According to Johnson, he quit the circus in New York, tried to live in New York City but fled the winter and went home again to New Orleans before heading to San Francisco, drawn by its literary and artistic communities.  He says he left the Big Easy for the City by the Bay in 1931, but the 1930 census puts him in San Francisco already, living in a group house on Fifth Street, his job listed as essayist.  In time, he would move to what he called an "artist's shack" at 1443 Montgomery Street in Telegraph Hill, not far from where Coit Tower was built in 1933.  He lived in a basement apartment, but when he came out, Johnson would have been able to track the building of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge from his street.

This was a critical time in Johnson's life, but it's difficult to get an exact handle on it.  It seems clear that he came to San Francisco to make his artistic mark, and in his remembrances for The Weird Tales Story he tells of meeting some of The City's leading literary lights--John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Herb Caen.  R. Alain Evarts, however, contacted Caen much letter, and the newspaper columnist had no memory of Johnson.  As well, some of Johnson's recollections just don't ring true.  He said that he was welcomed into the literary circle in part because he had read every issue of Weird Tales and corresponded with the editor, he was considered an expert on the magazine--at a time when "every celebrated author in town was trying to get a story into it; and most of them had failed."  It's hard to believe Steinbeck, Saroyan, or Caen were trying to break into Weird Tales, which calls into question a lot of Johnson's memories of the time.


[Late update: Apparently, Johnson lived alone during his time in San Francisco, but for his cat(s?).  In an article for the fanzine New Frontiers Johnson wrote, "I am as interested in sex as the next man," but he never married, and I've come across no evidence that he had girlfriends.  That doesn't mean he didn't have any girlfriends, but his lifelong bachelorhood--like George Haas's--certainly raises question about his sexuality.  That may also explain his feeling of being an outsider.]

Still, he did find a community of sorts.  At some point, he met up with George Haas and, through him, Clark Ashton Smith, and Smith's wife, Carol.  He also knew Anton LaVey, who would later found the Church of Satan.  (Through a church administrator, LaVey told Everts that he had known Johnson since 1947, when both were in the circus.  That's obviously wrong--but then LaVey is known to have fabricated parts of his past when it suits him.)  He seems to have been an important part of the 1956 Westercon--and that might help explain Johnson's recollections.

The San Francisco Bay Area--San Francisco and its suburbs, Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, maybe stretching the definition enough to include the Monterey Peninsula--was a hotbed for science fiction and fantasy writing in the years around World War II.  Perhaps, then, did find a community of writers, and then inflated their literary merit by combining them with Steinbeck and Saroyan in his memories.  (That's not to say some of the science fiction writers--including Anthony Boucher and Philip K. Dick were not excellent authors or, in Boucher's case, editors, but their fame is not that of Steinbeck's.)  Certainly, the pulp writer Garen Drussai has found recollections of Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith's wife also wrote warmly of him.  It's possible, given his background, he had some of the Southerner's charm.