[Paul Madonna, the well-known San Francisco artist who beautifully illustrated my book A Writer’s San Francisco, was recently seriously injured in a car accident. I am wishing him a very speedy recovery and wanted to share with you a few pieces from that book that he enriched so much.]
What piece of genetic code causes a husband to say to his wife, “I expect dinner on the table when I get home!”? Is it the same strand that makes a sister say to her brother, “I know that I’m going off to college, and I know that my room is nicer than your room, but you can’t have my room when I leave!”? When Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, it must have been this everyday selfishness that he had in mind. No person would do these things!—it must be our genes talking.
It is this selfsame shameless selfishness, rooted so deep that only the longest-handled scalpel can reach it, that prevents lovers from actually loving. Come with me, and I’ll explain what I mean. Let’s walk out to the Legion of Honor, a San Francisco museum on the ocean side of the city, high atop a golf course and overlooking the sea. We’ll park near Nineteenth Avenue and walk along one of the Richmond streets, maybe along Geary Boulevard, where Russian and Chinese are spoken, or along Lake Street. Out Lake Street we will be compelled to stop at a certain deli, dropped, herring and all, from Minsk, where suspicious babushkas will cut us up some fresh-baked mushroom-and-onion strudel.
The walking is gray, this being the foggy end of San Francisco. But as we trudge uphill past the golf course we are likely to find the Legion of Honor bathed in sunlight, since it sits high up, higher up even than the houses along the cliffs of Sea Cliff, where Robin Williams may be heard laughing. It is sunny up here, serene, and a much more interesting place to jump than the Golden Gate Bridge. It is certainly a good spot to build a replica of Paris’s Palais de la Legion d’Honneur, should you want to do that, which apparently Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of San Francisco sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels, in fact did.
The Legion of Honor has a lovely café in which to write, a fine collection of monochromatic paintings for those of us who get a thrill from all-black canvases, a charming small concert hall for rarefied music, and a Rodin sculpture court right in the center. When I enter that center court, however, I never see the sculptures. I only see Rodin’s transgressions. His failure to help his apprentice and lover, Camille Claudel, parlay her brilliance into fame obsesses me. It is a manifestation of that genetic selfishness that dooms all but the most evolved relationships.
The other day a client told me about her husband, who for the last few decades hasn’t cared to work. She works for the both of them and also tries to write, but, surprise, surprise, doesn’t get much writing done. Restless from so much not-working, her husband likes to hike and recently importuned my client to take a vacation in the mountains. She thought that she might get in some daydreaming and some writing, and so she agreed to the vacation. But when they got there he demanded that she hike. You would think that two twenty-first-century human beings could negotiate a way to make a beautiful day in the country beautiful for the both of them. But no. It had to be heavy backpacks straight up the hill, and damn the reverie.
Or consider that legendary moment some twenty years ago when a best-selling female author entered the monthly luncheon of some dozen venerable San Francisco male authors, looked around the room, and exclaimed, “I’ve sold more books than all of you put together!” Certainly it wasn’t she who spoke! No doubt she was too kind and humane to say such a thing. It must have been her ventriloquist, those selfish genes, inoculating her to the gathered authors’ disdain by getting the first blow in. As it so often happens when writers gather, this luncheon was no jolly lovefest.
Who are the villains? Not the people involved!—people would never do such things. A bad, old ancient gene in Rodin must have said, “Anyone else’s success diminishes you, Auguste. Be very careful!” Rodin certainly must have known better—look at his Kiss, look at his Thinker. Surely he possessed evolved-enough feelings that generosity and compassion must have counted among them. But his damned rotten genes, like the snake in the Garden of Eden, kept hissing and whispering. That Camille went insane was no skin off his back!
My own selfish genes, too numerous to count, have been subdued or at least kept in line by my heartfelt appreciation of, first, my mother’s support, and then my wife’s. Blessed by that support, I became kinder than I otherwise would have been. Esther said, “Go ahead, write.” Ann said, “Go ahead, write.” So I have written for thirty-five years. Sitting at the café at the Legion of Honor, having a nice salad, thankful not to be oiling the machinery of reality in an office, I chide Rodin and must repeat, “Couldn’t you have shared the spotlight with Camille?” You, Auguste, who had so much, ought to have known better.
Walking back from the Legion is easier than walking to it, since we are now heading downhill. We only have to remember where we parked the car, which was somewhere near the bagel place on Geary, wasn’t it? Even in the fog, the gold onion-dome spires of the Russian Orthodox Church on Twenty-seventh Avenue gleam. I have no palate for the tea flavors of ice cream at the Japanese ice cream parlor at Eighteenth Avenue, but I do duck in for a donut at Donut World. Donut World is filled with old Chinese men drinking coffee. Another excellent place to write, the Styrofoam and Formica notwithstanding. It is not the Palais de la Legion d’Honneur or the Legion of Honor, but I feel altogether blessed.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia