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32. Bruce Porter
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32 / Bruce Porter To term Bruce (Edmund Cushman) Porter (1865–1953) a Renaissance man hardly stretches the truth, for as a painter, stained glass artist, landscape architect and designer, art critic, writer, sculptor, muralist, decorator, and aesthete, he involved himself in much of the artistic life of San Francisco for several decades . Along with Norris, Gelett Burgess, and many of their friends and acquaintances , Porter was a member of the Bohemian Club, which may have been where he and Norris first met; they also knew each other through Les Jeunes and The Lark, which Porter and Burgess initially conceived. Then when Porter, having already allied himself with both the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements through his window designs for several churches in San Francisco and his early paintings, came to New York in 1899, Norris took up with him once again, since both for a time lived on Wash ing ton Square, Porter at the Benedick, number 80 on the east side, and Norris at number 61 on the south. Porter’s penchant for mysticism—he espoused Swedenborgianism—influenced Norris, who drew upon his friend’s personality and interests in creating Vanamee in The Octopus; not surprisingly, then, Porter’s memoir of Norris treats his friend’s temperament in considerably more detail than do those of many of his other friends. Source: Bruce Porter to Franklin D. Walker, letter, June 4, 1930, Franklin Dickerson Walker Papers, BANC MSS C- H 79, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. My dear Mr. Walker, Will you accept the excuse for the delay in answering your request, that your letter was mislaid, and I have no clue how to find you in Berke ley? I have no letters from Frank. I think none passed between us (which in itself distinguishes our association in a period when everybody else communicated hourly). I find it painful, this attempt to summon him out of those particular years. Part 3. Apprenticeship / 147 One was living and producing at such speed that the best—what was of deep & lasting value, that should have registered in quietude—was registered confusedly, and was smeared over with unimportances. That is why these notes are scant: you may use them or discard them, or incorporate them as a whole, as the contribution of a contemporary. I do not like to remember into that confusion: and I do not like the manner of my writing. Words should build as honest stone is builded: and here is the staccato of the facile writing machine again (by the same old bad habit of speed). I wish you pleasure & success in your interesting & touching labour. Norris should be so approached & remembered. He was a very dear, a very charming & very solitary human being. Yours very truly, Bruce Porter Strange, that the quickest memory I have of Frank—(the picture summoned when I think of him)—is of a slouched fig ure in an Inverness cape, passing beneath a blown gas- light, in the winter dusk and in a down pour of rain. It was a momentary impression from a “dummy” seat on the Sacramento St. Cable, in the old San Francisco of the earliest ’90s.—Some poignancy of drama in the fig ure of the unknown young man hit me: and the next day I painted the impression into a sombre little canvas and called it “Spring Floods.” He laughed dismissingly, at my impression & my title, when I told him, years later: and I smile now, as I recall his chagrin, when he learned that the picture had been destroyed. Where, when & how I first met him I cannot remember: likely enough on a Sunday evening at the Cosgraves102 —perhaps casually at the Bohemian Club (where neither of us properly fitted). He was at work on Cosgrave’s Wave: doing a variety of things in an extra inclusive journalistic job. But that job gave him the chance to do the thing he wanted to do.—a short story a week. But he gave the effect of being intensively “worn- out,” tired out, “written out,” according to his own declaration. He came with increasing frequency to the studio, mornings, when there was the uninterrupted chance to talk of what he was doing, what he planned to do. Grimly fulfilling every demand of the job: his story for the week, came to be discussed , plotted, beaten out, for the inexorable hour of “going to press” in the studio and between us he’d present his plot and likely enough...