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"Mirage or No Mirage":
Reading Los Angeles
Scott Saul
Writing
Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America, $40 (cloth)
8
Los Angeles easily defeats as many writers as it inspires—or
defeats them as it inspires them. Take the instructive case of
Arturo Bandini, the hero of John Fante’s proletarian novel
Ask the Dust (1939), a Depression-era chronicle of a writer
so down-and-out that he uses his suitcase strap as a belt for
his one pair of pants. Knowing that he has to produce a novel
in order to live, Bandini sits in his Bunker Hill hotel and clenches
up:
Arturo Bandini in front of
his typewriter two full days in succession . . . the longest siege
of hard and fast determination in his life, and not one line done,
only two words written over and over across the page, up and down,
the same words: palm tree, palm tree, palm tree, a battle to the
death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree won: see
it out there swaying in the blue air, creaking sweetly in the
blue air.
Bandini may be the most hardworking
and afflicted author who makes an appearance in Writing Los Angeles,
but his struggle is the anthology’s leitmotif: how do you write
about the Los Angeles dream without being seduced into thoughtlessness
by that dream—without letting it write you? While millions
have been transfixed by Los Angeles—by its light, its glitter,
its promise of mobility, its mix of hype and relaxation—Writing
Los Angeles is held together by the seductiveness of a city
that seems infinitely complex yet unified in its singularity. Generations
of writers, searching for the city’s principle of connection,
have landed on epithets that range from the ambivalently ironic
(James M. Cain’s “paradise,” Cedric Belfrage’s
“promised land,” D. J. Waldie’s “holy land”)
to the lyrically diagnostic (Aldous Huxley’s “city of
dreadful joy,” Umberto Eco’s “city of robots,”
Mike Davis’s “city of quartz,” Lynell George’s
“city of specters”) to the inventively celebratory (Reyner
Banham’s “autopia,” Jan Morris’s “know-how
city”). Every writer, it seems, is goaded to one-up the evocative,
almost garrulous poetry of the city’s full name, bestowed in
1781 by the governor of Spanish California: El Pueblo de Nuestra
Se<0x00F1>ora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porci<0x00FA>ncula, the
City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels.
Freewheeling and expansive, Writing
Los Angeles bears the subtitle “a literary anthology,”
which suggests its own principle of connection. Editor David Ulin
leans on the one hand toward writers with an established literary
cachet, many of whom either parachuted into Los Angeles on some
kind of reconnaissance assignment (Edmund Wilson, Simone de Beauvoir,
Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Umberto Eco) or were lured out by,
and often became disillusioned with, the Hollywood studio system
(William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Tennessee Williams). On the other
hand, Ulin has a strong attraction to the homegrown tradition of
L.A. debunkers, extending from the noir writer Raymond Chandler
and the Popular Front journalist Carey McWilliams to contemporary
authors such as Walter Mosley, Wanda Coleman, and Rubén Martínez,
whose work is grounded in the lives of the city’s less celebrated
residents. The back-and-forth between these two strands in the anthology
produces some good tension: the reader swings between the mindset
of the tourist and the mindset of the native informant, and the
judgments elaborated by one group are often punctured by the other,
so that by the end of the anthology one has been treated to a stimulating,
often lancing debate—debunkers, celebrants, and mediators in
a spirited century-long pile-on.1
As with all anthologies there are omissions
and stackings of the deck. One might quibble with the selections
near the end of the anthology, when Ulin had to cull ruthlessly
from the current literary scene: why no T. C. Boyle, no Karen Tei
Yamashita, no Octavia Butler, no Helena María Viramontes? As
a way to narrow his field, Ulin leans toward the genres of memoir
and realist fiction, scanting the more speculative and elliptical
fictions about the city. In addition, the anthology does not aspire
to represent fully how Los Angeles has been imagined in popular
fiction—a task that would mean excerpting such disturbing works
as The Turner Diaries (1978), a crypto-fascist and anti-Semitic
novel which revolves around the ethnic cleansing of Los Angeles
by Aryan Nation guerrilla warriors. (Timothy McVeigh read The
Turner Diaries, not against its grain, as a how-to manual.)
Inasmuch as Ulin’s authors have easily identifiable politics,
they tend to stake out a broad set of positions between the liberal
center and the left. Which is to say: they may challenge Los Angeles
for its devotion to artifice, its relentless celebration of youth,
its racially divisive politics, or its chokehold-given police, but
they give its cosmopolitanism and secularism a free pass. If L.A.’s
culture takes a beating in many of these writings, it is by implicit
comparison with megalopolises like Paris and New York rather than,
say, Topeka or Salt Lake City.
A productive way, then, to read the
selections in Writing Los Angeles is as a series of intellectual
sorties into some of the major cultural transformations of the last
century. As L.A. has risen from the capital of the film industry
to “the capital of the Third World,” in David Rieff’s
suggestive phrase, generation after generation of intellectuals
has seen in it the shape of the future and shadowboxed with it accordingly.
Parsing Writing Los Angeles as its own sort of labyrinth,
we might say that its contributors elaborate on four ways of looking
at Los Angeles—as a “city in a garden,” a God-given
but man-made Eden; as a city revved with the promise of mobility
and sexual adventure; as a city built on fantasy and simulation;
and as a city with a suppressed and noirish back story. The place
of spirituality in an age enamored of abundance, the status of mobility
in an opaquely stratified society, the role of fantasy in a commodity
culture, the disjunction between official memory and the full historical
record—these are the dilemmas that give the anthology its heft.
And, one might add, they are the dilemmas that give L.A. its unique
place in the American imagination, as a city that expresses—but
also is in thrall to—20th-century ideas of freedom.
I. City of Glow
When Gilded
Age author Charles Dudley Warner proposed that in Southern California
“nature seems to work with a man, and not against him,”
he condensed the early promise of the region, the way it seemed
to repeal Victorian assumptions about the virtues of struggle in
the development of character. Much of the region’s fate in
the past century derives from this prophecy of a new rapport between
the cultural and the elemental. Southern California would become
the breadbasket and fruit basket of the nation, sustained by a year-round
agricultural industry (and, as the boosters forgot to note, by poverty
wages in the fields). It would become a magnet for elderly Anglos
hoping to be “sun-kissed and made well,” in Louis Adamic’s
words, and for generations of immigrants looking for a steady job
and a place to settle. And it would become the birthplace of new
forms of spiritual-aesthetic convergence, from the barbershop pop
harmonies of the Beach Boys to the East-meets-West holism that found
many disciples in the Hollywood Hills. All these sorts of “California
dreaming” connected back to a very old dream: that the problem
of scarcity could be solved, and that individuals could be free
to devote themselves to self-fulfillment.
In this spirit, many of Ulin’s
authors bear down on the singularity of Los Angeles’s light—a
light which has been seen more generally as a supreme kind of blessing,
abundance made manifest in the color of the air. Lawrence Wechsler,
in his “L.A. Glows” (1995), surveys a broad spectrum of
opinion—astronomers, artists, cinematographers, sports announcers—as
if to solve the mystery of what, quite literally, is ineffable about
living in the city. A Cal Tech scientist, noting the number of significant
discoveries made by the telescopes at Southern California locales
such as Mount Wilson, Mount Palomar and the Griffith Observatory,
explains how the ocean-cooled air floats from the west over the
coastal plain, only to be trapped under the warmer flow coming from
the desert on the east—prompting a stasis in the atmosphere
that allows astronomers to view the stars without distortion. Environmental
engineers in L.A., meanwhile, have coined the term airlight
to describe the effect on the naked eye of pollutant particles,
which do not simply obstruct the light but also bounce it back with
a kind of ferocity. (L.A. residents will recall that smoggy days
are days of great glare too.) Putting together the intensity and
opacity of L.A.’s light, the poet Paul Vangelisti observes,
more metaphysically, that the city’s light “yields a simultaneous
sense of distance and of flatness: things seem very sharp up close
and far away, with nothing in between. And the uncanny result is
that you lose yourself—somehow not outwardly but, rather, inwardly.
Here the light draws you inward.”
The poet’s remark is borne out
by L.A.’s long history as a seedbed for new forms of religious
experience: the city was a cradle for Pentecostalism, Theosophy,
and sun-baked fundamentalism before it became home to Hare Krishna
and Zen. The beauty of the landscape has fostered the sorts of introspection
that center on the lure of rebirth—how to awaken from self-deception
and into enlightenment. More caustic observers have called this
drive for personal revelation “narcissism” or “airheadedness,”
but it’s interesting to note that some of the most severe critics
of L.A. spirituality reversed themselves after soaking in the city’s
atmosphere. The novelist Stewart Edward White, in his Rules of
the Game (1910), lumped together gurus with self-promoting teeth-pullers
as the great hucksters of Los Angeles, but later became an enthusiastic
proponent of spiritualism. The British transplant Aldous Huxley,
like H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, satirized L.A.’s prewar
faith healers for advertising, packaging, and selling salvation
in the manner of a Hollywood studio. But between the barbed Jesting
Pilate (1926) and the exploratory memoir The Doors of Perception
(1954), Huxley became one of Southern California’s most influential
and ecumenical spiritualists, retailing his own psychedelic experiments
to other enlightenment-seekers—most famously, perhaps, to Jim
Morrison of the L.A.–based The Doors, whose apocalyptic rock
bracketed the end of 1960s pop as much as the Beach Boys’ angelic
harmonies marked its beginnings.
Huxley’s fellow expatriate Christopher
Isherwood suggested a third way, something between enthusiasm and
debunking: a spirit of skeptical inquiry sustained even in the visionary
moment. In his brilliant pre–WWII diaries, in which he swings
between a fascination with the multinational cultural elite he knew
well (Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Thomas Mann) and a prickly disaffection
with the culture of Hollywood Boulevard, Isherwood is seduced most
by the power of the city’s landscape:
When the sun sets into a clear sea, with
a low bar of cloud along the horizon, its disk grows distorted,
bulging and flattening into a glowing pyramid of red coal, without
a top. Then, within half a minute it slides away under the edge
of the world, and suddenly the ocean seems enormous and cold,
teeming with wrinkled waves, unutterably wet.
Isherwood’s vision along the beach
manages to be at once scarifying and sensuous. The gift of the sunset
is no narcosis but a kind of hyperacuity: he experiences the sun
melting into oblivion, a palpable sense of being near the ends of
the earth, a wetness so extreme as to be sublime. Perhaps it shouldn’t
surprise us that Isherwood was simultaneously the most practical
and the most flamboyantly spiritual of the European exiles, one
who churned out savvy, genre-based scripts for Hollywood while pursuing
enlightenment under the guidance of his Vedanta teacher Swami Prabhavananda.
He was drawn to reconciling opposites, puncturing easy illusions
while searching for a form of enlightenment that would be impervious
to his own sharp irony.
Other
writers—usually those who settled in the city on a tentative
basis—have preferred mostly to puncture. The promise of an
“endless summer” has provoked ambivalent reflections from
writers like James M. Cain, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht,
and Norman Mailer, who have pointed out how unearned the blessing
of perpetual sunlight may be. Our sense of poetic justice may need
to be recalibrated, they note, when the most diabolical and hateful
people come disguised with perfectly tanned skin, gleaming smiles,
windswept hair, and the scent of success. This seems to be the ethical
point of, for instance, Faulkner’s “Golden Land”
(1935), the one short story he set in California. Its main character,
a real estate mogul, beats his son for being gay, frames his daughter
so that the tabloids report her involvement in Hollywood sex orgies,
holds his mother in what amounts to a state of house arrest—and
is rewarded with an easy conscience and the love of a woman who’s
the soul of wisdom and the very image of beauty. Faulkner ends with
a skeptical invocation of the pleasures of Los Angeles, which, unearned,
are also vacant: “the golden days unmarred by rain or weather,
the changeless monotonous beautiful days without end countless out
of the halcyon past and endless into the halcyon future.”
A less churlish note was struck by playwright
Tennessee Williams, who, like Faulkner, moved to L.A. to work as
an MGM screenwriter but could not accommodate the studio’s
demands. For the Santa Monica–based Williams, the weather of
Los Angeles was the city’s presiding deity, a “wonderful
rocking-horse” that
goes rocking over the acrobats and their slim-bodied
partners, over the young cadets at the school for flyers, over
the ocean that catches the blaze of the moment, over the pier
at Venice, over the roller coasters and over the vast beach-homes
of the world’s most successful kept women—not only over
those persons and paraphernalia, but over all that is shared in
the commonwealth of existence. . . . It has gone rocking over
accomplishments and defeats; it has covered it all and absorbed
the wounds with the pleasures and made no discrimination. For
nothing is quite so cavalier as this horse.
Williams’s final witticism—the
horse’s rider is supposed to be “cavalier,” not the
horse itself—points to one of the refrains of Writing Los
Angeles: the city’s simultaneous blessing of and blithe
indifference to its inhabitants. Here the “rocking-horse weather”
stands in for the supreme consciousness of the city. Are people
drawn to L.A. because they feel they can submit to this rocking
horse or because they feel they can take charge of it? Because they
lose themselves in the city or because they find themselves there?
In L.A. these sorts of existential questions are begged each time
you get in a car and take a drive.
II. The Cruising City
When Angelenos
talk about their freeways it is with the definite article—the
101, the 405, the 10—as if to recognize that
these numbered masses of concrete have higher powers and personalities
of their own. Los Angeles was the first American city to develop
a metropolitan freeway system, so its promise of modernity has always
been keyed to the idea of nearly miraculous freedom of movement—from
beach to mountains to desert in a matter of minutes. The British
critic Reyner Banham wrote, “The city will never be fully understood
by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture.
. . . So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who
taught themselves Italian to read Dante in the original, I learned
to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.” Banham
called Los Angeles “autopia,” but few contributors to
Writing Los Angeles have an unambivalent relationship to
its driving culture. Traveling through a region that, by one contemporary
estimate, contains 18 urban village cores and over 140 incorporated
cities, writers in L.A. have repeatedly experienced the loneliness
of the long-distance automobile. Joan Didion observed, “A good
part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through
streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the
place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous
unease.”
The brief against L.A.’s sprawl
is familiar. For Dorothy Parker, L.A. was “seventy-two suburbs
in search of a city”; for Gavin Lambert, it was “not a
city, but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes”;
for the more sympathetic Simone de Beauvoir, it was a “collection
of villages, residential neighborhoods, and encampments separated
by woods and parks.” In his short story “The Pedestrian”
(1953), Ray Bradbury imagined a future where walking the streets
was deemed illegal—and where the city dwellers were so submissive,
so conditioned by their “viewing screens” that the cool,
empty streets were patrolled by a single driverless police car.
Bradbury’s dystopian sense that pleasure in L.A. was routinized,
drained of its connection to the surprises of urban living, resonates
in the poetry of New York’s Charles Reznikoff, who spent three
years as a researcher for a Hollywood producer and brought to L.A.
his fondness for taking long walks. In “Autobiography: Hollywood,”
Reznikoff bid the city a weary farewell:
The cloudy afternoon is as pleasant
as silence. Who would think
one would ever have enough of sunshine?
A good epitaph, I suppose, would be
He liked the sunshine;
better still, He liked to walk.
And yet the dead, if it could speak, might say,
I had grown tired of walking,
yes, even of the sunshine.
Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture
of Four Ecologies (1971) took on the conventional bias
against the city’s sprawl, offering a striking riposte to the
anomie of observers like Bradbury and Reznikoff. Where they saw
Los Angeles as a depopulated polis—a commons turned over to
the thoughtlessness of four-wheeled machines—Banham appreciated
the sprawl as a new principle of connection, strangely egalitarian:
“The point about this huge city,” he wrote, “is that
all its parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts
at once.” The influence of Banham can be traced, in part, to
the way his view of the city’s architecture, his celebration
of its “symbolic assemblage,” articulated a postmodern
urbanism avant la lettre. While critics of Banham have rightly
pointed to the deep inequalities that divide neighborhoods from
each other, his point of view was that of the driver cruising along,
not the resident putting down roots. The Danish writer Cees Nooteboom
suggested along this line that “the essence of Los Angeles
lies in the fact that it hardly has a center. It is, if one can
say this, a fluid, a “moving” city, not only a city that
moves itself—breaks itself down, builds itself up again, displaces
and regroups itself—but also a city in which movement, freedom
of movement, is a strong premise of life.”
Yet what would it mean to make freedom
of movement into a premise of life? Jack Kerouac, who might have
been expected to delight in L.A., called it “the loneliest
and most brutal of American cities.” The great cruisers in
Writing Los Angeles—those who embody what Banham called
the “doctrine of ‘doing your own thing’”—tend
to fall into two camps: car enthusiasts like Light and Space artist
Robert Irwin and the customizers profiled by Tom Wolfe in The
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), and gay
artists like Tennessee Williams, John Rechy, and David Hockney,
who saw a more raucously festive city than the one captured in either
Hollywood’s A productions or its film noir. The pleasures of
cruising, judging from the anthology, seem largely reserved for
men: they include, for instance, drag racing in a city strip (Wolfe’s
car customizers), siphoning gas out of other parked cars (Robert
Irwin), and visiting the downtown headquarters of Physique Pictorial,
a magazine that recruited its pinups from the ranks of those recently
released from the city jail (Hockney). The tone of these selections
is iconoclastic and sprightly, although the buoyancy is often hedged
by the irony of camp, as in the Williams and Hockney excerpts,.
One partial exception to this buoyancy
is the memoir of Rechy, whose earlier work, City of Night (1963)
inspired Hockney to set off for Pershing Square on his very first
night in town. Rechy gives perhaps the most moving account in the
anthology of Los Angeles’s air of freedom. Waiting to view
a gay parade down Hollywood Boulevard on the occasion of the nation’s
bicentennial, he notes how the gay community “had fought dedicatedly
and sometimes bitterly for this royal street, and now it was more
symbolically ours than any other place in the world.” The parade
that follows is a carnival of misrule—queens and princesses
of drag balls alongside leather-clad motorcyclists—but its
sense of the absurd has an obviously provocative edge:
Defendants enmeshed in
the iron spiderweb of courts and idiotic laws—busted during
a notorious gay bathhouse raid—march along the street: a
woman chained to a man, each flanked and handcuffed to a gay man
in cop uniform—a chilling spectacle, a reminder to how many
spectators of their own arrests? Then the group pauses, and the
two gay men playing cops turn to each other and embrace lovingly,
and kiss. The roar of the real-cops’ motorcycles boomed like
shots, the drivers—faces drained . . .
Gay
men playing cops, set against real-life cops playing cops: we see
the power of simulation and the simulation of power, knit together
so tightly that the relation of the two becomes confused. This may
not have been Rechy’s intent, but he put his finger on the
possibilities and difficulties of speaking truth to power in Los
Angeles, where artifice has a reality all its own.
III. City of Simulation
L.A. novelist
Carolyn See has observed that “Los Angeles doesn’t make
raincoats and soup, it makes things like movies and bombs, which
are good and bad dreams. It’s the perfect place to write from.”
See’s remark has a considerable blind spot: the city does
produce some raincoats—and even more women’s sportswear—now
that its once-unionized auto, tire, and iron manufacturing plants
have been replaced by a sweatshop economy anchored in the low-wage
apparel industry; in 1991 L.A. passed New York as the center of
garment manufacturing in the United States. Still, there are many
voices in Writing Los Angeles that echo See’s sense
of Los Angeles as a city that specializes in the manufacture of
fantasy. Take the polymath historian William Irwin Thompson: “In
leading the world in the transition from industrial to post-industrial
society, California’s culture became the first to shift from
coal to oil, from steel to plastic, from hardware to software, from
materialism to mysticism, from reality to fantasy. California became
the first to discover that it was fantasy that led reality, not
the other way around.”
As Thompson and See underscore, fantasies
in Los Angeles are stoked by an economy oriented to specialize in
their production. The most longstanding, and perhaps easiest, criticism
of these fantasies is that they are unreal—mere flimflam or
tinsel, designed to distract, and so dupe, the purchaser of the
fantasy. Since its early days as a tourist town L.A. has been viewed
as a carnival of distractions, what Carey McWilliams called “a
great circus without a tent.” Novelist Stewart Edward White
saw, in the age before Hollywood, a public in thrall to L.A.’s
culture of publicity: his character Painless Porter speaks like
a descendant of P. T. Barnum, advertising his promise of pain-free
tooth-pulling with “I want you to go away and talk about me.
It don’t matter what you say, just so you say something. You
can call me quack, you may call me fakir, you may call me charlatan—but
be sure to call me SOMETHING!”
In L.A.’s carnival culture the hard sell works by winking at
itself. Flimflam is not mere deception but an invitation to be entertained
by deception.
Starting especially in the 1940s observers
of Los Angeles began viewing this self-conscious culture of the
hard sell in terms of commodification and depersonalization. The
various descendants of Painless Porter were representative figures
of a society in which everyone was on the make, peddling the insubstantial
fiction that was their self. L.A. was not a simple carnival culture,
then, but a brutal market economy tricked up as a carnival. Playwright
Bertolt Brecht, who escaped from Nazi Germany and landed at San
Pedro Harbor in July 1941, wrote in his journal that “custom
here requires that you try to ‘sell’ everything, from
a shrug of the shoulders to an idea, ie you have always to be on
the look-out for a customer, so you are constantly either a buyer
or a seller, you sell your piss, as it were, to the urinal.”
Brecht saw, behind the sun-drenched landscape of the Pacific Palisades,
the darkest of politics: his friend Isherwood made the telling observation
that he dressed “in loose grey clothes and felt slippers, like
a convict prepared for electrocution.”
Selling one’s piss to the urinal
was in some sense preferable to what Norman Mailer diagnosed as
the dehumanizing ethos of the city. Posted in L.A. to cover the
1960 Democratic Convention and drawn to the city’s show-business
aspects, he called it a “playground for mass men—one has
the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men.”
L.A., he wrote dismissively, was rooted in “the spirit of the
supermarket, that homogenous extension of stainless surfaces and
psychoanalyzed people, packaged commodities and ranch homes, interchangeable,
geographically unrecognizable.” Behind both Brecht and Mailer’s
antipathy to L.A. was a larger uneasiness with the shape of the
emerging service economy and a related discomfort with the idea
of the (tacitly male) writer as a mere salesman or crowd-pleaser.
Buying, selling, shopping, being psychoanalyzed: these were activities
unbefitting any intellectual with a sense of self-respect.
While writers like Brecht and Mailer
took a hard line against the shallowness of L.A. culture, many others
have seen this insubstantiality as part of a Faustian bargain: the
price paid for living in a culture where everyone is a star and
nature can be bent to the demands of fantasy. Early in the century,
the poet and film critic Vachel Lindsay replied to the “enemy
of California [who] says that the state is magnificent but thin,”
observing that “this apparent thinness California has in common
with the routine photoplay, which is at times as shallow in its
thought as the shadow it throws upon the screen. . . . It is thrillingly
possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual tradition
and depth together.” One might say that Lindsay’s prophecy
came true, but not as he had hoped. Films became more and more thickly
realized—with larger and larger budgets; with more devotion
to artifice that would recreate the “real” in painstaking
detail—but the depth was not “spiritual,” nor did
it reinforce the sort of “tradition” that Lindsay, emerging
out of Victorian America, took as a touchstone
of value. Instead of spiritual depth, films—and the L.A. landscape
in general—became devoted to the depth of illusion: entrepreneurs
like Walt Disney specialized in constructing rich fantasylands that
would be less burdened with ethical complexity than a flesh-and-blood
neighborhood and more predictable in the schedule of rewards that
they promised and delivered.
Umberto Eco was one of many cultural
critics who disembarked at Disneyland in the 1970s to get a fix
on the workings of this new America. Eco’s conclusion that
Disneyland was an “allegory of the consumer society” seems
like a truism now, but his discovery of the “hyperreal”
there—the novel way that the amusement park indulged in the
idea of the fake—remains fresh:
When there is a fake—hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea
serpent—it is not so much because it wouldn’t be possible
to have the real equivalent but because the public is meant to
admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program.
In this sense Disneyland not only produces illusion, but—in
confessing it—stimulates the desire for it: A real crocodile
can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding.
. . . Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality
than nature can.
Eco ended his essay by wondering whether
Disneyland was an exception in the broader pattern of American culture
or the rule. He did not foresee the developments of the past twenty
years—the “theme parking” of urban life, where whole
neighborhoods are organized as leisure worlds for a niche market;
the prevalence of reality TV and talk show’s, which scramble
the difference between public and private life in favor of a single,
media-saturated life—but with the idea of hyperreality, he
had a strong, premonitory sense of their allure.
If the pleasure of surfaces is a constant
theme in Writing Los Angeles, the undertow of the collection
suggests a harsher truth: the depth of pain that keeps the fantasy
machine in perpetual motion. The noir tradition in L.A. writing
proposes that spiritual dilemmas are not made irrelevant in a culture
of surfaces; rather, through a kind of existential blowback, they
are perceived with a renewed intensity. Joan Didion is probably
the most famous of L.A.’s native existentialists, having testified
for almost 40 years now, with preternatural lucidity and fearsome
coolness, to the city’s anomie. L.A. seems more self-aware
when refracted through Didion’s style—a style that is
properly ashamed, in its own way, of the city’s hunger for
quick fixes and sensual pleasures; a style actively working to shed
its illusions and acknowledge the distance that separates even those
people who share a common dream. Writing Los Angeles links
Didion, the voice of disconnection, to her literary forbears in
noir such as Raymond Chandler, to cohorts such as John Gregory Dunne
and screenwriter Robert Towne, and to her descendants among
current essayists, such as the lapidary Lynell George and the deadpan
D. J. Waldie.
Perhaps the most unexpected relative
of Didion in Writing Los Angeles is the French-born Simone
de Beauvoir, who delighted in the warm reception she was given by
her L.A. friends but also perceived the city’s haunting sadness.
Looking down on the city lights “glitter[ing] as far as the
eye can see,” the “big glowworms slither[ing] noiselessly”
between “red, green, and white clusters,” she offered
a doleful appreciation of the spectacle:
Now I am not taken in by the mirage:
I know that these are merely street lamps along the avenues, neon
signs, and headlights. But mirage or no mirage, the lights keep
glittering; they, too, are a truth. And perhaps they are even
more moving when they express nothing but the naked presence of
men. Men live here, and so the earth revolves in the quiet of
the night with this shining wound in its side.
Beauvoir’s final lines suggested,
against the equation of glamour and power that dominates L.A.’s
media culture, that it was sheer doggedness—the doggedness
of the unrecognized—that made the world go round. Behind the
spectacle, giving it its life, were the specters.
IV. City of Specters
Here’s
a telling vignette from near the end of Writing Los Angeles:
Lynell George is talking with her friend Moss, a formerly active
artist living among the converted warehouses just east of Little
Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. A decade earlier Moss had specialized
in massive, ceiling-to-floor sculptures welded together out of the
city’s debris—iron, steel, hubcaps, wire hangers. Then
his neighborhood turned ugly: a talk show host who lived nearby
was bludgeoned to death in his sleep; residents stopped walking
the streets after nightfall. Moss’s best friend, Aaron, feeling
stifled, did take a late-night walk to Venice Beach and was found
dead the next day behind a dumpster near the boardwalk—murdered,
apparently, for $20, a wristwatch, and a pair of glittered shoestrings.
Now Moss no longer sculpts, and he has taken leave from his old
life. “If you drop out of sight in L.A.,” he observes,
“people don’t always assume you’re dead, I’ve
learned. Rather they assume you’ve only moved out of carphone
service distance. Or that you’re busy. . . . thus happy and
healthy.”
The optimism of L.A. is often a form
of ruthlessness, a willed disregard for any story that has no happy
ending in sight. Unsurprisingly, certain areas in L.A. and the people
who live in them have borne the brunt of the city’s habit of
forgetfulness. The writers in the first two-thirds of Writing
Los Angeles, most of whom did not adopt L.A. as their own, tend
to remain on the glitter-and-sand axis that runs from Hollywood
through Beverly Hills to Santa Monica and Venice. The San Fernando
and San Gabriel valleys, the large central-city area extending from
downtown to Watts, the concentrated sprawl around East Los Angeles—these
areas do not figure in these selections, so off-limits as to be
unrecognized. In the last 30 years, however, Los Angeles has done
a better job at nourishing its own homegrown literary culture, and
the anthology’s selections fan out expansively at the end while
looking backward to the stories untold in the anthology’s earlier
pages. Mary Helen Ponce, for instance, remembers growing up Latina
in the San Fernando Valley, watching “El Roy Rogers” movies
in her local church hall and mistranslating them to her puzzled
and myopic aunt. Likewise, poet Garrett Hongo recalls an ill-fated
romance with his white classmate Regina in the South Central community
of Gardena. Hongo’s memoir illuminates the tribalism that structured
even the integrated communities of postwar Los Angeles: though he
and Regina avoided the all-white and the all-Japanese dances, romancing
each other at Chicano dancing parties in El Monte, the relationship
came to an abrupt end when Regina had her arm broken by a white
football player and Hongo had his face ground into a bed of gravel
by a group of Japanese boys.
Interestingly, although the genre of
noir allowed in the 1930s and 1940s for some of the most
scathing indictments of L.A.’s gilded beauty, many of these
recent memoirs—narrated from the point of view of those who
don’t fit the city’s self-image—refuse the older
hard-boiled attitude and strike a complicated ethical balance. On
the one hand, they tend to recognize, as Lynell George has written,
that “profound emptiness and a gray despair are both cradled
snugly within this vast lap of luxury.” Walter Mosley’s
Easy Rawlins says, typically, “People told stories of how you
could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire
one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t
like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every
day you still found yourself on the bottom.” The critic Mike
Davis, in particular, has mastered a no-holds-barred form of social
analysis that tracks the widening gap between rich and poor in the
city, while laying waste to the claims made by its captains of capital.
On the other hand, the most recent
generation of L.A. writers is less given to sweeping pronouncements
about the city and more sympathetic to those people—graffiti
artists, migrant laborers, failed mini-mall entrepreneurs, homicide
detectives—who live in the space between the city’s dreamwork
and its bottom line. The keynote of these more recent pieces is
one of a slightly confounded perseverance. They tend to hang on
moments of transitional self-knowledge—as when Bernard Cooper,
in his memoir of his childhood, comes to an awareness of sexual
possibility after bumping into two transvestites on Hollywood Boulevard.
Cooper’s immediate response is to feel like “everything
I had taken for granted up to that moment—the curve of the
earth, the heat of the sun, the reliability of my own eyes—had
been squeezed out of me.” But there is a sense of freedom,
too, in Cooper’s discovery of a sexual world beyond the conventional
wisdom of the nuclear family. Likewise Pico Iyer, who spends a week
soaking up the culture of LAX, writes of living “in an odd
kind of twilight zone of consciousness, that weightless limbo of
a world in which people are between lives and between selves, almost
sleepwalking, not really sure of who or where they are.”
This half-troubled, half-awake sense
of freedom is not quite what Los Angeles is known for: the mythologies
of the “golden land” tend to celebrate relaxation rather
than self-questioning, the blessing given rather than the blessing
earned. Yet Writing Los Angeles suggests that the contemporary
struggles of the city are pushing it toward a new literature, one
that builds on the debunking tradition while remaining committed
to the idea of the city’s promise as a community, however difficult
that promise may be to sustain in the polyglot and politically fragmented
metropolis that Los Angeles has become. There are many dreams of
community in the last 200 pages of the anthology, and while they
are not often the same dream, the selections generally share the
modest hope that the specters, once given a voice, will no longer
be mistaken for the dispossessed or unrooted. We can listen, for
instance, to the bristling poetry of Wanda Coleman, and hear someone
talking back to the city, holding it to account for the dreams it
inspires:
something keeps telling me to quit call
it splitsville baby ooohhh baby boogaloo down Broadway cuz
nobody signals their intentions anymore and the stare down is
as ugly in the 80s as it was in the 50s but i can’t give
it up or give up on it it’s my birthplace it’s my pride
my price having paid my dues forevah paying dues hopin’
to collect what’s due me
my wings <
Scott Saul, assistant professor
of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is author
of
Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties.
Note
1
Here Writing Los Angeles stands alongside several relatively
recent and worthy efforts to anthologize the city. For a strong
compendium of contemporary nonfiction about L.A. see David Reid,
ed., Sex, Death and God in L.A. (University of California
Press, 1994). For a panoramic appraisal of the city’s urban
development, with particular focus on its social and economic
disparities, see Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The
City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth
Century (University of California Press, 1996). And for a
selection of contemporary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from
authors, many lesser-known, who claim L.A. as their home, see
Ulin’s other edited collection, Another City: Writing
from Los Angeles (City Lights, 2001).
Originally published in the December
2003/January 2004 issue of Boston Review
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