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Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

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Kanno lived at the Hights for over ten years, writing<br />

one poem and a “vision drama,” with very<br />

limited exposure. In contrast, within a year of<br />

moving to the Hights, Noguchi produced idiosyncratic<br />

poetry that created a small sensation. His<br />

efforts were collected into Seen and Unseen, or<br />

A Monologue of a Homeless Snail (1897), the first<br />

and only book to emerge from Gelett Burgess<br />

and Porter Garnett’s Bohemian Press. 55 By the<br />

time he returned to Japan in 1<strong>90</strong>4, having left<br />

the Hights some four years earlier, Noguchi had<br />

published four books (and fathered the sculptor<br />

Isamu Noguchi). Repatriated, he established himself<br />

as one of the reigning authorities on English<br />

literature. Today his accomplishments are the<br />

subject of an extensive Web site, the object of<br />

study in courses on Asian Americans, and material<br />

for an exhibition at the Oakland Asian Cultural<br />

Center. 56<br />

Ironically, of all the once-prominent literati who<br />

gathered at Miller’s bastion, this penniless quasiservant<br />

is arguably the most feted. Noguchi was<br />

the comet whose tail still shimmers: the first<br />

Japanese to compose poems in English, a talented<br />

crafter of words, and a pioneer in bringing<br />

Western literature to Asian shores. The lesser<br />

lights who were drawn to the Oregonian’s “steeps<br />

and heaps of stones” for the most part could<br />

just watch. They, however, did their service stoking<br />

the numerous publications that made San<br />

Francisco a West Coast literary center at the turn<br />

of the last century. John P. Irish, George Sterling,<br />

Herbert Bashford, George Wharton James,<br />

Henry Meade Bland, Harr Wagner, Charles Warren<br />

Stoddard, Bailey Millard, and more—Miller’s<br />

boon companions—were the writers and editors<br />

of Sunset, Overland Monthly, and Golden Era magazines<br />

and the city’s four principal newspapers.<br />

Drawn to the Hights by its owner’s esprit, they<br />

sunned themselves in his larger-than-life personality,<br />

drank his whiskey, and chawed his barbecue.<br />

Some—Bland, Wagner, and the newspaper<br />

editor and poet Alfred James Waterhouse—even<br />

lived there for different periods. 57<br />

Miller was the<br />

“center of our<br />

solar system,”<br />

charles stoddard<br />

reported. . . .<br />

ambrose bierce<br />

conceded that<br />

miller was “as<br />

great-hearted a<br />

man as ever lived.”<br />

Not only writers gathered at the Hights. The fiery<br />

Xavier Martinez, first painting teacher at the <strong>California</strong><br />

Academy of Arts and Crafts in Oakland<br />

(later the <strong>California</strong> College of Arts and Crafts),<br />

came with and without his wife, Elsa Whitaker.<br />

Gertrude Boyle Kanno was one of the most talented<br />

artists to take up residency. A refugee from<br />

the 1<strong>90</strong>6 earthquake, she moved there when her<br />

studio (at the same Pine Street address as the<br />

Partington School) was destroyed. Boyle was<br />

the sculptor of choice for the eminences grises of<br />

the day, including Edwin Markham, John Muir,<br />

Joseph LeConte, and, of course, Miller.<br />

Miller was the “center of our solar system,”<br />

Charles Stoddard reported, describing the dullness<br />

that followed his absence from the ranch.<br />

Ambrose Bierce, who may not have worked on<br />

the stone monuments but who was known to<br />

join family members on excursions into the<br />

hills, conceded that Miller was “as great-hearted<br />

57

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