The Native Son

For the Native Son is an unique product, as distinctively and characteristically Californian as the gigantic redwood, the flower festival, the ferocious flea, the moving-picture film, the annual boxing and tennis champion, the golden poppy or the purple prune. There is only one other Californian product that can compare with him and that's the Native Daughter. And as for the Native Daughter - - But if I start up that squirrel track I'll never get back to the trail. Nevertheless some day I'm going to pick out a diamond-pointed pen, dip it in wine and on paper made from orange-tawny POPPY petals, try to do justice to the Native Daughter. For this inflexible moment, however, my subject is the Native Son. But if scenery and climate - and weather even - do creep in, don't blame me. Remember I warned you. Besides sooner or later I shall be sure to get back to the main theme.

In the January of 1917 I made my annual pilgrimage to California. On the train was a Native Son who was the hero of the following astonishing tale. He was one of a large family, of which the only girl had married a German, a professor in an American university. Shortly before the Great War, the German brother-in-law went back to the Fatherland to spend his sabbatical year in study at a German university. Letters came regularly for a while after the war began; then they stopped. His wife was very much worried. Our hero decided in his simple western fashion to go to Germany and find his brother-in-law. He traveled across the country, cajoled the authorities in Washington into giving him a passport, crossed the ocean, ran the British blockade and entered the forbidden land. Straight as an arrow he went to the last address in his brother-in-law's letters. That gentleman, coming home to his lunch, tired, worried and almost penniless, found his Californian kinsman smoking calmly in his room. The Native Son left money enough to pay for the rest of the year of study and the journey home. Then he started on the long trip back.

In the English port at which his ship touched, he was mistaken for a disloyal newspaper man for whom the British Secret Service had long been seeking. He was arrested, searched and submitted to a very disquieting third degree. When they asked him in violent explosive tones what he went into Germany for, he replied in his mild, unexcited Western voice - to give his brother-in-law some money. All Europe is accustomed to crazy Americans of course, but this strained credulity to the breaking point; for nobody who has not tried to travel in the war countries can realize the sheer unbelievability of such guilelessness. The British laughed loud and long. His papers were taken away and sent to London but in a few days everything was returned. A mistake had been made, the authorities admitted, and proper apologies were tendered. But they released him with looks and gestures in which an abashed bewilderment struggled with a growing irritation.

That is a typical Native Son story.

If you are an Easterner and meet the Native Son first in New York (and the only criticism to be brought against him is that he sometimes chooses - think of that - chooses to live outside his native State!) you wonder at the clear-eyed composure, the calm-visioned unexcitability with which he views the metropolis. There is a story of a San Francisco newspaper man who landed for the first time in New York early in the morning. Before night he had explored the city, written a scathing philippic on it and sold it to a leading newspaper. New York had not daunted him. It had only annoyed him. He was quite impervious to its hydra-headed appeal. But you don't get the answer to that imperviousness until you visit the California which has produced the Native Son. Then you understand.

Yes, Reader, your worst fears are justified; I'm going to talk about scenery. But don't say that I didn't warn you! However, as it's got to be done sometime, why not now? I'll be perfectly fair, though; so -

For the Native Son has come from a State whose back yard is two hundred thousand square miles (more or less) of American continent and whose front yard is five hundred thousand square miles (less or more) or Pacific Ocean, whose back fence is ten thousand miles (or thereabouts) of bristling snow-capped mountains and whose front hedge is ten thousand miles (or approximately) of golden foam-topped combers; a State that looks up one clear and unimpeded waterway to the evasive North Pole, and down another clear and unimpeded waterway to the elusive South Pole and across a third clear and unimpeded water way straight to the magical, mystical, mysterious Orient. This sense of amplitude gives the Native Son an air of superiority . . . Yes, you're quite right, it has a touch of superciliousness - very difficult to understand and much more difficult to endure when you haven't seen California; but completely understandable and endurable when you have.