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.]
I would see him drawing in pen and ink and colored pencils and sometimes writing in the same oversized sketchbook in which he drew. It seems to me that he wore a flannel shirt and jeans, though I also recall a colorful vest. I took him to be a visual artist, or maybe a children’s book writer. He would sit at one table at the Owl and the Monkey, on Ninth Avenue in the Inner Sunset, and I would sit at another. Sometimes we sat across from one another, sometimes we sat at adjoining tables, and sometimes, when the café was very crowded, we even shared a table. But we never spoke, and we never acknowledged one another.
This went on for years. We saw each other everywhere. Sometimes our paths crossed in Golden Gate Park, whose entrance was just down the block from the café. He’d be out for his afternoon constitutional, and I’d be out for mine. We’d pass and continue not acknowledging one another, offering not even the slightest nod. Not to register even a glimmer of recognition when you recognize someone says volumes about the subtleties of human affairs. Who knew that eyes could hide so much?
It was very odd. We weren’t shunning one another, since shunning implies animosity or a grudge. We weren’t avoiding one another, dismissing one another—those aren’t the right verbs. We were doing something very different. I believe that we were showing respect. By not acknowledging the other, we were saying something like the following: “I know that you spend your day in the world creating, that the world is your office and your home, just as it is mine, and since I wouldn’t want you to barge into my office or home 1 will try assiduously not to barge into yours.” I think that was what we were doing.
You might think that such mutual respect might have led to conversations and some artistic bonhomie rather than to such studied avoidance. But it didn’t—no more than it had for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Picasso and Matisse, and many other fabled artistic peers. In the history of creating, there are friendships between peers, but then there is also some amazing distance-keeping, which can’t be just attributed to envy, narcissism, or grandiosity. Such distance-keeping is doubtless a feature of alienation, self-protection, and the machinations of ego, but I am positive it is also a sign of respect. Picasso, who visited with Matisse only rarely, felt obliged to say upon Matisse’s death, “Now I must paint for the both of us.”
So many people who frequented the Owl in those years were absurdly happy producing very little. “I wrote two lines today—wow!” “I’ve gotten to the studio twice this week—I’m on a roll!” I knew in my heart that they weren’t devoted to their craft, to their dreams, or to their freedom. They came to the café looking for beer, sex, and other amusements. Yes, they had a lot to say!—while, at the next table, my doppelgänger was actually working. He would draw; he would write; did that make him ridiculous? The others were having so much more fun! Was it absurd for him to work with dignity while the others were pairing off for the evening? I think not.
Recently a client pledged to write every day. After one day, she emailed me her objections to her own pledge. “I see that I believe more in play,” she explained. “I can’t handcuff myself to the computer. Play is so important in life! Play is fundamental to the artist’s personality. Play is the creative spirit. So I’ve decided to play more and not write until I am moved to write. I am really proud of myself for letting go of a commitment that was really just an albatross!” To which I mentally replied, “So Owl and the Monkey!”
At some point, I began to see my doppelgänger on television, whenever an earthquake made the news. It turned out that he had written a bestseller on a famous earthquake and had become a talking head on the subject. What that meant to me was that I had been right all along: he had been real. He had been using the café as his study and not as a refuge from work. His celebrity status confirmed what I already knew, that his absorption in his colored pencils had not been for show. He had been deep in his fault lines, lost in his earthquake, making art.
On balance, it was probably smart of us not to speak. It is exactly because human beings can come to these unspoken arrangements that a café can serve as a writer’s home. Without this—what shall we call it?—sanctifying of the café space and dignifying of the artist’s profession, making each little round table a private studio, we would have to write, compose, and draw only at home. As if that wouldn’t prove even more isolating! It may be alienating for two writers to maintain such a pointed, arch separation when they are separated by exactly two feet of café space, and still it makes good sense. It allows cafés to serve as temples for the religion of creativity.
Very often two writers will inhabit the same café for an hour and feel the urge to chat. They crave friendship, a reprieve from work, a little amusement, maybe even love. But the writer on this side, honoring the dignity of their mutual calling, will send the telepathic message to the writer on that side: “I see that you are working, and so am I.” The other writer, without the slightest acknowledgment, will reluctantly agree and telepathically reply, “Yes.” Each continues writing and foregoes interrupting the other. This is not the way that friendship blooms or that love arises, but it is the way that books get written.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
