This is Me, Jack Vance

by Jack Vance

  I have attended conventions in Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Seattle, Medicine Hat (Alberta, Canada), and Melbourne, Australia, as well as in the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Germany.

  John and I attended the convention in Melbourne together. There we were joined by the writer Terry Dowling, a charming young man who played the guitar and sang comic songs on Australian television and who was great fun to be with, and who to this day remains one of our closest friends.

  After the convention in Melbourne, Johnny and I drove to Sydney. On the way we spent the night in the Hydro Majestic Hotel, a palatial edifice situated on a cliff in the Blue Mountains overlooking the Megalong Valley. At this time the hotel was in a state of sad disrepair, with hardly a working toilet in the establishment. For the evening’s entertainment, a young lady played unaccompanied clarinet very badly. We learned that the world-famous Graeme Bell had been there playing piano the night before. Bell led a great Australian jazz band, in which he also played piano; his brother Roger Bell played cornet; a chap named ‘Lazy Ade’ Monsborough played trombone.

  Terry tells me that since the time of our visit, the Hydro Majestic Hotel was been renovated and is now a beautiful luxury establishment.

  More recently, while Norma and I were attending a convention in Tours, France, our friend Paul Rhoads took us on a memorable excursion through the French countryside. He had heard that the best cassoulet in France was to be found at a certain restaurant in the south. We decided to test this rumor. We drove south and ultimately found this restaurant. It was off in the country, down a side road, and occupied a rather barn-like structure. We went in, prepared ourselves to sample the best cassoulet in the world. We ordered it and then waited for what must have been an hour before it arrived at our table. And…it was just terrible. In fact, it was almost inedible. So much for that!

  While I am on the subject of French cuisine, I am impelled to recall an episode which occurred long ago while we were touring France, when John was only about eight years old. I mentioned that we traveled by the Michelin guide, following the red rockingchairs, and also by the designations of the restaurants. The three-star restaurants, of course, are the best. There was a certain restaurant that had received a three-star rating for many years, and everyone seemed to concede that it was probably the best restaurant in France. This was La Pyramide. One Sunday, we chanced to be in the neighborhood*, and decided to stop in at La Pyramide for lunch, despite the fact that we were dressed very casually and might even have been described as scruffy Americans. Nevertheless, we were met at the door by Madame Point. Monsieur Point, who originated La Pyramide, had died, leaving the restaurant in the capable hands of his wife. She greeted us most graciously, seated us, and there we enjoyed one of the most magnificent meals of our lives. I am reasonably certain that Norma agreed with this assessment. John, I regret to say, had chosen to remain in the car reading Gerald Durrell, and so missed out on this gastronomic tour de force. Norma and I subsequently tried several other three-star restaurants in France, but none of them came up to the standard of La Pyramide*.

  On the occasion of the science fiction convention in Stockholm, I went alone. I flew via Icelandic Airways to England, then ferried from Newcastle upon Tyne in Yorkshire to Bergen, Norway. There I rented a car and drove through the Norwegian countryside. This is beyond question the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen anywhere, what with fjords and mountains, forests and fields. The time was summer, so the sun set late and rose late, and there didn’t seem to be any night at all.

  During my drive through Norway occurred one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Along the road through the countryside I came to a tunnel. As I started through I reached down to turn on my headlights, only to find that I did not know where the headlight controls were! I was already well in the tunnel and could hardly back up, and I saw a luminous patch perhaps a tenth of a mile ahead, which marked the exit from the tunnel. This was the longest tenth of a mile I have ever traversed in my life. It never occurred to me that I might have blown my horn to alert other drivers. Instead I crossed my fingers on the steering wheel and aimed the car for the little spot of light at the far end of the tunnel. By some miracle I never brushed the walls of the tunnel, and by another miracle I emerged from it unscathed. When I got out I stopped the car by the side of the road to let my rattled nerves settle down. Although I didn’t jump out and kiss the ground, I certainly felt like it.

  The rental car was expensive, and I only drove it for four or five days before taking public transportation to Stockholm. The convention, which was sponsored by a Swedish aristocrat, went about as usual: I was asked to give a speech, but on this occasion it took place in the dining room instead of on a stage with a podium. It therefore was not convenient to invite people to ask questions, as they were busy dining and drinking, so I talked, gave my opinions, produced wise remarks. As I talked I noticed a faint buzz; I went on, but noticed the buzz growing louder and louder. Somewhere, in the middle of a sentence, I stopped talking, sat down, and nobody seemed to notice.

  On my return home I stopped in Copenhagen, Denmark for a day or two. After checking into a hotel I went to explore the city. On a certain street where pedestrians only are allowed—no wheeled traffic—I sat on a bench to enjoy the sunshine and watch the passersby. Presently a lady came down and sat beside me. She was about forty years old, and not particularly handsome or well dressed. She began talking, telling me about herself. It seemed she worked in a saloon. Before long, she not-too-subtly propositioned me, and it dawned on me that this lady was on the make. I politely declined her proposition and moved on. Halfway toward the hotel, I noticed a young lady leaning against a car parked at the curb. She called out to me, and I thought to hear her use my name. I stopped and turned an inquiring gaze on her. Then this woman, too, propositioned me. She has younger and considerably more attractive than the lady of my previous encounter, but still—no sale. A hundred yards further along, an even younger woman—a girl, in fact, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, skinny, with wild dark hair—darted out and extended me the third proposition of the day. I made haste back to my hotel, where I vowed to stay clear of that particular street on my next visit to Copenhagen.

  Back in Oakland it was life as usual again. We continued to work on our house, which was now almost complete. In the place of the original, dilapidated little shack was now a three-story structure which I will not quite call a mansion, but which was spacious and comfortable. Before we could finish our dining room it was necessary to dig out some more of the hillside and put in a retaining wall. This we did, and built a beautiful stone wall using the stones which Norma and I over the years had brought up from the Mojave desert. At the opposite end of the room we installed a bar surfaced in polished mahogany and surrounded by horse brasses we had collected in England. Gradually we stocked the bar, not all at once but whenever we could afford the investment, so that over time it acquired many bottles of various distillations and tinctures and extracts.

  My grandfather, in the library of his home on Haight Street in San Francisco, had owned a collection of Life magazines, archived by year in great leather-bound volumes from 1883 to 1936. Here, it must be noted, I am referring not to Henry Luce’s later pictorial magazine of the same name, but to the original old humor magazine inspired by Puck, which in turn was the American answer to the British magazine Punch. When I was young and stayed with my grandfather, every night I would take to bed several volumes of Life and look them over until I fell asleep. About thirty years ago I came upon such a leather-bound collection for sale. This collection, however, was truncated at about 1917. The price was right, however, so I bought the collection, and it remains today on our bookshelves. These are wonderful magazines, and after about 1900 equal to Punch. They contain many full-page illustrations by Harrison Cady, who later went on to illustrate the Thornton Burgess books regarding Reddy the Fox and Chatterer the Red Squirrel, et al. Gibson is present and shows us his eponymous girls. The automobiles o
f the day were advertised in every spare inch, as was, depicted in the most romantically illustrated panels, a product called Creme Yvette, a liquor flavored with violet and vanilla which, sadly, is no longer manufactured. The artist behind these advertisements must be commended, as his work performed its function so successfully that years later, when the opportunity offered to augment the facilities of my bar with Creme Yvette, I seized upon it.

  I hope that this discussion regarding my bar and its multiple contents will not create the perception that I am an alcoholic. This is far from the truth. I admit that I regard the evening cocktail hour as a noble institution, but not an indispensable one. We often had wine with our dinner.

  Last year, my friend Jeremy Cavaterra and I chanced upon some old Trader Vic’s recipes, specifically the original Mai Tai and the Scorpion, and we became so vitalized by these that we began to formulate a unique and extraordinary series of libations which are to be found nowhere else but in this particular corner of Oakland. These include the “Stuttercup”, “Valley View Up-and-Down”, “Coyote Varnish”, as well as a few realizations of hypothetical concoctions from my books, such as “Blue Ruin” and “Pooncho Punch”. Again, I assert that while I am by no means a Wowser, neither could I be called a tapdancing drunk. Still, back in those days of yore, not an evening went by before Jeremy and I looked at each other and asked if the sun had gone down over the yard-arm yet*.

  Once a month or so Norma and I visited the town of Three Rivers in the Sierra Nevada foothills south of Yosemite. Here every Friday night, the High Sierra Jazz Band played. The band was made up of all local musicians, and was absolutely superb. I don’t remember the names of all the personnel apart from Al Smith, who played trumpet.

  On one of Terry Dowling’s visits, we took him to Three Rivers. About halfway there we stopped in Merced for dinner. I had contrived a method by which a transient might locate the best restaurant in town. He must find the local bookshop and take advice from the proprietor, who infallibly will possess this information. Why the bookshop? Because bookshop owners are usually discriminating gourmets without too much money.

  In Merced, the bookshop proprietor and his wife recommended a Basque restaurant at the edge of town and mentioned that they themselves would be going there this evening. They invited us to join them, and we were happy to do so. The restaurant proved to be beyond reproach, once again validating my theory.

  A Basque restaurant is quite different from the ordinary. You sit at a long table along with many other people, and the cuisine is served family-style. Everything appears on the table at once, from soup onwards. During the meal we became better acquainted with our friends from the bookshop. The proprietor’s wife informed us, with as much nonchalance as if she talked about the weather, that they lived in a haunted house.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Haunted house? Really?”

  “Oh, there’s no question about it,” the lady declared, “I’ve seen the ghosts myself.”

  Terry asked what the ghosts looked like, and the lady went on to describe what she had seen. She was specific in her descriptions; often, for instance, she found the ghosts sitting on her bed, staring at her. I looked to the husband for confirmation; he looked up toward the ceiling, shrugged, but neither endorsed nor contradicted these testimonials.

  She further informed us that she had called in a priest to exorcise the house. The priest performed the appropriate rites, sprinkled holy water here and there, and for a time the ghosts were abashed and failed to appear; but before long they returned, and our friends resigned themselves to cohabit with this infestation.

  Terry and I expressed an inclination to visit this house, but Norma considered this proposal to be bad form and quietly discouraged us. And so after leaving the excellent Basque restaurant we parted company. The next morning, as we were leaving Merced, we drove past the residence in question, but saw only an ordinary modern suburban house.

  The ceiling in our dining room was ordered from our friend, Mr. Peer in Kashmir. I took careful measurements and mailed them off. In due course the shipment arrived, exactly as ordered: pieces of Kashmir walnut, beautifully carved and polished. John did an excellent job installing the wood in the ceiling. With the stone wall and fireplace at one end, and the bar gleaming with horse-brasses at the other, the whole illuminated by the Waterford crystal chandelier, the dining room is now our favorite room in the house.

  We continued to improve the house. I had originally installed a slate floor in the living room, which was a tremendous amount of work, something like a jigsaw puzzle since every piece of slate had to be fitted exactly. Eventually we grew dissatisfied with it; the slate had turned a dark, dull purplish green and gave the living room a rather gloomy atmosphere; so we pulled it up and replaced it with a hardwood floor.

  The old house is now just about finished, but we often discuss further additions. Building our home has been one of our great pleasures.

  Chapter 11

  Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,

  Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West?

  Robert Bridges

  Boats, in one capacity or another, have always been a part of my life. When I was about ten years old, living up at Green Lodge Ranch, I built a boat out of fence rails, canvas and waterproof paint. It was about twelve feet long and sloop-rigged. I carried it over to the sloughs; it floated, did not leak, but neither did it sail worth a darn. Such was my first boat.

  I acquired my second boat while working at the Olympic Club. This was a 14-foot sloop which I bought from a bellhop for $40. I don’t remember what happened to it; I suppose I sold it. My third boat was also a 14-foot sloop, which I bought while a sophomore at the university. I kept it docked at the Berkeley marina and sailed it here and there around San Francisco Bay.

  On one occasion I took John West and Anne Pickering from the Daily Cal out sailing. We headed out toward Tiburon, a town in Marin County, but halfway there encountered strong winds and decided to turn back. Then occurred one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. A big wave came up behind us, threw the stern of the boat over. The wind caught the sails the wrong way and knocked us over, and to use a seagoing term, we broached, and all three of us were thrown into the water.

  After a moment or two of shock, I tried to right the boat, without a glimmer of success. The shore was two or three miles off, and we could not swim so far, and all of us realized that submersion in this cold water would not do our health any good; in fact we would die of exposure in short order. Fortunately, someone had seen us go over and had notified the coast guard, which presently sent out a rescue boat. They pulled us from the water, but either would not or could not save the boat; it drifted into the Berkeley Pier and broke up among the pilings, which was all very well as I was not too pleased with the conduct of this boat.

  Of course, I can make no pretense but to admit that this sorry episode was due to my own bad seamanship. Ever thereafter, even while sailing much larger boats, I retained an obsessional dread of that insidious stroke of destiny known as “the broach”.

  My friend Tom Hand co-owned this boat, and when we bought it, it was submerged in ten feet of water at Bay Point, a town about fifteen miles up the San Joaquin River. Since Tom Hand was glib and declared an aversion to getting himself wet, I was required to do the diving, down ten feet into the hold, where I found the ballast and carried it to the surface. In due course the boat followed and we set sail back to Berkeley. As we sailed we noticed that the boat leaked, and were forced to bail it out at intervals. So we sailed down the river, under the Carquinez Bridge and out onto San Francisco Bay. Here, among the waves and strong winds, we got very seriously worked, and I went down to bail using a bucket, which I then cast to Tom who would throw the water overboard. But on one of these passes Tom threw the bucket overboard along with the water—a reflex action of some sort—and there was nothing left to bail with. The water was coming in, not exactly in a torrent, but fast enough so that the boat was in serio
us trouble. I looked around for something to bail with but could find nothing but a bottle. I picked up the bottle and with great care knocked off its neck, and used what remained to scoop up water and threw it out a porthole. Otherwise, the boat would have sunk, Tom Hand and I would have been thrown into the water despite Tom’s aversion to being wet, and we would not have returned to the land of the living, since the coast guard was nowhere in evidence. However, through the agency of this broken bottle, the boat remained afloat and ultimately we docked in the Berkeley Marina, where we alighted and kissed the ground. Subsequently we sold the boat to my brother Louis.

  The years passed, years quite devoid of boats, although I subscribed to yachting magazines and studied yacht designs with great concentration. Along about this time a description of the Tahiti ketch appeared in Mechanics Illustrated. This was truly a romantic boat. A double-ender, about thirty feet long, it was solid, strong, deep-keeled, two-masted: not fast but dependable. The designer claimed that it could sail anywhere back and forth, laugh at storms, and that its design had been derived from the old Viking longboats. I also yearned for a boat of the type called the Block Island ketch. Block Island is off the coast of Rhode Island, and these ketches are used to carry supplies back and forth despite all extremities of weather. They were usually about thirty feet long; the hull showed no concave lines, with an extraordinarily wide beam. The ballast was internal and usually consisted of stone; the masts were unstayed and, at that early time, made of pine trunks (nowadays they are made of carbon fiber).

  Eventually, however, my attention was diverted from the Tahiti ketch to the trimaran. This type of boat, for people not in the know, consists of three hulls: a large center hull, then a smaller hull to either side attached with struts. Although the trimaran concept is originally Polynesian and thousands of years old, the model in use today was popularized by Arthur Piver, an American boatbuilder working on the west coast. Piver came to be known as “the father of the modern trimaran”. He claimed that the trimaran could sail anywhere in the world without problems. Thousands of adventurous young men and women began to build trimarans using Piver’s plans. In 1967 Piver, in order to satisfy requirements to qualify for the forthcoming Observer Singlehanded Trans-Atlantic Race, embarked on a 500-mile solo voyage from San Francisco to San Diego. He never reached port, and has never been seen again.