a berlin blog
|
a berlin blog |
|
|
Monday, March 08, 2004 O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and DickensGarrison Frost at The Aesthetic has a witty thing about L.A.'s South Bay as a literary setting. He lives in Hermosa Beach, I think.He writes: "Sure, Leonard Wibberley raised a family here, Thomas Pynchon ate burritos in our crappiest Mexican restaurants and Charles Bukowski read aloud at local bars, but this isn't generally the kind of place that inspires great writers to pen masterpieces." True, true. Masterpieces are hard to come by. Frost imagines what Hemingway or Kafka or Jane Austen would have made of surfers and Gallerias and decaf mochas. Amusing. But here's the thing: A California surf town makes an ideal setting because it's not literary. If a beach-suburb novel doesn't sound like a "real" novel, that's the reason to write one. Paris, New York, and Prague have been covered. Frost was having fun, but I meet his attitude whenever I fly home. ("You wrote a novel set here? Why?") The idea is that L.A. suburbs are too gauche or mundane. Postwar Westchester County was also too mundane for words until Cheever painted its people and yards in The New Yorker. The opening to "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" reads like a direct challenge: I would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming, "O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcaps?" As I say, I wouldn't want to begin a day like this, but I often wonder what the dead would have done. But the shelter is as much a part of my landscape as the beech and horse-chestnut trees that grow on the ridge. Mundane Southern California isn't unknown to legendary authors, anyway. You can answer the jokey Frost list with a real one. Listen to Tennessee Williams, in a story called "The Mattress by the Tomato Patch": This resurrected day is a Saturday and all afternoon pairs of young lovers have wandered the streets of Santa Monica, searching for rooms to make love in. Each uniformed boy holds a small zipper bag and the sun-pinked-or-gilded arm of a pretty girl, and they seem to be moving in pools of translucent water. The girl waits at the foot of steps which the boy bounds up, at first eagerly, then anxiously, then with desperation, for Santa Monica is literally flooded with licensed and unlicensed couples in this summer of 1943. Faulkner, in "Golden Land": His mother lived in Glendale; it was the house which he had taken when he married and later bought, in which his son and daughter had been born -- a bungalow in a cul-de-sac of pepper trees and flowering shrubs and vines which the Japanese tended, backed into a barren foothill combed and curried into a cypress-and-marble cemetery dramatic as a stage set and topped by an electric sign in red bulbs which, in the San Fernando valley fog, glared in broad sourceless ruby as though just beyond the crest lay not heaven but hell. Tobias Wolff, in his Vietnam memoir, In Pharoah's Army: I got to Manhattan Beach just after sundown and surprised my father once again. He was in his bathrobe, about to pop some frozen horror into the oven. I told him to keep it on ice and let me stand him to dinner at the restaurant where we'd eaten the year before. He said he wasn't feeling exactly jake, thought he might be coming down with something, but after we had a few drinks he let himself be persuaded of the tonic potential of a night on the town. A poet never has to like a place in order to write it well. Derek Walcott, in "Summer Elegies": Nothing hurts as much as the word "California," the wincing light of Los Angeles. In unfinished Venice a fresco interrupted in its prophecy looks phonier than what it promised: gondolas, palazzos, its own Bridge of Sighs. It fades under its graffiti, a transferred paradise. Southern California may reject its poets, loathe its artists, infuse its own people with dreariness and self-mockery, and repel any sensitive, right-thinking person who cultivates even a crumb of good taste. But then good taste is the enemy of art; and no place on earth is unworthy of its own literature. The mistake is looking for dead forms among the surf shops and Slushee machines. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:41 PM | |
|
|
 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
