San Francisco Bay Area Writers and Artists, Elsie Whitaker Martinez
A Two-House Family
MartinezWell, after twelve years I left Marty and moved over to Harriet Dean's house which was just down the street from the studio. She moved here to live near us. It had been a little too hard on Kai because Marty was rather tyrannical. He wasn't well and he was getting old — he was then in his late sixties — so I thought it would be better for Kai and me to be away from him.
However, we took care of him — got his meals and looked after him when he was sick. Separation was not too difficult for him. I think teaching exhausted him quite a bit, and I think he'd grown to
In 1939, when we moved to Carmel, my brother moved into Harriet's house and took care of Marty. Two years later Marty became ill, so we came up to get him and took him to Carmel. He was with us for seven months before he died in 1943. Pal, Kai and I were very devoted to Marty. He always called us "his people".
Baum
You said he drank quite a bit?
Martinez
Yes. It was complicated with that, too. It didn't make any difference if he were up until three in the morning in San Francisco or at home, Marty would be up at five, getting ready for school. He never was late once in the many years he taught there. He loved teaching, therefore it was no difficulty for him at all. He was not yet an alcoholic, but was on the way to alcoholism. The slightest amount of alcohol affected him.
But I think he was much happier with us living nearby. Kai would come every afternoon to be with him after her school hours. And then when tired he'd say, "You go home". So he just went back into the sort of quiet life that he'd had before he married.
Marty never had been able to live with anybody. Several friends tried to live with Marty in San Francisco and it was impossible. Piazzoni was a fellow student of Marty's in Paris — in the same classes. They tried to live together and they separated, too, after the early days in San Francisco.
You haven't spoken about the fact that Marty shared a studio with Maynard Dixon in San Francisco before the earthquake.
Martinez
Well, the only thing I knew about that was that Dixon told me Marty was impossible to get along with, and asked me how I managed to survive him. This happened a couple of years before I knew Marty, when they were in the Montgomery Block. I liked Dixon very much, and agreed with him that Marty was an exceedingly difficult person to get along with.
Baum
After Marty left San Francisco, he didn't see Dixon?
Martinez
No, they lost contact. It was just the early years.
Marty was neat to an annoying degree. It was a mania with him, almost. His friends would be there smoking and he'd jerk the ashtrays right out from under them and go clean them and bring them back. If you took a book out of the bookcase and set it down for a moment to talk, he'd grab the book and put it back in its place. He was trying. I can tell the world he was trying to live with. He had fixed habits and it never occurred to him it was ever necessary to change; so he never changed one habit when I moved into the studio. I was just part of Marty's possessions. Of course, I hadn't conventional ideas and had never lived a conventional life.
However, I was offended because the Bohemian Club gave every one of the prominent members, when they married, a chest of silver. They didn't do it for us since they discussed the possibility and finally agreed the marriage could not last, so they dropped the plan. Marty thought that was terribly funny, but I was furious. I asked Porter
Marty was devoted to her and she loved him. He was picturesque and always had the peanut man or the Indian legends to tell her. So I stayed with Marty until Kai was ten years old. In the meantime he had become quite tyrannical and drink was part of it. He never was an alcoholic in the sodden sense, but he did drink too much quite often. So I decided that that wasn't good for the child to know that side of him.
Harriet Dean took us to Europe in 1922 and we spent a year in France. By the time we returned he'd gotten used to living alone
Baum
Who lived in this house?
Martinez
He lived here at the studio and we lived with Harriet Dean.
Baum
How had you met Harriet Dean?
Martinez
It was in 1916, I think. She was with the Little Review with Margaret Anderson. They were then in Chicago and New York for a while. Finally they came to San Francisco to get new interest and support to keep the Little Review going.
I was not circulating at that time; I had the baby, three and a half, to care for and I was not going out much. Marty had gone over to some celebration at Coppa's. In came this picturesque girl and sat down beside him. She never said a word, just sat there waiting for some friend to come in. She knew who Marty was, of course. Pretty soon he started to quote something from Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and stopped and paused, and she finished the line. So then he turned to her and said, "Well, who are you?" She said, "I'm Harriet Dean, I'm on the Little Review". "Oh," he said, "then we're going to be good friends."
Baum
Were people out here especially eager to have the Little Review come out?
Martinez
San Francisco was so sophisticated... Well, I think Margaret Anderson was somewhat disappointed. They stayed over the summer months, only then returned to New York. Of course, Harriet was floating around all over, going to everything and getting interest and subscriptions, especially, for their magazine.
So he met her at Coppa's and he came back and said, "I met the most wonderful person and Lucy Pierce promised to bring her up Sunday. You've got to meet Harriet Dean, a really remarkable person." That
We entered World War I at that time and Harriet Dean's mother, worried about her daughter's connections with radicals, decided it was an excellent idea to have her tied down with a home near us. So she put up the resources to build. That kept her busy until the war ended. I had met her mother who decided I was a good influence on her, so she came back to Piedmont.
Harriet Dean and Marty were very great friends. Marty was devoted to her and they were very great friends right up until the day he died.
Baum
Did Marty resent the fact that you moved over with her?
Martinez
Not at all. He included her in "his people". From then on things ran along rather smoothly; there were no cataclysms in either of our lives. Then we moved down to Carmel in '39; this old friend of Pal's [Harriet Dean] had this place there and she wanted us to take it over. So we exchanged the two houses. She took our place up here, we took her place down there, and settled down. She was going into a Catholic order at the time so that she wanted us to take the place in Carmel. That's where we've been for 25 years. Marty died in 1943. The doctor had called us up and said, "Marty is really in a quite serious condition, he is getting too frail to go on with his teaching at the college." So we went up to get him and brought him down with us, fixed
Baum
You mention Indian culture along with Marty all the time, but did he really have much of an Indian background?
Martinez
No. I suppose he was about one-eighth Indian, but he was so proud of his Indian blood he made the most of it.
Baum
Did he have any Indian cultural background in his family?
Martinez
He always talked about the great culture of the Tarascans and claimed it was as great as the Toltec. His knowledge of them came from seeing them in Guadalajara and from books about their culture. His father was no admirer of Indians. He had the Spaniard's contempt for them, so Marty could not build up his Indian inheritance until after he came to San Francisco.
But Marty did look quite Indian, really and in later years he wore the traditional leather band around his head. Kai told us when she went to Mexico, the Mexicans always recognized her Indian blood by the shape of her head and some of her features, which are like her father's. They always recognized that she was part Mexican, at least. Her skin was too white. When we were down in Taos and I told Tony Luhan that she was part Indian, he looked her over and said, "Ye-es, but too white." (Laughter)
Which reminds me of one of the most delightful stories about Taos. Harriet Dean was there for the summer dances at Taos Pueblo with Ralph
Harriet wanted to know some details of the symbolism of the dance. She went up to a group of handsome young Indians leaning against a wall and said, "Would you please give me some information on the symbolism of your dances?" And they all just stared. "No speak English," muttered one young Indian. So she turned around and said to Margaret, "You know, I have never in my life been among so many handsome men." They burst out laughing for they all spoke English. They they told her everything she wanted to know.
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb6j49p1b8&brand=oac4
Title: San Francisco Bay Area writers and artists : oral history transcript / Elsie Martinez
By: Martinez, Elsie, 1890-1984, Interviewee, Baum, Willa K, Interviewer, Walker, Franklin Dickerson,, Interviewer
Date: 1962-1969
Contributing Institution: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
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