Lionel Rolfe Literary L.A., Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1981. 102 pp.
Preface:
"No one has yet precisely pinpointed the literary tradition of Los Angeles; but then, L.A. itself is a hard place to pinpoint. Perhaps this is because L.A. became a major city of the world without having had a history that went back for centuries . . . The transitory aspects of the contemporary human condition have been institutionalized in Los Angeles . . .
". . . the modern condition is rootlessness . . . Even without Hollywood, L.A. might have fostered a literature of the brief encounter, the momentary assignation that sometimes ends up in seduction . . . Los Angeles has turned that [rootlessness] into a kind of powerful adaptive mechanism. Ebb and flow, a non-homogeneous collection of human types piled decades high upon the magnificient California landscape had to produce something distinctive . . ." p. ix
1. Just Passing Through: The Ghosts of Twain, Dreiser, Steinbeck, Miller, Kerouac and Others
2. Down and Out at the Brown Derby with Malcolm Lowry
3. The Day of the Locust: The Greatest Hollywood Novel of Them All.
". . .
". . . [Nathanael] West . . . was a hotel manager and night clerk himself, in New York before he got his first job in a Hollywood studio. He came to Hollywood in 1933 for a job writing scripts, on the strength of his sale of Miss Lonelyhearts to Twentieth Century-Fox for four thousand dollars, even though the novel itself had sold poorly. He stayed only a few months.
"It was when West returned to Hollywood from the East Coast in 1935 that he moved into the Parva-Sed Apta . . . [unlike] his good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . in The Last Tycoon, West was writing about the lower depths, the sea of hopefuls from which the chosen few emerge. Unlike so many writers who came to Hollywood, West was rather good at separating his life's work, writing novels, from his hack work, which was grinding out scenarios, mostly for "B" movies.
"Hundreds of novels have been published about Hollywood . . . one must include [among the good] Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Raymond Chandler's works, The Last Tycoon, and perhaps even Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? . . . many critics contend that the elusive essence of Hollywood was best captured in West's novel.
". . .
"To some . . . it is a book about a Hollywood that no longer exists . . . "there was still a lot of hope as well as innocence" . . . the Hollywood population has gained a substratum that has no aspirations to glamour. The glamour is gone.
". . .
". . . there was a Depression on. Hollywood was a boom town when West first arrived, almost in the manner of San Francisco during the Gold Rush. The early thirties were especially good for writers, because talkies were still coming in, and there was a big need for scripts. Films were becoming a major industry in the country during the Depression-one of the nation's top ten industries . . . And it was an industry centered in Los Angeles.
"West had come from an affluent family that was wiped out financially by the Depression. West's sister Laura, however, had married his old college chum S.J. Perelman. Perelman became not only West's lifelong admirer but also his patron . . .
". . .
". . . West was something of an artist himself . . . had been an art student . . .
". . . he loved to cruise Hollywood Boulevard, and was a perennial fixture in front of Musso & Frank's Grill . . . [along with] . . . writers . . . next door to Stanley Rose's bookstore . . . Among them were John O'Hara, Erskine Caldwell, William Saroyan, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dashiell Hammett.
"In 1936 . . . West sought sleaze. In pursuit of the underworld, he became . . . a fixture in the pressrooms downtown. He got to know police-beat reporters and went out on calls with them. He was particularly intrigued by domestic murders, which were usually over money. He enjoyed Filipino dance halls, and he was an inveterate cockfight attender . . . in Wilmington . . .
"Another Los Angeles phenomenon West found fascinating . . . was Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's temple (officially called the Angelus Temple, which still overlooks Echo Park Lake . . . which houses the nation's biggest lotus collection . . . a gift from the mystic East, given by Sister McPherson in the twenties . . .
"In a very basic sense, West was out of step with his age . . . Like so many during the Depression, West was a communist sympathizer and even a political activist. He went on to become one of the founders, for instance, of the Screenwriter's Guild. But many of his leftist friends were uncomfortable with his unrelieved pessimism . . . West wanted The Day of the Locust to be a Marxist morality play. He wanted to say that proletarian politics offered hope. But . . . ultimately he was saying, "Nothing redeems, and there's no promise of redemption.". . .
"It is clear that West could almost certainly be counted as the first Jewish writer in America to achieve . . . the ranks of the nation's great writers, even if Nathan Weinstein did change his name to the oh-so-English-sounding Nathanael West . . .
". . .
". . . In April of 1939, West sent Fitzgerald galleys of The Day of the Locust, tellling him how difficult it had been to write in between "working on westerns and cops and robbers". . .
". . . he was becoming far less pessimistic because of his marriage in 1939 to Eileen McKenney, the "Eileen" of the popular book, My Sister Eileen written by her sister Ruth.
Eileen and West were killed in an automobile accident in El Centro on December 22, 1940.
4. Thomas Mann: Faustus in the Palisades
". . . [1950s] . . .
"My mother, Yaltah Menuhin, is a pianist, and she and Michael [Mann, son of Thomas Mann] had toured throughout Europe . . .
". . .
"Thomas Mann [and his wife, Katia, mother of Michael Mann] was the most famous of the many famous refugees from Hitler's Germany who sought out the untroubled blue skies over Los Angeles, so far away from the Holocaust in Europe . . . Many of the greatest personalities, as well as egos, had come to L.A. to escape Hitler. Some were Jews, of course, but many, like Mann and Stravinsky, were not. Some were quite left-wing; others were conservative . . . Yet they clung together . . .
". . . [Menuhin lived on Pelham Avenue]
". . . in the Pacific Palisades . . . Mann lived at 1550 San Remo Drive.
". . . Arnold Schoenberg [and his wife, Gertrud] . . . in Brentwood, at 116 N. Rockingham.
[A system for composing music is considered as unnatural.]
"It is surely not coincidence that in 1908 Schoenberg wrote some music for poems by Stefan George for voice and piano. Schoenberg regarded this work as his great "breakthrough"-melody and harmony almost completely drowned out by atonality-and he believed that he had finally succeeded in his . . . claim of emancipating dissonance with his work . . .
"Like Schoenberg . . . George was a dedicated member of the so-called avant-garde, which was always searching for a "higher order" . . .
". . .
". . . Alma Mahler-Werfel, who had once been married to the composer Gustav Mahler . . . then remarried Franz Werfel, author of The Song of Bernadette . . . is said to have pointed out the parallels to Arnold Schoenberg's music and career, in Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, to Arnold Schoenberg himself.
Schoenberg . . . blamed musicologist and philosopher, Theodor Wisengrund-Adorno . . . who Mann had consulted . . .
". . . Mann was sixty-six when he came to Los Angeles in 1941 . . .
5. Aldous Huxley's Strange Passage to the West
Part of the post-Huxley story involves Captain Beefheart . . .
6. Jack London May Have Slept Here
7. The Lost L.A. Years of Robinson Jeffers
"The other day I ran into John Harris, proprietor of Papa Bach Bookstore, the distinguished West Los Angeles emporium of the printed world. Harris is also a poet and a publisher, the closest thing Los Angeles has to a literary Renaissance man.
". . .
"One of [Robert J.] Brophy's friends and fellow researchers for the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter is Robert Kafka. He is a self-described Jeffers fanatic who had retraced much of Jeffer's life in Los Angeles . . . Kafka knows, for instance, by first-hand research, the various bars Jeffers went drinking in, and has even uncovered the fact that Jeffers was involved in-though did not cause-a bloody barroom brawl in a place called The Ship's Cafe, which was built in the shape of a ship on the old Venice pier . . ."
8. In Search of Upton Sinclair
The Jungle, 1906
Dragon's Teeth, Pulitzer Prize
"[Upton] Sinclair came to Coronado, on San Diego Bay, in 1915, and settled in Pasadena in 1916, a decade after The Jungle had made him a national celebrity. His exposé of the meat-packing industry . . . .
". . . By 1908 . . . George Sterling . . . was coaxing Sinclair to come west. So was another socialist, millionaire H. Gaylord Wilshire, after whom Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard was named . . . Wilshire had a gold mine in the Sierras, with two unusual . . . features: high wages and socialist propaganda . . .
". . .
". . . EPIC [1930s] . . . won [Sinclair] the Democratic nomination, and he lost to the Republicans with forty-five percent of the vote only after one of the most vicious political smear campaigns ever launched . . . Sinclair's candidacy forced a realignment of the two major political parties . . . [leading to] later Democratic officeholders as U.S. Senator Sheridan Downey, Governor Culbert Olson, Congressman Jerry Voorhis and Los Angeles County Supervisor John Anson Ford.
". . . [In 1916] Sinclair moved to Pasadena because he liked to play tennis and once ranked seventh in Pasadena.
". . .
". . . Sinclair discovered socialism in Wilshire's Magazine, which was published by H. Gaylord Wilshire . . . in 1902 which he discovered in a New York editor's office . . . he had a knack for writing pulp fiction . . . .
". . .
"He was a health-food nut . . . both he and Wilshire fell prey to a San Francisco homeopathic physician named Abrams . . . .
"[In Pasadena] He used to go walking with Henry Ford in the San Gabriel Mountains behind Pasadena; they would discuss politics and economics . . . [Sinclair] asked King Gillette, the socialist razor [magnate] to argue with the flivver [ merchandizer]. Gillette was no more successful than Sinclair . . .
". . .
". . . in 1923, Sinclair was jailed in San Pedro during a "Wobbly" strike. He was arrested while speaking to seven hundred strikers. He stood on private property, and he had written permission from the owner to be there. He was reading the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment to the Constitution. He was held incommunicado overnight-and out of the incident came the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. . . .
". . .
"Politics was ultimately to direct Sinclair's efforts away from the studios. The Depression was deepening. Sinclair had already taken out his typewriter and knocked off a couple of books telling what he would do about the country's financial problems- I, Candidate for Governor and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. They were novels, but among the people they impressed was a contingent of Democrats in Santa Monica, including the owner of one of that town's biggest hotels. They liked his ideas about what to do, and kept urging him to run for governor as a Democrat, not a Socialist.
" . . .
"Thus it was out of a book, a book that was really only fiction, that Sinclair's EPIC movement-End Poverty in California-was born. The EPIC plan became a giant grassroots movement such as California has not seen since. There were EPIC clubs, EPIC theaters and an EPIC newspaper, which had a daily circulation of two million at one point in Sinclair's campaign.
". . ."
9. Can Bohemia Thrive Here Once Again?
". . ."
Lionel Rolfe, The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey