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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
Thomas R. Edwards
When I lived in Southern California some years ago I
resented the apparent assumption of Eastern friends that I was somehow
to be pitied. It didn't
feel
like nowhere, and it seemed an enviable
existence when I (rather too frequently) imagined a me who had stayed
behind and missed it all. I soon learned to recognize this as the incipient
stages of a cultural paranoia that possesses all Californians - the convic–
tion that one's occupations and comforts, however respectable and finely
achieved, are being scrutinized and coolly dismissed by invisible enemies
(all remarkably like Henry James) who, though they've never been
west of Albany, sit in maddeningly irrefutable judgment over lives Out
There. Californians might go to Europe twice a year, they might develop
magisterial tastes in wine or literature and painting, or cultivate the
humble salad into a high and complex art, they might achieve a domestic
style that was externally as pleasant as any in the world - and yet they
would know that they were really funny and pathetic just the same. The
history of Populism in politics and of radical modernisms in the arts draws
extensively on this mood; from Hiram Johnson and Upton Sinclair to
Reagan and Savio, from Jack London and Gertrude Stein to Jackson
Pollock and the Beats, the West has been imagining roles for itself that
can resist transformation into Christopher Newman or Barry Goldwater,
those fictional embodiments of Western moral energy and responsiveness
to life entrapped and humiliated by Eastern sophistication.
When after eight years of this I went back East, the extent of my
delusion came as some surprise. People were anything but contemptuous
of the West, California was an object of interest and concern if not of
pure enthusiasm. Everyone had been there or was going or hoped to go
if someone would pay the fare, and finding myself occasionally mistaken
for a kind of expert, I could only sustain my dignity by inventing
skepticisms I hadn't really felt before. "Oh yes, we
liked
it - you know,
the sun and all that - but there really wasn't much Going On and now
that we're
back.
..."
(Such betrayal has its own parallels in politics and
the arts.) Now, in California again for a long but temporary visit, I
wonder what line I can take this time.
The San Francisco Bay area is of course quite different in touch
