Mad about You

Over the years, you have had frequent opportunity to socialize with writers, either in one-on-one editing sessions, impromptu lunches with a group of friends, speaking engagements at writers' organizations, the unflaggingly raucous dinner meetings at the Cafe de Paris, when you were regional president of the Mystery Writers of America, and back in the day when the LA Times was a newspaper, at the yearly celebration for their Books-of-the-Year Awards.  In more recent times, here in that exotic bubble known as Santa Barbara, you have the options of the Tuesday afternoon Wet Words gathering, the Wednesday Round Table, the First Thursday Lunch, and of course the Writers' Conference, interspersed with your regular Monday and Thursday lunches with Barnaby Conrad, and the Friday Morning Coffee at Peet's.  At earlier times in Santa Barbara, you were invited to Ross Macdonald's (Ken Millar's) Wednesday lunch group, as well as its splinter group that broke the gender barrier by inviting women. In many of these gatherings, fermented beverages were/are available if not an outright staple.  There were also invitations from the Santa Barbara Screen Writers' Association, where for a time, and on the basis of having once financed a Volkswagen Bug through the Writers' Guild Credit Union, you were an object of envy.

 With such sterling credentials, you believe you understand the permutations inherent in the writer persona, even to the point of seeing aspects of it in your own comportment.  It is a particular kind of madness, a landscape inhabited by literary agents, publishers, Quixotic dreams, stunning disappointments and depressions,confrontations, accusations, celebrations, and moments of stunning revelation and insight.  Even such unseemly behavior as you are likely to note in a writer whom you hold a particular disregard will cause you in final analysis to conclude, But he (or she) is our writer.

This has long since caused you to suspect that each discipline, say music or acting or dance or photography or fine art, has its own landscape of madness, inhabited by and familiar to its denizens, and in that sense we are as patients in a mental institution, each in his particular ward, sometimes escaping into another ward, say the film studies ward, therein to try the cafeteria and perhaps mis en scene of that landscape as a vacation from our own.

From time to time we are nudged back into the ward of the normal, the un-mad, those men and women who have had to take jobs of some other sort to meet their living expenses or to cope with growing children or aging parents.

By dint of furious work and focus, we have bent the rays of perception and reality to the point where we see a different reality although not by necessity a better one.  It is difficult to imagine, for instance, that Franz Kafka could have enjoyed his landscape.  Although he may have appreciated it, recognized it, accepted it, yet it becomes difficult to envision him thinking this landscape of conspiracy and uncertainty was any sort of cosmic promotion.  Yet still he accepted his landscape and wrote about it, leaving us a legacy we may have, each in our own way, passed through, recognized, and took steps to keep on riding away from it until it was little more than a glow in the rear view mirror.

From time to time, events and persons in the real world will try to talk us out of our landscape of madness, asking questions, needing our help, wanting the comfort of our presence as friends rather than as writers.  We accept these calls, secretly aware of their potential for use in our work, but no less ready to be a friend.

Many of us are not recognizably kidnapped by our madness, yet as we spend time with one another or even on a first-time meeting, it is possible to tell.  One former student of yours, a remarkably empathetic and generous woman, recognized at some point in her life that her sexual orientation wasn't what she had led herself to believe and thus, like a politician changing party affiliations, publicly switched orientations.  She spoke to you of a gaydar, a resident awareness one gay person had for distinguishing not only men from boys and women from girls but gays from straights and bi-sexuals.  Writers, you believe, have a similar detector by which one can assess the degree a professed writer has progressed into his or her necessary madness.  She's off-the-deep-end-nuts you think of a particular writer, by which you mean she has progressed well along the path she has chosen and is recognizably haunted by her visions, this assessment in opposition to one that indicates she still has some serious hiking to do in order to catch up with her madness.

Fortunately for you, both your mentors were flat-out mad, each shrewdly able to appear in public with the patina of normality, which, you recognize fondly, was not normal at all but rather an uncommonly deep kindness and empathy.  Rachel and Virginia have pulled you along into madness in their slipstreams.

In recent weeks, you've been writing letters and filling out forms from various universities for students wanting to enter yet another form of madness, the madness of graduate schools, the on-going madness of the great asylum we know of as the university.  In each case, you have found yourself tempted to use a shorthand you know exists and thus in your recommendation numerically relate him or her to the density of nuts in a fruitcake;  he or she is in the upper two percentile of nut case students I have known over my career.  You forebear to do so; you resort to the quotidian vocabulary, reminding yourself as you do of a mere mortal who has perhaps had a mystical experience, trying to explain it to an audience that desperately wants to have a mystical experience.

The Four Hoarse Men of the Apocalypse

Sitting at Peet's Coffee & Tea this morning, Jerry Freedman and I begin going over the notes we'd each made for the book on writing fiction it appears likely we will undertake. We have already begun looking for an edge, an approach that is at once positive and practical. Each of us, without consulting the other, came up with one of the more iconic--I seem to be in love with that word--writing books that while practical and positive enough in its way, seemed to give us the edge, the starting momentum. The book is Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird .

When Bird by Bird first appeared, Barnaby Conrad used some family connections to bring her from her Bay Area home to be a guest speaker at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, where her performance was electric and inspiring. To a degree, so was her text, particularly the chapter entitled "The Shitty First Draft." 

 I am one of the few book reviewers in America to have given her in the L.A. Times a less-than-flattering review on an earlier novel, Joe Jones. She remembered. And roared. But afterwards, sent me the most lovely note and we ended up quite respecting one another. That's all back story to the fact that neither Jerry or I believe in shitty first drafts, and so the approach to our book began. A major focus will be on revision, but it is the manner of doing so that will make our project different and, I dare say, useful.

As it so happened, Conrad dropped among other things the Atlantic Monthly fiction issue on me at lunch yesterday. I am always suspicious of such issues, not only from the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, but many literary journals and the so-called Best-of-the-Year collections and the O.Henry Prize Collection, thinking it fortunate for me to find one story I really like per issue. 

The Atlantic had a Tobias Wolfe, "Bible." Ever since I stumbled some years back on "In the Garden of American Martyrs," I've liked his work and the way he makes it possible for him to present a good relevant chunk of a character thanks to back story and subtext, or to put it another way for The Individual Voice, what the characters bring on stage with the and how they often speak at crossed purposes with their true feelings.

"The Bible" is a lovely example; it is about a woman who is kidnapped by a man who is obviously but not overtly identified as a Muslim. The man makes it pointedly clear that his motive has nothing to do with money or sex. Within the arc of the story, the woman realizes she may have momentarily lost power to her captor but is rapidly gaining it back to effect a lovely and stunning ending. Talking about this story gave us another approach to dealing with the definition of what story is today and what it is not.

There is one more element related to finding one's individual voice that came from Jerry remembering back to the time when he was in my novel beginnings class and I gave him a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa that turned him on. Not to forget the alchemy that is to be found in the old Rogers and Hammerstein song, "If I Loved You,"as it relates to a vital psychological concept and a technique from the esteemed actor, Uta Hagen.

Pictures at eleven.

Screw it; pictures now.

Recognition: The Beholder and the Beheld

Just over the hill from the portion of Santa Barbara where I live is the splendid, funky, notional hamlet of Summerland, a place that attracts tourists with the most dreadful-looking knees imaginable. A distinctive landmark in Summerland is a restaurant, The Big Yellow House, which closes and languishes on a regular basis, is reopened, staffed with locals who have attractive knees and who serve tourists who don't. There are a few other eating places, a post office, a coffee house, and antique stores that look more like retro Los Angeles movie houses. There is one liquor store, a gas station that used to be called Jack Gas, and no longer is, reflecting, some say, the sad effects of encroaching gentrification. There is also a toning station that used to be called a gym, a fire station, and a market that used to be called Lucky's, where one could procure remarkably good sausage. Lucky's is no longer called Lucky's; it is called Available, and Will Negotiate, which means the man who owns Lucky's and who used to make the remarkably good sausage has retired and wants to sell.

There is also a restaurant/saloon called The Nugget, which used to be called The Nugget, and which used to offer foodstuffs of remarkable awfulness. Like the dresshop in Santa Barbara now occupying a restaurant that used to be called Mom's, customers were drawn for ambiance rather than food. The Nugget now presents reasonably good food at reasonable prices, and reasonably strong drinks at prices locals seem to respect. Tonight, while dining at The Nugget, I was approached, as I was the last time I dined chez Nugget and the time before that, by a person who claimed to have just seen me on television.

I want to make it clear that I do not in the slightest resemble Geraldo Rivera or Jerry Springer, and when I compare myself to other TV personalities, I arrive at a loss. I do not give the impression of having been on TV when I dine at any other restaurant. Nevertheless,the experience got me to thinking along a particularly morbid line that has as its denominator the fickleness and forgetfulness of the public.

The following authors are scarcely thought of, which is worse than shameful. Although some forgotten authors are richly and deservedly forgotten, the following ought to be remembered with greater intensity and clarity:

1. Jack London
2. James M. Cain
3. Mordecai Richler
4. Carol Stone
5. John Fante
6. Ring Lardner
7. John Sanford
8. Willa Cather
9. Sarah Orne Jewett
10. Stephen Crane
11. Robertson Davies
12. Dorothy Parker
13. Dorothy Baker
14. Hilda Doolittle
15. Wilfrid Sheed

Through some past associations, I have a sense of the tough buck publishing is. Nevertheless, I would put time and effort into a business plan whereby the works of all these and many other wrongly or unnecessarily overlooked authors, perhaps calling them to the attention of those who have missed opportunities to know the, perhaps not. But it would do the modern equivalent of bringing these shining lights back in twisted, coiled format, where they could once again emit their friendly glow.

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.