By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
Sometimes it pays to be a pack rat. While rummaging through my Historical Society files this week I came across a clipping from the March 2015 New York Times that provides an in depth look at how Sausalito factored into the writing of best-selling author Evan S. Connell.
After describing the contemporary downtown tourist scene, writer Mark Oppenheimer gets down to business, hearkening back to the booth at the no name where “Evan S. Connell used to sit, beautiful in his bomber jacket, sipping his drinks, dreaming of literary success.”
Although he is now considered a great American novelist, “Mr. Connell is not really known,” says Oppenheimer, perhaps “because Mr. Connell worked across so many genres,” from book-length poetry to short stories to historic and contemporary novels, “as if each book were meant to alienate fans of the last.”
Oppenheimer notes that “it also matters that Mr. Connell left behind few people to keep his torch lit. He was a loner: He never married, had no children, rarely entertained, was scant of friends.”
In his research, Oppenheimer interviewed the Historical Society’s Rick Seymour, “a longtime Sausalito writer, born in town, an anchor of its literary and bohemian scene. He regularly drank with Mr. Connell when the writer was incubating ‘Mrs. Bridge,’ and he had written a charming eulogy of Mr. Connell for a local newspaper [that would be Marinscope]. “He was a very good-looking guy,” Ric said of Connell.” We called him Smiling Jack. He always wore a leather flight jacket, had a little mustache, looked like the Smilin’ Jack character in the comics — a macho aviator in a strip that ran from 1933 to 1973.
“In the convivial, hard-drinking Sausalito writing crowd, Mr. Connell kept his distance. ‘Whatever social life he had going, he was pretty private about’,” said Rick who separately has recounted that Connell dated Grammy-award winning folk artist Gale Garnett.
Oppenheimer also interviewed Jack Shoemaker, Connell’s longtime editor: “Mr. Shoemaker is Bay Area literary history: He has also edited or published Robert Hass, Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, M.F.K. Fisher and Anne Lamott. But Mr. Connell was one of his first writers, and the No Name years came at the beginning of a 50-year friendship”.
Shoemaker “met Mr. Connell at the No Name, where Mr. Shoemaker had first gone with the Beat poet Lew Welch, whose work he had published. Mr. Welch was dating a local woman named Magda Cregg. “She had a son” Mr. Shoemaker said, “who became known as Huey Lewis — he chose Lewis because he loved Lew Welch. Lewie always told me that he taught Huey Lewis how to sing.
“Sausalito had the Tides,” Mr. Shoemaker told Oppenheimer, “which was a very famous bookstore at the time. It was owned by a couple of people who were friends of Evan’s, a couple of doors beyond No Name. And those guys, the owners, bought the Washington Square Bar and Grill, otherwise known as the Washbag, which was one of the famous North Beach literary bars, famous for their softball team — Herb Caen played, and Claes Oldenburg made them a bat.”
Shoemaker next visited the location of the legendary Contact Magazine, in what had been an Italianate mansion a few paces from the No Name. Says Oppenheimer, “a little research revealed that this building had also housed the Tides, the old bookstore and hangout. So it seems that upstairs, the literary magazine that published early Updike and Barthelme had its headquarters — and downstairs was the store that nurtured Mr. Connell, Mr. Kentfield and Mr. Shoemaker.
But on Oppenheimer’s visit, “the ground floor was vacant, a sheriff’s eviction notice taped to the window. A worker was painting the trim around the door, and I asked him what was most recently there. “A store,” he said. “It sold hats and T-shirts, I think.”
The article and accompanying photos can be viewed at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/travel/searching-for-evan-connells-bohemian-sausalito.html. The New York Times clipping is now in the collection of the Sausalito Historical Society.
COURTESY PHOTO
The No Name Today