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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 1

Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life, 43.

Cage's time in Carmel remains largely unexplored. This excerpt reveals Cage's social status a a young adult.

"On one occasion a famous concert pianist was to give a recital at the Sunset Auditorium and Cage discharged his duties as quickly as possible so that he would not miss the performance. As chance would have it, he found himself seated next to the lady who owned the tearooms, who had come along with her daughter. Cage bade them good evening. "She looked the other way, whispered to her daughter," Cage remembered. "They both got up and left the hall." It was not the first time he had encountered such social divisiveness; he remembers being dismissed from a post as lawyer's clerk for inviting his superior to join him for a concert."

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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.