If the Native Son sees
anything he wants to do, he instantly does it. If he sees anything that
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.
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