile at having finally been released from the prison of marriage to him—if it ever was a marriage at all.

  All the rest of my life, Louis, I will remember you leaping through that window, as I sat to dinner with the other guests in the hotel; all my life I will remember you sweeping off your hat, and bowing low with the grace and humor I would come to know so well, and saying exactly the right warm witty thing, and staring at me with your eyes like fire, like stars, like embers, like pools of light; and everyone was laughing, and in an instant your cousin had whisked you away, and slowly the world returned to what it had been, a dinner party, a bevy of guests, the evening breeze through the trees outside; but I stood there, Louis, and I was a different woman after that moment; and I have been a new woman ever since.

  It is easy enough to write the words I love you, but impossible for me to explain how very deeply and thoroughly and excitedly I mean them, with every fiber of my being. When we are married and you are the husband and father you so wish to be, I will be happier than any woman who ever walked this earth. Sometimes it seems so terribly far off that our wedding day will come, with so many travails to surmount; but then there is a night like this one, when I feel your love like a bonfire across the bay, and for a moment it seems like perhaps tomorrow is the day we stand together and vow our lives to each other forever.

  All my love, Louis my dear, and Lloyd sends his affection, and says he is working hard on his newspaper, and wishes that you would contribute “two columns of leader, and one poem, of no fewer than twenty lines, with a drawing if you feel like it,” his exact words.

  Your loving

  Fanny

  In early March the house on Bush Street had another visitor from Mr Carson’s past, and this distinguished gentleman was of such a gentle and courteous nature, and so intellectually curious, and so riveting in the way that his ideas leapt up to hold hands with yours and sprint off into new and unexpected fields of inquiry, that when our long conversation by the fire was concluded, I went upstairs to my room and made notes of what I could remember; for I knew instantly that here was not only a rare mind among the people of the earth, but an even rarer case of a silver intellect directed by a most genial and disegotistical soul. The combination is remarkable, and did we measure men by what we ought to, that is to say their true qualities, and not muscle or money or magnetism, here would be a leading citizen of the age; but Mr Carson tells me, and Mr Wallace confirmed it with a broad smile, that he is not very famous at all, in other than a very small circle of people who believe his scientific ideas to be not only revolutionary but right—two very different things, and the latter not at all as alluring as the former, in the general course of worldly matters, as Mr Wallace noted.

  He was at this time in America only briefly, on his way home from a scholarly speaking tour, and had stopped in San Francisco expressly to meet Mrs Carson, of whom he had heard much in correspondence but had not the honor of her acquaintance, “as I am almost always now in England, and no longer a man of the world, and not at all the man you remember, John, wandering about in the mud, gaping at insects, and being saved from death and disaster by such able fellows as you and Charles and Adil—that was more than twenty years ago now, although I still dream of the jungles, and see my butterflies and flying-frogs in the glimmer, and hear the coughing of leopards not far away … I imagine I am the only man in Surrey nowadays who startles at leopards, and surreptitiously looks for a stick with which to defend himself from a possible charge—surely I am the very picture of an odd old man of the district, whom schoolchildren point out to their fellows as the local madman.”

  His talk, his talk! Over the course of the evening he talked about the vast wilderness of Amazonia, and how it was there he began to suspect that perhaps rivers were barriers that finally dictated, over uncountable thousands of years, the shape and form and habits of certain animals. He talked about how he began to realize, ever so slowly, “painfully and embarrassingly and ashamedly slowly,” that aboriginal peoples were not in any way inferior to “civilized” peoples, and in fact were often to be much admired for their moral and intellectual and spiritual integrity. He talked about his beloved orang-utang, “a most remarkable being, for any number of reasons, but that is a discussion for a whole month of evenings by the fire, which I do hope will someday come to pass, should you and your new bride be passing through Surrey in your authorial perambulations, Mr Stevenson.” He talked about his correspondence and respect and friendship with Mr Charles Darwin, whom he much admired and very graciously credited as the first to imagine the theory for which both men were now famous; “certainly Mr Darwin thought of the idea first, years before I had the happy chance to stumble upon it,” he said, “and rather than contest priority and primacy, I much prefer to be amazed that two young fellows should hit upon the same remarkable idea half a world apart, and then, by the happiest of chances, become friends—that is much more interesting, and important, than who did what when, don’t you think?” He talked about all sorts of birds, not only his beloved birds of paradise but the lowliest wrens and finches in his garden, “for the latter fit their place in just as wondrous a fashion as the former, though we think one surpassingly beautiful and th
e other common; but the wrens do not think wrens are drab, and perhaps there is much to be learned from their perception.” He wondered about the many races of human beings, and why they adopted certain forms and colors and patterns of existence, and wondered aloud if perhaps there had been many other species of human beings, or nearly human beings, whose existence did not survive various stresses and situations in the tremendous yaw of the unknown past. He waxed eloquent about the colors of birds in particular, and wondered if some colors were designed by nature to draw attention, and some to deflect attention, and some to hide the bearer, and some to broadcast and advertise messages, as it were—this line of talk fascinated all of us, and it was Mrs Carson who spoke most feelingly and fervently about color and cloth, and perception and illusion, and costumery and class, and how the smallest detail of dress and grooming spoke volumes to those who paid close attention to such things; which would be all women and most men, she said, which drew a roar of laughter from Mr Wallace, who had hung on every word, and even asked if he might make notes on what she had said, so that he could consider her penetrating ideas slowly and fully on his voyage home to England.

  There was much else said that night—we talked about Mr Wallace’s books, and how he had actually written the story of Adil and Mr Carson in his book about the Malay achipelago, but seen it stricken from the manuscript by an editor who insisted the book stay in its strictly scientific channel; we talked about migratory patterns in birds and animals and human beings; we talked about what effect human beings might even now be having on a world that knew them not for untold years, but now “endured us,” in Mr Wallace’s word, in every corner of the globe; we talked about languages and music and cities and ships and islands and novels and Scotland and marriage and the “very real possibility, even perhaps probability,” as he said, “that a semblance of the same scientific conditions that provoke life on this planet may exist elsewhere in the unimaginable reaches of space, which would have absolutely fascinating implications as regards new species, manners of existence, languages, and the like—imagine untold thousands of new kinds of music! Imagine places where eyes and legs are reversed, or trees speak, or everything alive is of a maritime character.…”

  And one more moment I remember vividly from that night. Picture Mr Wallace, with his tremendous beard, standing by the fire—a tall man, slender, now beginning to stoop a bit. He was speaking ostensibly to all three of us, Mr and Mrs Carson and myself, but it seems to me he was really speaking directly to Mrs Carson when he said, “You will know the respect that so very many people hold for John, the universal esteem with which he is remembered on the island; and not just for his rescue of the boy, though that is a dramatic tale that encapsulates his obdurate courage and grace. There is much else to tell, and little time to tell it, and the words I have are thin for what I wish to say. He was kind; he worked hard and well and without a word; he was gentle; he was fair and honest; he treated each being in just the same way, with a grave attentiveness that spilled easily into laughter, if it could. Even then, not much more than a boy himself, you could see the man being formed, and knew the man to be your good and true friend, as long as life—the sort of man you could come to, at any hour of the day or night, wherever he chose to make his abode, and there ask him for help, and his help would be given freely and instantly and without the slightest hesitation, to the pinnacle of his considerable powers of body and mind. I do not know that there is a greater thing in a man than that sort of instantaneous assent to service, without quail or cavil; we all aspire to that, but the mass of men will weigh and measure, gauge and consider, appraise and assess, estimate and project, before they will step forth with a will—but not John Carson.

  “I have lived long enough now to observe men in something of the way I have spent so many years studying animals,” continued Mr Wallace, “and I conclude that the true measure of a man is nothing you can see with your eye at all. The adornment, the size, the coloring, the songs of romance and combative challenge, the striving for rank and status and power—those are things you can notice and record and categorize; but kindness and tenderness, patience and grace, courage when no one will know, integrity when no one will see, creativity when none will witness and applaud—those are the things that make a man, or not.

  “I honored John, when he left the island, in the only way I knew, and appended his name, in the Latinate, to a creature new to science. A tiny frog, hardly bigger than the point of a pencil, which lives, so far as I could tell, in pitcher plants—Nepenthaceae, a sort of open gourd, from which monkeys drink water after rain, and called by some of the jungle people kantong semar, Semar’s pockets, after a cheerful deity from ancient times. I do not suppose that there are more than four or five people in the world who know of the tiny frog Carsonia in the upland forests of Sarawak; but tonight we add three to this small society, those who study our lively cousins the frogs, themselves descended from the same animating force that set the stars to spin, and life to whirl from one form to another, arriving at, in its turn, us. And who knows if there will always be an us? One can hope so, we can certainly hope so; and most of all we can hope that whatever that future us will be, it will be composed largely of the best of us now.”

  I believe it was soon after this that we concluded the evening, and went to our rooms, and in the morning Mr Wallace was away and gone already, home to his garden in Surrey; but I think I will remember that evening and that soaring and delightful talk all the rest of my days. Affable and lively, free and fluid, informed and curious at once, harmonious and humorous both; reflective of the man and his mind, but no mere sermon or homily or pat pronouncement; eager to apprehend another mind, but not subservient or squelchable; airy and open, darting and discursive, amicable and passionate together; ruminative and energetic, stimulated by company and concourse; musical, in a sense, in that he played variations on themes he knew, but never the same song twice; riverine, serpentine, sinuous, rushing along all a-tumble but, at the same time, channeled and bounded and headed to a specific point. His learning and erudition were staggering, but there was not a jot of pompous in him, nor desiccation, nor professorial arrogance; and he was thirsty for the ideas and opinions of others, not the sort of man who waits impatiently for another to finish before he launches forth his own cascade. An expert in his chosen field, but no urge to impose his faith upon you; no gossip and no verbal combat did he offer; indeed he was not interested, that I noticed, in verbal victory, as much as he was in the exploration of new territory, the acquiring of wider knowledge through the studies and stories of other beings. Eloquent and lucid, limpid and humorous, poignant and luminous; and finally he was most interested in celebrating another, not in being celebrated himself, though he surely had cause to be, given what only he and one other man in history had perceived of the unimaginable workings of uncountable lives through immeasurable years. A most remarkable man; the sort of man I wish to be, of whom it might someday be said, that he was much more than his worldly accomplishments, whatever they should turn out to be; a man mourned much less as a lost artist, than as a good and true and beloved husband, and father, and friend.

  9

  March 3, 1880, Bush Street, San Francisco

  My dear Colvin,

  I set pen to paper this morning to give you a strict sense of the actual conduct of my days, which are such a blizzard of paper and dreams and walks and stories and sharp winds and oysters and the scent of salt water that I sometimes feel that I am a seaman charged with keeping the log all day in a pitching schooner far out to sea; but instead I find myself absorbed with the idea of being a father, so to speak, to a boy I hardly know. This is young Lloyd Osbourne, with whom I have forged a happy bond based in silliness and theatrical prance—a persona I know all too well, having lived many years in it myself as a young man—you will remember the poseur poet of the alleys of Edinburgh, always eager to shock and startle his parents, to drink the cup of sordid experience, to pretend with all his might to be a flaneur, an
idler, a hail-fellow-well-met without a shilling to his name, or the prospect of one—how I wasted those years, Colvin, how I burned away the hours in drinking and flirting and trying so very hard to not be what my father wished me to be! Such heroic effort not to be someone, when I might have spent the same effort trying to be someone; but now I am hard at work doing that very thing—note the enclosed two essays, one story, one meandering article, two poems, and one excellent drawing of myself losing a beloved hat yesterday on California Street—how apt and fitting that part of me should be carried away by California! For that is what has happened, and will happen, I pray—I will be carried away by a Californian, or two, if we count Lloyd, as we must.

  He is a charming boy, shy and dreamy, like, perhaps, I was, and we get along famously—in large part perhaps because he and I much enjoy sprawling on the carpet, and doodling and drawing, and inventing islands, and imagining ourselves jungle explorers, and assigning ourselves various majestic titles, the Exalted Poobah of this and the Chief Mate of that—all to Fanny’s distraction and dismay, for I think sometimes she looks at the two of us laughing on the floor and wonders if she is acquiring another headlong boy, rather than a stalwart husband. But she is secretly pleased, I know, that Lloyd and I share common ground; and I suspect she is pleased also that I have no interest in authority over either of them. My concern is to support and protect them, not direct or command; I am hardly in command of myself, after all, and it would be hullabaloo should I ever attempt to instruct anyone else in anything at all.