Wisdom for Our times

The late and still lamented Joseph Campbell has written voluminously about myth, archetype, and the means by which it is possible to detect the DNA of a culture in its stories. Perhaps his most lavish gift to writers is his Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he tracked the orbits of heroes from numerous times and cultures, giving us a cross-cultural and cyclic pattern called The Hero's Journey. "Down these mean streets a man must go," mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the private detective hero. In his own writing, Joseph Campbell has said, "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Campbell was a devoted fan of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which reading may have helped Campbell formulate his articulate cycle of behavior, which appears in five stages:

A call to adventure
A road of trials
Achieving the goal or "boon"
A return to the ordinary world
Applying the boon.

The good Dr. Kubler-Ross had a five-step program of her own which, although not intended to help writers, is nevertheless of value. Hers are the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

With these patterns in mind, it becomes easier to cast a set of characters forth on a voyage or venture that will cause many of us who read narrative tales of any sort to take them up, internalize them, make them a part of our own individual sense of diagnosing the cultural wars about us, allowing us to feel deeply about issues and conflicts at some remove from our own culture. We have, for instance, no real cultural connect with Antigone, who is all set to marry King Creon's son and be welcomed into the family, even though Creon had chosen a cultural payment of a serious sort against Antigone's brothers. Antigone's persisting in the burial of her brothers is the crux of the matter. The social and cultural forces behind Creon's wish to have the brothers remain unburied do not touch us on any but an intellectual level; Antigone's persistence in the growing threat of her own death make us care.

We of the early years of the twenty-first century live at a time, I argue, where another mythic observation holds great sway and is a ruling force in what a writer of these days writes about. To be sure, Joseph Campbell's observations are insightful, valid, exciting. To be sure, Raymond Chandler's template for the private detective, articulated in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder, is no less apt now than when written. Dr. Kubler-Ross' observations about the human acceptance of grief holds as a valid observation, dramatically satisfying in its own arc of logic.

But these are the times when and where yet another observation, a classification in its own right, holds sway, speaks to our time in plangent tones The Emperor has no clothes.

Icons

An icon is an important, often enduring image, a definition that can be extended to include persons, places, things, as in nouns. While perhaps not appropriate to mix the genres of icons (lest you appear to be unintentionally demeaning the greater at the expense of the weaker) it is fun to take a personal inventory of one's own icons (Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, John Coltrane, Kansas City barbecue, South Carolina barbecue, Bill Evans, Lorez Hart).

I did not consider windows as icons until late in life, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, at which point I came upon the word defenestration, which began as so many things do with a political/religious vector. The word means "throwing or thrown out a widow." Having learned of that word, I have subsequently defenestrated razors, mushy peaches, a cell phone, and an manual Underwood upright typewriter. Hearing about defenestrations and indulging my own gave me a new respect for the window as a portal, not the portal some writers of fantasy employ to gain access to another world or time dimension, but rather a portal to the imagination.

One of my literary icons, Raymond Chandler, extended the concept of window for me in an observation that has often been misquoted or misinterpreted. Chandler did not suffer simple plots lightly. Writing about his specialty, the murder mystery, he inveighed against the plot-driven notion of getting out of a boring patch of writing by having some new character burst through the window, waving a gun.

As a fledgling mystery writer, I was entranced by the notion, Chandler's admonitions to the contrary notwithstanding, and so many of my early attempts had such duplicitous activity, adding yet another layer of respect to my growing admiration of the window.

Some years later, my connections with a massmarket publishing house led me to be in an editorial meeting when the sales manager announced the results of an experiment conducted on the covers of various Gothic and romance novels. Same book, same author, same moody background, same building featured in the foreground. But in each case, half the edition had a window that was either open or rendered with light emanating from it; the other half of the edition showed the same window either closed or with no backlighting. His moustache twitching,the sales manager went on to report that the copies with the open widow or the backlit window outsold the closed or unlit window by a factor of three to one.

Years down the river, I recall the sense that I had learned something about literature, readers, and the human psyche that trumped all my undergraduate years in the English Department at UCLA. I could not have told you what precisely it was that I learned as I took this information in. I still may not be able to impart the iconic sense of importance the awareness gave me.

Thus, when I looked up this morning and saw this image before me, this open window, I was once again transformed and transported, simultaneously recalling all the personal background and attachment I bring to the icon of the open window and adding the sense of curiosity I bring as well. Who lives or waits or works or lurks just beyond that open window?

As it happens, I know.

Beyond that window is a splendid office belonging to a sincere, devoted, and talented writer. The fact that I know the writer, have indeed edited his forthcoming novel, and have been a guest in this remarkable George Washington Smith house cuts no ice. The imagination rules with a service faster and surer than Roger Feder; the imagination trumps reality.

The open window is my icon for successful fiction. The open window makes you suspend what you know to be so and what you believe to be so, then gets you to use your frequent-flyer miles to transport yourself to another place, where another, more compelling set of realities obtain.

Food for Thought

With a full twelve-week summer session underway at the university and the hectic intensity of the week-long Santa Barbara Writers' Conference looming, I had no taste for a quickie six-week summer lit course at the Adult Ed. But they made me an offer I could not refuse: flaky, buttery raisin scones from Marcia, who runs the coffee shop, and the freedom to chose whatever author I chose so long as he or she was out of the standard canon that could be had anywhere else (by which they probably mean the lit course my buddy Steve Cook is teaching at City College).

Yes to the raisin scones, and yes to John Fante, who, along with the late, lamented John Sanford, rank first on the list of America's best under recognized fiction and nonfiction writers.

Both were loveable curmudgeons, but since I knew Sanford and had never met Fante, I'll award Sanford the head curmudgeon prize and get to him in another post.

John Fante was the quintessential Los Angeles writer of the late 1930s and '40s. Reading him was like being a kid and having a doctor plug his stethoscope into your ears, then letting you hear your heart and inner organs. His turf was the area just northwest of downtown called Bunker Hill, a gritty amalgam of Queen Anne houses with wide yards, tiny neighborhood groceries, and news stands where the papers of William Randolph Hearst competed with the LosAngeles Times, then owned by the wannabe royalty Chandler family. The hill had a steep angle, necessitating a small railway, the Angel's Flight, at a nickel a pop to get you up or down on the hill. Bunker Hill began to mold, its dark roots starting to show in the early 1920's when the affluent began to move west toward Brentwood, Bel-Air, and that upstart real estate venture, Beverly Hills.

Fante caught Bunker Hill as she put on weight, her paint peeler, and her high-heels grew wobbly. The Angel's Flight, great fun for a kid, began to have arthritic shudders and lurches. It was the part of town you lived in if you were getting by while waiting for the next miracle. You could shop at the Grand Central Market and actually catch a decent meal at Clifton's Cafeteria on south Broadway at a reasonable price. Fante's characters ate there, walked the hill instead of spending the five cents on the Angel's Flight, and probably got two meals out of a French-dip sandwich from Fillipe's, down by the Union Station. The only contretemps on the Bunker Hill of those days would be if a Helms Bakery truck entered the same street as a Good Humor ice cream truck.

Raymond Chandler put LA on the map, no question about it, but Fante told us what the map was, and so when I spoke of him and my first experience with one of his early short stories, "Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me," a sad tale about a young Filipino kid who falls big time for a dime-a-dance girl, the expression on the students' faces began to grow soft with the bittersweet of nostalgia, and by the time I got to his novels, Ask the Dust, and Wait until Spring, Bandini, the mood was so thick, you could serve it with the mystery sauce from Clifton's.

A goodly number of LA people--me included--have migrated to Santa Barbara, and like emigrants anywhere, they bring along in the fannypacks of their experience the poignant symbols of the old life.

Much of the old life is gone--one of the reasons we move on. Because of its extraordinary view, Bunker Hill has undergone a real estate renaissance. Were you to see it today, you would see office buildings, Mercedes-Benzes and the shiny dreams of entrepreneurs, glistening in the long rays of California afternoons. The Bunker Hill light, once sharp with the clarity of vision, seems to have been enhanced with the constant fall of glitter; it is the gaudiness of enterprise and property values. You have to look to the shadows and the past to find Fante characters there, but in his books and stories, they fall in love forever on the way home from work, share sandwiches, home-made wine, and the throbbing dreams of the young in a place where there are no obstructions.

I lived some eight or ten miles to the west, but coming downtown was an event and an adventure, a ten-cent ride on the top deck of the Wilshire bus. Often, very often, my destination was 648 South Broadway--Clifton's Cafeteria. You'll have seen books featuring the free-wheeling, anything-goes bravado of Los Angeles architecture, but unless you have seen the interior of Clifton's, smelled its piney-antiseptic ambiance, run your fork through its mashed potatoes, and listened to the on-going organ music, you'll think, yeah, I've been to places like that. Unless you have arrived on your birthday and been greeted by name by the hostess, who has allowed you an early dip into the treasure chest for a wrapped toy that might, on a good day, last the entire afternoon, you would think yeah, every city has such places. But did those places get the carrots just so? Did they make a pot roast that seemed more splendid than a steak? Did those places impart a fluffy insouciance to their macaroni and cheese. Was there a lemonade well where, with the mere wave of your hand, you could make glass after glass of lemonade appear. And was the sound of birds chirping amongst the painted redwoods anything less than glorious or the forest scenery anything less than dreadful in its earnest attempt to transport you out of downtown Los Angeles to the redwood coast?

When you were there, did you have any notion of how earnest Clifton's tried to skirt the very existence of the Great Depression? You saw the announcements that one could pay whatever one wanted--or nothing at all, and once, after pleading for the chance to try it yourself, then doing so, then being absolved of the need to pay for your meal if you signed your name to the check, you cried tears of thanks when the cashier let you change your young child mind and pay.

It is still there. Clifton's Brookdale Cafeteria continues.

You have moved a hundred miles north; Fante died in 1983, in nearby Woodland Hills, which fits under the LA umbrella, but barely. And Clifton's continues.

You're Getting to Be a Hobbit with Me

Discovery comes peeking over your shoulder whenever you empty your pockets on your desk, open a book you've previously read, or look through your car for something you think you may have left there. Discovery can also stand on a ladder or chair, straining for a better look whenever you enter the garage you so laboriously turned into a study (but rarely use now because you've switched to laptop computers and because the cable modem seemed to have developed the habit of turning off whenever you were in the midst of something truly interesting

There are things in your pocket and in books and sometimes in the car that truly amaze you, things that in essence remind you of the protagonist of Richard Powers's latest novel, The Echo Maker. Like this afflicted young man, you have the sense of someone or somebody's going to a great deal of trouble to imitate your handwriting, then use it to scrawl and scratch notes that were meant to remind you of things, or directions to places of whose reality you have no doubt but of whose relevance to you there is considerable doubt.

I am one of the few who know of J. R. R. Tolkein without being a fan of either The Hobbit or, later, The Lord of the Rings cycle. My interest in him has to do with the fact that he professed Anglo-Saxon at my old buddy Brian Fagan's alma mater, Pembroke College, and that while doing so, he found a scrap of paper on which he wrote--and promptly lost under a pile of other papers--the first sentence of what was to become The Hobbit.

I try to keep some sense of order about such scribblings of my own; at times I even try to keep a drawer or pile or even a PendaFlex file for the notes and concepts I suspect may have been produced by complete strangers.

There is no discipline to curiosity nor is there any to discovery; they both descend upon you like out-of-town friends or relatives, unanticipated, possibly even unwanted.

If I put in sufficient time trying to decode or give context to these mysterious and mystifying notes, I am often able to remember their origin, a spark or two of enthusiasm, a flash of energy, the lightning-in-a-bottle of an incandescent idea that has for a moment illuminated the darkness of my cranial cavity.

Late last week, having begun a list of 100 genre novels for use in my class this summer, it came to me--well, first it came to Barnaby Conrad--that I could get a twofer, some titles for my list and five or six novels I'd read in the past for my Book Talk column for The Montecito Journal, where I alternate a newly published work with something done well into the past.

One of the books I found in the library (remember the garage?) was The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler, with seven or eight place marks inserted here and there throughout the text. Thinking these place marks had been set to alert me to some quotable material, I began to read them.

I mostly do not do things in the library (garage) anymore, because of the ongoing odor of mildew that began with a severe rainstorm some years back, and because it simply isn't fun.

The Chandler trumped the mildew and the relative lack of fun. I have no idea why those particular places were marked but I do know that I had read enough of the novel to complete the rereading, rush to my newest laptop, and begin work on a retrospective look at The Little Sister.

Chandler has not been with us since 1959, not in person, but this, one of his least known, holds up and catches me immediately by having a woman from Manhattan, Kansas, hire Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, to find her gone missing brother, last known whereabouts a rooming house on Idaho Street in Bay City.

Bay City is to Santa Monica what Ross Macdonald's and Sue Grafton's Santa Teresa is to Santa Barbara. I was born and raised in Santa Monica, and just as he had with the rest of what we like to think of as the Los Angeles Basin, he "got" Santa Monica as it was back then when southern California was finding its way back from World War II.

There are a number of scraps from the garage, a few from my pocket, and one from my car that could either be from me or a student who writes like me.

These scraps of paper become like land mines; I wake from memory of their content, or a connection materializes when I am in the midst of something quite other.

It is as though these notes are like small pieces of myself, time capsules of me at an earlier age or with an attitude that makes me wonder about myself in ways that I have not.

The archaeologist at work.

Amicus Curiae

Writers, whether they intend it or not, are judges; they judge history, they judge the present, they judge the individuals in these places and the places of their imagination, and yes, they judge each other. Writers are simultaneously juries, prosecutors, attorneys for the defense; they are the defendant and the accused, all rolled up into one and expected by their craft to render a considered verdict on every matter that comes before them.

In the legal profession, an amicus brief is a considered opinion, a gloss, on a matter before the court. Writers do have friends. Some of these friends are:

1. books

2. other writers

3. actors

4. musicians

5. painters

6. photographers

7. chefs

8. dogs

9. cats

10. editors

Writers have a reference shelf and a to-read shelf, things to be consulted, search engines, as it were. At the very minimum, the ten friends listed above should be considered a part of the writers' reference shelf.

Among my favorite books are The Canterbury Tales, because its characters and language still stand after six hundred years; the collected poetry of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Marianne Moore, all of whom I have increasing hopes of understanding, if everything continues on schedule; Macbeth because of the way it introduced me to politics and point of view; The Trial by Franz Kafka, for showing the way to get past the reader's defenses and into the heart of his complaint; Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi, which were the only text books on writing I return to at every stage of my life; Tales of the Jazz Age by Fitzgerald because they awakened me to the immensity of the short story; ditto The Long Valley by John Steinbeck, The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, and the Knopf Collected Stories by John Cheever. The opening paragraphs of All the Kings' Men by Robert Penn Warren, and the stunning humor of "Spotted Horses" by William Faulkner, and The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler turn my heart to instant oatmeal.

Numbers 2 through 6 on the list serve as a constant reminder that we are all preoccupied with time and how it affects the work we do, whether it is capturing an image or pacing a performance or judging an event. By looking at and listening to these worthies, we understand how to transmit, say, the photographic equivalent of shutter speed to a short story or a novel, how to PhotoShop point of view. We listen to the monologues of George Burns and Jack Benny and we learn all the better how to withhold information until the right moment, strengthening the tie of these two performers to Mark Twain. We learn how an exaggerated pair of eyebrows, a shambling gait, and an eye for the absurd transforms Julius Marx into an integral archetype struggling to break free within every male.

Number 7 is vital; we must be on good terms with at least one first rate food preparer. Not to disparage peanut butter and jam sandwiches, eaten for fuel when the creative flame has us at our work; not to raise an eyebrow at a can of Franco-American spaghetti, eaten cold out of a can under similar work-intensive or financially burdensome times; rather to remind us that a splendid meal and a glass or six of a fruity pinot noir reminds us that the inner man is sensual, too.

Dogs and cats are quintessential extensions of ourselves. When I was living in a one-bedroom apartment within hearing distance of the Hollywood Freeway, writing a pulp novel a month for a ridiculously small advance, a cat came into my life, a cat the likes of which I have only approximated, a cat who opened for me the doors to growth, understanding, and a sense of what true companionship was all about. Sam, the cat, opened my eyes to Blue, the Blue-tick hound, and from that point on, I knew that fountain pens, typewriters, and, now, laptops are only one part of the tool kit--the other essential ingredient is a proper writers' dog.

Every now and then an editor will ask me a question about something I have written, my answer to which makes me realize that if I have a blind spot for accuracy, the editor does not. I am frequently reminded of an interview I listened to on radio in which Somerset Maugham told of making it a point to send an enormous bouquet of flowers to his copyeditor and to arrange a lavish dinner for his content editor, each of whom, he argued, had contributed considerably to saving him from an embarrassment.

If we as writers are to be friends of the court in which we practice the laws of humanity, observing fully the rigors of our craft, we need all the friends we can get.

Readers? Listeners? Viewers? They are not friends, they are clients. To them we owe at least as much if not more than we can ever hope to know.