University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Urban growth and narrative identity in Los Angeles fiction

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Urban growth and narrative identity in Los Angeles fiction

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Content URBAN GROWTH AND NARRATIVE IDENTITY IN LOS ANGELES FICTION

by

Jonathan Hamrick

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Jonathan Hamrick
ii

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction: Growth, Identity and the City

Chapter One: Urban Space and the Destruction of Identity
in the Novels of Chester Himes

Chapter Two: Raymond Chandler and Population Growth

Chapter Three: James M. Cain and the City as Existential
Challenge

Chapter Four: John Fante and the Writer in the City

Afterword: A Single Man and the City of Loss

Bibliography
iii

1

15

73

120

170

198

210

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Abstract

In Southern California; An Island on the Land (1946) Carey McWilliams memorably
characterized Southern California as “man-made, a gigantic improvisation,” and “a
product of forced growth and rapid change” (13). This study examines how literature has
represented the impact of this growth on the individual. By looking at canonical Los
Angeles fiction written during the 1930s and 1940s, I show that novels of this period
display an important concern with population and urban growth, as well as intense
anxiety about the consequences of this growth on masculine identity. I focus specifically
on the work of four major authors: Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain,
and John Fante. Each of these writers is now recognized as a significant figure in the
canon of literature about Los Angeles, and each is interested in the city as both a peculiar
urban space and as a space fraught with historical and ideological significance. Each
writer’s work specifically takes up the changes in population size and composition, as
well as the changes in the configuration of urban space, that Los Angeles experienced in
1930s and 1940s and uses these changes to fictionally examine the relationship of an
individual, and his sense of self, to his environment.
Though each writer’s engagement with the real historical details of what was
happening in Los Angeles at the time—or at least with his understanding of what was
happening—is unique, there are three major themes that tie all four writers together. The
first is a concern with how personhood generally, and manhood in particular, is defined
and realized against L.A.’s changing environment. As the population both grows and
becomes more diverse, and as neighborhoods shift, almost seismically, beneath one’s
iv

feet, how does one maintain a stable sense of self? This question is complicated further
by race, and by anxiety about whiteness in particular. These writers ask, from widely
different points of view, what it means to be and not to be white in L.A. The second
major concern that ties these four writers together is the threats and challenges to identity
that the complex spatiotemporality of the city presents. These writers thematize the way
one moves through the city, as well as the way one reads and navigates the city’s
changing spaces, to articulate the degree to which an individual has adapted to L.A. The
third is melancholia, and the way that a sense of self is born out of various kinds of
loss—loss of a city one thought one had known, loss of stability and hope for a future in a
hostile, antipathetic city.
By paying attention to these three concerns we can see not only that Los
Angeles’s rapid growth and change entailed a perceived threat to masculine identity, but
also that writers attempted to find ways, even if subtle or barely conscious, to deploy the
unique spatiotemporality of a city growing seemingly out of control to structure their
novels. By using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I will show that the
dynamics of a rapidly changing city appear in images of city space, including streets and
buildings, as well as neighborhoods, in ways that (1) give these novels a unique and
coherent narrative structure, and (2) tie the novels to the spatiotemporal realities in which
they existed.

1

Introduction
Growth, Identity, and the City

Carey McWilliams moved to Los Angeles in 1922, right at the beginning of one of its
great periods of growth. Oil and the film industry were largely responsible for this
growth, with three major oil strikes occurring in the first years of the decade—
Huntington field in 1920, and Santa Fe Springs and Signal Hill in 1921—and the
consolidation of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Loiuis B. Meyer Picture into
MGM, with the famous Irving Thalberg at its head. Also spurring growth was the
creation of the All-Year Club of Southern California, a “super-tourist agency” that, with
heavy subsidies from the County of Los Angeles, touted the virtues of L.A. to the rest of
the country (McWilliams 136). McWilliams was, then, uniquely qualified to write his
great study of the region, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946), not only
due to his experience as a journalist and lawyer, but, as he points out in the introduction
to the 1973 edition, due to fortuitous timing. As a result, he says, of the “great surges of
migration” that have characterized L.A.’s growth, “Modern day Los Angeles might be
said to date from 1920” (vii). Though the accuracy of this statement could be debated, it
is clear McWilliams links his own development as a writer to the development of the city
in which he made his professional life. “I did not plan to write [Southern California]; it
grew out of my experiences in a perfectly natural way” (vii). McWilliams realizes the
coeval development of his own consciousness and of Los Angeles; his book ties these
two together.
2

Among the many aspects of the region McWilliams covers in the study are the
treatment of Indians by Spanish Missionaries, the discovery of oil, first by Edward L.
Doheny, in the 1890s, and then later in the 1920s, and the unique connection between
Iowa and Southern California. McWilliams also pays particular attention to literature, for,
as he points out, literature and literary representations of the region have, from Southern
California (and Los Angeles’s) inception, been vital to both the image the place had of
itself, and the image the place projected to the rest of the United States. McWilliams
singles out Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1882) as, in its romanticization of the Spanish
missions, a kind of foundational mythological text for the region. He also devotes some
attention to Mark Lee Luther’s The Boosters (1924), Frank Fenton’s A Place in the Sun
(1942), and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939). These novels, along with
John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939), are the only ones that, in McWilliams’s view, “suggest
what Southern California is really like.” (He does not explain what this means.) “No
region in the United States,” he says, “has been more extensively and intensively
reported, of recent years, than Southern California” (364). McWilliams’s attitude may be
somewhat biased, as he was close friends with these and other important writers of the
region (including William Saroyan and Louis Adamic), though we can also credit his
personal involvement with the literary scene of Los Angeles for helping some of these
works (notably Fante’s) even exist.
The years from 1920 to 1946 (when Southern California was published) were
crucial to the history of Southern California, as well as the history of Los Angeles, the
focal point (sprawled and ungainly though it may be) of the region. In this project I will
3

look at fiction written in and about Los Angeles in a part of this period—the 1930s and
1940s—that addresses the challenges an individual faces while living in L.A. during a
time of great growth and change. I will focus specifically on the work of four major
authors: Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and John Fante.
1
Each of
these writers is now recognized as a significant figure in the canon of literature about Los
Angeles, and each is interested in the city as both a peculiar urban space and as a space
fraught with historical and ideological significance. Critical studies of these writers are
filled with references to challenges these writers’ works pose to notions of the “California
Dream” or to myths of Los Angeles as a land of limitless opportunity and ceaseless
sunshine. The following rather sweeping claim by Mike Davis, in which he includes,
along with Himes, Chandler, Cain, and Fante such writers as Nathanael West, Aldous
Huxley, and Horace McCoy is apposite: “As the depression shattered broad strata of the
dream-addicted Los Angeles middle classes, it also gathered together in Hollywood an
extraordinary colony of hardboiled American novelists and anti-fascist European exiles.
Together they radically reworked the metaphorical figure of the city, using the crisis of
the middle class (rarely the workers or the poor) to expose how the dream had become
nightmare” (20). This is true enough, for there is, even in the most positive or hopeful
moments of these four writers’ works—such as the moments when Chandler’s Marlowe
explains the solution to a crime, or when Fante’s Bandini finally publishes his novel—an
aura of fleetingness and futility.

1
McWilliams mentions, but does not, in any real detail, discuss Fante, and he mentions some of Cain’s
journalism on Los Angeles. He seems completely unaware, in Southern California, of Chandler and Himes,
though.
4

At the same time, a broad statement such as Davis’s is always necessarily blind to
nuance and details. In this project I will show how each writers’ work is specifically
related to the changes, in both population size and composition, as well in the
configuration of urban space, Los Angeles experienced in 1930s and 1940s. Though each
writer’s engagement with the real historical details of what was happening in Los
Angeles at the time—or at least with his understanding of what was happening—is
unique, there are three major themes that tie all four writers together. The first is a
concern with how personhood generally, and manhood in particular, is defined and
realized against L.A.’s changing environment. As the population both grows and
becomes more diverse, and as neighborhoods shift, almost seismically, beneath one’s
feet, how does one maintain a stable sense of self? This question is complicated further
by race, and by anxiety about whiteness in particular. These writers ask, from widely
different points of view, what it means to be and not to be white in L.A. The second
major concern that ties these four writers together is the complex spatiotemporality of the
city, and the threats and challenges to identity that it presents. These writers thematize the
way one moves through the city, as well as the way one reads and navigates the city’s
changing spaces, to articulate the degree to which an individual has adapted to L.A.. The
third is melancholia, and the way that a sense of self is born out of various kinds of
loss—loss of a city one thought one had known, loss of stability and hope for a future in a
hostile, antipathetic city. By paying attention to these three concerns we can see not only
that Los Angeles’s rapid growth and change entailed a perceived threat to masculine
identity, but also that writers attempted to find ways, even if subtle or barely conscious,
5

to deploy L.A.’s unique spatial dynamic as a city growing seemingly (though not
actually)
2
without order or boundary, to structure their novels.

Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s
1939 was a noteworthy year, an “annus mirabilis,” in David Fine’s words, for Los
Angeles, specifically in terms of Hollywood films. Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of
Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, among others, appeared
then (“John Fante” 122). 1939 also saw the publication of a host of novels that are now
canonical not only in what we might call the subgenre of Los Angeles fiction, but also,
for the most part, in American literature. Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust,
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, John Fante’s Ask the Dust, and Aldous Huxley’s
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan all appeared in 1939. This sudden literary output
coincided with a time of significant change in Los Angeles, particularly in terms of
population growth and demographic shifts. The 30s may have been a period of relatively
slow growth—with only about 266,000 new residents compared to 662,000 in the 20s
and 466,000 in the 40s—as it was marked by both the Great Depression and the end of
the 1920s oil boom. Unemployment was, of course, chief among the problems caused by
the depression. According to Errol Wayne Steven, of the 700,000 unemployed in
California, about half, or 344,000, lived in Los Angeles (189). Worse, according to
Douglas Flamming, was that though “Southern California’s diversified economy initially
shielded much of L.A. from the economic crisis,” blacks in Los Angeles, gathered mostly

2
Though L.A. may lack the nice shape of cities like New York or Paris, urban development did not happen
helter-skelter. Neighborhoods and districts were intentionally racially segregated, and regions, like the San
Fernando Valley, were annexed to benefit from the Owens Valley Aqueduct.
6

along Central Avenue and in the eastside, suffered disproportionately. By 1933, “nearly
half of black L.A. was out of work” (296). In an effort, ostensibly, to battle
unemployment, “the County of Los Angeles sponsored a repatriation movement that, at
the cost of $14.70 per person, paid the train fares of about fifty thousand residents
returning to Mexico” (Stevens 193). Repatriation, and the consequent dislocation of
populations and disjunction of communities, satisfied nothing more than nativist fear and
anger. It also facilitated a reorientation of the racial demographics of L.A., as well as how
people were distributed throughout the city.
After the lull of the 30s came a surge in the 40s. Though the growth in the 40s
was not as great as that in the 20s, it was nonetheless significant, particularly in terms of
the growth of the city’s black population. “Between 1940 and 1944, blacks accounted for
one-third of the population growth of Los Angeles. In the decade after 1940, the county’s
total population grew by 50 percent, but its black population increased by 190 percent”
(Stevens 257). The other major constituency in the 1940s was Southern Whites. These
new migrants, black and white, were drawn to the city not by the possibility of making
money in oil or real estate, or by the promise of a sunny Aryan paradise—these factors
had been among the main draws of the city for white Protestant Midwesterners from the
1890s to the 1930s—but for work in the city’s burgeoning war industries, including
plane-and shipbuilding. Even though the demand for labor was high, blacks still faced
intense discrimination, and were thus often severely underemployed. Tensions in the
workplace were high as well, with wartime labor shortages in some cases compelling
black men to work alongside white women. The proximity exacerbated already toxic
7

prejudices. These changes in population and demographics presented challenges to the
people of the city, in terms of how they experienced the city and got along with their
neighbors, as well as in terms of how they thought about themselves.

Spacetime and the Chronotope
Throughout this study I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope” to help articulate the
relationships among space and time, and fiction and history. Bakhtin introduces the
chronotope (“literally ‘time space’”) in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel,” where he describes it as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). Further:
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into
one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on
flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and
responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes
and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. (84)

Chronotopes are, then, images where the temporal and spatial assumptions in a narrative
are revealed. Chronotopes change over time in response to generic evolution, as well as
to history, and the way a culture’s conception of space and time develops. Further, “A
literary work’s artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its
chronotope” (243). The function of a chronotope is then, on one hand, mimetic.
Chronotopes also function structurally, though, as “the organizing centers for the
fundamental narrative events of the novel…The chronotope is the place where the knots
of narrative are tied and untied” (250). Bakhtin discusses the way the notion of the
chronotope changes over time, from Ancient Greek Romances through eighteenth-
8

century gothic novels and beyond, as well as particular examples of chronotopes. The
motifs of “meeting” as well as “the road”, for instance, are chronotopic. The former is a
generic feature of Greek romances, where, by an accident of time and place, two
characters, usually either lovers or presumptive lovers, either come together or don’t,
with narrative consequences to follow. “The road” is a chronotope that mediates or gives
rise to chance encounters by providing a space for all types of people to congregate,
meet, and move on. Both of these chronotopes, as well as chronotopes in general, have
the added burden of serving as pivot points, as it were, between different registers of
time, say between adventure time and historical time. In a Greek Romance, for instance,
two lovers will meet, by chance (and perhaps on a road) and then, over the course of
various partings and meetings, will marry, but the marriage will occur as if nothing at all
had happened. The lovers will not have aged, and they will show no signs of having been
changed by their adventures. Real time is suspended during the time of the adventure.
The chronotope is useful in this study because the novels on which I focus use
particular places and spaces in Los Angeles as, in Bakhtin’s language, narrative knots.
That is, Himes, Chandler, Cain, and Fante structure their novels according to specific
details of the city’s urban geography. These details could be public streets, which Himes
uses to stage moments of great tension, sometimes in terms of his protagonists’ psyches,
which are cleaved by the city’s endemic racism, and at other times in terms of larger
demonstrations of social unrest, such as rallies or riots. Chandler and Cain, for their part,
use particular neighborhoods and suburbs to signal shifts in class, both as those exist in
contemporary L.A., and as those shifts have occurred, and are still occurring, over time.
9

Neighborhoods and suburbs are places where history manifests both materially, in terms
of the structures and their state of upkeep or disrepair, and culturally, in terms of the
memories and experiences of the neighborhood’s residents. Movement among
neighborhoods and suburbs, as well as among the various manifestations of history, is,
generally speaking, what gives many of these novels’ plots their structure and coherence.
Reading with the chronotope in mind helps make these structures easier to see, and also
distills the novels’ relationships to the actual changes occurring in L.A. at the time. It is
not merely the case that the novels under consideration here represent, rather overtly, that
populations are changing and the city is growing. In other words, these are not only
novels about a growing city, but novels that use the spatiotemporal phenomenon of urban
growth—that is, the fact that changes in infrastructure, population, and architecture,
happen in space and through time—more subtly to show how crucial the environment is
to an individual’s sense of self.

Los Angeles’s Literature and the Outsider
Unsurprisingly, none of these writers was born in Los Angeles, or even on the west coast.
Himes moved to L.A. from Ohio, where he had been incarcerated in the state
penitentiary, in 1941 to attempt a career as a screenwriter. Chandler, born in Chicago but
raised in England, moved to the city in 1913 after a chance meeting with Warren and
Alma Lloyd aboard a ship sailing from England to America in 1912. Cain moved to L.A.
from New York in 1931 to write for Paramount. And Fante, eager to put some distance
between himself and his childhood home, hitchhiked from Boulder, Colorado in 1930.
10

Each writer was at a different stage of his life when he came to the city. And each began
publishing at a different age as well. Himes was 31 when he arrived in the city, and 36
when he published If He Hollers Let Him Go. Chandler was 24 upon arriving in L.A., but
did not publish his first story until 1933, when he was 45. Cain was 39, and an
established journalist when he came to Los Angeles, and 42 when The Postman Always
Rings Twice was published. Fante, 21 when he arrived in Los Angeles, published Ask the
Dust when he was 30 (though he wrote his first novel, The Road to Los Angeles, when he
was 23, and published Wait Until Spring, Bandini when he was 29). The varying ages and
lengths of time between arrival and initial publication among these writers indicates
differences not only in relationship to the city—i.e. how familiar each writer was with the
city when he began to write about it—but also in urgency to write. Himes and Fante, the
writers who most relied upon their own experiences to compose their fiction, felt an urge
to write immediately. One gets the sense from reading their work that the act of writing
was a way of coping with the challenges the city presented. Cain, we might say, wrote
with a journalist’s sense of immediacy and detachment. His early essays on L.A. are
conspicuous examples of an outsider’s attempts to understand his new home, while his
first novel is a kind of voyeuristic look at a world that was far removed from his own in
terms of class and stability. And Chandler, who had lived in Los Angeles the longest of
any discussed here before writing about it, and who had even worked in the oil industry,
is in many ways the most romantic and idealistic of the four. His city is more an
abstraction, though a carefully and artfully rendered one, than the other writers’. At the
same time, though, he writes about Los Angeles with sensitivity to history (albeit
11

relatively recent history) that is missing from Himes, Cain, and Fante. While he may not
ever respond to the immediacy of racial injustice in the way of, say, Himes, he does take
a longer view, and he builds into his city a sense of the past, and how the city is different
now than it was a few decades ago.
As McWilliams points out, the percentage of the population of native-born
Southern Californians in this period was small, hovering around 25%. “Practically,
therefore, the whole population is immigrant, with the slowly changing sense of home
peculiar to non-indigenous life” (165). And, as David Fine points out, the fact that most
major L.A. writers moved to the city from elsewhere is vital to understanding L.A.’s
fiction. “Los Angeles fiction,” Fine says, “is about the act of entry, about the discovery
and the taking possession of a place that differed significantly from the place left behind”
(Imagining Los Angeles 15). It may be more accurate to say that L.A. fiction, or at least
the fiction covered in this study, is about the attempt to discover and take possession of a
place. In the work of Himes, Chandler, Cain, and Fante, the sense of a peculiar and
changing relationship to the city is palpable; each writer approaches the city with the
fresh and critical eye of one who has come from outside, and, to a more and less
successful degree, integrated himself into the city.
In the first chapter I discuss Chester Himes’s two Los Angeles novels, If He
Hollers Let Him Go, and Lonely Crusade. These novels, published in 1945 and 1947,
respectively, focus on the intense racism faced by educated, working class black men in
Los Angeles’s war industries. In Himes’s L.A. racism is both endemic in and constitutive
of the city. Whiteness looms over the city’s streets as a panoptic threat. Los Angeles is
12

represented as not merely a dangerous place, in which a black man cannot easily or safely
live; the city is represented as actively hostile to the sense of self sought by Himes’s
protagonists. Los Angeles destroys black men. Further, Los Angeles, in Himes’s view, is
held together by only the most fragile, uncertain ties. These threaten to break, and the city
to destroy itself.
Though Himes’s work is, chronologically, the last that this project covers, it is the
work that engages most overtly with the risks, challenges, and dangers the growing and
changing city poses, and so I discuss it first. The struggles of Himes’s protagonists
against violent and widespread racism also points out how high the cost of living in Los
Angeles can be in this period. The material and psychological consequences of Los
Angeles’s increasingly intense racism that Himes’s characters, and even Himes himself,
experienced provide a stark contrast to the identity crises faced by Chandler and Cain’s
white characters. And, in the light of Himes, the racism that Fante’s Italian-American
Arturo Bandini participates in appears as the clearest and most obvious way to make
oneself feel white in L.A.
In the second chapter I turn to Chandler, the writer who came to be regarded, over
the course of the twentieth century, as perhaps the preeminent writer of Los Angeles, as
well as, of course, one of the originators of American crime fiction. This chapter will
focus on Chandler’s first two novels, The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely
(1940). I will argue that these novels manifest, on one hand, a significant, if also
occasionally subtle, concern with population growth, and, on the other, a complex
representation of the spatiotemporal changes that occur in a growing city. In The Big
13

Sleep Chandler is obsessed with growth, and with the risks and dangers associated with a
larger population. Among the most significant of these risks is that as a city grows and
develops an identity, the individual finds himself, and his idea of his self-hood, embedded
in and constituted by the densely populated urban space sprouting up around him.
Chandler casts the consequences of having one’s identity bound up in a city in stark and
existentially negative terms. As the city grows, the individual’s self vanishes. Farewell,
My Lovely, for its part, dispenses with existential dread, and instead rather deftly attempts
to create a kind of composite image of Los Angeles as if in a moment in the midst of
change. Chandler represents Los Angeles neighborhoods as complex nodes where several
periods of time are layered in a single space. A consequence of this layering is an attempt
to create an image of the city where people of color are simultaneously recognized and
erased.
Chapter three will cover James M. Cain’s three major L.A. novels, The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity, (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941).
Unlike Chandler, Cain expresses no anxiety about population growth (this is surely partly
due to the fact that while Chandler experienced the boom of the twenties, Cain did not
arrive until a time when growth had temporarily slowed). Instead, his novels portray the
city as a largely static space, albeit one fraught with obstacles that metaphorically refer to
the challenges his characters face as they attempt to reach for positions of power and
status beyond their means. Further, while Cain’s white characters will initially
demonstrate racial anxiety against the threat of perceived contamination from people of
color, specifically Mexicans, their concerns will eventually become based entirely around
14

class and upward mobility. This change from feeling anxious about whiteness to taking
whiteness for granted and feeling anxious about class is represented as a move from the
outskirts of the city, rendered as a kind of bizarre and empty borderland, into the racially
segregated city and suburbs. The ability of one to move successfully through these—
majority white—parts of the city is a sign of one’s fitness and adaptability. The more
mobile a person is, the more capable he is of realizing the self he desires.
Finally, chapter four will discuss John Fante’s The Road to Los Angeles (written
around 1934, but not published until 1985) and Ask the Dust (1939). These novels, unlike
any other in this study, dramatize the struggles of a writer to make a name for himself in
Los Angeles. In the struggle for artistic (and indeed, economic) self-realization, Fante’s
protagonist, Arturo Bandini, learns that his romantic, mythological attitude toward the
city undermines not only his ability to see L.A. as it is, but also his ability to succeed as a
novelist. Arturo’s personal growth is linked to his ability to reimagine the city. Though
not as trenchant a critique as Himes’s novels, Fante’s also explore how white supremacy
undermines Los Angeles’s identity.
McWilliams memorably characterized Southern California as “man-made, a
gigantic improvisation,” and “a product of forced growth and rapid change” (13). This
study examines how literature has represented the impact of this growth on the
individual.

15

Chapter One
Urban Space and the Destruction of Identity in the Novels of Chester Himes

Chester Himes’s Los Angeles is a place that introduces division, even as it brings all
kinds of people into intimate contact with one another. The primary agency of the city,
the way it exerts its specific pressures, is cleaving, which, of course, can mean both to
fuse together and to break apart. Race is the main axis along which the cleaving occurs.
As Sean McCann points out, “race almost always comes to [the heroes of Himes’s
novels] as a bad surprise” (264). This was part of Himes’s effort to subsume racial
concerns beneath class concerns, which began, “[d]uring the Depression, [where]
Himes’s prison experience and his work on the WPA enabled him to maintain his belief
in the interracial ‘human family’” (265). For McCann, it is not until the 1950s and his
series of Harlem-based detective novels that Himes completely lost faith in this “human
family,” as well as his ability to attempt to regard race as “a potent, but empty, fiction—
one that could be overcome by the institutional pressures…and by the personal will
represented by his own determination to become a writer” (265). Even if his time in Los
Angeles was only the beginning of the change in philosophy and outlook that subsequent
events required, his Los Angeles fiction illustrates pretty clearly, (1) that social and
cultural pressure, rather than minimizing racial distinctions, only magnifies them, and, (2)
any ideas of an “interracial ‘human family’” are more dream and fantasy than reality or
possibility, and it is the city itself that effects his change in outlook.
For Himes Los Angeles is a city organized by the volatile contiguity of unstable
elements, a place of dangerous fault lines that threaten to break apart and destroy
16

whatever is nearby. It is a destructive place, and also a place that is always already
fractured, and barely hanging together. While there are no earthquakes either represented
or mentioned in Himes’s work, there is a seismic activity that gathers beneath the surface
and, occasionally and violently, explodes. “I was thirty-one and whole,” Himes says,
“when I went to Los Angeles and thirty-five and shattered when I left to go to New
York” (76). The stakes of living in and experiencing Himes’s Los Angeles become
personal. Just as, thirty years after the fact, he claims to have been shattered by the city,
his fiction dramatizes this destruction, and shows how a place can not only resist
unification, but can fracture the identity, the sense of self, of someone who tries to belong
(or be long) in L.A.
In a frequently cited passage from The Quality of Hurt (his autobiography),
Himes says, “Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known—
much more than any city I remember from the South” (73). For him the hurt came from
the “lying hypocrisy” in a city where African Americans were “Jim-Crowed in housing,
in employment, in public accommodations, such as hotels and restaurants,” but where
whites “seemed to be saying ‘Nigger, ain’t we good to you?’” (74). Jim Crow segregation
is one obvious form of splitting apart, where a city’s spaces and resources are broken into
those which are exclusively for whites, and those which are allowed to blacks. White
hypocrisy, which imagines that attitudes toward race in Los Angeles are different from
elsewhere despite behavior by whites that ensures they are not, is another. These two
kinds of splitting work hand in hand to make the city not only one defined by racism, but
also one defined by the denial of racism. So the city is separated not only by segregation,
17

but also by unwillingness to admit to the existence of segregation, where an African-
American minority must encounter not only the realities of racism, but also the belief by
a white majority that there is no racism in L.A. In this kind of environment, where there
seem to be two realities, one is all but forced into a kind of psychotic break. This is partly
how Himes represents Bob Jones’s decline in If He Hollers Let Him Go, to which I will
turn in a moment.
Himes’s simultaneous experience of racism and the denial of racism was violent
by itself, but it was also instrumental, though of course negatively, in two other kinds of
personal cleaving. First, Himes’s identity as a working man was broken. He came to Los
Angeles in 1941 with a letter of reference from Langston Hughes to be a screenwriter.
This job was cut short when Jack Warner, upon hearing about Himes, said, “I don’t want
any goddamned niggers on this lot” (Milliken 56). He had to turn to the growing war
industry for work, where he was not only humiliated, but also forced to move all over the
county (and indeed, state, as he worked in factories in both Los Angeles and San
Francisco) in search of suitable employment. “To briefly sum up my attitude toward
industry on the West Coast I can say that I had twenty-three jobs during the first three
years of the war, and all in essential industries” (74). Second, Himes’s marriage began to
fall apart. His wife Jean, whom he married shortly before moving west, accompanied him
to Los Angeles where she found both better job opportunities than Himes and a better
social life. While he bounced around from menial job to menial job, Jean worked at the
Los Angeles Area USO as co-director, with a white woman, of “the entertainment
provided by the USO units in the area, including the Hollywood Canteen.” This position
18

gave her both access to middle-class black communities “who wouldn’t touch [Himes]
with a ten-foot pole,” as well as respect from her white co-workers (75). While these
feelings of exclusion were certainly painful, they were not as relevant to Himes as the
fact that his wife had a better job. “I found that I was no longer a husband to my wife; I
was her pimp. She didn’t mind, and that hurt all the more” (75).
Though Himes was certainly not the only man who felt threatened and
emasculated by the increased economic opportunities the war years afforded women, he
did seem particularly obsessed with the phenomenon. His male protagonists in both If He
Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade frequently, and futilely, rage against their
wives’ employment. This theme appears elsewhere in his fiction. In the short story
“Make with the Shape” (1945) Himes attempts to treat the issue humorously. There a
soldier named Johnny comes home from war, and is “disappointed in finding [his wife]
so industrialized and athletic and self-reliant” (Collected Storeies 111). Not only is he
disappointed; he is literally beaten down by her. His wife, Jessie May, mistakes him for a
burglar and, using her newly acquired Judo skills, “[yanks] him off of his feet, [ties] him
in a knot, and [slams] him against the floor with such vigor he [goes] out like a light”
(111). The story ends bizarrely and surrealistically with Jessie May’s deciding to quit her
job and let Johnny support her after he breaks up a fight between her and another woman.
Johnny, who rationalizes the sudden turn by “his being dumb about the ways of dames,”
is just as surprised as the reader. This comic reconciliation, this reintegration of a
marriage through its return to “natural” gender roles, is unique in Himes’s fiction,
occurring only in this story, and nonexistent in his life.
19

Contiguity Along Fault Lines: The City’s Sense of Place
When Himes came to Los Angeles in 1941 the city was experiencing one of its greatest
population and demographic changes. The so-called “Great Migration,” which historian
James N. Gregory called, “the greatest spatial reorganization in the nation’s history,”
(qtd. Stevens 256) brought around half a million new residents to the city. Though most
of these new residents were southern whites, the city’s black population grew at a greater
rate than not only the population of Los Angeles as a whole, but also at a greater rate than
“similar communities in other California cities” (Stevens 256). Kevin Allen Leonard puts
the African American population in 1940 at 64,000 out of the city’s total population of
1.5 million, or about 4.2 percent. In 1946, it was 133,000 out of 1.8 million, or 7.4
percent. This means “the African American population of Los Angeles grew at least four
times more rapidly than the city’s population as a whole during the war” (312). Historian
Josh Sides figures the number of African Americans who moved to Los Angeles between
1940 and 1946 at “70,000…causing a 109-percent increase in the city’s black population
(qtd. Wilhite121-2). Though the numbers clearly vary from source to source, the message
is always the same: the forties were a period of unprecedented growth for Los Angeles’s
black community.
The plentiful employment opportunities in the area’s burgeoning war industries,
particularly airplane and ship building, drew so many west. And, until June 1941, it was
Los Angeles’s reputation as a city firmly committed to the open shop that attracted
employers (Stevens 262). Due to the combined efforts of the Communist Party USA
20

(CPUSA) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), workers at North
American Aviation held a strike that prompted the Federal Government to guarantee
employers would pay fair wages in exchange for a no-strike pledge during the war (266).
Not only were the CIO and CPUSA the labor organizations more sympathetic to black
workers (the older and more conservative American Federation of Labor was openly
hostile to integrated unions); the CPUSA was, due to its shifting and ambiguous
relationship to the war effort, also perhaps the only labor organization in the United
States willing to hold a strike in an essential industry. To varying degrees, both If He
Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade represent the contentions relationships among
Communists, unionists, and black workers in war industries.
Also in June, 1941 Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which forbade
discrimination in employment based on “race, creed, national origin, or color,” and
created the Fair Employment Practices Commission (qtd. Stevens 268).
1
Though the
FEPC was, because of restricted powers of enforcement, only moderately effective in
ending discriminatory hiring practices, the number of African-American workers in war
industries still rose sharply in the early 1940s. This was due to labor shortages as well as
the growing influence of the CIO and industrial, rather than trade, unions (Boris 83). Still,
African-American workers were slow to benefit from the boom in industrial employment
in the area. While the number of shipyard workers in the area increased from about 1,000
before the war to 90,000 at the peak of production, African-Americans’ gains were
initially modest. Bethlehem Shipbuilding, for instance, had only two African American

1
EO 8802 was issued in response not to the North American Aviation Strike, but to A. Philip Randolph’s
threat to march on Washington if discriminatory hiring practices were not changed (Stevens 267).
21

workers out of 3,000 in 1941. By 1943 the number at Bethlehem had grown to 300, while
California Shipbuilding (Calship) had 1,200. By 1944, though, the numbers had increased
sharply, with 7,000 employed just at Calship (Leonard 311-12). Even with these gains, it
is clear from Chester Himes’s own experience that the war economy might have meant
better prospects for many, but certainly not for all.
The changes in Los Angeles’s demographics, as well as the changes in the city’s
relationship to unions during the war, also brought changes in the spatial orientation of
the city in terms of both the city’s geography and the places, reasons, and ways people
came into contact. The biggest geographic change involved the massive influx of new
residents. Of similar importance was the removal of the city’s Japanese-American
population. On February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066,
which directed the internment of Japanese Americans. For those residing in Los Angeles,
this meant relocation from downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo to the Santa Anita Racetrack
outside Pasadena. Little Tokyo then became known as “Bronzeville,” as over eighty
thousand African Americans moved in to a neighborhood that had previously held thirty
thousand (Stevens 259). Despite the overcrowding and substandard housing—single-
family apartments were subdivided into “kitchenettes”—there was nowhere for black
residents to go but south, toward Watts. Other parts of the city were governed by
restrictive covenants, “legal language for deeds and leases…that required property be
sold or rented only to members of the ‘Caucasian’ race” (260). These covenants were
challenged in 1919 in Los Angeles Investment Co. v. Gary, but the California Supreme
Court found that a restrictive covenant that prevented someone from moving into a house
22

was valid, even if one that forbade someone to buy a house was not. So, nonwhites
“could buy houses anywhere in Los Angeles, but they might not be able to move into
them” (260).
The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created by Congress during the
New Deal to provide low-interest mortgages “created a rating system that proved
disastrous for nonwhite neighborhoods.” Cities were divided into four categories, with a
color corresponding to each grade. A, the highest grade, was green, while D, the lowest,
was red. Nonwhite neighborhoods rarely received As, and “[black] neighborhoods almost
always received a grade of D and a the color red. While the HOLC would sometimes
make loans in “redlined” neighborhoods, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA),
which was created in 1934 to provide insurance to banks that lent to developers so that
the banks could never lose money, even on defaulted loans, never approved them
(Stevens 261). So African-Americans hardly benefited from a surge in homebuilding
during the war, with “only 942 of 51,000 housing units constructed in Los Angeles
between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and 1 January 1945…open to blacks (Leonard
313). Los Angeles neighborhoods were thus deeply segregated. Keith Wilhite
characterizes the city’s development as “the geographic inevitability of a suburban-style
investment in the ideologies of privatization and racial segregation” (121). Even if the
pattern changed over time, with whites moving from the east and Pasadena westward,
Jews moving from Boyle Heights west down Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards, Mexican
Americans moving into the eastern neighborhoods vacated by Jews, African Americans
taking over for removed Japanese Americans, and the Chinese creating a new Chinatown
23

to replace the one destroyed by Union Station, built in 1939, the city was carved into
clear districts.
Of course, the boundaries of these districts were not impermeable. Thomas
Pynchon, writing in 1966 after the Watts Rebellion, may have considered the
psychological barriers that prevented whites from “[leaving] at the Imperial Highway exit
for a change, [going] east instead of west only a few blocks, and [taking] a look at Watts”
too high, either because of will or habit, to cross, but in the forties, when populations
were still in flux—from immigration as well as forced removal and internment—
opportunities for contact, and the risks those entailed, were perhaps less rare (Pynchon
np). This was most clearly true for the working class, for “those who could not afford the
economic exclusivity of racially segregated suburbs encountered a terrain of fluid
boundaries in which border transgressions occurred on sidewalks and streetcars as part of
the rhythm of day-to-day living” (Wilhite 122). These “transgressions” were, often
enough, violent. The most conspicuous example was the so-called Zoot Suit Riot of June
1943, where white naval and marine servicemen stationed throughout the city marched en
masse into black and Mexican neighborhoods and assaulted Zoot-wearing youths,
stripping them of their clothes (Pagan 223). The riots lasted five days, and stopped not
because of police intervention—the Los Angeles police frequently arrested the Mexican
youths who had just been beaten, allegedly for their own protection—but because
commanding officers stationed in L.A. realized they had to rein in their men. The riots
had many catalysts, including anti-Mexican sentiment stirred up the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon
24

Murder,
2
but the primary one was the “routine contact” between white servicemen and
non-white residents. Wilhite characterizes the violence as enabled “by the uneasy borders
between racially, ethnically, and economically segregated neighborhoods” (122). That is
to say, the cleavage that characterizes Los Angeles’s urban geography, where people are
simultaneously fused together and broken apart, resolved itself in open conflict. It is as
though the very incommensurability of that word’s multiple meaning were reified in
violence.
The construction of the National Reserve Armory in Chavez Ravine, north of
downtown, in 1940 brought white sailors and marines into nonwhite neighborhoods.
According to Eduardo Obregon Pagan, “The armory…looked every bit the frontier
outpost standing watch over the surrounding enclaves of the local population” (233). The
proximity heightened dramatic differences in both economic status and culture. Zoot suits
were not only countercultural; they were also considered unpatriotic because they
required cloth in excess of what war rations allowed (Boris 90). In “Zoot Riots are Race
Riots,” published in The Crisis in 1943, Chester Himes wryly comments on the clash of
values, realized through a clash of style, when he suggests that to young Mexican
women, “Maybe a uniform looks more impressive than a Zoot suit” (222). For Himes,
this suggests the riots were not only a matter of race—though race certainly matters, as
indicated by both the title of his essay, and by Himes’s final, bleak line: “But the outcome
is that the South has won Los Angeles”—but also of masculinity, of white soldiers
feeling entitled to any and all women, and Mexican men feeling their claim on Mexican
women threatened (225). Himes describes an encounter on a “Red car coming from

2
See Pagan and Stevens.
25

Watts.” There, Drunken white sailors “[boasted] of how they had whipped the Japs.”
Upon seeing a young Mexican couple, one of the sailors yelled, “‘Boy, did those native
gals go fuh us. Boy, uh white man can git any gal he wants” (222). While the young man
leaves the car, avoiding a confrontation, for Himes, this event is emblematic of the way
contact between whites and Mexicans led to violence.
While the urban geography of Los Angeles created certain points of contact and
conflict, or what I am calling cleavage, along borders that were both clearly demarcated
but also readily broached, the exigencies of the war economy created others. Specifically,
the ship and airplane factories that supported the bulk of the area’s industrial workers
brought into close proximity people who were not accustomed to mixing on the job. A
workforce that had been primarily white and male had to adjust itself to women and
nonwhites. The adjustment was, of course, not easy. For Hazel V. Carby, commenting
specifically on If He Hollers Let Him Go, “The spatial organization of…work sites,
categorized by racial and ethnic division, intensifies and concentrates racist hatred”
(24).According to Eileen Boris, the conflicts between white and black workers broke
down along the rather predictable line of intergender contact. Her essay, an “analysis of
confrontations sparked by bodily closeness on shopfloors, streetcars, and other public
spaces” subtitled “Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II,” points out that, in
addition to “[challenging] women’s and men’s proper places,” the entry of women and
nonwhites into the industrial workforce sparked fears of rape and miscegenation.
Obviously, the primary anxiety concerned the proximity of black men and white women.
The presence of women in factories threatened the masculine identities of the male
26

workers, who were accustomed to regarding the workplace as male. The mixing of
genders, though, also turned the workplace into a more overtly social space where the
proximity of men and women, blacks and whites, had the potential to lead to
“compromising” or “dangerous” situations for white women. Work spaces were never
asocial, of course, but whereas before interactions were largely confined to the
homosocial bonding among men, the introduction of women, and the concurrent
possibility of creating heterosexual relationships, either socially accepted ones among
people of the same race, or socially condemned ones across racial lines, created special
anxieties.
3
According to Boris, “A Los Angeles ship fitter recorded a conversation with
his AFL representative who justified a ‘Negro Auxiliary’ [union] by reminding him, ‘Our
unions give social affairs. You wouldn't want one of 'em dancing with your wife, would
you’” (87). Though it is clearly the mixing of races and genders that is of primary
concern, with “equal opportunity and ‘social mingling’ [merging] into each other,” the
conflation of work space and social space threatened to accelerate equalization, which, by
ending segregation, would have threatened the integrity of the “natural order” of race in
America (84).
“Lunching at the Ritzmore,” a story Himes published soon after he arrived in Los
Angeles, is a brief and bitterly sarcastic satire on racism in the city. The plot concerns a
bet between two men, a University of Southern California student from Vermont and a
“drifter from Chicago,” on whether “Negroes were discriminated against at all.” The
student believes they are not, while the drifter, who wonders whether the student is

3
Of course, the introduction of black male workers threatened to upset white male homosociality at work.
The “ideas” that white men had of how they wanted to work would be compromised by the presence of
black men, who would, apparently have different “ideas” (Boris 86)
27

kidding or “just plain dumb,” suggests a “colored fellow” nearby would know “whether
he’s being discriminated against or not” (17). The student and the drifter decide to wager
lunch on whether the “colored fellow” would be served in a downtown restaurant. The
difficulty quickly becomes finding a suitable test case. As the African-American man
points out, restaurants downtown “are used to seeing colored people…It ain’t like if it
was somewhere on the West Side where they ain’t used to seeing them.” This is
important because if he goes with the student and the drifter, both white men into a
restaurant downtown, they will likely serve him, which will lead the student and drifter to
believe African-Americans are served all over the city. “And I know they ain’t,” he says
(19). Before the men settle on the Ritzmore, “swankiest of West Coast hotels,” they
wander around downtown, and gather in their wake a “ragged procession of gaunt,
unshaven, unwashed humanity” numbering nearly a thousand (20). This crowd watches
from outside as the three men go into the restaurant at the Ritzmore. The story ends when
the African-American is served at the Ritzmore (he and the student and drifter all have
apple pie), “[and] it was thus proved by the gentlemen of Pershing Square that no
discrimination exists in the beautiful city of Los Angeles.” But the drifter is short of cash,
and so the student has “to pay off a bet which he [has] won” (21).
Though dripping with irony, this story is nonetheless a serious treatment of not
only race in Los Angeles, but also of the value of unified group action in effecting
political and social change. It is clear that the African-American man (not to mention the
drifter) would not have been served if not for the men marching behind them. A police
officer, who accuses them of “Starting a riot, eh! Communist rally, eh!” is powerless to
28

stop the crowd because “he could not hinder them from going to lunch” (19). De jure
segregation, of course, did just this. And, while the skeptical student could stand for any
white person in America, it is clear that Los Angeles could not stand for any city in
America. Himes’s characterization of it is detailed and specific, and it is worth quoting at
length. The story begins, “If you have ever been to the beautiful city of Los Angeles, you
will know that Pershing Square, a palm-shaded spot in the center of downtown, is the
mecca of the motley.” It continues:
Here, a short walk up from ‘Skid Row,’ on the green-painted benches flanking the
crisscrossing sidewalks, is haven for men of all races, all creeds, all nationalities,
and of all stages of deterioration—drifters and hopheads and tbs’ and beggars and
bums and bindle-stiffs and big sisters, clipped and clippers, fraternizing with the
tired business men from nearby offices, with students from various universities,
with the strutting Filipinos, the sharp-cat Mexican youths in their ultra drapes,
with the colored guys from out South Central way. (16)

And, a paragraph later:

Along the Hill Street side buses going west line up one behind the other to take
you out to Wilshire, to Beverly Hills, to Hollywood, to Santa Monica, to
Westwood, to the Valley; and the red cars and the yellow cars fill the street with
clatter and clang. On the Fifth Street side a pale pink skyscraper overlooks a
lesser structure of aquamarine, southern California architecture on the pastel side;
and along Sixth Street there are various shops and perhaps an office building
which you would not notice unless you had business there. (16)

In Pershing Square all kinds of men come together, and there are all kinds of ways of
taking them elsewhere—though, as the young African-American man points out, some of
these men are only welcome in the West Side as “domestic workers” (19). Everyone can
gather in the square, everyone comes from somewhere else. They cannot all go the same
places, though, and not all meetings in the square are peaceful: “here the hunters relax
29

and the hunted keep vigil. It is here you will find your man, for a game of pool, for a
game of murder” (17).
I turn now to the novels, where the historical changes and cultural tensions I have
discussed in this section manifest themselves in Himes’s works of “bitter” protest (The
Qualify of Hurt 75). Here Himes dramatizes a struggle for personal integrity and
unification in a place that is both defined and constituted by cleavage and rupture. The
Los Angeles of If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade is not the city rendered
with the caustic irony in “Lunching at the Ritzmore,” as “the beautiful city of Los
Angeles.” While the sarcasm of that story is unmistakable, Himes dispenses with it in his
longer works, leaving us with violent and naturalistic (not to mention heavily
autobiographical) accounts of life in a city that is hell-bent on destruction.

The City and the Self
If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade have, of course, been discussed
specifically in terms of their deployment of Los Angeles as both setting and problem. In
the revised edition of Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Original Essays, David
Fine includes an essay on Himes, Robert B. Skinner’s “Streets of Fear: The Los Angeles
Novels of Chester Himes.” In his more recent book, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in
Fiction, Fine includes Himes, along with Fante, Mosley, Charles Bukowski, along with,
briefly, Danny Santiago, Ron Arias, and Oscar Zeta Acosta in “Down and Out in Los
Angeles: From Bunker Hill to the Barrio.” Fine says “Chester Himes offered the most
painful witness to the migration of blacks into wartime Los Angeles to work in the
30

defense industry” (196). This is true enough, though it tells only a limited part of the
story. More recent essays by Keith Wilhite, Lynn M. Itagaki, and Hazel V. Carby, among
others, have discussed Chester Himes’s Los Angeles in more detail than the constraints of
Fine’s book allowed. Carby’s claim that “Los Angeles enables Himes to represent how
racialization and citizenship coalesce, accumulate, concentrate, intensify, and, ultimately,
penetrate through the skin to the body of Robert Jones, arguably the most localized site of
all” is apposite (25).
Though mentioned only briefly in City of Quartz, Himes receives high praise
from Mike Davis for constructing “a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic
dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine.” For Davis, Himes paints a “Dostoyevskian
portrait of Los Angeles” that achieves particularly poignancy for its noir qualities.
Though he does not discuss Himes’s relationship to noir in detail, Davis declares Himes’s
offerings to the genre “as well-crafted as anything by Cain or Chandler” (43). In this way,
Davis speaks to another critical conversation about Himes involving Sean McCann,
Christopher Breu, and Justus Nieland, and others: the author’s place in the noir and
hardboiled fiction traditions, as well as his use and appropriation of those genre’s
conventions. Hardboiled writing influenced Himes from the beginning of his career, and
not only, as is sometimes thought, in his later Harlem novels.
4
Himes read Black Mask
while in prison, and was particularly impressed by the work of Dashiell Hammett, and he
thought he could “do them just as well” (Oakes 20). Though Chandler did not influence
him early on, Himes would later express a significant preference for Hammett over

4
In Chester Himes, Gilbert H. Muller focuses only on the research into detective fiction Himes did at his
French editor, Marcel Duhamel’s, urging so that Himes could contribute to Duhamel’s “Série Noir.”
31

Chandler: “I didn’t think Chandler was in the same class with Dashiell Hammett” (Fabre
85). While Chandler’s “imagery and phraseology impressed [him] greatly,” Himes points
out he “always felt his essential character, his detective Philip Marlowe, was asinine”
(Bandler 109).
Set in 1944, If He Hollers Let Him Go is the story of five days in the life of Bob
Jones, an African-American leaderman at Atlas Shipyards. In these five days Bob suffers
a series of unjust misfortunes that culminate in his being arrested, brutally beaten by
police, and then punitively enlisted in the army, where, it is suggested, Bob will be torn
apart either by bullets or by the army itself, for “[a]s long as the army is Jim Crowed a
Negro who fights in it is fighting against himself” (121). Bob’s decline begins when he is
demoted from leaderman to mechanic after a confrontation at work in which he calls
Madge Perkins, a white “peroxide blonde with a large-featured, overly made-up face,”
who looks “thirty and well sexed, rife but not quite rotten,” a “cracker bitch.” (19, 27).
He only says this after she tells him, “I ain’t gonna work with no nigger!” Then, during a
dice game he is knocked out by a white man, Johnny Stoddart. Desperate, Bob plans to
kill Stoddart, but decides against it at the last minute, believing it “made all the
difference” that he “had a peckerwood’s life in the palm of [his] hand” (45). Instead,
things only deteriorate further as Bob fights constantly with Alice Harrison, his light-
skinned girlfriend from the middle-class black West Side, whose accomodationist and
assimilationist politics disgust Bob. He is finally caught in a ship’s cabin with Madge,
who maliciously frames him for rape. Throughout, Bob’s mental state swings from
intense fear and hatred to the depressing realization that “Bob, there never was a nigger
32

who could beat it” and “unless I stopped hating white folks and learned to take them as
they came, I couldn’t live in America, much less expect to accomplish anything in it”
(150).
Each of Bob’s days begins with a vividly rendered dream. These dreams function
not only as a particularly realistic and racially inflected adaptation of the common trope
in Los Angeles fiction of the “dream-come-true that turns nightmare,” where we
specifically see “the lure of the West as an unfulfilled dream for blacks,” (Fine 98,
Glasrad 394). They also clearly reinforce the increasing absurdity and cruelty of Bob’s
life. As James Lundquist points out, the dreams “[underscore] the resemblance between
the nightmares Bob suffers through each night and the nightmare world he wakes up to
each day” (34). In other words, Bob’s life comes to look a lot like his violent, terrifying
dreams, and vice versa. While it is tempting to follow Lundquist further and view the
similarity between Bob’s dreams and his reality as evidence that Bob is “not quite certain
about where he is and which is real,” it is more accurate to say, as Christopher Breu does,
that Bob does not conflate the two, but instead emphasizes their differences (Lundquist
34, Breu 776). Likewise, Gilbert Muller’s claim that Bob’s dreams “define his
relationship to an equally nightmarish culture” misses the mark in suggesting that dreams
and reality are somehow equivalent, or that dreams can entail reality (21).
Himes uses the resemblance between Bob’s dreams and his real life in a way that
suggests the concept of cleaving I read not only in Himes’s fiction, but in the changes
facing Los Angeles in the 1940s. Insofar as Bob’s dreams resemble his real life, they are
clearly not his life. We are never surprised to find that Bob is dreaming: each begins with
33

“I dreamed” and ends with “I woke up,” clearly setting off the narration of his dreams
from the narration of his life. The relationship between the two is not uncanny, where
they are so similar that their differences are disturbing. Rather, dreams and reality are two
distinct realms that come together in Bob’s body and consciousness.
5
That is, Bob is the
uneasy fault line between the two. This position as the point of contact between a
nightmarish reality and a realistic dream world is uncomfortable, to say the least. Bob’s
body responds violently when he awakes, as if the very experience of being on the
borderline between dream and reality were painful:
I kept my eyes shut tight. But I began feeling scared in spite of hiding from the
day. It came alone with consciousness. It came into my head first, somewhere
back of my closed eyes, moved slowly underneath my skull to the base of my
brain, cold and hollow. It seeped down my spine, into my arms, spread through
my groin with an almost sexual torture, settled in my stomach like butterfly
wings. For a moment I felt torn all loose inside, shriveled, paralyzed, as if after a
while I’d have to get up and die. (2)

It is fear that moves through Bob’s body, breaking him apart, though he points out
“Every day now I’d been waking up that way, ever since the war began” (3). Here, and
“every day” prior, it is at the moment of waking, when dreams and waking are at their
most proximate, that Bob’s body erupts in fear.
It is not the case, of course, that the cleaving of dream and reality causes Bob’s
fear or that it is in any way part of a problem for Bob to overcome. It is, rather, part of a
thematic maneuver Himes makes to illustrate how the novel is structured around fault
lines and cleavages like this, and how these faults are liable to erupt. Further, Himes
makes it clear that this cleaving of dream and reality, and the fear it creates is caused by

5
Keith Wilhite makes a similar suggestion when he points out “We are simultaneously in the private room
where Jones is sleeping…and in the shared public space of his dream” (133).
34

Bob’s being in Los Angeles. The “white folks’ pressure” that Bob refers to on occasion
behaves like seismic pressure in Bob, so that he is, as David Fine puts it, “almost
psychotically torn apart by the hatred and hostility [he faces] daily [my italics]” (197). I
emphasize the word “almost” because “psychotically” refers to breaking from reality, and
while Bob’s fear is extreme in the way that “psychotic” is sometimes colloquially used,
he does not break with reality; reality breaks him.
Immediately after Bob describes this violent experience at the liminal space
between dreams and waking, he shifts to discussing his arrival in Los Angeles. Though
the racial panic sparked by the attack on Pearl Harbor certainly played a part in the
deterioration of Bob’s mental and emotional state, simply moving west to Los Angeles
causes Bob to lose his sense of a whole, integrated self. “When I came out to Los
Angeles in the fall of ’41 I felt fine about everything. Taller than the average man, six
feet two, broad-shouldered, and conceited, I hadn’t a worry.” Indeed, initially, Bob was
so sure of himself, of his wholeness, he felt he could not only dominate other men, but
break them apart. “If it had come down to a point where I had to hit a paddy I’d have hit
him without any thought. I’d have busted him wide open because he was a paddy and
needed busting” (3). While before Bob had the ability to effect ruptures in others, now his
own body and consciousness are the agents of his own rupturing. “Race was a handicap,
sure, [he’d] reasoned.” In Cleveland, which “wasn’t the land of the free or the home of
the brave either,” segregation and prejudice had “never really gotten [him] down.” Also
in Cleveland Bob had been able to believe he could lash out at the racist society, that he
could “hang somebody sure as hell” if whites were continually hired ahead of him. While
35

he believed he could find a better life in Los Angeles, Bob felt confident and secure in
Cleveland despite the racism. Then, as he puts it, “They shook that in Los Angeles” (3).
In fact, in order to emphasize the precise effect the city has on him, he brackets a
paragraph on the specific qualities of the racism he experiences in Los Angeles with the
verb “shook.” What hurt him so much about the racism in Los Angeles was not its mere
presence, or the fact that workplaces were segregated. Rather, it was the condescending
and dehumanizing attitude of whites toward his desire to be employed. “They just looked
so goddamned startled that I’d even asked. As if some friendly dog had come in through
the door and said, ‘I can talk.’ It shook me” (3). The proximity of “shook” and “Los
Angeles” rather strongly suggests the kind of seismic activity for which the region has
long been known. There is no earthquake represented in Himes’s novel, as there is in, for
instance, John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939), where the 1933 Long Beach earthquake
makes an appearance, and it would be inaccurate to classify If He Hollers Let Him Go as
disaster fiction, where the city is annihilated by some overwhelming force. In Himes,
there is merely the suggestion of seismic activity, and, even if subtle, it is consistent with
Bob’s own language of the disintegration he experiences and even imagines inflicting on
others.
This language of disintegration is established early on, and it appears again and
again, sometimes in incidental ways, such as when Bob refers to Alice’s brief lesbian
dalliance as “the breakout,” and sometimes violently, with Bob’s describing himself as
bursting or breaking apart. These become particularly frequent toward the end of the
novel. On the drive to work after Alice has gone out with a white man, he says “I felt as
36

fragile as overheated glass; one rough touch and I’d burst into a thousand pieces” (102).
As he roams around the ship, hoping to find Madge so he can talk to her, Bob says he
feels “as if a thousand things were tearing at me, pulling at me” (160). “My whole body
got rigid and my head swelled as if it would explode. My eyes felt as if they were five
times their natural size; as if they were bursting in their sockets” (180). When the men
burst into the ship’s cabin where Bob is trapped with Madge and attack him, he says, “I
didn’t feel the blow; just the explosion starting at a point underneath my skull and filling
my head with a great flaming roar. And then what seemed like falling a million miles
through space and hitting something hard enough to splatter into pieces” (182). When he
is on what he realizes is a futile attempt at escape from the police he states that his mind
has “burst wide open” (194). In his final dream, where he imagines he kills Johnny
Stoddart, he says, “all of me felt swollen and bursting with joy as if I’d hit a hundred-
thousand-dollar jackpot” (198). This last instance is sadly ironic. The incongruity
between Bob’s feeling of joy and its expression as bursting (a familiar and colloquial
phrase) highlights the fatal incongruity of the various elements put into contact. We see
not only a sharp distinction between dream and reality, but also a clear manifestation of
the potency and inescapability of Los Angeles’s violence. Even when he is dreaming, and
even when he is happy, he still bursts. It is as though, rather than the victim of destruction
by an outside force, Los Angeles is, in If He Hollers Let Him Go, the force of
destruction.
6

6
Hazel V. Carby echoes this sentiment in “Figuring the Future in Los(t) Angeles,” when she says, “The
forces of destruction permeate every page of If He Hollers, but it is not the city’s infrastructure that is under
siege. Rather, it is the physical, political, and psychological well-being of Los Angeles’ minority residents
that is being attacked at each and every turn” (23).
37

In “Transgressing Race and Community in Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him
Go,” Lynn M. Itagaki makes a similar point about the novel’s invocation of disaster when
she refers to Bob’s fear of “personal racial apocalypse.” Drawing on Bob’s status as a
migrant, as well as Himes’s representation of Los Angeles’s demographic changes
resulting from the internment of Japanese Americans and the Zoot Suit Riot, Itagaki
shows how “wartime racism and classism become coded onto both the spatial geography
of Los Angeles and the racialized body of Bob himself” (66). Crucial to Itagaki’s
argument are the genre of the “fugitive migrant” novel and the concept of
“transgression,” the latter of which she adapts from Foucault. Itagaki’s understanding of
“fugitive migrant” novel comes from Lawrence Rogers, who claims it is a variation on
the fugitive slave narrative that critiques “ascent as a mechanism to achieve racial and
cultural advancement,” by undermining the idea that the North represented a kind of
promised land for escaped slaves (Rogers qtd. Itagaki 66). “Moving up in the world,”
whether geographically by moving from the South to the North, or by education and hard
work, only maintains the racial and cultural status quo.
According to Itagaki, we can read Himes’s texts as using “transgression” to
modify the fugitive migrant novel. Bob’s body is “the transgressor that manifests limits
as it attempts to erase them” (66). Transgression, in this sense, is the crossing and re-
crossing of limits as a way to create and realize (as in make real) those limits. This entails
a kind of self-reification for the transgressor. Itagaki characterizes the movement back
and forth across limits as a “rupture that allows the limit to incorporate what has been
38

previously excluded” (67). In If He Hollers Los Angeles is the ground against which
transgression occurs:
This transgression can be perceived metaphorically as the movement across
threatening geographical divisions of Los Angeles. In the transgression of limits,
however, Bob is silenced by his inability to articulate his location, a position that
excludes neither location but also belongs to neither. (67)

Whatever self-reifying limits Bob may realize in his transgressions of Los Angeles’s
neighborhoods are undermined by the repression of identity Bob always already
experiences as a result of racism. Though early in the novel Bob attempts to claim a kind
of stable subject position through his role as a worker—“Something about my working
clothes made me feel, rugged, bigger than the average citizen, stronger than a white-
collar worker—stronger even than an exectutive”—this is undermined soon after he
crosses the various boundaries of the city and reaches the Atlas Shipyard, where his
status as a black man undoes any kind of integrity his being a worker might maintain.
7

Itagaki concludes her essay with the observation that, by the end of the novel,
when he has been brutally beaten by police, Bob comes to represent “the multiple
locations and perspectives of the silenced minorities in Los Angeles,” and, indeed
America (75). He is broken into these various perspectives. Implicit in her argument is
that the conceptual arc of the narrative of If He Hollers Let Him Go moves from
transgression to disintegration. Though I think Itagaki is quite right about Bob’s ultimate
disintegration, as well as the importance of the divided geography of Los Angeles in this
disintegration, she overstates the importance of a strictly Foucauldian understanding of
transgression, as well as the fugitive migrant genre. Insofar as Bob has moved to Los

7
We might think here of McCann’s claim that Himes, in his early work, attempted to subsume racial
division under the aegis of class solidarity.
39

Angeles for work he is of course, strictly speaking, a migrant. Itagaki, though, wants
“migrant” to suggest a kind of homelessness or rootlessness. “Bob continually migrates
just as he constantly moves, transversing the different segregated spaces of Los Angeles:
the white Westside, the Harrisons’ elite black Westside (28
th
and Western) and the seedy
Southside of Central Avenue and downtown.” (67).
This is true enough, though even if Bob does not entirely belong to any of these
communities, and even though part of the reason for this is the inescapable loss that
comes from being a black man in a racist city, it is also the case that he almost fits in all
of these communities. His critical attitude toward the unscrupulous assimilationist views
of those on the black Westside makes him unsuitable for that community, though his
status as an educated man—he has at least two years of college—could give him access.
He is a working man, which would allow him to fit in the Southside (which is in fact
where he lives) but his education, as well as his “rich and light and almost white”
girlfriend exclude him (47). And his status as a man, with all the privileges that
masculinity entails, gives him access to the white world, as demonstrated by two pleasant
chance encounters he has with white men. The first is when he shares a table with “a big
rawboned old-timer,” and over steaks and martinis the two complain about marriage and
work. The second, which occurs a page later, occurs when he gives a ride to two young
white soldiers, where he muses, “I liked those two white kids; they were white, but as my
aunt Fanny used to say they couldn’t help that” (41). Of course, his blackness ultimately
makes entry into the white world impossible, as we see when he takes Alice to dinner at
“the best hotel in town.” Though they are seated and served (albeit only after Bob points
40

out that he made a reservation by phone, when his race was hidden) and treated with
some measure of respect, particularly by the waiter and valet, he and Alice cannot free
themselves from the patronizing gaze of the rich white crowd. The point is that it is
perhaps not Bob’s rootlessness or homelessness that is the problem—the problem, that is,
beneath the greater problem of white supremacy—as much as the fact that he has one
root in each community, as it were, or one foot in the door of each home, but another
elsewhere. Los Angeles’s segregated communities, in varying ways, come together in
Bob. He is the fault line and the point of contact.
This is one aspect of Bob’s relationship to Los Angeles’s segregated geography,
at any rate. The place he holds between these various communities, a kind of paradoxical
insecure stability, is similar to the one he holds as the point of contact between dream and
reality. Another aspect of Los Angeles’s segregated geography is described well in Keith
Wilhite’s “Mapping Black and Brown L.A.: Zoot Suit Riots as Spatial Subtext in If He
Hollers Let Him Go.” Here Wilhite conceives of “the city’s racial and ethnic
borderlands,” frontier-like spaces where “border negotiations and transgressions…occur
in ambiguous spaces, such as barrooms, sidewalks and, especially, streetcars” (132, 125).
Wilhite draws on the border transgressions specific to the Zoot Suit Riot. These frontiers
and borderlands are tense spaces where various oppressed groups—African Americans,
Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans—“seek a sense of an authentic American
identity inextricably tied to a sense of place,” but under the watchful eye of white
supremacy (138). Wilhite describes the tensions that inhere in this kind of urban
geography:
41

What Jones’ narration “maps” for the reader, then, is a metro-region that seems
always on the verge of revolution, and we are meant to see that threat of violence
as inseparable from the entrenched fluidity of Los Angeles’ segregated
geographies. That is to say, Jones is free to cross boundaries and move through
public spaces, but only in a way that calcifies his conspicuous presence as a threat
to the tenuous equilibrium of racial tension held in check by the segregated
patterns of development. (139)

The stakes are higher here than in Itagaki’s formulation based upon migrancy and
transgression. While the city still forces Jones to encounter the limits of his self—for
Wilhite, borrowing Himes’s term, the “‘Nigger limit’ of the identity he hopes to trump
through the sheer physicality of “weight, height, and gender””—these limits function
entirely as barriers, as boundaries that must be negotiated, and usually violently. We can
see in Wilhite an acknowledgement of the dangers that inhere in construction of these
differential spaces, both for Bob Jones as an individual, and for the communities that
constitute them. The danger is eruption into civic violence.
Just as there are no earthquakes in If He Hollers, there are no riots. Still, just as
the aftershock of the Zoot Suit Riot lingers with Bob, the possibility of another violent
outburst looms constantly. At the beginning of the novel’s second day, after he dreams
he’s being beaten by “two poor peckerwoods in overalls” while the patronizing white
president of the shipyard and some sycophantic African Americans watch, Bob goes to
the Rust Room, a bar and restaurant on First and San Pedro in the heart of Little Tokyo.
8

Here Bob drinks and thinks of the chances he has to be a hero, the “thousand chances
every day…a thousand coming up tomorrow. If I could just hang on to one and say, ‘This
is it!’ And go out blowing up the white folks like that cat did the Nazis [in a movie called
A Guy Named Joe]” (74). When two white soldiers and a white woman enter the bar,

8
Bob calls the neighborhood “Little Tokyo,” though it was, by 1944, known as Bronzeville. See Stevens.
42

“every eye in the room [is] on them,” and the scene changes from Bob’s self-pitying
contemplations and fantasies of violence, to a tense standoff when the sailors attempt to
leave without the woman. One of the sailors turns “a white look on the manager,” and it
seems, for a moment, that things could turn violent. “If the boy got hurt,” or if something
happened to the white woman, “there wouldn’t be any way at all to stop a riot—the white
GIs would swarm into Little Tokyo like they did into the Mexican districts during the
zoot suit riots.” Bob is ultimately disappointed when nothing happens because “…in
Little Tokyo [the soldiers] would have to kill and be killed, for those spooks down there
were some really rugged cats; the saying was they wouldn’t drink a white cow’s milk.”
Bob wants “it to come and get it over with” (77). This seems to anticipate the
revolutionary rhetoric he will espouse in his argument in the Harrisons’ home with
Alice’s white friend Leighton, where Bob says, “If we had a revolution it’s force you to
act, either for us or against us—personally, I wouldn’t give a goddamn which way.” in
response to Leighton’s question “What if your revolution failed?” Bob says, “That’d be
all right, too. At least we’d know where we stood” (89).
Of course, as Himes points out in his 1944 essay “Negro Martyrs are Needed”
“Riots are not revolutions” (233). While “revolutions are the renunciation of the existing
evils of the government by the governed, riots “are tumultuous disturbances of the public
peace by unlawful assemblies of three or more persons in the execution of private
objects” (233). Riots, in fact, are reactionary, a “step backward.” For Bob, riot and
revolution overlap, suggesting not only that Bob, “with all the pressure on [him],” has no
clear idea of the kind of change he’d like to see—other than, of course, for it to no longer
43

be “the white folks’ world,” where “they resented [him] just standing in it” (78, 79).
More to the point is that for Bob revolution in Himes’s own terms is impossible. This
means, for one thing, that Bob is not the kind of Negro martyr Himes envisions. There
are a variety of reasons for this, many having to do with Bob’s material circumstances:
whatever else Bob might be, he is not “a Negro leader…who is well-known to Negro and
White Americans alike and who cannot be ignored by either white or Negro media of
news distribution” (234). Bob does not want to be a martyr, of course; he only wants to
be “a man, defined by Webster as a male human being.” He goes on:
That’s all I’d ever wanted—just to be accepted as a man—without ambition,
without distinction, either of race, creed, or color; just a simple Joe walking down
an American street, going my simple way, without any other identifying
characteristics but weight, height, and gender. (153)

The overlap of riot and revolution in Bob’s mind also means he cannot be just a man,
“walking down an American street.” American streets, or, specifically, Los Angeles’s
streets, are hostile to Bob. That he wants them to erupt into riot is like his desire to kill
Johnny Stoddart or rape Madge: a violent attempt to overpower and control what has hurt
him. And while the novel shows us that Bob could kill Johnny and rape Madge, but, for
various reasons (among them the obvious realization that killing and raping would only
cause more trouble for him) decides not to do either, he is powerless against the streets.
In the novel the streets represent Los Angeles’s unique destructive tendency. As Robert
B. Skinner says in the aptly titled “Streets of Fear,” in Himes’s Los Angeles “corruption
and violence [are] bubbling just under the surface” (228). The streets are where this
bubbling violence reaches the surface.
44

The novel is full of references to the street, both as a place and as a kind of
concept, or an index of the freedom that would come with living in a non-racist society.
An example of the latter is the passage above, where Bob only wants to be able to walk
down the street as a man rather than as a racialized body. In his many efforts to explain
his behavior and anxieties to Alice, who is shielded from the realities of Bob’s painful
life by her light skin, middle-class family, and naïve belief in progress through
assimilation, Bob refers again and again to walking down the street.
9
When Bob and
Alice attempt to talk, midway through the novel, about their previous night’s date gone
awry, in which Bob was revolted to find Alice kissing another woman, he tells her, “You
wanna know why I came here tonight?...I came here because I had to. Because I thought
you were my girl and I didn’t have no other goddamned place to go…I had to get off the
goddamned streets out of the goddamned peckerwoods’ eyes before I killed some son of
a bitch and went to the chair” (94). Bob comes to Alice’s house for refuge, a hiding place,
and ostensibly to keep himself from behaving violently. It is clear by this point, though,
that whenever Bob talks of committing a violent act he is, first, unlikely to follow
through, and second, not really speaking about what he would like to do, but speaking
about violence he fears will be inflicted upon him. Any desire he feels to kill a white man
on the street is a projection of his inner fear of that act of violence reified and turned
against himself. Later in the same conversation Bob pleads with Alice to listen to him so,
he says, that he can tell her

9
Alice’s refusal to help Bob escape from the police, who have beaten and arrested him on a false murder
charge, justified by her bizarre belief that “A person just can’t charge you with a crime you haven’t
committed” pushes naivety almost to the point of surrealism or cruelty. “This is the state of California—I
was born here,” Alice says, convinced that the rule of law exists there, if nowhere else (193). Bob and the
reader, of course, know otherwise.
45

everything I know about myself, about my waking up scared every morning,
about the way I feel toward white people, why I resent them so goddamned
much—resent the things they can do when all they got is color—tell you about
what happens inside of me every time I go out in the street. (96)

When he complains that “the sons of bitches were grinding me to the white meatless nub”
we can see that “what happens inside of him” is the revelation of the white oppression
and violence he has internalized (79). So even if Bob describes an attack from outside,
this passage suggests an eating away from within, so that the appearance of the “white
meatless nub” signifies both what is left of Bob and what has participated in his
destruction.
That whiteness as violence and discipline is both within and without him is
evident from the way Bob renders the experience of walking down the street as a kind of
panoptic threat. The “goddamned peckerwoods’ eyes” refers not only to the literal eyes of
white people, but also to the “rows of white faces on the magazine covers at the
bookstand,” and the “white faces on the marquee billboards” (78). (At this point, Bob is
wandering the streets, pondering whether to go to see Alice.) Whiteness is panoptic, and
Bob not only cannot escape the internalized gaze of whiteness; he also cannot go
anywhere without seeing white faces everywhere. He tells Alice, “Every white person I
come into contact with, every one I have to speak to, even those I pass on the street—
every goddamn one of them has got the power of some kind of control over my own
behavior” (167). Even moments on the street when Bob appreciates the natural beauty of
the Southern California landscape are tinged with the discourse of white supremacy.
Temporarily in a good mood after he decides that Johnny Stoddarts’s living in fear is
satisfaction enough, he notes, “Outside the setting sun slanted from the south with a
46

yellowish, old-gold glow, and the air was warm and fragrant. It was the best part of the
day in Los Angeles; the colors of flowers were more vivid, while the houses were less
starkly white and the red-tiled roofs were weathered maroon” (48). Happiness for Bob
means being able to ignore, if only slightly and temporarily, the fact of the segregated
city, where starkly white houses suggest the restrictive covenants that kept non-whites
confined to less desirable parts of the city. Later, when Bob, again in a good mood, drives
to see Alice, where they will reach a brief reconciliation, with Bob agreeing to return to
college and assimilate to white society, he says, “Traffic was loose on the harbor road,
making driving friendly, but the big Diesel trailers, long as freight cars, hogged the road
in passing.” Conditions are ambivalent; driving is both easy and difficult. This clearly
suggests the fleeting quality of Bob’s good feelings, and the difficulties he will soon face
despite his contentment, rendered at the moment as an inclination to “just squat on the
highway and drive a thousand miles.” He goes on, “The vertical sun had a hard California
brilliance, powder-white and eye-searing” (162). The sun, and with it whiteness, is not
only painful; it is unavoidable. As it sears into his eyes, we see white violence and
surveillance becoming a permanent part of his consciousness, undermining even those
moments that should be happiest. Assimilation is not the answer, this suggests, but also,
there is no answer.
So while whiteness is a ubiquitous panoptic presence, a concept of control and
punishment, there is still the overwhelming presence of real white faces to contend with.
“The sidewalk was heavy with pedestrian traffic, mostly white, a sprinkling of Mexicans,
here and there a colored face. Every second man was in uniform; four out of five women
47

were unescorted.” A clear reference to the tensions that led to the Zoot Suit Riot, this
scene also makes clear the extent to which “colored faces” are simply outnumbered, not
to mention outgunned. The uniformed men are the only ones described as aggressive, and
their aggression is directed at black men who have not gone to war. “The servicemen
were always hostile towards a Jodie, especially a black Jodie in his fine Jodie clothes”
(79). (Jodie refers specifically to a man who sleeps with a serviceman’s wife or girlfriend
while the serviceman is overseas.) The soldiers are bringing the war overseas back to the
streets of Los Angeles.
10

Bob feels white power most acutely and is most vulnerable to its violence when
he walks on the street. In his car things can be slightly different. Bob’s car, “a ’42 Buick
Roadmaster,” is “proof of something to [him] a symbol,” and the thing he fears losing
more than anything else, even his job, after his altercation with Madge (31). Not even
whites in Beverly Hills can buy cars now because of war rationing. In his car, he not only
has the space and freedom to socialize openly with both young white soldiers and his
black coworkers; in his car he can seriously contemplate indulging his desire to commit
violence against whites. He ponders killing Johnny Stoddart as he follows him in his car,
and thinks of raping Madge while he stakes out her building. More concretely, he is able
to frighten white pedestrians. While driving to work early in the novel he catches the
glare of some whites crossing the street, and becomes enraged. “I let out the clutch and
stepped on the gas. Goddamn ‘em, I’ll grind ‘em into the street, I thought. But just before
I hit them something held me. I tamped the brake (13). And then later, when he returns to

10
See Wilhite, Lundquist, and Carby for discussions of how If He Hollers brings the national and the
international, and the theaters of war and domesticity together in Los Angeles.
48

work, demoted, angry, and humiliated, he says, “I was playing a game. Whenever I saw
some white people crossing the street in front of me I stepped on the gas and blew. If they
jumped they could make it; if they didn’t I’d run ‘em down. All of ‘em jumped” (103).
Driving is both a safe social space and a space to indulge in violent fantasies.
11

Still, because the fantasies do not present Bob with a viable alternative to his
situation, they prove unsatisfying. And Bob’s car, while an occasionally pleasant social
space, is also a limited one. It is true as Wilhite astutely points out that, on one hand, “His
car provides him with the closest approximation of agency and private identity in the
novel, allowing him temporarily to transgress the borders of his own racial isolation”
(134). On the other hand, (1) the symbolic value he invests his car with is only a slight
compensation, for being able to drive does not satisfy Bob’s true desire to walk the
streets, and (2) the privacy and agency of his car is not total. Indeed, the car, as a token
designed to draw attention to itself and its driver, “is the instrument of [Bob’s] undoing”
(Wilhite 135). Twice Bob encounters the police while in his car. The first time is when
Alice is caught speeding in Santa Monica in an effort to forget their humiliating date at
the white hotel downtown. An officer tells them to “get back where you belong and stay
there” (64). The second is when Bob, short on gas and money, tries to escape the police

11
Christopher Breu writes in detail about Bob’s violent fantasies, and how they constitute an innovation on
the hard-boiled genre with important ethical implications. For Breu “Himes’ fiction “can be read, in part, as
a desublimation of the cultural fantasies that animate both the hard-boiled genre and the broader fictions of
American culture from which this genre gains much of its vitality and appeal” (770). What this means is
that by having Bob indulge in fantasies of violence, Himes is critiquing the hard-boiled genre’s use of
violence as trope and theme. At the same time, since Bob does not actually act on any of his violent
fantasies, Breu claims the fantasies are cathartic for Bob, and ensure he behaves morally in a ruthlessly
immoral world. This differentiates him from hardboiled heroes, who will engage in multiple acts of
violence under the aegis of fantasy heroism. While Breu’s argument is compelling from the point of view
of the conventions of the hard-boiled genre, it sounds like bad moral philosophy. While it is always better
to fantasize about violence than to act violently, it is difficult to say that someone is morally praiseworthy
for deciding not to satisfy his violent desires.
49

and the false rape charge against him. An officer, ignorant of the fact that Bob is wanted,
pulls him over after he “saw that [he] was a Negro” (195). The car does not provide Bob
with suitable mobility to escape. Rather, as “a liminal space that underscores his
conspicuous and intrusive racial presence within the metro-region,” it ensures he does not
escape (Wilhite 135).
Even if the streets both constitute the fragile and permeable boundaries, or fault
lines, between Los Angeles’s various neighborhoods, as well as represent the space
where the city’s submerged violent tension reaches the surface and where Bob’s fear is
most acute, it remains the case that the place where Madge accuses Bob of rape, as well
the place where Bob is beaten senseless, is not on the street, but at the workplace, in the
cabin of a ship. This highlights the tensions in the workplace exacerbated by the wear
economy I discussed above. Himes is careful to demonstrate that Los Angeles is
undergoing significant and specific changes, and not doing so gracefully. At the same
time, Himes overdetermines Bob’s identification of Madge with the south, and Texas in
particular, in order to emphasize how the newcomers to Los Angeles bring their
geography with them.
12
While one of Bob’s coworkers named Arkansas muses early in
the novel that “Ain’t nobody in here from California,” it is the white southerners whose
influence on the city is strongest, to the point that Himes claims in “Zoot Riots are Race
Riots” that “The South has won Los Angeles.”
Bob refers to Madge as “pure white Texas” (124) and “a no-good slut from
Texas” (126). In his head he implores her to “let Texas rest” (130), and reminds her “This

12
See Laurie Champion and Bruce A. Glasrud’s “Texas as Foil: Racism in Chester Himes’ 1940s
Writings.”
50

ain’t Texas” (147). He comments on her “sleepy Texas voice” (144) and her “flat Texas
voice” (178), and, in a slight variation compares her to a “big overpainted strumpet with
eyes as wild as Oklahoma” (124). In a strange moment of civility between Bob, Madge,
and Madge’s sister-in-law Elsie, they discuss the differences between California and
Texas. Elise muses, “Course it’s different in Texas. The colored folks there like to be by
themselves…Don’t have no trouble and everybody is happy.” Also, “I declare, you
colored folks frum [sic.] California is so sensitive. Colored boys in Texas know better’n
to sit beside a white woman” (132)., In the context of this novel, Texas means violent
racism.
Himes wants to show that anyone who believes California is more civilized is
kidding himself. He uses references to states, particularly Georgia and California, to
make the point that the geography of Los Angeles, which is all but unknown since “ain’t
nobody in here from California,” is overlaid with the geography of the South, so that Los
Angeles becomes a sunny, urban version of the south. Madge threatens to “get [Bob]
lynched right here in California” (146), and warns him “This’ll get you lynched in Texas”
(147). She is referring to Bob’s attempt, by this point half-hearted, unserious, and futile,
to rape her. When in prison Bob thinks, “Well, she got me lynched all right,” he stops
himself short and reasons that since he did not actually rape her, and since he had, in fact,
“been trying to get away from her” that she “couldn’t get away with that,” i.e. making
false accusations against him. Justice would be served; the law would protect him. After
all, he concludes, “This wasn’t Georgia” (184). It soon becomes apparent, though, that
his first conclusion, that Madge had got him lynched, is the accurate one. Bob maintains a
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last moment of self-deluded equanimity when he learns from a guard at Atlas that Madge
has officially sworn out a warrant for him: “I was even kind of amused to think she was
simple enough to think she could get away with that in California” (187). Then he is on
the run, ducking and driving through the streets of Los Angeles, where he compares
himself to a “Negro share-cropper facing a white mob in Georgia” (194). When a guard
tells him he’s “lucky” to be in California because “In my home state we’d have hung
you” it is clear to both Bob and the reader that the difference between Texas, Georgia and
Los Angeles is a matter of degree rather than of kind (186). This is because the South is
one of the communities held in Los Angeles’s cracked, divided structure. It is as if there
were Texas-Georgia-and Oklahoma-shaped pieces in the city, mixed in among Little
Tokyo, the West Side, and the Central Avenue district. A name for this amalgamation,
Bob realizes, is “America,” and “the whole structure of American thought was against
[him]” (187). The uneasy cleavages that structure Los Angeles make it inseparable from
America. As Carby notes Himes “imagined a Los Angeles in which the geography of its
human relations pre-figured and epitomized the future of the urban racial formation of the
U.S.” (23). He would develop this look toward the future of America further in Lonely
Crusade.
Twice as long, vaster in scope, and told from a roving third-person point of view,
Lonely Crusade is very different from If He Hollers Let Him Go. Still there are certain
basic similarities between the books. The setting is still Los Angeles, though now it
is1943 rather than 1944, and the protagonist is still a black factory worker. This time,
though, the protagonist, Lee Gordon, has just accepted a job as a union organizer tasked
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with consolidating the African-American workers at the Comstock Aircraft Corporation
in advance of a National Labor Relations Board vote. Whereas If He Hollers Let Him Go
is an intense and visceral depiction of Bob Jones’s destruction from the crippling fear of
living in a racist city, Lonely Crusade is, among other things, a rambling philosophical
and political discussion. Himes debates the value of unionism, Communism, and
romantic individualism, specifically in terms of which is most conducive to the survival
of a black man in America. The novel is also an at times amusingly overwritten sexual
melodrama in which Lee’s marriage is threatened not only by Lee’s insecurity about his
ability to support his wife, Ruth, but also by the attractions of a white woman, Jackie
Forks. Lee must also resist the temptations of both unscrupulous Communists,
represented by the dangerous and street-savvy black man Luther McGregor, as well as
ruthless nationalistic industrialists, symbolized by the anti-union, anti-Roosevelt,
“American-first-to-hell-with-all-others American” Louis Foster (169). And, on top of all
of this, Lee must confront his own anti-Semitism, which is ostensibly overcome when he
forms a close friendship with the Jewish Communist Abe “Rosie” Rosenberg.
13

James Baldwin points out in “History as Nightmare,” his review of the novel, that
“Lonely Crusade can…be considered an expansion of [If He Hollers]” (3). This is not a
bad way to think of the relationship between the two books, for while If He Hollers
dramatizes the rapid destruction and disintegration of Bob Jones, Lonely Crusade begins
with disintegration and tries to suggest a path toward unity and organized movement into

13
For a discussion of how Himes fails to adequately treat tensions between African Americans and Jews,
and how Lonely Crusade ultimately reproduces the anti-Semitism it attempts to investigate, see Steven J.
Rosen’s “African-American Anti-Semitism and Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade.” Justus Nieland also
discusses the response from Jewish critics to Himes’s representation of Rosie. And Jeffrey Paul Melnick
uses Lonely Crusade as his primary text in “Some Notes on the Erotics of ‘Black-Jewish Relations.’”
53

the future.
14
The novel’s philosophical and political interests, particularly its lengthy
discussions of dialectical materialism and its opposition to romantic individualism,
inform this path. It is Rosie’s role to lecture Lee on the progress of history, the
inevitability of Communism, and the “immemorial movement of matter” and how that is
reflected in the human mind (379). Lee gradually comes to appreciate this point of view,
and as a result discovers how to take committed and cohesive, if also short-lived, action.
Importantly, the novel demonstrates how the streets of Los Angeles are vital to Lee’s
transformation. The streets represent a kind of concretization of history. What Lee slowly
sees is that the city’s construction is the result of certain historical forces, particularly
capitalist production and exploitation. The city is not fixed, however; it can change, and it
is, in fact, changing in the context of the novel. Lee’s learns that he must stop trying to
organize, that is, to use his own individual force to make the world cohere, and instead he
must recognize and embody the progressive change that is inevitably happening. The
novel endorses existential commitment and conviction, and it shows how the city is the
ground from which such commitment can grow.
While it is not quite the case, that “[the] word union appears on almost every page
of the novel,” it is true, as Lundquist points out, that “[the word union] comes to take on a
significance beyond its basic connotations of labor organization. At the start of the book,
Lee himself is disorganized. He has no sense of unity” (53). As in If He Hollers, this lack
of unity is a result of the fear precipitated by living as a black man in an aggressively and
uniquely racist city. Lee’s internal torment is rendered as physical violence. Lying awake

14
The Story, “A Night of New Roses” is a direct sequel to If He Hollers. There the protagonist, just
returned to Los Angeles from the war, wanders, sad and lonely, around a bleakly fog-shrouded city.
54

the night before he is to begin his job with the union, he thinks, “He could see the hostile
faces of the white workers, their hot, hating stares; he could feel their antagonisms hard
as a physical blow; hear their vile asides and abusive epithets with a reality that cut like a
knife” (5). Himes is careful to illustrate that the racism Lee experiences is unique to the
time and place, and particularly intense as a result of Los Angeles’s spatial orientation:
Awareness of his race began leaking into his consciousness. And when he
boarded the streetcar crowded with white Southern warworkers that spring of
1943, being a Negro imposed a sense of handicap that Lee Gordon could not
overcome. He lost his brief happiness in the sea of white faces (4).

Elsewhere, Himes describes Los Angeles’s climate, both in terms of weather and in terms
of culture, as threatening. While Lee drives with Luther McGregor, the hypocritical
Communist, Himes says, “For a time the sun shone dazzlingly, but when they came into
the one-storied, car-tracked monotony that was Los Angeles proper, the sky clouded and
the day grayed” (29-30). Lee recollects a time he and Ruth rented a house from a friendly
white man in City Terrace as among the most terrifying of his life. Lee and Ruth lay
awake at night, imagining every sound they heard signaled white people coming for
them. Himes writes, “Hearing it himself. Hearing it in his mind and in his aching chest
and in his hurting diaphragm. Hearing it in his breathless trepidation, in his waiting for it
to happen. Lying there waiting for the white people to come and do something to him.”
Lee reassures himself that nothing will happen by thinking, “This was Los Angeles,
California, where the police answered a call for help in three minutes, he had told
himself. It was senseless to think anyone was going to bother them. He did not believe it.
But he had feared it” (126). This is clearly bitterly ironic, and will be proven even more
so later in the novel with Lee’s terrible encounters with police. Lee and Ruth’s fear will
55

also be validated later in the novel, when Lee reads “of the growing racial tensions
throughout the city,” examples of which include:
A Negro had cut a white worker’s throat in a dice game another of the aircraft
companies and was being held without bail; and a white woman in a shipyard had
accused a Negro worker of raping her. A group of white sailors had stripped a
Mexican lad of his zoot suit on Main Street before a host of male and female
onlookers. Mistaken for Japanese, a Chinese girl had been slapped on a crowded
streetcar by a white mother whose son had been killed in the Pacific. And down
on the bottom of page thirteen there was a one-line filler, “Negro kills self.
Charles Bolden, known to intimates as ‘Fatso,’ an unemployed diemaker, took his
life this morning by slashing his wrists with a razor.” (207)

The white woman who accuses a Negro of rape refers to the plot of If He Hollers Let Him
Go, suggesting that even if Himes does not represent the racial tensions and pressures the
same way in this novel, the kids of tensions and pressures we saw in the previous novel
still exist and still represent a significant presence in the lives of Lee and the city’s other
African American residents.
And as with If He Hollers, Himes uses streets to draw out the particularity of
racism to Los Angeles, as well as to illustrate how the city is a hostile force. Now,
though, rather than places where the undeniable presence of whiteness brings the tensions
lurking within both Bob and the city itself to the surface, streets are deployed as places
where history manifests itself, suggesting that the city’s past is realized in its
infrastructure. By the end of the novel, when Lee engages for the first time in
existentially committed action, it is in concert with a conflict occurring on the streets. The
suggestion then is that historical progress and change will accompany a change in the
infrastructure of the city. And Lee, by aligning himself with that moment of change,
achieves a kind of personal unity. By joining a mass movement directed at future change,
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Lee becomes part of “the struggle of humanity,” which, in the novel, is equated with
“humanity” itself, which Lee, initially, does not “feel that much involved in” (28). Lee
becomes human by the end of the novel.
The novel establishes that streets function as reified history early in the novel, on
Lee’s first day as a union organizer, when Smitty, a friendly if naïve union leader, drives
Lee to work. It is a rainy morning, “making driving perilous.” Himes describes the drive
in detail:
At Washington Boulevard they turned west, taking their position in the long line
of warworkers’ cars. Headlights glowed yellow in the gray gloom, and from the
flanking murk a drab panorama of one-storied, stuccoed buildings unfolded in
monotonous repetition. At every intersection a streetcar ahead forced them to
stop. (15)

Smitty decides to try to dodge the streetcar, “gunning the coupé through the curb-high
flood.”
Cutting back to the center of the street after they had passed, they narrowly
missed the streetcar; and the motorman clanged furiously, frantically on his bell.
Lee’s heart caught in his throat. But the physical tension abruptly loosed the
tightness of his mind, causing him to give a spurt of laughter.
“Sunny California,” Smitty muttered.
“That’s what the post cards say.” (15)

Smitty and Lee’s exchange on “sunny California” is ironic, of course, since the day and
the attitude of the streetcar motorman are anything but sunny. At the same time, it is as if
Smitty is naming the activity of navigating the streets in such a way, dodging various
aspects of the city’s built-in infrastructure, “sunny California.” When Lee refers to post
cards, he references the image Los Angeles has concocted to sell itself, literally, to the
rest of the country. So while Smitty and Lee comment on the incongruity between the
post card image and the image of rain-drenched street, they also point out how these
57

images are the same: both the image that is sold and the reality the men must navigate are
results of the city’s booster, as well as its open-shop anti-union industrial capitalist, past.
This is made clear a sentence later, when Smitty and Lee discuss the history of
unions in Los Angeles. Lee says that, despite his being born in Los Angeles, he does not
know “too much” about that history other than “the road has been rocky” (15). On one
level this is merely a cliché that refers to the difficulty unions have faced. In the context
of Lee and Smitty’s drive to work, though, as well as their association of this drive on
these particular streets with California itself, this metaphor aligns the history of unionism
with the infrastructure of the city. As they talk, Smitty says one aspect of the problems
unions have faced is “the work has been too seasonal.” Here Himes draws a parallel
between the rainy setting and their conversation, emphasizing that the conversation
should be read in terms of their drive. Just as going to work is complicated by the rain,
organizing workers, agricultural workers in particular, has been complicated by the
seasons and growing cycles. The more significant complication, though, has been “the
golden sons and daughters [who] have fought [unions] at every turn in the road” (16).
The streetcars, at the time privately owned and operated, are thus associated with the
“golden sons and daughters.” Just as Smitty and Lee must fight them to get to work, so
unions must fight the industrialists who own and control the city’s infrastructure. This
moment on the street dramatizes the history of the battle between labor and capital in Los
Angeles.
Aspects of Lee’s personal history become mingled with the history of labor in the
city when the industrialist Louis Foster, owner of the Comstock factory, brings Lee to his
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“so American” home to offer him a job (169). Accepting the job would mean that Lee
would make enough money to support himself and Ruth, but it would also mean selling
out the union. Foster’s home, built in 1939 “upon his return from war-crazy Europe,” is
designed to replicate the various “features in the homes of early American patriots,” and
is “dedicated...in solemn thankfulness to the fact that he was an American” (169). Here
Himes rather clearly illustrates how the built environment of Los Angeles is designed to
reflect and perform a certain relationship to history. The house is supposed to concretize
Foster’s view of patriotic American, history, and then bring it into the present and future.
Foster’s house is a bulwark against forces he views as anti-American, specifically
unionism and Communism, as well as President Roosevelt, whom “he [abhors] with an
intensity he could not contain.” Roosevelt is, for Foster, a symbol of everything that
threatens the integrity of America. Foster [considers] him a meddler, a socialist, and a
stooge of Stalin,” as well as “a traitor to his heritage and profaner of tradition, ‘a cripple
bastard with a cripple bastard’s spitefulness and lack of honor’” (171). Roosevelt, then,
represents attempts to undermine American sovereignty and history, as well as its
capitalist economy, and, we might say, its social health. Foster’s house, as a
manifestation of his ideal America, keeps these various threats out, and indeed converts
his intense hatred into a counterattack measure—private property wielded as fortress and
weapon.
Foster’s house, and his America, is Lee’s destination, and the road that takes him
there forces him to confront again the racist hurts he has suffered in his own life, as well
as the historical development of the city’s pattern of structured segregation. Foster lives
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in Pasadena, which is not only the eastside bastion of old-money Los Angeles; it is also
the place of Lee Gordon’s birth. As he is being driven into the city by Roy, Louis
Foster’s black chauffeur, Gordon reflection on how, “He and his parents had been driven
away like thieves in the night” (167). (They had been forced out of the city after Lee was
caught peeping at white girls as they changed in a gym locker room.) Himes’s pun on
“driven” here is appropriate. When Lee was driven out of Pasadena seventeen years prior,
and as he is being driven into it now, he moves not on his own, but rather is moved by
racist and capitalist forces that are constitutive of the city. Lee’s only access to the place
of his birth is as a passenger in a car on a freeway, and this causes him a significant
identity crises. “How should he act in Foster’s presence?” he wonders while on the road.
His two options, “the timid son of domestic servant parents; or the reserved and quite
Negro college graduate, picking his chances to speak…walking hard and talking loud and
trying to give the appearance of being unafraid” seem equally untenable (167). The
former would be untrue to Lee’s current situation, while the latter would likely
undermine any headway he might make with Foster. Yet the choices, such as they are, are
made for him, just as the road is laid out before him, by history, or people and forces
beyond his control.
Himes pays careful attention to the details of the drive from Los Angeles to
Pasadena. As in the earlier scene with Smitty, Lee and Roy chat, this time about how
many cars Foster owns—“Only seven,” Roy says. Lee wonders, sarcastically, “How does
he get along?” Himes goes on:
But Roy had given his attention to the traffic as they swept along Sunset out
toward the Pasadena speedway and did not hear. On the wide, winding turnpike
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the long car flowed along at sixty, curving effortlessly past the lush green
countryside. It was pleasant with the wind in their faces and the bright sun
overhead. Life could be so simple, just floating along, Lee thought—no
movement of the masses, no racial problems, no workers’ unions, just relaxation
and enjoyment. (167)

The traffic kills the conversation, demanding that Roy focus on the road, and sending Lee
into a daydream. The dream, of idling stress-free in the country, reflects the change from
urban Los Angeles to the privileged, wealthy world Foster occupies. Whereas labor
movements and racial strife defined Lee’s life before, now he tries to pretend he belongs
to a world where those things do not exist, where life is consists only of countryside and
sunshine.
The daydream does not last long, though, as Lee realizes, quickly, that such a
fantasy is untenable. “Movement of the masses” and “racial problems” are as much a part
of the landscape as the lush countryside. Indeed, Himes intimates these belong more
authentically to the environment than the sunshine and countryside. The lush greenness is
not “natural” but a feature built into the environment by people and shaped by history.
Himes writes:
But Lee could not relax. This crossing into the domain of wealthy white seclusion
was never a casual thing, and to Lee Gordon it was something more. For now
after seventeen years he was going back to the city where he had been born and he
did not relish seeing it again. He had no pleasant memories of Pasadena; he had
been born in the backyard and in his unhappiness had known only the back door.
He and his parents had been driven away like thieves in the night. (167)

In this passage Himes sets “the night” against the “bright sun overhead” and “the
backyard” against the “green lush countryside” from the previous paragraph. Backyards,
fenced-in segments of private lots, are the only access to property Lee recalls having in
Pasadena. The city, divided not only into lots for homes, but also into segments by
61

freeways and streets, manifests different realities for different residents, white and black,
rich and poor. Though Foster’s car “[flows] along at sixty, curving effortlessly” along the
road, this trip to Pasadena is part of the “rocky road” unions have faced. Access to
property and capital is restricted, and resources, seized by the wealthy, are not allocated
equitably. Further, these passages indicate how history, concretized in the built
environment, has determined Lee’s own life. His trips up and down the Pasadena
speedway—always as a passenger—show how the city has shaped and, literally, set his
life into motion.
The association of history with the city’s infrastructure, and with streets
especially, reaches its most crucial and dramatic (perhaps melodramatic) point at the end
of the novel, when the union clashes with police and soldiers outside Foster’s factory.
Here Himes dramatizes a moment of (potential) historical change as a mass movement
that is bound up with the reconfiguring of a city street. Streets, which so far have been
barriers enforcing racial segregation, as well as dangerous places that must be navigated
carefully, are now the manifestations of historical progress, a nexus of time and space,
where opportunity—being in the right place at the right time—must be seized. The street
is still a hostile place of conflict and violence, though now that conflict takes on a
dialectical cast, with opposing forces meeting and creating something new, and the
violence instrumental to achieving a valuable goal, rather than as only the means by
which the powerful assert their control over the oppressed. Part of this change has to do
with the forces of historical progress, and part of it has to do with a change in Lee’s
outlook that allows him to understand how history progresses. This change in outlook, as
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well as the philosophical and discursive grounding for the novel’s conception of
historical progress, comes from Lee’s conversations with the Jewish Communist Abe
“Rosie” Rosenberg.
Himes casts the novel’s final scene on the street before the factory as a moment of
great historical significance for workers around the world, as well as a moment of great
personal significance for Lee Gordon. Lee remembers a line Smitty uttered on the day he
drove him to work: “As Comstock goes the West Coast goes. As the West Coast goes the
nation goes. As the nation goes the world goes” (17, 390). Interspersed with thoughts like
these and slogans blasted from the union’s sound truck—“Workers of America! Now is
time to assert your democratic rights;” “In union there is strength. Without a union you
are helpless” (391, 393)—are Lee’s musings about his own significance in the world, and
how becoming a part of a cause, embodying a movement, can give his life meaning. “But
through Lee Gordon’s mind kept running one refrain. What was this thing that made
meaning? This thing that brought change? What could he do for all these people who had
befriended him?” (393). Himes is not subtle in the way he conflates Lee’s existential
crisis and the crisis of the union. The “metallic voice” of the sound truck cries out, “What
do you want?—a job? security? the right to live decently?...Your union offers you this
future!” In the next sentence Lee thinks, “And what future had Lee Gordon ever offered
anyone?” (394). Himes builds the intensity of the scene in this way, drawing Lee’s and
the union’s needs gradually into alignment.
The point at which these respective needs meet is “the future,” which has been a
kind of obsession in the novel since its first page, where Himes tells us that Lee’s job as
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union organizer might have meant, to a white man, “no more than a future in the union,”
while “to Lee Gordon it meant a new lease on life” (3). The word “future” very nearly
does appear on every page, with Smitty worrying abstractly about the future of the
workers of the world, and Lee and Joe concerned practically that, at this moment of peak
war production and wages, the union can offer the workers nothing more than future
security—“And right now they ain’t thinking about the future” (24). (This line is repeated
almost word-for-word a moment later when Lee thinks, “But in the spring of 1943 few
were thinking of the future” (64).) Foster, in his attempt to woo Lee away from the union,
claims, “I am more concerned with people than with unions…with what affects them,
their lives, and their futures…” (180). And then, in a different vein, Lee’s wife Ruth
accuses him of being “willing to destroy your whole future for some dirty white whore”
when she learns of his affair with Jackie Forks. For her part, Jackie, upon being cashiered
from the Communist party, thinks, “The past was closed and the present moved and there
was only the haunted future” (276). When Smitty convinces eight other men to sign a
false affidavit claiming Lee was with them at the time of a crime he is wrongly accused
of committing he is “confronted by the awful immensity of his action”—“[He] had not
only jeopardized his own future, but the future of eight other really good guys, and the
future of the union” (350). Whatever his or her motivation, ethics, or position, nearly
everyone in the novel has a vital concern with and claim on the future.
So when the standoff between the union and Foster’s soldiers reaches a climactic
point, Himes, sparing nothing in declaiming its importance, emphasizes the future:
For a moment the tableau held, two suspended lines caught in that moment of
time. It seemed suddenly like a battlefield before the battle has begun, with two
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opposing forces arrayed against each other. Lee sensed the drama of the moment.
It made him bite down into his lip and tightly clench his fists. Then suddenly in
that telescoped instant in history the zero hour sounded on which the future of the
world might hang. (394)

Himes balances his focus on time with a concern with space. This space, which has
changed from a city street into a battlefield, will determine the future. Further, while
“forces” clearly refers to the opposing groups of men, it also means the abstract forces of
labor and capital, socialism and capitalism, dialectical materialism and rugged
individualism. While in If He Hollers streets were boundaries between segregated
neighborhoods, now the street is the site where opposed ideologies, opposed visions of
the future, are cleaved. And this boundary is unstable, and on the point of eruption.
Change is coming, and it is the responsibility of everyone involved not to watch
passively, but to take part in and embody the movement toward something new. So, Joe
Ptak, the hardened union organizer recruited from the Midwest, marches forward with the
union banner to break the line where soldiers beat him to death. The soldiers cross Joe’s
legs and “stick the handle of the union banner in his crotch so that it stood erect. There
was blood on the banner now—and blood on Joe’s hard, uncompromising face, looking
up from the pavement of the street, down but undefeated” (396). Joe has exemplified the
kind of existential commitment the moment calls for. Joe’s dead gaze seems to fall in a
kind of incoherent non-place, looking both up and down simultaneously, but the
important thing here is that his “hard, uncompromising face” rests in relation to the street.
His commitment to the cause of unionism and the future is rendered as proximity to the
shifting ground that sets that cause in motion. He has not died in vain; his commitment
65

shows the other workers that the final push “[needs] but a spurring-on, a calling-out, an
incident to set it off” (396).
The novel ends with Lee’s attempt to be that incident. After watching Joe’s
“gallant stand,” and thinking with tender appreciation of the sacrifices Smitty and the
other men have made for him, Lee resolves the cause of the union with his own search for
meaningfulness. “The zero hour…on which the future of the world might hang” is also
the moment on which his life hangs—or, thinking of the metaphor with which Himes
opens the novel, when Lee’s “new lease on life” realizes its value. He thinks:
It was as if all of his life was coming to a head; the good and the evil, the high and
the low, all of the things that had ever happened to him and all the things he had
ever done and the things he had not done, coming together into meaning. It was as
if this was the moment he had lived for—not the choice of a conclusion, nor the
facing of a fact, but this was the knowledge of the truth. (397).

The last sentence of this passage is poorly worded, but it seems Himes wants to make
clear the fact that Lee sees himself as fulfilling a kind of destiny. This destiny is
conceived as “coming together,” an integration of the various facets of his life into a
coherent whole. Lee has sought coherence and organization throughout the novel, and
now he has found it. And also, I suggest “the knowledge of the truth” refers not only to
every event in Lee’s life up to now, but also, and perhaps especially, to what Lee sees
before him—a demonstration on a city street that suggests a change is coming and that
Lee should become a part of that change. By the novel’s last sentence we see that Lee’s
feeling of integration is likely to be short-lived, and also that that feeling comes from
movement down the street. The novel ends: “He reached Joe Ptak, snatched up the union
banner, and holding it high above his head, began marching down the street” (398). He
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will no doubt be beaten to death, like Joe, but it will be a meaningful moment, and will,
like Joe’s, culminate in his becoming almost literally one with the street, the material of
historical change. In doing so Lee Gordon becomes the martyr Bob Jones could not be.
This ending, as well as my claim that Lee’s actions are made possible by a change
in the material conditions of the city, makes sense only in light of Rosie’s lectures to Lee
on historical materialism and the inevitability of a communist revolution. The most
important of these occurs toward the end of the novel, just before the clash in the street.
Lee is in a hotel room, recovering from his last encounter with the police, and Rosie
comes to nurse him to health. Lee learns Rosie has been expelled from the Communist
party for expressing loyalty to Lee rather than to Luther McGregor. Rosie reassures Lee
that he is a communist by conviction, not affiliation, and that his membership in the party
is not as important as his belief in “communism as a way of life superior to all other ways
of life previously in existence” (378). Most crucial to Rosie’s communist conviction is
his belief in “the immemorial movement of matter,” and that “matter progresses and man
reflects that progress in the living brain” (379, 380). He quotes Marx from the afterword
to the second edition of Capital, “With me the idea is nothing else than the material
world reflected in the human mind and translated into forms of thought” (380). Lee
resists this way of thinking, saying, “it is a more comforting assumption that it is man
who progresses and that the movement of matter is a result of this progress” (379). Not
only is this, for Rosie, simply inaccurate; it is also the ideology of a passing generation.
“Just as the rugged individualist of the last generation has passed, the capitalist
maneuverer of human destiny under the guise of political liberalism will also pass” (382).
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Once Lee recognizes the truth of the immemorial movement of matter, he will be able to
realize his “revolutionary potential.”
The Marxism Himes puts into Rosie’s mouth may be limited and facile, but it
helps Himes to resolve the problem he stages between an individual’s consciousness and
the city of Los Angeles.
15
While this resolution is not entirely positive—Lee Gordon will
die—it is more hopeful than anything that happens in If He Hollers Let Him Go. Bob
Jones is beaten and punished almost literally for nothing, while Lee Gordon is able to
stand for a cause. Communism (though without any Communist Party members) is the
philosophy behind his cause.
16
Though it seems Bob Jones does not have access to a
useful communist philosophy, Himes did. His relationship to the Communist Party was
complex, and he ultimately followed in the footsteps and Richard Wright and Langston
Hughes and abandoned the Party, which he saw as disingenuous and opportunistic (this is
exactly how he portrays the party members in Lonely Crusade). Nevertheless, in “Negro
Martyrs are Needed” Himes promotes communist revolution as both the only solution to
racism in America and, oddly, the way to enforce the Constitution of the United States,
demanding that “a revolution by Negro Americans [will] bring about the overthrow of
our present form of government and the creation of a communist state” (231). He accepts

15
According to Steven J. Rosen’s “African-American Anti-Semitism and Chester Himes’s Lonely
Crusade,” Himes’s portrayal of Rosie is, despite certain obvious and likely sincere attempts to represent his
friendship with Lee as close and genuine, grossly anti-Semitic. Himes claims that his portrayal of Rosie and
Lee’s relationship is an attempt to faithfully and truthfully represent something that is perhaps ugly and
unpleasant—that African Americans are often anti-Semitic themselves. Still, this does not excuse Himes’s
racist representation. I agree with Rosen that the depiction of Rosie is ultimately problematic. This is
unfortunate, since Rosie’s friendship plays such a vital role in Lee’s character development.

16
In “Everybody’s Noir Humanism: Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade, and The Quality of Hurt,” Justus
Nieland reads Lee Gordon’s ending of existential commitment as optimistic, but in a way that reads false in
light of the bleakness that pervades the rest of the novel. This is a fair reading insofar as it shows the
difficulty Himes has in representing how a black worker could overcome the city of Los Angeles. Lee
Gordon succeeds, but only in death.
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that the CPUSA will lead the revolution and even predicts that “where great numbers of
people are oppressed the communists have a fair chance of success” (232). In Lonely
Crusade, which dramatizes much of what Himes says in “Negro Martyrs are Needed,”
Himes refuses to imagine the democratic, communistic future in order to focus on how a
single man’s consciousness may change from oppressed object to revolutionary subject.
In doing so Himes creates, in Eric Margolies and Michel Fabre’s words, “a novel of
ideas,” which they consider “all too rare in American fiction” (58). Still, Himes cannot
leave out the crucial, and crushing, impact of the city of Los Angeles, so that his novel’s
concern with ideas becomes inseparable from its concern with place and urban
geography.

If He Hollers Let Him Go was a critical and commercial success, and it is not difficult to
imagine why. The novel is compact, fast-paced, intense, and written with an urgency that
never loses its focus. Interestingly, the novel is, despite its dramatization of the
destruction of a man, what we might call “unified.” It observes the classical unities of
time, place, and action, and is driven solely by Bob’s first-person voice. Though that
voice is damaged by the end—he can only lisp, and is barely comprehensible to other
characters in the novel—it stays with us from start to finish. The voice can only sustain
itself for the novel’s 203 pages, though, as its last words spoken to another character are
the rueful and “painfully” lisped “I’m still here.” A sentence later Bob tells us, “Two
hours later I was in the Army” (203). On the page it is as though Bob is simultaneously
“still here” and elsewhere, “in the army.” The novel ends, then, when we see Bob’s voice
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place the character in two places at once, an ontological impossibility that signals the
character’s disintegration.
Lonely Crusade was not a success. Its failure, in fact, threatened to end Himes’s
career. As he bluntly puts it in The Quality of Hurt, “Everyone hated the book” (100).
And “everyone’s” reason for hating it has to do entirely, for Himes, with anger at his
representation of Jews, blacks, Communists, liberals, and even, because of his
characterization of the factory owner Lewis Foster, industrialists. Of course, Himes
believes this anger is misplaced and is an indication of the world’s discomfort with
hearing the truth. Or, if not the truth, then everyone’s problem is with Himes’s attempt
“to be completely fair,” (and he means “marked by impartiality and honesty”) which is
even worse than telling the truth because “it is the one single thing no one will forgive
you for.” Fairness is apparently less forgivable than truthfulness because the former is
“just possible,” whereas “no one believes it possible to tell the truth anyway” (102).
Unwillingness to face the truth and refusal of fairness—these are the only reasons Himes
will accept for his novel’s failure. The fact that he seems to contradict himself in positing
both is evidently beside the point; if it is truth and fairness that he offered, then he can be
a kind of martyr, a man on his own lonely crusade, when those are rejected.
He will not accept that the novel failed on aesthetic grounds. In fact, he refuses to
acknowledge that any such critiques were made: “The writing might well have been bad,
but the writing was not criticized in one review which I read” (101). This is untrue in
every possible way. The writing was in fact rather harshly critiqued, and Himes suggests
in a couple of places he read a review where he saw the writing critiqued. In The Quality
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of Hurt, in the midst of his list of Lonely Crusade’s brutal reviews, he says, simply,
“James Baldwin wrote a review from the socialist newspaper the New Leader titled
‘History as a Nightmare’” (100). Unlike the rest of the articles he mentions, Himes does
not include a quotation from Baldwin’s that evocatively captures the harshness of its
critique. (For instance, he quotes the Atlantic Monthly as saying “Hate runs through this
book like a streak of yellow bile.”)
17
Had he decided to include the harshest quotation
from Baldwin’s piece (actually titled “History as Nightmare”), it would have been either
“the book is written in what is probably the most uninteresting and awkward prose I have
read in recent years” or, in a similar vein, “I have already indicated that Mr. Himes seems
capable of some of the worst writing on this side of the Atlantic” (3, 4). This is just the
kind of criticism Himes claims was not directed at his book. Further, Baldwin qualifies
both of these remarks with comments that would surely have pleased Himes, since they
praise his integrity and honesty. Baldwin says, first, “Yet the book is not entirely without
an effect and is likely to have an importance all out of proportion to its intrinsic merit.
For, just as [If He Hollers Let Him Go] was carried by rage, this book is carried by what
seems to be a desperate, implacable determination to find out the truth, please God, or
die;” and second, “[His] integrity has actually the cumulative effect of making him seem
far wiser and more skillful than he is. The value of the book lies in its earnest effort to
understand the psychology of oppressed and oppressor and their relationship to each
other” (3, 4). Baldwin seems to appreciate the novel in just the kind of way that would
please Himes.

17
In a 1970 interview with John A. Williams Himes says, “Jimmy Baldwin did a review for the Socialist
newspaper, New Leader I believe, under the heading “History as a Nightmare.” I don’t remember the gist
of the review” (39).
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Moreover, Himes suggests in his autobiography that he was familiar not only with
the title of Baldwin’s piece, but also with the content. When he says
I had written what I thought was a story of the fear that inhabits the minds of all
blacks who live in America, and the various impacts on this fear precipitated by
communism, industrialism, unionism, the war, white women, and marriage within
the race. It was not too big a scope; this was our daily life during the war. [my
italics] (101)

he seems to refer directly to Baldwin’s claim that “Part of the failure of the book certainly
lies in this fact, that far too much is attempted; and the story never really gets under way
because of a complete lack of integration” (4). Also, Himes’s list of the impacts of the
“fear that inhabited the minds of all blacks who life in America” sounds rather similar to
Baldwin’s list of the things that “in less than four hundred pages Mr. Himes undertakes to
consider” (3). These are:
the ever-present subjective and subconscious terror of a Negro, a dislocation
which borders on paranoia; the political morality of American Communists; the
psychology of union politics; Uncle Tomism; Jews and Negroes; the vast sexual
implications of our racial heritage; the difficulty faced by any Negro in his
relationship with both light people and dark; and the position of the American
white female in the whole unlovely structure. (3)

So it seems, in fact, that Himes was not only aware of Baldwin’s criticism of Lonely
Crusade; he also did not care for it. What Baldwin sees as a rambling novel that lacks
cohesion is for Himes an authentic representation of his own experiences. Aesthetic value
depends upon authenticity, and, Himes suggests, sometimes authenticity is messy. The
degree to which this messiness, or lack of integration or cohesion, is a deliberate aesthetic
choice (rather than, say an ad hoc justification) is of course impossible to say, though, to
paraphrase Baldwin, it has an effect out of proportion to the problems it causes. Insofar as
Lonely Crusade is, in Baldwin’s terms, “an expansion” of If He Hollers, we can say that
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Himes, recognizing the futility of maintaining a unified first-person narrative in the face
of an environment like Los Angeles’s, either decides or finds himself forced to dismiss
any illusion of unity and instead must consciously work with the fragment, with the fact
of disintegration (Baldwin 3).
So while it is certainly interesting (if not entirely unexpected, since Himes was
not fond of Baldwin) that Himes seems to disavow knowledge of Baldwin’s review, the
more important point is that the novel’s structural lack of unity mirrors the way disunity
is the novel’s primary theme and narrative motivation. This mirroring of fractured
narrative structure and theme of fracturing does not, it must be said, come off as the result
of a kind of modernist experiment in storytelling. It is perhaps more accurate to say the
novel is an example of a flawed conventional narrative, as in Ralph D. Story’s comment
in “The Dissonant Chord: Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade” that the way the Himes
“[roams] over such diverse ideological territory…does in fact retard the narrative’s pace”
(287). Or as Lundquist puts it, Himes’s use of the third-person omniscient point of view,
which does not allow “Lee’s consciousness…to dominate the story the way it might,”
causes the novel to lose focus (70). While it is true that the narrative veers in sometimes
unpredictable directions, changing point of view frequently, as well as picking up
characters and then dropping them suddenly, these issues are productive rather than
entirely problematic.
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Chapter Two
Raymond Chandler and Population Growth

Raymond Chandler liked to think of himself as “the first writer to write about Southern
California at all realistically” (223). He said that in a letter to Jessica Tyndale in 1956,
and would repeat it, a year later, in a letter to Helga Greene: “I have lost Los Angeles as a
locale,” he says. “It is no longer the part of me it once was, although I was the first to
write about it in a realistic way” (238). He was also fond of imagining that he spawned a
kind of literary progeny that has run away with the territory. “Now,” he writes to
Tyndale, “half the writers in the country piddle around in the smog. Los Angeles is just a
tired whore to me now.” And to Greene:
Now half the writers in America live in or near it, the war has made it an
industrial city, and the climate has been ruined partly by this and partly by too
much vegetation, too many lawns to be watered, and in a place that nature
intended to be a semi-desert. It was hot and dry when I first went there, with
tropical rains in winter, and sunshine at least nine-tenths of the year. Now it is
humid, hot, sticky, and when the smog comes down into the bowl between
mountains which is Los Angeles, it is damn near intolerable.

The barren semi-desert has become overgrown with invasive species; the new
environment is characterized by overabundance and density, so that even the air seems
closer, cloudier, more convoluted than before. Chandler is quite right about the way the
city has grown since he settled there permanently in 1913. In 1910 the population of Los
Angeles was, according to the Los Angeles Almanac, 319, 198. By 1920 it was 576,673;
by 1930, 1,238,048; by 1940 1,504,277; by 1950, 1,970,358; and by 1960, a year after
Chandler’s death, the population of the city of Los Angeles was 2,479,015, over seven
times what it was in 1910. Between 1920 and 1930 alone, as we have seen, the
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population more than doubled. Industry grew during the war, and as a result of a sharp
increase in the non-white, the city strongly segregated along race, as well as class, lines.
Those last facts don’t seem to bother Chandler as much as the fact he feels his territorial
claim on Los Angeles has been threatened—and, significantly, not by anyone in
particular, but by hoards of writers in numbers approaching half the country’s population.
Though this irritation about Los Angeles’s growing population is unique to this
late stage in Chandler’s life (he was sixty-eight at the time those letters were written, and
would be dead in three years), there is a certain interest in, and anxiety about, population
growth, and what it means to an individual’s sense of belonging in the city, that occupies
even his earliest fiction. While the Chandler who writes in 1956 recognizes the
importance of the city of Los Angeles to both his professional and personal identity, the
Chandler who published The Big Sleep in 1939 was still finding his way as a writer. That
novel is of course a classic of American hard-boiled detective fiction, celebrated for its
idiosyncratic narrator, Philip Marlowe. It is also a story of a man’s coming to understand
his identity in relation to his place, and how he is in many ways defined and determined
by that place.
1
This realization is not pleasant. While by the end of his career Chandler
clearly embraced his identification with Los Angeles, he manifests in his early fiction a
certain anxiety about being intimately associated with L.A. Likewise Marlowe, by
realizing that he is as an embedded subject that belongs in Los Angeles, loses his illusion
of freedom and autonomy. This narrative of melancholic self-realization occurs against
the backdrop of, and is indeed caused by, Los Angeles’s growing population.

1
See Christopher Routledge’s “A Matter of Disguise: Locating the Self in Raymond Chandler’s The Big
Sleep and The Long Goodbye” for a discussion of the ways Chandler constructs Marlowe’s identity.
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In “Chivalry and Modernity in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep” Ernest
Fontana discusses The Big Sleep specifically in terms of population growth and urban
sprawl. As the title suggests, Fontana’s essay is concerned with Chandler’s use of the
generic conventions of romance and chivalry, and how those conventions, and the ethics
associated with them, cannot survive in the post-industrial city. In the face of a
“collective entropic adversary” represented in images of disease (specifically Carmen’s
epilepsy, the General’s paralysis, and Geiger’s homosexuality) and the weather, which
suggests a fatal miasma, Marlowe is conceived as a figure of order and honor. Fontana is
of course not wrong to point to the chivalric images in The Big Sleep (including
Marlowe’s name, his apparent code of honor, the paintings in the Sternwood mansion,
and his observation that “It was not a game for knights). In fact, the failure of Marlowe’s
chivalric code, regardless of the cause, is Fontana’s real interest. He does not speak in
detail about how population growth is represented in the novel (except indirectly, through
disease and weather) nor how it specifically undermines Marlowe, and Marlowe’s
chivalric attitude. Rather, Fontana takes population growth as a fact, and merely assumes
it is connected to changes in Marlowe’s character. Population growth is important,
though, and not only as an aspect of Chandler’s representation of Los Angeles; it is also a
key theme in The Big Sleep and, through a dense network of images and motifs, a
structuring device.
Chandler mentions population growth specifically and overtly twice. The first
time is when Marlowe meets Eddie Mars at Arthur Geiger’s house, when Geiger’s body
is missing. When Marlowe guesses that someone killed Geiger in order to “[take] over
76

the racket and [who] wants a little time to organize,” Eddie says, “grimly,” “They can’t
get away with it.” And Marlowe, almost tauntingly, says:
“Who says so? You and a couple of gunmen in your car outside? This is a big
town now, Eddie. Some very tough people have checked in here lately. The
penalty of growth.” (73, emphasis added)

A larger population means a greater chance “some very tough people” will check in.
More people means more bad people, which means the city will become wild and
unmanageable. So the penalty of growth involves losing control. “New rival mobs are
moving in” Charles J. Rzepka points out. “Even Eddie Mars’s rule may not last very
long” (713).
The second specific mention of population growth is at District Attorney Taggart
Wilde’s house. Marlowe is there with Wilde, Bernie Ohls, and a self-righteous, “hatchet-
faced” cop named Captain Cronjager. This is the moment after Marlowe has solved what
was the novel’s primary mystery: who was blackmailing Carmen? He solved that and he
solved who killed Geiger and who killed Brody. Wilde and Olhs are sympathetic to a
private operative like Marlowe, but Cronjager presents a new kind of problem. As the
scene begins Marlowe says:
Cronjager looked at me without nodding. He looked me over as if he was looking
at a photograph. Then he nodded his chin about an inch. Wilde said: “Sit down,
Marlowe.” I’ll try to handle Captain Cronjager, but you know how it is. This is a
big city now.” (106, emphasis added)

And this is another facet of penalty of growth, this time specifically for Marlowe: just as
Mars has to face the higher number of tough people that an increased population brings,
so Marlowe has to face the higher number of obnoxious cops that comes with a big city.
“They come a dime a dozen in any big city now” (114). And presumably this is not only
77

because a big city requires a larger police force, and thus has to allow men like Cronjager
onto the force. It has, rather to do with, as Wilde puts it, “just why cities are run the way
they are run” (113). Importantly, Cronjager is not really a corrupt cop. The Big Sleep is
not critical of social institutions like police departments. Sternwood does not hire
Marlowe because the police are ineffectual; he hires Marlowe because he does not want
publicity. Cronjager is evidence that, whatever else police departments may do, they
thrive on publicity. Cronjager agrees not to press Marlowe because Marlowe threatens to
reveal publicly that Cronjager was complicit in allowing Geiger’s pornographic
bookstore to operate in broad daylight, and “it won’t help [Cronjager’s] division to have
it washed all over the papers” (113). What does make it into the papers is a wildly
inaccurate account of the solving of the murders, where “Captain Cronjager had solved
both murders while lighting a cigarette” (119). This, then, is another aspect of the penalty
of growth: a mass culture that not only can be tricked into believing anything the police
and media tell it, but that also needs to be tricked, because the truth would undermine the
way a city is run.
The anxieties about growth, then, are specific: more people means more bad or
troublesome people, and more people means an increasingly unwieldy media apparatus,
where the possibility of someone’s losing control of a story means that information must
be distorted or suppressed, just as Marlowe does many times to characters in the book (it
is the fact that he hid information from the police that irks Cronjager). And indeed, just as
Marlowe does to the reader when we do not learn that he loaded Carmen’s gun with
blanks before taking her to the oil field to “teach her how to shoot” until he tells Vivian.
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Of course Marlowe must withhold from the reader that he has guessed how Rusty Regan
died or else all narrative suspense is killed. It is nonetheless an odd moment, particularly
because Marlowe has up to that point gone out of his way to tell the reader when he
suppressed information from other characters in the book. If too many people know a
secret, the secret risks becoming public. The reader’s foreknowledge would undermine
Marlowe’s control over the case and, more importantly the narrative. The penalty of
growth: the more people know something or are involved in something, the greater the
chance something could go wrong.
Growth, then, presents a challenge to everyone in the city, from cops to criminals
to private operatives. The city is not what it used to be, and so people have to change
accordingly. Adapt or lose your place. Within this growing city, General Sternwood has
his own unique problems with growth. Specifically, he has children. He took a chance
that he could add to the population without adding to the population of bad people, and
he lost. He says, “I need not add that a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time
at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets” (13). What he gets is one child, Vivian, who
“is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless” and another, Carmen, who “is a child who
likes to pull wings off flies” (13). Carmen is epileptic, and also quite insane, a result,
Fontana says, of “Sternwood fathering Carmen at an advanced age” (160). Of course,
Sternwood also points out that “Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat.
Neither have I. No Sternwood ever had,” suggesting, perhaps, that while Carmen’s
epilepsy may have unique causes, it may not by itself be the cause of her criminal
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behavior (13). That could have deeper roots. In any case, General Sternwood’s present
problems with gangsters and blackmailers are a result of his children.
But the children, as well as the gangsters and blackmailers, were themselves
caused by Sternwood. It was men like Sternwood—oil men, prospectors, speculators,
capitalists—who made the city grow. The discovery of oil and the creation of the Los
Angeles Aqueduct brought wealth and people to the city. The novel is full of images of
oil and water, and particularly of water scummed over with oil. At the end of the novel
Marlowe thinks that when you are dead (“sleeping the big sleep”), “[o]il and water were
the same as wind and air to you” (230). When you are alive, of course, oil and water are
not the same as wind and air; the first two are rare and can make you money. Sternwood
has not only participated in bringing people to the city, making the city grow; he has, like
Victor Frankenstein, turned his back on his creation, the source of his wealth as well as
the cause of his trouble. In a well-known passage Marlowe points out:
On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old
wooden derricks of the oil field from which the Sternwoods had made their
money. Most of the field was public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city
by General Sternwood…The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no
longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out of their
front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn’t
suppose they would want to. (21)

By isolating himself from the city he helped to create, Sternwood has allowed it to grow
out of control. Fontana reads Sternwood as a “masterful and courageous entrepreneur
who develops socially beneficial, primary raw materials,” who has simply exhausted his
usefulness and is now out of place in his current world (163). Clearly I disagree.
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Whatever social benefits resulted from Sternwood’s labor are outweighed by the costs:
the penalty of growth.
Even if he has removed himself from the source of his wealth as well as the city
he helped create, Sternwood still lives in a world of unregulated growth. The “jungle” of
orchids in his greenhouse provides the kind of environment the General needs to survive.
“I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for
the heat” (9). The atmosphere is overwhelming for someone not in the General’s state:
“It’s too hot in here for a man with blood in his veins” (12). The image of the orchids
quickly becomes overdetermined, so that it refers not only to growth and the fact that a
capitalist like Sternwood requires constant growth to sustain himself. The orchids are also
associated both with death and with sex in a rather straightforward way: reproduction
leads to death. According to Marlowe, “The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with
nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled
as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket” (7). And Sternwood says, “They are
nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the
rotten sweetness of a prostitute” (9). The imagery is rather overdetermined here. The
flowers are like both living men and dead men; their smell is reeks of sex, but also rot
and decay (which is specifically feminized here).
Orchids appear one other time, and Chandler is careful to keep economic growth,
sex, and death tied together in the single image. In Art Huck’s garage Marlowe meets,
and is quickly knocked out by, Lash Canino, Eddie Mars’s gunman. Marlowe wakes to
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find himself tied up, and in the presence of Mona Mars. The following conversation,
which, on the surface seems rather bizarre, occurs:
“How do you feel?” It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It
had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. I thought that was silly as soon
as I thought of it.
“Great,” I said. “Somebody built a filling station on my jaw.”
“What did you expect Mr. Marlowe—orchids?”
“Just a plain pine box,” I said. “Don’t bother with bronze or silver handles.
And don’t scatter my ashes over the blue Pacific. I like the worms better. Did you
know that worms are of both sexes and that any worm can love any other worm?”
(191).

As a conversation between people that have never met, this makes little sense. But as the
development of an image, it is complex and revelatory. When Marlowe says, “Somebody
built a filling station on my jaw,” he is presumably talking about the swelling that has
resulted from Canino’s punch. He cleverly refers to Huck’s garage, where the punch
happened. The filling station also refers to oil and oil production, as well as to population
and economic growth; filling stations are built as they are needed. More people means
more filling stations. So when Mona Mars mentions orchids, Chandler is metonymically
following a train of thought. Orchids, in the world of the novel, refer to growth, just like
filling stations. But then Marlowe takes the significance of orchids in a different
direction: to death and sex, to a plain pine box and worms who feed on decomposing
matter and have unregulated, unimpeded sex.
This is the world Sternwood helped to create, a world in which he continues to
live, and it is a world that he draws others into. Just as water and oil contributed to Los
Angeles’s growth by creating a need for jobs and the artificial environment to sustain
them, and just as those who owned the means of production lived off the workers who
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came to the city for jobs, so also does General Sternwood live off the outsiders he draws
into his world of unregulated growth, men like Rusty Regan, who was, Sternwood says,
“the breath of life to me—while he lasted” (11). The novel consistently reminds us of
Regan’s status as an outsider. When Sternwood first mentions Regan, he says, “He had
been an officer in the I.R.A. He wasn’t even legally in the United States” (11). Regan is a
consequence of growth, and, while he was a bootlegger, the novel does not portray him as
a bad person necessarily or as part of a dangerous criminal element. Rather, Regan
represents unattached migrants. He has no status in the city, no capital or land, and so he
must use whatever resources are at his disposal. Sternwood may depend upon him—just
as capitalists depend upon unattached migrants for labor—but Regan, of course, depends
upon Sternwood as well. He marries Vivian, and lives off of her until, apparently,
Carmen tries to seduce him, just as she does Marlowe. And, just like Marlowe, Rusty
refused her. And Rusty was killed for his refusal, a fate Marlowe manages to escape. In
refusing to have sex with Carmen, Rusty refuses to participate in the world of uninhibited
growth. He refuses to take the chance on making a child with Carmen, a child who
presumably would have greater than normal odds of inheriting Carmen’s insanity, and
thus of turning out bad. Men like Rusty, though, cannot afford to refuse to participate in
the growth economy, and so he is killed. And, oddly, after he is dead and buried, he
haunts the text from beginning to end, as though his ghostly presence is the spawn of the
near-union with Carmen. In death, his influence grows greater than it ever was when he
was alive.
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Chandler presents an alternative of sorts to Sternwood in the form of District
Attorney Taggart Wilde. Whereas Sternwood facilitated and created the growth of the
city through the exploitation of its resources and people, Wilde was a part of Los Angeles
before the presence of oil men like Sternwood. Chandler uses descriptions of each man’s
house to illustrate the differences between Sternwood and Wilde. While Sternwood is
responsible for adding to the city through the donation of his fields, and while his house
is built on a hill, and thus removed from the concerns of that city, Wilde’s house is “one
of those solid old-fashioned houses which it used to be the thing to move bodily to new
locations as the city grew westward. Wilde came of an old Los Angeles family and had
probably been born in the house when it was on West Adams or Figueroa or St. James
Park” (105). Wilde’s house moves with the growth of the city, but it always stays deeply
embedded in the city. Wilde is thus a sympathetic figure, who shares Marlowe’s wisdom
about the penalty of growth, and who also realizes that Sternwood’s problems result both
from his having children and from isolating himself to such a degree that “he doesn’t
realize what the world is today,” and is incapable of seeing that “[those] girls of his are
bound certain to hook up with something that can’t be hushed, especially that little
blonde brat. They ought not to be running around loose” (114). Wilde is certainly not
innocent; he is complicit in the sometimes hypocritical activities of cops like Cronjager,
and is, like Cronjager, dependent upon managing information. But he is also sympathetic
to Marlowe, and he is an example of a responsible, involved public servant who does not
depend on reproduction-unto-death, and who can successfully adapt to a changing world
(“This is a big city now.”), even if he evidently lacks the conviction to change that world.
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Marlowe is most relevantly similar to Taggart Wilde, and most unlike Rusty
Regan, in that he is adaptable, which we can most clearly see when Marlowe, unlike
Regan, does not die at the oil field. He has “a hunch about what [Carmen] would do—if
she got the chance” (226). This hunch is based less upon many of the events in the novel,
and more on Marlowe’s gradual realization that he occupies roughly the same place in the
Sternwood house as Regan did. The hunch is based then not on what Marlowe learns
about criminals like Geiger, Eddie Mars, and Joe Brody, or about the connections he
makes among these characters and the Sternwoods. The hunch is based upon his
proximity to the scene of the crime, and the fact, which people tell him over and over,
that he is like Rusty. In other words, I want to suggest that Marlowe’s advantage over
Regan has nothing to do with intelligence or guts, both of which, we are led to believe,
Regan has. Rather, the advantage has to do with history (Regan came before him), and
with a kind of knowledge that only Marlowe can have as a result of his belonging to Los
Angeles in a way that Regan did not. Regan, in contrast was an unattached migrant
figure, with, as Harry Jones puts it, “long-range eyes” that were “looking over into the
next valley all the time. He wasn’t scarcely around where he was” (165). While Marlowe
may begin with eyes like Regan, “a cockeyed sort of buzzard,” he develops short-range
vision, eyes that require him to be where he is.
Marlowe’s descent into the Sternwood’s oil field, the site of Regan’s death, shows
an instance of this change in Marlowe from a man who “wasn’t scarcely around where he
was” to someone with eyes focused only on his present circumstances. Initially, Marlowe
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only sees the field from afar, “looking down a succession of terraces” and “faint and far
off” (21). But when Marlowe goes down into the field, his entire perception changes:
I followed the ruts along and the noise of city traffic grew curiously and quickly
faint, as if this were not in the city at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then
the oil-stained, motionless walking-beam of a squat wooden derrick stuck up over
a branch. I could see the rusty old steel cable that connected this walking-beam
with a half a dozen others. The beams didn’t move, probably hadn’t moved for a
year. The wells were no longer pumping. There was a pile of rusted pipe, a
loading platform that sagged at one end, half a dozen empty oil drums lying in a
ragged pile. There was the stagnant, oil-scummed water of an old sump iridescent
in the sunlight. (218-9).

As Marlowe’s initial impression is that they are going further away from the city, into “a
daydream land,” this quickly reverses—the “then” that begins the second sentence signals
a complete shift—and we see that Marlowe and Carmen are in fact immersed in the urban
environment, and what is far away is Sternwood’s mansion on a hill. At first the traffic is
quiet, but once they reach the point furthest inside the field, “The hum of traffic was a
distant web of sound, like the buzzing of bees” (218). The sounds of the city have
returned. Indeed, the oil and all the parts of machines suggest cars and traffic. The oil
field is, then, the city, only more so. Regan’s long-range eyes, accustomed to seeing
things only from an unattached distance, likely remained in the faraway dreamland. His
eyes failed him in the muck and the chaos of the oil field-cum-city. But Marlowe’s eyes
are not buzzard eyes. Where Regan can only circle overhead and scavenge, Marlowe
finds that he can survive in the muck, or, as he will call it later, “the nastiness.” Marlowe
is a part of this world, “[far] more a part of it than Rusty Regan was” (230).
While this fact of embeddedness saves his life, it comes at the cost of Marlowe’s
losing a romantic illusion of independent self-sufficiency and unattachment with which
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he begins the novel. This process of disillusionment occurs over the course of the entire
novel. Chandler shows it specifically through a motif of eye imagery and looking. The
frequency and use of “eyes”—the word very nearly appears on every page—presents a
challenge to Marlowe’s “I,” and shows his sense of unified subjectivity eroding as he is
reminded again and again, through other characters’ eyes, of his fixity in space and time,
and his status as an object.
The word “eyes” does not appear on the novel’s first page, though, for here
Marlowe’s subjectivity is at its most stable. There is no one looking at him; he can create
himself without considering the impression he makes, or what other people might see.
The novel’s first paragraph reads:
It was about eleven o’clock in morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and
a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-
blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black
wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober,
and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective
ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. (3)

After a sentence in which he establishes the time and, if not quite place, at least the
climate, Marlowe then takes four sentences, and five independent clauses, that begin with
“I” to describe himself. Marlowe thus superimposes himself on the landscape (in terms of
both time and space), making his figure clear, sharp, and distinct from the vague and
distant surroundings. (Imagine a shot in a film where a character looms enormously large
in the foreground, while the background is blurred and small by comparison.) The “dark
blue clocks” on his socks are, aside from a very specific detail of his appearance,
evidence that at this point he possesses, or at least believes himself to possess, his own
time that is independent of time out in the world. It may be “about eleven o’clock in the
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morning” for a while in Los Angeles, but the clocks on Marlowe’s body always read the
same. Further, in announcing he is “everything the well-dressed private detective ought to
be” he gives himself an identity that is almost Platonic in conception. It does not depend
upon the real world, but upon its correspondence to some ideal form of Private Detective.
Anything else anyone might know, such as his neatness, cleanliness, or sobriety, is
subsumed beneath the identity of “private detective.” It is this uncomplicatedly unified
thing that calls on four million dollars, with the implication that whatever “four million
dollars” refers to, it is not only not unified; it is (or they are) multiple and indistinct to an
almost bewildering extent. This comparison between the one and the many is useful
because it highlights Marlowe’s singularity, his uniqueness and independence.
“Eyes” first appears, twice, on the second page (4) when Marlowe notices, and is
momentarily transfixed by, the “hot hard coal-black eyes” on the portrait of General
Sternwood’s relative over the mantle in the main entry hall. Right away Carmen appears,
and her “slate-gray” eyes have “almost no expression when they [look] at [Marlowe]”
(5). On page 6 the butler, Norris, appears; he has “blue eyes as remote as eyes could be.”
He tells Marlowe, twice, “The General will see you now, Mr. Marlowe.” We quickly see
this common phrase means not only “meet,” its usual meaning, but also, literally, “see,”
as in, the General will fix his eyes on you. Marlowe’s first encounter with Sternwood is
of “[An] old and obviously dying man [who] watched us come with black eyes from
which all fire had died long ago, but which still had the coal-black directness of the eyes
in the portrait that hung above the mantel in the hall.” After Norris introduces Marlowe
him Sternwood, “just looked at [him] lifelessly” (8). Sternwood watches, looks, and
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stares at Marlowe throughout their interview. When Norris shows Marlowe out, “His blue
eyes gave me a smooth level look” (16). Marlowe is already almost constantly in
someone’s gaze.
Chandler shows that all these looks, and looking in general, are a way of breaking
an object apart and freezing it in a moment in time and space. When he first meets Vivian
Regan (who will give him “a cool level stare over the rim of [her] glass” with “the hot
black eyes of the portrait in the hall”) he looks at her and finds, “She was worth a stare.”
He goes on:
She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-lounge with her slippers off, so I
stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to
stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees
were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and
slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and
strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black
and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait in
the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her
lips and the lower lip was full. (17)

She is, in short, a set of body parts arranged on a chair, perhaps in many ways not unlike
the images in the pornographic books Geiger peddles. Scopic objectification is a threat
because it not only figuratively dismembers someone; it also places a person in
circulation. It makes him, or her, something to be used, a means to an end, rather than an
end in him/herself, to paraphrase Kant.
This is the risk of being stared at, and it is what Marlowe endures throughout the
novel, from characters like Vivian and the General to more threatening men like Eddie
Mars and Captain Cronjager. When Eddie Mars first appears he is described as “staring at
us quietly, with complete composure” (68). Marlowe points out that Mars’s “gray eyes
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twinkled and then hardened as [he] went past him to open the door,” just before Mars
detains Marlowe to question him. The eyes hold Marlowe in place. Marlowe notices
when Mars “wasn’t looking at [him] anymore.” “He was walking around the room,
frowning, not paying attention to me.” While walking around Mars finds objects,
specifically, “the purple flagon and the two gold-veined glasses on the desk” (69-70).
What Marlowe shares with these mere objects is that all of them can be looked at and, to
varying degrees, handled by Eddie Mars. When Marlowe meets Cronjager the cop,
“looked at [him] without nodding. He looked [him] over as if he was looking at a
photograph” (106).
While neither Mars nor Cronjager gain a significant advantage over Marlowe in
these encounters, their looks are part of a large and persistent matrix of gazes that
culminates in the image of the environment itself staring at Marlowe. When he leaves
Vivian and the Sternwood house for the last time Marlowe says:
I went quickly away from her down the room and down the tiled staircase to the
front hall. I didn’t see anybody when I left. I found my hat alone this time.
Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were
watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a
mysterious something in its light. I got into my car and drove off down the hill.
(230, emphasis added)

The relationship between Marlowe and the landscape has changed completely from the
beginning of the novel. While before he was a figure cut against or superimposed on the
landscape, existing above the space and according to his own time, now he is the object,
now he can be traced by the imaginary sightlines emanating from the bushes and even the
sunshine, which I read here as a kind of spotlight. We might think here of Peter
Rabinowitz, who in “Rats Behind the Wainscoting: Politics, Convention and Chandler’s
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The Big Sleep,” points out that the end of The Big Sleep violates an important convention
of mystery fiction that reached its height in, say, Agatha Christie: the convention that evil
is the problem of an aberrant individual, and not of society at large. In Chandler, though,
this is reversed. Evil is pervasive. Eddie Mars gets away unpunished, while Carmen, the
one clearly aberrant individual, cannot be recuperated, and must be shut away in an
institution. Just so, the gaze of others becomes pervasive as well, suggesting, on one
hand, that in a growing city, privacy and autonomy are lost (the penalty of growth). And
on the other that there is no place outside the city’s environment where one can imagine
oneself as oneself.
The only outside is death, and there nothing matters because whether you died “in
a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill…You were dead, sleeping the big
sleep, you were not bothered by things like that,” i.e. where you died. Everyone is equal
in death, and in death no one “[cares] about the nastiness of how you died or where you
fell.” In life, though, all anyone cares about is the “nastiness.” In life people are bothered
by things like their material conditions, where they sleep at night, and who they are. So
when Marlowe says, “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” he is affirming that whatever
else he may be, he is not dead. But because he is not dead, he is not indifferent to “the
nastiness,” nor is he free of it. The nastiness is, rather than anything in particular that
happened over the course of the novel, life. Notice the use of both the objective and the
subjective form of the first-person pronoun: “Me, I.” While at the beginning of the novel
Marlowe could start all his sentences with “I,” and paint the perfect picture of himself
outside the exigencies of urban living, now the “Me,” the object, enjoys equal standing.
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This loss of an idealized self is rendered, finally, as the loss of a person, specifically
Mona Mars: “All they [a couple of double scotches] did was make me think of Silver-
Wig, and I never saw her again” (231).
Chandler leaves us with this melancholic moment until The Little Sister,
published ten years later. In that novel, unlike the three that intervene, including
Farewell, My Lovely, which I discuss below, Chandler shows more clearly what follows
The Big Sleep’s melancholic realization. Marlowe is anxious about who he is and how he
belongs in the city. If by the end of The Big Sleep Marlowe sees that he is embedded in
Los Angeles’s urban environment, then The Little Sister shows him dwelling on the
existential sadness and dread that this embeddedness involves. At various points in the
novel Marlowe worries that he has ceased to meaningfully exist. “I was a blank man. I
had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name” (179). This lack of meaning, and
of identity, is also linked to a loss of humanity: “Let the telephone ring, please. Let there
be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again. Even a cop…Nobody has
to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star” (180). To be removed from the human
race is to be removed from L.A.’s urban life. “Even a cop,” a representative of not only
the of city’s institutional structure, but also, in The Little Sister, a force of corruption and
intimidation, would suffice. The desperation is intense.
So when Marlowe says, “You’re not human tonight” on his drive to Oxnard and
back, he does not mean something like, “You’re not being very nice right now.” On that
drive, he sees the city’s various parts from above as it were, the bird’s-eye-view he loses
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sight of in The Big Sleep. He sees a collection of signs and products, but no “bony
structure under the muck” (184).
Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More
Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair
and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals.
Now, wait a minute. Lots of nice people work in pictures. You’ve got the wrong
attitude tonight, Marlowe. You’re not human tonight. (81)

The people he identifies with the environment of Malibu are as artificial as the products
that constitute their world. It is a world of signs that point only to more signs: “pseudo-
refined” voices find their reality in something as insubstantial, though undeniably
present, as “Chanel No. 5” and “Lincoln Continental.” Not the things, but the names for
the things. Marlowe resists the artificiality and the emptiness, but the cost is that he has
nothing with which to identify himself, no stable ground on which to base his identity and
humanness.
Even contact with people fails. His plea for the telephone to ring is answered with
a call from Dolores Gonzalez, an oversexed actress friend of Mavis Weld. She wants
Marlowe to accompany her to see Mavis at Steelgrave’s house. On the drive through the
city, Marlowe’s mood quickly darkens again, and as they arrive at a parking lot that “was
like ants on a piece of overripe fruit” he lashes out again, and, as the image of the ants
suggests, his complaint has to do specifically with the overabundance of people that have
swarmed to Los Angeles. In that overabundance are a variety of unpleasant types:
We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-
dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and
Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels
and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits
that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress
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designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a
paper cup…(184)

The unfettered growth that was used mostly metaphorically in The Big Sleep is now
literal. There is a surplus of people from elsewhere who have come, attracted to a city
that is as cloying, not to mention rotten, as “overripe fruit,” and they have brought with
them nothing but a desire to consume, a hunger for products. Every character involved in
the mystery plot—Mavis Weld, Orin and Orfamy Quest, Stellgrave, Gonzalez—are
identified clearly and strongly with their city of origin, whether Manhattan, Kansas, or
Cleveland. Chandler renders the consequences of the explosion more literally than he did
in The Big Sleep in the form of high rents resulting from the scarcity of apartments. “You
make me laugh,” a character says when Marlowe pretends he is scouting apartments.
“You don’t look at rooms in this town. You grab them sight unseen. This burg’s so jam-
packed even now that I could get ten bucks just for telling there’s a vacancy here” (26).
And Mavis Weld’s apartment, “on Doheny Drive, just down the hill from the Strip,”
“didn’t look very expensive except that everything was expensive that year” (69). Things
cost more than they are worth; value is skewed in Chandler’s “jam-packed” postwar city.
The Los Angeles of The Little Sister is what the Los Angeles of The Big Sleep grew up to
become.
Chandler’s second novel, Farewell, My Lovely is quite different from both The
Big Sleep and The Little Sister, in terms of its representation of the city and of Marlowe’s
relationship to the city, as well as in terms of its style, structure, and tone. Farewell does
not lend itself to the exploration of symbols and tracing of keywords in the way that The
Big Sleep does, and it does not present the city as a kind of cultural wasteland of
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unreliable signification and identification, as does The Little Sister. Marlowe is not as
troubled by Los Angeles in Farewell. In fact, in that novel he demonstrates a kind of
anthropological expertise that allows him not only to move through the city’s various
neighborhoods and spaces with, if not impunity, then something like educated caution;
his degree of expertise also allows Marlowe to come closest to Fredric Jameson’s idea of
“a figure…who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-
pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together” (Jameson [1970]
69). This figure is needed in a place like Los Angeles (which, for Jameson, foreshadows
the more horizontally arranged social structures of postwar America) “[since] there is no
longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the social structure can be
grasped.” It is a useful, though not a perfect, formulation, and it does not apply to all of
Chandler’s novels. Even in Farewell, Marlowe is not “superimposed on the society as a
whole.” Rather, to the degree that he ties “its separate and isolated parts together,” he
does so not by the routine of his life, but by exploration, hypothesis, and trial and error,
as well as by seeking out and deploying the knowledge of others, such as the unnamed
African-American manager at the Hotel Sans Souci, journalist Anne Riordan, and ex-Bay
City cop Red Norgaard. Robert Merrill points out that “Farewell, My Lovely is perhaps
the most admired of Chandler’s novels, yet Marlowe’s involvement in this story is so
distant it is not altogether clear why he even participates in the investigation” (9).
Insofar as we think of “involvement” as, say, having a client, or, more
interestingly, feeling disturbed by his being complicit in and even constituted by a corrupt
environment, then, yes, Merrill is quite right. At the same time, though, Marlowe
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develops close feelings, one might even say attachments, to several characters, including
Moose Malloy, Anne Riordan, and Red Norgaard. He ends the novel feeling unusually
sympathetic for Helen Grayle. And, while he might not develop any sustained
relationship to the manager of the Hotel Sans Souci, Marlowe certainly respects his
intelligence and calmness under pressure. The good feelings he has for these characters
seems to overcome any negativity or bitterness he may feel toward the either obnoxious,
irritating, or downright evil characters, such as Detective Nulty, Lindsay Marriot, Dr.
Sonderborg, Jules Amthor, and the entire Bay City Police Department, especially its
Chief, John Wax. Sean McCann characterizes Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely as an
“emotion collector,” who moves “through the fragmented landscape of Los Angeles,
[absorbing] the injuries and attitudes of a host of minor characters so that eventually the
city can be drawn together into a landscape unified by common feeling” (158).
2

Marlowe’s own feelings for Red Norgaard are so intense they seem to verge on sexual
attraction, as Gershon Legman and Michael Mason have discussed.
Even within this matrix of feeling, though, Marlowe still seems detached. These
attachments are fleeting, and do not, after all, culminate in anything. More importantly,
Marlowe’s detachment has to do with his not having a clearly defined and intricately
rendered neighborhood that he knows intimately and can call his own. Anne Riordan,
daughter of a former (and good) Bay City Police Chief who has inherited oil fields, can
say she knows “all this neighborhood [around Purissima Canyon] like a book” (45). Red
Norgaard can navigate the Bay City pier and even the ocean out to Laird Brunette’s ship

2
For McCann this makes Marlowe typical of “appeal[s] to popular community at the core of New Deal
decentralism” (158).
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so well that Marlowe jokes, “You must have relatives on board” (154). The manager of
the Hotel Sans Souci is intimately familiar with his neighborhood. Jessie Florian may live
in utter squalor and destitution, and her neighbor, Mrs. Morrison may be a snoop, but
they are, in their own way, shown to be natives of their own part of town. “This ain’t a
relief neighborhood,” Mrs. Morrison says defensively (67). Even the weak and
ineffectual (not to mention, in a typically homophobic Chandler characterization, effete)
Lindsay Marriot is linked, through physical description, to Montemar Vista and Cabrillo
Street. After Marlowe has climbed the “two hundred and eight steps up to Cabrillo
street,” he meets Marriot, whose “blond hair was arranged, by art or nature, in three
precise blond ledges which reminded me of steps, so I didn’t like them” (29). Even Jules
Amthor’s office, in Stillwood Heights, is located in an ideal part of town, even if it is
only because “Nobody would be able to hear any screams” (88). Each neighborhood has
its representative, who either has a kind of intimate knowledge of, or who is somehow
inseparable from, that neighborhood.
We know Marlowe’s house and apartment are in Hollywood, and that one, or both
is on Hollywood Boulevard, near Ivar. Chandler does very little, though, to suggest that
there is any kind of neighborhood, or any kind of place at all, surrounding these spaces.
The only description of the office Chandler provides shows us, clearly, that the office is
in the city:
A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the
carpet. Traffic lights bong-bonged outside on the boulevard, interurban cars
pounded by, a typewriter clacked monotonously in the lawyer’s office beyond the
party wall. (26)

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I will have more to say about this in a moment, but for now suffice it to say that Chandler
renders the details of Marlowe’s neighborhood intentionally imprecise. Marlowe’s
apartment is particularly uninteresting, and quite unlike his apartment in The Big Sleep
which has, Marlowe says, “everything that was mine, that had any association for me,
any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio,
chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my
memories” (158).
3
And while he makes coffee for Detective Randall, the ritualistic
significance of the act in this novel pales in comparison to, say, The Long Goodbye. In
Farewell, Marlowe merely says, “I went back to the kitchenette and made the coffee and
waited for it to drip” (116). In The Long Goodbye, he says, “The coffee maker was
almost ready to bubble. I turned the flame low and watched the water rise. It hung a
little at the bottom of the glass tube…” and so on (28). Further, while an important scene
occurs in Marlowe’s apartment—the killing of Moose Malloy by Helen Grayle, when
Moose reveals that she is actually Velma Valento—it seems this scene occurs at all
because Marlowe’s apartment is neutral territory, a place of such little significance and
interest that he could gather people there without their suspecting anything.
Marlow’s office is equally uninteresting, particularly compared to his own or
Sheridan Ballou’s in The Little Sister, or to the offices of, Chief John Wax, which has “a
stained wood desk set far back like Mussolini’s,” or of Harry Jones’s in The Big Sleep or
Elisha Morningstar’s of The High Window (see Fredric Jameson’s “The Synoptic
Chandler” for a discussion of these offices and for Chandler’s figuration of the office).

3
This perhaps sentimental moment occurs when Carmen appears in his bed naked, and threatens to have
sex with him.
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Marlowe does not do much drinking or smoking in his office in this novel, nor does he
try to catch any bluebottle flies. His office does contain one evocative item, which helps
to characterize both the space and Marlowe:
They had a Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due
to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette
with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean
either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do
a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was
aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it
had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.
(25)

This picture quite clearly refers to Marlowe himself, who, like Rembrandt, works on
commission, and who, like any artist (or writer) who tries to make a living by his craft, is
bound to do some unappealing work in order to finance work that is more interesting, if
also less remunerative. This is John Hilgart’s point in “Philip Marlowe’s Labor of
Words.” Marlowe’s job may be to do detective work for sometimes undesirable clients
like Detective Nulty and Lindsay Marriot, both of whom will call asking Marlowe for
favors in a few paragraphs. But his vocation is as a wordsmith. He earns money doing
detective work in order to finance his labor of words.
This is a perfectly fine reading, as is that of Ronald R. Thomas, who, in “The
Dream of the Empty Camera: Image, Evidence, and Authentic American Style in
American Photographs and Farewell, My Lovely,” suggests the image of Rembrandt
refers specifically to Marlowe’s efforts to locate something like a real image through
layers of distortion and misrepresentation. It is also useful to think of the picture as
simply a vague, imprecise image, an image lacking clear definition. Insofar as this is the
one distinctive feature of Marlowe’s “neighborhood,” it seems appropriate to read this as
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indicative of Marlowe’s place and his position within that place: vague and undefined.
Further, notice that the picture is affixed to a calendar, linking it to time. We might read
this to mean a certain temporal vagueness is associated with Marlowe as well, as though
he is somehow detached from time, or related to time differently from the way other
characters are. He is certainly related to time in a less specified way than another
character who is largely placeless, Moose Malloy, who has been imprisoned for eight
years, and is thus a relic from the past, trapped in a time when Helen Grayle was still
Velma Valento, when the Central Avenue district was still primarily white, and when, as
William Marling points out, “an era when crime, like the rest of life, was romantic”
(218).
4
Even if Malloy is, unlike Marlowe, out of place in the present, he has a kind of
time that is specific and unique to him. He has a past, though one he is trying to
recapture, rather than evade. He is, in his attachment, the temporal opposite of Helen
Grayle, whose life now depends upon avoiding the past. These characters have a clear
and precise relationship to time.
Helen Grayle/Velma Valento, it should be said, has a clear and precise
relationship to space as well. Her narrative, which we learn of as the solution to the
mystery, is one of upward class mobility, of “a girl who started in the gutter [and] became
the wife of a multimillionaire” (168). Her change of class—which comes with a change
of name—is characterized geographically as a kind of lateral move from one Los Angeles
neighborhood to another. Velma Valento sang at Mike Florian’s nightclub, on Central
Avenue, and lived, presumably, in the rundown neighborhood nearby. Upon becoming

4
Marling cites the evident pride with which Malloy relates why he was imprisoned: “The Great Bend bank
job. Solo. Forty grand. Ain’t that something” (8).
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Helen Grayle, she left that slum, with its lack of privacy, for the mansion on Aster Drive
in Bay City that has, inside, “a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-
proof containers just for the upper classes” (72). The identity tied to the past is named
Velma Valento, and lives in a decaying neighborhood. The identity tied to the present is
named Helen Grayle and lives in a neighborhood so prosperous it seems to generate its
own atmosphere. Though the person Velma/Helen changes time, space, and identity, it is
really impossible to say which is real, Velma or Helen. Rather, it seems each is real,
though limited to its unique spatiotemporal conditions. At the end of the novel, when
Marlowe has narrated in a coda how Velma/Helen was captured, and how she committed
suicide, he says “I rode down to the street floor and went out on the steps of the City
Hall. It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as
Velma had gone” (175). This is commonly read as referring to death, which is certainly
plausible, not to mention romantic.
5
It seems equally plausible, though—particularly
considering the care Chandler takes to point out his location, City Hall, and the
atmospheric conditions at just that moment—to imagine that Marlowe simply cannot see
from downtown to Aster Drive, which is where Velma had gone to become Helen Grayle.
This reading clearly shows how Velma and Helen are tied to their particular

5
In “The Synoptic Chandler” Fredric Jameson compares the end of Farewell, My Lovely to the end of The
Lady in the Lake: “Yet Fawn Lake [from The Lady in the Lake] is in another sense something like the end
of a trajectory, a point beyond which neither writer nor character can seem to go, and which marks the end
of the road by being somehow beyond it. We may here want to recall the equally memorable ending of
Farewell, My Lovely which, also couched in the language of distance or space, seems to attempt to
transcend it by cancelling it out…It is not because Fawn Lake is associated with death after the fashion of
this sentence that we reach the end of the road as such but, rather, the other way around: it is because of
Fawn Lake’s spatial peculiarity and involution that the theme of death can win back such power of
evocation” (50).
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neighborhoods, and why “Velma,” as Marlowe calls her in the coda, cannot survive for
long in Baltimore, far away from her native environment.
The clear link between Velma/Helen’s identity and her neighborhood is
emblematic of the link between other characters’ identities and their neighborhoods.
Anne Riordan, Red Norgaard, Lindsay Marriot, Jessie Florian, Mrs. Morrison, and the
manager of the Hotel Sans Souci are all embedded in their neighborhoods. Moose
Malloy’s neighborhood is spatially absent, but temporally clear: it is in the past. In
contrast Marlowe’s neighborhood is utterly vague. Recall the description Chandler gives
of the world as Marlowe experiences it from his office (see page 96). Notice how this is a
kind of amalgamation of Helen Grayle’s house on Aster drive and Jessie Florian’s house
near downtown. The sunlight that “fell noiselessly” refers clearly to the “very quiet”
“special brand of sunshine” available in Grayle’s mansion, while the noise and obvious
lack of privacy, indicated by the thin party wall through which Marlowe can hear the
typewriter, refers to Jessie Florian’s house. His office, then, extends geographically over
all the places covered in the novel. Further, insofar as “the gutter” from which Velma
rose is the same as Jessie Florian’s current neighborhood, but in a different time,
Marlowe’s office also extends over all the time covered in the novel. So Marlowe’s space
and time may be vague, but it is also vast, as though he is both nowhere and everywhere
at once.
Detective Randall describes Marlowe’s activities as “master-minding all over the
landscape” (127). He does not mean this positively: “I’m telling you a few things…just
so you won’t go having any more brainstorms…Just so maybe for Christ’s sake you will
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let this one lay” (127). Marlowe, predictably, does not, though the reason he eventually
gives, that Helen Grayle hired him to find her necklace, rings hollow. It seems, rather,
that Marlowe persists just to persist, like the pink bug he finds in Randall’s office and
then carries downstairs and hides carefully in a bush. “I wondered, in the taxi going
home, how long it would take him to make the Homicide Bureau again” (131). What is
important to see here, though, is the vast difference in spatiotemporal scale between
Marlowe and the bug. The bug cannot master-mind all over the landscape. Its progress is
that of literal and linear time through space. With Marlowe, time and space seem more
like matters of everything or nothing. He can mastermind over the entire landscape, and
his office can metonymically relate to the entire quantity of space-time in play in the
novel. Or he can be unconscious. Marlowe is knocked out at least three times in
Farewell, and spends at least 48 doped up hours in Dr. Sonderborg’s clinic. These spells
of unconsciousness are outside time because, as Jameson points out, they “imitate death
itself by allowing the conscious or named personality to come into contact with its own
end or extinction.” As Jameson further points out, though, the moments of
unconsciousness “also seem to transform the spaces at which they occur” (1993, 51). The
first time he is knocked unconscious, in Purissima Canyon with Lindsay Marriot, is
illustrative. Here, it is after an encounter with a timeless, spaceless void that Marlowe
loses consciousness. Down in the Canyon, he and Marriot reach a “white painted barrier”
that “loomed across the dirt road.” Marriot says, “I don’t think you can get past it. The
space doesn’t look wide enough” (37). So Marlowe gets out of the car and walks beyond
the white barrier where
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the road dropped and curved. Below was darkness and a vague far-off sea-
sound…The road ended in a shallow bowl entirely surrounded by brush. It was
empty. There seemed to be no way into it but the way I had come. I stood there in
the silence and listened.
Minute passed slowly after minute, but I kept on waiting for some new
sound. None came. I seemed to have that hollow entirely to myself. (38)

He goes back the way he came, and upon reaching the car, is sapped, knocked
unconscious. When he regains consciousness, Marlowe talks to himself, referring to
himself in the third-person and the voice he hears merely as “the voice.” It is not until
several paragraphs that he, and the reader, realize there is no one else around, and that he
is narrating his theory of what happened to himself. When Marlowe regains
consciousness, he does so in an apparently serious philosophical sense. He does not
merely wake up from a deep sleep, or even come to his senses; he literally comes to
himself, regains his access to space and time. He inhabits his identity again.
It may seem that if Marlowe is either (a) completely outside space and time, (b) or
in it in such a way that he can grasp greater quantities, as it were, of space and time, then
he ought to have some level of omniscience. He may not be Philo Vance or Sherlock
Holmes, able to solve a case by miraculous deduction, but his understanding, in the terms
I have established, ought to be vast. Yet Marlowe is clearly not omniscient—or at least is
not supposed to be—even if in this novel his “masterminding” takes him pretty far from
Chandler’s idealized “mean streets.” Still, though, the way he solves this case has little to
do with guts and bravery and more to do with chance. It is by chance that he meets Anne
Riordan and Red Norgaard, a chance that allows him to see Moose Malloy in Dr.
Sonderborg’s clinic, thus saving that unpleasant excursion from complete pointlessness.
It is a seemingly on a wild hunch that Marlowe calls the title company and finds out that
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Lindsay Marriot owns Jessie Florian’s house, though this intuition seems consistent with
his involvement in a wider spatiotemporal field than other characters. He only guesses
that Malloy is aboard Brunette’s ship, the Montecito. It is also only by chance that
Marlowe meets Moose Malloy and even embarks on the case in the first place.
Even if all of these important moments happen as a result of chance encounters,
though, I do not believe Chandler is arguing, even if only implicitly, for a random
universe. In the section that follows I will show how Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope
helps us to see how Chandler manipulates the space and time of the various
neighborhoods in the city so that Farewell, My Lovely is not necessarily a representation
of Los Angeles at a specific time and place, but is rather a kind of composite
representation of a city in the midst of significant changes. Thinking this novel’s Los
Angeles in this way helps to make sense of the existence of almost personalized
spatiotemporalities. It also mitigates the possibility of a universe governed entirely by
chance because it shows a city growing and reorganizing itself in such a way as to make
the various chance encounters into likely occurrences.
In Farewell, My Lovely, “the neighborhood” is a chronotope and neighborhoods
function chronotopically. Let’s look for example at the opening of the novel, when
Marlowe, while searching for a Greek Barber, meets Moose Malloy. The opening
sentence signals that the neighborhood will be a kind of zone where space and time
behave unexpectedly. Chandler writes, “It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central
Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro” (3). Though apparently simple, this
sentence not only sets up the novel’s concern with neighborhoods; it makes spatial
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description an act of representing temporal change. Notice the beginning of the sentence,
“It was one of the mixed blocks…” While Chandler rather clearly implies that “It was
ON one of the mixed blocks…” that something happened, he does not actually use the
word ON. Compare this sentence with the similar one in “Try the Girl,” one of the stories
Chandler “cannibalized” to make the novel: “I was over on Central, which is the Harlem
of Los Angeles, on one of the ‘mixed’ blocks, where there were still both white and
colored establishments” (137). Notice the use of the preposition, and that the sentence
stays in the past tense. In Farewell, My Lovely his way of marking space is more
consistent with the way we mark time, as he indicates a few sentences later: “It was a
warm day, almost the end of March…” In signaling space the way we might ordinarily
signal time, Chandler suggests space can be expressed in terms of time. Notice too the
change from past tense, “was,” to present tense, “are.” Where before Chandler merely
implied a preposition in order to cue space in terms of time, now he creates a temporal
expectation, a description of the difference between then and now. We might expect to
hear that the block has changed, that what was once the case is now no longer the case. In
other words, in the obvious absence of the preposition, we might expect this sentence to
begin a description of a place, rather than indicate the place where something happened.
For instance, “It was one of the mixed blocks on Central Avenue, but now it is all
Negro…” Or “It was one of the mixed blocks…the blocks that were not yet all Negro…”
suggesting the block is now all Negro. The way the sentence is written, though, does not
suggest a distinction between then and now, between what was and what is. Rather, the
sentence suggests that a process of change has been going on for some time, but has not
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yet reached an as yet only speculated end. Marlowe does not speak from a point at which
the blocks are already all Negro; he is speaking from a point at which he imagines the
blocks will one day, perhaps soon, be all Negro.
Though perhaps only a neighborhood of Los Angeles in an extended sense—a
neighborhood exclusively of criminals and pleasure-seekers—Laird Brunette’s ship, the
Montecito, also functions chronotopically as a historical marker, and one that signals the
novel’s curious temporal range. It is only with great difficulty, and help from Red
Norgaard, that Marlowe boards the Montecito. And he only visits it on the hunch that
Moose Malloy may be onboard. Instead of Malloy he finds Brunette himself, and
seemingly in a flash of inspiration intuits the man’s identity. Brunette takes a message
from Marlowe, which he delivers to Malloy, evidently through one of the “dozen
grapevines that might help him to do that” (165). Though the visit with Brunette is
ultimately a success—he passes on the message to Malloy, who then turns up at
Marlowe’s apartment, only to be shot by the unmasked Helen/Velma—it seems oddly out
of place, just as, to Brunette, Marlowe is himself out of place. The gambler asks again
and again, “So how did you get on the boat?” Marlowe’s vague replies give him the
upper hand in the situation; Brunette’s territory is not secure if someone can appear out of
seemingly nowhere. And, even though Marlowe’ trip across the water in Red’s boat is
realistic enough, and described in detail, the actual moment that Marlowe boards the boat
through a ventilator shaft is described in terms of a mysterious emergence from darkness
into light, from near nothingness into a location in space and time:
Cold air rushed down the ventilator. It seemed a long way to the top. After three
minutes that felt like an hour I poked my head out cautiously from the hornlike
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opening. Canvas-sheeted boats were gray blurs near by. Low voices muttered in
the dark. The beam of the searchlight circled slowly. It came from a point still
higher, probably a railed platform at the top of one of the stumpy masts. There
would be a lad up there with a Tommygun too, perhaps even a light Browning.
Cold job, cold comfort when somebody left the loading port unbolted so nicely.
Distantly music throbbed like the phony bass of a cheap radio. Overhead a
masthead light and through the higher layers of fog a few bitter stars stared down.
…And out of the night and the fog, as it mysteriously does, enough light
gathered into one focus to shine on the dark hardness of a machine gun mounted
on a high tripod and swung down over the rail…(155, italics added)

The scene gradually materializes before Marlowe’s eyes, as if the distortion of time
Marlowe experienced in the ventilator shaft upset space too, so that either Marlowe has to
catch up with the space of the ship, or vice versa.
Marlowe’s conversation with Brunette further highlights the peculiarity of this
episode. Brunette says the note that Marlowe wants him to give to Malloy (which we
never see) “means nothing to” him. When Marlowe assures him the note will mean
something to Malloy, Brunette replies, “I don’t make you out. You risk your hide to come
out here and hand me a card to pass on to some thug I don’t even know. There’s no sense
in it” (160). Marlowe’s reply, ridden with negation, that “There isn’t if you don’t know
him,” clarifies little. There is an extent to which this scene, where the detective and the
gangster exchange mannered phrases, drink scotch, and smoke Egyptian cigarettes,
suggests a kind of self-conscious parody of screen dialogue (Babener 131). More
importantly, though, the oddness and perhaps unrealness of the dialogue and rituals
indicate that the point of this scene is to reintegrate Moose Malloy into the main narrative
(we know there is little time left for his story to end properly) without recourse to
ordinary legal or institutional procedures. Since Malloy is so strongly associated with a
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different, exceptional, time, then only by exceptional means can he be made to fit in the
present time, from which he is, once again, missing.
And so Chandler uses a gambling ship as the space to reincorporate Malloy, the
man out of time, into the plot. This is an interesting maneuver for a couple of reasons.
First, in reincorporating Malloy into the plot, Marlowe incorporates the Montecito (which
shares a name with a wealthy neighborhood in Santa Barbara) into the world of the novel,
which is to say into metropolitan Los Angeles. Brunette is a gambler and a racketeer who
owns “a piece of Bay City,” and while Marlowe cannot bring him to justice, he can dispel
the illusion that such a man is somehow not a part of the city. Though the growing city
may wish to disown the criminals and gamblers who populate the Montecito, or wish to
imagine that it is a world that exists far from its own borders Chandler uses Marlowe to
show that these types figure into and circulate through the population by influence on
police departments, and by subsidizing other criminal operations, like Dr. Sonderborg’s
clinic, which operates in plain sight. This is a neighborhood of Los Angeles with
boundaries that may seem strict and absolute, but that are, in reality, only imaginary.
By 1940, when Farewell, My Lovely was published, gambling ships had long
disappeared from Los Angeles’s shores. According to James Schwoch, in the early 1930s
gambling ships sailed just beyond L.A.’s coast, in international waters, and thus outside
United States jurisdiction. Further, these ships were registered in foreign countries, often
Panama, further distancing them from the legal authority of the United States. Their
primary purpose was to provide a space to sell alcohol during prohibition. 1933 marked
both the high point in gambling ships’ popularity and the abrupt end to the gambling ship
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era. While the repeal of prohibition in December 1933 would make offshore drinking
establishments obsolete, it was actually the occurrence in September of that year of two
highly publicized murders aboard two prominent ships, the City of Panama and the
Johanna Smith, that pressured federal authorities to crack down.
Chandler is never clear about when the events of Farewell, My Lovely take place.
As in all his novels, alcohol is easily available (Marlowe plies the manager of the Sans
Souci and Jessie Florian with a bottle of bourbon he buys at a drugstore), which suggests
some time after 1933 and the repeal of prohibition. Yet, after 1933 gambling ships would
have been both obsolete and not tolerated. Maybe one could say 1936, the year “The Man
Who Liked Dogs,” one of the stories Chandler developed into Farewell, or sometime
between then and 1940, when the novel was published, but it does not seem that such a
distinction matters as much as the fact that the presence of a gambling ship of the coast of
L.A. after 1933 is anachronistic.
6
Chandler employs this anachronism, though, to help
create his composite view of the city. I argue that he is linking pre-prohibition and post-
prohibition pictures of Los Angeles in order to create a sense, in the very time and place
of the novel’s action, of change. It is the case, as Mrs. Morisson intimates when she says,
“When I come here twenty-two years ago we didn’t lock our doors hardly,” or as
Marlowe points out when, in Purissima Canyon he notices among the “unfinished
electroliers and weed-grown sidewalks that “some realtor’s dream had turned into a

6
For his part, Schwoch does not even notice an anachronism, and merely suggests their presence in
Farewell, My Lovely is evidence of the influence of local details on Chandler’s work.
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nightmare there,” that the city has changed (66, 37).
7
Despite the changes, though, the
past continues to influence the present.
I argue this composite picture of Los Angeles, this attempt to represent change
over a period of time in a single narrative instance (in this case a novel) mitigates the
apparent randomness that governs the novel’s events. This is because the composite
picture draws together population growth and the decay of imagined neighborhoods, as
well as the realignment of already existing neighborhoods, including white flight away
from downtown and the imaginary incorporation of the seedy elements of the
Montecito—what we have here is a fluctuating, active metropolis that seems to move on
its own, creating boundaries and breaking them down, and in the process bringing
populations together and moving them apart. In such a place as this, it is perhaps less
chance that someone like Marlowe will meet someone like Moose Malloy on Central
Avenue than it is likely or probable, or a safe bet. And here the tension that has been
historically observed between seeming randomness in the face of actual planning,
between its appearance, as Michael Dear puts it, as, “on one hand…an intensely
privatized, anarchic vision of urban growth” and on the other as a city “with a long
history of formal planning,” comes to light (76).
8

7
William Marling points out that “This abandoned subdivision epitomizes Chandler’s view of the
migration on which Los Angeles depended for growth” (232).
8
On the issue of Los Angeles’s status as a heavily planned urban region, William Deverell and Greg Hise
point out in their introduction to Land of Sunshine that “Los Angeles is widely perceived as a museum of
failed urbanism, the great what-not-to-do of twentieth-century building and civic enterprise. Study of the
regions environmental history suggests otherwise. We are living with the consequences of regional
“success” defined simply as the cumulative realization of discrete policy and planning objectives, advanced
from the turn of the twentieth century forward, intended to recast American cities as metropolitan regions”
(2-3)
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Conclusion: Chandler and the Chronotope
I have argued that Farewell, My Lovely is significantly different from The Big Sleep and
The Little Sister in that it deploys space and time in ways that are not only unique and
complicated, but also particular to the Los Angeles urban milieu he uses as setting.
Chandler’s use of space and time has implications for the structure of his narratives as
well—or at least how the structure is perceived. I would like to end this chapter by
addressing Chandler’s narrative structure, and how space and time, as well as the
representation of Los Angeles, inform that structure.
In his two essays on Chandler, “On Raymond Chandler,” published in 1970, and
“The Synoptic Chandler,” published in 1993, Jameson suggests two different ways that
Chandler’s representation of Los Angeles’s urban space structures Chandler’s narratives.
9

In “On Raymond Chandler,” Jameson says “The form…is more spatial in character: even
after the temporal reading of the book is finished we have a feeling of its continuity
spread out before us in a pattern, and the earlier, misleading twists of the plot…remain
for the imagination of form as an integral part of the road travelled, the experiences gone
through” (83). The structure of the book becomes less an uncovering of clues or of
coincidences in time, than simply following Marlowe around as he ties the various parts
of the city together. John Hilgart echoes and modifies this view in “Philip Marlowe’s
Labor of Words,” where he claims that the novel’s structure represents the city’s
structure. He says, “The fragmentary appearance and experience of modern society takes

9
See Casey Shoop’s, “Corpse and Accomplice: Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler, and the
Representation of History in California,” for a detailed discussion of the differences between Jameson’s
two articles on Chandler in terms of the representation of California as postmodern space, and the
development of Jameson’s philosophy.
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its mimetic form in Chandler’s discrete and often short chapters, each of which is
technically a piece of a puzzle, though most of the time the connection between part and
whole is quite beyond the understanding of both Marlowe and the reader” (368). The
novels, Hilgart suggests, must be assembled, though it seems one has little hope of
realizing a complete picture. We might think in this context of Edward Soja, who says
that Los Angeles “is difficult to grasp persuasively in a temporal narrative, for it
generates too many conflicting images, confounding historicization, always seeming to
extend laterally instead of sequentially” (150).
Together, Jameson and Hilgart show a model for imagining a spatial, rather than
temporal, narrative structure based upon the apparent resemblances between Chandler’s
representation of Los Angeles and the experience of reading his novels. In Literature and
Race in Los Angeles Julian Murphet locates a similar spatial structure, though he claims
its appearance results from Chandler’s tendency to deemphasize plot (and thus
temporality) at the expense of style and voice. Murphet writes, drawing upon Bakhtin,
“With plot thereby subordinated to modernist stylistic experiment, the Los Angeles
detective story became more interested in space than in time, and generated within its
own formal evolution new procedures of chronotopography” (42). This view that
Chandler is uninterested in plot (and that this lack of interest is a sign of superior writing)
is rather common. We see in Freeman, for instance, that the strength of Chandler’s prose
comes from “individual scenes that never feel rushed, rather than mere plots” (157).
Chandler generated the idea that his work deemphasizes plot in a 1947 letter in which he
claims, “to care nothing” about and to be “fundamentally rather uninterested in plot”
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(78). His purpose is partly to justify his own feelings of vexation in the face of creating
plots. “I’d write something I liked and then I would have a hell of a time making it fit to
the structure. This resulted in some rather startling oddities of construction…” At the
same time, though, there is evidence to suggest Chandler felt there was an artistic
principle at stake in trying to write in such a way as to minimize reliance on plot. In a
1944 letter to James Sandoe, Chandler suggests that among the good reasons why
detective stories are marginalized as literature, is the fact that “The detective or mystery
story as an art form has been so thoroughly explored that the real problem for a writer
now is to avoid writing a mystery story while appearing to do so” (40). That is to say, he
should avoid the narrative conventions but maintain the aura of mystery fiction. This is a
peculiarly English problem, too: “The French are the only people I know of who think
about writing as writing.”
Chandler is taken too much at his own word here. Where Freeman, Jameson,
Murphet, and Hilgart want to follow him in deemphasizing plot and time in order to
emphasize something else—space, perhaps, or style—George N. Dove, Peter J.
Rabinowitz, David H. Richter, and Robert Merrill (whom I will arbitrarily call the Plot
Positive critics, in opposition to the Space Positive critics) all refuse to take Chandler at
his word, and argue that his novels are not only carefully and interesting plotted, but that
his plots constitute the source of his innovativeness (Dove) or can tell us something about
plot in general (Merrill). These writers all acknowledge that in writing about Chandler’s
plots, they are writing in opposition to much Chandler criticism and to the views of the
writer himself. Though it is true that these essays are not all entirely successful, they do
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succeed in showing that plot is not an arbitrary or easily dismissible aspect of Chandler’s
work. And this implies that arguments for a spatial structure that depend upon
minimizing plot are hollow, and refuse to consider Chandler’s work in all its complexity.
Though in some ways the simplest and least ambitious (not to mention, for what
it’s worth, the one originally published in the least prestigious journal, The Armchair
Detective) Dove’s essay is quite useful for thinking about Chandler’s plots, even if the
other Plot Positive critics do not cite it. In his essay, “The Complex Art of Raymond
Chandler,” he argues that each of Chandler’s first four novels has not only a unique plot,
but a plot that also challenges the plotting conventions, “first used by Poe, crystalized by
Conan Doyle...” and even used by Hammett, of detective fiction as they existed at the
time.
10
In terms of The Big Sleep, Dove points out, as is well known, that the main
mystery is solved midway through the novel, leaving “residues of mystery” to drive the
story until the end. Dove uses the term “‘residue of mystery’ to describe a story-line that
diverges from the main plot, runs parallel to it, and after the solution of the original
problem, carries forward the element of suspense on its own” (103).
11
Dove points out
that The Little Sister is the only other of Chandler’s novels to employ the “residue of
mystery structure.”
Dove characterizes the plot of Farewell, My Lovely as a “parallel-merging plot
type of story,” which if we ignore certain complexities, seems right. The incident with

10
Dove lists seven steps of the conventional, or “classic,” structure: “The Problem, the First Analysis, the
Complication, the Period of Confusion, the Dawning Light, the Solution, and the Explanation” (102).
11
Merrill too points to the early solution to the mystery as a crucial moment in Chandler’s concept of
plotting. For Merrill, Marlowe’s conscious and deliberate decision to ignore Sternwood’s wishes and
pursue Rusty Regan tells us something about Marlowe, namely that he remains unsatisfied with what he
has discovered, and the novel's plot turns on what we learn here about its narrator protagonist” (6).
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Moose Malloy occurs independently from the incident with Lindsay Marriot, though
readers with any familiarity at all with even basic novelistic conventions know that the
two incidents, and the plots spurred by them, have to come together eventually. The first
point of connection we get, of course, has to do with real estate: Marlowe learns that
Lindsay Marriot owns Jessie Florian’s house. The narrative from then on gradually
makes more and more connections between the two plots. The occurrence of these
revelations means that, for Dove, time is the main structuring element. He points out
Marlowe’s musing in The Lady in the Lake that “there’s a connection in time” between
the murder of one character and the disappearance of another to indicate how connections
in time are the devices that give Chandler’s novels shape (qtd. 105).
Useful as Dove’s formulations are, though, they fail to take into account the
crucial point that though these plots might make narrative sense in other novels, the fact
is they derive their power from Chandler’s Los Angeles setting. Rabinowtiz and Richter
do not miss this point, though they do not develop it as well as they could. Rabinowitz,
who limits himself to The Big Sleep, argues that Chandler upsets the political
assumptions of detective fiction as practiced by someone like Agatha Christie by making
corruption a social problem, and not the result of a single unbalanced individual. The
result is an ambience of despair, which reflects the corruption and injustice that
constituted Chandler’s social world. One of Rabinowitz’s stated assumptions (which,
though perhaps worth mentioning at the time, is taken for granted now) is that literary
meaning depends upon discourse external to literature. This is another way of saying The
Big Sleep reflects an attitude toward, as Tom Hiney puts it, the real-life “rise of hard-
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boiled crime itself,” especially in Southern California. Examples include the bombing of
private detective Henry Raymond’s car. Raymond was in a position to expose corruption
in the mayor’s office (Hiney 87). So, Rabinowitz points out, [The Big Sleep] ends not
with the soothing conservative affirmation of order, but with something more politically
unsettling: loose ends, a detective who fails, and a pervasive sense of individual despair,
social chaos, and the triumph of evil” (123).
12

Richter revises Rabinowitz by arguing that while the ideology of pervasive
corruption structures The Big Sleep, it is not a vital aspect of the main plot of Chandler’s
other novels, as Rabinowitz suggests. That is not to say the theme of corruption does not
run through all of Chandler’s work. Rather, according to Richter, “The fact is…that the
cynical ideology of crime at the heart of The Big Sleep runs all through the Chandler
canon. The formal element through which this element of content is expressed, however,
shifts from the foregrounded plot at the center of the story to what I am going to call the
background action” (31). “Background action” refers to “those elements of the story that
do not contribute to the plot,” but that nonetheless make the plot intelligible. Background
action does this by (1) establishing the realism of the setting; (2) establishing the
likelihood that something would or could happen in the foreground; (3) establishing “the
values of the narrative against which the primary action is to be judged” (32-33).
13
So,
elements of corruption like Dr. Sonderborg and Jules Amthor exist in the background in

12
David Fine echoes this point in Imagining Los Angeles: “…[In] the brand of detective fiction pioneered
by Hammett and the Black Mask writers, and anchored in Los Angeles by Chandler, Crime is not just an
aberrant act—a murder in the vicarage or country estate—but a pervasive feature on the urban landscape, a
network that crosses neighborhood, class, and racial division” (119).
13
Richter calls these functions “mimetic, probabilistic, and normative” (32).
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order to establish the moral and mimetic environment, and to give readers a way to judge
the coherence and value of what happens in the foreground.
Still, even though Rabinowitz and Richter are aware of the importance of the
setting not only to the coherence of the plot but also to the meaning of the novel, they do
not acknowledge the importance of Chandler’s representation of urban space as a way of
filling out a story, as well as way of organizing the telling of the story. So dismissing plot
entirely is undesirable because doing so simply ignores a significant aspect of Chandler’s
achievement; and emphasizing plot to the point of diminishing Chandler’s interest in
urban space is also undesirable. One cannot be entirely plot— which is to say time—
positive or entirely space-positive. Bakhtin’s chronotope is the most sensible way of
thinking about how Chandler structures his narratives because his narratives consist so
vitally of an interplay between space and time. This is clearly the case in a rather
complex and idiosyncratic way in Farewell, My Lovely, where a city is represented as a
composite picture in space over time, but it is also true in other novels, where Chandler is
less interested in layer space and time. For instance, in The Big Sleep, houses and rooms
are specifically chronotopic. It is in a special room in a special house that Marlowe meets
Sternwood and Vivian, a special room in a special house where Marlowe discovers
Geiger’s body, a room in a house where Marlowe meets Wilde, Ohls, and Cronjager, a
very distinctive room in a very distinctive building where Harry Jones dies, and the room
in Marlowe’s apartment where he is threatened by Carmen’s sexuality. These are all
major narrative moments, moments when time slows down, space fills up, and the story
takes a turn. Whereas Routledge says a room such as Vivian Regan’s is not a reflection of
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her mind, but “actually a projection of her character,” I would suggest the room’s
significance is not so limited, or as it were local, but rather constitutive of the way
Chandler organizes space and time (Routledge 100).
While cars play an important role in all of Chandler’s books, they seem
particularly chronotopically relevant in The Little Sister. Marlowe’s most scathing
speeches about Los Angeles occur in his car, and it is in his car that he negotiates the
quasi-vigilante neighborhood watch to reach Steelgrave’s mansion. It could also perhaps
be possible to think of Los Angeles itself as a chronotope in The Little Sister. Chandler
compares Los Angeles to the rest of the United States more in this novel than in any of
the others I have treated here, and it is the novel in which the origins of so many of the
principal characters are mentioned the most clearly and emphatically: The Quests from
Manhattan, Kansas; Weepy Moyer, Dolores Gonzales, and Dr. Lagardie from Cleveland;
Sunny Moe Stein and his gang from Brooklyn. While I will not for now think about what
it would mean for an entire city, and the city that is the setting of the novel, to be a
chronotope (Bakhtin certainly does not mention such a possibility), I will merely suggest
that the peculiarities of Los Angeles’s urban development can perhaps be discussed in
terms that sound like the chronotope. Notice for instance this evocative similarity
between how Bakhtin describes the chronotope, and how Michael Dear (via Lewis
Mumford) describes Los Angeles: with the chronotope “time becomes, in effect, palpable
and visible” (250). Dear titles his essay on Intentionality and Urbanism in Los Angeles,
1781-1991, “In the City, Time Becomes Visible.” In this essay, Dear wants to talk about
how “L.A. landscapes are obviously a direct consequence of the constant interplay
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between…the intentionalities of the private realm and those of the public sphere” (76).
Note the spatial metaphors, “realm,” “sphere.” These kinds of spaces have historically
competed over how, via urban planning and land use, to project the city into the future, as
well as to determine what version of the past is legible. Space writes time, or “the text of
the city” (77).
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Chapter Three
James M. Cain and the City as Existential Challenge

Raymond Chandler was known to have disliked James M. Cain’s work, and resented
being associated with him under the aegis of hard-boiled or tough-guy writing. In a 1943
letter to Alfred A. Knopf he vents his disgust at some length. “But James Cain—faugh!
Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux
naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence
and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about
dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and
ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops
at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that?” (McShane 101). For Cain’s part,
he “would not read” Chandler—“Well, I tried,” he said in a 1974 interview—or, for that
matter, Hammet; after reading “only about twenty pages [of The Glass Key], [he] said,
forget this goddamn book” (Hoopes 470, 213). So Cain did not like being associated with
the tough-guy or hard-boiled school either, though the association persists (and probably
always will) as evidenced by the title of William Marling’s study of The American
Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. It makes some sense, of course, to discuss
Hammett and Chandler together. They worked within the same general generic
constraints; both began their careers publishing stories in pulps like Black Mask; and
Hammett was an important influence and inspiration on Chandler. “Hammett is all right,”
Chandler said. “I give him everything” (101).
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Cain and Chandler began publishing fiction at about the same time (though Cain
had worked as a journalist before), but in very different places. Whereas Chandler was
publishing stories in pulps like Black Mask and Dime Detective, Cain was placing his
early stories in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Cain knew Mencken personally from
his time as a journalist in Baltimore and New York. And, of course, Mencken founded
Black Mask as a way to finance his less popular and less financially viable magazine, The
Smart Set. Success came quickly to both men, even if they only began publishing in
middle age. Both Cain and Chandler’s first novels were published by Alfred A. Knopf,
and both were instant hits. According to Cain’s biographer, Roy Hoopes, the immense
success, in 1934, of The Postman Always Rings Twice was utterly unprecedented (244).
Cain and Chandler approached mainstream success, then, from somewhat
opposite ends, though the products that brought such immense cultural and financial
rewards shared certain superficial similarities: relatively frank portrayals of sexuality and
even “deviant” or extreme sexuality, such as sadism, pornography, and nymphomania.
Though Frank Chambers and Philip Marlowe have, ultimately, little in common, both are
white, working class men whose emotional register fluctuates between brutishness and
sentimentality. And, of course, both use Los Angeles and its environs as the backdrop for
the bizarre and rather extreme behavior on display. This is, of course, the case for all of
Chandler’s novels, and for Cain’s most successful ones (with the exception, perhaps of
Serenade, which was successful, and which took place mostly in Mexico). Also, each
writer becomes more and more invested in his representation of the city in each
successive novel. I have already pointed this out with Chandler. The progression is even
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more pronounced in Cain. From The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), through
Double Indemnity (1936), and on to Mildred Pierce (1941), Cain’s representation of Los
Angeles’s urban spaces becomes denser and more specific to the extent that the last novel
is very nearly about the city, while the first employs it mostly as an abstraction.
While Chandler’s fiction betrays a kind of anxiety about Los Angeles’s growing
population and geographical expansion, Cain’s conceives of the city as the grounds of a
kind of existential challenge, albeit one that develops from novel to novel. A common
thread running from Postman to Mildred is both a desire to be and to possess, as well as a
terrible fear of, the unique, the sui generis. Cain’s characters strive for success and
fulfillment, but also for a kind of unprecedented condition, an utterly singular way of
being. This is a vague formulation, but it is also a vague desire, though not one without
representation or embodiment in the novels. Cain’s most compelling figures of utter
uniqueness, Phyllis Nirdlinger and Veda Pierce, are near monstrous figures that almost
defy comprehension, let alone control. Los Angeles ends up an apt setting for these
stories of ambition and fear because, in Cain’s reckoning, it is characterized,
simultaneously and paradoxically, by uniqueness and banality. Further, the city is, to him,
rather than a metropolis whose rapid and unregulated growth threatens to overwhelm
itself, a place of significant, if as yet unrealized, potential where the possibility of great,
and sudden, success is balanced by the rather Frankensteinian possibility that one’s
efforts at achieving brilliant, unique originality can end in destruction. Cain’s Los
Angeles challenges characters out of benign complacency only to show the ways their
desires are incompatible with their abilities.
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I suggest this reading is different from the one put forth, in various but only
slightly modified forms, by David Fine, Paul Skenazy, and David Madden and Kristopher
Mecholsky, that for Cain Los Angeles is a place where dreams turn to nightmares, and
that Cain’s fiction is designed to undermine myths of the West as a kind of Promised
Land. For Fine in “Beginning in the Thirties: The Los Angeles Fiction of James M. Cain
and Horace McCoy,” “[Cain and Horace McCoy’s novels are] concerned with puncturing
the bloated image of Southern California as the golden land of opportunity and the fresh
start. For Cain and McCoy, Southern California was not the place of new beginnings but
of disastrous finishes” (44). Skenazy’s interestingly similar formulation says, “Cain’s
California is not a golden land of promise but it is the opportunistic zone of people
greedy to claim a place in the sun” (33). And David Madden and Kristopher Mecholsky
write “Cain is interested in the way the high hopes of the westward movement collapsed
on the Pacific shore in the vacant glare of a sunlight that gilds the cheapest artifacts of
transient American technology” (91).
Admittedly, there is something certainly true about these readings, for all of
Cain’s novels are about ambitions of one kind or another that end badly. The problem is
these readings suggest, I think, that Cain, like, say, Nathanael West or Theodore Adorno
or even the late Raymond Chandler, despised Southern California, and conceived of it as
a vulgar, crass, and all but dystopic place. This is inconsistent with the attitude Cain
expressed in his non-fictional writings about Southern California. Within three years of
his arrival in Los Angeles, in 1931, to write at $450 a week for Paramount, Cain
published a handful of articles on Southern California and the West, all of which are
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ultimately positive, and some of which are enthusiastic to the point of almost religious
hyperbole. His most enthusiastic pieces are from 1934. In “Western Virus” and “The
Bosky Dells,” short pieces published in Hearst’s New York American in June of that year,
Cain depicts the West glowingly as a land of spiritual renewal. Cain opens “Western
Virus” with the “dissatisfaction with everything” he saw on a trip back to the east coast.
The reason for his dissatisfaction is that he had “gone Western in precisely the way that
every Iowa farmer goes Western as soon as he treks over the Rockies, buys a ranch and
settles down to raise oranges.” Rather than contracting a virus, “going Western” is a more
spiritual experience involving “a belief that the West affords a better, richer way of life,
that it offers something to the soul as well as to the body, that it is esoteric as well as
material.” “The truth about the West is that there is something mystical in it” (187). “The
Bosky Dells” is a brief account of the superiority of Western landscapes to others in
America. Of the Western deserts he says:
It would be hard to imagine a more horrible place, and yet as I looked out
on those stunted desert bushes, all warped and twisted by a wind that never stops
blowing, I got something. There was nothing sweet, contented, and pretty-pretty
here. It was a grim, desperate and terrible struggle for existence, and all of a
sudden I was stirred by it, excited by its drama, lifted by its stark, lethal beauty.
They say the desert gets you after a while; that once you begin to feel it no
other place seems like home. I suppose so. I have been in the Southwest for three
years, and like all the rest have begun chasing mirages. (188).

While moving to Los Angeles fostered Cain’s imagination, it also made him
nostalgic for the time before the frontier closed, and specifically, in his mind, the kind of
fiction frontier exploration, or merely the presence of a frontier, enabled. In “Wanted: A
Western Story,” also from The New York American, in November 1933, Cain pines for
“Western stories” of the kind that Twain, Harte, Bierce, London, Norris, O. Henry, and
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Cather, among others, wrote. Without going into specifics, Cain merely says that in these
kinds of stories “the destiny, the national purpose of the deal must be there” (184). Unlike
the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, West, and Sinclair Lewis, which “bear no relation,
except in a purely journalistic sense, to the times in which [he] [lives],” Western stories
would show “in these directionless days” “what we are headed for” (184). The “stark,
lethal beauty” of the desert and the mirages it inspires are for Cain a pursuit, a
destination, and one that both refers to the frontier and Manifest Destiny, and also
functions as the best possible replacements. There is no frontier to approach anymore, but
there are mirages, and there are miles and miles of imposing territory yet to be braved.
In “Paradise,” published in The American Mercury in March 1933, his longest and
most complex piece on “the civilization of Southern California,” Cain locates “the idea
held by everybody here that some sort of destiny awaits the place” as not only the
region’s most unique and meaningful feature, but also as the very thing that gives life in
Southern California meaning at all. As in “Wanted: A Western Story,” Cain emphasizes
the important role the frontier and Manifest Destiny had in American history, and
expresses regret that the frontier is gone. “I believe that one of the troubles of the United
States as a whole is that it no longer has [a destiny]. In the beginning, its destiny was to
reduce a continent, and that destiny, as long as it lasted, made everything hum…” (177).
Evidently, even if the United States might be, in Cain’s view, stumbling along,
“directionless,” at the moment, Southern California is “a place that not only thinks it has
a destiny, but knows it has a destiny,” and so “you cannot help but be arrested” (178).
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Cain himself is thusly arrested, and this is his reason for staying in Southern California.
“The climate,” he says, “suits me fine” (178).
Though this enthusiastic endorsement of Southern California is perfectly
consistent with Cain’s subsequent pieces on the region, it comes as something of a
surprise in “Paradise.” Cain, not yet quite infected with the Western Virus, mixes his
praise of Southern California’s virtues with rather harsh criticism of its flaws. Among the
targets of Cain’s criticism are the region’s climate (that is, its weather patterns; Cain’s
concluding sentence is evidently intended to be punningly ironic) and a general sense of
almost Beckett-like lassitude and meaninglessness that results from a lack of vitalizing
economic activity. The climate’s greatest scourge is the sunlight, whose effects are both
phenomenological and existential: “it sucks the color out of everything that it touches,
takes the green out of leaves and the sap out of twigs, makes human beings seem small
and of no importance.” Any variety that exists in the landscape, whether built or natural,
is neutralized to a monochrome “gray, sunbaked tan…” (165). In the face of such
sameness, where human activity is washed away the possibility of insanity becomes real:
There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic
crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference, and that is the one thing the human
imagination cannot stand. It withers, or else, frantic to make itself felt, goes off
into feverish and idiotic excursions that have neither reason, rhyme, nor point, and
that even fail in their one purpose, which is to attract notice. (166)

This is rather different from the spiritually beneficial qualities he would ascribe to the
place in his later pieces. In any case it is a bold and evocative description of Southern
California, and one guaranteed to satisfy his stated purpose of undermining the “false
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picture” of Los Angeles from “Sunkist ads, newsreels, movie magazines, railroad folders,
and so on…” (164).
If the climate is, rather than beautiful and inspiring, dull and tedious, then the
economy is no different. Cain finds there is little meaningful work in Southern California.
While he wants, “big slashing industries, industries that bind men together, make them
feel their competence as workmen, fill them with the vanity that demands adequate
recompense; industries that afford an afflatus of the ego that is requited only by fine food
and drink; industries that produce pep, bustle, enjoyment of life,” all he finds are menial
jobs growing oranges, pumping gas, or waiting tables. This kind of work conduces only
to soul-destroying boredom. Rather than to productive activity, Southern Californians
pursue one, or a few, of the “nutty religions” that pervade the place. These religions “are
merely the effort of these people to inject some sort of point into their lives; if not on
earth, then in the stars, in numbers, in vibrations, or whatever their fancy hits on” (173).
So in between an unsatisfying economy and the prevalence of faddish religions “life
takes on a dreadful vacuity here,” which cannot be mitigated by the abundance of cultural
opportunities (“when I want symphonies, I can hear excellent performances in the
Hollywood Bowl, and under pleasanter circumstances than in a stinking hall in Paris”) or
the excellent schools and infrastructure, or the absence of “the Ku Klux aspect of the
American temperament” (169, 170, 168). There is no variety, nor is there the bustle and
energy that characterizes older, more successful cities.
On the other hand, though, one should not infer from Cain’s many critiques that
everything about Southern California is utterly awful. Indeed, despite their dullness, Cain
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regards the people as not only consistently and uniformly friendly and courteous, but also
of “distinctly superior human material” (166, 175). Unlike other American regions,
Southern California was settled by “a selective process” so that, instead of failures simply
looking for a new opportunity to survive, the region was populated by accomplished
people who were looking for a new challenge (175). The fact that they have not found the
kind of challenge or stimulation or success is not their fault. “Circumstances, particularly
the fact that at the moment there are not very stimulating things for them to do may have
condemned these people” to ennui and mostly pointless pastimes, but they are capable of
more (175). If circumstances were to change, if “it were only possible to create for them a
suitable play artificially” then, presumably, it would be possible for the people, and the
region, to reach its potential. Whether this is what Cain means when he speaks of the
place’s “destiny” is unclear, and it is unclear (1) how the “idea held by everybody here
that some kind of destiny awaits the place” is consistent with the general lassitude he
ascribes to the place, and (2) how this idea of destiny differs greatly from among the
various “nutty religions.” Cain also suggests that the change of circumstances or the
arrival of destiny will simply happen; he does not call upon the people already in
Southern California to do much of anything to change their circumstances. One might
also well wonder how such superior people with such a belief in destiny fell into
existential torpor. The implication is that Southern California is capable of exerting a
kind of languorous influence, one that is quite the opposite of the sense of spiritual
renewal described in “Western Virus,” and that newcomers are powerless to resist. It is,
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again, difficult to square this influence with Cain’s optimism and belief in “destiny.”
Couldn’t the belief in destiny be the very thing that enables the ennui, the torpor?
In any case, Cain’s early journalism portrays Southern California as a place with,
for good or ill, almost magical powers. For this reason, along with its sense of destiny, it
is unlike other parts of the United States. Southern California is special, exceptional. And
yet, part of its exceptionalness, at least in terms of “Paradise,” is its constitutive
monotony. This is coded negatively with the sunlight, which bleaches everything a
uniform gray, and even eliminates distinctions in length and height: “your trees do not
look like trees at all, but are inconsequential things reaching not .000001% of the distance
to heaven they aspire to” (165). Of course, the sunlight does have one redeeming quality:
“It is a sort of general disinfectant” (167). In fact it conduces toward an exceptional
cleanliness, “a cleanliness hardly to be matched anywhere.” If everything is more or less
the same, at least it is clean. “There is no squalor here, or dirt,” with the exception of “the
few Mexican hovels in every town” (167). Cleanliness, then, is next to whiteness, and
specifically to American whiteness, which Cain makes clear when he points out that
European cities are often full of litter and garbage, none of which is to be found in Los
Angeles.
Since the Mexican hovels are the only exception to Cain’s claim of universal
cleanliness in Los Angeles, it comes as no surprise that he codes the general sameness of
the people of the region positively. His experiences with Mexicans, not to mention other
people of color whom he does not bother to mention, seems limited to distant glances of a
duration only adequate to ascertaining difference. The hovels are mere blemishes in an
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otherwise spotless landscape, while the Mexicans themselves, who barely deserve notice,
are for Cain also near negligible aberrations from the region’s general whiteness. Cain’s
Southern California is not significantly multicultural; nor is it multilingual. The people
are not only universally friendly and courteous—“you will go a long way before you
meet a churl”—they also speak perfect English (166). “The authentic talk of the region is
simply good English, and you will hear it wherever you go” (167). Anticipating readers’
objection, Cain points out that he, too, was surprised initially because “it is hard to
believe that the common man can express himself coherently, unless he has learned the
trick somehow by rote.” There are apparently no tricks. Cain would figure out quickly
how to use the articulate common man to literary profit. In “The Art of Fiction” for The
Paris Review he says, “They use a little better grammar in California than they do in
Maryland, but what was even better for me was the roughneck who uses fairly good
grammar…Everything broke for me” (Zinsser par. 25). This phenomenon, common
enough in Southern California, was evidently novel enough elsewhere, and particularly as
a representation in literature, to make Cain famous.
Though it would be an exaggeration to say “Paradise” manifests much anxiety
about Mexicans, or even, really, gives them much thought, the brief mention of those
hovels, along with the complete deafness to the presence of languages other than English,
is a move that does end up revealing what it attempts to conceal. The existence of
nonwhites cannot be denied, even if he attempts to obscure it. Though Cain does say, in
his penultimate paragraph, on the region’s destiny, that Southern California “is keenly
aware of Mexico and the Orient,” and that “streams are meeting here that ought to churn
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up some exciting whirlpools,” he does not himself seem aware of the Mexicans or
Japanese or Chinese in his midst except as vague constructs indicating something non-
American (178).
Cain published The Postman Always Rings Twice a year after “Paradise.” The
novel, a rather brutal story of murder, betrayal, and retribution, contains nothing of the
essay’s optimism. And, while life in Postman’s Southern California certainly seems to
have something of the vacuity Cain ascribes to it in “Paradise,” one could hardly say
Frank or Cora are made of “distinctly superior human material.” For these reasons, David
Ulin seems right when he says of “Paradise,” “it's tempting to read the essay's title as
ironic, since Cain's fictional world is generally more of a paradise lost” (par. 4). Also, it
seems unlikely that Postman is what Cain has in mind when he pines for Western stories
that show a clear national direction. The main inspiration for Postman, in fact, was the
Snyder/Gray case, which took place not in the West, but in New York City. Ruth Snyder
and her lover Judd Gray plotted to murder Snyder’s husband Albert. The part of the story
that particularly intrigued Cain was that after the murder Gray rode a train with a bottle of
wine from Snyder. He would have drank the wine if he had a bottle opener; but since he
did not want to draw attention to himself, he left the bottle untouched. A story emerged
that the bottle had been poisoned. Though it would turn out to be apocryphal, Cain was
fascinated by the idea of conspirators turning on each other after committing a crime.
1
Cain claims to have decided to set a similar story in Southern California after
learning that a woman, “this appetizing but utterly commonplace woman,” who is “sexy,
the kind you have ideas about,” and who worked at his regular gas station, had murdered

1
See William Marling’s The American Roman Noir for a more detailed account.
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her husband (Hoopes 225). Not only does this importation of an eastern story into a
western setting sound radically different from his archetypal Western story; it differs
sharply from the interest Cain cultivated in the history of the West:
I had supposed the West to be a bit naïve, a bit recent, a bit wild, wooly, and
absurd. When I examined the facts, however, I found them rather different.
Actually, the country is the heir to a prodigious, rich, colorful civilization that
sprang into being with the first gold strike on the American River in 1848 and,
indeed, went back years before that, for the life that was led by the Spanish
ranchers, to say nothing of the contribution of the Russians, was wholly charming.
(Hoopes 224)

Evidently he had imagined writing “a new history of the United States…not in terms of
government , but in terms of, let us say, conquest. It would trace the movement (across
the continent) in terms of great staples, tobacco, cotton, lumber, fur, gold, corn, cocoa,
and wheat, and show what happens when these big lodes of export staples begin to run
out” (Hoopes 243). Indeed, in Postman, rather than working on the grand scale of
“conquest,” Cain seems to go out of his way to make his scope as small as possible. As
Joyce Carol Oates points out, “Cain’s world is by no means ‘realistic’: coming to him
from the great psychological realists, Joyce and Mann, one understands how barren, how
stripped and bizarre this Western landscape has become. It is as if the world extends no
farther than the radius of one’s desire” (111).
One could say that Cain’s decision to set a version of the Snyder/Gray case in
California was a kind an attempt to add a further layer of strangeness to an already
strange case. Cain could play on the eastern idea of California as “a bit recent, a bit wild,
wooly and absurd” to grotesque effect. Taking a sensational murder from New York City
to California not only heightens the fiction; it seems to move the story slightly away from
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civilization and into uncharted territory. The few descriptions Cain offers of the
landscape characterize California as both exceptional and ordinary: “It was nothing but a
roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California” (3). Not a million others
anywhere, only a million others in California, as if it represents the very special
California breed of roadside sandwich joint. At the same time, Cain’s decision to set the
Snyder/Gray case in Southern California allows him to complicate the motivation for a
pair of lovers to kill one lover’s spouse. Frank and Cora are motivated not merely, or
even primarily, by greed or vengefulness, but by race, and by a desire to assert a stable
white identity in response to fears of contamination or corruption. In this way, Cain gives
vent to the mostly implied racist concerns of “Paradise.” Southern California is, then,
valuable to Cain in Postman for its proximity to Mexico, and the drama of racial
contamination that proximity can entail.
Cain deploys Southern California as a specifically Mexican, but generally Latin
American (a term he would likely not have used) borderland, a place where Mexican and
American are sufficiently mixed to make Cora and Frank’s racist fears credible. And
though it seems difficult to believe that “the destiny, the national purpose of the deal” is
present in Postman, the presence of racial anxiety figures as a kind of national anxiety.
Cora’s desire “to be something,” which is to say, to be white, manifests against the
proximity of non-whites, such as Nick and the implied Mexicans present in Los Angeles,
and also against the proximity of Mexico, to which Frank temporarily flees, and from
which he comes at the beginning of the novel. The desire to be white is also a desire to be
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American; Southern California, in Cain’s reckoning, is the space that presents the greatest
challenge to that desire.

Race and Space in The Postman Always Rings Twice
Racial anxiety lies at the heart of The Postman Always Rings Twice, a fact that is all more
pronounced by its absence in the 1946 film, with John Garfield and Lana Turner. While
Cora’s husband, Nick Papadakis, is conspicuously racially marked in the novel—along
with his name and his stereotypical accent is the fact that he is almost never referred to by
name, but rather as “The Greek”—he is thoroughly white in the film. According to
Leonard J. Jeff and Jerold L. Simmons, Nick’s name was changed from Papadakis to
Smith (Cora’s maiden name in the novel) “to insure distribution in Greece” (134). In the
film Nick is portrayed as dull and irritating, a man who loses whatever ambition he may
have once had. After the first attempted murder, during which Nick falls in the bathtub
and cracks his skull, he decides to sell his restaurant and take Cora to move in with his
sister, who still lives near where they were born—Northern California, not Greece.
Cora’s desire to murder Nick is reignited because she does not want to lose the restaurant.
In the novel, Nick’s accident makes does not make him want to give up on his business.
Just the opposite in fact: “This Greek had had a fracture of the skull, and a thing like that
don’t happen to a dumb cluck like him every day. He was like a wop that opens a drug
store. Soon as he gets that thing that says Pharmacist, with a red seal on it, a wop puts on
a gray suit, with black edges on the vest, and is so important he can’t even take time to
mix the pills…The Greek was all dressed up for the same reason. A big thing had
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happened in his life” (31-2). In other words, Nick is prouder than ever of his
entrepreneurial accomplishments. The accident makes Nick think of his future, and of his
desire for a family. And this is what disgusts Cora: “I can’t have no greasy Greek child,
Frank. I can’t, that’s all. The only one I can have a child by is you” (34).
Hatred of Nick’s own “greasiness” motivated Cora to attempt murder in the first
place, as did fear that she would be mistaken for Mexican. She betrays this fear in her
first conversation with Frank, which is completely excised from the filmic adaptation.
After Frank praises her and Nick’s good enchiladas, Cora becomes defensive, saying,
“You think I’m Mex.” Frank responds:
“Nothing like it.”
“Yes, you do. You’re not the first one. Well, get this. I’m just as white as
you are, see? I may have dark hair and look a little that way, but I’m just as white
as you are. You want to get along good around here, you won’t forget that.”
“Why, you don’t look Mex.”
“I’m telling you. I’m just as white as you are.” (5)

Frank then reassures her with a rather brutally racist description of the differences
between Mexican women and white:
“No, you don’t look even a little bit Mex. Those Mexican women, they all
got big hips and bum legs and breasts up under their chin and yellow skin and hair
that looks like it had bacon fat on it. You don’t look like that. You’re small, and
got nice white skin, and your hair is soft and curly, even if it is black. Only thing
you’ve got that’s Mex is your teeth. They all got white teeth, you’ve got to hand
that to them.” (6)

Cora clarifies matters entirely by saying she is not only not Mexican—her maiden name
is Smith—she is not even from California, but rather Iowa. She not only originates far
from the Mexican border; she is among the largest American migrant groups to settle in
Southern California, a fact Cain mentions in Double Indemnity, when Phyllis Nirdlinger,
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a native Californian, says to Walter, an Iowan, “Most Californians were born in Iowa”
(116). Carey McWilliams also devotes extended attention in Southern California
Country to the phenomenon of the Iowan settler in Southern California.
2

The story of how Cora arrived in Los Angeles, and how she married Nick, is
intentionally stereotypical. She won a trip to Hollywood in a beauty contest in Des
Moines. But while her screen presence was fine for silent movies—“It was all right in the
face”—the introduction of sound doomed her. “And when I began to talk, up there on the
screen, they knew me for what I was, and so did I. A cheap Des Moines trollop, that had
as much chance in pictures as a monkey has. Not as much. A monkey, anyway, can make
you laugh. All I did was make you sick” (12). And so she married Nick because “You
spend two years in a Los Angeles hash house and you’ll take the first guy that’s got a
gold watch” (12). Marrying Nick did not free her from the hash house, though it becomes
clear that leaving work at a cheap diner is not as important to her as having “to be around
somebody that’s greasy and makes you sick at the stomach when he touches you,” as well
as the racial injustice entailed in the Greek Nick’s having “four silk suits and a dozen silk
shirts,” while white Frank wears a laborer’s uniform (13, 14). Cora does not want to leave
and become a tramp; rather she wants to rid her life of all ethnic contaminants.
3

And Frank, in his retrospective, confessional narration, suggests he anticipates
this desire. After Cora angrily argues for her whiteness, Frank says:

2
He points out that the origins of the strong Iowa-Southern California connection are, in some ways,
coincidental. He says, “Southern California began to attract national attention at precisely the time when
Iowa needed to export population” (163).
3
As Megan E. Abbott points out in The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hard Boiled Fiction and
Film Noir, “[Cain and Chandler’s] texts are then responding to the tensions arising from the increasing
ethnic diversity in Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s. This ethnic diversity existed side-by-side
with harsh segregationary policies, particularly in terms of housing, that were designed to keep non-white
groups enclaved from white Californians” (94-5).
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I knew for certain, then, what I had just taken a chance on when I went in there. It
wasn’t those enchiladas that she had to cook, and it wasn’t having black hair. It
was being married to that Greek that made her feel she wasn’t white, and she was
even afraid I would begin calling her Mrs. Papadakis. (6)

Frank’s gambit to play on Cora’s racist fears is motivated only by a desire to possess
Cora, and not to commit murder and take over Nick’s business. Frank, as the novel makes
clear, has no ambition and no interests other than his immediate appetites, and
maintaining an itinerant lifestyle to find various ways of satisfying those appetites. Cora,
on the other hand, wants to stay put and run the diner in Nick’s absence so that she can
“be something”—“I want to be something” she tells Frank twice in as many pages (81-2).
He does not typically think of the future, and only does so with Cora because she raises
the possibility of creating their own world, constituted only by the two of them, where
“That’s all that matters, isn’t it? Not you and me and the road, or anything else but you
and me” (15). And later Frank says, “It’s you and me. There’s nobody else” (99). This
world of two is a closed system, with its own morality. As Paul Skenazy points out,
“[Frank and Cora] symbolically proclaim an alternative society, even if only a society of
two, built on love’” (33). This ideal alternative society would be entirely white, and thus
Cora’s fears of having a “greasy” baby would disappear. “I can’t have no greasy Greek
child, Frank. I can’t. That’s all. The only one I can have a child by is you” (Cain 34). For
Frank, the alternate society would, in theory, provide the comforts of his itinerant
lifestyle—remaining outside mainstream society and so avoiding responsibility, and
maintaining freedom from attachment to middle-class life—while also allowing him to
retain access to Cora.
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Of course, their alternate society is not sustainable. It is threatened, first, by the
law, though the form the law takes is hardly as a representative of justice or of a righteous
restoration of moral order. Rather, both Sackett, the District Attorney, and Katz, Frank
and Cora’s lawyer, are unscrupulous gamblers who regard the case as a game and care
more about getting the best of each other than about serving the interests of their clients.
As Skenazy points out “If moral repugnance for the murder and adultery limit sympathy
for the lovers, an even greater repugnance for the lawyers’ lack of standards forces one
back into allegiance with the killers. There is no stable moral basis, no middle ground of
sympathy, from which to condemn the lovers. Frank and Cora are all one has left” (30).
The law is not so much corrupt as it is capricious, as evidenced by the fact that what
seems like the most damning evidence against Frank and Cora—the insurance policy
Nick took out just days before he was killed—turns out to be their salvation when Katz is
able to use the insurance companies’ attorneys to show that the policy would not in fact
have paid, and Frank would not have benefited from the murder. The fact that neither
Frank nor Cora knew anything at all about the policy hardly matters. In the novel’s moral
universe Nick’s murder is a crime only insofar as it gives lawyers something to do, and
gives insurance companies something to worry about.
Though Frank and Cora initially escape this legal threat, their alternate society is
still not safe. Katz’s former assistant attempts to blackmail them with a Photostat of a
confession Cora made while in custody. The blackmail plot fails, and even helps Frank
and Cora realize they need each other because enemies from outside present a greater
threat than any desire one might have to betray the other. After Cora reveals she is
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pregnant with Frank’s baby, they decide to stay together, but only after Cora tests Frank’s
love by wading far out into the ocean, where he can, if he wants, let her drown. He does
not, but their happiness is fleeting. As they drive along the same road on which they
killed Nick, Frank crashes, killing both Cora and the unborn baby. This time, despite
taking everything Frank has—“the $10,000 he had got for us, and the money we had
made, and a deed for the place”—Frank is convicted of murder (103). The law is once
again revealed to be self-interested, capricious, and vengeful; Katz takes everything
Frank has, and the judge, upon reading the guilty verdict says he would give Frank
“exactly the same consideration he would show any other mad dog” (104). In this light
Frank’s being punished at all (not his punishment for the murder he did not commit, but
the punishment that arrives eventually as a result of the murder he did commit) comes to
seem less justified—even if we think on the kind of cosmic scale that Cora does when she
tells Frank that because they killed Nick, took a life, they have a responsibility to give
one back in the form of their baby—than a very unfortunate turn of events (99). Though
Cain ultimately has Frank condemned by an unsavory legal system, he does not suggest
the reader should condemn him. In the final pages, when we learn Frank has narrated the
story from a prison cell, he realizes that he appreciates Cora because “She wanted
something, and she tried to get it. She tried all the wrong ways, but she tried” (105). This
is not only rather an understatement; it is a largely successful attempt to wash over the
fact that included among “all the wrong ways” that Cora tried was murder. Frank’s final
plea for prayers attempts to make the reader complicit in his and Cora’s desire for an
alternate society of two. “If you’ve got this far, send [a prayer] up for me, and Cora, and
140

make it that we’re together, wherever it is” (106). Whatever repugnance the novel might
have reserved for Frank and Cora is buried under layers of sentimentality. It is difficult
not to feel, on some level, bad for them.
One on hand, this is a clever move that, perhaps, heightens the novel’s moral
ambiguity, and thus its interest and controversial quality. On the other, though, this
absolves the characters of murder to the extent that it turns them into victims, and utterly
absolves them of their racist fears. Cora’s problem is not, according to the novel, that she
is anxious about being mistaken for Mexican or Greek, or that she is repulsed by
miscegenation; her problem is that she is a lousy criminal, and that she wanted things, she
tried things, that were outside her abilities. Here we see a certain resonance with
“Paradise.” There, Cain suggests it is better for Southern Californians to wait for their
circumstances to change, rather than to attempt to change them themselves. While
“Paradise” does not prophesy the doom that befalls Frank and Cora, it also does not
include a program for action. Further, while Cain does not specifically blame Nick, or the
presence of Mexicans in general, for Cora and Frank’s downfall, he also does not
problematize his protagonists’ racism. His characterization of Mexicans and Greeks as
dirty and greasy in Postman directly echoes his characterization of the Mexican hovels as
the only unclean places in Southern California. Cora’s, desire to seek sanctuary and
sanitize herself from Nick’s ethnic influence—and presumably the influence of other
non-whites—is portrayed as understandable, even normal. In this way Postman becomes
a kind of frontier story, with the white settlers attempting to create a new world in a
hostile environment. The border between Southern California and Mexico, so close
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geographically, is significant not because it is uncrossable or unexplored; Frank and the
puma trainer Madge cross it frequently. Rather, it is significant because of its very
permeability, and the fact that it has been permeated creates the desire in Cora and Frank
to define themselves by creating a secure border around their small alternate society.

Double Indemnity and the Roads Through Griffith Park
Cain wrote Double Indemnity quickly; it was serialized in Liberty magazine just two
years after the publication of Postman. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the two
novels have certain obvious similarities. They are both confessions written by men who
are, we gather, going to die as soon as they type the final word of the manuscript. The
confessional structure is also in both cases revealed only at the end, a surprising twist that
is perhaps employed to account for the narratives’ very rapid pacing. And both are clearly
based upon the Snyder/Gray murder. Indeed, the plot of Double Indemnity is not radically
different from that of Postman. In both, a man and a woman conspire, only moments after
meeting, to kill the woman’s husband. As they realize they cannot get away with the
crime, they turn on each other. It is as if Cain took the story in Postman and moved it
from the outskirts of Los Angeles and into the city itself; most of the action is set in the
adjacent neighborhoods of Hollywood and Los Feliz. Along with this geographical
change from periphery to center, Cain also changes the class status of his characters from
itinerant hobos and restaurant workers to middle-class professionals: Walter Huff is an
insurance salesman, and Phyllis Nirdlinger is a former nurse who has become a suburban
housewife.
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These changes in background and locale accompany, and perhaps account for,
other changes, most notably Cain’s representation of race in L.A. Double Indemnity is not
interested in L.A. for its proximity to Mexico; nor does the novel suggest its characters
are preoccupied in any way with racial fear or anxiety. Both William Marling and Megan
E. Abbott discuss Cain’s representation of race in Double Indemnity. For Marling, the
fact that Walter seems untroubled by the presence of non-whites, particularly Asians and
European-Americans, in his everyday life indicates Cain’s effort to place Double
Indemnity “in a California context rather than a national one” (179). Walter’s general lack
of overt racism does not mean there is not a hierarchy; indeed, as Marling points out,
European-Americans, such as Lola’s boyfriend Sachetti, seem to rank higher than Asians,
but below nonethnic whites. It is entirely unclear how this hierarchy suggests a
“California context.” On one hand, the hierarchy, problematic though it of course is,
seems to lack important constituents, namely blacks and Latinos. For another, though
Walter seems untroubled by the presence of nonwhites, this hardly needs to suggest
anything special about California. Indeed, as Abbott points out, what is significant is not
an even moderately progressive attitude on Walter’s part, but rather the fact that, as a
result of his middle-class status, he feels more secure and at ease in his whiteness than
Frank (96). Rather than, in Abbot’s words, an attempt to “ethnographize Los Angeles”
Double Indemnity shows that being middle class brings not only material benefits, but
also benefits related to one’s sense of self and personal identity.
The different relationships to race Cain articulates for his characters are important
because they entail different relationships to the city. If neither Walter nor Phyllis is
143

particularly worried about whiteness or in cordoning themselves off from factors that
could contaminate whiteness (as Frank and Cora are in Postman) then the city is not
primarily interesting or relevant for its capacity as a stage for a drama of racial fear.
Rather, in Double Indemnity Cain articulates the city as a place of frustrated middle-class
ambition, where class and professional mobility are stymied by arbitrary barriers.
Overcoming these barriers, and achieving a kind of freedom and uniqueness, motivate the
characters and structure the plot. More significantly, Cain maps these barriers onto the
city, so that his representation of Los Angeles casts the city as a kind of maze, where
uneven development have contributed not only to inequalities, but to a space that requires
more skill and luck to navigate than most can manage.
Walter and his immediate supervisor, Keyes, clearly exemplify the problem of the
professional who has advanced as far as he can in his work, though not as far as his
abilities could take him. Both Walter and Keyes are highly talented and driven men who
have devoted their lives to the insurance business—and each is stuck in his current
position in middle-management. Keyes, smart enough and experienced enough to run the
company, cannot do so because the owner of the company has simply placed his own son
in charge. As Walter points out, Keyes’s commitment to the insurance business borders
on fanaticism. Keyes is “the most tiresome man to do business with in the whole world.”
He is also pugnacious, argumentative, and insufferably technical and precise. Walter
says:
You can’t even say today is Tuesday without he has to look on the calendar, and
then check if it’s this year’s calendar or last year’s calendar, and then find out
what company printed the calendar, and then find out if their calendar checks with
the World Almanac calendar. (113)
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For all this, though, Keyes “is a wolf on a phony claim.” He cannot be fooled. All of
these qualities are on display when he and Norton argue about whether to settle with
Phyllis Nirdlinger. While Norton does not want to risk tarnishing the company’s image,
Keyes brings overwhelming evidence to illustrate that the likelihood that Phyllis’s
husband committed suicide verges on impossible. He goes over tables of data to make his
point:
“Here’s suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by locality, but seasons
of the year, by time of day when committed. Here’s suicide by method of
accomplishment…And here, Mr. Norton, are leaps subdivided by leaps from high
places, under wheels of moving trains, under wheels of trucks, under the feet of
horses, from steamboats. But there’s not one case here out of all these millions of
cases of a leap from the rear end of a moving train. That’s just one way they
don’t do it.” (163)

Keyes of course is right, though only Walter and the reader know it. And Keyes also does
not hesitate to reveal his disgust at Norton’s style of management, particularly when
compared to his father’s. “Why, Huff, Old Man Norton would have had a confession out
of that woman by now…If that guy keeps on trying to run this company, the company’s
sunk…Holy smoke. Fifty thousand bucks, and all from dumbness. Just sheer, willful
stupidity” (171). Keyes clearly not only longs for the management of “Old Man Norton,”
but believes he himself could do the job better than young Norton. The company is not
organized to reward his ability, and so his acumen and passion have to be channeled into
mastering the tables of data, and into prolonging “some kind of feud with other
departments of the company” (113).
Norton’s hereditary privilege, and the way it short-circuits advancement through
intelligence and hard work, acts as an artificial barrier to advancement for everyone in the
145

company. Just as Walter and Phyllis intend to pursue their plan “straight down the line”
so too does Keyes’s inability to advance inhibit Walter. His talents and experience as a
salesman are on display in the novel’s opening pages when he successfully maneuvers
past Nirdlinger’s housekeeper and into the “House of Death”—though, of course, he
points out that if he had used his skills, or “juice trying to keep out [of the house], that
might have got me somewhere” (110). And soon after, he is singled out by Keyes for his
ability to spot false claims: “If other departments of this company would show half the
sense that you show—” (114). Walter’s talents are unrewarded, though, and so, like
Keyes, he becomes frustrated and must find outlets for that frustration. He finds a legal
outlet by starting his own lending company that will give loans against a car. This small
operation covers an inadequacy in General Fidelity, which does not lend money against
cars. And, of course, in addition to his small lending company, Walter finds an outlet for
his frustration in dreaming up schemes to undermine his company. If Keyes has come to
see his job, and perhaps the insurance business in general, as a battle, then Walter sees it
as a game. “It’s the biggest gambling wheel in the world” (129). An attitude that may
have begun as cynicism has evolved into spitefulness:
All right, I’m an agent. I’m a croupier in that game. I know all their tricks, I lie
awake nights thinking up tricks, so I’ll be ready for them when they come at me.
And then one night I think up a trick, and get to thinking I could crook the wheel
myself if I could only put a plant out there to put down my bed. That’s all. When I
met Phyllis I met my plant. (129)

This passage illustrates John T. Irwin’s point that in addition to sex and money, Walter is
motivated to conspire to commit murder by perverseness and a desire to “beat the boss,”
or demonstrate his superiority to the man he works for (260).
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Irwin distinguishes between trying to beat the boss and trying to become the boss.
While the latter, he says, can be observed in Chandler and Hammett’s heroes, who seek
economic independence in order to live according to a private code, the former is less
high-minded, and reflects a desire for “a more or less capricious freedom from the
responsibilities and demands that work entails.” For Irwin, Walter shares this desire with
Frank Chambers from Postman, and both men can be characterized by “an
irresponsibility regarding work that’s of a piece with their impulsive, spur-of-the-moment
adulterous affairs and the murders these lead to” (278). While it does seem useful to
distinguish between beating the boss and becoming the boss, and while Philip Marlowe
seems clearly distinct from both Frank Chambers and Walter Huff, it is not quite right
that Frank and Walter can be so easily grouped together. Frank displays an utter
indifference both to work and to expertise—the latter of which comes from experience
and practice—while Walter, though he may harbor certain hostilities toward his job,
values his talents, and takes pride in his ability to do his job well, even if doing so brings
him little satisfaction. So it is not out of a desire for “capricious freedom” that Walter
kills Nirdlinger, but rather out of frustration at the inability to fuse work and expertise, to
be able to realize the benefits, both in terms of material comfort and in terms of esteem,
that being good at his job should entail.
4

Even if the reason Irwin gives for Walter’s wanting to beat his boss is not quite
right, it still remains clearly true that beating the boss is Walter’s primary motivation.
Phyllis’s motivation is perhaps less clear. As Frederick Whiting points out, Walter’s

4
The equivalence Irwin draws between Frank and Walter breaks down in other ways as well. For instance,
Frank does not really beat his boss; he kills him. And he could easily have had the capricious freedom from
working even without killing Nick. After all, his life had consisted entirely of that freedom before.
147

decision to murder Phyllis’s husband rests partly on “a misrecognition of Phyllis’s
ambitions” (195). Walter assumes Phyllis is unhappy in her domestic life and so wants to
destroy it. After murdering her husband, Walter reckons, she will then find another, i.e.
Walter himself. Phyllis’s motives are, in fact, almost impossible to understand in terms of
the insurance industry’s interest in, and indeed dependence on, conceiving of people as
though they were types, with predictable patterns of behavior (think of Keyes’s data
tables). If Phyllis wanted to leave one domestic situation for another, Whiting shows, she
would be playing according to type. Though it will eventually become rather ghoulishly
clear that Phyllis is motivated, not merely by a desire for money, but, more significantly,
by the love of killing, she does tell Walter early on that she is unlike most women:
“Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of
myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so
beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking
them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all
unhappiness…Walter, this is the awful part. I know this is terrible. I tell myself
it’s terrible. But to me, it doesn’t seem terrible…Do you understand me, Walter?”

Walter’s response is a rather stunningly unreflective: “No…But we’re going to do it [kill
Phyllis’s husband]” (124). In his retrospective first-person narration Walter does not
suggest he thought anything at all about this speech at the time it was delivered, nor does
he offer any commentary on it with the benefit of hindsight. Though it is true that, as
Tom Reck points out, one of the hallmarks of Cain’s style is to offer “action, narrative,
and character in one clean thrust, without reflection of psychology—or, in other words
“‘nothing but the facts’”—this seems like an instance in which the narrator’s silence is
full of meaning (377).
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And the meaning is that Walter is finally drawn to Phyllis not merely because of
her physical charms, her “shape to set a man nuts,” or even because she gives him the
opportunity to act on a plan to cheat his company (112). These of course matter to
Walter, but what he finds particularly irresistible about Phyllis is that, in her words,
“nobody could” understand her (124). She is utterly unique, and Walter is able to see this
even as he seems to assume Phyllis’s motives are rather conventional—a desire to leave
one husband for another. The text suggests Walter sees in Phyllis something he would
like not merely to possess, but to be. Notice certain similarities between Phyllis’s speech
on death, cited above, and Walter’s on the ludic nature of the insurance business. “You
think I’m nuts? Alright, maybe I am. But you spend fifteen years in the business I’m in,
maybe you’ll go nuts yourself” (129). Both speeches open with the possibility of
madness, and then change, with a coordinating conjunction, to an explanation of the
possible madness. And, while Phyllis’s speech concerns her love of death, Walter’s
discusses his acceptance of, and even numbness to, death. He says:
If that seems funny to you, that I would kill a man just to pick up a stack of chips,
it might not seem so funny if you were back of that wheel instead of out front. I
had seen so many houses burned down, so many cars wrecked, so many corpses
with blue holes in their temples, so many awful things that people had pulled to
crook the wheel, that that stuff didn’t seem real to me any more. (130)

If there is something in Phyllis that loves death, then there is something in Walter that
identifies with and appreciates Phyllis’s love. And not merely because it is convenient
that the person who indicates a desire to commit insurance fraud also seems to have no
qualms about committing murder. And not because Walter himself necessarily loves
death—but because he is impressed by Phyllis’s singularity, which is a kind of freedom
149

from constraints, and an ability and willingness to follow her passion—opportunities
which Walter feels are stifled at his job.
Walter makes Phyllis’s uniqueness clear elsewhere, first by discussing it literally,
and then by pointing out how there is more to her than what appears, as if beneath the
rather conventional exterior is something that defies the exterior’s conventionality. On his
second visit, over tea, Walter learns that Phyllis is not English, but “native Californian.”
“You don’t see many of them,” Walter replies. Like “most Californians” Walter was
“born in Iowa” (116). Phyllis is a rarity, then, a kind of exotic species. It is after learning
this, as well as finally succumbing to the appearance of her body in a tight fitting white
sailor suit, that induces Walter to sit and stay. Her body, though, like her being a native
Californian was not immediately obvious. Her “shape to set a man nuts” had initially
been hidden beneath billowy house pajamas. Cain suggests Walter’s attraction is based
entirely on her physical appearance, now more clearly revealed in the white sailor suit,
but the fact that this revelation occurs at the same time she reveals her origins suggests
they are related, part of a structure of singularity and revelation.
5
What Walter sees in
Phyllis is not merely an attractive woman, but an attractive woman unlike any he has seen
before.
Further, as in Postman (and, indeed, as we will see, in Mildred Pierce) Walter
points out that Phyllis’s house, called after the events of the novel, “The House of
Death,” is “just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California” (109). It is a

5
Megan E. Abbott argues that in Double Indemnity “masculinity reveals itself as a hysterical structure,
displacing its own anxieties onto an undefined, empty femininity” (29). Phyllis, though, seems anything but
empty. And rather than displacing anxieties onto her, Walter instead finds what he imagines is a kind of
kindred spirit, an individual with whom he believes he identifies, and who also embodies a level of
commitment he finds alluring.
150

certain kind of house, distinct from houses in the rest of the country—the California
house. But it is not an exceptional California house. It embodies that type completely.
But the domestic life within that house is quite extraordinary, and in many more ways
than Walter at first realizes. Initially, we learn that inside the house is not domestic bliss,
but a wife who wants to leave her suburban life. Not what one would expect from the
simple Spanish house, with department store furnishings and a rug “that would have been
Mexican except it was made in Oakland, California” (110). Later, though, we learn that
the normal house conceals an even more bizarre family: Phyllis has killed her husband’s
first wife, as well as one of that woman’s children (in the process killing two innocent
children, just to be sure). The family was created by death, and by Phyllis’s ostensible
plan to eliminate everyone between herself and an inheritance. Phyllis, then, seeks
independence both from work (she was a nurse, and in fact used that position to commit
murder) and from domesticity. Walter of course does not realize this until it is too late,
and their plan, which seemed so perfect, has fallen apart under the careful—not to
mention more intelligent and experienced—eye of Keyes.
And it is because of Keyes’s aptitude, his ability to read the evidence and his
doggedness in trying to convince Norton to pursue Phyllis because foul play is the only
possible way to explain the circumstances of Nirdlinger’s death, that Walter and Phyllis
fail. Walter is not the man of superior ability, the man with enough inside information to
play the insurance game against itself he had hoped to prove himself to be. But just as
Keyes’s vast experience investigating phony claims undermines Walter, so too Phyllis’s
experience committing murder undermines Walter’s attempt to kill her—both so that he
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can eliminate someone who could incriminate him, and so he can forget about the crime
and marry Lola, Phyllis’s adopted daughter (Skenazy 39). He is not as good at the
insurance game as Keyes, and not as good at the murder game as Phyllis. His plan is to
lure Phyllis to Griffith Park, which Walter calls not really a park but “a scenic drive, up
high above Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, for people in cars, and a hilly ride
for people on horses,” where he will “accidentally on purpose” have a car fall over a
ledge, with her inside (193).
Intending to use the complicated geography of Griffith Park to his advantage, he
finds an isolated lookout, not a big one, but “one with room for just one or two cars” and
no stone parapets (193-4). After he has sent the car over the ledge—and he plans to use
Lola’s sometime boyfriend, Nino Sachetti’s, car—he will retreat along the bridle path to
his car, and then make his escape. As he points out, the place where he will push
Sachetti’s car, with Phyllis inside, over the edge, and the place where he will leave his
own car, are not, strictly speaking, far apart. Going by the bridle path, they are only “a
hundred yards [apart], on account of the road winding all through the hills for an easy
grade, and the bridle path being almost straight up and down” (193). By car, though, the
distance is two miles. So Walter’s plan is to cut through the winding, impeded paved
path, and take a shortcut, so that he can be gone before anyone knows he had been there.
The plan fails, though, because Phyllis, anticipating Walter’s intentions, hides and shoots
him before he can even drive her into the park. He is defeated by someone who is not
only a more experienced and sophisticated murderer, but also someone who, as it were,
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better understands the lay of the land. Phyllis gets the jump on Walter because, unlike
him, she knows how to use the land to her advantage in a way that Walter does not.
Cain makes this clear when he has Lola describe how Phyllis killed Lola’s
mother. While on a winter trip together in a remote shack at Lake Arrowhead, Lola’s
mother contracted pneumonia. Phyllis then walked “twelve miles through snowdrifts,
through the woods, to get a doctor” (177). By the time the doctor reached Lola’s mother,
it was too late. As Lola points out, Phyllis did not have to “tramp all that distance to get a
doctor”:
“Why didn’t she stop some place, and telephone? Or why didn’t she put on her
skates, and go across the lake, which she could have done in a half hour? She’s a
fine skater. Why did she take that three-hour trip? Why didn’t she go for a doctor
sooner?” (177).

By doing none of these things, Phyllis was able to make the death look simply like
pneumonia, a condition Phyllis knew a great deal about as “one of the best nurses in the
city of Los Angeles” (177). Phyllis was able to use the geography of Lake Arrowhead—
the isolation, the lake, the weather—to her advantage in a way that Walter could not with
Griffith Park. Indeed, Phyllis takes advantage of the geographical isolation of Griffith
Park. When Walter tells her where to meet him, she repeats the information, getting it
down perfectly, as if already forming a plan: “In between the two streets...Twelve-thirty,
two hundred yards up Riverside” (191). Phyllis can move through the city (and its
surrounding area) more successfully than Walter, just as she can move ever closer to the
financial independence that inheriting Lola’s mother’s money would bring. The fact that
she fails—and, indeed, that she is willing to let Walter take such a lead in the early stages
of the murder plot—ultimately makes little sense, and indicates, rather than a thematic
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instance of a failure to “claim exemption from fate,” a lack of polish on Cain’s part
(Skenazy 38). Why would someone as diabolical, efficient, and clever as Phyllis concoct
such a wildly impractical scheme to murder her husband? If the goal is to make herself
the sole beneficiary of an inheritance, then why involve Walter and the insurance
company? Cain’s desire to make Phyllis’s transition from frustrated housewife to cold-
blooded murderer makes for a surprising, if ultimately utterly incredible, narrative.
Still, while Cain may be inconsistent in his characterization of Phyllis, he is not in
his use of L.A. as a space that cannot be navigated without a certain amount of skill and
expertise. All of Walter’s plots involve his attempting to move through the city more
expertly than others. In murdering Mr. Nirdlinger, Walter and Phyllis have to drive
carefully, without either getting caught in traffic, and thus missing the train, or speeding
and thus drawing attention to themselves. They have to park in precise locations, both so
that their cars will not be noticed, but so they do not have to walk too far while burdened
with, in Walter’s case, a cumbersome cast so he can pretend to have a broken ankle, and
in Phyllis’s case, her husband’s corpse. Walter must be careful to jump from the train at
just the right moment. And Phyllis has to stop at the drugstore so she can “have witnesses
[she] drove straight home from the station” (156). Likewise, when Walter attempts to kill
Phyllis, he drives downtown so he can be seen at a movie, and then, timing his motions to
the minute, drops his car off at the Park, takes a streetcar to Hollywood, and then takes
Sachetti’s car. In order for each of his schemes to work, Walter must cover a certain
amount of ground in a certain amount of time, and he must be seen, and remembered, in
significant places for an alibi. Committing the crimes means giving two performances of
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being in the city: one is as a kind of exaggerated normalcy (going to the movie, calling
his office, etc.) designed to be noticed; the other is as exaggerated haste, designed to be
unnoticed.
These challenges of moving through the city—making good time when
appropriate, slowing down when appropriate—are not, as it happens, radically different
from the challenges of his job selling insurance. The novel opens with Walter on the
road: “I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond,
and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland. I decided to run over there.
That was how I came to this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the
papers” (109). The first sentence is rather subtly bizarre. Why mention Glendale and the
brewery company bond at all? Walter does not suggest that “the House of Death” is on
his way to Glendale. Indeed, it seems as though Walter is going out of his way. To get
from Glendale to Hollywood, Walter would have to pass through Los Feliz, the
neighborhood in which he lives; a shortcut, if it were possible, would be to go through
Griffith Park. So while Walter is willing, and able, to drive all over the city to do his job
(and to do it reasonably well) the city is not constructed in a way that conduces to the
efficient accomplishment of his job. It is in this way that the layout of the city, with
streets winding for miles around an enormous natural park, mirrors the layout of his life.
Just as he cannot go directly through Griffith Park from Glendale to Hollywood, so he
cannot go through Keyes to become the boss. And, though he can still reach his
destination by circumnavigating the park, it is also the park, with its treacherous drops
and dark, winding pathways, that is the scene of his undoing.
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The way one moves through the city, and the obstacles, impediments, and
difficulties one faces in doing so—not to mention the way one exploits or overcomes
these things—is, then, intimately associated with a character’s sense of himself, and his
relationship to the distance between the details of his everyday life and his dreams. This
theme is perhaps gestured at in Postman, though not with the same urgency and
specificity as in Double Indemnity. While Frank and Cora do of course drive, and while
cars are figured importantly as loci of death, loss, and sudden change, Cain in Postman
shows no interest in city space, and he does not represent city space as a challenge to be
met. Rather, Los Angeles is, like the Southern California region that is the setting for the
novel, more an abstraction, a sign of difference. “Los Angeles wasn’t but twenty miles
away, but he shined himself up like he was going to Paris…” Frank says about Nick. The
actual distance between the diner and the city is not as relevant as the perceived cultural
difference. And, as I pointed out, more important than Los Angeles or Paris is Mexico,
and the racial mixing its proximity allows. So though it would be inaccurate to say, as
Marling does, that Double Indemnity is Cain’s first novel to use “a California context,” it
is true that (1) Cain radically changes his understanding of California context from one
novel to the next, and (2) Double Indemnity is certainly the first of Cain’s novels to use a
specifically Los Angeles context.
In Mildred Pierce, published in 1941, Cain would both expand upon his Los
Angeles context—using Glendale, Pasadena, Beverly Hills, and Laguna Beach—and the
symbolic resonance of that context. While Double Indemnity, with its small scope,
focuses on relatively minor details of moving through the city—where one parks, how
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one approaches a house, the best place to dispose of a body—Mildred Pierce is interested
in broader gestures, such as the material significance of the distances between
neighborhoods, and in how those distances act as, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, the veil
between a character and what she wishes for.
6

The Road from Glendale to Pasadena in Mildred Pierce
Joyce Carol Oates characterizes Mildred Pierce as “overlong and shapeless,” and says it
“must surely owe its flaws to the third-person omniscient narration, which takes us too
far from the victim and allows us more freedom than we want. To be successful, such
narrowly-conceived art must blot out what landscape it cannot cover” (112). For Oates,
such blotting accounts for the success of Postman, which has, in her terms, a
“surrealistic” background, though it seems she means something more like “minimal.”
While Mildred certainly lacks the focused intensity of Postman and Double Indemnity, as
well as the fatalistic worldview of his previous two novels, it is also free of the
constraints that such rigid plotting entail. Though Oates suggests the freedom is too great,
Paul Skenazy points out that in the absence of a fast-moving plot, Mildred Pierce can
linger on details of background and setting. He notes that “Cain’s observations on place
and class in California in the 1920s and 1930s make the first half of the book a frequently
revealing analysis of Los Angeles life, from its Spanish bungalows and mimosa trees to
its food fetishes and weather” (68). Tom Reck finds a kind of authenticity in Mildred
Pierce that is lacking in the work of Cain’s contemporaneous writers of so-called

6
“‘For wishes themselves are a veil between us and the thing wished for’” (Philosophical
Investigations110).
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“proletarian fiction,” such as Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck. For Reck, “Mildred
Pierce is in many ways a better chronicle of the Depression than Grapes of Wrath
because its characters are not sentimentalized, glamorized, or passed off as similes”
(376). Reck offers no evidence for this assertion, and so it is difficult to judge how
authentic, or even relatively authentic, Cain’s representation really is. In any case, in
Mildred Pierce Cain is certainly more interested in what we might call, to borrow from
his opening to “Paradise,” “the civilization of Southern California” than in the details of a
diabolical plot.
The civilization includes not only food and weather, but also, as Catherine Jurca
points out, suburban homemaking, in terms of both interior design and the labor of
maintaining a home—i.e. cooking, cleaning, nurturing. Jurca suggests that in the novel
“homemaking” becomes “an aesthetic and affective practice in and out of the house”
where Mildred’s success as a restaurant owner arises out of her ability to commodify both
the look and feel of homemaking. In her restaurants she sells all the comforts of home,
even as she is completely incapable of realizing these in her own life. Jurca contends that
this commodification of domestic sentiment suggests, interestingly, that “the more
manufactured the home in Mildred Pierce, the more sentimental one can be about it”
(78). Generic, prefab design has an affective component that is lacking in something like
Monty Baragon’s mansion, which is not only cold and forbidding, but literally falling
apart. When Mildred buys Monty’s house, she learns a “lesson in interior decorating,”
which is that a home “does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you”
(481-2). And so Monty decorates the living room with memorabilia from Mildred’s
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business career: “Mildred’s first menu, her first announcements, a photo of the Glendale
restaurant, a snapshot of Mildred in the white uniform…” (481). For Jurca this exhibit’s
“emphasis on Mildred’s professional achievement as Mildred Pierce, Inc., reveals the
depth of Cain’s commitment to the reciprocity of homes and commercial enterprises…”
(87).
In the case of the three characters for whom the reciprocity of home and
commerce is strongest—Bert, Mildred, and Monty—life follows a trajectory from boom
to bust, and each character ends up with less than he began. Bert, who was briefly
successful as a developer during the real estate boom of the 1920s, named a street in his
development after himself. As Cain makes clear, Bert’s success was due entirely to
luck—an uncle had given him land “located in the exact spot where people wanted to
build”—and not to any skill or foresight (225). In fact, his business acumen proves quite
poor; he loses everything in the stock market crash because he invests too heavily in
AT&T. Monty Baragon, for his part, does not live on a street named after himself.
Rather, his mansion is on Orange Grove Avenue, a clear reference to his family’s
business, which is failing because it cannot compete with the California Fruit Growers’
Exchange. Monty takes no interest in the business, and instead spends his time in
leisurely pursuits like drinking, playing polo, and womanizing. Like Bert, he is lazy,
ineffectual, and utterly dependent on women—for all intents and purposes an overgrown
child. And Bert, no less a child, “lived in a world of dreams, lolling by the river, watching
the clouds go by” (226).
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Mildred is not childish, lazy, or ineffectual. And her business, in many ways, is
quite different from either Bert’s or Monty’s. Most significantly, as Jurca points out,
Mildred does not sell homes or food; rather, she sells homeliness, the feelings associated
with being at home, well fed, and cared for. This is a commodity—or the
commodification of a feeling—that is always in demand, even during a depression. Mrs.
Gessler points out as much when she tells Mildred that working in a restaurant was better
than becoming a saleswoman because, while no one is buying anything, “People eat,
though, even now” (276). This fact, combined with Mildred’s incredible culinary skills,
not to mention her desire, shared with Postman’s Cora, “to be something before I die,”
make her business a stunning, and, at first seemingly enduring, success (329). Mildred is
also, it is worth pointing out, lucky. Like Bert and Monty she has access to resources—
the Pierce model home that becomes her first restaurant, Wally Bergen’s legal advice—
available for no reason other than family connections. The novel is clear that while a
certain amount of initiative and skill is required to build a business—and a certain
amount of neglect and mismanagement is necessary to losing it—one also needs
resources that must be found and not manufactured.
Mildred’s businesses succeed where Bert’s and Monty’s fail, and the reason for
this is that whereas Bert and Monty are tied to the land—Pierce Drive, Orange Grove
Avenue—and to a specific place, Mildred is mobile. This mobility entails, on one hand,
the commodification, and hence movement, of domestic affect that Jurca describes.
Mildred moves the feeling of home from the confines of a house out into the public world
of commerce and exchange. On another hand, mobility simply means that her business is
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not restricted to a single location, but can expand from literally one side of Los Angeles
to another. After the success of her first restaurant in Glendale, she opens branches in
Beverly Hills and then Laguna Beach, a territory that spans about seventy-five miles, but
that Mildred nonetheless traverses regularly in her car. Further, she maintains a wholesale
pie business that requires her to employ a truck and driver for door-to-door deliveries.
The truck has “‘Mildred Pierce, Pies’ lettered on in bold red script” (394). Her name is
literally on the road. The quality of mobility that characterizes Mildred’s business is
further underscored in Monty’s derisive, but apposite, nickname for her restaurant: The
Pie Wagon.
Mildred’s restaurants are not only mobile; they are also tailored specifically to the
needs of their location. The Glendale restaurant, catering to a suburban, working class
clientele, offers the comforts of home in the form of old-fashioned chicken and waffle
dinners, which her customers rave over, saying, according to Mildred’s friend Ida, “they
never got such waffles since they was little, and they had no idea anybody knew how to
make them anymore” (365). The Beverly Hills branch serves lighter fare—sandwiches
and fruit salads and coffee and tea for the older, movie crowd, and sodas and malts for
the college students, “wonderful refined kids on their way home from Westwood” (421).
And the Laguna restaurant, on Mrs. Gessler’s advice, serves “a shore dinner—fish,
lobster, and crab” because customers do not “come all the way to the ocean just to get
chicken…” (423). Mildred’s flexibility and adaptability, as well as her willingness to take
advice, are constitutive of her mobility, and being mobile means being able to bridge the
distances between herself and the things she wants—specifically the affection and
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acceptance of her daughter, Veda. More restaurants means more money, which then
means the ability to provide Veda not only with milk and music lessons, but also with the
trappings of the lavish Pasadena lifestyle embodied, in all its decadence, by Monty.
7

So, mobility is a business principle, and one that gives her an advantage over
more static enterprises like Bert’s and Monty’s. Mobility, though, also simply entails the
act of getting around the city. The changes in Mildred’s modes of transportation—from
riding busses and streetcars, to driving her own car, to employing a driver—are signs of
her growing success and status. And, further, as David Fine points out, “Mobility means
freedom; physical motion is translated into social power and sexual release. Behind the
wheel of her car Mildred transcends her environment” (31). Mildred’s initial move into
the restaurant business, making pies for Mr. Chris, is facilitated directly by her finally
taking Bert’s car. With the car, she can drive Ida to and from work, and in doing so she
not only develops a relationship with her, but also learns how to approach selling her own
pies to Mr. Chris. Aside from generating a business opportunity, though, having the car
simply makes Mildred feel powerful. In a passage that is worth quoting at length, Mildred
indulges in a sense of freedom, power, and possibility while in her first ride in what had
been Bert’s car:
She pulled away and drove home. When she got there the light was still
on, and everything was as she left it. Glancing at the gas, she saw there were two
gallons in the tank, and kept on straight ahead. At Colorado Avenue she turned. It
was the first through boulevard she had been on, and the traffic signals were off,
with yellow blinkers showing. She gave the car the gun, excitedly watching the
needle swing past 30, 40, 50. At 60, on a slight upgrade, she detected the gravelly
sound of ping, made a mental note to have the carbon removed. Then she eased

7
Early in the novel, before Mildred takes her first job as a waitress, Cain points out that “The milk was a
sacred duty. No matter how gritty things got, Mildred always managed to have money for Veda’s piano
lessons, and for all the milk the children could drink” (240).
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off a little on the gas, breathed a long, tremulous sigh. The car was pumping
something into her veins, something of pride, of arrogance, of regained self-
respect, that no talk, no liquor, no love, could possibly give. Once more she felt
like herself, and began thinking about the job with cool detachment, instead of
shame. Its problems, from balancing the dishes to picking up starters, flitted
through her mind one after another, and she almost laughed that a few hours ago
they had seemed formidable. (289-90).

Driving a car makes the newfound sense of independence, which Mildred discovers in the
novel’s opening pages, and which had at first seemed terrifying and even dangerous,
suddenly not only endurable, but enjoyable. Just as she moves quickly down the
boulevard, the various problems that had once composed her life move quickly through
and out of her mind, so that driving creates a sense not only of self-sufficiency and
wellbeing, but also of permanence. Compared to the transitory memories of past
struggles, the feeling of control while driving is stable and secure.
This stability in (auto)mobility is tested when Mildred, over the objection of
everyone she knows, braves a torrential rainstorm to attend a New-Year’s party at
Monty’s, after which she intends to end their relationship. Monty has, by this time,
proved not only a drain on Mildred’s financial resources; he has also gossiped to Veda
about their sex life, turning the child against her mother, and in the process mocked
Mildred for working to earn a living. “‘Never take the mistress if you can get the maid,’”
is, according to Veda, one of his “quite fascinating” social theories (400). On the drive to
Pasadena, Mildred, poised and full of anticipation for the scene she has rehearsed, is
contemptuous of both the weather and of anyone who “should get so excited over a little
rain.” She drives around detours and washouts, all the while “[laughing]…at the way
people got all worked up over nothing” (406). Her ability to navigate the familiar road
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between Glendale and Pasadena in such treacherous conditions gives her an exaggerated
sense of self-confidence and power, so that when she arrives at Monty’s to find that the
couple he had invited to spend the evening with them, the Ewings, have not arrived and
that they cannot go to the Biltmore as planned because, according to Monty, “Wherever it
is, and however we go to get to it, we have to cross the Los Angeles River, and by last
report it’s a raging torrent, with half the bridges out and three feet of water boiling over
the rest,” she finds herself confused and unsure. “[The] main idea of the evening was still
clear in her mind, and this turn of events was badly interfering with it” (409).
Rather than delivering her cool and collected speech on how they should go their
separate ways, Mildred fights, and nearly has sex, with Monty. Angry, drunk, and
frustrated, she leaves, once again resolving, this time over Monty’s objections, to drive
through the rain. But by now, as if in direct proportion to her own mental state, the storm
has worsened. “There were no men with lanterns now [guiding cars to detours], nothing
but the black, wild, and terrible night” (416). Where before the storm appeared as a
challenge to be overcome, now it is a threat, an aggressor, that Mildred must fix her
resolve against, or else risk succumbing to. It is appropriate that Monty follows her,
appearing at her window periodically to urge her to return to his house. Her car
eventually stalls in the high water, leaving her with a final choice to either return to
Pasadena in Monty’s arms or trudge through the storm to Glendale. She chooses the
latter, “[staggering] home through the worst storm in the annals of the Los Angeles
weather bureau, or of any weather bureau” (418). When she arrives home she decides she
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will buy Veda a piano, thus setting in motion the events that will lead to Veda’s eventual
success and her own financial ruin.
The drive through the rain highlights how one form of mobility thematized in the
novel—the freedom accorded to one who can move, relatively easily, through the city—
intersects with another, namely, class mobility. Cain is not subtle in his characterizations
of Glendale and Pasadena as signifying vastly social strata. The former is new and
growing, but also drab and working class, while the latter is old, polished, refined, and
rich, but also in decline. Nor is he subtle about characterizing movement from Glendale
to Pasadena as not merely a change in geographical location, but also a change in class.
(Subtlety is not among Cain’s strengths.) A similar distinction is drawn between Glendale
and Beverly Hills. During her initial search for a job, Mildred interviewed as the
housekeeper for a wealthy woman, Mrs. Forrester, who had recently married a famous
director, John Lenhardt. Mildred refused the job, and the position of inferiority it would
have placed her, and her daughter, in. Later, she will meet Mrs. Forrester again in the
Glendale restaurant because Veda has become involved with her son, Sammy. Mrs.
Forrester warns Mildred to keep Veda away, saying, “they move in two different
worlds…” (442).
8
This remark, offensive to Mildred, is important for it shows not only
that Cain is interested in mapping certain class distinctions on to the city of Los Angeles.
He is also interested in drawing finer distinctions between simply working class and
upper class. For while Glendale and Beverly Hills, as well as Glendale and Pasadena, are
different worlds, Pasadena and Beverly Hills are also different. Both may be exclusive

8
Veda successfully blackmails the Lenhardt family by pretending to be pregnant. The money she receives
is sufficient to make her financially independent, and thus out of Mildred’s control.
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and economically prohibitive, but while Mildred can only move into Pasadena at ruinous
expense, by buying Monty’s house, she can gain a foothold of sorts in Beverly Hills by
opening a restaurant. Further, while Pasadena is associated with antiquated orange groves
and polo, Beverly Hills belongs to the newer, and growing, film industry. Mildred’s
attempt to move to Pasadena is, then, not merely a move up in class, but also a move
back in time. While Beverly Hills and Glendale are growing, albeit in different ways,
Pasadena is in decline, its relationship to its old glory “ghostly” like the rooms in
Monty’s mansion (416).
This is the world Mildred wants to move into, though only because it is the world
her daughter, Veda, wants to move into. Veda, an artist of, we eventually learn, near-
supernatural ability, disdains both the working class economy of her mother’s Glendale,
as well as the motion-picture based prosperity of Beverly Hills, in favor of opera and
Pasadena, both of which signify classicism and refinement. Veda realizes, before Mildred
does, that Pasadena, which had seemed like the only place that could satisfy her desires
and ambitions, is in fact inadequate, and the place she really needs is an even older city,
like New York. So after Mildred marries Monty and moves into his Pasadena home,
Veda sleeps with him, provoking Mildred to attack her, which allows Veda to be free of
her contract from Pleasant mentholated cigarettes, and to pursue a much more lucrative
offer to sing advertisements for Sunbake vitamin bread. Though it appears that in
securing the better contract Veda has satisfied her desire, her voice teacher, Carlo
Treviso, predicts that New York may not be sufficient. In his long and memorable speech
to Mildred on the characteristics of a coloratura soprano, Veda’s unique and rare voice,
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he suggests that coloraturas are not only singularly talented and vicious—“I tell you, is
snake is bitch, is coloratura”—but also committed both to wealth and to a certain old-
world lifestyle that Southern California perhaps cannot accommodate (471). He says,
“All coloratura ‘ave decoration from King of Belgium, rest of life twiddle a la valiere,
talk about decoration.” When Mildred replies “Well—Los Angeles is some distance from
Belgium—” Treviso cuts her off, saying, “No, no distance. Dees girl, make you no
mistake, is big stuff” (469). Veda’s talent, both for music and for manipulation, is great
enough to bridge the distance between Los Angeles and Europe. Europe is the inevitable
result of Veda’s insatiable greed. And, not just living in Europe, but constantly moving
from place to place, never settling, never getting bored, and always on the hunt for more.
One way of looking at the end of the novel, with Veda leaving for New York and
Mildred stuck back in Glendale with Bert, is that if Mildred had a business advantage
over men like Bert and Monty because of her mobility, then Veda is even more mobile
and so has an even greater advantage over Mildred. Veda is always looking for new
territory to colonize. First Glendale, then Beverly Hills, and then, through her
performance singing The Polonaise from “Mignon” on the Hank Somerville (Snack-O-
Ham) Program, all of Los Angeles. While the expansion of Mildred’s business is
impressive, and due in large part to her ability to make money off of feelings, Veda’s
expansion is even greater, and it depends even less upon material goods and abstract
labor. As Rob White points out in Film Quarterly’s discussion of Todd Haynes’s
remarkably faithful adaptation of the novel, “[Veda’s] transformation shortly afterwards
into a fully-fledged concert coloratura is nothing short of magical. No training, no work is
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needed” (par. 5). Veda does not sell homes or oranges or even the feeling of home; she
sells, on one hand, music, and on the other, herself. Her voice, particular and
idiosyncratic, cannot be produced in any place but her own body.
As Skenazy points out, there is a relationship between Veda and Phyllis
Nirdlinger; both are remarkably unique:
Like Phyllis Nirdlinger’s death fixation in Double Indemnity, Veda’s talent makes
her inexplicable, turns her into the desired but unknowable “other”—the object of
passion who must always remain mysterious, and hence powerful. As such, she is
an extreme example of the objectified woman in all of Cain’s work, forever
separate from and so both desirable and terrifying to the Cain protagonist. (78)

And, like Phyllis, Veda, who is so adept at navigating the social maze of Los Angeles’s
urban space, ultimately cannot remain in the city. Each character belongs elsewhere. On
the ship to South America, Phyllis dons her scarlet death shroud and commits suicide in
the light of “The moon” (216). And Veda, we must assume, will eventually reach Europe
and travel, in Treviso’s words, “all over Europe, grand opera to grand opera, ‘otel—a
baron, ‘e travel in Compartment C, take care of dog. A banker, ‘e travel in Compartment
B, take care of luggage. A sweetie, ‘e travel in Drawing Room A, take care of
coloratura—al one big ‘appy family” (469). It is as though a place like Los Angeles has,
in Cain’s reckoning, only so much space available for phenomena like Phyllis and,
especially, Veda.
Interestingly, Cain makes it a point to show that both Veda and Mildred are, like
Phyllis, native Californians. At one point he describes Mildred as looking “like a
successful woman of business, with the remains of a rather seductive figure, a face of
little distinction but considerable authority, a credit to the curious world that had
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produced her, Southern California” (473). Mildred is also a producer. She creates not
only restaurants and a commodified feeling of home, but also jobs. Veda and Phyllis,
unique and impressive though they may be, are forces of consumption and destruction.
Jurca points to a passage at the end of Mildred Pierce, after Mildred has lost everything
but before Veda reveals she has faked the injury to her throat, when, seemingly reunited
as a family, Mildred, Bert and Veda contemplate reentering the pie business. “Then Bert
said if she felt like making pies again, just leave the rest to him. He’d sell them. Veda
laughed, pointed at her mouth, whispered that she’d eat them” (515). Jurca points out that
this fantasy of the family “as a tidy, self-sufficient cycle of production, distribution, and
consumption” is appealing but ultimately unsustainable because “In Mildred Pierce no
good can ever come of a woman who only ever consumes food and produces none
herself” (95). And, pointing to Veda’s “need to destroy others to achieve her own
selfhood,” Skenazy suggests Cain reflects something of his own ambivalence about his
own middle-class upbringing (76).
More to the point, though, is that, with Veda and Phyllis, Cain suggests that
Southern California is capable of producing remarkable and previously unimagined
things. Some of those things, like the Spanish houses we see at the beginning of both
Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, are unique but banal, “like thousands of others in
southern California” (Mildred Pierce 219). These thrive in Los Angeles. The city
supports, nurtures, and, perhaps, even depends upon them. Even Mildred’s restaurants,
easily reproducible and adaptable to a variety of surroundings, can thrive. They can even,
in their easy reproducibility, achieve a kind of emotional resonance. But those things that
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cannot be reproduced, like Phyllis and Veda, are both immensely alluring and deadly.
They are, in fact, like the flip side to the “vast cosmic indifference” Cain claims
constitutes the region. If the undifferentiated sunbaked land of “Paradise,” which, in its
ability to destroy all distinction, threatens to drive everyone mad, then Veda and Phyllis,
as signs of utter difference, suggest a kind of meaningfulness that leads only to utter loss;
both Walter and Mildred follow their respective obsessions to their own ruin.

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Chapter Four
John Fante and the Writer in the City

An implicit theme that has run through all of the novels I have covered thus far has been
labor, and the importance of work to one’s identity. Himes’s characters struggle to find
meaningful work in a city poisoned with racism. Both Bob Jones and Lee Gordon feel a
great deal of pride and self-worth in having jobs that confer on them a degree of authority
and responsibility. When those jobs are threatened or taken away, the men lose their
sense of meaning and purpose, and become more vulnerable than before to the
destructive forces of racist Los Angeles. As a private detective, Philip Marlowe attempts
to maintain some sense of independence from the corruption of institutions and
economics. Part of the drama of his novels involves (1) how his understanding of
independence must change, and (2) how he must make compromises between
independence and ethics. Many of his struggles with independence, though, are largely
philosophical; he is always a private, self-employed operative, and this privilege is
obviously the result of his status as a white male.
James M. Cain is also interested in the ways work variously enables or imperils a
character’s independence. His novels cover a much wider range of jobs than either
Himes’s or Chandler’s. Frank Chambers is a drifter who, despite demonstrating a certain
degree of competence in working at a roadside diner and auto repair shop, believes work
is opposed to his independence, and identity. This is clearly the kind of indulgence
Himes’s characters would love to be able to enjoy. In a slightly different vein, Walter
Huff, who demonstrates near mastery of his job, is stymied and frustrated by a corporate
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environment that rewards not hard work and expertise, but family ties and nepotism.
Mildred Pierce dramatizes a conflict between the unglamorous but lucrative labor
entailed in owning and running restaurants, and the very glamorous world of professional
opera singing. In this novel Cain also captures an uneasy moment where the decline of
the landed, moneyed leisure class, epitomized by Monty Beragon, occurs at the same
time as the rise of a leisureless, and largely cultureless, middle class.
The jobs these writers held before becoming novelists certainly helped to shape
their attitudes toward both L.A. and toward literature. After being refused work at Warner
Brothers Studios, Himes bounced around various unskilled jobs during a war economy in
which skilled labor was in high demand. The experience made him see L.A. as among the
most racist places in America. Chandler was an executive at an oil company, a position
that gave him first-hand access to corporate scandal, office politics, and instant riches
made on speculation and luck. Cain was a journalist, where he learned the value of
sensational storytelling. Both Cain and Chandler had lucrative careers as screenwriters.
Their middle class status also helped to isolate them from the Depression.
The last writer I want to discuss, John Fante, was not isolated from the
Depression. Fante moved to L.A. from Boulder in 1930, partly to escape the hole in his
domestic life left by his father’s departure, and partly to escape growing nativism and
anti-Catholic sentiment that accompanied the rejuvenation of the Ku Klux Klan in the
1920s (Cooper 52, 23). Also, Fante had three uncles who lived in Los Angeles
(Wilmington, specifically) and a friend, Ralph Burdick, who wanted out of Boulder too.
Fante’s early letters to his mother attest to the difficulty he had in finding work in
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Wilmington, as well as the poverty in which he lived as he tried to sell stories, and make
a living as a writer. “Times are very, very hard down here. I can’t say anything about the
future. I wish I could. I’m down to my last dollar, and doing considerable worrying” (28).
Sometimes he put a romantic spin on his struggles: “Every writer has to do a certain
amount of starving before he is worth a damn. He has to experience the hard things as
well as the easy, and I’m at the moment getting my share of the harsh side of this
business of living” (31.)
Fante would also, like nearly every other writer of the period, also work in
Hollywood, and he felt he had to justify his success there later in his life. In a 1972 letter
to Carey McWilliams he writes, “I am always accused of forsaking my writing for
Hollywood glitter and gold. Nobody…bothers to consider that I had a family to
maintain…That I worked as a screenwriter is treated as if I had a bout with the clap. If,
on the other hand, I had pumped gas instead, or been a bricklayer, the ensuing glamour
would have immortalized me” (294). The cost of maintaining a reasonable standard of
living is the loss of access to a kind of proletarian authenticity, which Fante mocks here.
Elsewhere, he would not mock working-class authenticity, but would rather claim it for
himself in a kind of self-mythologizing move. To Mencken he says, he “did a pretty swell
job of keeping alive my ma and the kids. I had more than one job, I had twenty-four,
from hotel clerk to stevedore” (qtd. Kordich 3).
Fante may have held twenty-four jobs to Himes’s twenty-three, but the
differences between Fante’s and Himes’s experience are, of course, significant. While
Himes was denied work entirely because of racism, Fante’s difficulty securing
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employment was a result of, on one hand, the Depression, and on the another, his
reputation as, in Stephen Cooper’s words, “a cocky little hothead” (Cooper 2000, 71).
Cooper relates an incident in which a Filipino coworker at the California Packing
Company turned Fante in for smoking on the job. To retaliate, Fante and a friend attacked
the man, “stripped him naked and pitched his clothes into the harbor, then poured stencil
ink over his penis” (73). Cooper points out the “crude writerly implications” of this
action as an “exclamation point” in response not only to being ratted out for smoking, but
also to the “disdain” with which his coworkers treated him for his boasting claims to
being a writer (73). The narrators of Fante’s novels of this period, men who had much in
common with Fante himself, would engage in this kind of petulant behavior, albeit with
less violent outcomes.
Fante wrote two novels about Los Angeles in the 1930s, though only one, the
famous and highly regarded Ask the Dust (1939) was published in his lifetime. The other,
The Road to Los Angeles, was written around 1934, but not published until 1985, two
years after Fante’s death. Each of these novels is narrated by a young Italian-American
man named Arturo Bandini. Though the characters have the same name (or mostly the
same name: in The Road to Los Angeles, the narrator is Arturo Gabriel Bandini, while in
Ask the Dust he is Arturo Dominic Bandini) they are not the same character, and the
novels are not, strictly speaking, a series. Arturo has a different family and a different
history in each book—though the histories of each Arturo coincide with various aspects
of Fante’s own history (e.g. the Arturo in The Road to Los Angeles was born in and lives
in Wilmington with his mother and sister, while the Arturo in Ask the Dust is from
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Boulder and lives in Bunker Hill). At the same time, despite the differences in family
history, the Arturos in each novel manifest many similar behaviors, such as appalling
egomania, wild mood swings, a need to escape into fantasy, a raging libido, debilitating
insecurities that result from all of these qualities, and a powerful desire to be a writer.
And not merely to be a writer, but to make a career as a writer—that is, to make money
writing fiction. Unlike other novels I have covered in this dissertation, then, Fante’s are
interested in literature as a job.
Both Arturos are also, as Catherine Kordich points out, on a “search for identity
and place” (Kordich 1995, 26). Indeed Arturo’s frenzied attempts to realize some sense
of self make Fante’s novels the most overt exploration of the relationship between the
self and the city of Los Angeles discussed in this project. In both The Road to Los
Angeles and Ask the Dust Arturo stakes his sense of self to a professional identity as a
writer. While initially Arturo conceives of the pursuit of this professional identity only in
terms of recognition—that is, either through announcing that he is a writer or wildly
seeking readers for his small publication—he eventually accepts that recognition of this
sort is empty, and that what is more relevant and meaningful is the dedicated pursuit of
writing, the work of it, for its own sake. In Ask the Dust, more so than in The Road to Los
Angeles, this character development happens, not incidentally, against the backdrop of a
crowded and diverse city, which Arturo learns to accept on its own terms as merely a city
full of people trying to live their lives, rather than as either a mythological paradise or a
decrepit wasteland. As Arturo demystifies the significance of being a writer, he also
understands Los Angeles as a human endeavor to ward off meaninglessness.
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These themes are more thoroughly developed in Ask the Dust than in The Road to
Los Angeles. The latter is, simply, not a very good book. The Arturo Bandini of The Road
to Los Angeles is figuratively at war with everyone and everything, from his mother and
sister, to the Catholicism they practice, to his dead father, to, really, everyone in
Wilmington, the industrial neighborhood south of downtown L.A. and adjacent to San
Pedro. He is particularly contemptuous of anyone unlucky enough to be his employer or
coworker. The novel’s first sentence, “I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because
our family was poor and my father was dead,” announces the role labor will play in the
novel, but it is not quite the “unsentimental declaration” Stephen Cooper suggests it is
(134). The novel makes quite clear that while Arturo is forced to work because of his
father’s absence, it is his own arrogance and irascibility that forces him to switch jobs
constantly. Self-deluded from the beginning, Arturo angrily moves from ditch digger, to
dishwasher, to dockworker, to grocery clerk, to labeler at a canning plant, all the while
entertaining delusions of intellectual grandeur—and he never changes. Though Fante
clearly has some sarcastic fun at his narrator’s expense—it is difficult not to laugh at
Arturo’s vain attempts to use Menken-esque insults like “Boobus Americanus” and
“clod-hopping poltroon”—and he also ultimately indulges Arturo’s bad behavior. Rather
than providing Arturo with an opportunity to learn to cope with his surroundings, Fante
ends the novel with Arturo at the train station, awaiting “the midnight train for Los
Angeles,” and thinking about the novel he hopes to write about a young man, named
Arthur Banning, who is poor, and, instead of searching the world for “the woman of his
dreams,” will wait while the woman searches for him. (164, 163). There seems to be no
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attempt at irony. Arturo escapes his stultifying domestic life for freedom in Los Angeles,
where, we must assume, he will behave in exactly the same way.
When Arturo is not egomaniacally flaunting his “intellect”—by boasting about
writing projects that do not, and will not, exist, or by quoting barely understood passages
of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, or, simply, by conspicuously carrying copies of their
books—he is lost in delusional fantasies that range from unremarkable romantic
successes to bizarre scenarios of vengeance and conquest. The strangest occurs after a
café owner asks if he has ever tried to write a book, and Arturo decides, whimsically, that
he wants to be a writer (28). Arturo then walks under a bridge that crosses a channel and
finds that the ground is covered with crabs. Arturo proceeds to kill all the crabs, even
going to buy an air gun to speed up the process. He proclaims himself “Dictator Bandini,
Ironman of Crabland,” who, in killing the crabs, undertakes “another Blood Purge for the
good of the Fatherland,” and “Führer Bandini” (33, 35). The scene has obvious historical
resonance, as well as resonance with Arturo’s understanding of Nietzsche. The reader
certainly does not feel any sympathy for Arturo here, but, at the same time, Fante does
not successfully ironize Arturo’s behavior. It is difficult to understand quite why he calls
himself “Führer Bandini,” other than to satisfy his own petulance and obnoxiousness.
Catherine Kordich charitably reads the many scenes like this one as instances of Arturo’s
“running full bore, fists up, at the windmills he sees around him,” suggesting, obviously,
a kind of Quixotic inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality (Kordich 2000, 57).
Arturo is less Quixotic, though, than simply angry. And since there is no moment of
change, or redemption, his anger merely festers, and moves from one stimulus to another.
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Arturo’s most repellant behavior occurs in the Soyo Fish Company factory, where
he puts labels on cans. He alienates his boss, Shorty Naylor, and his coworkers, who are
mostly Filipino and Mexican, immediately with his loud and arrogant claims to being a
writer. “I interpret the American scene,” he tells Naylor. “I am here to gather material for
my new work” (56). (The resonance with Fante’s own life is clear.) This does not help to
allay Naylor’s dislike of American workers, who “don’t work hard like the other boys;”
neither does Arturo’s weak stomach—he becomes instantly nauseated in the presence of
the overwhelming stench of fish. His coworkers like him even less. They mock his weak
stomach and his writerly pretensions, both of which Arturo of course flaunts openly to
make himself feel superior, and possessed of a more sensitive, refined constitution, unlike
the boorish workers. Eventually the mocking becomes intolerable, and Arturo seeks
vengeance, thinking, ominously, “You couldn’t kill cannery workers the way you killed
flies” (63). Arturo quickly realizes that while murder is infeasible, racial insults are not.
In fact, he knows from his own experience as an Italian-American that they can be quite
effective:
When I saw how dark [a Filipino coworker] was I suddenly knew what to say to
him. I could say it to all of them. It would hurt them every time. I knew because a
think like that had hurt me. In grade school the kids used to hurt me by calling me
Wop and Dago. It had hurt every time. It was a miserable feeling. It used to make
me feel so pitiful, so unworthy. And I knew it would hurt the Filipino too. (64)

So he calls the Filipino a “nigger” and a group of Mexican workers “Greasers” (65, 70).
The men, and particularly the Filipino, are obviously hurt by the slurs, though they also
do not take Arturo nearly as seriously as he takes himself. The Filipino asks again and
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again, “You feel better now?” and one of the Mexican men says, “Bah! Leave heem
alone, Joe. The leetle son of a beetch is crazee.”
While Fante suggests that Arturo deploys racist language merely as a weapon, and
only in response to his own experience and insecurity—rather than as a sincere
expression of contempt—he does not succeed in adequately critiquing his narrator, or the
culture and society that nurtures racism. As Charles Scruggs points out, “Arturo
understands, on some level, that his racist insults toward his fellow Mexican laborers in
the California cannery are a reflection of his own insecurity as an Italian-American. Yet
his self-absorption makes it impossible for him to empathize with others as a writer or as
a fellow worker” (235). This self-absorption also weakens any critique of the exploitation
of immigrant labor Fante may be gesturing at in this scene, or in a later scene in which
Arturo berates Manuel, a Mexican worker, for enduring low pay and long hours, for
merely being happy to have a job to support his family. Rather than generating sympathy
for Manuel, and for other exploited workers, Fante simply has Arturo abandon them,
along with his family, in order to pursue his life as a writer in “utopian Los Angeles”
(Scambray 127). Though readers may feel critical of Arturo, it is not because Fante sets
him up as an ironic antagonist. Rather, the novel ends with Arturo on his way to pursuing
his dream. Despite his terrible behavior, he gets what he wants, and his narcissism
remains uncompromised.
The Arturo Bandini who narrates Ask the Dust is also prone to narcissistic,
obnoxious behavior, but he, unlike the Arturo Bandini who narrates The Road to Los
Angeles, is capable of some degree self-reflectiveness; he even demonstrates growth.
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Fante draws out the character with more nuance and care, and shows that, while Arturo’s
main concerns are consistent from one novel to another—specifically, sex, fame, ethnic
heritage, and his immediate environment, and how these things relate to his identity—the
ways these concerns interact are portrayed with more sophistication. And, rather than
dwelling on Arturo’s bizarre fantasies, Fante engages with the culture and history of Los
Angeles. Further, Arturo’s character development is tied to his changing conception of
Los Angeles. While he initially fluctuates between romantic idealization and harsh
critique—both extreme views—he eventually acquires a more balanced, de-mythologized
view of the city as a human attempt to hold off oblivion a little while longer. Arturo
arrives at this realization through a change in his conception of his own identity as a
writer. His understanding of what it means to be a writer, and to identify himself as a
writer, initially depends upon recognition—on being seen as a writer, and on announcing
the fact, loudly and frequently. By novel’s end, though, this view has changed to one that
is more existential. In this view, being a writer does not depend upon recognition, but on
making a commitment to the work, the labor, of writing.
This is not to say that Arturo is, in the early going, lazy or not committed to
writing. He works hard, but he does not identify himself with the work. Rather, he
identifies himself as the author of a single short story, “The Little Dog Laughed,” and
spends as much time as he can trying to drum up readers, but with only minimal success.
Early on he claims “everybody in the hotel read The Little Dog Laughed, everybody,”
and its effect on them was transformative. “Mrs. Hargraves [his landlady] read it and I
was a different man in her eyes thereafter.” For “Mrs. Granger in 345, a Christian
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Scientist” the story “brought her back to the earth, and that look in her eyes made me
know it was right and I was right…” (14-15). And then there is “Mr. Leonardo, a great
Italian critic, only he was not known as a critic” who said in a letter, “Mr. Bandini, if ever
I saw a genius, you are it” (14). The fact that Arturo feels a certain sense of self-
validation from these people is of course not unreasonable. It is clear, though, that his
entire sense of self-worth comes from the effect his story has on people, which is only
made clearer when we learn later that perhaps he has initially exaggerated the size of his
readership.
He recounts the moment that he first checked into the Alta Loma Hotel. Then,
Mrs. Hargraves was less interested in his status as a published author than with the fact
that he was not Mexican or Jewish, and with his agreeing that Boulder, his hometown,
was not in Colorado, but Nebraska. After he scratches out “Colorado” from the register
and writes in “Nebraska” Mrs. Hargraves is pleased enough to say, “So you’re an author!
How nice!” but she puts the magazine with his story “out of sight...” (49). The distortion
and erasure of his own past and the occlusion of his authorship occur simultaneously. If
in his earlier account of Mrs. Hargraves’s reading his story he was “a different man in her
eyes thereafter,” now he is almost invisible. It is unclear which of these accounts is
accurate. And while it could be the case that Mrs. Hargraves eventually reads Arturo’s
story, it seems more likely that Arturo is simply telling contradictory stories. Even his
earlier claim that “everyone in the hotel read The Little Dog Laughed, everyone” is
contradicted by his admission that only one person read the story, despite the fact that
Arturo placed copies of the magazine all over the hotel. His one reader is not “the kid
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from Memphis” who hated L.A., or Heilman, who also hated the city, and who was an
inveterate reader that, as “a matter of principle,” would not lend any books to Arturo.
And it is not “the redheaded girl from St. Louis who always asked about the Filipinos”
(51).
The only person who reads his story is a fourteen-year-old girl named Judy
Palmer. When she visits him in his apartment, “holding a copy of the magazine in her
hand” Arturo says he can “tell from her eyes that she had read The Little Dog Laughed”
(53). As with the earlier account of encounters with readers, Arturo makes it a point to
say that Judy makes him feel recognized, seen: “her eyes widened with such admiration I
wanted to throw myself at her feet and weep” (53). He has a similarly gratifying moment
when Judy reads the story out loud. She has to stop momentarily to choke back sobs.
Arturo feels a kind of gratification that is almost sexual—which is no doubt what Judy’s
mother, “a tall, bitter-mouthed woman” thinks when she enters the room and studies
Arturo and Judy with her “fierce eyes” (55).
Arturo’s early obsession with recognition as an author is tied to his attitude
toward Los Angeles as a near-mythological place of instant fulfillment and ceaseless
gratification. It is true that Arturo can see both positive and negative aspects of L.A. at
this point, but his view is largely colored by received notions about the city, as well as his
own desires and obsessions, but not reality. “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los
Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I
loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town” (13). This impassioned
plea follows a brief fantasy in which Arturo imagines he is at a restaurant with a beautiful
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woman, “and the world was wonderful, because every two minutes some gorgeous one
gazed at me, the great author, and nothing would do but I had to autograph her menu…”
His vision of L.A. is as a fantasy place, where his desire for fame will be realized and
where he will be recognized and appreciated for the great man he believes he is. In his
more optimistic moods the city is the city where dreams come true.
In his more pessimistic moods Arturo can see the lie of boosterish imagery of
L.A. as a land of eternal sunshine and opportunity. “The lean days, blue skies with never
a cloud, a sea of blue day after day, the sun floating through it. The days of plenty—
plenty of worries, plenty of oranges. Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down
for dinner. Oranges, five cents a dozen. Sunshine in the sky, sun juice in my stomach”
(27). This steady diet of oranges is far from appealing: “It was so sad down there in my
stomach. There was much weeping, and little gloomy clouds of gas pinched my heart.”
Mark Laurila rightly points out that in this moment “a quintessential booster icon
becomes directly linked with nausea" (114). For Laurila, this passage illustrates how “Ask
the Dust dramatizes the tension between [two] myths in conflict”: Boosterism and noir,
the latter of which, according to Laurila, had a “tendency to transform elements viewed
positively by Boosters into something negative” (112, 114). Even as Arturo critiques
these stock images, though, his worldview remains restricted to them. Even as he mocks
the transplanted mid-Westerners, generic “Smith and Jones and Parker,” and the
disappointment they all now endure (Arturo included), “doomed to die in the sun” and to
“keep alive the illusion that this [is] paradise,” he draws upon a kind of experience that is
as mythological as the city of dreams (45). This widespread disappointment is so
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poignant because it remains tethered to the images and symbols of happiness and
fulfillment that the people came to expect, but still don’t know how fully to abandon.
Arturo’s most sustained and dynamic engagement with Los Angeles’s ideological
and mythological content is his relationship with Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress at
the Columbia Buffet. In Camilla Arturo sees someone with what he imagines as a deep,
authentic relationship to Southern California, a sense of rootedness and belonging that he,
and other migrants, lack. While Arturo’s past can be easily erased, Camilla’s cannot. Or
so Arturo imagines, anyway. As Laurila points out, “He admires her to the point of
idealizing her, thus making her an unreal object” (115). Arturo’s pursuit of Camilla
represents his futile chase after several things that do not exist: the ideal woman, the ideal
audience, the ideal relationship between a person and a place. It is through his inevitable
failure to catch these three things that Arturo recognizes the inadequacy of both his desire
for recognition and his unrealistic conception of the city of Los Angeles.
The plot of Arturo’s pursuit of Camilla is Ask the Dust’s main narrative thread,
and, accordingly, it has been widely commented upon. Criticism has generally, and
reasonably, focused on the stakes of Arturo’s ethnic identity. As in The Road to Los
Angeles, Arturo’s Italian-Americaness is the source of some anxiety. Kordich has
variously referred to Arturo’s “border consciousness” and “wildcard ethnicity” to
describe his ethnic status (Kordich 1995, 18; Kordich 2000, 78). While she acknowledges
to a degree that Arturo struggles in Ask the Dust to achieve a stable sense of self in
multicultural, if still hegemonically white, Los Angeles, Kordich generally conceives of
his liminal status positively. In “John Fante’s Ask the Dust: A Border Reading,” she
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points to “his ability to cross cultures,” and in John Fante: His Novels and Novellas she
claims his “wildcard ethnicity” means “he can play his ethnicity more than one way.”
While true to a degree, these formulations do not take into account that Arturo is
generally more confused about his ethnicity and how he fits in American culture than he
is a willing border crosser or code-switcher. Even as he admires Joe DiMaggio as a
“credit to the Italian people” he does so while making a point of looking at the American
League box scores and “scrupulously [avoiding] the box scores of National League
games” (11). This is a minor, almost humorous, version of a performance of exaggerated
Americanness he consistently insists upon playing, such as when he says, after
humiliating Camilla, “Thank God I had been born an American!” (44).
More interestingly, Mark Laurila argues that “Arturo’s liminal status as an Italian-
American serves to expose the racism inherent in the Booster ideology” (114). Laurila
shows how Arturo’s performances of whiteness resonate with texts written in the early
part of the 20
th
century that extol L.A. as a kind of Aryan paradise, such as The Los
Angeles Tripbook (1928) by Katherine Ames Taylor, Harry Carr’s Los Angeles: City of
Dreams (1935), and Joseph P. Widney’s Race Life of the Aryan People (1907). Laurila’s
analysis is significant because it points out how Ask the Dust succeeds where The Road to
Los Angeles fails. While Arturo engages in racist slander in both novels, the character is
remorseful (though only to the reader) about his behavior in Ask the Dust. Though the
fact that he never expresses shame or remorse to Camilla is certainly a weakness, the
reader can see quite clearly that Arturo calls her “Greaser” entirely in response to his own
feelings of sexual intimidation, and only because he knows, again from the personal
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painful experience of being called “Wop” and “Dago,” that racist taunts are the most
effective way to demean someone. Further, the Arturo of Ask the Dust does not engage in
acts of petty violence against animals; he is not consumed with rage. Instead, he is
preoccupied with performing whiteness, Americanness, and Fante reveals that the
performance of Americanness entails performing racism. In this way, Fante shows, in
Laurila’s words, “how racism victimizes, how it becomes perpetuated, how it becomes
entrenched in society” (119).
It is through his representation of racism as the performance of whiteness that
Fante emphasizes Arturo’s idealization of Camilla, and how that idealization is related to
his idealization, and his misapprehension, of Los Angeles. When he calls Camilla a
“filthy little Greaser” he knows, from the insults he endured as an Italian-American, how
it will hurt her. But he also recognizes, in a way the Arturo from The Road to Los Angeles
does not, how his taunts are both deliberate and insincere, and the remorse he expresses
about using such language, to the reader at least, suggests a kind of self-awareness on
Arturo’s part, and also an attempt on Fante’s part to create a space for the reader to be
critical of Arturo’s behavior without dismissing him entirely. He says:
Smith and Parker and Jones, I had never been one of them. Ah, Camilla! When I
was a kid back home in Colorado it was Smith and Parker and Jones who hurt me
with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser, and their
children hurt me, just as I hurt you tonight. They hurt me so much I could never
become one of them, drove me to books, drove me within myself, drove me to run
away from that Colorado town, and sometimes, Camilla, when I see their faces I
feel the hurt all over again, the old ache there, and sometimes I am glad they are
here, dying in the sun, uprooted, tricked by their heartlessness, the same faces, the
same set, hard mouths, faces from my home town, fulfilling the emptiness of their
lives under a blazing sun. (46)

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The similarities to The Road to Los Angeles are easy to see. The difference is that now
Arturo speaks about the effects of racism: how racism not only hurt him, but also drove
him away from his hometown, and into a life of introspection and literature. He is aware
that he is behaving like the kind of monster that he came to Los Angeles to flee. More
importantly, he shows that he feels terribly about this: “…and when I say Greaser to you
it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the
terrible thing I have done” (47). Arturo’s shame is admirable, though it is still mostly
self-involved; he never tells Camilla any of this. And the fact that he is only capable of
having feelings for her when his experience overlaps with hers indicates how Camilla
remains, at the moment, less a person to Arturo than an idea of authenticity that he, as
well as “Smith and Parker and Jones” lack.
From the time he first sees her Arturo is fixated on Camilla’s physical appearance,
and how she is ethnically marked. “Her nose was Mayan, flat, with large nostrils. Her lips
were heavily rouged, with the thickness of a negress’ lips. She was a racial type, and as
such she was beautiful, but she was too strange for me” (34). Camilla’s huaraches also
draw Arturo’s attention, and his scorn. “She was tall and straight-shouldered, a girl of
perhaps twenty, faultless in her way, except for her tattered huaraches” (35). His
estimation of her has changed slightly—whereas before she was perhaps too beautiful
and exotic for him, now she is perfect but with a fatal flaw—her tattered shoes. In each
case the features that most strongly suggest Mexicanness are the ones that possess Arturo,
drawing either his insecure admiration or his scorn. Arturo’s attitude changes so
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drastically in the space of a few paragraphs because he sees Camilla laughing and
imagines, on no authority other than his insecurity, it must be at his expense.
And so for the rest of the novel Arturo pursues Camilla with a wildly fluctuating
mixture of admiration and contempt. In the course of this pursuit he engages in his most
vicious performances of racist whiteness, by calling Camilla “Greaser” and mocking her
huaraches, and also by engaging, as Mark Laurila shows, in white supremacist rhetoric
common to the period. After Camilla shreds The Little Dog Laughed in an effort to get
revenge on Arturo for mocking her, he insults her, and then says to the reader:
I was an American and goddamn proud of it. This great city, these mighty
pavements and proud buildings, they were the voice of my America. From sand
and cactus we Americans had carved an empire. Camilla’s people had had their
chance. They had failed. We Americans had turned the trick. Thank God for my
country. Thank God I had been born an American! (44)

This refers, according to Laurila, to the argument in Ames’s The Los Angeles Tripbook.
Arturo exaggerates his performance of Americanness in direct proportion to his
perception of Camilla’s Mexicanness. This posture of the conquering American, the
representative of the superior race that succeeded where the inferior race failed, is a myth,
a fantasy, evidence of Arturo’s inability to see both the “real” Camilla and the “real” Los
Angeles. His perception of the artificiality of both is linked with Arturo’s insecurity as a
lover—he repeatedly fails to have sex with Camilla—but also as a writer. All of his
attempts to make Camilla a member of his readership—from giving her a copy of The
Little Dog Laughed to sending her a sappy adaptation of an Ernest Dowson poem—fail.
We see Arturo’s fantasy of Camilla’s authenticity in its fullest form when he is
with Vera Rivkin, the melancholy Jewish woman with a mysterious wound. Vera wants
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Arturo because she is insecure and desperate for self-validation (not unlike Arturo). She
is alone in Los Angeles (Long Beach, more specifically), having left her unfaithful
husband, and a housekeeping job she hated, in Pennsylvania. And she is terribly insecure
about her “wound,” which Arturo describes as “at the loins…a birthmark or something, a
burn, a seared place, a pitiful, dry, vacant place where flesh was gone, where the thighs
became small and shriveled and the flesh seemed dead” (88). In a move of, for Arturo,
odd sympathy, he tells her she is beautiful, that there is nothing wrong with her, and
agrees to meet her at her home in Long Beach the next day. There, as they prepare to
have sex, Arturo fees he cannot be unfaithful to Camilla, though their relationship is
hardly real: he has always found himself impotent when with her. Vera’s solution is for
Arturo to pretend that she (Vera) is Camilla. “I’m so lonely,” she says (94). And so
Arturo imaginatively recharacterizes Vera as Camilla. “You’re beautiful,” he tells her.
“You’re a Mayan princess.” He goes on in greater detail, emphasizing as he does that his
attraction to Camilla has less to do with who Camilla actually is than with his idea of her
as authentically belonging to Southern California:
“All of this land and this sea belongs to you. All of California. There is no
California, no Los Angeles, no dusty streets, no cheap hotels, no stinking
newspapers, no broken, uprooted people from the East, no fancy boulevards. This
is your beautiful land with the desert and the mountains and the sea. You’re a
princess, and you reign over it all.” (94)

This is a somewhat less aggressively insulting version of his “thank God I’m an
American speech.” He maintains the distinction between the “authentic” Mexican past
and the tawdry Anglo present. Rather than chiding Camilla for her race’s failure, though,
he romanticizes its otherness, and its history.
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The fantasy does not end with Vera’s assuming Camilla’s “identity,” though.
Arturo demands recognition for himself as both a writer, and, not as an American, but an
Italian. “I’m myself,” he says. “I’m Arturo Bandini. I’m the greatest writer the world ever
had…I’m a conqueror…I’m like Cortez, only I’m an Italian” (94). The dream of
romantic authenticity changes, perhaps predictably, into a fantasy of conquest and
domination. Arturo the writer, the Italian Cortez, will, in his imaginary possession of
Southern California, write a new history. Or so he imagines, anyway. What he actually
ends up writing is not, as Kenneth Scambray points out, “about his nostalgic recollections
of the past or his idealized Mayan princess” (139). Instead, it is about Vera Rivkin, a
lonely, scarred, ethnic outsider who comes to Los Angeles to escape her previous life,
and to try to create a new on. In other words, it is essentially Arturo’s story.
1

The success of the fantasy—Arturo manages to have sex with Vera—points out
how dramatic his idealization of Camilla is. He can simply transpose her identity onto
another woman. At the same time, though, it is clear that the presence of the real Camilla
severely undermines Arturo’s idealization. Camilla, despite her physical appearance, does
not perform the role of the Mayan princess in the way that Vera is willing to (or to talk
about, anyway; Vera does not actually do anything). Camilla undermines Arturo’s
dreams of her authentic identity by attempting to assimilate into mainstream American
culture. Her car is registered to Camilla Lombard, which she claims is “For fun,” and also
something she uses “professionally,” suggesting, of course, she has attempted an acting
career (64). She defiantly claims to be “Just as American” as Arturo is.

1
Scambray goes on to speculate that the Rivkin novel is “presumably about the complexity of the ethnic
condition in America.” It seems as likely as not that such a theme would be present in that novel.
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Her most troubling attempt at assimilation is her doomed and unrequited love for
Sammy, whom George Guida calls Camilla’s idea of “Americanness, personified” (121).
He is a sickly white bartender who treats her even worse than Arturo does. He is not only
openly racist; he is also physically abusive. He gives Camilla black eyes, and when
Arturo and Camilla visit Sammy in his desert shack, he says, “If that’s you, you little
spick, I’ll kick your goddamn teeth out” (136). He clearly embodies the archetypal white
American that Arturo came to Los Angeles in the hopes of escaping. In a letter Sammy
tells Arturo, “the trouble with you, Mr. Bandini, is that you don’t know how to handle
her. You’re too nice to that girl. You don’t understand Mexican women. They don’t like
to be treated like human beings. If you’re nice to them, they walk all over” (121). While
an abundance of kindness was never Arturo’s problem, Sammy’s letter makes clear that
there is a difference between cruelty uttered out of intimidation and real hatred.
While Sammy represents an obstacle, both real and ideological, to Arturo’s
conquest of Camilla, he also provides an opportunity for Arturo to begin to be a writer
rather than simply act like one. While Sammy wastes away in a shack in the Mohave, he
attempts to write stories, and Camilla brings some for Arturo to critique. She asks him
not because she respects or admires his writing, but because he is the only man she
knows who at least claims to be a writer. Unlike Arturo, who writes and publishes literary
fiction in the prestigious magazine of J.C. Hackmuth (clearly the American Mercury,
where Fante published his first stories; Hackmuth is H.L. Mencken), Sammy writes
amateurish westerns about a Texas Ranger named Coldwater Gatling. The work is
terrible, and initially Arturo gleefully savages it. But just before he mails it, he has a
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change of heart, one that precipitates the end of his unreal and mythological attitudes
toward Los Angeles, and the beginning of his ability to identify himself as a writer by the
work he does and not by the recognition he receives. Upon leaving his hotel, at three in
the morning, ready to mail his response to Sammy’s work, which he suddenly conceives
of as “an effort of [Sammy’s], and expression of his struggle against the implacable
silence toward which he was being hurled,” Arturo finds himself suddenly overwhelmed
by nature:
Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here
was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to
die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying
sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The
desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for
civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me,
and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed
not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the
desert down. (120)

Sammy’s fate, Arturo realizes, “is the common fate of all.” In the presence of the
vastness of the darkness and the desert Arturo realizes Sammy’s story is nothing more
than part of the “endless struggle to keep the desert down,” and so he reconsiders his
harsh criticism and writes a positive, encouraging letter.
This is, actually, Arturo’s second encounter with the vastness of the natural world.
The first is the earthquake that occurs immediately after he has sex with Vera Rivkin.
Though his response to that event is, like his experience of mailing Sammy’s letter,
infused with references to the book of Ecclesiastes—“The world was dust, and dust it
would become” he says after the quake—Arturo does not quite develop the sense of
common humanity, and the need to stave off oblivion (104). Instead, he feels guilty, and
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as though God is punishing him specifically for his affair with Vera. In this moment of
rather comic narcissism Arturo hits upon the idea to write his novel about Vera. In the
moment with Sammy’s letter, Arturo cannot help but indulge in self-centeredness—
“How wonderful I really was,” he says. “A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all
things, man and beast alike”—but his attitude is clearly beginning to change (120).
Facing the immensity of the universe makes him not only kinder, more humane, and
somewhat less self-involved; it makes him productive. After another disastrous encounter
with Camilla, in which her physical presence, the fact of her body, more so than any
attempt she makes at being American, shatters his idealization of her, and prevents him,
once again, from having sex, he suddenly finds himself writing ceaselessly. “The good
days, the fat days, page upon page of manuscript; prosperous days, something to say, the
story of Vera Rivkin, and the pages mounted and I was happy” (129). Now that he has
both an idea for a novel and a new appreciation for human activity, production, creation,
as the expressions of attempts at life, Arturo needs Camilla less. His latest failure with
her does not linger with him. He can pour himself into work.
As Arturo becomes immersed in work, Camilla begins to disappear from his life,
and the story. She loses herself in alcohol and marijuana, and is even committed to a
mental hospital before leaving Los Angeles entirely. On one hand, her absence—whether
physical or psychological—indicates that her grip on Arturo’s life is weakening. She
becomes ghostly. On the other hand, though, in her absence Arturo manages to care for
her as a person, rather than an idea. He tries to sneak into the mental hospital to visit her,
and even sends her money, against his better judgment. After her third telegram asking
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for money, Arturo says he “clung to my resolution [not to send any more money] for two
hours. Then I pictured her wandering around, penniless, probably caught in the rain. I
sent her a fifty, with a message to buy some clothes and keep out of the rain” (154).
Arturo’s idealization of Camilla has worn away, and all that is left is an image of a
suffering person for whom Arturo cannot help but have genuine feelings.
In the novel’s final episode Arturo travels again to Sammy’s shack in the Mojave.
Sammy has said Camilla had been to see him. By the time Arturo arrives, she has
disappeared into the desert, which still has, for Arturo, a great symbolic resonance:
Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and
another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling
wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert
would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your
memory with ageless wind and heat and cold. (164)

This is what Camilla has disappeared into: oblivion of eternal nature. His conception of
her relation to the land is no longer a romantic, nostalgic idealization of authentic
belonging. Camilla is not, significantly, a Mayan princess, returning to her ancient
homeland. She is one who has gone to meet the common fate of all. In a final gesture
Arturo signs a copy of his novel, the story of Vera Rivkin, “To Camilla, with love,
Arturo” and throws it into the desert. Then, he says, “I got into the car, started the engine,
and drove back to Los Angeles” (165).
This is a melancholy moment, certainly, and one that perhaps reminds us of
Marlowe’s “I never saw her again” at the end of The Big Sleep. Whereas Chandler stakes
out an alternative to death in the form of a life lived in “the nastiness,” though, Fante is
perhaps a bit more optimistic. He does not remain in the desert, but heads back to Los
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Angeles, a city with which he has developed a new relationship. As Charles Scruggs
points out, Los Angeles’s “artifice reflects a human impulse to resist the encroaching dust
of the desert” (240). If L.A. is exceptional in any way it is not because of its sunshine or
its Mexican past, but because of its proximity to the desert, which only highlights the
city’s status as an affirmation of life. The price of this realization is Camilla. According
to Melissa Ryan, “her disappearance into the desert is the precondition for his ultimate
articulation of self.” Insofar as this involves Arturo’s giving up his nostalgic idealization,
this is positive. His tendency toward mythologizing—of Camilla, of L.A., of himself—is
replaced with a more grounded understanding of the fragility and difficulty of life.
Ask the Dust has been widely praised for its authenticity. Both Charles Bukowski
and Robert Towne regarded reading the novel as a transformative experience. Bukowski
writes in his introduction to the novel that Fante “was a man who was not afraid of
emotion” (6). The other books he read at the L.A. Public Library while he was young and
trying to discover himself as both a man and a writer were contrived and full of “word-
tricks,” and bore no resemblance to “[him] or to the streets or to the people about [him]”
(5). Fante was the opposite—raw, immediate, and relevant. Robert Towne had a similar
revelation when he read the book to research the script for Chinatown. In an interview
with Peter Sobczynski on the occasion of the (long awaited) release of Towne’s filmic
adaptation of the novel he says:
What [Ask the Dust] did was bring my own past and my own childhood back to
me–all the physical memories and senses of the locations that he described felt
like my own childhood. He remembered things that I had forgotten or that I never
even knew about–it all came flooding back to me.

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Fante’s novel seemed more real than films made and set in the 1930s Los Angeles:
“movies from the early 1930's never showed day-to-day life in Los Angeles back then
and while the dialogue was as clever as it could be, I knew that real people never talked
like that.” Both Town and Bukowski not only appreciated the realness of Fante’s novel;
they also identified with the struggle of the protagonist, Arturo Bandini, to become a
writer in L.A. Ask the Dust spoke to the realities of their own lives.
Carey McWilliams also admires some authentic aspects of Ask the Dust, though
not because the novel reminds him of his own struggles to be a novelist. In Southern
California Country he lists Ask the Dust as one of only four novels “that [suggests] what
Southern California life is really like” (364, emphasis added). The other three are
Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Mark Lee Luther’s The Boosters (1924),
and Frank Fenton’s A Place in the Sun (1942). Curiously, McWilliams does not say why
Fante’s novel manages to be an authentic representation, though he talks about the other
three in some detail.
2
Perhaps Fante merited inclusion because of his friendship with

2
Elsewhere in Southern California he discusses, in some detail, The Day of the Locust, The Boosters, and A
Place in the Sun. West’s novel captures, for McWilliams, “the undercurrent of crazy fury” that runs
through the masses of bored, dislocated, desperate people who populate the city. This fury manifests in the
riot scene at the end of the novel, and also in West’s representation of the various religions that took root in
L.A. (what Cain called “nutty religions”). McWilliams observes, in reference to West’s work, “No man is
more dangerous than the man who has caught a glimpse of a great idea, who has feverishly seized upon a
fragment of truth and gone forth to battle chanting the slogans of a Messiah” (309).
Fenton exemplifies the wild, improvisational character of Los Angeles, the way it has grown not
from steady, measured development, but as though thrown together by bits and pieces. McWilliams uses
the following passage from A Place in the Sun as the epigraph to chapter 12, “The Sociology of the Boom”:
Los Angeles was not like some Middle-Western city that sinks its roots into some strategic area of
the earth and goes to work there. This was a lovely Makeshift city. Even the trees and plants did
not belong here. They came, like the people, from far places, some familiar, some exotic, all
wanderers of one sort or another seeking peace or fortune or the last frontier, or a thousand dreams
of escape. (qtd. McWilliams 227)
In Luther’s novel McWilliams finds evidence of, on one hand, the isolation and homelessness that
characterizes the experience of the many new arrivals to the city. He says, “Like a Character in Mark Lee
Luther’s novel, she [a friend of McWilliams’s] has always felt ‘an alien, a stranger in a foreign city whose
language was mysteriously her own’” (179). On the other hand, McWilliams is evidently attracted to
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McWilliams. The two met in late 1932 through H.L. Mencken; the meeting would be
more significant to Fante than McWilliams. In October 1932 Fante wrote to his mother,
“Los Angeles is a hard town to break into. It’s too big. Millions of people, and no friends.
I’ve got a big job ahead of me. With a little help, I’ll make it. I know I shall” (30). He had
already published a coupled of stories in American Mercury, but he still lacked any sense
of a literary community in L.A. This changed when he met McWilliams. “I have good
news for you,” he writes his mother. “…I have met Carey McWilliams, a lawyer, writer,
and friend of Mencken here in Los Angeles….He seems to be a very fine man. I think he
likes me. He furnished me with introductory letters to his friends in Hollywood, specially
M.G.M. studios. I am going out there Monday with my letters. I have a feeling that
something good may come of this. I have needed the beans for a long time now” (36).
Indeed, much good would come of the meeting. Fante would not only make contacts in
Hollywood that would facilitate his screenwriting career; he would also become friends
with other Los Angeles writers, including Frank Fenton, William Saroyan, Ross Wills,
and Louis Adamic.
This kind of literary community is precisely what Arturo lacks in both The Road
to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. While his pretensions to be a writer involve the attempt
to cultivate a kind of community (essentially harassing anyone he knows into reading his
stories), his actual, positive, meaningful labor as a writer is entirely solitary, and indeed
depends upon losing meaningful relationships with Vera and Camilla (these relationships
were, of course, meaningful in various and complicated ways). The fact that Fante’s own

Luther’s L.A. for the way it represents the city, and the state, as a kind of homogenizing force. “A character
in Mark Lee Luther’s novel finally concludes, despite much resistance to the idea, that ‘by some chemistry
of her own, California was triumphantly blending the races into a single type” (180).
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success as a writer (along with every other writer) depended upon his inclusion in a
community, helps us better see his story of a solitary man making it in the world of
literature as the romantic fantasy it of course really is.
In other words, while Fante’s fictionalized account of literary success occurs in
the absence of a community, the fact that his real-life success depended greatly upon one
indicates a rather important truth for all of the writers covered in this dissertation: L.A.’s
growth, for all the problems it presented (some truly devastating, as in Himes’s case, and
some more abstract, as in Chandler’s) also facilitated the enduring legacy of each of these
writers. In life as in the literature I have discussed here, the consequences of growth have
always entailed the possibility of the city’s destruction—by overextension and overuse of
resources, or by riot and racial strife, or by natural disaster exacerbated by expedient
building—but the fact that it endures, against the odds, is a testament both to the tenacity
we see in Fante, and the self-delusion we see in Isherwood. And it is a testament to the
fact, dramatized in Himes, that it is only those strong enough or privileged enough or
lucky enough to withstand the severe challenges presented by the city who are able to
record their experiences of it. And it is those who manage to escape.
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Afterword
A Single Man and the City of Loss

Though published in 1964, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man provides an example
of how the problems with identity, masculinity, and melancholia appear when set in a
growing and developing Los Angeles. Isherwood’s novel is unique in that, while set in its
present day, it looks backward, at times longingly, at times critically, to the 1930s and
1940s, when Isherwood himself settled in the city.
Isherwood first came to Los Angeles in May 1939—probably about the same time
that George would have arrived. His reasons for moving, first to the United States, and
then to Los Angeles, had less to do with the war than with, first, a kind of wanderlust,
and, second, a desire to discuss pacifism with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard (Diaries
4-14).
1
Heard, whom Isherwood regarded as “one of the greatest story-tellers alive” was
at the time adept at yoga and Vedanta. Isherwood credits, in part, their mutual distaste for
Christianity, along with Heard’s skills as a teacher, as the reason for his own conversion
(29).
A Single Man follows, like modernist masterpieces Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses,
the thoughts and activities of a single character over the course of a single day. George,
like Clarissa Dalloway and Leopold Bloom, spends his day moving through a city and
experiencing, along with all that is present before him, memories of his own past, as well
as larger historical changes. Specifically, George, an aging British literature professor, is
haunted by the loss of his lover, Jim, as well as by the changes that have occurred in the

1
In An Approach to Vedanta he does say his pattern of constant travel was initiated by Hitler and the
Nazi’s rise to power in 1933.
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city of Los Angeles since his arrival in the late 1930s. The private loss, as well as the
search for meaning and identity that recovering from such a loss entails, is intertwined
with a single man’s relationship to a changing urban environment. In developing its
narrative of loss and melancholia, A Single Man idiosyncratically incorporates concepts
from Vedanta, the Indian religion Isherwood began following upon his moving to Los
Angeles in 1939. The incorporation of Vedantic concepts allows Isherwood to illustrate
both the values and the limitations of working through melancholia, and also to adapt
modernist concerns with the relationships of space and time, as well as of the past to the
present.
Isherwood figures the persistence of the past into the present in various ways.
Early in the novel, as George regards his own face in a mirror he “sees many faces within
[his] face—the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so young man—all
present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead” (10).
Though there are remnants of George’s appearance from various times in his life, they
are ossified, hardened, and, in this rendering, bear only a superficial resemblance to what
exists in the present. By the end of the novel, though, his attitude will change. As George,
slightly drunk and calmly happy, drifts asleep, the narrator thinks of the relationship
between the water in individual rock pools in “a lava reef under the cliffs” and the water
in the ocean. This relationship is supposed to help explain the relationship between
individual consciousnesses and a larger, more general consciousness. During the day, the
rocks of the pool “hold their world together” and “know no other.” Just so, each
consciousness is aware only of itself, its own world. “But,” the narrator goes on:
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that long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood. And, just as the
waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and
the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean—that consciousness which
is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present
and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars. (184)

This image of “the waters of the ocean [that] are not really other than the waters of the
pool” suggests a more vital, imbricated, and persistent relationship among past, present,
and future, as well as between space and time.
This image of the rock pools is also a direct reference to Vedanta. According to S.
Nagarajan, the image of the rock pools refers to the Vedantic concept of pure
consciousness, or Atman. Atman (also called Brahman) is the “single reality,” “‘one
without a second.’” Atman has “a certain power or effect called Prakriti,” which is “the
undifferentiated stuff of all mind and matter in the cosmos” (64). Individual minds are
merely instruments of knowledge, of Atman. Indeed, one must try to free oneself of the
misapprehension that one has a mind that is separate from Atman. According to
Nagarajan, “Until we break free of this false identification, we shall not achieve freedom
from birth and death” (65). Victor Marsh notes that the statement, “that consciousness
which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present
and future,” is “the pure expression of an Advaita position” (386). “Advaita” merely
refers to the particular Vedantic tradition with which Isherwood is involved; it insists on
“nonduality” (387).
2
Both Nagarajan and Marsh are interested in A Single Man insofar as

2
In An Approach to Vedanta, published a year before A Single Man, Isherwood discusses the “two selves”
that are entailed in Yoga philosophy (“Yoga is a method…by which the individual can achieve union with
God” (18). Or, to put it another way, “Vedanta stands to Yoga in the relation of theory to practice” (29).)
One is “an apparent, outer self” and the other is “an invisible, inner self.” While the outer self merely
“claim to be an individual,” and while this claim allows it to have feelings and sensations, it is not the real
self. “The real self,” Isherwood explains, “is unchanging and immortal; it has no individuality, for it is
equally within every human being, living creature, vegetable, mineral and inanimate object.” This positing
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it is a religious novel. Nagarajan wants to explicate the Vedantic elements present in the
novel, and Marsh wants to point out that while A Single Man is perhaps Isherwood’s least
obviously religious work, it is nonetheless the one that most successfully integrates and
deploys religious theories and concepts.
These theories and concepts articulate an idea of the relationship between space
and time and the individual; everything is one. George, of course, never realizes this. He
is not a Vedantist. It is the omniscient narrator, and not George, who conceives of the
image of the rock pools and the unity of consciousness. George’s last thoughts are of Jim,
his lover who died in a car accident. George has, in fact, thought of Jim throughout the
novel, and it is always with the pain of melancholy, rather than the perspective of
mourning. Melancholia, in Freud’s terms, is an inability to let go of a lost love object.
The persistent memory of the lost object torments the melancholic to the point that, in
Freud’s terms, the love of the object, “which cannot be abandoned while the object itself
is abandoned, has fled into narcissistic identification, [and] hatred goes to work on the
substitute object…” (318). This means, simply, that in the melancholic’s inability to work
through loss, he first begins to hate what has been lost, and then begins to identify the lost
object with his own ego, and thus begins to hate himself. The melancholic suffers
persistently both as a way to maintain a kind of contact with the lost object and to punish
himself (and the lost object) for the fact of suffering loss. We see as much when George
first thinks of Jim:

of two selves does not undermine the central tenet of nonduality, though, for the outer self is, clearly, not
real, but a delusion. With training one can apprehend the union of all things. Isherwood explains this with a
metaphor that is strikingly similar to the image of the rock pools: “Or, to put it in another way, there is a
part of myself which, being infinite, has access to the infinite—as the sea water in a bay has access to the
sea because it is the sea” (19).
202

It is here that he stops short and knows, with a sick newness, almost as though it
were for the first time: Jim is dead. Is dead.
He stands quite still, silent, or at most uttering a brief animal grunt, as he
waits for the spasm to pass. Then he walks to the kitchen. These morning spasms
are too painful to be treated sentimentally. After them, he feels relief, merely. It is
like getting over a bad attack of cramp. (13)

Notice the pun on “morning.” If George had merely mourned the loss of Jim, he would
not have these spasms. The pain of a mourning spasm is a sign that Jim, the lost object,
has not been forgotten, that he lives, after a fashion, in George.
George’s refusal to let go manifests itself elsewhere in starkly melancholic terms
when he visits Doris, a woman with whom Jim had a brief love affair in order to “satisfy
all his curiosity and flattered vanity and lust…” (96). Doris is dying; it is almost as
though, as a “shriveled yellow mannequin with its sticks of arms and legs, withered flesh
and hollow belly,” she is decaying right before George’s eyes (95). It seems that George
only visits Doris to feel angry and hurt, to be reminded of the “gross insucking vulva, sly
ruthless greedy flesh” that had lain with Jim (95). On this particular visit, though, George
is not able to bring forth these feelings, for “the very last traces of the Doris who tried to
take Jim from him have vanished from this shriveled mannequin, and, with them, the last
of his hate.” This is devastating because in losing his ability to hate, he loses a connection
with Jim. “As long as one tiny precious drop of hate remained, George could still find
something left in her of Jim. For he hated Jim too, nearly as much as her, while they were
away together in Mexico. That has been the bond between him and Doris. And now it is
broken. And one more bit of Jim is lost to him forever” (102).
For most of the novel, then, George manifests a melancholic refusal to work
through his loss. By the end, though, he has changed. As he drifts asleep, George begins
203

to recognize that clinging to Jim’s memory does not conduce to living well. The narrator
says, “George makes himself remember [Jim]. He is afraid of forgetting. Jim is my life,
he says. But he will have to forget, if he wants to go on living. Jim is death.” Instead of
returning to England—an idea he drunkenly entertained with Charlotte, an English
friend—he decides he will stay in Los Angeles because “[this] is where he found Jim. He
believes he will find another Jim here. He doesn’t know it, but he has started looking
already” (182). This marks, in Freudian terms, a shift from melancholy to mourning.
George is willing to let Jim go, and even replace him with a new lover. He will mourn the
loss of Jim, but he will not torture himself with it.
The time at which this moment of working through happens is significant, for it
coincides with, first, the image of the rock pools and the concept of universal, unified
consciousness, and second, George’s death. Or, rather, with the possibility of George’s
death; the ending is decidedly ambiguous. The novel posits working through
melancholia, accepting loss, is analogous to the realization of the Vedantic unity of
consciousness, and of the fact that an individual mind is merely a temporary container for
universal consciousness. By juxtaposing George’s letting go of Jim with the image of
universal consciousness, Isherwood contrasts the kind of psychological freedom available
to George, an intelligent, educated, Western man, and the kind available to Vedanta.
Working through melancholia gives one a kind of peace in the present. Realizing that
one’s external self is not the same as one’s real self, and that one’s real self is part of an
ocean of consciousness gives one a kind of eternal peace, “freedom from birth and
death,” as Nagarajan puts it. George does not achieve this by novel’s end, though he is
204

also unaware of it. According to the narrator, “And if some part of the nonentity we
called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there
on the deep waters, then it will return to find itself homeless. For it can associate no
longer with what lies here, unsnoring, on the bed. This is now cousin to the garbage in the
container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too
long” (186). According to Nagarajan, what is implied here, in Vedantic terms, is
incarnation, whereby “The ego, or non-entity, called George, will seek…a birth which
will give it opportunity to express its samskaras” (70). Samskaras are characterological
predispositions that “condition the birth that we acquire, for it is their inherent
characteristic to cast about for maximum expression in action” (67). Because George is
not aware of Vedanta, he does not achieve freedom from birth and death. The “part of the
nonentity called George” which is for the moment “homeless” will cast about for a new
birth in the hope that a realization of universalized consciousness will allow it to achieve
ultimate unity with it. Isherwood, then, articulates the relationship between Vedana and
Western modes of thought. Working through melancholy, a process most readers can
identify with, is good. And while doing so helps George to achieve peace, it is only a
small part of a greater peace, via the realization of oneness, he could achieve through
Vedanta.
George’s death, if indeed he has died, is tragic not merely because he does not
achieve freedom from birth and death; it is also tragic because, of course, he will not have
a chance to live free of melancholia. He will not be able to find a new lover. Also, he will
not be able to live with a renewed sense of commitment and belonging in a city to which
205

he has rediscovered an attachment. At the same time that he admits the necessity, despite
his fear, of letting Jim go, George also admits that remaining in Los Angeles is important
not because it allows him to maintain a connection to Jim, but because it will allow him
to find a replacement. This means that instead of clinging to an idealized version of what
Los Angeles used to be, back before he lost Jim, and, indeed, instead of going even
further into the past and returning to England, George decides that, in staying, he will
exist in and recognize the city as it is “Now,” not as it was or will be, because “It is Now
that he must find another Jim. Now that he must love. Now that he must live… (182).
Obviously, we do not get to see this new relationship. Isherwood does, though,
show in amazing detail how George’s melancholic relationship to Los Angeles looks.
George begins dwelling on the lost city almost as soon as he feels his first “morning
spasm.” He thinks about his house, which is on Camphor Tree Lane. The name, George
guesses, “was chosen for its picturesqueness by the pioneer escapists from dingy
downtown and stuffy-snobbish Pasadena who came out here and founded this colony
back in the early twenties” (17). George idealizes these early “pioneers,” calling them
“rear-guard individualists” who had “escaped the soul-destroying commercialism of the
city.” They lived a bohemian existence until “The Great Change,” of the late 1940s,
“when the World War Two vets came swarming out of the East with their just-married
wives, in search of new and better breeding grounds in the sunny Southland…” The
quirky, artistic, sophisticated beauty of the place gradually gave way to the very vulgarity
“the original colonists” had tried to flee. “So, one by one, the cottages which used to reek
206

of bathtub gin and reverberate with the poetry of Hart Crane have fallen to the occupying
army of Coke-drinking television watchers” (18).
This change occurred before George and Jim moved into the house, but others
have happened since. George is particularly sensitive to the changes that have happened
since Jim’s death. All of these changes have to do with population growth and the costs
of urban expansion. On his drive from home to San Tomas State College (which stands
for California State University, Los Angeles) George bristles at the appearance of “a
huge, insolent high-rise building,” that will “block the view along the coast from the park
on the cliffs above” (36). George fantasizes about destroying the building, and then about
maiming and torturing a homophobic newspaper editor. When he reaches the campus he
finds himself “in the tacky sleepy slowpoke Los Angeles of the thirties, still convalescent
from the depression, with no money to spare for fresh coats of paint” (41). This
neighborhood, on the east side of the city, has been neglected since the move west of the
World War II veterans. The population is entirely Mexican and black. The presence of
those populations means, for George, that “there are lots of flowers” and “it is cheerful”
(41). Despite this condescension, though, and despite the fact that George himself would
never live in this neighborhood (“because they blast all day long with their radios and
television sets”) he does not consider these people his “enemies” (like the newspaper
editor) and he would not yell at their children, as he does the children that live in his own
neighborhood. These people are friends because of their status as oppressed minorities
and because they occupy a place in the city that still resembles what it was thirty years
before.
207

In stark contrast is the nearby San Tomas State campus, which is in “the
nowadays of destruction-reconstruction-destruction. Here the little hills have been
trucked away bodily or had their tops sliced off by bulldozers, and the landscape is
gashed with raw terraces.” These terraces are built to accommodate tract houses to serve
the needs of the “clean modern factory” that is the college, which, when “fully
operational…will be able to process twenty thousand graduates.” However, because the
city continues to grow and expand so rapidly, “in less than ten years, it will have to cope
with forty or fifty thousand. So then everything will be torn down again and built up
twice as tall” (42).
Though there is an undeniable quality of cynicism with which George thinks
about the apartment building and the constant development and redevelopment of the
area around the college, these moments mostly amount to observations about population
change and urban growth. It is not until after George has visited Doris and then exercised
at the gym, when “he wants to enjoy the uncomplicated relaxed happy mood which is
nearly always produced by a workout at the gym,” that he experiences melancholic rage
at what has been lost in Los Angeles through urban development. He decides to hike into
the hills, where he used to go, “before Jim even, when [he] first came to California.” The
joy he felt in going into the hills was entailed in “the wildness of this range, largely
uninhabited yet rising right up out of the city, that fascinated him. He felt the thrill of
being a foreigner, a trespasser there, of venturing into the midst of a primitive, alien
nature” (110). The appeal of the hills, then, lay in their lack of urban development, their
208

distance from crass commercial culture, and the absence of any evidence of human
influence.
The hills have lost their appeal, though, because they are no longer isolated from
the city. In a paragraph that is worth quoting in full, Isherwood says:
But this afternoon George can feel nothing of that long-ago excitement
and awe; something is wrong from the start. The steep, winding road, which used
to seem romantic, is merely awkward now, and dangerous. He keeps meeting
other cars on blind corners and having to turn sharply. By the time he has reached
the top, he has lost all sense of relaxation. Even up here they are building dozens
of new houses. The area is getting suburban. True, there are still a few
uninhabited canyons, but George can’t rejoice in them; he is oppressed by
awareness of the city below. On both sides of the hills, to the north and to the
south, it has spawned and spread itself over the entire plain. It has eaten up the
wide pastures and ranchlands and the last stretches of orange grove; it has sucked
out the surrounding lakes and sapped the forests of the high mountains. Soon it
will be drinking converted sea water. And yet it will die. No need for rockets to
wreck it, or another ice age to freeze it, or a huge earthquake to crack it off and
dump it in the Pacific. It will die of overextension. It will die because its taproots
have dried up—the brashness and greed which have been its only strength. And
the desert, which is the natural condition of this country, will return. (111,
emphasis added)

The process of expansion, of making things suburban, is killing both nature and the city.
This righteous complaint, which George makes in the attitude of a “sad Jewish prophet of
doom,” is motivated not merely by an insulted ecological sensibility, but also, and
significantly, by the melancholic realization that things are not as they were. The
“progress” of the city toward its eventual destruction takes place by destroying, a phase at
a time, the various incarnations of the city that have existed up to this point. And here we
see another resonance with the novel’s Vedantic themes: the city will experience birth
and death “destruction-reconstruction-destruction” until it realizes the falseness of its
209

outer identity and its ultimate unity with the world around it. The city will be most itself
when it is gone, and joined with the desert that is its natural state.
In deciding to stay, though, and search for another Jim, George does suggest that
he is willing to come to terms with expanding, dying, changing city. George works
through the melancholic feelings he has toward the Los Angeles that has been lost. In
suggesting that he dies, though, the novel relieves George of having to test his ability to
accept the new city, to attempt to find new meaning in it, and to let go of what he misses
about the old one—not only its idealized bohemian enclaves, but also its places of real
natural beauty. So while it is tragic for George to die at just the moment he is prepared to
live free of self-torturing melancholia, it is perhaps also fortunate that he does not have to
attempt living in a place that has become so different from the one he had loved. Instead,
in the novel’s ending of implied Vedantic reincarnation, the part of him that ends the
novel “homeless” will be reborn elsewhere, with another attempt to realize the unity of
itself with the single unified reality. The dying city, as well as those things it had loved
about the city, can be part of a distant past, of which George can be unaware.

210

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946) Carey McWilliams memorably characterized Southern California as “man-made, a gigantic improvisation,” and “a product of forced growth and rapid change” (13). This study examines how literature has represented the impact of this growth on the individual. By looking at canonical Los Angeles fiction written during the 1930s and 1940s, I show that novels of this period display an important concern with population and urban growth, as well as intense anxiety about the consequences of this growth on masculine identity. I focus specifically on the work of four major authors: Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and John Fante. Each of these writers is now recognized as a significant figure in the canon of literature about Los Angeles, and each is interested in the city as both a peculiar urban space and as a space fraught with historical and ideological significance. Each writer’s work specifically takes up the changes in population size and composition, as well as the changes in the configuration of urban space, that Los Angeles experienced in 1930s and 1940s and uses these changes to fictionally examine the relationship of an individual, and his sense of self, to his environment. ❧ Though each writer’s engagement with the real historical details of what was happening in Los Angeles at the time—or at least with his understanding of what was happening—is unique, there are three major themes that tie all four writers together. The first is a concern with how personhood generally, and manhood in particular, is defined and realized against L.A.’s changing environment. As the population both grows and becomes more diverse, and as neighborhoods shift, almost seismically, beneath one’s feet, how does one maintain a stable sense of self? This question is complicated further by race, and by anxiety about whiteness in particular. These writers ask, from widely different points of view, what it means to be and not to be white in L.A. The second major concern that ties these four writers together is the threats and challenges to identity that the complex spatiotemporality of the city presents. These writers thematize the way one moves through the city, as well as the way one reads and navigates the city’s changing spaces, to articulate the degree to which an individual has adapted to L.A. The third is melancholia, and the way that a sense of self is born out of various kinds of loss—loss of a city one thought one had known, loss of stability and hope for a future in a hostile, antipathetic city. ❧ By paying attention to these three concerns we can see not only that Los Angeles’s rapid growth and change entailed a perceived threat to masculine identity, but also that writers attempted to find ways, even if subtle or barely conscious, to deploy the unique spatiotemporality of a city growing seemingly out of control to structure their novels. By using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I will show that the dynamics of a rapidly changing city appear in images of city space, including streets and buildings, as well as neighborhoods, in ways that (1) give these novels a unique and coherent narrative structure, and (2) tie the novels to the spatiotemporal realities in which they existed.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hamrick, Jonathan (author)

Core Title Urban growth and narrative identity in Los Angeles fiction

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/12/2013

Defense Date 05/01/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American history,American Literature,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,population growth

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Handley, William R. (committee chair), Boone, Joseph A. (committee member), Deverell, William F. (committee member)

Creator Email jonathan.m.hamrick@gmail.com,jonathan@hamrick.net

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-288004

Unique identifier UC11293409

Identifier etd-HamrickJon-1762.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-288004 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HamrickJon-1762.pdf

Dmrecord 288004

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Hamrick, Jonathan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA