he wants to get, he promptly takes it. If he sees anything that he wants
to be, he immediately is it. He saunters into New York in a degage way
and takes the whole city by storm. He strolls through Europe with an
insouciant air and finds it almost as good as California. All this,
supplemented by his abiding conviction that California must have the
most and best and biggest of everything, accounts for what California
has done in the sixty-odd years of her existence, accounts for what San
Francisco has done in the decade since her great disaster, accounts for
that wartime Exposition; perhaps the most elaborate, certainly the most
beautiful the world has ever seen.

The Native Son has a strong sense of humor and he invents his own
slang. He expresses himself with the picturesqueness of diction
inevitable to the West and with much of its sly, dry humor. But there is
a joyous quality to the San Francisco blague which sets it apart, even
in the West. You find its counterpart only in Paris. Perhaps it is that,
being reenforced by wit, it explodes more quickly than the humor of the
rest of the country. The Californian with his bulk, his beauty, his
boast and his blague descending on New York is very like the native of
the Midi who with similar qualities, is always taking Paris by storm.
Marseilles, the chief metropolis of the Midi, has a famous promenade -
less than half a dozen blocks, packed tight with the peoples and colors
and odors of two continents - called the Cannebiere. The Marseillais,
returning from his first visit to Paris, remarks with condescending
scorn that Paris has no Cannebiere. Of course Paris has her network of
Grand Boulevards but - So the Californiac patronizingly discovers that
New York has no Market Street, no Golden Gate Park, no Twin Peaks, no
Mt. Tamalpais, no seals. Above all - and this is the final thrust - New
York is flat.