My Lousy Adventures With Money

by William Saroyan

ABOUT thirty years ago, when I began to meet rich people, as they are called, I was a little surprised to notice that at their best their thinking had the kind of purity I had imagined was beyond them. In all things, excepting the possession of money, they were in fact poor, and therefore attractive. They really didn’t know what to do about anything, other than what they had done.

I was not surprised, consequently, when I heard two stories:

1. W. C. Fields one morning is said to have accepted a telegram on the lawn of his home in Beverly Hills while he was drinking martinis with his cronies. The telegram was long, and he read it twice, tears streaming down his face. He was asked what had moved him to tears, and he said the telegram, requesting money, was from the orphanage at which he had spent a number of years of his boyhood. “Are you going to send them money?” he was asked. Still weeping, Fields said, “The hell with ‘em.”

2. A rich Californian who had once been very poor was visited by a delegation seeking a donation for a cause they knew was near his heart. Again, the man broke into tears, and so of course the delegation believed his donation would be even greater than they had hoped until he said, “Gentlemen, I am brokenhearted, because even though I know the urgency of the need, and even though I want to make a generous donation, I can’t, I simply can’t, you must believe me, I cannot donate one dollar.”

These stories are only meant to hint at some of the personal complications that are inevitable in the possession of money. Needing money made W. C. Fields one of the greatest (and most truly tragic) comics of our time, a spirit of almost unbearable sensitivity and enormous isolation and grandeur. It is common gossip that he had money in safe-deposit boxes in banks all over the country, because he was afraid (terrified?) that someday he might find himself in an American city broke again. And it is also common gossip that the money is still in the unrecorded, unlocatable safedeposit boxes, years after the death of W. C. Fields.

The other man, the rich Californian, has also now been dead for some time, and I don’t know what has happened to “his” money.

Before I see about looking into the matter of my own involvement with money, I believe it might be in order to remember my first fame in relation to it.

I was under six years of age, and for three years I had been living in an orphanage at Oakland, California, but already some of the preposterous meaning and lore of money had reached me and had affected my view of things in general. For instance, I permitted myself to believe I had a right to take pride in the fact that my people, generally speaking, were money people, when in fact they were no such thing. My father died suddenly in 1911, aged thirty-seven, not only broke but in debt. My mother was obliged to work for a middle-class family in San Francisco as a maid and cook. How or why these facts entitled me to imagine that I came from money, as the saying is,

I can’t imagine. Was I insisting, or was I equating the possession of money with the possession of life, or with the possession of what I shall now call class (solely as a time-saver), or superior natural endowment, which I must confess I did believe I had?

In any case, eight or nine boys at the orphanage in my age-group had been taken to Luna Park, and we were all running around having grand adventures of all kinds in the outside world, so to put it, and not any of us had a penny to his name.

Some of the other kids in Luna Park that day also did not have a penny, but others of them had nickels, dimes, and quarters, which we saw with our own eyes, astonished, admiring, and envious.

In the lore of the orphanage there were tales of boys who had found all sorts of things in the streets, going to and from school, or on errands: pocketknives, dollar watches, young and helpless birds, small animals of various kinds, and finally coins, actual pieces of money. And so it had come to be traditional to be watchful wherever we went. One did not actually look for money, but at the same time one was always alert about the possibility of finding some.

And so it came to pass that in Luna Park I found a coin. It was light in weight, bronze in color, and in all truth, even at that age, I was quite sure that it was not an authentic coin of any real value. It might even have fallen out of a Cracker Jack box. But my finding of the thing had been so exciting that I wasn’t ready to forfeit even the most remote possibility of worth, and so I ran with all my might to the nearest boy who was also from the orphanage to let him see the coin.

“It‘s a five-dollar gold piece,” the boy cried. “You’ve found a five-dollar gold piece.” And he began to jump up and down, and dance around, hollering at the top of his voice and every now and then taking another look at the coin.

I thought, “Now, that’s a damned lie if I ever heard one. Or isn‘t it?”

Suddenly the boy went off into another order of excitement: “Don’t tell anybody about it. They’ll take it away and spend it on soap for the laundry. It’s a five-dollar gold piece, but don’t tell ‘em. It’s a secret. I won’t tell anybody.”

I put the coin in my pocket, and there we were in Luna Park in 1914 with this secret between us. We went back to the rest of our gang and tried to act as if we had no secret, but every once in a while the boy took me aside and asked me to let him see the five-dollar gold piece again.

After another look he whispered, “Put it back. Nobody knows. Keep it until you run away, and then you‘ll be able to buy something you need.”

Well,of course it was pure fantasy, and I knew it was, but all the same, little by little, the lie began to take possession of me. At the very least I was now ready to believe I might be mistaken in thinking that the coin was a worthless token of some kind. Later on, I would certainly show it to my brother, and he would let me know the truth. In the meantime, the adventures of the day continued for another hour or two – slides, swings, tree climbing, running, jumping – and once again the boy came and asked to see the five-dollar gold piece.

I reached into my pocket to fetch it up, but it wasn’t there. I went through every one of my pockets twice, but it wasn’t in any of them.

I ran back to where I had last been and began to look for it, and the boy began to look, too. The other boys from the orphanage came and asked what we were looking for, and the boy blurted out what he believed to be the truth: whereupon all of us began to search all through Luna Park lor the lost five-dollar gold piece.

We didn’t find it, although several of the boys found other things, pretty much useless and shabby in comparison with a five-dollar gold piece.

At length we were dragged away from the search by Blanche Fulton, a kind of social worker at her own expense, who had been assigned to our group.

Ten minutes after we reached the orphanage it was common knowledge that I had found a fivedollar gold piece in Luna Park but had lost it.

Everybody was sympathetic about the irony of finding and losing such a valuable piece ol money, and while I was tempted to dispel some of the sympathy by remarking that I really didn’t believe it had been a five-dollar gold piece, I simply did not do so. And it wasn’t that I was enjoying the sympathy, which in fact embarrassed me: it was simply that I didn’t know how to tell them the truth without spoiling the fun they were having.

I reasoned, “Well, it’s lost in any case, whatever it was. If I had found what they all believe I had found, it would still be lost, so what’s the dillercnce? Let it go.”

They were mourning the loss, not the coin itself.

They were being astonished about irony, not gold. And so I let it go.

But that’s not all. The event became a part of the lore at the orphanage. Even if I were to say, as I did to my brother, that the thing I had found was not a five-dollar gold piece, was not in fact any real coin with any real value, I would not have been believed. The thing had gone past me entirely, as if it might have been a kind of inevitable fragment of children’s folklore.

Thus, little by little, month after month, being reminded of the lore, doubting it, disbelieving it, I was suddenly astonished to find myself willing to believe that I hadn’t studied the coin carefully enough to know for sure that it had not been what everybody had decided that it had been, and consequently it might very well be that, in spite of my feeling about it, it had in fact been a five-dollar gold piece.

Soon, at sleep time, I frequently remembered that I had once found a very valuable gold coin, and had lost it.

Half asleep, I no longer doubted the thing, but every so often during the day I remembered the whole episode clearly and felt with a terrible sense of guilt that I had been a party to a lie, a deception, which all by itself had taken off and become, for all practical purposes, the truth.

Well, it wouldn’t do, that’s all, and so I said so, but it was too late.

The lore was established that I had found and lost a five-dollar gold piece in Luna Park, period.

And so I gave up, every now and then helplessly falling back into a belief in the lore, but most of the time knowing that it was a lie.

I had found something, and I had lost something, What I had actually found didn’t matter because I had lost it. I was famous as the central character of the lore. As far as I was concerned, it was a spurious order of fame, but at the same time there was no getting away from the fact that everybody wanted me to have it. There is probably no telling precisely what effect this had on my character. Thus, is literal truth the thing, or is lore the thing? Does the hero need anything more than the insistence of those who have chosen him for the role? Was it in me, simply, to be the only boy at the orphanage who was equal to that particular lore and role? As long as I was there no one else became similarly famous, at any rate.

The important thing appears to have been the losing of the coin soon after having found it. Had it been a true gold coin, and had I not lost it, the situation would not have impelled a comparable lore and fame. The coin woidd have been exchanged for its worth in ordinary stuff of one sort or another, which could not have meant anything in particular to me, and which I would have received, in any case. The losing, and the lore, had transformed the coin into something far more dramatic and valuable than anything in the world which might have been bought for five dollars.

THERE is still a little more to the matter. Soon after I began to earn money as a writer, soon after more than I really needed began to come to me, I found that I wanted to buy five-dollar gold pieces, and I began to do so, preferably coins dated 1908, the year of my birth. Here and there, stashed among other items of junk that I have accumulated over the years, there are probably as many as three dozen five-dollar gold pieces, and there is hardly ever a time when one such coin is not in my pocket, or in my wallet, or on a table where I am staying.

What does it mean?

I leave that to the reader.

Still, it is possible, and it may be desirable, to relate the matter to more of my involvement with money, and with anybody’s involvement with it.

First, I believe I speak truthfully when I remark that I am opposed to the stuff, because of what it does to most of the people. And yet I am aware of the foolishness, the meaninglessness of this opposition. We simply have got to have such a division of matter and energy into recognizable portions of worth. I suppose what I am opposed to is that which want of money does to the potential that is in all people for decent being, and that which passes -sion of money does to the few who have it excessively. That is to say, I am opposed to the distortion possession of money impels in the human being in general. It is difficult for anybody who by his own will, wit, labor, luck, cleverness, or even dishonesty has acquired a great sum of money not to believe that this fact alone proves something worth proving. The right to feel superior? The right to feel unimportant, or humble? Or the right to feel neither? To be above the whole thing?

Second, I deeply cherish poverty, for the simple reason that real wealth, inner wealth, is impossible for anybody who is measuring worth in terms of matter, money, possessions. If money could bring a man to the same true wealth that want of money imposes on him, I would urge everybody to find out how to get money, but it simply doesn’t do any such thing. It disengages will from the real, and directs it to a continuation of the action by means of which still more money may be added to the sum that is already there. This, of course, is futile, since there is always still more to be had, and to be added.

I was once informed at a dinner party that the man across the table from me was worth fifteen million dollars. I had no choice but to reply that the amount was not enough. Had it been fifty million, it would still not have been enough. The man was scarcely touching his food, he was all but silent, he seemed watchful and confused, and I felt that he was thinking for the most part about death. Now, that of course is what all of us are thinking about. Death and sex, or a good way to get through the human experience so that it might at least seem not to have been totally meaningless, and in order that the inevitable might not necessarily also be the fearfully undesirable, a raucous jeer at the desperate but useless lifetime performance.

Third, and last, I must openly acknowledge that there is an enormous area oi contradictoriness in my involvement with money, some of which I understand a little and can account for, but most of which appears to be lodged in me in a manner that does not permit me to make sense of it. Perhaps the greatest living authority on money is Ezra Pound, judging from what I have heard about his theories and his persistence in expounding them in poems, essays, and letters. And yet one has the feeling that his theories, like mine, or the next fellow’s, or even the specialist’s, are personal and therefore not possible to understand.

If you write about money for a lifetime, you’re interested in it, and you probably want more of it than you have, or are able to get, but when a poet is in a fix like that it is difficult to know what to think, since any involvement in the poetic is in itself a repudiation of all lesser involvements, but most especially the money involvement. What drives a poet to become a specialist in money matters? There is really only one valid excuse for it: that willy-nilly it keeps him alive and for all anybody knows drives him to the writing of poems he might not write had he not made himself into a money specialist.

A great poem is worth no known coin of any known realm, but at the same time all of the coin of all of the realm could not produce a comparable poem, and could not even purchase the production of such a poem by a poet with a known and established potential for the writing of great poems. Money can be given to a poet if he will accept it. Part of the contradictoriness I am speaking of does not permit me to accept a gift of money from any source. I consider the very offer an insult. On the other hand, I insist upon being paid for that which I have written, and I am not above bargaining, disputing, and if need be refusing to sell, which I have frequently done, with the result that the writing involved has never appeared in print. I am not unaware that there is an element of bad manners in my resentment of offers of gifts of money. But it is only common sense to insist on being decently paid for that which in one degree or another is the means by which a publication, or a television program, or a publisher is to stay in business and to earn money. I refuse to appear on any kind of television program without payment. I consider all such requests the impertinences of shameless and wealthy beggars and thieves.

The fact is, What does any of us really know about the world? Do we even live there, really?

Is the coin we find and lose gold, or a piece of junk, to dazzle the eye a moment, out of a box of Cracker Jack?

I don’t know. And when I carefully examine the dissertations of those who think they know, and then turn and take another look at the world and the human race, I still don’t know. All the same, I’m all for the world just as it is, because that’s all we have. And I’m all for the poets and beggars and thieves, because that’s who we are, we have no choice, and on our way through there is always at least an unexpected joke and a laugh or two now and then.