70
PARTISAN REVIEW
the City of Our Lady, Queen of Angels.
In
August, 1993, what is in–
tended by smiles in L.A.? How rob what is already emptied of substance?
Is she one more L.A. whore dying of AIDS or a down-on-her-Iuck
Aztec princess? The eyes of a dancer before dying? Or a counterfoil to
this teenager's liquid pools? These dying generations in their need are the
true degradation of the democratic dogma. The scene might be unrec–
ognizable to Brooks and Henry Adams, aristocrats of their own imagi–
nations mired in an eighteenth-century Massachusetts that never existed,
yet no state has given more to that dogma than California has. Two
states, the voice on NPR admonishes. North and South. Two, three, a
hundred.
It
doesn't matter. All of California shares in my imagination of
the place. East, North, South - palm tree or giant redwood, cactus or
Douglas fir, mountain or desert or ocean, they blend into the unfinished
map in my heart.
Twain, Steinbeck, London, Bierce, Stegner, ponderous Frank Norris
- the sentences of California writers stab at the open air with a vigor
denying that mere language can bring grace to American life. Then why
is it that writers never seem fully formed here, as if words were the
stepchildren of circumstance? California never did much for literary style.
Henry Miller could have lived in Big Sur another forty years and he
would still be a New York-Paris writer.
In
California but never really of
it, his style molded by streets in which space is a question mark.
The sentences of California writers pose like bodybuilders at Muscle
Beach or Hollywood actors melding into age as if prepped by central
casting. California writers begin in the open air, a truth evident to
Edmund Wilson as he took himself from a decade-long immersion in
Marxism to the West Coast more than fifty years ago.
To The Finland
Station
finished, Wilson took the measure of
The Boys in the Back Room.
What had they paid for all that fog and sun?
"All visitors from the East know the strange spell of unreality which
seems to make human experience on the Coast as hollow as the life of a
troll-nest where everything is out in the open instead of being under–
ground." But is it "the strange spell of unreality" one feels in San
Francisco or L.A.? I feel that in the Harlem I taught in for thirty-one
years, as I felt it on a gloriously clear mid-October day in 1978, driving
through a nineteenth-century New England mill town converted into
warehouse malls housing boutiques that sold cultural bric-a-brac, iron
and oak school desks with glass inkwells for people who no longer need
pen or ink. It's Easterners who insist on fantasy. Disneyland was made for
us, not for California's "strange spell of unreality."
What I feel in California are the swell of prospects I am told have
