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"If I had to Live my Life Over Again, I would Be a Botanist": John Cage’s Mycology Collection

CM Note 2

Kuhn ed., The Selected Letters of John Cage, 258–259.

Cage was very aware of the effects of the Depression which led to the California Agricultural strikes during 1933 in the San Joaquin Valley. In a 1967 letter to the composer Philip Corner he wrote:

“My dear Phil, Your very moving letter and days pass without my answering… I discovered early in the thirties, in New York City and in Carmel, California that radical social action had no use for my services, that to be of use I’d best stick to my guns, not theirs.”

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Carmel 1933 Following the height of the Great Depression in 1933, John Cage was a twenty–one year old aspiring composer. He departed from his hometown of Los Angeles and moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea, a central Californian coastal city located on the Monterey Peninsula. Outside of experimenting with serialism and writing prolific amounts of music, he moonlighted at the Blue Bird Tearooms, earning one dollar for each twelve–hour shift (around twenty dollars a day in 2021). As Cage recalled, “I washed all the dishes and pots and pans… [I] scrubbed the floor, washed the vegetables, crates of spinach for instance; and if the owner came along and found me resting, she sent me out the back yard to chop wood.” [1] To reduce his personal food costs, Cage went foraging for strawberries but instead he found diverse cultures of wild mushroom–these famous and quintessential saprophytes are common around the oak studded fields and damp forests of the Monterey Bay region. [2] He used the public library to research which ones were edible and sustained a mushroom diet for a few days. Cage recalled that this type of wild food gathering and consumption was not physically maintainable; at one point he found himself so malnourished that he barely made it to a lunch invitation. As he recalled in a Vogue interview with Ninette Lyon:
I had no money. I was living in Carmel and around my shack grew mushrooms. I decided they were edible and lived on them. After a week of this, I was invited for lunch by friends who had a house about a mile away. I found I no longer had the energy to get there. Mushrooms are so arranged chemically that we are incapable of absorbing their proteins. We can only use the minerals, the vitamins, and the water, which is not sufficient. But they taste so good they increase our ability to digest other things; our stomachs are so happy. [3]
This early and dangerous encounter with wild mushrooms would not be Cage’s last.

References:

Kostelanetz, Richard ed. John Cage: An Anthology. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.

Kuhn, Laura ed. The Selected Letters of John Cage. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016.

Revill, David. The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life. New York: Arcade, 1992.