Literary L.A.

By Lionel Rolfe

Beyond L.A.'s self-promotional glitter is a hotbed of writers, bohemians, mad poets, exiles and refugees from every form of oppression -- and "Literary L.A." details their fascinating histories. The first book to chronicle the world-class writers who called Los Angeles home Lionel Rolfe's "Literary L.A." introduced the literary world to a neglected universe of writing, to major critical acclaim. Now, AirStream Books is proud to present this e-book version of "Literary L.A." to a new generation of readers. New to this edition are: bohemian and apocalyptic streams in L.A. writing • the thriving coffeehouse scene, including the new L.A. poets • additional chapters by noted archivist and literary essayist John Ahouse. Among the transients, literary gypsies, bohemians and writers in imposed or self-imposed exile whose stories are told in "Literary L.A." are Oscar Zeta Acosta, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Ken Kesey, Carey McWilliams, Charles Lummis, Jacob Zeitlin, Louis Adamic, Nathanel West, Robinson Jeffers, Malcolm Lowry, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and many others. The first edition of "Literary L.A." was published by Chronicle Books in 1981. An expanded edition, on which this electronic edition is based, was published by California Classics Books in 2002. A documentary movie based on the book by KO Pictures is forthcoming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Airstream Books
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780983488446

Lionel Rolfe

Lionel Rolfe is a professional journalist with a lifelong interest in medicine and science. He is also the author of six books.

Book preview

L.A

Editor’s Introduction

MOST OF THE chapters in this book still coalesce in my memory in their original form as magazine pieces from the Herald-Examiner Sunday California Living section. The H-E was beginning to fight for its life at the end of the seventies, and where the news sections were concerned, the paper was looking gray/gray on increasingly poor newsprint. The Sunday magazine, on the other hand, was still colorful, with attractive layouts and generous use of photographs.

This is how things stood when his editor handed Lionel Rolfe a truly enviable carte blanche to develop feature articles on whatever subjects he pleased. Midway in a career of writing for a succession of weekly or alternative papers and for the Herald-Examiner, as well as for the Jewish press (he was to become editor of the B’nai Brith Messenger in the eighties), Rolfe especially liked telling about other writers in his Sunday space. Without knowing it, a series was born.

The pieces he composed in those years made for a tidy collection, which in 1981 would find still more readers as an attractive quarto-sized paperback from Chronicle Books. The extraordinary cover photograph of the Aldous Huxleys on their terrace (see cover photo) was oddly suggestive even if no one could agree just what it brought to mind: Genteel couple alights from space ship directly into the good life, somewhere in the L.A. mountains.

Those who clipped the H-E series or bought the book, even for its cover or suspecting an oxymoron lay behind the title Literary L.A. , acquired a diversified gathering, part reminiscences, part interviews, part ruminations on some of Rolfe’s favorite authors and topics, with a special nod to the sixties coffee house scene which had marked his entry into a life of journalism. In book form, certain fixed ideas tended to hold the collection together. But Lionel, I said when we begin to talk about this new edition, the on es who were bohemian weren’t apocalyptic, and the apocalypse-types aren’t my idea of bohemian unless the term is stretched beyond all meaning. But then, I wasn’t there.

Not for the day-glo, coffee house scene, nor for the authors who were classics even then: still, twenty years are time enough for some of the later chapters to begin to speak to my own past. When I reread the Rolfe essays now, they lift me back to a point where they addressed my own personal and professional interest in a compelling way. Newly hired at Long Beach State University in 1977, where I had been entrusted with building up the library’s Special Collections, this transplanted Easterner already believed in the power of place, and I know I began to wonder who L.A.’s authors might be. I willingly succumbed to a form (variant: library) of geographical determinism, which directed me—as an early priority—to pursue collection strength in Southern California writing.

There was far less solid information to go on two-and-a-half decades ago than there is today. Franklin Walker’s A Literary History of Southern California detailed the early years before 1920, while Lawrence Clark Powell’s admirable Land of Fiction (itself a compilation of short articles from Westways) took care of more recent highspots. Then, after I had enlisted the aid of Michael Thompson’s bookshop to flesh out the lists and acquire the actual books, two further elements entered the mix.

The first arrived in the form of the altogether fortuitous but perfectly-timed November 1978 issue of the Auto Club magazine. With a splendidly apt

bookshop cover by CSULB’s Dick Oden, that issue of Westways was devoted to a survey of Los Angeles literature.

The lead article, Writers of the Western Shore, came from the pen of Carey McWilliams, who had written prominently for Westways as far back as the days of Jake Zeitlin’s small renaissance in the thirties. The article is still a gem of titles, authors and opinion by one who knew the subject from the inside out. I must have sent him a followup question, because my files contain a letter from McWilliams, by then editor of The Nation, suggesting still more names and offering good wishes for the growth of the collection.

The second boost, soon afterward, was the arrival of Lionel Rolfe’s Herald-Examiner series, which struck me then as it does now as both genial and inspired, and helped give dimensionality to some of the writers I was adding to the library. I had met Rolfe at the the Upton Sinclair conference held at CSU Los Angeles in 1978, and enjoyed collecting his sketches as they appeared in

California Living during the next year or two until the book came out. While reliving the making of that Californiana collection for CSULB, I find myself agreeably reminded of places and persons encountered in that same period.

The pages of Literary L.A. invoke, for example, the Zeitlins’ red barn as well as another very different bookshop, Papa Bach, where spending an hour was a compulsory add-on to any visit to the Nuart Theater; it very pleasurably recalls my acquaintance with Dorothy Healey and Ward Ritchie, and seeing McWilliams at his Union Station farewell; it conjures up some true believers like Robert Brophy, who still puts his waking hours into keeping the Jeffers flame alive, or Bob Hahn, who allowed me to edit his Sinclair newsletter for several years, or even Dudley Gordon, whom I met once and who had transmigrated himself not only into the famous suit but also into the soul of Charles Fletcher Lummis. And I recall seeing the spectral Marta Feuchtwanger, who outlived her husband by so many years, on a single occasion though I later visited the Villa Aurora both before and after its renovation.

*

Rolfe’s collection includes some ‘also-rans’ from earlier days who would go unrecorded if not for the stories in this book. At the same time, there are one or two notable omissions from Literary L.A. even though several chapters were added when the book was reissued in 1991 and again on the occasion of this new edition. No Chandler? The writer who most forcibly breathes L.A. to the rest of the world also belongs to the larger world outside Los Angeles through movies and through his hardboiled literary progeny. A Ross MacDonald, a Chester Himes, a Joseph Hansen, a Walter Mosely have carried forward the Chandler style and method, applying it successfully in milieus Philip Marlowe never visited. Further discussion of the Raymond Chandler phenomenon simply belongs both to their noirish crowd and, on the other hand, to the dedicated urban preservationists who like to go looking for the mean streets and mean buildings where the fictional Marlowe really sleuthed.

But no John Fante either? Here the problem is different. Rolfe admits the piece he wrote based on interviews with Joyce Fante never quite jelled, nor had her late husband come fully into critical view in 1980. Now, and only now, with a new and thorough biography and the continued devotions of Black Sparrow Press, is John Fante taking his deserved place as a defining writer for his time and place (L.A. in the early forties)—defining especially in the sense that Fante’s multicultural world matches what Los Angeles increasingly views in its own mirror. The rise in Fante’s fortunes is a welcome reminder of how population shifts and the weight of twenty years of new writing can change and reflect the self-image of the modern city. A novice librarian, recien llegado as I was then, would also find a very different bibliographic situation today than existed in 1978-1980. The scope of Southern California writing is now clearly mapped in the form of excellent anthologies, e.g., by Gerald Haslam and by the University of California Press; and she or he could next turn to the sovereign treatment of the topic by David Fine in his long-awaited Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction.

The successive volumes in Kevin Starr’s history of Southern California have also given generous space to the Los Angeles literary scene.

Reader or librarian pursuing more recent landmarks since Rolfe would not fail, for example, to include Carolyn See, writing with contagious comfort about her city; T.C. Boyle, whose Tortilla Curtain seems almost prescription-made for the twin cultures that identify today’s L.A.; or Joan Didion, whose handful of local stories have made it onto student reading lists nationwide. Add in James Ellroy with his nouveau-noir, Francesca Lia (the Weetzie Bat series) Block for the younger set, and perhaps Kem Nunn or T. Jefferson Parker for the vast suburban culture of L.A., all of whom would now be candidates for our own reading list if we agree with Rolfe that place matters.

The Los Angeles described on a recent KCRW authors’ panel was—if not a melting pot— at least a confluence of disparate and newly optimistic cultures, in which L.A. is no longer fringe but center. Does this mean the end of Rolfe’s cataclysmically-inclined L.A. or the city of failed intentions? Into the gap since the first Literary L.A. fall the much-discussed theories of social historian Mike Davis, who stepped up the amperage on catastrophic predictions for Los Angeles beyond the worst imaginings of Myron Brinig ( Flutter of an Eyelid), Gavin Lambert ( The Slide Area), or Curt Gentry ( The Late Great State of California). Any librarian who, like myself, was working in January 1994 will not have forgotten how the next days after Northridge were spent picking up books fallen from the shelves. Still, having looked Davis in the eye, the rest of us Pompeiians can return to less threatening literary landscapes, read Rolfe for background on the subject and on our heritage of doom, and perhaps begin to shake old notions of Los Angeles as a dead end where you hocked your hopes and soon stopped answering mail from home.

—John Ahouse

The University of Southern California

Hidden Links

THE CALIFORNIA BOHEMIAN movement, under whose shadow I like to think my life has mostly been led, is basically a journalistic one that, like its progenitors in England, saw its activities coming out of certain coffeehouses. It can claim ancestry in the early writings of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, during the Comstock Lode period, and it touched much of the really great American writing. Besides Twain, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac may be included in any list of California bohemians. These were writers who owed some of their literary persona to California bohemianism, not because they even necessarily sought it out but because it just was what was.

These were not hack journalists; rather journalism gave their writing a certain stamp that the Ivy League academics never had. My own mentor was Scott Newhall, about whom I wrote a chapter in my book Fat Man on the Left:Four Decades in the Underground. For nearly two decades, during its most creative and imaginative years, he edited the San Francisco Chronicle. The Bohemian Club, from which sprang the California bohemian movement, started meeting in the kitchen of one of the Chronicle’s editors in the eighteen sixties, then moved to Montgomery Street—and finally to its present location on the Russian River, considerably north of its original San Francisco location.

This book tells the story of what they as California iconoclasts gave to the nation and the world in terms of the written word, not as an exhaustive history, but rather as a personal record by one who readily acknowledges how deep bohemia’s influence was on him.

*

When I was growing up on the west side of Los Angeles in the forties and fifties, uncouth Russian Jews like myself only rarely ventured to the Pacific Palisades to visit the high and the mighty. One day, after a particularly stern warning to be on my best behavior, my mom took me to call on a relative of United States Senator James Phelan, then in his nineties. Senator Phelan had been a patron of bohemia for many years. My mother, pianist Yaltah Menuhin, also concertized with violist Michael Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, the famous German writer living out his years of self-exile from the war a few miles west of us in the Palisades. In my childhood memories, the Palisades was a beautiful wooded place, with mansions nestled in beautiful canyons lined with tall trees, all sloping gently to the Pacific.

I reflected on the fact that although I sometimes visited the homes of the elite in the Palisades, I grew up elsewhere. I didn’t live in the Palisades—few Jews did. I went to public schools in West Los Angeles and attended what is now called Brentwood Academy. Thus I lived next door to the Palisades, and those occasions when I went there were usually memorable.

Randy Young, the historian of that upscale community, has authored two volumes, Rustic Canyon: The Story of the Uplifters and Pacific Palisades, FromMountains to the Sea. He writes that the Methodists founded Pacific Palisades in 1921, but about a year later others began developing the area as well. A group known as the Uplifters had purchased a large ranch next to the Methodist portion. These were the opposite of the Methodists—they were spiritually descended from the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. The most prominent of Los Angeles pioneer Jewish family names were Hellman and Newmark, and they were members of the Uplifters. Marco Hellman himself, who founded Hellman’s Bank (which later became Union Bank), built a beautiful log cabin in 1923 in Rustic Canyon that is still a landmark on Haldeman Road (named after the grandfather of Bob Haldeman of Watergate notoriety). During the forties the place served as the home of then-Governor Earl Warren. Camp Josepho, the boy Scout camp in the Palisades since the thirties, was donated by a prominent Jewish businessman and philanthropist, who was also a member of the Uplifters.

The Uplifters, who didn’t mind drunken reveling and other hedonistic bacchanalia on occasion, frankly horrified the Methodists. The Uplifters were, says Young, the antithesis of the Methodists.

A couple of years after the sixties came to an end, I found myself in Northern California, a writer-in-residence at a place called Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. It was a replica Italian villa in Saratoga, a little way inland from Carmel—a country house with great exotic gardens and rare birds, surrounded by hundreds of acres of prime rolling California chaparral, nestled in the lush Los Gatos hills. Villa Montalvo had been Senator Phelan’s old place.

I had been given the residency for six months to write a novel. My intention was to sum up the meaning of my sixties career as a wandering small-town newspaperman, which I saw as occurring in the California bohemian tradition. I thought of it as a testament to the last hurrah of the California bohemian movement. At this writing, I’m still putting the final touches on TheMisadventures of Ari Mendelsohn.

Partially I was writing about Newhall during the sixties. Newhall is just north of the Los Angeles basin. I saw Newhall as one of those special bohemian places and times, when special people came together and created something, such as occurred at Carmel after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and also occurred during the fifties in San Francisco’s North Beach. Scott Newhall, who then owned The Newhall Signal, was the prototype for one of the novel’s main characters as the last great California bohemian editor.

So I packed myself off to Villa Montalvo—now run by private donations and Santa Clara County—hoping to deal with the novel’s subject. While there, I did get a feeling of what Phelan’s life had been like in his younger days, when he had used the estate to indulge a penchant for fine women and fine arts. I was there in the early seventies, and legends from the villa’s halcyon days were everywhere to sense, especially if you got to know the villa and grounds day after day, night after night, as I did. For walking around the grounds was the main thing to do when I wasn’t writing. The young Robinson Jeffers is said to have come here regularly to recite his epic poetry.

Villa Montalvo was certainly my Magic Mountain. It was reasonably near Carmel, although it was farther away from the original bohemian encampment on the Russian River, which had been a sort of socialist and writer’s Utopia in the previous century. But in the twentieth century, the grounds were getting too difficult for the real bohemians to maintain, so moneyed people from academia and commerce took over—and that, of course, was the beginning of the end.

Montalvo also had that quality. It was moneyed and bohemian. I remember being offered the choice of a very grand bedroom in the main building versus a much more modest apartment bungalow detached from the main building. I chose the bungalow, not wishing to feel I was living in a mansion.

I wrote every day during those initial Montalvo days, impatiently awaiting the first gloom of evening. No light from the surrounding cities touched Montalvo, and the night was very dark. The first thing I did was take a walk, beginning from the flower garden at the bottom of the long sloping lawn. I would walk up the lawn, seeing the grand old villa drawing closer, sensing the shadowy old place as it must have been in Robinson Jeffers’ day.

Buildings and places tell stories—never believe it isn’t so. In the novel I was writing, it was no accident there was a mansion, which had been the Newhall Mansion House in real life. Mansions that harbor dark bohemian secrets are especially intriguing.

All of which brings me back to Newhall in the sixties when I worked there. Scott Newhall had been an art student in the twenties, also a passable ragtime pianist and an innovative metal sculpturist. His hobby for the last several years had been restoring mid-fifties Chryslers on a grand scale. The man had three warehouses full of them.

I soaked up the California bohemian tradition at Newhall’s feet. I was fascinated by this last of the great bohemian newspapermen—working for him gave meaning to my years as an itinerant small town journalist. Everything became connected at that point, culminating at Villa Montalvo and summing up the Zeitgeist that had begun for me in the coffeehouses of Venice in the late fifties. I came of age in those coffeehouses where I met newspapermen of all kinds, many of them brilliant raconteurs.

The California bohemian tradition, as noted, was as much a newspaper tradition in the nineteen sixties as it had been in the eighteen sixties. Nowadays, of course, the authenticity is hard to find. The old bohemian tradition is as elusive in a Starbucks coffeehouse today as it is in the insurance company styled offices of the corporate newspapers of the new millennium.

At Newhall’s Mansion House we threw regular bohemian soirees, where we ate lavish meals at dinner tables whose size can only be compared to what might be found in a European castle. We talked or played chess or admired the house and gardens or swam in the great tiled pool outside, or perhaps we relaxed in the Jacuzzi and watched the dusk creep in across the narrow Santa Clarita Valley, dusk that spread its gloomy purple shadows first on the orchards and then on the great house itself. We felt as if we were the elite o’ the sixties—in summers especially; the rounded, tall, narrow doors of the mansion parlor were thrown wide open and the hot summer air was full of restless spirits flowing in and out. We were alive with the spirit of the rebellions of the sixties.

And yes, we were frankly hedonists. Perhaps I overdid the sex and drug descriptions of our great parties in my novel, but they had caught that spirit of high jinx and ritual in the bohemian groves. Robert Corrigan, the first president of California Institute of the Arts, on whose board Newhall sat before Cal Arts even had a campus, frequented our parties—and he would talk about Cal Arts as if it really were going to be a place to rival the German Bauhaus of the twenties. Cal Arts was originally supposed to have been built in Placerita Canyon, near the Oak of the Golden Dream, where gold was first discovered in California. But the geology turned out to be unsafe, so a site perched on the side of the Golden State Freeway was offered for the Disney school in the Valencia development by the Newhall Land and Farming Company, on whose board Scott Newhall also sat.

Thirty years later, it was apparent that Cal Arts was not going to be the second Bauhaus. The sixties might have been the nation’s equivalent of China’s Cultural Revolution, but how indelible a mark did the Cultural Revolution have on China?

The notion of the bohemian writer faced hard times in the last three decades of the twentieth century as the harsh, ugly reality of the age of multinationals set in. By the Reagan eighties, Babbitts and Stangeloves were the order of the day; and the notion that the arts were more noble than commerce and militarism had no currency.

This project of mine, writing about writers and a city, dates back to my childhood love of the King of the Bohemians, Mark Twain in San Francisco. Many of the writers I loved after that could be counted among the ranks of the California bohemians. Since a big part of their tradition was journalistic, it was no accident that by the time I was 21 I was already working full time on newspapers.

One of the most memorable moments of that long journey came before I went to Montalvo. It was in the late sixties and Scott Newhall was expounding at length on his views of newspapers and literature. Newhall said that real newspapermen were called to the profession the way others were called to the priesthood. He said that newspapermen should understand that journalism, despite what the cynics say, really should be practiced as a kind of daily literature.

I got the same feeling of what he was talking about more than a decade later when I walked up the wide flight of stairs to the second story city room of the old Herald-Examiner, and was confronted by Dick Adler, the editor of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine section. Adler was a burly, balding, bearded man— which, incidentally, is not a bad description of me, either. Adler told me that he couldn’t pay well, so I ought to have fun and write stories I cared about. I began writing about writers and Los Angeles and this book in its original form was the result.

All through the fifties and sixties, I rode the old Southern Pacific Daylight up and down the coast of California—I started doing so as a kid and I kept on doing so—and even do so now every once in a while. On one particular trip, I remember that all the way up the coast everyone I spoke with was talking about death, which was a strange topic considering the beautiful yellow-green-brown landscape just outside the window. As the Daylight wove its way along the top of the ocean cliffs just north of Santa Barbara, the widow of beatnik poet Stu Perkoff talked about his death. She talked of how during the last few weeks of her husband’s life, as he was wasting away from cancer, he became beautiful, philosophical and very religious. Stu Perkoff had been the most notable poet of the Venice scene in the fifties, which Lawrence Lipton of the old Free Press had written about in his book, The Holy Barbarians. Perkoff was sort of the Los Angeles Ginsberg —except he didn’t quite have the talent of the author of Howl.

Just how much things were changing didn’t hit home for me until 1984 when the Papa Bach bookstore in West Los Angeles closed its doors forever. John Harris, the poet-proprietor, partly blamed himself in closing his shop, which had been much more than just a bookstore when it opened in 1964 as the city’s, if not the country’s, first all-paperback bookstore. It was located on Santa Monica Boulevard, a couple of blocks west of the San Diego Freeway. Perhaps I should explain that in the early sixties, quality paperbacks—not the cheap, pulp paperbacks found in drugstores and supermarkets, but books with content, ideas, enduring cultural values—were still something new in publishing.

Even in the fifties and sixties, with the exception of the Modern Library’s wonderful classic series, hardcovers were expensive and people were resistant to the idea of paying a lot for them. On the other hand, quality paperbacks were the basis of mass left-wing publishing projects of the political thirties; in fact, most of the country’s important new writers published by Grove Press, New Directions and City Lights reached thousands of readers because they were first published in paper covers. Paperbacks were obviously more democratic and hence a bit subversive; and this aura rubbed off on Papa Bach when it dedicated its shelves to them in 1964.

Papa Bach quickly became the center of the city’s burgeoning counterculture movement and remained so during the twenty-odd years it continued to be a fixture on Los Angeles’s cultural scene. Papa Bach was a meeting place and a cultural institution in its own right. Papa Bach was where people went to announce their meetings or give away their tendentious literature, as well as where