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Content LIMEYS IN THE ORANGE GROVE:
THE BRITISH NOVEL IN LOS ANGELES
VOLUME I
by
Sheryl Gail Banks
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1986
Copyright 1986 Sheryl Gail Banks
UM I Number: DP23107
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089
This dissertation, written by
SHERYL GAIL BANKS
under the direction of hf:T Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted b y The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
fVi).
E
z
86
B2IS
v.f
D O C TO R OF PHILOSOPH Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
December 15, 1986
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
'.hairperson
ii
To my husband, Jeff—
without whose inspiration and encouragement
this dissertation would never have been written—
and to our daughters,
Erika, Gabrielle and Miranda,
with love and appreciation
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Though a single author's name appears on the title
page, there are many others behind the scenes who
provided substantial assistance in its writing. Without
them, the study would not exist. Special thanks are due
to the following:
First of all, to Professor Jay Martin, whose guiding
presence informed my seven years at the University of
Southern California, and whose wisdom and erudition was
always available to me from the inception of the idea
behind this study to its final presentation.
Secondly, to Professor Marjorie Perloff, my female
mentor and friend, who always encouraged my scholarly
efforts and supported me in the multiplicity of my roles.
Thirdly, to Professor Robert Baker, who cheerfully
entered part way through the project to provide the
authorization of the Graduate School.
To Gavin Lambert and Brian Moore, the only living
subjects of my study, who gave generously of their time
and kindly encouraged my work.
To my fellow graduate students, particularly Judy
Laue, Sydney Dieterich, and Ann Warren, who shared the
often-treacherous road to academic achievement with me.
iv
To my friend David Southwood, a Briton with a love
of both Los Angeles and literature, who continued to
provide inspiration as well as an endless supply of books
and advice.
To my friend Lael Rubin, who seemed continually
fascinated by the details of my day's or week's work, and
was confident that one day I would be done and we would
have something else to discuss.
To my mother, Geraldine Janis, and my late father,
Harold Janis, who— in addition to providing me with my
birthplace, the subject of this study— never doubted that
I could accomplish whatever I set out to do and always
encouraged me to follow my dreams.
To my daughters, Erika, Gabrielle, and Miranda, who
had to put up with endless take-out dinners and lots of
boring conversation on my part: your love and
encouragement sustained me.
And finally, but most importantly, to my husband,
Jeff, who was the inspiration for my return to graduate
school, who sacrificed in heroic proportions for the
mythic seven years, whose humor buoys me up and whose
love pervades my life. I thank you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
V
VOLUME I
Page
Dedication . i ..........................................ii
Acknowledgments ............................... iii
Chanter
1 INTRODUCTION..........................................1
2 BEFORE 1939 ..........................................41
3 RAYMOND CHANDLER ............... 96
4 JAMES HILTON....................................... 143
5 ALDOUS HUXLEY ..................................... 177
6 EVELYN WAUGH....................................... 235
VOLUME II
7 HUXLEY'S APE AND ESSENCE.......................... 314
8 CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD ............................ 357
9 BRIAN MOORE.................................. 443
10 GAVIN LAMBERT...................................... 516
Bibliography..................... 628
1
INTRODUCTION
Southern California [is] an aberrant part of America
which might also be thought of as in some sense its
realisation, a land of sunshine and oranges placed
on the cultural extremity at which the more
extravagant forms of American dream and American
fantasy are made manifest, not only on the stage-
sets and in the studios of Hollywood, but in the
surrounding environment. It is hard to write about
it with balance and poise. A home of utopian
experiments, novel religions, advanced forms of
self-display, style-hunger and assertive identities,
built upon desert and land-slippage, landscaped and
bulldozed hills and an earthquake fault, on oil,
gold, advanced technology, expectation and the
promise of eternal youth follwed by eternal
salvation? it affords at times both horror and the
ready promise of redemption.
* * *
Some lands were a father to a man, and beat him; and
some were a mother to him, and loved him; and some
were a wife, and had to be loved; but California was
just a whore who dropped her pants down to the first
man that came along with a watering-pot.2
* * *
Southern California, for Eric Knight writing in
1938, was a region wide open to all who cared to try out
their dreams on her. People came and continue to come,
1 Malcom Bradbury, "America and the Comic Vision."
In Evelyn Waugh and His World, ed. David Pryce-Jones
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 168.
2 Eric Knight [pseud. Richard Hallas], You Play the
Black and the Red Comes Up (New York: Robert M. McBride,
1938), p. 210.
2
filled with aspirations, not just from all over the
United States, but from the far-reaches of the globe, all
having been touched by the power of her fantasy-producing
machinery. British immigrants have always held a rare
position there. Unlike foreigners with strange accents,
these newcomers spoke a cultured English. In a new land
searching for instant history, an old world sounding
approach to language succeeded immensely. Employment
even in very hard times was readily available to them.
Sometimes they grew disillusioned and, when left to their
own devices, many of the more creative foreigners turned
to their individual art forms to try to capture something
of their Southern California experience for the world.
How well did the British novelists who came to Los
Angeles over the fifty year period between the 1930's and
the 1980's really succeed in dealing with the Southern
California setting in the novels they produced? Some
critics never even noticed their work:
There are no important novels about . . . Los
Angeles. Perhaps the closest approximation to a
major novel of the Hollywood-Los Angeles area is
Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, but this was left a
fragment.
3 Frederick Bracher, "California's Literary
Regionalism," American Quarterly, 7, No. 3 (Fall 1955),
p. 279.
3
As recently as three decades ago, Fredrick Bracher
made the preceding conclusion about the Los Angeles novel
in his article in American Quarterly. Bracher's major
blind spot was that he neglected to check whether any
major British novels had portrayed Los Angeles in a
compelling fashion. It will be the object of this study
to show in what respects Bracher's conclusion was false
in 1955, especially in regard to British novels set in
Los Angeles and written during the 1930's and 1940's, as
well as to demonstrate how many novels of significance
with Los Angeles settings have been produced by British-
born writers since that time. Because so many fine works
by the seven major authors incorporated in this study
have been located in Southern California, they can almost
be considered something of a sub-genre in the history of
the English novel.
All the novelists to be considered do more than just
set their stories in Southern California. In each case,
though with varying degrees of success, they make an
attempt to engage with and respond to the environment.
As such, the region becomes more than just a backdrop;
rather it infuses the lives of the characters in deep and
meaningful ways, providing the very framework or
structure to the people and events of each novel. Though
4
every place can be said to have its uniqueness, Los
Angeles has more than its share of identifiable
differences, so that novels set in the region can be seen
as bearing certain commonalities of perspective,
especially if— as in this case— their authors share a
similarity of background.
Britons have a unique relationship to America, in
general, because it is a former colony. Some Americans
believe that their literature picks up where British
writing left off, that American writing is the ultimate
extension of what the British developed. And Los Angeles
as a location can readily be seen as both the most remote
geographically and the most different culturally from the
British homeland. In this respect Southern California is
at once the antithesis and the fulfillment of British
life. Despite the fact that they share a common
language, the British who come to Los Angeles encounter a
people and a place with a culture and attendant lifestyle
quite alien in many respects from their native
perspective. These characteristics of place mold the
fiction they write, so that the Los Angeles novels of
Raymond Chandler, James Hilton, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn
Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, Brian Moore and Gavin
5
Lambert are indeed a breed apart in the annals of British
fiction.
* * *
Eudora Welty published a monograph in 1957 called
Place in Fiction. Here she raises a number of issues
that bear directly on this study. The significance of
place in fiction is often overlooked, and yet she makes a
strong case for the idea that if place is not deeply
realized, the entire work comes unglued:
Surely books suffer as people do from the ailment of
lack of base of reference. It comes out in the
novel as uncertainty about what the characters
really think or mean, ambiguity about what they do
or fail to do, or as a queer haphazardness in the
novel's shape or form. The trouble is, of course,
that if a character has no established world to
operate in, no known set of standards to struggle
within or against, then whatever disaster may
befall, there is no crisis; and although the problem
is a moral one, the crisis is an artistic one.
What is unique about the present study is that each of
the novelists to be considered deals with two places of
reference: his British homeland— even if the details of
this world remain implicit rather than explicit— and the
4 Eudora Welty, Place in Fiction (New York: House
of Books, 1957), p. 23. This is a condensation of
lectures prepared for the Conference on American Studies
in Cambridge, England in 1954. The monograph is
unpaginated, but for reference purposes here, pages have
been counted beginning with the first page of the printed
text.
6
Southern California environment in which the novel itself
is set.
One of the unique qualities of Los Angeles fiction,
among regional literatures, is that it has almost
exclusively been written by outsiders— whether Americans
or foreigners. So that unlike most regional writing
where the present is seen against a background of its own
historic past, these novels tend to see current events in
r
terms of a past from someplace else. This is true of
the Middle-Westerners (Fitzgerald, Alison Lurie), the
Southerners (Horace McCoy, James Cain), the Easterners
(West, O'Hara, Mailer and Pynchon), as well as the group
to be considered here, the British. It is not surprising
then that a sense of displacement is a common theme and
feeling in these novels.
Welty contends that it is in the very nature of
fiction to be "all bound up in the local. The internal
reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in
place. The human mind is a mass of associations—
associations more poetic even than actual" (4). And this
is a very real dilemma to the authors here, for Los
Angeles is a place that is already endowed with
5 David Fine, "Introduction," Los Angeles in
Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1984), p. 2.
7
connotations and teeming with impressions for the modern
reader. Some of the authors discussed here have
corroborated and extended the standard views of the area,
while others have worked very diligently to overthrow the
commonly accepted perspectives.
Certain places exert a special claim on a novelist,
and this is the case with all of the major novels
considered in this book. These are British authors who
have been shaken in some way by their own experiences in
Los Angeles, so that what they have written incorporates
a uniqueness that can only come from an engagement with a
certain locale. These novels belong, as it were, to
Southern California and could not be lifted and
transported elsewhere. And yet too, as the research will
show, they still carry the vestiges of the other place,
that perspective bred into the British child which he can
never fully renounce.
Though each of these writers focuses on Los Angeles,
the world that each creates is really one of his own
making. Out of all the possibilities in the greater Los
Angeles area, he selects and combines only those elements
which suit his purpose. This, Welty contends, is the act
of any novelist at work:
8
The writer must accurately choose, combine,
superimpose upon, blot out, shake up, alter the
outside world for one absolute purpose, the good of
his story. To do this, he is always seeing double,
two pictures at once in his frame, his and the
world1s, a fact that he constantly comprehends ? and
he works best in a state of constant and subtle and
unfooled reference between the two. It is his clear
intention— his passion, I should say— to make the
reader see only one of the pictures— the author's—
under the pleasing illusion that it is the world's;
this enormity is the accomplishment of a good story.
(15)
As one reads through the novels included in this study,
sometimes it seems hardly possible that these people are
writing about the same city, and yet there are certain
points of similarity that do begin to emerge.
Much of the impetus for action in any novel comes
from the place in which it is set. In good fiction,
Welty says, "location is the ground-conductor of all the
currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that
charge out from the story in its course" (21). Each of
the authors to be discussed here grapples with the Los
Angeles setting, mining it for ways that it supports or
thwarts the efforts of the characters in the novel.
Welty holds that the novelist must continually be
willing to give up the familiar place for the untrodden,
even if he elects to stay, as Faulkner did, with the same
physical setting, while at the same time moving-on and
exploring new aspects of the place:
9
For the artist to be unwilling to move, mentally or
spiritually or physically, out of the familiar is a
sign that spiritual timidity or poverty or decay has
come upon him; for what is familiar will then have
turned into all that is tyrannical. . . . Risk—
experiment— is a considerable part of the joy of
doing (25-6).
The novelists in this study have made a physical journey,
however, and such an undertaking has its own attendant
risks. Some novelists, like Joyce, become exiles, but
nevertheless continue to write about their place of
origin. These British novelists in question here have
taken a different tack. No matter how much they may
prefer Britain, they are setting their stories in
Southern California, and are thereby daring to write
about a foreign environment. This was particularly risky
for the established writers who came to Los Angeles— true
of all the novelists included in the study except for
Chandler and, to some extent, Lambert— for they were
jeopardizing their reputations by dealing with a locale
that each of them recognized as of intrinsically
questionable literary reputation.
* * *
The novels to be considered within the scope of this
dissertation share a number of common characteristics
beyond the basic stipulation that they are all British
novels set in Los Angeles. Only those works in which a
10
substantial part of the action takes place in Southern
California have been included, unless the author has
written more than one Los Angeles novel, in which case
earlier minor appearances have been incorporated for the
sake of comparison. All of the authors are of either
English or Irish heritage. (Had any Welsh or Scots
written novels about Los Angeles, they too would have
been included.) And the scale is decidedly tipped in
favor of the Englishmen, for only Brian Moore and the
early Hollywood novelist Liam O'Flaherty were born in
Ireland. Chandler is alone among the group in having
been born in the United States. Because he returned to
live in Britain as a young child, always identified with
his Irish mother rather than his father who was American-
born though of Irish descent, had all his years of
education in England, and did not come back to the United
States until the age of twenty-four, he is justifiably
included among these British novelists. In addition,
only Chandler, among these writers, has located virtually
all seven of his novels in Southern California. For the
others, their Los Angeles works constitute a varying
percentage of their entire output, from Waugh who set
only one work there to Lambert who fully incorporated the
area into five of his novels.
11
It should be noted that there are no women included
among the novelists under consideration here. Certainly
British women writers have visited the city, but no major
works of fiction have been produced as a result of their
experiences. There are a handful of British women who
have written novels at least partially set in Los
Angeles, but none of these has achieved the level of
importance of the other works to be examined here.
Not all the authors included in this study lived out
their lives in Southern California. Waugh found Los
Angeles utterly unsatisfactory and as a result spent only
a little over six weeks in the area, returning as quickly
as possible to England. His novel, The Loved One,
resounds with his disgust at what he encountered.
Lambert, on the other hand, lived in Los Angeles for
fifteen years, but then moved to Tangier, Morocco;
nevertheless, he continues to write about the area with a
genuine fondness. For the rest, Chandler, Hilton,
Huxley, Isherwood and Moore all eventually made Los
Angeles their permanent home. Nonetheless, there is in
fact a continuum of acceptance of the city among them.
Waugh is at one extreme, the man who comes to see the
monster and then flees, returning home to inscribe a
record of the horrors he has seen. Isherwood, on the
12
other hand, became an American in every respect he could,
never effectively contemplating life anywhere else but in
Southern California. The others fall somewhere in
between these two, marginal figures straddling the lines
between the two worlds— the old one and the new— and to
some, extent strangers to each.
Though they had a common perspective, not all
British novelists looked at Los Angeles the same way.
The city in fact has occasioned an incredibly wide range
of responses from British writers, swinging from its
being the subject of the most plentitudinous historical
romance of a minor figure such as Victoria Wolf in her
1957 novel Fabulous city to its being the object of the
most bitter satire as in the case of Evelyn Waugh. The
balance, however, seems to be toward a certain irony of
approach, though one might credibly argue that such a
stance is indeed characteristic of the British novel in
general.
* * *
Los Angeles, as discussed in this study, is to be
understood as that portion of Southern California
generally termed "the greater Los Angeles area.'1 This
extends from the southern boundaries of Ventura County on
the north to the northern boundaries of San Diego County
13
on the south, and then east to the edge of San Bernardino
County. The Pacific Ocean is obviously the westernmost
boundary, the end of the frontier, so to speak, and, in
fact, it often plays a major role in the novels
themselves. Within the county of Los Angeles there are
over eighty municipalities, including Santa Monica and
Beverly Hills, as well as the city of Los Angeles itself,
which includes many districts such as Hollywood,
Downtown, Glendale, Pacific Palisades, Bel Air, Malibu,
Culver City and Venice— all of which often appear in the
fiction of the Southland.6
The geographical area encompassed within these
boundaries combines a set of characteristics unlike those
to be found almost anywhere else on earth: large ranges
of relatively high mountains7 extend all the way down to
miles upon miles of beautiful beaches, and the land
between is a desert artifically made green by the
importation of water. The areas boasts, therefore, wide
variety within a single territory, so that the newcomer
6 Aaron Blake Publishers produced The Raymond
Chandler Mystery Map of Los Angeles in 1985 which locates
the actual sites of all the major places and events in
Chandler's Los Angeles novels.
7 Many of the mountains of Southern California are
over 5,000 feet in altitude and are, therefore, higher
than any land mass on the British Isles.
14
has the option of locating in almost any terrain and
climatic situation he finds desirable. The climate
itself is exceptional, and it alone is often the single
most attractive quality of life in Southern California
for the Briton. Because the sun shines brightly nearly
all the year round, there are no real seasons. This may
account for a certain timelessness in the consciousness
as well as the writing. Characters are more free to act
as though they can go on indefinitely, to think of
challenging time by focusing on youth and becoming health
conscious. Yet because of area's propensity toward
earthquakes and land slippage, as well as its frequent
brushfires, the very land itself is unstable, and this
characteristic too makes its way into many of the novels
where the landscape becomes a metaphor for the
instability and unpredictability of human life.
Another geographical quality that has influenced the
British novels produced about Los Angeles is the area's
great distance from New York. This at first seems like a
tautology, but in practical experience it comes to mean a
great deal when the long distance in miles is combined
with a sense of remoteness in temperament and values from
the eastern literary establishment. This is what Edmund
15
Wilson described in his famous essay "The Boys in the
Back Room" published first in 1940:
All visitors from the East know the strange spell of
unreality which seems to make human experience on
the Coast as hollow as the life of a troll-nest
where everything is out in the open instead of being
underground. . . . Add to this the remoteness from
the East and the farther remoteness from
Europe. . . . California looks away from Europe, and
out upon a wider ocean toward an Orient with which
as yet any cultural communication is difficult.
Bracher refers to the same experience as the area's
"psychic distance"9 from the traditional centers of
western culture.
This sense of distance is further marked by contact
with the Pacific Ocean as the periphery, the outer limit
of the "known" world. Whereas the early settlers of San
Francisco tended to arrive by boat, Southern Californians
traditionally came overland, so their pilgrimage was much
more consciously to the westernmost point of what they
considered civilization.10 For Britons, the trip entails
even more travelling in a westerly direction, so it is
8 Edmund Wilson, "The Boys in the Back Room" in
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the
Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), pp.45-7.
9 Bracher, p. 283.
10 See Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The
Architecture of Four Ecologies (Middlesex: Penguin,
1976), p. 25.
16
not at all strange that these people often come right out
to the seafront— both personally and in their novels—
then turn around and look back at their old lives from
this far-distant perspective. They are a long way from
home both psychically and physically. Many of the
protagonists in the novels to be discussed in fact
experience their final moments of peace and harmony while
poised on the edge of the ocean, having fully integrated
the experiences which have gone before. This particular
location offers them the moment of insight and reckoning
they need. There are, in addition, other characters in a
number of the novels who can be seen as living on the
very edge of existence, many of whom in fact reside in
the beach areas of the city: most often these are
runaways, playboys, sun-worshippers, drifters and
vagrants of various sorts.
* * *
British novels set in Los Angeles first began to
appear in the 1930*s . . . and for a very specific
reason. Their existence was tied to the advent of sound
movies which, unlike the often casually-planned silent
features, required legitimate scripts. When the talkies
prevailed, Hollywood needed scriptwriters quickly to
provide the words to go with the pictures on the screen.
17
There was no time to develop authors unique to the
medium, so experienced writers from other media— most
notably the novel— were pressed into service at enormous
salaries so as to ensure proven writing talent and
established literary credibility right from the start.
This situation is basic to the subject of this
paper. Celebrated authors came to Hollywood to write
scenarios; then in between films or when their stints in
the motion picture capital were finished, they used their
experiences in Los Angeles as background for new works of
fiction. Because a number of classic or popular English
novels were proposed for film-adaptations in the
Thirties, already well-known English writers were sought
to do the work. But they were all men; there is no
evidence that any prominent British women novelists were
ever asked to come to Hollywood and write screenplays.11
Producers often felt that British writers were
specifically called for in the adaptation of certain
British materials to the screen, the feeling being that
only another Briton would be able to capture the
authentic feeling and language of the original. And life
11 British women did write some screenplays in
Hollywood, as in the case of Gavin Lambert's aunt
Claudine West, but they did not come to Los Angeles as
novelists, nor did they subsequently write any novels
based on their experiences in Southern California.
18
in Britain, with the impending war, had taken on a
decidedly ominous cast, making the prospect of life in
sunny California an even more appealing alternative.
Becoming involved in films occasioned, then, a first
visit to America for some of the writers in this study:
notably Hilton, Waugh, and Lambert. It seemed natural
that when these foreign novelists had free time they too
would eventually incorporate some of their experiences in
Southern California into whatever new fiction they might
decide to write. The Britons, perhaps even more than the
American-born writers, had come such a distance and,
therefore, often responded not just to Los Angeles but to
what they discovered first-hand of America as well. Thus
it is with the development of talking pictures that the
British literary community began to develop an outpost in
Los Angeles and that during the Thirties, as a natural
consequence, the British novel began to have Southern
California as its not infrequent setting.
Except for Waugh all of the authors in this study
eventually wrote scenarios. Neither Chandler nor Lambert
had ever published a novel before coming to Los Angeles,
so for both of them Los Angeles became the birthplace of
their novelistic careers. Raymond Chandler is the only
one of the major figures who came to Los Angeles for
19
reasons totally unrelated to the film industry; but like
all the others, once he became well-known as a novelist,
he too was offered large suras of money to write motion
picture scenarios. This experience colored his
subsequent writing about the city.
Salaries in Hollywood— even for very little work—
were so large compared to the sums these writers were
used to earning, that they all questioned their own
motives. How much were they selling out their artistic
integrity to the collaborative process in order to garner
the sumptuous rewards Hollywood offered? It is no wonder
that this same issue made its way so often into the
novels they subsequently wrote.
This study does not propose to focus on the
Hollywood novel per se, which by definition encompasses
the film industry as much or more as it does any discrete
geographical area, but rather on fiction as a whole
written by Britons and set in Southern California,
whether or not it has anything to do with Hollywood. A
good deal has already been written about the Hollywood
novel. Three notable studies are Carolyn See's 1963
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation on the subject, Walter
Wells' 1973 Tycoons and Locusts: A Regional Look at
Hollywood Fiction of the 1930s, and Jonas Spatz' 1969
20
Hollywood in Fiction,12 but none of these focus in any
detail on the British authors and, of course, even as it
concerns Hollywood, some of the finest novels have been
written since these distinguished scholars completed
their research.
Though this is not a study of "the Hollywood novel,"
the concept is used so frequently in reference to fiction
set in Los Angeles that some clarification is called for.
Carolyn See proposed the following definition:
A Hollywood novel is here defined as one which is
set in the film capital, and has at least one major
character or several minor ones working in show
business; or as any novel of the American film
industry anywhere on location, as long as the action
of the book focuses on movie-making and the lives of
movie people. 3
The first half of the preceding definition, omitting
the sense of the film industry on location, will be taken
here as the proper understanding of the term Hollywood
novel. By this standard, only three of the novels
examined at length in this study can be classified as
12 There is also Tom Dardis' Some Time in the Sun
(New York: Scribner's, 1976) which makes no attempt at
being a comprehensive study. He discusses five major
novelists who came to Hollywood to write screenplays,
only one of whom was British— Aldous Huxley.
13 Carolyn See, "The Hollywood Novel: An Historical
and Critical Study," Diss. U.C.L.A., 1963, p. 5.
21
Hollywood novels: Hilton's Mourning Journey and two of
Lambert's books, Inside Daisy Clover and Running Time.
It is interesting that these two men were in fact the
only novelists among the seven who were really successful
at screenwriting and indeed made it a major part of their
careers as writers. Huxley and Isherwood wrote a fair
number of scenarios but few of these ever made it to the
screen. P. G. Wodehouse, the first British novelist to
be brought out to Hollywood, was notoriously bad at the
endeavor, though he was eminently successful in nearly
every other form of writing.
In reference to Hollywood, what began as a
geographical designation— for the earliest motion picture
enterprises in Southern California were indeed located in
Hollywood, as is illustrated so well in British author
Cedric Belfrage's little-known Promised Land (1938) —
rather rapidly became a metonymic expression for the
motion picture industry as a whole. In fact the many
facets of the entertainment world finally spilled over
into nearly every major part of the greater Los Angeles
area. The Hollywood novel was, then, right from the
i
beginning a description of certain kinds of subject
matter rather than being a term used to focus on a region
and its manifestation in fiction.
22
Because of the amorphousness of Hollywood, since it
is no longer a geographical entity of consequence, the
difficulty of separating Hollywood from Los Angeles
arises. Some novelists and critics use the names
interchangeably, whereas others like Belfrage and Lambert
really understand the differences between them. In this
study Hollywood is to be understood as the entertainment
world, and Los Angeles as the city itself.
One of the interesting findings of this study is
that before 1939, British novelists— with the single
exception of Eric Knight— wrote only Hollywood novels;
thereafter, the cavalcade of serious general fiction
written by British novelists of importance, which still
sometimes encompasses elements of the entertainment
industry, really begins. The earliest British
novelists— P. G. Wodehouse, Liam 0’Flaherty, Cedric
Belfrage, and Eric Knight— will be the subject of the
opening chapter, after which attention will turn to the
seven individual authors who are the primary focus of
this study. Some of the novelists examined at length
began writing about Hollywood at first, and later wrote
more about Los Angeles and less and less about Hollywood.
When they chose to write about Hollywood figures, these
novelists selected only a few of its professions to
23
highlight: directors, producers, actors and, naturally,
writers. Six of the seven major novelists included a
screenwriter as a major figure in one or more of their
Los Angeles novels. Lambert, amongst the writers under
consideration here, wrote the most comprehensive
Hollywood novels when he did choose to turn to that
portion of life in Southern California.
* * *
Once Hollywood brought them to Los Angeles, British
novelists had varying responses to the notion of trying
to remain British while living and working in Southern
California. Chandler's Philip Marlowe keeps remarking
how things should be done "properly," and makes amusing
references to British literature that only he (and the
reader) can understand. In Chandler's case, as with the
others, things British, even unconsciously, become a
standard of judgment.
All the novelists who stayed in Southern California
integrated into the American community, though with
varying degrees of success. As a result, they all felt
themselves becoming hybrids: partially still British, but
24
also, in very large measure, increasingly Angelino.14
This duality of perspective is particularly noticeable in
reference to automobile driving in Chandler's and
Isherwood's novels. As Reyner Banham emphasizes, the
automobile is responsible for Los Angeles being the way
it is, and this is especially true of freeway driving:
"Coming off the freeway is coming in from outdoors. . . .
For the Freeway, quite as much as the Beach, is where the
Angeleno is most himself, most integrally identified with
his great city." As many of the novelists have noticed,
driving in Los Angeles is frequently a way to restore
mental equilibrium, and, Banham adds, "The freeway is not
a limbo of existential angst, but the place where they
spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their
daily lives."15 When Isherwood wanted to express a
Briton's defiance of the Los Angeles lifestyle, he
created a character who refused to drive. Nevertheless,
14 This term is used to describe an inhabitant of
Los Angeles, but it has two commonly accepted spellings—
Angelino and Angeleno— both of which are used by
novelists and scholars quoted in this paper. Will
Ellsworth-Jones, writing in the London Sunday Times
Magazine said, "In Los Angeles . . . there is no British
bloc. . . . For the most part, the Brits have simply gone
underground, blending into the new scenery remarkably
quickly." As quoted in Jerry Cohen, "The British
Invasion— L. A. Style" Los Angeles Times, 26 December
1985, Part II, p. 1.
15 Banham, pp. 213-22.
25
the dominance of the automobile is responsible for much
of the way life is lived in Southern California.
Though in every case where opinions are available,
this Los Angeles group of British novelists expressed
mutual respect for and kept up with one another's work,
nevertheless they did not really consider themselves a
network or even a special community. Others perceived
them as part of the larger group of European emigres.16
They met at social gatherings that were neither
exclusively British nor exclusively literary. Despite
the more than accidental similarities between the novels
and novelists discussed in this paper, both living
novelists I interviewed— Moore and Lambert— were
surprised to learn that there was, no matter how loosely
conceived, a definable British perspective on Los Angeles
or that there was anything which could be thought of as a
British literary tradition with regard to the city.
16 Louis Epstein, owner of Pickwick Bookstore, a
cultural landmark in Hollywood, wrote in his memoirs:
"There were many British who came to live here . . .
simply to get away from the war and its effects. (I
don't know what they were running away from except the
atmosphere of war. What their motivation was is not for
me to say [cowards?]) But there was this emigrd colony
of every language you could think of, and they would meet
at the Pickwick." Volume I, p. 319.
26
* * *
Though they may not have recognized it themselves,
when they took to writing about Los Angeles, these
British novelists tended to share certain approaches to
their material. First of all, of the twenty-one Los
Angeles novels produced by these seven writers, only
two— Huxley's Ape and Essence and Moore's Fergus— proceed
beyond the bounds of established realistic forms. Thus
no matter how bizarre the subjects, these authors wrote
traditionally-structured novels of Los Angeles.
Secondly, except for Hilton and Moore, the work of each
of the novelists included here is marked by a decidedly
ironic tone. Isherwood's is perhaps less so than the
others, and Lambert's varies by work— bitterness rather
than irony, for example, is more evident in A Case for
the Angels.
There also are certain commonalities in the Southern
California landscapes that appear in the novels. It is,
for example, quite evident that the Southern California
beach towns have a peculiar appeal to these British
writers, for the novels of Chandler, Isherwood, Moore and
Lambert are all, at least in part, set there. Because
Britain itself is an island, beach areas are readily
accessible to the inhabitants and, therefore, become
27
interesting sites to Britons far from home. Although
this may be the most stiking and beautiful part of the
Southern California locale, perhaps it is the familiar
smell of the sea air which especially attracts them.17
In addition, several of the authors are fascinated by Los
Angeles' resemblances to places they have known before,
whether it be the Mediterranean landscapes of Greece and
Italy or the locations they have seen projected numerous
times on the screens of their local movie houses. In
either case, the Los Angeles terrain appears to them to
have something familiar about it.
Beyond landscapes, a careful observer is struck by
the great number of character types these British
Thousands of British exiles in fact live in Los
Angeles County's beach towns. A recent article "The
British Invasion— L. A. Style" by Jerry Cohen in the Los
Angeles Times of 2 6 December 1985, Part II, p. 1, makes
the following statements: "Except for the United
Kingdom, more British natives probably live in Greater
Los Angeles than in any other urban area in the
world. . . . Some calculate that the number of British-
born living between the Mexican border and Santa Barbara
may run as high as half a million, with the greatest
number living in the Santa Monica-West Los Angeles
area. . . . Santa Monica, with its several pubs and
tearooms and a long tradition as a base where Brits first
light when they come to Southern California, indisputably
remains the most popular home of U. K. emigres. 'British
people, when they can, graviate toward the ocean,1
observed Trevor Valentine, executive director of the 3 0-
year-old 4 00-member British American Chamber of Commerce.
•Remember, in Britain it is impossible to live more than
2 00 miles from the sea and most live much closer than
that."' Cohen, p. 1.
28
novelists share. The reader of these novels often sees
the city through a British character's eyes, one who
generally enters the city early in the novel and is
introduced to the people, the places and the mores by
some relatively-knowledgeable though often ironically-
connected guide. In a large percentage of the novels
this stranger is a relatively circumspect individual— as
most Britons are— often with something about him of the
likeable bumbler. During his time in Southern California
he must develop a new consciousness or learn a whole new
set of behaviors in order to survive. Change is
inevitable, for his conventional British upbringing has
inadequately prepared him for the unique world he
encounters there. This is not to say that the Britons
themselves always have the most admirable moral values.
People in Southern California are prone, like Virginia
Maunciple in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, to
rationalize quite openly that whatever they feel like
doing is "right," thus establishing an overall atmosphere
of hedonism and narcissism.
No wonder a sense of displacement prevails amongst
these characters. They feel cut loose, adrift: there are
no reliable seasons, even the land itself is unstable,
liable to earthquakes, mudslides, brushfires, droughts,
___________________________________________________________________________
29
and bizarre Santa Ana winds. Reyner Banham adds that the
very acentrality of the city itself makes getting one’s
bearings difficult for the newcomer.18 For the Briton
everything feels out-of-balance, awry, off-kilter. One
can comprehend, in these conditions, why some of the
fiction has an apocalyptic quality to it. Yet despite
all these difficulties, most of the newcomers in the
novels gradually become comfortable, for among other
things, they soon discover that there are few natives,
that nearly everybody, like themselves, has come to Los
Angeles from someplace else. Lambert and Chandler (along
with Eric Knight) are the only ones among these novelists
who dared to create American-born protagonists, though
Lambert attempted this in only two of the five Los
Angeles novels he wrote.
Not one of the major characters in these British
novels leads what could be considered a standard suburban
Los Angeles life. Rather, most of the novels have a full
complement of characters who can be classified as "living
on the edge," a characteristic, it must be admitted that
probably makes for more interesting plots than suburban
family life would.
18 Banham, Chapter 4.
30
Indeed relationships between people are temporary,
unreliable, a far cry from the secure social links most
Britons have grown used to. There is not one good
marriage in all the novels under consideration, despite
the fact that several of these authors themselves had
"happy" domestic lives. The best that any of them can
offer in their fiction is a few hopeful signs for the
future.
With the single exception of Lambert, these British
novelists employ no children as major figures in their
novels: they are notably absent in the work of Chandler,
Waugh, and Isherwood, with only babies to be murdered in
Ape and Essence, neighborhood children in Morning Journey
and a brief hallucinatory interchange with a daughter in
Fergus. Lambert’s children, however, are all of one
type— child movie stars, would-be or successful, and the
girls fare quite a bit better as a whole than the boys.
So if Southern California is the land of youth, in
British fiction it is populated by adults who look and/or
act young, rarely by youngsters themselves.
Rather than being members of a stable family or
community, the major figures are loners in the city, each
of them making a powerful statement of indivdual
integrity against the mass culture that threatens to
31
engulf them. The British novel in Los Angeles is
populated, for the most part, by people who, despite the
fact that they may have many people around them, are
painfully isolated. No wonder the attempt to fight off
ever-encroaching disillusionment is a major
characteristic of these works.
Wisdom figures are, for the most part, notably
lacking in these Los Angeles novels. There are a few
noble people, but they are primarily old folks who are
losing their power and go unheeded. Most often, one
encounters false prophets. The abiding theme these
figures bring out is that riches and power are not
necessarily the accompaniment of benevolence and wisdom.
Those who are treated as wise are frequently people
motivated by money and power, who have very
materialistic, self-aggrandizing ends.
The women who populate these British novels share
several interesting characteristics and fall into two
major categories: the powerful women and the love
interests. In the first group, these power-wielding
females are, without exception, Americans. The second
group, the female love interests, are all relatively
simple-minded Los Angeles-born women who, in the course
of their novels, cause the release of other characters'
32
sexual inhibitions. Each is young and alluring, from a
relatively simple background, not especially well-
educated, and quite sure about what she wants. In
several cases, the British observer notes that she
typifies a unique Southern California juxtaposition of
vulgarity and innocence. Several of these young women
are vulnerable to false or nihilistic prophets seemingly
common in the Southern California environment.
These writers also share a similar group of themes
and images in their individual Los Angeles novels.
Britons are not the first to have observed that the area
cultivates the unusual, the unorthodox in religious
practices. But they love to portray it in their fiction.
Carey McWilliams suggests that Southern California is
•'paradoxical in all things, . . . a land of exaggerated
religiosity and also of careless skepticism, where old
faiths die and new cults are born." New religious
movements are likely to proliferate there because of its
proximity to the desert, its geographical position (a
land facing both east and west), and its history of rapid
social change through migration.19 And many Britons
themselves have partaken of the more liberal religious
19 Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island
on the Land (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973), pp.
270-73.
33
atmosphere. Every one of the British novelists, however,
incorporates something about Los Angeles' unique
religious atmosphere into his work set in Southern
California.
Much of the fiction centers on the issue of time and
mortality. To an astonishing degree, life in Southern
California makes Britons write novels about death and
mortality. Surely Britain has long been known for its
interest in exhumations— the Egyptian mummies, the Elgin
marbles. In fact it is a culture in which a central
activity has been has been the bringing up of the dead.
The British Museum is a repository of graveyards; whereas
Americans characteristically have tended to avoid dealing
with death-related issues. None of these writers were
prepared to find a whole new concept of graveyards in the
new world. The culture conflict then between a people
fixated on death and another so concerned with youth and
health brings about a morbid reaction in these Los
Angeles novels. Every author, except Hilton, focuses on
death or near-death in one way or another. The examples
are pervasive and numerous; suffice to say that it is one
of the most distinguishing similarities in these works,
especially in contrast with works also set in Southern
California by authors of a different background. When
34
Americans, for example, write about Hollywood they tend
to focus on the love imagery, whereas the British quickly
point to the death imagery of the film capital. They
even interpret the eroticism as a way of avoiding or
denying death. Waugh was not alone in recognizing that
what Hollywood did to screen stars with makeup and
illusory lighting was very similar to what Los Angeles
morticians did to dead bodies— in both cases attempting
to defy time and reality. Protagonists who seek out
younger lovers are attempting in part to evade their own
mortality.
In Southern California, time is the enemy. Most
often seen as a coordinate to the mortality issue, the
Southland's youth and health preoccupation inevitably
draws a response from the British novelist. Characters
in these works devote an extraordinary amount of energy
to looking and staying young. A mind-set so alien to
British sensibility cannot prevail; it seems to need to
retreat to overwhelmingly detailed discussions of death
and burial. Swimming pools, for example, almost an
understood adjunct to a successful life in Southern
California, are never portrayed positively. Most often,
instead, they are cracked, neglected mementoes of an
earlier but pathetic attempt at glory or meaningfuness.
35
A warped version of time and history emerges in most
of the novels. People in fickle Hollywood are all-too-
soon forgotten once they are off the screen. Most of the
authors, as screenwriters, experienced the collapse of
meaningful time that occurs on the Hollywood sets as
costumed people and scenery and props from one era and
another co-mingle in almost chaotic fashion on the back
lot. And a number of these British writers expressed
their own need to get some distance away from the center
of Hollywood in order to get a perspective on it. This
jumble of history many see reflected in the architecture
of the city, a place where building whatever one desires
is possible and, at the same time, hardly remarkable.
Like everything else in Los Angeles, architecture takes
what it wants regardless of traditional measures of
judgment. The same is true of fashion: here too, in
dress anything is possible.
The result is a decided blurring of reality. Many
characters can no longer distinguish between the real and
the illusory, and the implication is that Hollywood is at
least partly to blame. Several authors have characters
who say they have trouble telling which are the sets and
which the real world. In fact the real world of Southern
California has become the filmed location for stories set
36
in all parts of the world. And most everyone seems to be
going around in a costume of some sort. It is no wonder,
then, that time is so fragmented and history so poorly
appreciated in these novels.
* * *
This introduction, and perhaps even this entire
study, marks the beginning of a discussion of an
important continuing sub-genre of British literature: the
British novel set in Los Angeles. There are a number of
novels by prominent British authors which include
passages that take place in Southern California— such as
Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and John Fowles' Daniel
Martin— but these sections in the works are not extensive
enough to warrant being included amongst the major
British novels under consideration. British women
novelists, as indicated earlier, have yet to produce any
works of major significance set in Los Angeles. But this
is an area that deserves watching, as it seems likely
there will be opportunities for such research in the not-
37
too-distant future.20 In addition, there are some
younger British authors21 who may in the future be
deserving of analysis similar to that which follows on
the works of these seven well-known British novelists.
* * *
Everyone started laughing up there with the air
soft and warm and smelling of orange blossoms from
the garden; the smell coming right up, warm from the
grass, and the grass smelling of night. There was
Jira falling into the swimming pool and a bunch all
going in after her with their clothes, and then
staying in but taking their clothes off and swimming
around and yelling drunk.
I stood there and smelled the smell of water.
I could smell even that, all mixed in with the grass
and the sweetness of the orange trees all in
blossom.22
20 Some British women novelists to be included in
such a study— along with their works set in Los Angeles—
are the following; Winifred Ashton [pseudonym Clemence
Dane], The Flower Girls (1955); Angela Carter, Passion of
New Eve (1977); Molly Castle, New Winds Are Blowing
(1946); Annabel Davis-Goff, Night Tennis; Phyllis
Demarest, The Angelic City (1961) ; Julia O'Faolain, The
Obedient Wife (1982); and Victoria Wolf, Fabulous City
(1957) .
21 Some that seem especially worth watching for are
Ian Whitcomb, whose LotusLand: A Story of Southern
California, was published in 1979; William Boyd, whose
collection of stories On the Yankee Station was published
in 1981; and Julia O'Faolain, whose The Obedient Wife was
published in 1982.
22 Eric Knight [pseud. Richard Hallas], You Play
the Black and the Red Comes Up (New York; Robert M.
McBride, 1938), pp. 74-5.
38
* * *
Sixty years ago we had no past here, . . . and then
the movies turned a creative desert into a new
Athens or Rome. But now, with the old spirit drying
up, we could return even more quickly to desert
again. And as the City of Angels goes, they say, so
goes America.23
23 Gavin Lambert, Running Time (New York:
Macmillan, 1983), p. 372.
39
Introduction Bibliography
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four
Ecologies. Middlesex: Penguin, 1976.
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 2 vols.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.
Bracher, Frederick. "California's Literary Regionalism."
American Quarterly, 7, No. 3 (Fall 1955), 275-84.
Bradbury, Malcolm. "America and the Comic Vision." In
Evelyn Waugh and His World, ed. David Pryce-Jones.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, 165-82.
Cohen, Jerry. "The British Invasion— L.A. Style." Los
Angeles Times, 2 6 December 1985, Part II, 1, 4-5.
Epstein, Louis. The Way It Was: Fifty Years in the
Southern California Book Trade, interviewed by Joel
Gardner. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, Regents
of the University of California, 1977, 2 vols., UCLA
Special Collections.
Fine, David. "Introduction." In Los Angeles in Fiction.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984,
1-26.
Huxley, Aldous. Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover
Smith. London: Chatto and Windus, 1969.
Knight, Eric [pseud. Richard Hallas]. You Play the Black
and the Red Comes Up. New York: Robert M. McBride,
1938.
Lambert, Gavin. Running Time. New York: Macmillan,
1983.
McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the
Land. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973.
Peters, J. U. "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth." In
Itinerary: criticism: Essays on California Writers,
ed. Charles L. Crow. Bowling Green: Bowling Green
University Press, 1978, 21-34.
40
The Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of Los Angeles. Los
Angeles: Aaron Blake Publishers, 1985.
See, Carolyn. The Hollywood Novel: An Historical and
Critical Study. Diss. UCLA 1963.
Spatz, Jonas. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the
American Myth. The Hague: Mouton: 1969.
Wells, Walter. Tycoons and Locusts: A Regional Look at
Hollywood Fiction of the 1930s. Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1973.
Welty, Eudora. Place in Fiction. New York: House of
Books, 1957.
Wilson, Edmund. "The Boys in the Back Room." In
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of
the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950, 19-56.
41
BEFORE 1939
Everything is so unreal out here and I feel so
removed from ordinary life that I haven't quite
realised it. . . . This is the weirdest place. . . .
If you asked me, I would say I loved Hollywood.
Then I would reflect and have to admit that
Hollywood is about the most loathsome place on the
map but that, never going near it, I enjoy being out
here. . . . Add incessant sunshine and it's really
rather jolly. It is only occasionally that one
feels one is serving a term on Devil's Island.
British literature set in Los Angeles began in the
Thirties with the four authors— Wodehouse, O'Flaherty,
Belfrage and Knight— who are the subject of this chapter,
yet none of them are remembered for their pioneering
work. Despite the fact that all but one of the novels
they wrote would be considered a Hollywood novel, Walter
Wells' entire study of Hollywood fiction of the 1930s
never mentions any one of them, nor do Franklin Walker's
A Literary History of Southern California (1950), Lionel
Rolfe's Literary L. A. (1981) or David Fine's Los Angeles
in Fiction (1984). The only study to note them (but only
two, and at that in the briefest possible fashion) is
Jonas Spatz's Hollywood in Fiction (1969):
1 P. G. Wodehouse in a letter dated 2 June 1930, as
quoted in Frances Donaldson, P. G. Wodehouse : A
Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 128.
42
The center of consciousness in the Hollywood novel
is often an outsider, an Eastern visitor whose
cultural background enables him to appreciate fully
the strangeness of the New World paradise. The
utopian Hollywood, then, is encountered as the
surprising result of an inverted Jamesian
experience. It has been, for this reason, a
favorite subject for foreign writers like Aldous
Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Eric Knight (You Play the
Black and the Red Comes Up), and Liam O'Flaherty
(Hollywood Cemetery), all of whom have regarded it
as somehow the essence of American life.
Hollywood Cemetery does indeed bring a foreign stranger
to Hollywood, but there are no foreigners of consequence
in You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up and the book
itself has almost nothing to do with Hollywood, though
quite a bit to do with Los Angeles. In fact it is the
first of the British novels in this research to concern
itself with the city itself rather than the movie
industry. But both O’Flaherty's and Knight's works
appeared in 1938, just a year before Chandler and Huxley
published their first Los Angeles novels. There were
several earlier British novels— all having to do with
Hollywood.
P. G. Wodehouse, born in Guildford, Surrey, England
in 1881, published his first novel in 1902. By 1930, he
had at least two dozen more novels to his credit, a dozen
2 Jonas Spatz, Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions
of the American Myth (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 120.
43
short story collections, numerous plays, and even musical
comedies done in collaboration with Jerome Kern and with
George and Ira Gershwin. Wodehouse was world-renowned
for his light and witty fiction. It is no wonder then
that Hollywood tapped him first to join its ranks in the
fledgling profession of screenwriting. He came out to
Southern California in the spring of 193 0 . . . and was
back in London by November of 1931. He describes those
days in America, I Love You, memoirs of his experiences
in the United States:
In 193 0 the talkies had just started, and the
slogan was come one, come all, and the more the
merrier. It was an era when only a man of
exceptional ability and determination could keep
from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity
or other. . . . The advent of sound had made the
manufacture of motion pictures an infinitely more
complex affair than it had been up till then. In
the silent days everything had been informal and
casual. . . . As for bothering about getting anyone
to write them a story, it never occurred to them.
They made it up as they went along.
The talkies changed all that. It was no longer
possible just to put on a toga, have someone press a
button and call the result The Grandeur that Was
Rome or In the Days of Nero. A whole elaborate
organization was required. . . . [Boss, Producer,
Supervisor, Dirctor, Camera Man, etc.] and, above
all, you had to get hold of someone to supply the
words.
The result was a terrible shortage of authors
in all the world's literary centers. . . . They had
all been decoyed away to Hollywood.
3 P. G. Wodehouse, America, I Like You (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1956), pp. 169-71.
44
He then draws a charming parallel, in typical Wodehousian
fashion, between the abduction of screenwriters and the
capture of pet dogs— or at least domesticated animals—
trapped, transported, caged and made to write:
I got away from Hollywood at the end of the
year, . . . but I was there long enough to realize
what a terribly demoralizing place it is. The whole
atmosphere there is one of incidious deceit and
subterfuge. Nothing is what it affects to be. . . .
It is surely not difficult to image the effect
of all this on a sensitive-minded author . . . — the
inevitable sapping of his self-respect. At the time
of which I am writing authors in Hollywood were kept
in little hutches. In every studio there were rows
and rows of these, each containing an author on a
long contract at a weekly salary. . . . There were
authors who had been on salary for years in
Hollywood without even having a line of their work
used. All they did was attend story conferences. .
. . It may be different now. After all, I am
speaking of twenty-five years ago. But I do think
it would be wise if author-fanciers exercised
vigilance.
The issues Wodehouse raises became central problems
for most of the writers in this study: how to cope with
the intimidating nature of Hollywood, a world that
sustained them more luxuriously than any of them had ever
imagined and yet at the same time demanded little work
from them compared to what they had known as novelists?
Many were especially concerned with the net effect of
this exposure: would their creative abilites dry up in
4 Wodehouse, America, I Like You, p. 175-77.
45
the sunny, somnolent atmosphere? Would they ever be able
to write novels again?
Wodehouse described the working process in a letter
to a minor English novelist by the name of Denis Mackail
on 2 June 1930 with whom he corresponded at length:
The actual work is negligible. I altered all the
characters to earls and butlers with such success
that they called a conference and changed the entire
plot, starring the earl and the butler. So I'm
still working on it. So far I've had eight
collaborators. . . . I could have done all my part
in a morning but they took it for granted that I
should need six weeks. . . . There are ugly rumours
that I'm to be set to work soon on something else.
I resent this as it will cut into my short story
writing. It is odd how soon one comes to look upon
every minute as wasted that is given to earning
one's salary.
Wodehouse despaired whether he would ever be able to
use anything of his experiences in Hollywood in his
fiction:
Oddly enough, Hollywood hasn't inspired me in the
least. I feel as if everything that could be
written about it has already been done. [This was
18 August 1930!] As a matter of fact, I don't think
there is much to be written about this place. What
it was like in the early days, I don't know, but
nowadays the studio life is all perfectly normal,
not a bit crazy. I haven't seen any swooning
directors or temperamental stars. They seem just to
do their job, and to be quite ordinary people,
especialy the directors, who are quiet, unemotional
men who just work and don't throw any fits. Same
5 Wodehouse as quoted in Donaldson, p. 128.
46
with the stars. I don't believe I shall get a
single story out of my stay here.
He was wrong, though the process did take a while. The
Hollywood experiences needed to simmer for a time before
he was ready to incorporate them into his fiction.
The delay may have come at least partly because of
an interview published in the Los Angeles Times on 7 June
1931 and quoted a few days later in the New York Times
and the New York Herald Tribune, as well as throughout
the country. In the interview Wodehouse revealed his
regret that he made so much money for so little work, and
then went on to describe what they paid him $2000 a week
for. The studio seemed to have trouble finding things
for him to do: a little dialogue, a bit of touch-up work.
He spent three months writing a screenplay, and when he
was finished, "They guessed they would not use it" and
thanked him most politely— musicals (which it was) were
not doing well then. Because of the exposure in this
interview, Wodehouse became a catalyst for a whole series
of changes that subsequently took place in the film
industry. Bankers, who had underwritten movies but had
had little actual contact with the process, were
6 P. G. Wodehouse, Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait
in Letters (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1953), pp. 53-4.
47
galvanized into demanding reform. Yet Wodehouse had
revealed nothing that other writers had not said before
him; the difference was that he had been the first to
• . 7
give his name.'
Evidently Wodehouse was not particularly gifted at
writing scenarios. He never seemed to be able to adapt
to the freedom of movement that film allows. Guy Bolton
explained it in the following manner: "When a man leaves
the stage in the theatre, you can't follow him. In a
film, you can, but Plum [Wodehouse's nickname] could
never do that."8 So it is not surprising to learn that
his studio contract was not renewed in 1931. This left
Wodehouse free to write that which he had already
succeeded mightily at— fiction and drama.
Despite his aversion to Hollywood, he found life in
Southern California very much to his liking, as the
epigraph at the beginning of this chapter also indicates:
This place has certain definite advantages which
make up for it being so far from home. I love
breakfasting in the garden in a dressing gown after
a swim in the pool. There's no doubt perpetual
sunshine has its points. I've never been able to
7 Donaldson, pp. 131-2.
8 Guy Bolton as quoted in Donaldson, p. 132.
48
stay more than a few months in one place before, let
alone a year. And the people here are quite fun.
And, in addition to enjoying the lifestyle, he discovered
that he was able to get enormous amounts of work done
there. "There is something abut this place that breeds
work. . . . One feels quite isolated. . . . I have never
had such a frenzy of composition.1,10 What a contrast
this is with tlie very small amount of work that he felt
got done at the studios. Oddly enough, more than fifty-
five years later, Brian Moore said exactly the same thing
about working on fiction in Los Angeles.
Wodehouse did not publish his first novel relevant
to Los Angeles until four years after he left town, and
when it came it too was in the light satirical style for
which he had become famous. The curious thing is that no
part of The Luck of the Bodkins (1935) actually takes
place in Southern California; rather, it is the
destination of all the characters in the book. They
spend their time in Cannes, France; in Southhampton,
England; on a Transatlantic crossing; and then in New
York. Many of the characters are English people on their
9 Wodehouse in a letter of 10 May 19 31 as quoted in
Donaldson, p. 13 0.
Wodehouse in a letter of 2 6 June 193 0,
Performing Flea, p. 52.
49
way to live and work in Los Angeles, but there are three
Hollywood figures among them who come to represent just
what life in Southern California presumably will be like,
figures who anticipate many of the more highly developed
characters in the Los Angeles novels to be taken up later
in the paper. They are Ivor Llewellyn, a former Briton
who is the president of Superba-Llewellyn Motion Picture
Corporation of Hollywood; Lotus Blossom, a voluptuous
movie star; and Mabel Spence, Llewellyn’s sister-in-law,
an osteopath who endeavors to get her brother-in-law to
smuggle in a set of pearls duty-free for her sister. The
primary stranger figure is Monty Bodkin, who
inadvertantly becomes involved in the fiasco with the
pearls. Lotus (known as Lottie) tells him all about the
life he will encounter in California:
I'll bet you love Hollywood. Everybody does. Think
of the everlasting hills, think of the eternal
sunshine, think of seeing Sam Goldwyn and Louis B.
Mayer! Honest, it's a place that kind of gets you.
What I mean, there's something going on there all
the time. And if you aren't getting divorced
yourself, there's always one of your friends is, and
that gives you something to chat about. And it
isn't half such a crazy place as they make out. I
know two-three people in Hollywood that are part
sane.
11 P. G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), pp. 264-5. All further
references to this work appear in the text in
parentheses.
50
The idea that people in Los Angeles are all insane,
that the very culture itself has crossed over the border
between sanity and craziness, is a theme that recurs
throughout these British novels. Naturally it is a
simple way of discounting the society's differences from
the European norm. And in addition, Lottie, as the
female representation of Hollywood values, introduces
Monty to a sexual openness for which he is unprepared,
given his relatively circumspect British upbringing.
When she leaves his stateroom,
He was a good deal unnerved. All this sort of
thing, he presumed, would have been the merest
commonplace of everyday life in Hollywood, but to
one who like himself was mixing for the first time
in motion picture circles it was rather
breathtaking. He felt as if he had been plunged
into the foaming maelstrom of a two-reel educational
comic. (75)
Monty is just the first of the British strangers who feel
somewhat nauseous or disoriented when they realize the
nature of life in Los Angeles. Clearly, Lottie conforms
entirely to the stereotype of the sexy young actress most
Britons would expect to find working at the studios in
Hollywood.
And Llewellyn fits the mold of the film mogul, with
hordes of people around him seeking preference or favors,
each attempting to manipulate him for his own benefit.
51
Mabel, for example, wants him to hire a young Englishman
she has met, so she reminds Llewellyn that he must have
someone British to oversee the English sequences in his
films, especially on matters of English Society Life, so
that he will never repeat the disaster of having people
in a movie fox-hunting in July— an error which had caused
the complete rejection of an earlier picture in Britain.
Even though his own origins are British, Llewellyn has
lived so long in America that he, like all Americans— or
at least residents of Los Angeles— seems to have no
knowledge of good English literature. He hires a
scenario writer by the name of Ambrose Tennyson because
he believes that he is the great English writer by that
name. Admittedly he himself has never read any of
Tennyson's work? instead he relies on the advice of
others. When he discovers that the famous Tennyson is in
fact dead, he responds, "Corpses would probably be just
as good at treatment and dialogue as most of the living
authors already employed by him" (120). Here then is an
example of how Americans are tricked in one way or
another because of their inadequate knowledge of
English— generally, Victorian— literature. Thirteen
years later Waugh, a great admirer of Wodehouse, used the
same concept in The Loved One.
52
Forty years after the publication of The Luck of the
Bodkins, Wodehouse returned to this same cast of
characters and wrote the sequel The Plot That Thickened
(1973). Only one year has elapsed since the events of
the first book. Here Monty Bodkin, having put in the
year of labor he bargained for with his future father-in-
law, is now ready to return to England. Thus Monty, like
Wodehouse himself, could only stay in Hollywood for a
year at a time, for Wodehouse had returned to Los Angeles
in October 193 6, worked for R.K.O. Pictures, and stayed
through 19 37. By the time he was ready to leave after
this second trip Wodehouse said,
What uncongenial work picture-writing is.
Somebody's got to do it, I suppose, but this is the
last time they'll get me. . . .1 shall be glad to
get away from California. It is too far away.
During his time in Southern California (referred to as
Llewellyn City) Monty, it seems, had been engaged to help
write a history of Superba-Llewellyn Studios. But as
Ivor Llewellyn says himself,
How can you write a history of a motion-picture
studio without leaving out all the best bits? If I
were to reveal some of the things that went on at
S-L in the early days, the things that give such a
12 Wodehouse letters of 24 and 25 June 1937,
Performing Flea, pp. 97-8.
53
history 9TiP anc* interest, I should have the police
after me. 3
Wodehouse puts some of his own feelings, no doubt, into
Monty's mouth: "Twelve months in Hollywood seem to have
done something to him, leaving him more captious, more
censorious" (68) . Indeed when, after the first chapter
in Southern California, Monty returns to England, he
becomes a much nicer person. He is unlike Llewellyn who,
though born in Wales, has become so Americanized, so
corrupt, that he has lost his British sense of values.
He doesn't even observe the formalities all have been
taught to revere, going so far as to suggest that Monty
break off his engagement just because he loves someone
else:
Mr. Llewellyn could regard the sacred word of an
English gentleman so lightly, apparently completely
unaware that there are things a chap can do and
things a chap cannot do. (126)
The second Southern California novel that Wodehouse
wrote, Laughing Gas (1936), does actually take place
almost entirely in Los Angeles and concerns the
adventures of Reginald John Peter Swithin, third Earl of
13 P. G. Wodehouse, The Plot That Thickened (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 42. All further
references to this work appear in the text in
parentheses.
54
Havershot, who comes out to Southern California to
"rescue" his cousin from the clutches of a Hollywood
woman. While there, he has to go to a local dentist,
during which time an amazing occurrence transpires: while
under the influence of gas, his soul exchanges bodies
with that of a young child star, Joey Cooley, who is
under the influence of gas at the same time in an
adjoining chamber. Much of the humor comes from the
observations Reggie is able to make from this unique
double perspective— seeing Hollywood both as an insider
and an outsider at the same time. The house he is
brought to live in, for example, is described with
appropriate irony:
Chez Brinkmeyer . . . was evidently one of the
stately homes of Hollywood. The eye detected
spacious lawns, tennis courts, swimming-pools,
pergolas, bougainvillea, three gardeners, an iron
deer, a ping-pong porch, and other indications of
wealth. If further proof was required that its
proprietor had got the stuff in sackfuls, it was
supplied by the fact that the butler, who had opened
the door in response to the chauffeur's tooting, was
an English butler. You don't run into an English
butler in Hollywood unless you are a pretty
prominent nib. The small fry have to rub along with
Japanese and Filipinos. . . . He was like a breath
from home.14
14 P . G. W o d e h o u se , Laughing Gas (New Y ork : H e r b e r t
J e n k i n s , 1 9 3 6 ) , p. 81. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s t o t h i s
w o rk a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t i n p a r e n t h e s e s .
55
Wodehouse was keenly aware of the distinct advantage of
being British in Hollywood during the Thirties. In fact
none of the authors in this research ever experienced
adverse responses in Southern California as a result of
their British origins. Rather, they often mention how
much it operates in their favor, especially the advantage
of speaking with a British accent. Wodehouse in Laughing
Gas says,
Since the talkies came in, you can't heave a brick
in Hollywood without beaning an English elocution
teacher. The place is full of Britons on the make,
and if they can't get jobs on the screen, they work
the elocution-teaching racket. References and
qualifications are not asked for. So long as you're
English, you are welcomed into the home. (150)
Most of the detail in these Wodehouse novels belies
the dominance of the motion picture world in his
relationship to Southern California, but there are a few
instances where he becomes more fully engaged with the
specific environment in which he has set his novel. In
Laughing Gas, for example, Reggie (in Joey's body) uses
oranges as missiles in a fight he has with a young
ruffian:
56
This flower-bed, I now perceived, was adorned
by a small tree, on which the genial Californian
sun had brought out a great profusion of hard,
nobbly oranges. It altered the whole aspect of
affairs. Say it with oranges1 The very thing.
To pluck one and let fly was with me the work
of an instant. . . . I then plucked more fruit and
resumed the barrage. . . . He stuck it out for
another half-dozen oranges, and then decided to
yield to my superior generalship. . . .
As I poised myself for another [final] pop my
arm was gripped by an iron hand. . . . 'You've
ruined my orange tree.' (177-79)
In another instance, presented in Wodehouse's
characteristically broad-humored fashion, the cousin he
has come to rescue informs Reggie about the advantages of
the Southern California climate:
You don't understand the wonders of the Californian
climate yet. So superbly bracing is it that day by
day in every way you can put away all you want to,
and not a sguawk from the old liver. That's what
they mean when they speak of California as an
earthly Paradise, and that's why train-loads of
people are pouring in all the time from the Middle
West with their tongues hanging out. (34-5)
The idea that Southern California has the potential to be
the earthly paradise— but that something has gone awry—
is another oft-repeated concept in these novels.
15 The British often use the adjective
"Californian," whereas Americans employ the term
"California" instead in an adjectival sense. For them,
"Californian" is reserved for use as a noun.
57
Wodehouse does make passing reference to some of the
professions rather characteristic of the Los Angeles
lifestyle. Mabel in The Luck of the Bodkins is a
practicing osteopath, and Sister Lora Luella heads the
Temple of the New Dawn in Laughing Gas, a group that is
"a sort of combination of revival meeting and a Keeley
Cure Institute . . . [dedicated to] converting California
to true temperance" (292, 91).
In 1951, Wodehouse whose own life had taken a number
of dismal turns during the Second World War, including
internment by the Germans and the French and accusations
of collaboration by his fellow Britons,16 published one
more Los Angeles novel, The Old Reliable. This work
includes about as much description of the Southern
California environment as Wodehouse ever provided, the
details of which do testify to the fact that he did spend
some time there:
The sunshine which is such an agreeable feature
of life in and around Hollywood, when the weather is
not unusual, blazed down from a sky of turquoise
blue on the spacious grounds of what . . . was still
known as the Carmen Flores place. The month was
May, the hour noon.
The Carmen Flores place stood high up in the
16 See Donaldson biography Part II for extensive
discussion of this period in Wodehouse's life as well as
extracts from his "Camp Note Book" and texts of the
German Broadcasts.
58
mountains at the point where Alamo Drive peters out
into a mere dirt track fringed with cactus and
rattlesnakes, and the rays of the sun illumined its
swimming pool, its rose garden, its orange trees and
its stone-flagged terrace. Sunshine, one might say,
was everywhere.
The story that takes place there suits the atmosphere: it
is primarily a tale of worn-out people grasping for
whatever they can have without doing much work, hoping to
manipulate things just enough to acquire a sufficient
amount of money to continue their lives of relative
leisure. Though it might be almost any part of the Santa
Monica Mountains, Wodehouse labels this particular place
Hollywood, because to him Southern California inevitably
was Hollywood. And Hollywood for Wodehouse had lost
whatever charm it had ever possessed. A character says,
for example,
Hollywood is not the place it used to be.
Hollywood, . . . once a combination of Santa Claus
and Good King Wenceslas, has turned into a Scrooge.
The dear old days are dead and the spirit of
cheerful giving a thing of the past. (34)
Yet Wodehouse himself, ironically, had been indirectly
responsible for much of the belt-tightening that had
17 P . G. W o d e h o u se , The Old Reliable (G a rd en C i t y ,
New Y o rk : D o u b le d a y , 1 9 5 1 ), p. 7. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s
t o t h i s w o rk a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t i n p a r e n t h e s e s .
59
taken place subsequent to his published interview in the
Thirties.
It is fair to conclude that the British novel in Los
Angeles did not really materialize yet in these few works
Wodehouse set in Hollywood. Nor did Liam O'Flaherty, the
first of the two Irish novelists to be considered here,
succeed in fleshing out in Hollywood Cemetery (1935) the
prototype of serious British fiction set in Los Angeles.
O'Flaherty's novel does, however, introduce some of the
significant themes that other authors subsequently
develop, but the work itself is limited because of its
singular focus on Hollywood and movie-making issues
rather than on the encompassing environment in which the
novel is actually set.
Whereas Wodehouse demeans Hollywood in a wry but
relatively light-hearted manner at every turn, the
overall tone of Hollywood Cemetery is only comparable to
the bitterly satirical approach Waugh later used in The
Loved One (1948). But Waugh's work has a brilliance that
is never achieved by O'Flaherty. Hollywood cemetery
presents an unremittingly caustic view of Hollywood
filmmaking, one which is intended to be humorous, but is
so only in an obvious and heavy-handed way. The unnamed
first person narrator disappears after the first page,
60
but his perspective remains clearly British. The only
"pure" or uncorrupted characters at the end are the young
Irish woman Biddy Murphy whom Hollywood's Jack Mortimer
unsuccessfully attempted to transform into "Angela
Devlin, the Veiled Goddess," and Brian Carey, the Irish
writer who is brought over from London to write the
screenplay for her. Everyone else is corrupted by
Hollywood— generally referred to as "the celluloid
city"— which has lost touch with the eternal verities of
life and is motivated entirely by power, prestige and
money. Art and real creativity have no place in it.
Everything is fakery done for the sake of publicity.
Angela is veiled because she is still too rough to be
presented to the public; then Jesse Starr, an effeminate
actor, is discovered to be better capable of playing
"Angela" than Biddy is, so Biddy is disposed of in Mexico
(she and Carey survive a plane crash), and Jesse as
Angela is paraded through the streets of Hollywood. The
procession travels from Mortimer's fortress-like "ranch"
by the polo fields to the Hollywood Bowl, and the final
absurdity is that the bystanders who watch are
. . . in a state of religious exaltation. . . . The
thoroughfare [Hollywood Boulevard] on either side
was lined with kneeling women, all dressed in white,
with a banner strung across above the road, bearing
the inscription; 'The league of screen mothers
61
dedicate their children to the pure and romantic
love personified by Angela Devlin.' Farther down on
opposite sides of the road, there were two groups of
young men [presumably writers], wearing flour sacks
similar to the one Carey wore [holding a banner that
read] , . . 'WELCOME TO THE CEMETERY OF THE LIVING
DEAD.118
Here is an early example of the death imagery the British
characteristically associate with Hollywood, as well as
the notion of bizarre religious cult formation in
Southern California. In fact, in this novel local
religious beliefs and practices have become absurdly
intermingled with Hollywood values: "The church of the
twentieth century is the motion-picture theatre, where
the populations of the world come to worship their ideal
of beauty and virtue" (101). In this celluloid world
values are so turned around that the illusory becomes
more authentic (in terms of being convincing) than the
real:
You couldn't get an American audience to believe
that a primitive Irish village is like what it is.
No, sir, they want the real thing and the real thing
is the genuine Hollywood product, made by the most
highly paid expert in the business. . . . [Then
referring to the Irish towns they are visiting,
someone else adds,] These punk Irish villages are
just too sordid for anything. Why, they wouldn't
even look convicing in a news reel dealing with a
18 L iam O' F l a h e r t y , Hollywood Cemetery (L on d on :
V i c t o r G o l l a n c z , 1 9 3 5 ), p. 287. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s
t o t h i s w o r k a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t i n p a r e n t h e s e s .
62
goddam revolution. Why, the best actor in the
business would look a ham against a background like
that. (32-3)
Not only are false people like Angela Devlin created in
Hollywood, but so are bogus communities made to pose as
actual places. In both cases, the public appears
entirely convinced by the frauds.
Many of the novels included in this study use the
narrative device of having a stranger enter Los Angeles
so as to introduce both reader and character to the
environment at the same moment. Brian Carey fulfills
that role in Hollywood Cemetery. His first views of the
city from the train window are awe-inspiring:
Then dawn came, bringing with it the glory of the
Southern Californian landscape and he felt that he
had really been transported into an earthly Paradise
on the wings of love. All round the rushing train
stretched a Lotus Land of imagination, a vast
garden, luridly bright with the refreshing moisture
sprinkled on its joyous face from a myriad
fountains, that rose from the earth, as if by a
miracle. While in the distance rose majestic
mountains, their peaks lost in the morning mist.
(128)
Not many pages later, he takes his first automobile ride
through the Los Angeles, and the land that first appeared
as the Garden of Eden now takes on many of the opposite
properties:
63
He gaped like a rustic being in a city for the first
time. But was it a city? They had already gone ten
miles, passing through streets that were identical,
with identical houses in each street, through a maze
of automobiles, which even at that early hour
covered the ground like a horde of scurrying ants,
screeching, rumbling. . . . He felt that he was
caught in a labyrinth from which he could never
extricate himself and he thought the place was the
most frightful place he had ever seen. It gave him
the impression of having been devastated by an evil
genius, who, with a gigantic comb of uneven teeth,
had torn away the upper layers of the city, leaving
only the jagged base, with the interiors of the
houses exposed and the furniture scattered about in
disgusting confusion. . . . [Carey is told he is in
Hollywood, and he asks 'Where?* The answer is,]
'Where, indeed? It's merely an illusion. It's a
point of view, not a place. A mirage.' (13 6)
Biblical phraseology marks this whole section of the
novel, and Sam Gunn, a screenwriter who is described as a
"man of quality" with an "obvious respect for good
taste," gives Carey a quick history of Southern
California that reads like Genesis:
There was only one point on the world's map for the
creation of Hollywood, at the foot of Beverley [sic]
Hills in Southern California. Look at it this way.
On one side the dreary Pacific Ocean. On the other
sides a dreary desert, with no history whatsoever.
Inhabited in the past by mountain lions, snakes and
Indians, deplorable human types dying out, until we
came here in search of gold and made them die
quicker. Left nothing. There was nothing but what
was brought here, paltry lot it was, too, by some
Spanish monks and rancheros. A desert. . . . Man
circumvented this lack by irrigation. With
artificial rain he turned the Southern Californian
desert into a land flowing with milk and
honey. . . . Safe from the destructive hand of
God . . . except for an occasional earthquake, which
64
is, of course, the work of the devil as it comes
from underground, this artificial garden gave birth
to incredible wealth at incredible speed, so that
the city of Los Angeles grew over-night from a
miserable village to a city extending fifty miles in
length. Oil, fruit, vegetables were there as well,
so that the inhabitants became so rich that Croesus
is a beggar in comparison. But man cannot live by
bread alone. He must have a God. . . . His gods are
always representatives of the way he earns his
bread. . . . Man in Southern California, living in a
completely artificial environment, no seasons, no
natural calamities except an occasional earthquake,
no poverty as it is understood, had to invent
artificial gods. So he made celluloid gods by means
of the camera and Hollywood is the factory in which
they are made. . . . The celluloid city. . . . I've
been seven years here. It's like dope, this place.
One visit is amusing, provided it's cut short and
one doesn't come again. . . . [Los Angeles is] one
thousand and one Californian nightmares in search of
a city. (131-5)
People there have no appreciation or even cognizance of
fine European values. Jack Mortimer, for instance, wears
a monocle and is, therefore, given the nickname of
gentleman. Another character admits that "he had no idea
what the word gentleman meant, except that it was one of
those 'goofy Limejuice words' that had no meaning for an
American" (19).
Everything relative to Hollywood is shown as
debauched, degenerate, but the land itself nevertheless
remains bountiful to the homeless and destitute victims
of the economic depression:
65
When I came here first, I couldn't get a break, not
knowing anybody, but in southern California, it's
practically impossible for anybody to starve. You
have to be blind, dumb, and paralysed to starve
here. You can buy for ten cents enough fruit and
vegetables to do you for a week. In an hour or two
you can fix up a hut to shelter you against what
weather there is. Go down to the shore and catch
enough fish. Just pick oranges off the trees. (211)
What began as the Earthly Paradise, however, has been
transformed into the land of the lotus eaters. People
there are lured away from their proper pursuits, as for
example with the pilot hired to dump Biddy and Carey:
Like most stupid and sensual men, once he. had tasted
the luxury of life in Hollywood, he was unable to
escape from it and return to the strenuous business
of being a commercial pilot. (249)
But the most horrifying victims are the
intellectuals, most often the writers and directors, who
seem to be the hardest to corrupt and then the most
difficult to keep in the necessary state of degeneracy.
Director Bud Tracey, "a man of really great talent," for
example, says to Jack Mortimer,
I'm sick an' tired o' directing tripe. . . . I've
made enough money to last me as long as I live.
Unless I can direct what I want, I ain't goin' to
stick around. I'm for the South Seas. (8)
The hierarchy is the same in each of these Thirties
novels, and in each the power push is very much the same.
66
The New York bankers control the Hollywood moguls who
control the directors who control the writers. With such
forces out to pervert their talents, the intellectuals
(writers and directors) have little chance to survive
undefiled. The title of the novel derives from this
tendency of Hollywood to destroy those who could become
the saviors of the good society. O'Flaherty quotes a
Communist newspaper called Proletarian Power:
Hollywood is a cemetery where the remains of
present-day bourgeois intellectuals are buried,
after being fattened, like the sacrificial victims
in ancient Mexico on enormous salaries, only to have
their hearts plucked out and eaten by the Moguls of
modern mammon. . . . As soon as any writer in the
present world economic crisis abandons the class
position, then his doom is inevitable. The more
bourgeois traitors that are engulfed in Hollywood
Cemetery the better it is for the working class.
(113-14)
So what appears as a precursor to the British novels
about the death industry in Los Angeles never actually
touches on the funeral mongers, but rather refers
metaphorically to the death of the human spirit
associated with selling one's soul to the Hollywood
devil. The final presentation of Carey and Biddy in
Mexico as refugees from a Sodom and Gomorrah world is
unctuously melodramatic. Such a comparision is apt
because 0*Flaherty returns again to Biblical language:
67
'Oh! God, Brian, don't let them get hold of me
again, will you?'
'Have no fear,' said Carey savagely. 'They
won't get hold of you again.'
And as. he soothed her, rocking her in his arms
like a child, he felt a sense of pride and a power
in him that made his youth return. All the
bitterness and humiliation of his past life, and
especially of the time that he had spent in
Hollywood, were washed away by the appeal for
protection uttered by the beautiful creature that
snuggled within his arms. Then, indeed, he felt a
pure love well up in him like a glorious song. It
possessed his body and his soul in the silence of
the desert. . . . 'I have been far more wicked than
you have been, but I now feel pure and innocent
again and I'm not afraid.'. . .
[They are married by a priest who just happens
by, described as a] valiant Crusader of the
twentieth century [who] has just taken time out from
fighting the Government with his brave peon
followers, to bless one of the most romantic
marriages of modern times. . . .
[As they say farewell to potential rescuers,
Carey tells them,] 'My wife and I have had enough of
what you call civilisation. We prefer to live here
[in Mexico] in peace. . . . I shall go on wearing
sack-cloth and ashes until I have washed the stain
of Hollywood off my soul.' (266-7, 271)
Like Waugh's view of Los Angeles to come a decade later,
O'Flaherty showed it to be a world so degraded that the
living of a righteous and religiously glorified life in
its midst was an utter impossibility. That O'Flaherty
and Waugh, along with Brian Moore, are the only Catholic
authors in the study may or may not be a factor. These
are the only novels in which the subject of religious
belief is a serious issue. Either explicitly (with
O'Flaherty and Moore) or implicitly (with Waugh), each
68
measures Southern California life by scriptural
standards.
The single novel Cedric Belfrage wrote about Los
Angeles, Promised Land (1938), comes much closer to
providing a useful prototype of the British novel set in
Los Angeles, though it too falls somewhat short of the
mark in several important respects. Belfrage, born in
London in 1904, attended Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, and then at the age of twenty-three became a
Hollywood correspondent for both British and American
publications. He continued in this field for many years,
working both in Los Angeles and London, until his left-
wing political activities caused him to be "ruled
subversive by the McCarthy committe in 1953" and
"deported to England in 1955.1,19 Belfrage currently
resides in Mexico.
Promised Land is the only historical novel discussed
at any length in this research, and certainly it is
important as the first attempt by any Briton to provide a
fully elaborated history of Southern California as an
essential background to the particular events he
narrates. Gavin Lambert, in the last novel introduced in
19 Contemporary Authors: New Revision, III
(Detroit: Gale, 1981), p. 82.
69
the paper. Running Time (1983) , is the only major author
who attempts an equally ambitious historical undertaking,
but Running Time becomes more than a historical novel of
Los Angeles.
Promised Land begins in 1857 with two branches of
the Laurie family who have emigrated to America from
Britain— one branch establishing a spread in the Owens
River Valley in California and the other starting in
Kansas and later moving on in 1902 to become one of the
earliest families in Hollywood. They choose Hollywood at
that time because it is "something pretty near to a city
without sin."20 The novel then goes on to document the
ravaging of the Owens River by water moguls of the
Southland such as Mulholland, the development of the
motion picture industry, and the attendant corruption of
people and places because of the lust for power, money
and fame. There are some fine passages of historical
writing and a strong appreciation of what could have
been, but the whole novel is flawed by two blatantly
preachy epilogues on the virtues of socialism reminiscent
of the ending of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Belfrage
20 Cedric Belfrage, Promised Land: Notes for a
History (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 46. All
further references to this work appear in the text in
parentheses.
70
tries to create an upbeat finale by envisioning an
organization of workers achieving power and founding the
New Jerusalem in Hollywood.
Many of the themes and characters introduced in this
novel are developed at great length in the British novels
of 1939 and later. First is the figure of the dreamer
who comes to Los Angeles in hopes of achieving his
heart's desire, whatever that may be. These folk are
almost inevitably disappointed and even beaten by the
city, but for many of them the dream lives on for years
despite overwhelming disillusionment. Here it is Ed
Laurie's dream of establishing a citrus grove that brings
him to Southern California: "The smell and the beauty of
the orange and lemon trees intoxicated him. He had
wondered whether man could possibly know greater
happiness than citrus-growing" (26). He is even more
pleased to discover that the Cahuenga Valley was "a
citrus-grower's paradise provided you could get enough
water. It was the old problem of all California since
the beginning" (35). water, referred to here as Liquid
Gold, is in effect stolen from the Northern California
branch of Ed's family by the unscrupulous water-barons
who reside in the south. When in 1924 journalist Don
Laurie tours Los Angeles, knowing that the city is now
71
watered by the riches of the Owens River where he grew
up, he "had expected to see some tangible results in the
city: some greenness, some pleasant vistas, some charm.
But in the potential paradise hell seemed to have broken
loose" (155). Here again is a British novelist using the
image of the would-be paradise becoming instead a
veritable hell on earth. The ultimate evocation of this
theme in the novel comes when the refugees that have been
forced to desert the Owens River Valley set themselves up
a community of sorts below the reservoir in the south
that holds their "gold" which has been "pirated" away.
Because of shoddy and inadequate workmanship, the dam
collapses, and these beleaguered folk disappear without a
trace, victims of the very water beside which they had so
valiantly sought to rebuild their lives.
Another reccuring character in British novels of Los
Angeles is the woman who comes West determined to carve
out a place for herself in what seems to her a relatively
malleable society and landscape. Ma Laurie is just such
a woman in Promised Land. She guards her real estate
holdings in the area and actively promotes public
policies in accordance with her own moral and political
views. Primarily through Ma Laurie and her interactions
with the developing community, Belfrage tells a good deal
72
of the history of Hollywood, from the days of Horace
Henderson Wilcox's founding through the establishment of
labor unions in the latter 1930's. The novel offers some
fine detail about the way in which the "movies"21 grew
from being strange people on the absolute fringes of
society to becoming the undisputed dream and illusion
peddlers to the world. The narrative is laced with lots
of ironic commentary, such as the one dated 1911 which
says, "The movies had stayed out of Hollywood. They
knew, Ma had said, what sort of a reception they would
get in a really God-fearing community" (76). Ma samples
"a dozen fancy religions" (305) and admits that Aimee
MacPherson "was the greatest success in the West since
Fra Serra" (286). Ma sees herself as a custodian of
whatever history the region has. She is in fact a small
time version of the last matriarchal figure in this
research, Elva Kay in Lambert's Running Time. Both grow
old watching Hollywood develop from its fledgling state
21 Belfrage used this term to refer to the people
who actually made the early motion pictures in Los
Angeles. In Southern California: An Island on the Land,
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1983, p. 332), Carey
McWilliams quotes Belfrage as he writes about this aspect
of Los Angeles' history: "The curiously assorted
characters who made up the colony were segregated like
lepers in Los Angeles. 'Over no decent threshold,'
writes Cedric Belfrage, 'were they allowed to step. They
were unfit to mingle with respectable citizens."'
73
in the earliest days of movie-making to the booming
metropolis it later becomes:
It was a great, wonderful city that Ma had seen grow
up around her, and she was proud of it, proud of her
pioneer's faith and foresight. There on that porch,
on that same old rocker, she had watched it grow.
(282)
But unlike Elva, who dies in old age still at the crest
of her fortune, Ma Lurie is devastated by the economic
crash of 1929 when all that she has worked for is lost—
such is the fate of the common man, Belfrage implies,
unless the powerful forces of capitalism can be
curtailed.
Beyond reviewing the cultural and geographical
history of the area, Belfrage explains, as a good
historical fiction writer should, just why Los Angeles
became the movie-making headquarters it did. He shows,
for example, that the climate and the close proximity of
a variety of scenic location were very important at the
outset, though ironically most films finally came to be
made inside the studios themselves. Another interesting
region-based idea he presents is that because people felt
movies should be far from "reality," Los Angeles seemed
to be an ideal environment:
74
In order that movies would continue to fulfill
their function they must be made far from what the
ordinary man and woman know as the realities of
life. Perfect for this purpose is the Los Angeles
atmosphere, swarming with swamis, crawling with
Christian Science, alive with osteopaths, saturated
with sunshine.
It is the right background for the movie-makers
to live against. And why should we expect them,
from whose minds it is essential that realistic
thinking be banished, to apply in their sexual and
general conduct such elementary practical wisdom as
humanity has been able to acquire? Their whole life
is a dream. In a dizzy dream they rise from
spittoon-cleaner to millionaire; in an equally dizzy
dream they soon make the return journey. Without
regard to their qualifications, their needs or their
standards, society has rained fabulous wealth upon
them. . . . They are professional illusionists and
the first requirement of them is that they keep
trying to delude themselves. (2 06-7)
The greatest illusionist in the novel is Dr.
Mannheim, a man not ostensibly connected to the film
industry, yet in his own way the ultimate exemplar of its
implicit values. He builds a mansion on a hill in
Hollywood. In showing the Lauries his organ loft, one of
the little girls discovers that the organ itself is "just
a thin layer of wood laid over plastered chicken wire.
She then looked through a door and asked what that next
room was doing without a floor" (107). This is
Hollywood's very stage sets made manifest in a person's
home. Some years later Mannheim builds a second house,
The Mannor [sic],
75
. . . a blend of every style of architecture and
decoration ever known, but roughly approximating to
a medieval English castle, . . . recognized as the
ultimate goal of all who aspired to 'society'
status.
When Huxley published After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
the following year, two of its aspects had been
anticipated in this Belfrage work. The Mannor is indeed
the forerunner of Stoyte's castle, as Jack Mortimer's
house too had been— in each case, a home that is an
utterly absurd hodge-podge of architectural and
historical styles. But even more specifically, Mannheim
himself is a precursor to the figure of Dr. Sigmund
Obispo in Huxley's novel. One is never entirely sure
just what kind of medicine each is supposed to be
practicing, though both are known to dabble in
rejuvenation treatments, and the reader feels each is
among the most nefarious figures in his particular world,
a person at least partially responsible for bringing
about the downfall of one or more relatively unsuspecting
and perhaps unfairly vulnerable victims.
Finally, Belfrage anticipates the preoccupation
every one of the important British novelists had with the
issue of death and funerals in writing about Los Angeles.
When some folks objected in 1900 to the creation of the
Hollywood Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, Belfrage
76
writes that some people have set themselves a goal "to
forget the very existence of poverty, dirt, death,
disease and ugliness" (205). But in an even more
extensive example, before both Huxley and Waugh, he
presented the role of the mortuary cosmetician as
something of a redeemer figure. A girl with a wretched
case of acne finally commits suicide, after which she is
"transformed" by
. . . the most expensive mortician in town. . . . In
death she was indeed beautiful. All the fierce red
blotches which had marred her face in life had
disappeared. The face was white like the finest
marble and it was as if some master sculptor had
carved it. (279)
Because Promised Land makes a conscientious attempt to
come to terms with the Southern California environment as
it relates to the lives of the characters, no matter how
wooden the portraits and how preachy the approach to
issues, it deserves a special place in this study of the
British novel in Los Angeles. Yet ironically, according
to Baird and Greenwood, although "it is one of the best
novels on Hollywood and Los Angeles . . . [it was] never
published in the United States."22
22 Newton D. Baird and Robert Greenwood, An
Annotated Bibliography of California Fiction, 1664-1970
(Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Literary Research, 1971),
p. 37.
77
By far the best of the early British novels set in
Los Angeles is You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
(1938) written by Eric Knight under the pseudonym Richard
Hallas. Like O'Flaherty and Belfrage, Knight produced
only a single work of Southern California fiction, and in
the case of Knight, this is indeed a sorry loss to the
genre.
Eric Knight was born in 1897 in Menston, Yorkshire.
At the age of fifteen he migrated to the United States,
but moved back to England during World War I. In
September 1934 he came to Hollywood for the first time,
but left the studios by May 1935 because they were not
interested in what he offered and he was too honest to
attempt to curry favor with them. He offered his
resignation, it was rejected, and then two days later
they fired him. After that, he was able to devote his
full attention to writing. During this time he worked on
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up. He bought four
and a half acres of land in the San Fernando Valley that
had already been planted with alfalfa and built a house
on the property himself. In late 1936 or 1937, he went
back to the east coast to live. There he wrote and
published his most famous work, Lassie Come Home (194 0).
Finally, he returned to Hollywood the summer of 1942 to
78
make Army training and technical films at Disney Studio.
This time he had a very positive experience. He died on
January 21, 1943 on the way to Cairo in a United States
military transport air crash off the coast of Dutch
O T
Guiana. J
Some of his letters from America to his friend in
England, published in a collection called Portrait of a
Flying Yorkshireman, reveal his reactions to the
foregoing experiences: the reader will note certain
resemblances to responses that have gone before and then
find these ideas fleshed out in Knight's own work and in
the other fine British novels of Los Angeles that were to
come after his. Part of his first letter from Hollywood
reads:
Hollywood 1934 (Some day. God
knows which, of some month)
If I told you about this place you wouldn't
believe me. If I chronicled the amazing
concatenation of idiocies and irritants, you'd
merely say I'd been watching one of the stage
satires on Hollywood.
It is just like the stories. I sit here in a
beautiful office— my office. Having refused a
secretary to do God knows what, I sit alone and
contemplate my beautiful office, the marvellous
carpet, the dinky lamps, the desk with doodahs on
it, the comfortable chairs. Outside in this
23 Anne Commire, Something about the Author: Facts
and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for
Young People (Detroit: Gale Research, 1980), pp. 151-62.
79
indescribable California weather strange black birds
with yellow-button eyes scream on sunstriped lawns.
Tropical foliage, marvellous trees, brilliant
unnamable flowers stand in miraclous park-like
order.
I sit here. I have nothing to do. I have had
nothing to do for days. I have had nothing to do
since I came here. No one opens my office door. No
one hints what might be expected of me to earn my
handsome salary. No one knows I'm here, or gives a
good Goddamn. . . .
With your knowledge of Hollywood pictures you
wouldn't believe that a place could be like this.
The sham and the indescribable beauty.
That's the real hell of it. It should be the
most marvellous place in the world. You can't
picture it, because California has never told the
truth to the world even about California.
The first thing about this place is
Showmanship. You can't get anything without
Showmanship. . . . When you arrive here, you don't
come into the Los Angeles station. They drive out
and meet the train at Pasadena. You are whisked
into a gorgeous Cadillac. That's Showmanship!
After that you can rot in your office unknown and
unsung. . . .
Yet, even the curse of the dumb human can't
blind such a hater as myself to the grandeur and
wonder of this State. No movie has ever thought to
reveal that— and it lies right at their door. The
strange pepper trees that soar into this everlasting
sunlight; the magnificent mountains of pure earth
that the sea pushed up not so very long ago to make
the territory here. In the great, flat valleys, in
the rich earth were the Japanese toil among the
orange orchards, the heat banks up like nothing you
ever saw before. . . .
The sunbaked land lies dry and dusty and hard,
_ but wherever a drop of water is pumped to it, it
flourishes and sends up lavish and exotic return.
There is no green at all— except where water is
pumped. A lawn is a treasure to stare at, and to
water incessantly. All is burned and dry, and yet
the rich soil watered sends up loads of profuse
dividends. The outdoor markets in the city are
loaded with lush truck; beans, tomatoes, potatoes,
squash, pomegranates, white-bleached celery— all the
fruits and vegetables of a temperate or a tropical
80
climate load down the stalls— and are as cheap as
dirt and cheaper than water.
Was ever there such a land blessed as this? No
winter at all. At the eternal beach children splash
in the water. The whole populace is suntanned and
healthy. It is a paradise for children, who are all
beautiful, healthy, overgrown. But, like India, it
softens them. Wise people send them back to the
hard East for schooling. Here, indeeed, bodies do
leap up to the sun, and they are like gods.
So why— why all this unhappy manifestation of
man here? Why? I think it is the blessing that
curses. In this eternal paradise among all this
everlasting sunshine, they grow like gods and yet
become weak. They are soft. Gone is that grand
granite hardness of New England— the spontaneous
vigor of my own Pennsylvania country. It is in
neither the people nor their works.
Soft people and soft houses; soft words and
soft deeds. For they are kind really. . . . And yet
that drives me madder. The monotony of the sunshine
gets equalled by the monotony of kindness. If only
a good city-editorial voice would . . . tell me for
the love of so-and-so to get something written and
write it in twenty-minutes— must!
But no! Take your time, they say. You'll be
homesick at first and so we don't expect you to do
anything for quite a while. Just be happy and walk
around and get used to the climate. If you need
anything, just ask us. And be happy!
How can I be happy after the strange, hard,
fine vigorous rush of the East? Dolce far niente
isn't a motto— it's a curse. . . . But I will be
hard. I won't go soft. That's why they get us
fellows out here. They come out. They still have
the Eastern vigor. They produce. They soften under
the warm climate and the easy living. Then they're
fired— through— used up.
Nothing shall use me up. . . .1 shall give
nothing of myself to this industry except competent
workmanship. . . . I shall work, observe, watch— and
only if I ever get a picture of my own shall I bring
out any of my ideas. [This same attitude will be
voiced by characters in the works of both Hilton and
Lambert.] They don't want movies. They don't want
my ideas. They want dialogue and stars. I'll write
them dialogue. I'll take their money; I'll save
8 1
most of the salary. I111 produce a picture of my
own before I'm through.
Gradually Knight began to get a deeper understanding of
life in Southern California. Although employed by the
studios and involved in the world of filmmaking, as all
the novelists in this paper were, Knight was the first go
beyond Hollywood to grapple with the dynamics operating
in the environment as a whole. Some of his conclusions
made as early as 1935 jibe with those reached by
prominent Los Angeles historians like Reyner Banham
thirty-five years later:
Yet I try to rationalize this whole country, and
excuse it. If the people are nuts, it is because
after the flat middle lands this is Heaven to them.
If they strew the place with the ostentatious
vulgarity of palm trees, it's because they still
can't believe in the miracle of landing in a land
where palms will grow. If their houses are cheap-
jack it is because they're afraid of earthquakes
which crumble brick and stone buildings. If they
dress like fools, it's because this is the tropics
in a way, and anyhow our own sane clothes are about
as foolish as could be conceived for such living
conditions. So the women wear pants and shorts and
everyone lives in a sort of cheap-jack fugitiveness
as if all this would vanish suddenly tomorrow and
they'd have to. live_baek on-earth again. A
temporary feeling everywhere— waiting for what?
Earthquakes, some sectarian Domesday [sic], the
24 Eric Knight, Portrait of a Flying Yorkshireman:
Letters from Eric Knight in the United States to Paul
Rotha in England, ed. Paul Rotha (London: Chapman and
Hall, 1952), pp. 69-73. All further references to this
work appear in the text in parentheses.
82
collapse of the motion picture industry, the
millennium? I don't know. (78-9)
This very same transitory quality to the land and the
buildings upon it was one of the major factors that drew
Isherwood to Southern California. He felt that the
environment there, unlike the stable natural and man-made
sights of other places in the world, mirrored the very
ephemeral nature of man's life on earth.
Unlike some of the other authors in this paper who
developed and maintained negative views on everything
about the film industry in Southern California, Knight
changed his mind when he returned in 1942. He could have
lashed back at those who had spurned him, but was
gracious instead:
It was wholly characteristic of him that suddenly
being in a position to take a bit of human revenge
on the Hollywood that treated him so ill, his
integrity caused him to be an inspiration to those
cynical cinema types. The men who worked with him
there in the summer of 1942 were unanimous in giving
recognition to the speed of his efforts and his
inspired ability to find a way past obstacles or
red-tape and technicalities that looked
insurmountable.25
He was pleased to learn that there was at least one
studio in Los Angeles that operated the way he had always
25 Paul Rotha, Flying Yorkshireman, p. 213.
83
believed they all should: with everybody working hard and
at the same time cooperating fully with one another.
Some extracts from his letters during that period detail
the excitement he felt at the discovery:
They want me here, they have piled more and more
work on me. . . . I like it. I like it especially
in a town where I once did nothing so boringly for
so long. The past week I've been working with
Disney, who is one of the grand oases in the
Hollywood desert. . . . Here at Disney's it is
really wonderful. . . . The staff is wonderful, the
studio is the only one I know of decent, ultra-
friendly human relationship, and if you want
something— everyone leaps to think up some way of
presenting it. Everyone calls Disney 'Walt' and
'Walt' calls everyone by first name and that's the
way the studio is run. You have an idea— you walk
right up to Walt and spill it. . . .If God were
minded to punish me by sentencing me here for life,
may I be at Disney's, the only oasis in this goddam
arid waste. (215-17)
The more sardonic of the novelists discussed herein—
those of the Evelyn Waugh persuasion— would probably have
responded quite differently to the Disney enterprise, but
for Knight it provided a happy conclusion to a very mixed
earlier experience.
It is, however, the. first encounter Knight had with
Los Angeles that formed the basis for You Play the Black
and the Red Comes Up. He wrote on September 10, 1935, "I
am deep in a short, swift, novel of California that
really has the stuff. Every character in it is mad,
miserably and futilely mad. . . insane. It truly
reflects the country" (97). Then, nine months later he
added,
Everyone in the book is mad, including the man who
tells it. California is mad. The mountains and
stucco houses are insane. It is just finished and
my agent calls it 'the most saleable thing you've
done.' Maybe that is a slam. Hepburn is saleable.
Mae West is saleable. Jean Harlow is saleable.
This book is saleable. It doesn't matter. I wanted
to get it off my chest. (105)
Despite its "saleability," it was to be another two years
before the novel was actually published.
Stylistically You Play the Black and the Red Comes
Up has certain resemblances to James Cain's The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1934) and Horace McCoy's They Shoot
Horses, Don't They? (1935), both of which are also set in
Southern California and have hardened protagonists. But
as grim as some of the events in Knight's work are, there
is an overall lightness to it, a humor that prevails in
the end. Rotha refers to it as "a trick double satire,
first on sophisticated life in California and, secondly,
on the then current literary fashion of 'tough'
novels."26
26 Rotha, p. x.
85
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up is the story
Dick tells of his life once his wife Lois leaves him,
taking their son Dickie with her to the Coast. He closes
their diner and hops aboard the boxcar of a train bound
for Los Angeles, where Lois has cousins and has always
wanted to go. The novel details his adventures on the
train, his attempts to find them in Southern California,
his being double-crossed in a faked robbery where someone
is killed, his involvement with and bigamous marriage to
a woman by the name of Mamie, his subsequent falling in
love with a wealthy young woman named Sheila, his
attempts a la American Tragedy at doing away with Mamie
and, instead, inadvertantly causing Sheila's death. He
is convicted of Sheila's murder and sentenced to die, but
is let off when his friend Quentin Genter, a movie
director, commits suicide, leaving a document confessing
"that he was ethically, morally, and actually responsible
for the murder of Sheila."27 Once out of jail, Dick
tries to confess to the crimes that he has actually
committed (bigamy, attempted murder, robbery, etc.), but
everyone laughs him off. A short time later he heads out
27 Eric Knight (published under the pseudonym
Richard Hallas), You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
(New York: Robert M. McBride, 1938), p. 198. All further
references to this work appear in the text in
parentheses.
86
of town on the very same road he had entered, catches a
freight train, and then jumps off at the desert just
before "my mountains that I'd seen when I was a kid and
that I'd always wanted to see again" (210).
Dick is a patently simple person who finds himself
caught up in a world far-too-complex for him to figure
out. Dick is a man who makes harmony with his
environment wherever he is. He pretends he is a Spaniard
one night when he comes to a mission and explores the
grounds. He loves machinery and enjoys driving, and
there is a particularly fine scene where he and Sheila
drive at night along Pacific Coast Highway past Malibu,
then stop and go into the water. Part of the delight in
the reading of the novel comes from the dramatic irony
one feels in recognizing connections and implications
that Dick can never understand, which at the same time
gives him something of the quality of a holy fool. He
gets ideas from other people, most often from Genter, and
then makes them his own. In the following passage Dick
is thinking, as he rides out of town on the train, about
something Genter said. But he gives it his own uniquely
sensual interpretation:
I guess it was true what Genter once said: that
the minute you crossed into California you went
crazy. And I think that the minute you cross the
87
mountains coming back, you change again. . . .
It was like all I had done in California was
just a dream. . . . I could remember everything
about California, but I couldn't feel it. . . .It
was all gone. All of it. The pink stucco houses
and the palm trees and the stores built like cats
and dogs and frogs and ice-cream freezers and the
neon lights round everything.
I tried to remember everything. . . . The big
dirt cliffs beside the ocean with the seagulls
screaming very high up and on Sunday the stinking
lines of auto traffic; and the way people were
always nutty over some religion. . . .
And I thought about coming over the Santa
Monica mountains and seeing Hollywood all lighted up
like a fairy city; and the way the men in yellow
smocks stood on Sunset Boulevard waving bags of
Krispy-Korn and trying to sell movie guides to the
homes of the stars and how I never saw anyone ever
stop to buy one; and the smell at night of orange
blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. . . .
I thought about at night when the people all
built fires on the shore and you smelled the sea and
wood-smoke of eucalyptus logs all mixed
together. . . .
I thought about the way the grunnion run, and I
thought about how one night Sheila took off her
shoes and stockings, and when the wave went out she
would run right down and pick up the grunnion off
the sand where they were laying eggs, and skip back
before the next wave came in.
I remember the way we went after them, laughing
and getting wet, just catching the fish with our
hands and letting them go again, and how the fish
flashed silver in the moonlight, because they only
run at full moon; and I can't forget how Sheila
looked, laughing and dancing barelegged and holding
up her hands full of fish, shining and wiggling.
And I thought about Genter and how he gave
Sheila the lilies, and how he cried in my cell, and
how he was the night he told me about California
being only a moving picture. I remember him saying
that some lands were a father to a man, and beat
him; and some were a mother to him, and loved him;
and some were a wife, and had to be loved; but
California was just a whore who dropped her pants
down to the first man that came along with a
watering-pot.
88
And I thought about all the things they'd said
about Genter after he was dead, but it didn't
matter; because he knew more than they did. Anyhow,
he was the only man in California with enough sense
to know he was crazy. (2 07-10)
Genter, it is clear, is the manipulator in this
novel. His technique is to ingratiate himself and then
wield power over weaker folk who fail to comprehend just
how he is sadistically imposing his will upon them. When
he suggests to Mamie's friend Patsy— seemingly as a
joke— that she start a religious sect based on her idea
of curing the country's economic woes by offering $50 a
week to everyone, she instead believes him. She "started
going round in a white robe and beach sandals painted
with gold radiator paint" (107), and before long her
Ecanaanomic Party is a roaring success. Dick as Genter's
would-be disciple responds, "I kept thinking that the
goofier the plan the more quickly people seem to fall for
it in California" (66). But unlike Mannheim in Promised
Land and Dr. Sigmund Obispo in Huxley's After Many a
Summer Dies the Swan, Genter is finally remorseful about
all that he has done and, with his death, makes some
attempt at reparations.
Although a substantial part of Knight's own
experience in Los Angeles was connected with the film
world, Genter is really the only character of
89
significance who comes from that milieu. He brings out
the illusory world of Hollywood when he suggests to Dick
that the Southern California scenery he sees about him is
really a clever background projection:
You see those mountains too just like I
do. . . .We only think they're there. And they're
not. It's just a movie set. If you go round the
other side of that mountain, you'll see nothing but
two-by-fours that hold up the canvas.
And you see this restaurant? Well, it isn't
here. It's a process shot. All Hollywood is a
process shot. It's a background just projected on
to ground glass. And the only reason nobody knows
that is because we're all mad. (71-2)
One of Genter's dilemmas is that he feels trapped in the
world of the movies, for in an interesting way, he shows
that all the world is a movie and, as a result, he cannot
go anywhere:
It's because the rest of the world is a movie. I
know. I've tried. I've made a picture in Baffin's
Bay and I made one in Sumatra. And it's no good.
Because the places are exactly like a movie
travelogue. They won't be different. Wherever I go
the world won't be itself. It becomes a movie set
the moment I get there. And I can't go any further.
If I go to Europe that will become a movie, too.
Everywhere I went it would become a process shot or
a travelogue, until there'd be no world left. Only
a movie of the world. Then the world would die— it
would be the end of the world. It would be
Armageddon. (190-91)
A man of Southern California, Genter can no longer
distinguish between reality and illusion— even outside of
90
his native territory. Lambert, who read You Play the
Black and the Red Comes Up and thought it "very good,"
was particularly impressed by Knight's notion "that it's
all back projection. That's a marvelous image, I
think."28 Lambert's own ElVa Kay in Running Time has
difficulty at the end of her life separating her
indivdual existence from the lives in the movies she has
seen. Brian Moore takes quite a different view of the
movies' effect on travel. He says that people find
Southern California familiar, though they have never been
there before, because they have seen it disguised in so
many ways as a background location in all manner of films
they have seen at their theaters at home.
Other than Genter, the rest of the characters in You
Play the Black and the Red Comes Up demonstrate in
various ways how much they are a part, not of Hollywood,
but of Southern California life in general: Mamie and
Dick get involved because of cars; Patsy successfully
combines economics, religion, advertising, and lighting
effects to promote her new sect; and Dick and Sheila are
most themselves at the water's edge. Sheila shows a deep
understanding of the special mystery the ocean gives to
28 Gavin Lambert, personal interview, 28 December
1 9 8 5 .
91
life in Los Angeles, and particularly to its beach
communities:
Sheila got a long piece of kelp and went
running up and down the beach and dancing with the
kelp waving behind her. . . . It was funny, when she
was down by the ocean you could talk to her but she
just paid no never-minds. . . 'You like the sea,
don't you?' I said.
She nodded. . . . 'Man can do anything to the
land. But his domination stops right at the beach.
He can't do anything out there. He can't spoil it.
His power stops right exactly at that place where
the deep waves begin.' (117)
It should be clear from all of the preceding that
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up has a unique
place: in addition to its being an exceptionally well-
written work, it is the first British novel to focus on
Los Angeles rather than Hollywood. And in a remarkable
way, the book anticipates so many of the works which
follow. A sense of apocalypse and Armageddon evident in
much Southern California fiction is represented here, as
well as voiced, by Genter. Like Chandler, Knight never
reveals his own British origins in the work, but rather
creates a convincingly American protagonist and even
captures the American idiom remarkably well. Knight's
character, like Hilton's, enjoys driving in Southern
California as a way of escaping. Dick is a free-spirited
figure at home at the edge of the ocean, enjoying the
92
tacky pier concessions just like Lambert's Daisy Clover
("it was a place where you liked to be and when you were
there you'd be satisfied inside you"— 126). And like
George in Isherwood's A Single Man, Dick has his peak
moments bathing and frolicking at night in the sea.
While in Los Angeles he experiences the "illusions" of
the city as well as its madness, and, like Waugh's Dennis
Barlow and Isherwood's Stephen Monk, it is all clear for
him once he leaves town and crosses beyond the Southern
California mountain range. Finally, the book ends much
like Huxley's Ape and Essence, with the protagonist in
the desert amongst the Joshua trees feeling a great
release and almost euphoria:
I ran down through the fields, through the great
white paper poppies and the Indian-blankets, and I
snatched them up in my arms as I went. And I ran on
and on, down the hillside to the big desert that I
had to cross to get to my golden mountains. (213)
At the same time it correlates so well with the other
major works in this study, You Play the Black and the Red
Comes Up is a fine novel in its own right.It. is more
objective in its outlook on Los Angeles than any of the
other early works and is especially excellent in evoking
the imagery, including the smells, of life in Southern
California.
93
The four British novelists of this chapter pioneered
the new Southern California territory for their
countrymen. It was left to the seven who wrote after
them to establish domain and, eventually, to fashion fine
works of art out of the environment.
94
B e f o r e 1939 B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Works
Novels
Belfrage, Cedric. Promised Land: Notes for a History.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1938.
Knight, Eric [pseud. Richard Hallas]. You Play the Black
and the Red Comes Up. New York: Robert M. McBride,
1938.
O’Flaherty, Liam. Hollywood Cemetery. London: Victor
Gollancz, 1935.
Wodehouse, P. G. The Luck of the Bodkins. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1936 (English edition, 1935).
Laughing Gas. London: Herbert Jenkins, 193 6.
The Old Reliable. New York: Doubleday, 1951.
The Plot That Thickened. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1973.
Nonfiction
Knight, Eric. Portrait of a Flying Yorkshireman: Letters
from Eric Knight in the United States to Paul Rotha
in England, ed. Paul Rotha. London: Chapman and
Hall, 1952.
Wodehouse, P. G. Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in
Letters. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1953.
America, I Like You. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956.
Secondary Sources
Baird, Newton D. and Robert Greenwood. An Annotated
Bibliography of California Fiction, 1664-1970.
Georgetown, California: Talisman Literary Research,
1971.
95
"Cedric Belfrage." Contemporary Authors: New Revision,
III. Detroit: Gale, 1981, 82.
Commire, Anne. Something about the Author: Facts and
Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for
Young People. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980, 151-62.
Donaldson, Frances. P. G. Wodehouse: A Biography. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the
Land. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1983.
Spatz, Jonas. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the
American Myth. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
96
RAYMOND CHANDLER
In L.A. to be conspicuous you would have to drive a
flesh-pink Mercedes-Benz with a sun porch on the
roof and three pretty girls sunbathing.
No doubt the most widely recognized Los Angeles
author, Raymond Chandler is the man who carved out the
territory, particularly as it related to the criminal
underworld. He became thereby not only one of the deans
of American detective fiction but also one of the
earliest and most successful of Los Angeles novelists:
one of the few figures against whom every subsequent Los
Angeles novelist must finally be measured.
Though he chose to present an American narrator-
protagonist, Chandler's British perspectives on Los
Angeles do reveal themselves in numerous ways in his
novels. In terms of this study, Raymond Chandler's
position is fundamental. He recognized that in many
respects he had presented Los Angeles to the world. But
by 1956, just three years before his death, Chandler
wrote to a fellow author:
“ * ■ Raymond Chandler, Playback (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1958? rpt. New York: Ballantine-Random, 1977),
p. 87. All further references to this work appear in the
text.
97
You boys have taken my locale away from me. I was
the first to write about Southern California in a
realistic way; now half the writers in America are
piddling about in the smog. To write about a place
you have to love or hate it or both, like a woman.
Vacuity and boredom are futile. Los Angeles is just
a tired whore to me now. I shall be going back to
Europe soon, permanently most likely. And boy, will
I give this sweet little town the treatment, once
I'm out of rifle range.
Chandler is unique among the subjects of this study:
he is the only native born American among the "British"
novelists who wrote of the city. Some might question
just how British he is. Born in Chicago on July 23,
1888, Chandler later said of his birthplace, "Chicago is
not a place where an Anglophile would choose to be
born."3 He was the only son of an American father (of
Quaker and Irish descent) and an Anglo-Irish mother who
were ill-matched from the start. Maurice Chandler drank
a great deal and was often away; so it is not surprising
to discover that by the time Chandler was seven, his
parents had divorced and he had emigrated with his mother
to Britain. Then, except for rather brief periods in
2 Chandler, Letter to William Campbell Gault, 14
July 1956, Chandler Archives, UCLA Special Collections,
Los Angeles, California.
3 Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), p. 3. This biography is the
source of any biographical details which are otherwise
uncited in the text.
98
France and Germany, he lived in England until the age of
24.
Though Florence Thornton Chandler had been born and
brought up entirely in Ireland, she took her son Raymond
with her to London when she decided to return to Britain.
There they set up housekeeping in the home of her mother
and sister. At first Raymond went to the local school,
occasionally visiting with his mother's family in
Waterford, Ireland during the summer holidays. In
Ireland he was exposed to social distinctions as well as
the Anglo-Irish class system. Even though he often
ridiculed the rigid standards applied by his family
members, nonetheless he always retained a certain amount
of snobbery he must have learned there.
In 1900 at the age of 12, Chandler entered Dulwich
College, the first of his family to matriculate at an
English public school. (P.G. Wodehouse preceded him at
Dulwich by a few years.) The experiences there were to
be some of the most formative of his life, for the
emphasis at Dulwich was on a thorough study of the
classics. The headmaster Gilkes, like so many of his
peers, firmly believed that literature was a source of
moral instruction, demonstrating to the youngster both
Christian as well as Greco-Roman virtues and based on a
99
code of public service, honor and self-sacrifice.
Studying such literature from this perspective, the young
Public School gentleman was bound to absorb these strong
moral attributes.
Though Chandler had thought about being a writer
from his youth, while in England he published very
little— journalistic essays and a few poems— and had yet
to attempt the genre of the detective novel that was to
make his reputation. In literary criticism which he
wrote for the Academy in 1911, he takes an idealistic
rather than realistic view of literature, an approach
that "deals with human possibility." The effect he seeks
is "like that of a fine etching, colourless but full of
suggestion, with a faint flavour of the sordid— but it is
the romance of sordidness."4 With this, it is almost as
though he anticipated something of the Philip Marlowe
novels to come some twenty-eight years later.
By 1912, since it was clear to Chandler that his
vocational prospects were severely limited in England, he
borrowed 500 pounds from his uncle and set sail for
America. To him, returning to the country of his birth
4 MacShane, p. 19.
100
represented his failure in England: America "was second
best and would always be so."5
A rather ironic accident led to Chandler's coming to
Los Angeles upon his return to America. He had no
particular desire to see the city but on board ship
became friendly with some Los Angeles residents who
encouraged him to come and visit them as soon as he
could. He did . . . and never permanently lived outside
of Southern California for the remainder of his life.
During the early years he worked in a position of
authority with a Southern California oil company.
Fortuitously for his later career as a detective
novelist,
Chandler's decision to settle in Los Angeles
coincided with the rise of organized crime in the
United States. After prohibition created gangland,
the rival syndicates moved from bootlegging into
drug smuggling, gambling, prostitution, labour
unions, local politics. They even penetrated oil
companies, so perhaps Chandler had some first-hand
knowledge of them.
In America Chandler felt cut off from the land that
had nurtured him. He unhesitatingly recommended Mr.
Bowling Buys a Newspaper, a book written in 1944 by
5 MacShane, p. 22.
6 Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge (New York:
Grossman, 1976), p. 213.
101
Donald Henderson, giving dozens of copies to his friends.
In this story the protagonist— clearly a projection of
how Chandler saw himself— completes his education in an
English Public School, but never makes anything else of
his life; so he commits a series of utterly motiveless
murders as a means of achieving notoriety. A poignant
example of the parallels for Chandler occurs near the end
of the novel when Mr. Bowling is being interrogated by
the police;
The superintendent mentioned, coldly, the name of
Mr. Bowling's old school; it seemed to Mr. Bowling
the hardest blow of all. He had been plucked out of
that school, and its much-lauded advantages, and
thrown into— what? Into a world at its rawest, and
its most changing, a world which had less room for a
gentleman than ever, unless he had money and
powerful connections; and it did seem to Mr. Bowling
that this was hard.
Chandler's biographer Frank MacShane aptly characterizes
the cultural ambivalence Chandler felt and offers a few
poignant illustrations;
Unlike James, Joyce, or Conrad, who were all in
exile from worlds-they-detested, Chandler was in
exile from a world he thought he loved. Instead of
his adored England, he lived in a place where values
seemed to shift with the tides. No wonder he clung
7 Donald Henderson, as quoted in MacShane, p. 197.
102
to the code of the Public School gentleman and
applied it to his fictional hero as well.
One evening as he was having dinner with friends, he
heard church bells tolling in the distance. He "said
that he hated them because they reminded him of England.
It was not that he hated England; rather he was
momentarily saddened by his exile from it." The
nostalgia for England and things English went deep.
When he had completed one of Max Beerbohm's books, he
wrote to his publisher;
I found it sad reading. It belongs to the age of
taste, to which I once belonged. It is possible
that like Beerbohm I was born half a century too
late, and that I too belong to an age of grace. I
could so easily have become everything our world has
no use for. So I wrote for Black Mask. What a wry
j oke.
He expressed his dissatisfactions with life in Los
Angeles in a series of letters written in 1939 to fellow
detective writer George Harmon Coxe who had just built a
home in Connecticut. They provide a good deal of insight
into Chandler's perspective on the city:
October 17, 1939; I'm sick of California and the
kind of people it breeds. Of course I like La Jolla
8 MacShane, p. 208.
9 MacShane, p. 76.
103
[a town just north of San Diego], but La Jolla is
only a sort of escape from reality. It's not
typical. . . . If after twenty years I still fail to
like the place, it seems that the case is
hopeless. . . . The percentage of phonies in the
population is increasing. No doubt in years, or
centuries to come, this will be the center of
civilization, if there is any left, but the melting
pot stage bores me horribly. I like people with
manners, grace, some social intuition, an education
slightly above the Reader's Digest fan, people whose
pride of living does not express itself in their
kitchen gadgets and their automobiles. I distrust
Jews, although I admit that the really nice Jew is
probably the salt of the earth. I don't like people
who can't sit for half an hour without a glass in
their hands, although apart from that I think I
should prefer an amiable drunk to Henry Ford. I
like a conservative atmosphere, a sense of the past,
I like everything that Americans of past generations
used to go and look for in Europe, but at the same
time I don't want to be bound by the rules. It all
seems like asking a bit too much, now that I've
written it. I like all the things about England
which Margaret Halsey [another writer] liked and
many of the things she didn't like, but that is
largely because I was brought up there and English
manners don't intimidate me.10
Nothing can speak better about Chandler's deep cultural
ambivalence than do those foregoing words. Though all of
Chandler's major works are set in Southern California, he
often dreamt of a return to England. It was to be fifty
years before he made his first trip back, already having
written five of his seven novels, and finally returning
as something of a celebrity.
10 Letters, pp. 11-12.
104
Perhaps had he never gotten involved with Hollywood
screenwriting he might have preserved a certain freshness
of vision about Los Angeles. But in 1943 he collaborated
on a screenplay, and from that time on, Hollywood
continued to ask for his talents. It changed his
perspective. He wrote an Atlantic article, "Writers in
Hollywood," published in 1945, in which he explains the
incredible number of pressures on the Hollywood writer
and the unreality he is likely to become inured to: "It
is so easy to forget that there is a world in which men
buy their own groceries and, if they choose, think their
own thoughts.1,11 To make matters worse, he later wrote
James Sandoe that he had "been blackballed at all the
best bistros and call houses for my remarks in Nov.
Atlantic about screenwriters.1,12
Chandler himself never wrote what could be termed a
Hollywood novel, though actresses and occasional
entertainers weave their way into and out of the novels.
Actually, he thought a true Hollywood novel would be
next-to-impossible to write. In the process of reviewing
another author's attempt at the genre, Chandler did
11 Chandler, "Writers in Hollywood," Atlantic,
November, 1945, p. 53.
12 Postcard to James Sandoe, 28 November 1945, in
Chandler Archives, UCLA Special Collections.
105
praise F. Scott Fitzgerald's efforts, suggesting why it
is so hard to write and what the genre needs, and then
formulating a strong positive plan for the ultimate
Hollywood novel. Because such novels have been attempted
by the some of the other novelists discussed here and
because Chandler's statement shows a keen insider's
understanding of the problem and sets forth a standard
against which to measure these novels, it is worth
quoting the article at some length:
You cannot show the inner workings, the superb
skills, the incredible idiocies, the glory, the
opulence, the grandeur and the decay, the poignant
humanity and the icy heartlessness of this
magnificent yet childish colossus, the movie
business, in terms of a hot-pants actress, an
egomaniac director, a snide executive, four frantic
secretaries, and a sweet young thing in an open
Cadillac.
You can only write about the waste, and the
waste is not the story. The Last Tycoon, by far the
best of them all, most clearly (perhaps for that
very reason) reveals this futility. Monroe Stahr,
its hero, is magnificent when he sticks to the
business of dealing with pictures and the people he
has to use to make them; the instant his personal
life as a love-hungry and exhausted man enters the
picture, he becomes just another guy with too much
money and nowhere to go. Perhaps, had Scott
Fitzgerald lived, he might have written the story
and thrown out the nonsense. I do not think so, but
the hope lies with the dust.
The story that is Hollywood will some day be
written, and it will not primarily be about people
at all, but about a process, a very living and
terrible and lovely process, the making of a single
picture, almost any hard-fought and ambitious
picture, but preferably a heartbreaker to almost
everyone concerned. In that process will be all the
106
agony and heroism of human affairs, and it will be
all in focus, because the process will be the story.
Everything that matters in Hollywood goes into this
process. The rest is waste. Above all the vice is
waste, and the vicious people, of whom there are
many and always will be, because Hollywood is
starved for talent, for a single facet of a single
talent, and will pay the price in disgust, because
it has to. Why should it not? The theatre always
has, and the theatre is a pygmy compared with
Hollywood.13
His own mixed exposure to Hollywood showed him all that a
completely accurate and successful Hollywood novel would
have to encompass. Few novelists have the resources and
dimension to write on such a necessarily grand scale.
Several of the novelists in subsequent chapters make such
attempts, but perhaps only a Tolstoy or Dickens could do
it.
Unlike some other British novelists who came,
observed, wrote and then left town, Chandler never
permanently left Southern California from 1912 when he
first arrived until his death in 1959 (despite what he
said in the second quotation of this chapter). During
his lifetime in Los Angeles he frequently made
connections with other Britons who had come to
California. An early response to his fellow expatriates
13 Chandler, "The Hollywood Bowl," in editor's
files of Atlantic, Chandler Archives, UCLA Special
Collections.
107
occurred upon his return from World War I, long before he
began writing detective fiction. He had taken a job at
an English bank in San Francisco:
I think I there for the first time began to dislike
the kind of English who don't live in England, but
bloody well want to wave their Chinese affectations
of manner and accent in front of your nose as if it
was some kind of rare incense instead of a
distillation of cheap suburban snobbery which is
just as ludicrous in England as it is here. 4
But he did manage to find a number of Britons he enjoyed
being with; notably, for the purposes of this study,
Christopher Isherwood, in whose company Chandler was
always animated, responsive to Isherwood's "off-beat
humour." Isherwood greatly admired Chandler's portrayal
of Los Angeles, and was not at all hesitant to say so
publicly: "No one in our time [better captures] the
personality and feeling of the city."15 Natasha Spender,
wife of the poet Stephen Spender, writes sensitively of
Chandler's relationship with the literary community of
British expatriates in Los Angeles:
14 Letter to Roger Machell, 11 July 1954, as quoted
in MacShane, p. 31.
15 Christopher Isherwood as quoted in John and
Laree Caughey, Los Angeles: Biography of a City
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp.
332-3.
108
Christopher Isherwood was an admirer of
Raymond's powerful evocation of Los Angeles in all
his novels so Raymond took us for lunch and a
perilously erratic drive round his Los Angeles,
taking both hands off the wheel to gesture grandly:
'That’s where Bugsie Siegel was SHOT!'16 and
recapturing scenes which he had used in his
novels.1
That evening Gerald Heard and Raymond came to
dine at the Hookers, and as always I found Gerald's
gentle, erudite, mandarin brilliance a delight.
Topics ranged widely: mescaline, Chinese jades, the
piano music of Schubert, Tolkien, and the private
life of Dr. Swift, all of which Raymond found very
boring, and Evelyn and Edward Hooker's cheerful
attentive efforts to engage Raymond in conversation
were of little avail. Christopher Isherwood and Don
Bachardy joined us after dinner, but even
Christopher's appreciative account of our afternoon
drive failed to mollify Raymond's feeling of
exclusion so often engendered when subjects
unfamiliar to him were discussed.18
Because the Chandler novels became exceedingly
popular in Britain, long before he ever traveled there
himself Chandler was visited by a number of prominent
British people. By the time Chandler at the age of 62
finally went to England, he was tired, believed there was
little future for the genre he had perfected, and saw
16 Gavin Lambert, too, was fascinated by this
location and incident and included it in Running Time,
the last novel to be considered in this research.
17 The reader who cares to make such a journey
himself can refer to The Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of
Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Aaron Blake Publishers, 1985).
18 Natasha Spender, "His Own Long Goodbye," The
World of Raymond Chandler, p. 153.
109
little else that he cared to write about in Los Angeles.
As he told Kenneth Allsop who interviewed him in London
just two years before his death:
Maybe I did invent a new attack upon the
suspense book— I wrote about California, its smell,
its atmosphere, for the first time realistically-—
but I feel I’ve gone about as far as one can go in a
medium. I think I've exhausted it.
His earliest Los Angeles fiction had a rather
inauspicious beginning. It was a story he sent cold to
Black Mask called "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" which was
published in December 1933. This and the stories to
follow were a conscious attempt on Chandler's part to
achieve a double purpose: to find a way to make some
money in an economy crippled by the Depression and to try
his hand at fiction-writing, that long-postponed goal.
He describes the sequence of events in a letter:
Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an
automobile, I began to read pulp magazines, because
they were cheap enough to throw away. . . . This was
in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call
them great days) and it struck me that some of the
writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though
it had its crude aspect. I decided this might be a
19 Chandler, as quoted by Kenneth Allsop in Scans
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), p. 79.
110
good way to try to learn to write fiction and get
paid a small amount of money at the same time.20
He was consciously following in the footsteps of Dashiell
Hammett and immediately felt himself to be part of a
special group of writers. This is what has come to be
known as Chandler's "hard-boiled" approach, both a
language and a genre he adapted from Hammett, a debt he
readily acknowledged:
'Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and
dropped it in the alley.' Unlike English detective
stories in which murder was an affair of 'the upper
classes, the week-end house party and the vicar's
rose garden,' Hammett 'gave it back to the people
who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a
corpse. He put these people down on paper as they
were, and he made them talk and think in the
language they customarily used for these
purposes.'xx
Though he knew that the Black Mask story had developed
certain predictable qualities, Chandler tried to break
away from the formula and give his readers something more
than violent death:
20 Raymond Chandler, Letter to Hamish Hamilton, 10
November 1950, Raymond Chandler Speaking, eds. Dorothy
Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1977), p. 26.
21 Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder," as quoted
in MacShane, pp. 47-48.
Ill
When I was writing for the pulps I put into a
story a line like this: 'He got out of the car and
walked across the the sun-drenched sidewalk until
the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell
across his face like the touch of cool water.' They
took it out when they published the story. Their
readers didn't appreciate this sort of thing, just
held up the action.
I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was
that readers just thought they cared about nothing
but the action; that really, although they didn't
know it, they cared very little about the action.
The things they really cared about, and that I cared
about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue
and description.22
Initially he had to work very hard to overcome the
rigid character of his own British form of English. Just
how he went about it he described in a letter to a
Canadian journalist:
I'm an intellectual snob who happens to have a
fondness for the American vernacular, largely
because I grew up on Latin and Greek. I had to
learn American just like a foreign language. To
learn it I had to study and analyze it. As a
result, when I use slang, solecisms, colloquialism,
snide talk or any kind of off beat language, I do it
deliberately. The literary use of slang is a study
in itself. I've found that there are only two kinds
that are any good: slang that has established itself
in the language and slang that you make up yourself.
Everything glse is apt to be passe before it gets
into print.23 .
22 Chandler, as quoted in MacShane, p. 51.
23 Letters, p. 155.
112
Gavin Lambert, one of the younger group of British
novelists to be discussed later in this book, recognized
how much the juxtaposition of Chandler's British
background with the life and language of the city worked
to create a new literary perspective:
Chandler's primal remoteness from Los Angeles
allowed him to look at it in a way no one had done
before. With his allegiance to 'revered' Henry
James and his Flaubert-like concern for words, he
could also look at a new language with the same
creative astonishment. He saw a break with the past
in the focus on instant physical response and the
assimilation of slang to heighten it.24
Nowhere else is Chandler's perspective on Los
Angeles more affected by his personal history than in the
language of the novels themselves. His education at
Dulwich was critical, for as Chandler discussed many
years later in a letter to his London publisher Hamish
Hamilton, "A classical education saves you from being
fooled by pretentiousness, which is what most current
fiction is too full of."25 This translates itself into
Chandler's works both in terms of characters who are
shown up as poseurs as well as the very language itself
24 Lambert, p. 218.
26 Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank
MacShane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p.
238.
113
which is clipped and free from overwriting. He is the
master of the wry understatement.
His language combines his fascination with the
cheapness of Los Angeles— its profusion of trash, both in
popular culture and personality— with Marlowe's innate
sophistication, his ability to look beyond, to see
essences. Yet Marlowe has a tendency to mock his own
choice phrases. And this style, marked throughout by an
undercutting wit, reveals the Chandler double
perspective. Marlowe says, for example, in Farewell, My
Lovely, "Don't make me get tough. . . . Don't make me
lose my beautiful manners and my flawless English."26 Or
in his response to Lindsay Marriott's initial phone call:
'Are you particular about the nature of the
employment?'
'Not as long as it's legitimate.'
The voice grew icicles. 'I should not have
called you, if it were not.'
A Harvard boy. Nice use of the subjunctive
mood. (34)
Marlowe accepts the job. He is always particularly
sensitive to the use of good English, though he
recognizes its antiquarian status. Scrupulous attention
26 Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1940; rpt. New York: Vintage-Random,
1976), p. 152. All further references to this work
appear in the text.
114
to language is indeed a Chandler trademark. He said, for
example,
The best writing in English today is being done by
Americans, but not in any purist tradition. They
have roughed the language around as Shakespeare did
and done it the violence of melodrama and the press
box. They have knocked over tombs and sneered at
the dead. Which is as it should b^.
Nearly all the British writers in this study were
aware of the general lack of understanding or
appreciation of British literature amongst Los Angeles
residents, and this conception manifested itself in one
way or another in the novels they wrote. References to
literature become a kind of underlying code amongst the
cognoscenti in the land of the culturally ignorant.
Chandler, for example, makes an interesting reference to
church bells— no doubt those of John Donne— in The Little
Sister, one of the frequent English literary allusions in
his novels that are fully beyond the ken of the other
characters involved. Thus they can only be there for
Marlowe-Chandler's own amusement and, potentially, that
of the well-educated reader. Marlowe is speaking with a
sleazy hotel detective by the name of Flack:
27 Chandler, as quoted in MacShane, p. 48.
11 5
'I thought I heard a church bell,' I said.
'There ain't any church around here,' he said
contemptuously. 'It's that platinum brain of yours
getting cracks in it.'
'Just one bell,' I said. 'Very slow. Tolling
is the word , I believe.'
Flack listened with me. 'I don't hear
anything,' he said sharply.
'Oh, you wouldn't hear it,' I said. 'You'd be
the one guy in the whole world who wouldn't hear
it. •
I left him to his thoughts, which were probably
as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.
(73)
Later in the same novel, when Marlowe is talking to Mavis
Weld, the up-and-coming screen star, he says,
'Never the time and place and the loved one all
together,' I said.
'What's that?'
'Browning. The poet, not the automatic. I
feel sure you'd prefer the automatic.' (81)
In so many ways, the very details of Chandler's
biography dictated certain emphases that would come to
characterize his work. Years after he left England, when
he created his protagonist Philip Marlowe, he gave him
his own keenly developed British ability to discriminate
.between social classes and to ferret out .the niceties of
social conduct. Frank MacShane suggests that Chandler's
unique formulation of Marlowe relates to the specifics of
his own early life:
1
I
116
Abandoned by his father, he developed an
extraordinary sense of loyalty to his mother, and a
sense of justice that became a central part of his
character and gave him the attitudes he was to
express later through his character Philip
Marlowe.2
A boy without a father might be likely to create a real
man's man for his hero. And the detective genre just
naturally appealed to someone who had experienced
abandonment in life: his fantasy hero would be someone
with a strongly felt sense of justice and loyalty. Every
Chandler novel is grounded on a traditional moral basis:
those who perpetrate evil are always forced to pay, most
often with their lives, and the truly good (though there
are precious few of them) prevail.
Marlowe abides by a very definite moral standard and
a strict code of ethics in a uniquely Anglo-American
combination. Though he rarely verbalizes his principles,
they are easy to deduce from his actions. As a mark of
his public service, Marlowe will inform the police of
murders he discovers even if it conflicts with his
_ commitment to. his clients:. "I-have to go to the cop-
house just about now. I have -to" (Playback, 127). He
maintains an honorable position even in the presence of
those with little reputation left to maintain— notably
29 MacShane, p. 5.
117
the sluttish women (such as Carmen Sternwood of The Big
Sleep, Mrs. Grayle of Farewell, My Lovely and Dolores
Gonzales of The Little Sister) who throw themselves at
him in the course of his work. Chandler’s Dulwich
headmaster indeed had made his mark. Marlowe's impetus
towards self-sacrifice evidences itself in the numerous
times he risks his life to find out necessary information
or to save his clients' lives.
Yet no matter how much he narrates in the guise of
an American, Chandler's English upbringing manifests
itself throughout the oeuvre. English concepts of things
being done "properly" became the standards against which
Chandler secretly measured things. There is a definite
code of right and wrong behavior which anyone who strays
into Chandler's fictional world can deduce. Unlike the
rest of the high-living Los Angeles society— whether
socially prominent or part of the criminal underground—
around him, Marlowe is most concerned about the principle
behind his actions.
Gentlemanly values, evident throughout, are another
vestige of Chandler's British upbringing. Much of the
tension in the novels comes from the juxtaposition of
what might be considered the gentleman's code and the
seeming amorality of the Los Angeles environment. After
118
Vivian Regan offers Marlowe $15,000 to keep quiet about
her younger sister Carmen, he responds,
That makes me a big shot. With fifteen grand I
could own a home and a new car and four suits of
clothes. I might even take a vacation without
worrying about losing a case. That's fine. What
are you offering it to me for? Can I go on being a
son of a bitch, or do I have to become a gentleman,
like that lush that passed out in his car the other
night? (213-14)
Here Marlowe uses the term gentleman ironically,
indicating thereby his distinction between someone the
society might refer to as a gentleman and what his own
inner code tells him becomes the character of a
gentleman. This most often* requires that Marlowe take a
laissez-faire attitude towards money. Only in rare cases
does he actually keep any money from a client, and if so
it is generally very little in comparison with the amount
he has had to risk for it: he finally returns Miss
Quest's $20 in The Little Sister; in The Long Goodbye he
allows Roger Wade to tear up the check he has written for !
services rendered; in the same novel, he never uses and
finally returns the $5000 bill (the Madison portrait)
Terry Lennox gives him; in Playback he returns Betty
Mayfield's $5000 in signed traveler's checks and also
tells Javonen, the hotel detective, to give the Police
Relief Fund the $5000 that the hotel has offered him.
119
Chandler himself recognized that Marlowe was becoming
rather gentlemanly, and after the "Simple Art of Murder"
essay was published in Atlantic, he wrote to a friend in
his publisher's office:
The Atlantic article has got me into a lot of
trouble. Mr. P. Marlowe, a simple alcoholic
vulgarian who never sleeps with his clients while on
duty, is trying to go refined on me. . . .1 suppose
if I write another article in the Atlantic he will
demand spats and a monocle and start collecting old
pewter.29
Indeed Marlowe not only plays the gentleman but
seeks out gentlemen, so that the books in which he
appears show him attempting to avoid disordered sexuality
and at the same time trying to find gentlemanly
resources. But Marlowe is not the only gentleman, nor is
he the only one who recognizes gentlemanly behavior. Los
Angeles Police Detective Lieutenant Christy French speaks
of Steelgrave (the alias of Weepy Moyers) in The Little
Sister, "He's a gentleman like I said, and gentlemen
don't go around sticking ice picks into people. They
hire it done."30 Wealthy and influential Harlan Potter
Letter to Dale Warren, 7 January 1945, in
Chandler Archives, UCLA Special Collections.
30 Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1949; rpt. New York: Ballantine-Random,
1971), p. 65. All further references to this work appear
in the text.
12
of The Long Goodbye also recognizes human value when he
i encounters it: "He said Terry was a gentleman twenty-four
hours a day instead of for the fifteen minutes between
the time the guests arrive and the time they feel their
first cocktail."31
The attraction to Terry Lennox is one such incidence
of Marlowe's seeking out of gentlemen. Terry Lennox's
appeal seems to be that he is somewhat "English" and has
"manners." "We didn't shake hands. We never did.
Englishmen don't shake hands all the time like Americans
and although he wasn't English [Marlowe finally finds out
at the end of the novel that Lennox was born in Montreal]
he had some of the mannerisms" (The Long Goodbye, 13).
Later, when he thinks of Terry, Marlowe goes to Victor's
to drink gimlets made with Rose's Lime Juice and to
"Lowry's [sic]"— a popular English-type Los Angeles
restaurant— for prime ribs and Yorkshire pudding (8 0).
In these Los Angeles novels, Chandler creates a sub
society composed of those with English aristocratic
feelings who rise above the vulgar populace that
surrounds them. He makes, in effect, his own covert
31 Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1954; rpt. New York: Ballantine-Random,
1971), p. 134. All further references to this work
appear in the text.
121
version of English aristocracy. Often they live in
places like the Grayle residence— described in Farewell,
My Lovely as "smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray
for California, and probably . . . [with] fewer windows
than the Chrysler Building" (103). Their servants fit
the part too:
A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the
door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the
day. Behind him in dimness, a man in striped knife-
edged pants and a black coat and wing collar with
gray striped tie leaned his gray head forward about
half an inch and said: 'Mr. Marlowe? If you will
come this way, please— ' (Farewell, My Lovely, 103)
What a lot of grayness and striped clothing Chandler
remembered from his childhood in association with the
concept of aristocracy. In addition to their dress,
their butlers have all the attributes of the fine British
prototype: Norris— note the single name— protects the oil
baron, General Sternwood, and even knows about Carmen's
murder of Rusty Regan, but "he'll never tell" (The Big
Sleep, 215).
Nevertheless, in Los Angeles Chandler sees these as
a dying gentry. General Sternwood tells Marlowe: "You
are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy
life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half
of his lower belly. . . . I seem to exist largely on
122
heat" (The Big Sleep, 7). Most of these figures are
pitifully impotent against the corrupt forces which
surround them; old Mr. Grayle comes in while Marlowe and
Mrs. Grayle are kissing (she is attempting to seduce
him):
The door opened and Mr. Grayle stepped quietly
into the room. I was holding her and didn't have a
chance to let go. I lifted my face and looked at
him. I felt as cold as Finnegan's feet, the day
they buried him.
The blonde in my arms didn't move, didn't even
close her lips. She had a half-dreamy, half-
sarcastic expression on her face.
Mr. Grayle cleared his throat slightly and
said: 'I beg your pardon, I'm sure,' and went
quietly out of the room. There was an infinite
sadness in his eyes. (Farewell, My Lovely, 113)
Decadent though they are, such women in Chandler's world
recognize, respect and even defer to the innate gentility
of their men: Vivian Regan confesses to Marlowe,
If dad knew he would call them [the police] and tell
them the whole story. And sometime in that night he
would die. It's not his dying— it's what he would
be thinking just before he died. (The Big Sleep,
214)
Similarly, the murderess Mrs. Grayle commits suicide when
she is discovered, thereby showing a consideration for
her husband nowhere else evident in her behavior:
What she did and the way she did it, kept her from
coming back here for trial. Think that over. And
123
who would that trial hurt most? Who would be least
able to bear it? And win, lose or draw, who would
pay the biggest price for the show? An old man who
loved not wisely, but too well. (Farewell, My
Lovely, 249)
The "better" type of killers always commit suicide in
Chandler's novels: in addition to Velma Grayle, these are
Degarmo the policeman in The Lady in the Lake and Eileen
Wade, the prominent author's wife in The Long Goodbye.
Perhaps suicide is the "gentlemanly" thing to do, rather
than subjecting the society and particularly the innocent
but implicated relatives to an ugly murder trial.
This deference for the genteel amidst the sharply
drawn vulgarities of Los Angeles typifies Chandler's
ambivalence about America. It finally becomes apparent
that as he travels through his underworld of crime,
Marlowe resembles a knight errant. Interestingly, in his
first incarnation in Chandler's premiere detective story
"Blackmailers Don't Shoot" published in 1933, the Marlowe
character is named Mallory— that most prominent English
creator of knights errant. And the question of what
knights do and don't do is subtly posed in the first of
the Chandler novels, The Big Sleep (1939). Carmen
Sternwood, his client's daughter, is waiting naked in
Marlowe's bed when he returns home. He talks with her
from a distance while he tries to solve a problem laid
out on his chessboard: "The move with the knight was
wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights
had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for
knights."32 This British knight in disguise in Los
Angeles has to figure out just what the new rules of the
game are. In an essay originally published in the
Atlantic December, 1944, and later revised and frequently
republished elsewhere, Chandler himself lays out the
nature of his hero. Though Chandler never acknowledged
the connection, it is important to see in this extract
from the essay just how closely the character compares to
the prototype of the English knight— although here he is
transformed into a modern Los Angeles incarnation
(italics inserted to highlight the chivalric qualities):
Down these mean streets a man must go who is
not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor
afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be
such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He
must be a complete man and a common man and yet an
unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered
phrase, a man of honor— by instinct, by
inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly
without saying it. He must be the best man in
his world and a good enough man for any world. I do
not care much about his private life? he is neither
a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a
duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a
32 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1939; rpt. New York: Vintage-Random,
1976), p. 146. All further references to this work
appear in the text.
125
virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is
that in all things.
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be
a detective at all. He is a common man or he could
not go among common people. He has a sense of
character, or he would not know his job. He will
take no man's money dishonestly and no man's
insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge.
He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will
treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever
saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks— that
is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque,
a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is this man's adventure in search of
a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it
did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a
range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs
to him by right, because it belongs to the world he
lives in. If there were enough like him, the world
would be a very safe place to live in, without
becoming too dull to be worth living in.33
This knight disguised as a common man hero is one
even the British can recognize as one of their own. He
is, as English critic Edward Thorpe notices, "Well built,
athletic, hard, self-sufficient, courageous,
undemonstrative, taciturn, conservative, he would have
been almost as at home in an English pub as in an
American bar."34 But he does take on uniquely American
qualities. Chandler wrote in his notebook that he
thought of Marlowe as
33 Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder," reprinted
in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Ballantine-Random,
1972), pp. 20-21.
34 Edward Thorpe, Chandlertown: The Los Angeles of
Philip Marlowe, p. 62.
126
. . . the American mind; a heavy portion of rugged
realism, a dash of good hard vulgarity, a strong
overtone of strident wit, an equally strong
undertone of pure sentimentalism, an ocean of slang,
and an utterly unexpected range of sensitivity.35
Although the English knight, Marlowe also typifies the
American folk hero: he is at once quick-witted, athletic,
politically astute, and gallant. One is particularly
tempted to see him as a modern Natty Bumppo, a man
comfortable wielding a gun even amongst the most
desperate elements in the society; a man who can make his
way among the savages (the criminal underworld) and
emerge relatively unscathed, often having made a friend
or two among them; a man always ready to guide and
protect an innocent person in distress; a man without a
family, essentially alone, except for the one male soul
mate of his life— for Natty, Chingachgook; for Marlowe,
Terry Lennox of The Long Goodbye; a man who is never
allowed to marry, at least partially because he
recognizes that he has grown out of his own class yet
would be foolish to marry too far above it, and also
because love and/or marriage would force him into a
bonded commitment hampering his ability to offer himself
35 Chandler as quoted in MacShane, p. 207.
127
unreservedly in the service of others.36 His aloneness
marks him, makes him unique among the other characters—
who cluster together— and yet easy for the reader to
identify with: "I filled and lit my pipe and sat there
smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing
happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El
Paso.1,37
Sexuality as Marlowe experiences it in Los Angeles
is clearly a morass from which he continually attempts to
extricate himself. In The Big Sleep, for example, he
says: "You have to hold your teeth clamped around
Hollywood to keep from chewing on stray blondes’ 1 (12 0) ;
and "You can have a hangover from other things than
alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick"
(149). Such an anti-feminine stance may have its source
36 It is true that Linda Loring calls Marlowe at
the end of Playback, the last published novel, and
reintroduces the subject of marriage (first proposed in
The Long Goodbye). She says she has been "faithful"
(167) for a year and a half. However, Marlowe has only
been faithful to the "dream." Marlowe does in fact marry
Linda Loring in Chandler's unfinished novel The Poodle
Springs Story; but because of the tentative nature of
this fragment one cannot speak with any assurity whether
Chandler would finally have published it in the manner he
left it.
37 Raymond Chandler, The High Window (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1942; rpt. New York: Vintage-Random,
1976), p.150. All further references to this work appear
in the text.
128
in the strict Public School code so widely accused of
inhibiting natural sexual development.38 Chandler also
had an unusual attachment to his mother, marked by his
willingness to delay his marriage to Cissy until after
his mother's death. His marriage itself is a curiosity,
in that Cissy was fully eighteen years his senior. Gavin
Lambert suggests that detective fiction set in Southern
California was in itself a solution to Chandler's
personal problems:
It released the imagination of a private diffident
exile, on the threshold of middle age, who sought
the protection of women much older than himself.
The man without a country suddenly embraced a
fiercely alien country, full of youth and danger and
brutality.39
A man who made such life decisions might well be
frightened of highly sexual women his own age and
particularly those living in a relatively permissive
sexual environment such as Los Angeles.
Chandler writes about Los Angeles "like a woman,"40
one he has little respect for, and in his representation
of Marlowe's attitude his own views are exaggerated. The
38 MacShane, p. 22.
39 Lambert, p. 213.
40 See the second quotation in the chapter.
129
only totally good woman in his novels is Ann Riordan, the
policeman's daughter in Farewell, My Lovely, and Marlowe
rebuffs her overtures. Women in Chandler are nearly
always dangerous, deceitful two-timers. Blondes are
particularly low class: "Three of the butts had lipstick
on them. Bright Chinese red lipstick. What a blond
would use" (The High Window, 164). Even old ladies like
Mrs. Murdock in The High Window and Jessie Florian in
Farewell, My Lovely become sleazy drunks and are only
pathetic in their efforts to retain some dignity.
Indeed, the Los Angeles morass is not only
heterosexual but homosexual as well, and Marlowe is
continually faced with derangement of male and female sex
alike. Michael Mason carries the argument even further to
suggest that Chandler has a blatantly homosexual
perspective, noting that "the most brutal murders in the
Marlowe novels are committed by women with whom the hero
has had sexual contact."41 By contrast, the male
criminals are much more tender, as in the case of Moose
Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely and Steelgrave in The
Little Sister. As early as 1949 Gershon Legman had
noticed how susceptible Marlowe is to male charm, a
41 Michael Mason, "Marlowe, Men and Women," in The
World of Raymond Chandler, ed. Miriam Gross (New York: A
& W Publishers, 1977), p. 93.
13 0
. d 0
notion hotly denied at the time by Chandler, who spoke
disparagingly of homosexuals and, for the most part
avoided their company. Commenting in this respect on
Christopher Isherwood, he said, "I think he is the only
queer I have felt entirely at ease with.1,43 A good
example of Marlowe's homophobic anxiety occurs in
Farewell, My Lovely when the first person protagonist
shifts to speaking in the present tense to emphasize the
long-term effect of an Indian man's stranglehold:
Sometimes I wake up in the night. I feel them [his
fingers] there and I smell the smell of him. I feel
the breath fighting and losing and the greasy
fingers digging in. Then I get up and take a drink
and turn the radio on. (13 0)
Extended and meaningful human interaction is a rare
experience in Chandler's Los Angeles. Despite the fact
that people are almost-never trustworthy, Marlowe has an
uncanny ability to ferret out just when to believe them
and when not. The reader, however, is maintained in a
frustrated state until long after Marlowe has figured
things out. He is able to make sense of a history in
42 See letter to James Sandoe, 15 August 1949,
Letters, p. 188-9.
43 Letter to Jessica Tyndale, 18 January 1957,
Letters, p. 416.
1 31
each novel that appears to stump the native of Los
Angeles.
Los Angeles residents, particularly when measured by
British standards, have a tendency to deny tradition and
avoid history. In Chandler's works characters often live
in terror that their past lives will be revealed. The
unraveling of the mysteries in both Farewell, My Lovely
and The Lady in the Lake, for example, hinges on the
discovery that each murderess has taken on a new identity
and then made a "respectable" marriage. Chandler's
malefactors experience no guilt about what they have done
in the past, but are fearful that their true histories
will become common knowledge. So history as it is
gradually pieced together uncovers underground social
networks: "The past is like a private 'underworld,' hence
it often reveals the connections that bind the rich to
the criminal, or social, underworld elements."44
Almost more than anything else that is memorable
about his novels, Chandler wrote some of the finest
descriptions of the Los Angeles landscape. Los Angeles
comes alive on the page because of his superb attention
44 Paul Skenazy, "Behind the Territory Ahead," in
Los Angeles in Fiction, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 98.
132
to physical detail. J. B. Priestley writes this about
Chandler's fictional world:
To read him is like cutting into an over-ripe melon
and discovering that it has a rare astringent
flavour. He reduces the bright California scene to
an empty despair, dead bottles and a heap of
cigarette butts under the meaningless neon lights,
much more adroitly than Aldous Huxley and the rest
can do; and suggests, to my mind, almost better than
anybody else the failure of a life that is somehow
short of a dimension, with everybody either
wistfully wondering what is wrong or taking savage
short cuts to nowhere. 5
Driving in a car is the way most people encounter the Los
Angeles landscape:
We curved through the bright mile or two of the
Strip, . . . and down a wide smooth curve to the
bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the
south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear
in an evening without fog, past the shadowed
mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly
Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill
boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of
wind from the sea.
It had been a warm afternoon, but the heat was
gone. We whipped past a distant cluster of lighted
buildings and an endless series of lighted mansions,
not too close to the road. We dipped down to skirt
a huge green polo field with another equally huge
practice field beside it, soared again to the top of
a hill and swung mountainward up a steep hillroad of
clean concrete that passed orange groves, some rich
man's pet because this is not orange country, and
then little by little the lighted windows of the
millionaires' homes were gone and the road narrowed
and this was Stillwood Heights [one of Chandler's
45 J. B. Priestley, in New Statesman, April 9,
1949, p. 350.
133
made-up place names].
The smell of sage drifted up from a
canyon. . . . Straggly stucco houses were molded
flat to the side of the hills, like bas-reliefs.
Then there were no more houses, just the still dark
foothills with an early star or two above them, and
the concrete ribbon of road and a sheer drop on one
side into a tangle of scrub oak and manzanita where
sometimes you can hear the call of the quails if you
stop and keep still and wait. On the other side of
the road was a raw clay bank at the edge of which a
a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty
children that won't go to bed.
Then the road twisted into a hairpin and the
big tires scratched over loose stones, and the car
tore less soundlessly up a long driveway lined with
wild geraniums. At the top of this, faintly
lighted, lonely as a lighthouse, stood an eyrie, an
eagle's nest, an angular building of stucco and
glass brick, raw and modernistic and yet not ugly
and altogether a swell place for a psychic
consultant to hang out his shingle. Nobody would be
able to hear any screams. (Farewell, My Lovely, 121-
22)
Here Chandler captures both the expansive scene and the
small detail. Throughout, he is aware of the natural
beauty of the locale, both in its humble and magnificent
manifestations. He even becomes rather absurdly
protective of the environment in Playback. When Betty
Mayfield throws a cigarette out of a car window, Marlowe
reacts immediately, as a native Californian would: "I got
out of the car and stamped on the cigarette. 'You don't
do that in the California hills,' I told her. 'Not even
out of season"' (90). Some of his readers, like critic
Edward Thorpe, for example, come from England to seek out
134
and photograph the actual spots; and others come to walk
the streets (as Joyce devotees do in Dublin) and, as is
necessary for Los Angeles, to drive the boulevards and
canyons as Marlowe did.
Nearly all the British novelists write about the
beaches, those places where Los Angeles actually touches
the ocean, but Chandler’s novels particularly delineate
how time has affected these beach towns. Perhaps because
he lived here longer than most of the British novelists
(47 years), he was better able to show the effects of
time on place:
After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not
very much, but as if they had kept this much just to
remind people this had once been a clean beach where
the waves came in and creamed and the wind blew and
you could smell something besides hot fat and cold
sweat. (Farewell, My Lovely, 202)
In another novel, The Little Sister (1949), Marlowe is
driving south into Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast
Highway:
On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging
into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon,
no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell.
None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A
California ocean. California, the department-store
state. The most of everything and the best of
nothing. . . . I smelled Los Angeles before I got to
it. It smelled stale and old like a living room
that had been closed too long. But the colored
lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful.
1 35
There ought to be a monument to the man who invented
neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble.
There's a boy who really made something out of
nothing. (88-9, 90)
In Los Angeles, though such things as the colored lights
are "unreal" and "fooled you," they are nevertheless
"wonderful." The art of fooling the senses, making
"something out of nothing" is part of the inherent
theatrical magic of the city. Chandler understands and
delineates both the incongruencies of the landscape and
those of the people operating within it. Lambert, whose
novel Inside Daisy Clover begins with a long evocation of
the seamy side of life in Santa Monica, openly lauds
Chandler's ability to capture the Southern California
locale:
Like a sketchbook of Los Angeles, [his stories]
contrast sleazy beach cities or downtown areas with
rich exotic houses in remote foothills. They
indicate the haunting presence of desert and ocean
and power behind the scenes— the mayor controlled by
a gambling syndicate, the police chief linked to
shysters
Chandler changed his feelings about the city as he
continued to write about it. At first he presented Los
Angeles rather positively, saving all the bad things that
happen for Bay City, his name for Santa Monica. For
46 Lambert, p. 217.
1 36
example, Bay City is the town with the corrupt police
department in Farewell, My Lovely, whereas the Los
Angeles force is relatively honest, though bumbling— and
obviously, therefore, in need of Marlowe's assistance.
By the time of the publication of The Lady in the
Lake in 1943, Chandler shows even Los Angeles and its
police department as corrupt, whereas in contrast the
inhabitants of the San Bernardino mountains and their
sheriff are refreshingly friendly and honest. Though
murders take place in the mountains, they turn out to be
perpetrated by evil city people who have invaded the
higher pristine environment.
Marlowe, Chandler's alter ego, gets exceedingly
bitter in The Little Sister, though there is never any
clear indication just why he is in such a funk. He
recognizes his condition and tells himself such things as
"You're not human tonight, Marlowe" (89). In a
conversation with Dolores Gonzales, Marlowe shares his
feelings about what has happened to Los Angeles;
'I used to like this town. . . . A long time
ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard.
Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare
hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars
and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame
houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just
a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style,
but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate
they just yap about now. People used to sleep out
137
on porches. Little groups who thought they were
intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.
It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum
either. . . .
'Real cities have something else, some
individual bony structure under the muck. Los
Angeles has Hollywood— and hates it. It ought to
consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it
would be a mail-order city. Everything in the
catalogue you could get better somewhere else.'
[Dolores answers him with] 'You are bitter
tonight, amigo.' (202-3)
By The Long Goodbye (1953), Marlowe is more philosophical
about the city. Though indeed cruel and violent, Los
Angeles as he sees it is rather typical of modern urban
life:
Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running,
somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in
the night of a thousand crimes people were dying,
being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against
steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were
being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and
murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored,
desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry,
cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse
than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of
pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
(224)
He considers getting out, but finally, as he has done
before, decides otherwise:
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out,
but this was the part I never listened to. Because
if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where
I was born [Santa Rosa, a town in Northern
California] and worked in the hardware store and
married the boss's daughter and had five kids and
138
read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and
smacked their heads when they got out of line and
squabbled with the wife about how much spending
money they were to get and what programs they could
have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got
rich— small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars
in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's
Digest on the living room table, the wife with a
cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack
of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take
the big sordid dirty crooked city. (204)
With the preceding excerpt, one has cause to recall
Chandler's 1911 essay on "the romance of sordidness"
discussed earlier in this chapter.
Like Marlowe, Chandler remained ambivalent about Los
Angeles, though he used it to work his art. This mixed
attitude no doubt accounts for the pervading sense of
irony to the Chandler novels— a slightly bitter wondering
whether he has been a chump to have stayed. Marlowe's
existential resignation to the discontinuities he sees
around him can be seen, as J. U. Peters suggests, as
similar to those of Camus' Meursault.47 But this
approach had been anticipated in James Cain's Los Angeles
novels and in Eric Knight's You Play the Black and the
Red Comes Up. Marlowe does not desire revenge or go mad
at the absurdities; rather, he achieves a stoic
47 J. U. Peters, "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth," in
Itinerary, ed. Charles Crow (Bowling Green: University
Press, 1978), p. 32.
139
disinterestedness in the face of the chaotic environment
he inhabits. In this respect Marlowe is the model anti-
hero of the Los Angeles anti-myth, a man coping with
modern discontinuities rather than being poisoned or
defeated by them.
140
Raymond C h a n d le r B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Sources
Novels
The Big Sleep. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939; London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1939; rpt. New York: Vintage-
Random, 1976.
Farewell My Lovely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940;
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1940; rpt. New York:
Vintage-Random, 1976.
The High Window. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942;
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943; rpt. New York:
Vintage-Random, 1976.
The Lady in the Lake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943;
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944; rpt. New York:
Vintage-Random, 1976.
The Little Sister. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949;
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949; rpt. New York:
Ballantine-Random, 1971.
The Long Goodbye. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1954; rpt. New York: Ballantine-
Random, 1971.
Playback. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1958; rpt. New York: Ballantine-
Random, 1977.
Articles
"The Simple Art of Murder." Atlantic Monthly, December
1944; rpt. New York: Ballantine-Random, 1972, pp. 1-
21.
"Writers in Hollywood." Atlantic Monthly, November 1945,
pp. 50-54.
"The Hollywood Bowl." Editor's Files of Atlantic Monthly.
Chandler Archives, UCLA Special Collections.
1 4 1
"Farewell, My Hollywood." Antaeus 21/22 (Spring, Summer,
1976), pp. 24-33.
Letters
Letters of Raymond Chandler, Chandler Archives, UCLA
Special Collections.
Raymond Chandler Speaking. Eds. Dorothy Gardiner and
Kathrine Sorley Walker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1977.
Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Frank
MacShane. New York: Columbia University Press,
19S1.
Secondary Sources
Allsop, Kenneth. Scans. London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1965.
Barzun, Jacques. "The Illusion of the Real." In The
World of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Miriam Gross. New
York: A & W Publishers, 1977, pp. 159-163.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Raymond Chandler: A Descriptive
Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1979.
Caughey, John and LaRee. Los Angeles: Biography of a
City. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976.
Durham, Philip. Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go:
Raymond Chandler’s Knight. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1963.
Gardiner, Dorothy and Kathrine Sorley Walker, editors.
- Raymond Chandler Speaking. London: Hamish -
Hamilton, 1962.
Gross, Miriam, editor. The World of Raymond Chandler.
New York: A & W Publishers, 1977.
James, Clive. "The Country Behind the Hill." In The
World of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Miriam Gross. New
York: A & W Publishers, 1977, pp. 115-126.
142
Lambert, Gavin. "A Private Eye: Raymond Chandler." In
The Dangerous Edge. New York: Grossman, 1976, pp.
210-34.
Luhr, William. Raymond Chandler and Film. New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1982.
MacShane, Frank. The Life of Raymond Chandler. New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1976.
Mason, Michael. "Marlowe, Men and Women." In The World
of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Miriam Gross. New York:
A & W Publishers, 1977, pp. 89-101.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. "Forward," The Raymond Chandler
Omnibus. New York: Knopf, 1976, pp. v-viii.
Priestley, J. B. Column. New Statesman, 9 April 1949,
pp. 349-50.
Spender, Natasha. "His Own Long Goodbye." In The World
of Raymond Chandler. Ed. Miriam Gross. New York:
A & W Publishers, 1977, pp. 127-158.
Thorpe, Edward. Chandlertown: The Los Angeles of Philip
Marlowe. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.
143
JAMES HILTON
Like many of his fellow British writers who
originally gained prominence at home as novelists, James
Hilton came to do a screenplay, thought he would write it
and leave, but instead lived the remainder of his life in
Southern California. Hilton achieved more actual success
in the Hollywood community than Raymond Chandler did. He
became a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Vice-President of
the Screen Writers Guild. He even captured the
industry's highest award, the Oscar, for his 1942
screenplay of Mrs. Miniver. He is in fact reported to
have been the highest paid scenario writer at that time
in Hollywood.1
Hilton, whose father was the schoolmaster model for
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, had been well-educated at Ley's
School and Christ's College, Cambridge. After writing
Lost Horizon in 1933, which met with substantial critic
acclaim, Hilton, a young journalist, was asked by the
British Weekly to write a story for their Christmas
number. He dashed out Goodbye, Mr. Chips in just four
1 Lovat Dickson, "James Hilton," Dictionary of
National Biography 1951-60, p. 479.
144
days. Not only was it an immediate success in Britain,
but the Atlantic Monthly broke a long-standing tradition
and printed it in its entirety in its April 1934 edition,
and as a result Hilton became enormously popular in
America as well. That was when motion picture producers
sought him out to assist in the filming of his work. His
novel Random Harvest was published five years after he
came to Los Angeles but has nothing whatsoever to do with
the Southern California location in which it was actually
written. Hilton was in fact in Los Angeles for over a
decade before he ever published a novel using the
encompassing locale for his setting.
In 193 6, after he had been in Los Angeles for six
months, Hilton wrote an article "Hollywood, Movies, and
The Novelist." Though it was never published during his
lifetime, it reveals a great deal about the British
writer who travels to Hollywood, what his expectations
are and what the actualities turn out to be:
When a writer says he's going to Hollywood,
people crowd about him with far more solicitousness
than if he were about to leave, say, for the
Brazilian jungle. 'You will be disappointed,' they
say. 'You will either be crushed by failure or
ruined by success. Anyhow, you won't be happy.'
Well, to be personal, I have been in Hollywood now
for six months, and none of these prophecies has
come true. I am still happy, I am thinking of
writing a book, and it won't be anything about
Hollywood.
145
Of course some writers come here expecting too
much. They are tremendously earnest about the
importance and significance of the cinema, they can
talk about it more learnedly than you or I could
understand, and they find, to their chagrin, that
movie magnates play poker and study box-office
returns.
Then there is another kind of visiting writer
whose attitude is as if he were indulging in some
vague but profitable slumming in the lower-class
suburbs of literature. Hollywood for him is just a
dirt track, with plenty of pay dirt. He meets the
wrong people out here because the right people don't
like him, and sooner or later the wrong people and
the right people both decide that they have had
enough of him. So he goes back to London or New
York and gets as much credit for having failed as he
would have got for succeeding; so he doesn't have to
worry.
But if you aren't either of those types, if you
expect neither too much nor too little, if you are
interested in most of what interests humanity, if
you like making friends and having good talks, if
you like parties or pretty women or boxing or
symphonies, if you accept easily the fact that you
don't know everything, and if you are still a little
bit of a child in some ways, then Hollywood is all
right. I have heard it said (by flatterers) that it
is the nearest modern equivalent to ancient Greece.
Probably it is, especially when you remember that
Greece wasn't entirely populated by genius. There
must have been a terrible lot of bad poets in
Athens.2
Although six months was hardly enough time for Hilton to
have a seasoned perspective, clearly he has targeted the
key issues involved in a writer's relocating, especially
in terms of the expectations he comes with, the realities
2 James Hilton, "Hollywood, Movies, and The
Novelist," Entertainment World, 7 November 1969, p. 6.
146
he encounters and a necessary ability he must have to
compromise.
In looking at the totality of Hilton’s career in
Hollywood, one can conclude that his expectations about
the film community were not so great as to be dashed by
the equivocal realities he encountered. Undoubtedly his
tremendous financial success was a balm to his artistic
conscience should it ever have decided to bother him.
Because he was not an artist of the first rank, and
probably realized it, he was perhaps more amenable to Los
Angeles— and especially Hollywood and its attendant
realities and necessary compromises— than a greater
artist or more original genius would have been.
During the almost twenty years he lived in Los
Angeles, he wrote two novels with some settings in the
area, only one of which has any semblance of being a
Hollywood novel. In these works, as is common in a
number of the novels in this study, Hollywood becomes a
place where the artist carries on an intense war with
himself. Just how much does he become a sellout by
moving to Los Angeles and taking employment with the
studios? Much revolves around the issue of integrity as
set against material desire. How much guilt does he feel
about having made the decision, and how much self-pity is
147
balanced against this? Is it actually possible for him
to maintain his artistic integrity in Southern
California?
The first of the two novels with a Los Angeles
setting is Nothing So Strange, published in 1947. The
very nature of the narrator-protagonist reveals Hilton's
mixed national allegiances.3 Reporter Jane Waring is the
wealthy daughter of an American finaneier-entrepreneur
and a socially and culturally sensitive English woman.
Jane lives comfortably in both countries, for she and her
parents spend their summers in London, while the rest of
the year they reside either in New York or Florida. Much
of the early part of the novel is taken up with
comparisons between the Americans and the English: "Did
he like living in London?" "I think so. Most Americans
do."4 "He paid me what many Englishmen think is the
supreme compliment; he said he wouldn't have guessed I
was American" (14). All this is offered as a way of
convincing the reader that Jane has a truly international
3 Hedda Hopper reported on 9 December 1948 in the
Los Angeles Times in an article entitled "James Hilton
Making Bid For Citizenship" that he had taken out the
first papers of application for American citizenship.
4 James Hilton, Nothing So Strange (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1947), p. 6. All further references to this work
appear in the text.
148
perspective, with a particular keenness in discerning
national characteristics? she says, in referring to her
father,
In England he felt that he still mattered himself,
not merely because he was rich, but because few
English people appreciated the changes in America
that had put him out of favor. So English and
foreign politicians listened to his advice, not with
any idea of taking it, but as an act of educating
themselves in some mythical American viewpoint which
they believed he represented. (18)
She shows herself to be a young woman with few illusions
about her father's importance. Further, as a reporter,
she provides relatively unbiased perspectives on events.
To substantiate her fairness in this regard Hilton offers
Jane a compliment through Mr. Small, the investigator:
My wife's a very good judge of a book— and of a
writer. She said you looked at things without
prejudice and you had a passionate devotion to
freedom, so that what you wrote was what you felt as
well as what you saw. (164)
The story that Jane tells is substantially that of
Mark Bradley (referred to as "Brad"), a bright young
American scientist who meets Jane while they are both at
the same university in London. Brad then moves to Vienna
as the protege of Framm, a world famous scientist, who
ultimately steals Brad's research and publishes it as his
own. Because the events of the novel encompass the
149
period 1936-1945, nationalities and countries of
residence are of the utmost importance. During the war,
Brad returns to America and is detained for psychological
and political reasons. At this point Jane is queried
about him by the authorities and takes the opportunity
they suggest for her to reconnect with Brad. She asks
him to join her for a time in Southern California where
her widowed father is now residing and where she has come
to consult on a screen adaptation being made of her book.
Jane's story is offered in Nick Carraway-like
fashion: though the narrator is involved in the action,
the central focus is on a yet more significant figure.
"This is not my family's story, or even primarily my own"
(87). Jane goes further than Nick does in becoming the
conscious writer, and even deliberately removing herself
from the action by switching to the third person while
speaking of events she has pieced together. "The whole
thing built up to something I can put more connectedly at
this stage into the third person; so here it is" (190).
It is hardly a smooth transition, however; frankly, a
reporter would be embarrassed by such abruptness.
There are a number of settings in the novel—
Southern California is, however, the final location. The
action of the novel moves at first west to east and then
150
changes, traveling continually thereafter toward the
west. After a brief introductory section in New York,
the scene shifts to Jane’s first meetings with Brad in
London in 1936. From there events move to Vienna, and
then on to the long final section in California, with
Jane and Brad at the end having made a lifetime
commitment to one another.
Almost all the California sections of Nothing So
Strange take place in the mountains where Mr. Waring has
a hilltop estate Hilton calls Vista Grande— no doubt
because one can see things better from this perspective,
as it affords a grand view. This accounts for a
tremendous amount of atmospheric serenity not generally
characteristic of Los Angeles novels. One expects that
characters will be able to put their lives together in
such a rarefied environment, and this does in fact occur.
Though at first Jane had thought to find a place in Los
Angeles, she ultimately decides she would rather drive
the distance from Vista Grande whenever she has to go
into Hollywood for consultations with Mr, Chandros, the
writer-producer of the movie based on her book.
One day Jane comes into the city seeking information
about Framm, the scientist under whom Brad had worked;
she tries both the Central Library (which had no recent
151
information about him) and a newspaper office, where she
encounters "a man who had read my book." Here Hilton
comments on the Los Angeles residents' interest in the
film community living in their midst:
Like most Los Angeles journalists he read the
Reporter and Variety and liked to feel that movie
affairs were within a home-town gambit; and as I was
anxious to undo the effect of the shocked look I
gossiped a bit and told him I was just about to
lunch with Mr. Chandros at the Brown Derby to
discuss matters. He said he knew Mr. Chandros, who
had once visited the office in search of background
material for a newspaper story— a fine producer,
full of ideas? I was certainly fortunate in having
him do my picture. (He too called it my picture.)
(226)
Like so many studio employees, Hilton felt that
everyone in the city at large was living and breathing
Hollywood lore. But it is primarily through Chandros
that both Jane and the reader are introduced to Los
Angeles. And most of their meetings are conducted at the
Brown Derby restaurant, whose charged atmosphere Hilton
captures well:
We were silent for quite a while and the hubbub of
the restaurant rose around us into a roar; the place
was filling up; flashbulbs were popping at
personalities; the cartooned faces of famous patrons
stared down from the four walls. (228-29)
When Hilton first came to Hollywood, one of the
local characteristics he found most difficult to adjust
152
to was the concept of time. "The moments slip by on
variable gears: 'early' and 'late' are mere terms in
relativity, depending on whether the person you are going
to meet has not yet arrived or has gone away without
bothering about you."5 Not surprisingly, then, at Jane's
first meeting with Paul Chandros she is kept waiting
several hours, although she is given lots of apologies
from his assistants. When he finally arrives, they begin
talking and he tells her that— like most Los Angeles
residents— he too is no native. He originally came to
Southern California for health reasons, having made his
way to Hollywood from Harvard Law School by way of a
stint in Chicago as a journalist. Nevertheless, it is
obvious that Chandros is the best of Hollywood, as is
evident in this extract from their first conversation.
It is interesting that Hilton uses him as the
representative of the city and its entertainment industry
in the book. Such a singular characterization shows that
Hilton was in no mood in the Mid-Forties to be biting the
hand that was feeding him so well.
'So you like it here,' I said. 'It's good for my
lungs,' he answered. 'Not for anything else?'
'Well . . . for my pocket, if you count that.'
5 Hilton, "Hollywood, Movies and The Novelist," p.
6.
153
'Let's be realistic and count everything.' He
laughed. 'All right. But I warn you— I'm an
idealist. I'd like to make a picture that would
cost a couple of millions and lose at least one of
them. Hollywood won't let me. It's all I have
against the place. Or nearly all.' 'So what do you
do in the meantime.' 'I compromise. . . . You can't
expect Hollywood to be an exception. It's a machine
for the production of financially profitable
entertainment, and it does that pretty well— so
well that if it produces a miracle now and again it
really is a miracle.' . . . 'So to work miracles you
should get out of Hollywood.' 'Yes, but the even
greater miracle of getting a miracle out of
Hollywood always tempts me. It's such a wonderful
place for sheer technical competence.' (pp.158-59)
So the pervading Hilton themes about Hollywood emerge in
Jane Waring's first exposure to the town: that it is good
for one's physical as well as financial health, that
there is an astonishing amount of technical knowhow and a
strong spirit of cooperation, that one does have to
compromise to succeed; but that idealists can survive
there and that miracles do happen and— works of art
occasionally get made.
But Jane Waring plays the role of the skeptic, too;
she is not always the naive outsider. Chandros tells
her,
In my office there's one taboo— one only. Never say
that a certain thing can't be got on the screen.
What would you have said to anyone who set limits to
music or painting only half a century after their
first beginnings?
154
She is quick to answer him and to pose the issue of
aesthetics:
I've heard that before in another form. The
difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a
little longer. It's the sort of gag you see framed
on the office wall of a toilet paper manufacturer.
Art isn't half so arrogant. It accepts limits— in
fact, the limits are part of it. (159)
Something of the absurdity of Chandros' role— and by
extension the nature of Hollywood adaptations— is evident
when he tells Jane that she is incapable of playing
herself in cinematic version of her own life. She has
always wondered just what they were planning to do with
the journalistic record she had published. Chandros
intends to make her into a screen heroine, but he
remarks, "You know, Jane, you are the part. What a pity
you can't actI" (252) Clearly living a part and acting
it are not the same thing by Hollywood standards. But
later after she makes a witty and astute observation, he
suggests that her talents might tend toward
screenwriting. "Don't let them hear you talk like that
at any studio. . . . They might offer you a writing job
at four figures a week." She is quick to respond with
"It wouldn't tempt me" (176). Unlike Hilton, perhaps,
she can afford to resist it because she has plenty of
155
money; in fact, she remains basically unaffected by her
exposure to Hollywood.
It seems important to underscore what a cleaned-up
view of Hollywood Hilton presents in this novel. Even in
his overtures toward Jane, Chandros shows a high amount
of discretion, very unlike the stereotypical Hollywood
bachelor in his approach: Incidentally, are you— by
any chance— engaged— or tied up to anyone?' 'No,' I said
doubtfully. And because I wanted to spare him whatever
he might be risking, I added: 'I like you very much—
perhaps as much as any man I've ever met, with one
exception" (252). By this time the reader is prepared to
guess that the exception is Brad, but for Chandros to be
in second place says a lot for the positive aspect of the
movie capital that he represents.
One of the most revealing aspects of Chandros is the
fantasy he shares with Jane-— and the implications a
discerning reader might draw therefrom. It is a fantasy
he had the previous evening while he was driving home.
In it he is on a dark road in the San Fernando Valley, he
passes his own house, and goes on driving. Finally he is
aware that "there's nothing but the road. . . but it
doesn’t go anywhere. And there isn't a light, or a sign,
or a mailbox, and in a few more miles I shall run out of
156
gas" (228). For a man in Chandros' (or Hilton's)
position, a man who seems to have everything going for
him in a fickle town like Hollywood, there has to be a
secret fear that he may be on the road to oblivion and
yet be totally unaware of it. This might be especially
true for a man who comes from somewhere else, who wonders
whether he has picked up all the clues a native would
quite naturally be alert to.
Driving imagery is central to Hilton's portrayal of
life in Los Angeles. Nothing So Strange ends with Brad
and Jane in a most appropriate setting, driving in a car
on the Southern California highways from the desert to
the hills nearby. They turn on the radio at this time
and hear the news of the Hiroshima bombings. Curiously,
Hilton's second Los Angeles novel similarly ends with the
couple who seem destined to be together finally joined
again and driving along the Southern California highways.
Jane Austen always brought the heroine and her
appropriate mate together at the end of the novel by
. having them confess their love- for -one-another in an ■
outdoor area; Hilton seems to have provided his
protagonists with a California highway for the same
purpose. Perhaps the solitude of a forest walk in the
early eighteenth century can only be equalled in the mid
157
twentieth century by a drive cloistered together in an
automobile outside of an urban center. Both suggest ways
of getting clear of the oppressive encompassing
environment, though driving an automobile is clearly a
Californian's favorite method of transportation/and or
escape.
The need to drive as a way of restoring mental
equilibrium is an aspect of the Southern California
mentality Hilton was keenly alert to. In the second of
the Los Angeles novels, Morning Journey (1951), actress
Carey Arundel, the protagonist, picks up the driving
mentality as a way of coping with her life in Hollywood:
It seemed to her that many of the interesting people
were too busy to make friends, that many of the
laughing people were laughing too hard to make
merry, and that many of the interesting, laughing,
and busy people were also as lonely as herself.
Sometimes after such a party, she had a spiritual
hangover that sent her driving random miles in her
rented car, as if to kill the memory of an evening
that had been full of excitement yet fundamentally
distraught.6
In a similar fashion, but twenty years later, Joan Didion
in Play It As It Lays was to immortalize driving-in-the-
Southland as a way of keeping sane.
6 Jam es H i l t o n , Morning Journey ( B o s t o n : L i t t l e ,
Brown, 1 9 5 1 ) , p . 294. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s t o t h i s
w ork a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t .
158
When she has time away from the set in Morning
Journey and needs to piece things together, Carey drives
to a neighborhood she and Paul had lived in many years
earlier when they had tried briefly and disastrously to
find good work in the burgeoning entertainment capital.
Though Paul has repressed that year, Carey needs to
reconnect with it. The house they had rented was located
between Western and Vermont. It is decidedly shabbier
and has been "renumbered"; nearby "there were gaps in
what had once been a careful line of palm trees" (294).
These outside circumstances are a reflection of Carey's
own condition. Rather than being married to Paul as she
was then, she is now the wife of Austen Bond, but there
are pronounced "gaps" in her relationships with both men.
Though Paul had been miserable professionally, they had
been at their happiest as a couple in those days, for he
needed and accepted her most then, particularly for "the
clearance she could make in the thickets of his
emotions— a sunlit clearance before the jungle grew
again" (326). So, what had once been a well-structured
life now appears to be falling apart. And it is mirrored
in the fact that their old Los Angeles neighborhood is
rundown too.
159
As she is looking at their old house, she sees a
brown-faced child step out. The happy expression on his
face inspires her to respond to her stepson Norris's
long-unanswered query. "Don't give in— to anything or
anybody" (295), she decides then to tell him. As she
drives she notes a racial change in the whole district
"that real-estate people deplore; but to her was part of
a deep content that came on her as she drove back to her
apartment" (294). Watching a happy child, realizing the
changes that time has wrought, getting away from the
acting community and at the same time reconnecting with
an honestly engaging moment in her life— all this gives
her both a new and a clarified perspective.
The implication seems to be that in order to see
life in Hollywood properly one must be some distance away
from its center. Hilton always had trouble separating
Hollywood from Los Angeles, something he needed to do
because, as he said, "Hollywood is too far from
America. . . . I want to live in America. I want to
write about it. _You can^t get_the feel of it from
Hollywood. So I came to Long Beach."7 As he told
7 Hilton, as quoted in Dan MacMasters, "Big Room
and a Small House," Los Angeles Times Home Magazine,
n.d., p. 3. Files of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library, Beverly Hills.
160
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, "I find Long Beach a
much more typical American town."8 Yet for all this
there are precious few references in the Hilton novels to
aspects of life in Los Angeles outside the sphere of the
Hollywood community. He speaks, for instance, of
. . . the geographical heartlessness of the city,
the miles of streets where nobody walked, the rigid
charm of the professionally decorated interiors, the
air of insecurity that was more sinister, somehow,
than the perhaps greater insecurity of stage life.
(294)
By contrast the studio back lot— that reconstructed two
dimensional version of the world— seems more alive than
the city itself does, and it is clear that Hilton is
suggesting that Hollywood professionals experience real
confusion between the real and the illusory:
The studio was the real world— or rather, an unreal
world which she explored sometimes. . . . The maze
of streets and alleys there, where one could step
from brownstone New York to Elizabethan England in a
few seconds, the stranded Pullman on the two-
hundred-yard track, the small-town main street with
its false-fronted store buildings— all this was
fascinating, a symbol (Paul said) of a world in
which emotions themselves were false-fronted, . . .
and in which the symbols of life become substitutes
for life itself. (280)
8 Hilton, as quoted in Hedda Hopper, "James Hilton
Making Bid for Citizenship, " Los Angeles Times, 9 Jan
1948, n. pag., Files of Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences Library.
161
Despite all the nice things he said publicly about
the community, Hilton sees the special kind of loneliness
of the Hollywood life:
The peculiarity of this film environment was that
one could live in a large American city week after
week without feeling intimate with it, without even
feeling it was part of America. The apartment Carey
had was of standardized luxury, the restaurants she
patronized catered to people like herself, the
morning and evening travel in the studio limousine
was through streets that all looked the same, with
the same stores and billboards, the same shadow and
sunshine. Even the ocean was somehow disappointing
as an ocean. But she loved the mountains twenty or
thirty miles away, and solely to drive to them
whenever she had a few hours to spare she rented a
rather smart convertible. (279)
She takes a convertible for the drive, of course, but
other than that Los Angeles is just as lonely and even
ultimately boring as wherever one came from— perhaps even
more so because it is supposedly so glamorous, and isn't.
The mountains of the area garner Hilton's highest
praise as they attract his protagonists.
The thought of leaving the city and driving into the
mile-high mountains lifted her spirit. . . . The
mountains heaved into outlines against the
blue-black sky? it was the smell of manzanita that
crossed the roadway in gusts; the eyes of tiny
animals blinked out of their secret populated world.
(Morning Journey, 323-24)
Carey, like Jane and Brad in Nothing So Strange,
achieves a kind of solace from being in the relatively
162
unpopulated parts of Southern California. When she is in
the central area, Carey projects her cinematic anxieties
on those she comes in contact with: "On the day these
critiques were reprinted in the trade papers Carey could
sense an almost barometric change in the local
atmosphere. She could even believe that at her usual
restaurant the smile of the head-waiter had an extra
obsequiousness" (298).
By the time Hilton wrote Morning Journey in 1951
(just five years before his death), he was clearly
prepared to be more critical of Hollywood, at least in
his fiction; he put dissenting statements into the mouths
of his characters, but public statements issued in his
own voice remained positive.9 Criticism of the cinema
world in Los Angeles comes early in the novel: the
Prologue opens at a Critics' Dinner where the lead actors
and the director of the film "Morning Journey" are being
presented with the year's awards. There are, in effect,
9 Frank Eng, writing in the Daily News on 8
December 1948, talks about Hilton and makes a series of
negative statements about Hollywood. It is unclear just
how much of this is really Hilton and how much Eng:
"Aside from the fact that he can afford to, living
'simply' as he avers in Long Beach (a truly American
community as distinguished from the ersatz veneer and
composition of filmland), he maintains that the 'co
efficient of pleasure' he derives from working in
Hollywood is not sufficient to warrant the effort."
163
two Hilton alter-ego figures at the dinner. The first is
attorney George Hare, through whose eyes the events of
the dinner are recorded. Hare is the Apollonian Hilton
persona, the one who looks on Hollywood as "a place to
earn a living, a place also in which he had found
friends" (7). But Hilton for the first time formulates a
Dionysian repsonse. When his turn comes, Paul Saffron,
the director who may perhaps be speaking for Hilton
himself who, after receiving the industry's highest
honor, may still feel himself unworthy, delivers a
scathing denunciation:
As for 'Morning Journey,' I have this to say, and as
an artist I must say it, that the picture you have
so extravagantly praised and undeservedly honored is
a product of the gigantic factory that does for
entertainment what Henry Ford has done for
automobiles. A competent picture— oh yes. A clever
picture— perhaps. But a great picture? . . . Oh
dear no, let us save that word for some occasion
when it might possibly be needed— even here. But it
has been needed here— in earlier days. Griffith
could have claimed the word— and Chaplin— perhaps a
few others whose names are less well known, perhaps
a few whose names are by now completely forgotten.
(7)
One who has studied Hilton's life in Los Angeles and his
continuing fine relationship to the studios cannot help
thinking that a great deal Hilton himself wanted to say
but couldn't comes out through the mouth of Paul Saffron.
Saffron's statement has an immediate and devastating
164
impact on the whole film community; by the next morning
Paul is unreachable and word is out that Carey Arundel,
the female lead in the picture and his former wife, has
gone off with him.
Then Part One begins, which goes back over twenty-
five years to the time that Paul and Carey first meet in
Ireland. Hilton paints Paul as something of a Jamesian
American abroad. Lest the reader should miss the point,
an Irish multi-millionaire brewery owner calls Paul "a
young American— tabula rasa" and tells him, "You're not
world-broken" (56). So the contrast is set up between
the bitter older Paul of the opening and the idealistic
young Paul who "discovers" Carey driving a cart on a road
in the Irish countryside— one of those classic theatrical
discoveries.10 After successfully directing plays, most
often with Carey in starring roles, in both London and
New York, Paul begins making films in Europe where he is,
for the most part, able to retain complete control over
the process. These are notable artistic though not
economic successes. Carey hears of him through her
10 One is reminded of the creation of Hollywood
star Angela Devlin out of young Biddy Murphy in Liam
O'Flaherty's Hollywood Cemetery. She too was discovered
in the Irish countryside. Curiously, the author of the
work in which Biddy is supposed to star is named Carey.
One wonders if Hilton, over fifteen years later, was
conscious of the connections.
165
stepson Norris, a young film buff, who does not know that
she was once married to Paul— for by then she is married
to stable financier Austen Bond, another Apollonian set
in contrast to Paul's Dionysian extremism. After the
Second World War, Paul returns to the United States
impoverished but full of ideas. He is rumored to have
been something of a collaborator in Europe and has to
grovel for backers for his films. Using her good name
and connections, Carey is able to arrange for Paul to
direct "Morning Journey" in Hollywood as long as she
consents to star in the picture herself. Austen objects,
but she has grown frustrated with his covert regulation
of her life and determines to go ahead with her first
movie project despite his objections. The remainder of
the novel takes place in Los Angeles.
Paul is prejudiced against the film and Los Angeles
in general from the start. First there was that year in
the Twenties he has repressed, "that year in Los Angeles
(for Hollywood had not yet become the magnetic,
polarising name), the year he had tried to crash the
picture industry on the ground floor, and it would have
none of him" (325). Then he has told a derogatory story
during the intervening years about a trip to Los Angeles
in which he tried to discover Hollywood:
166
When once he had been stranded in Los Angeles for a
few hours he had been curious enough to ask a
taximan to drive him around Hollywood, but the
expedition had covered such dreary territory that he
could only (in fairness to such a world-famous name)
conclude that the driver must have lost his way.
(105)
Such anti-Hollywood stories are frequently the stock-in-
trade of those who find themselves, either by choice or
by an inability to make it, outside the Southern
California film world. And this novel shows Hollywood as
a "set" community with clear norms of behavior and
limitations for each role in the studio hierarchy: the
screenwriters (with whom Paul has his most bitter
fights), the musicians ("Petrillo's union"), the
publicity departments, etc. Against all this Paul
struggles as a loner, attempting to circumvent the system
and prevail as Super Director.
At times it seems that the whole book becomes a
vehicle for Hilton to expound his philosophy about
acting, acting theory, directing, in fact all phases of
motion picture making, for Paul's "speeches" are given
the most prominent places in the novel— at the beginning
(before the flashback), in key places throughout, and
then again at the end. Paul is clearly The Artist
attempting to come to grips with Hollywood; what, in
speaking of other authors, Jonas Spatz in Hollywood in
167
Fiction refers to as the Thalberg image, "the one man
able to maintain his integrity while earning the acclaim
of the philistines."11 , As Artist and Wunderkind, emblem
of the Dionysian spirit at work, Paul is erratic,
temperamental, utterly incapable of fitting into the
motion picture milieu, really the opposite of the artist
who succeeds in Hollywood as Hilton described him (see
above) in 193 6. He refuses to "pay his dues" to the
prime movers and chooses instead to mock the success the
community accords him, pleading eloquently for the role
of Independent Director. His "indictment against the
whole industrialized picture industry" is, from a larger
perspective, an indictment against modern society as a
whole:
He said that to breed art and keep it alive there
should be a continual mutiny of ideas. 'But there
isn't any here. This place is swarming with
craftsmen who might have been artists if only they'd
stayed away. And everybody's scared— scared of each
other, of the future, of gossip columns, of ulcers,
of the public, of Washington, of censorship— there's
something gets into the blood from being scared of
so many things all the time. . . . These folks are
afraid for their lives, they've built themselves a
concentration camp that they're all fighting to stay
inside— a damned democratic de luxe concentration
camp.' (303)
11 Jonas Spatz, Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions
of the American Myth (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 88.
168
Hilton puts into the mouth of this pivotal character many
of the negative feelings he no doubt experienced either
first or second-hand during his years in the movie
capital. But then characteristically he softens the
blow. After such a powerfully-affecting and articulate
statement, how bizarre it is that the novel concludes
just a short time later with Carey comforting a sad, sick
and effectually spent Paul Saffron in a roadside hotel
outside of town! Perhaps the implication is that such a
denunciation of Hollywood in his own voice would render
Hilton powerless by making him a pariah in the community.
Just as Hilton was never-again to write a novel about
Hollywood,12 Paul, after having said his piece, appears
to be physically incapable of making another film.
In decided contrast to Chandler's women, both of
Hilton's Los Angeles novels have highly positive female
protagonists who reflect and resolve the story of
brilliant but misunderstood men for whom they ultimately
gives up more lucrative or worldly-prestigious offers.
At -the same time both novels incorporate relationships
between idealized but unobtainable older women and the
12 In 1952 when he made his first trip to England
since World War II Hilton began writing about Britain
again, as John K. Hutchens reports in "On An Author," New
York Herald Tribune Book Review , 27 September 1953, p.
3 .
169
somewhat emotionally-wounded younger man who reveres her:
Jane Waring's mother-Mark Bradley in Nothing So Strange
and Carey Arundel-Norris Bond in Morning Journey. Though
neither older woman ever forms a permanent romantic
attachment to the younger man, the relationship is a
catalyst to her realization of all that is missing in her
socially and financially successful but emotionally
unsatisfactory marriage.
The need for individual integrity as a defense
against the devastating aspects of our own culture is
finally Hilton's message. He makes this point in Morning
Journey by quoting Diaghileff: "The culture that has been
created by us will sweep us away," unless, as he told
reporter Jane Voiles of the Los Angeles Times in 1951, we
employ individual integrity as "the only defense we have
against this ruin."13 In the same year Hilton discussed
the future of the novel with another newspaper reporter:
The novel, as an art form, is in the process of
decay. . . . Because of the impact of current
events, novelists find it increasingly difficult to
write convincing fiction. The readers expect much
more from a novel than they formerly did. To
13 Jane Voiles, "Hilton's Hollywood, Los Angeles
Times, 9 March 1951, n. pag., Files of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
170
succeed, it must come to grips with some vital
problems. 4
With Morning Journey did Hilton in fact write the
Hollywood novel as Chandler envisioned it? The answer is
unclear. Some critics think so; Charles Lee, writing in
the New York Times Book Review, said:
The author's picture of Hollywood is drawn with a
kind of affectionate malice. He writes of stars,
producers, authors, actors, gossips, party givers
and ulcers, and he gives the reader a new
understanding of the intricate processes of motion
picture making. . . . He makes many shrewd comments
about the highly complex inter-relationships among
actors, writers, audiences and directors. 5
This is, after all, what Chandler said the Hollywood
novel should do: it should be "about a process, a very
living and terrible and lovely process, the making of a
single picture."16 But looking at it from another
perspective, it is not a Hollywood novel because it
really does not focus on the place and the making of the
picture. Rather, it is a novel which just happens to
14 Walter L. Scratch, "Hilton Pays Tribute to
Publishers," Hollywood Citizen News, 2 6 February 1951, n.
pag., Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library.
15 Charles Lee, "Flickering Lights," New York Times
Book Review, 18 Feb. 1951, n. pag., Files of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
16 See the Chandler chapter.
171
have Hollywood as the glamorous background to its
climactic section (Part V). The focus is entirely on
personality and plot with locale in a minor position, and
with Hollywood here as an emblem of all that attempts to
defeat Paul. Kingsley Widmer, in an article entitled
"The Hollywood Image," classifies Hilton as a
"sentimental realist" in "the genteel-thin competence of
[his] image of a 'democratic deluxe concentration
camp.'"17
Mark Twain split two aspects of himself into Tom and
Huck: the one who, though occasionally naughty, basically
goes along with the establishment position, and the other
who tries the socially-accepted way for a while but
cannot abide it and finally strikes off on his own. But
as Twain was never able to live the Huck role, to openly
defy the society that supported him, Hilton too never
became a Paul Saffron. Certainly he was no purist. For
example he did not look on screen adaptations of his
works as violations but rather as a way of opening up his
ideas to thousands or even millions who would not
17 Kingsley Widmer, "The Hollywood Image,"
Coastlines 17, 5, No.l (1961), p. 19.
172
otherwise have them available.18 There remains a nagging
feeling about Hilton that he was happy in Hollywood
because he was willing to compromise and avoid becoming
offensive. His Hollywood scenes never touched on sexual
impropriety, for example, though they were the stock-in-
trade, even came to be assumed of, almost every Hollywood
novelist. The Fulton-Griffiths' parties he describes in
Morning Journey are outrageously ostentatious, like
Gatsby's, but never explicitly vulgar. They planted
servants among the guests— to ferret out problems ahead
of time. The rooms were air-conditioned, though the
windows were wide open, and thereby "contrived an
enchantment." What he offers as a Hollywood party is
very circumspect, "an evening out of a travel folder,
with starlit sky and floodlit lawns to aid the
illusion. . . that the cream of civilization had
coagulated here and would make excellent cheese" (319) .
There is an episode in Morning Journey where Paul and
actor Greg Wilson go off for a period of weeks together.
That it may be a homosexual relationship is never so much
as hinted at, though both men return buoyant and
professionally dedicated to one another.
18 Hilton, "Horizons Lost and Found, Stage,
February 1937, p. 42, Files of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences Library
173
Apparently Hilton was never a part of the British
emigre writers community in Los Angeles, the group
including Huxley and Isherwood and inspired by poet and
philosopher Gerald Heard.19 He chose rather to align
himself with the Hollywood inner circle, remarking at one
time that he wished "the world as a whole were run as
well as a studio."20 Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips
demonstrate that Hilton's fictional perspective is
characterized by a rather naive and idealistic look at
the future21 and a nostalgic view of the past. Of Los
Angeles he said, for instance,
I should like to have lived here fifty years
ago. . . . That seems to have been a quieter, more
gracious time. Its architecture reflected it.
19 Evidence for a link is found in Grace Hubble's
diary entry of April 17, 1936? Grace and Edwin Hubble,
who became very close friends of Aldous and Maria Huxley,
were at a dinner party with Hilton and his first wife a
year prior to the time the Huxleys moved to California.
Grace Hubble, unpublished diary for 1936, Huntington
Library.
20 Hilton, "Hollywood/ Movies, and the Novelist,"
p. 6.
21 In a speech "A Commentary on Our Times" given at
The Modern Forum of Los Angeles on 11 November 1940, he
said: "To me as an Englishman who loves America, one
thing is today the brightest hope in a pretty hopeless
world. It is the emerging shape of something that may
eventually be born. . . . The beginning of the
consolidation of a new empire of faith and purpose— an
empire not yet aware of its own physical frontiers but
only of the boundlessness of its dreams."
174
People had then turned away from gingerbread
Victorian. They had not yet taken up with Spanish,
Mediterranean, Tudor and what have you. Their
California bungalows were of their own creation,
practical and handsome in their modest way. They
still are.22
The rest of the British literary community was willing to
be more deeply critical of Los Angeles even while many of
them chose to live out the rest of their lives there.
History has shown that Hilton's reputation was at
its height during his own lifetime. Though he wrote a
number of popular novels and screenplays, won several
literary awards as well as an Oscar, had a highly
successful radio dramatization series in California, and
made a great deal of money, thirty years after his death
he is virtually unknown. No one has written his
biography nor are there any scholarly articles published
about his work. But he did set two of his novels in
Southern California, and by so doing Hilton added his
name to the elite list of twentieth-century British
authors who chose to focus their art for a time on an
environment far different from their homeland.
22 MacMasters, Home.
175
Jam es H i l t o n B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Sources
Novels
Nothing So Strange. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947.
Morning Journey. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951.
Lectures
"A Commentary on Our Times." Lecture given before The
Modern Forum of Los Angeles, 11 November 1940.
15 pp.
"Mr. Chips Looks at the World." Lecture given before
The Modern Forum of Los Angeles, December, 1939.
15 pp.
Articles
"Hollywood, Movies, and The Novelist." Entertainment
World, 1 November 1969, p. 6.
"Horizons Lost and Found." Stage, February 1937, p. 42.
Secondary Sources
Dickson, Lovat. "James Hilton." Dictionary of National
Biography 1951-60, edited by E. T. Williams and
Helen M. Palmer. London: Oxford University Press,
1971. 478-79.
Eng, Frank. Column in the Daily News, 8 December 1948.
Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library.
Hopper, Hedda. "James Hilton Making Bid for
Citizenship." Los Angeles Times, 9 December 1948,
n. pag. Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences Library.
Hubble, Grace. Personal Diary for 1936. Hubble Papers,
Huntington Library.
176
Hutchens, John K. "On An Author." New York Herald
Tribune Book Review, 27 September 1953, p. 3.
Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library.
"James Hilton." Current Biography 1942, ed. Maxine
Block. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942. 372-74.
Lee, Charles. "Flickering Lights." New York Times Book
Review, February 18, 1951, n. pag. Files of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
MacMasters, Dan. "Big Room and a Small House." Los
Angeles Times Home Magazine, n.d., p. 3. Files of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Library.
Scratch, Walter L. "Hilton Pays Tribute to Publishers."
Hollywood Citizen News, February 26, 1951, n. pag.
Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library.
Spatz, Jonas. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the
American Myth. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
Voiles, Jane. "Hilton's Hollywood." Los Angeles Times
March 9, 1951, n. pag. Files of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
Widmer, Kingsley. "The Hollywood Image." Coastlines 17,
5, No. 1 (1961), 17-27.
177
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The deserts began to flourish. Groves of lemons and
oranges flanked the railway. There were vineyards,
and fields of corn, and bright flowers. Parallel
with the sea, a range of elegant and florid
mountains mimicked the Apuan Alps. A little
architecture, and the illusion would have been
complete. But there were no churches, no huge pink
villas among the cypresses, no castles on the hills.
Nothing but wooden shanties and little brick dog
kennels, dust heaps and oil tanks and telegraph
poles, and the innumerable motor-cars of the most
prosperous country in the world.1
Born in England in 1894, Aldous Huxley was already a
well-established British novelist by the time he had his
first glimpse of Los Angeles from the train window in
192 6. Though he eventually found it salubrious and came
to consider it his home, his initial response to Southern
California was not very promising.
In only one published document, Jesting Pilate
(1926), a record of his nearly year-long global journey,
did Huxley focus exclusively on the city of Los Angeles
itself as a subject. In thirteen pages he chronicles
his impressions of his first trip to Los Angeles in May
of 1926. The details of this travel narrative underscore
the bleakness of Huxley's first response to the area— a
1 A ld o u s H u x l e y , Jesting Pilate (New Y ork: G e o rg e
H. D oran , 1 9 2 6 ) , p. 293. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s t o t h i s
w ork a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t .
178
beautiful terrain he perceives to be dominated by
industrial blight and base living conditions. He enters
the city by rail from San Francisco, having spent the
previous month crossing the Pacific from the Orient.
While still aboard the train, in the passage quoted
above, he is struck by Southern California's resemblance
to Italy, except for the architecture. Yet churches and
villa-like homes were to grace the Los Angeles landscape
Huxley came to know, and he would himself create an
imaginative castle on the hill.
The section which follows the train window view is
called "Los Angeles. A Rhapsody." Rhapsodies are
traditionally written from a somewhat ecstatic
perspective, as this one is; and, like the musical form,
it is divided into movements.
The First Movement is a day at the studio— at that
time motion pictures were still silent. The
juxtaposition of sunshine and death occupies Huxley right
from the beginning. Amidst the bright California
daylight, what he notes first of all is the death imagery
within the studio itself. The artificial lights make the
actors look like "jaundiced corpses"— he is already
179
making connections between studios and mortuaries2— and
the cinematic expression "shoot" is the ultimate focus of
those workers on the set. The sound of the camera in
motion is likened to "a genteel variety of dentist's
drill." He discovers that contrived and even fraudulent
emotions are aroused by musicians playing on the set in
much the same way that the Southern California cemetery
attempts to manipulate the visitor in Huxley's novel
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan a little more than a
decade later. Between takes, the star reads a book on
Theosophy, thus introducing here the subject of the more
atypical religious alternatives in Southern California
that he mentions a number of times in the rhapsody and
that Huxley was to give so much attention to later on.
Here in Jesting Pilate religion emerges as one of Los
Angeles's major commercial enterprises. The rest of his
day at the studio he experiences other mysteries of the
make believe world. That it is some sort of secret
society he suggests by revealing that "we pronounced
passwords, quoted the Manager's permission, disclaimed
connections with rival companies and were finally
admitted" (295). By capitalization he shows the godlike
2 Evelyn Waugh makes the same connection in The
Loved One, published twenty-two years after Jesting
Pilate.
180
quality of the decision-makers, e.g. the Director or the
Manager, as above. To substantiate this he tells the
reader,
In one room they were concocting miracles and
natural cataclysms— typhoons in bathtubs and
miniature earthquakes, the Deluge, the Dividing of
the Red Sea, the Great War in terms of toy tanks and
Chinese fire crackers, ghosts and the Next World.
In another they were modelling prehistoric animals
and the architecture of the remote future. (295)
Time is collapsed; and man's greatest natural dramas and
the great events of his history are demeaned by being
reduced to child's play. He concludes this movement with
the wry remark that the studio is a veritable production
line of "art and culture" for the masses; "I forget how
many thousands of feet of art and culture they could turn
out each day. Quite a number of miles in any case"
(296).
The Second Movement is almost entirely devoted to a
reading and response to the Saturday newspaper's "whole
page . . . filled with the announcements of rival
religious sects, advertising the spiritual wares that
they would give away, or sell on the Sabbath." Again,
Huxley uses hypercapitalization to show the puffery of
their claims: "Miss Leila Cast-berg [Hollywood, no doubt]
of the Church of Divine Power [they can part the Red Sea,
181
too] . . .(Advanced Thought) [only the latest,
naturally— nothing old] is scheduled to preach at the
Morosco Theatre [it is showbiz, anyway] on Divine
Motherhood" (296). In addition Huxley laces the text
with clipped sentences of jazz hype:
Keep moving. Step on the gas. Say it with dancing.
The charleston, the Baptists. Radios and Revivals.
Uplift and Gilda Gray. . . . Hymns and the movies
and Irving Berlin. Petting Parties and the First
Free United Episcopal Methodist Church. Jazz it upI
(297-98)
Los Angeles women are described in the Third
Movement. Though it is Mother's Day weekend, Huxley
maintains that "in Joy City there are many more
Flappers— married as well as unmarried— than Mothers."
Fun and flapperdom take precedence over responsibility.
He, Robert Nichols, and Charlie Chaplin see beautiful
women everywhere as they walk along the beach, but Huxley
suspects their fulsomely displayed bodies are filled with
air, what both he and T. S. Eliot refer to as "pneumatic
bliss" (298-99).
In the Fourth Movement, the hectic emptiness of the
city becomes the subject. First there are bootlegged
cocktails, followed by a long drive to nowhere in the
sprawling, swarming "City of Dreadful Joy" where movement
182
itself is seen as a pleasure by people who are dedicated
'•to having a Good Time!" It is a town, he declares, where
•'thought is barred . . . and conversation is unknown,"
where people are "too rich to doubt" (3 00-01).
The Fifth and final movement takes place in a
restaurant where here again everything is done on an
outlandish scale— and Huxley's satire rises to the
delightfully absurd. The portions: "Great ten pound
chops, square feet of steaks, fillets of whales, whole
turkeys stewed in cream." A surfeit, however:
How Rabelais would have adored it! For a week, at
any rate. After that, I am afraid, he would have
begun to miss the conversation and the learning,
which serve in his Abbey of Thelema as the
accompaniment and justification of pleasure. This
Western pleasure, meaty and raw, untempered by any
mental sauce— would even Rabelais's unsqueamish
stomach have been strong enough to digest it? I
doubt it. In the City of Dreadful Joy Pantagruel
would soon have died of fatigue and boredom. (3 02-
OS)
After the meal, the movement concludes with the singer
performing under "a great beam of light, like the Eye of
God in an old engraving" which is then followed by more
frenetic dancing. Almost like Cinderella, as an intruder
on a world he doesn't belong to, he cuts out at midnight.
"It is time to go home. Farewell, farewell. Parting is
such sweet sorrow" (304). For a city that seems to have
183
little appreciation of traditional culture, a cliched
quotation from Shakespeare provides an appropriate
conclusion to the Rhapsody— and Huxley's first visit to
Los Angeles.
On the train across the United States between Los
Angeles and Chicago, on May 13, 192 6, he wrote the
following note to his friend Robert Nichols, an English
poet whom he had visited during this first trip to
Southern California:
How delightful it was to see you again, my dear Bob,
after all these years--and how still more delightful
to think that you will soon be returning to
civilization. Hollywood is too altogether
antipodean to be lived in? it gives you no chance of
escape. Italy seems to me to be clearly indicated.3
In the next city he visits in Jesting Pilate—
Chicago— Huxley takes up the issue of the funeral
business in America by reading a page of advertising from
the Chicago telephone directory. So the bizarre nature
of the America funeral industry that he first observed in
the Middle West, he later located as a phenomenon
3 "To Robert Nichols," 13 May 1926, Letter 246,
Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 269.
184
particularly characteristic of Southern California.4 By
turning their trade of undertaking into the profession of
"mortician" (which sounds like physician) and combining
it with the Christian notion of Service, the Kalbsfleisch
Cemetery Unusual becomes a forerunner of the Beverly
Pantheon, and Huxley uses its advertising to exemplify
the "falsification of the standard of values" in the
democratic world (310).
Had circumstances not drawn him back to Los Angeles
some eleven years later, Jesting Pilate might be all that
Huxley would have written about Southern California.
Unlike some of the other writers in this study— it was
not until he returned to live there that he used it as a
background landscape for a work of fiction.
The Jesting Pilate journey actually prepared Huxley
for a return to Los Angeles. While in Chicago in 1926 he
had thoroughly enj oyed both the Anita Loos' novel
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and a dramatization of it. He
immediately wrote to her and proposed a meeting during
the brief time that he and his wife Maria would be in New
York— and thus began a lifelong friendship. In 1937, the
Huxleys were in Taos, New Mexico visiting Frieda
4 A number of his relatives and friends have
reported that Forest Lawn was the first stop on what
became the standard Huxley tour of Los Angeles.
185
Lawrence5 when Anita Loos encouraged him to go on to
Hollywood to take up an exceedingly lucrative
screenwriting position. At the time the first talking
picture, The Jazz Singer, came out in 1927, Huxley had
denounced both film and sound in an essay called "Silence
is Golden." Jacob Zeitlin, who was also at Freida
Lawrence’s In 1937, reports that Huxley was extremely
reluctant to accept the job, but Loos "convinced him that
he could help a great many of his friends in Europe who
were suffering from Hitler, or who were suffering from
the war in Great Britain, with the money that he was
earning. That, of course, had great weight with him."6
For Huxley as for many of the British writers in this
study, screen money was always there, waiting, a
temptation that in time became irresistible to him."7
Though his personal wants were of modest proportions, he
could help so many others with the Hollywood money that
he finally agreed to it. As Lawrence Clark Powell
5 Huxley was the literary executor of the D. H.
Lawrence estate.
6 Jake Zeitlin, Books and The Imagination: Fifty
Years of Rare Books, interviewed by Joel Gardner (Los
Angeles: Regents of University of California, Oral
History Program, 1980), I, 192.
7 Tom Dardis, Some Time in the Sun (New York:
Scribner's, 1976), p. 13.
186
remembers, "It was a combination of world events, family
need, climate, libraries and friendships that brought
Aldous Huxley back to Southern California and kept him
based here for the rest of his life."8
Right from the beginning, both he and Maria felt
decidedly more positive about the city than they had in
1926. His friend Jacob Zeitlin, a Los Angeles rare book
dealer who was instrumental in arranging for the Huxleys'
return trip to the area in 1937, wrote to a Los Angeles
Times theatrical critic contradicting something he had
written and telling about the change in Huxley's views of
the city:
Rather than looking down his nose at Southern
California and Hollywood, he was quite definitely
impressed and most enthusiastic about what was
taking place and its possibilities. He expressed
himself as believing that Los Angeles had the
possibility of becoming one of the greatest cities
in the world and his reactions to a great many of
the small every-day facts of our life here were
kindly and enthusiastic.
On October 13, 1937, after the first six weeks of their
return trip, Maria wrote:
8 Lawrence Clark Powell, California Classics (Santa
Barbara: Capra Press, 1971), p. 362.
9 Jacob Zeitlin, Letter to Philip K. Scheuer, 6
December 1937, Huxley Archives, Box 1 file 2a, UCLA
Special Collections.
187
It is like a permanent International Exhibition.
The buildings are ravishing, fantastic and flimsy.
They are all surrounded by green lawns, and high
palm trees and flowering hibiscus and to finish it
off the population wear fancy dress costume, or
rather, in the hot weather, fancy-undress costume
and everyone looks happy and cheerful.10
In this passage she points out so many of the qualities
that attracted the Europeans to Los Angeles: the always-
on-show atmosphere, both in terms of architecture and
fashion, with little emphasis on subtlety and tradition.
But just a month later she expressed a feeling of
estrangement, the cheeriness had worn thin, and it seems
they thought of leaving Southern California again:
Well, the Hollywood adventure is over. I loved it.
We were very amused, very interested and very
cheerful and very well. . . yet we are leaving it
because it does not seem the place for us to settle
down in. . . . This here [California] is so far. So
far, I suppose from Europe, or from New York or from
I don't know what but it feels far.11
Maria's comment sounds a good deal like Huxley's own use
of the word "antipodean” to describe life in Los Angeles
in the 1926 letter to Robert Nichols quoted above.
Antipodean, after all, refers to something diametrically
opposite, situated on the opposite side of the globe.
10 Letters, pp. 425-26.
11 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, I
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 351.
188
Huxley and his friend Gerald Heard, an English
philosopher, set off at that time on a lecture tour; but
Heard only got as far as Iowa, where he broke his leg.
The Huxleys continued on to New York, but by January of
193 8 were ready to return to Los Angeles to see Heard12—
and, finally, to settle down. This time Maria wrote that
people in the East "are more like English and freezing.
But here we have some Mediterranean ease and kindness.1,13
Huxley himself, in saying in those days that they had
determined to stay in Los Angeles, was rather amazingly
prophetic; "We might travel inwardly instead of
outwardly."14 Huxley with Heard did explore the
spiritual life, making contact with Swami Prabhavananda
and striking up a long relationship with Krishnamurti.
12 Aldous Huxley, Letter to Jake Zeitlin, 10
January 1938, Huxley Archives, Box 1 file 2a, UCLA
Special Collections.
13 Bedford, I, 3 61. The Huxleys had always loved
Italy, so anything "Mediterranean" was to be taken as a
compliment. In giving Grace Hubble directions on June
28, 1939 to the house the Huxleys had rented on Amalfi
Drive in Pacific Palisades, Maria wrote: "It comes after
avenues with names that make one melancholy for things we
loved and have left but would not be sweet any more
ever— such as Napoli and Corsica and Toulon— and really
California is still calmer and quieter. And it is
beautiful and it has been kind and anyway we do like it"
(Hubble Papers, Huntington Library).
14 Bedford, I, 376.
189
It was not until 1953, however, that Huxley took mescalin
for the first time.
Something else held Huxley in Los Angeles. As an
adolescent he had been stricken with an attack of
keratitis punctata, which left him blind for well over a
year. Later he was able to recover some of his sight,
but it was not until he came to Los Angeles and began
following the Bates method for training the eyes that he
was able to make significant improvements in his vision.
When asked just a few years before his death why he had
settled in California, he gave the vision training as his
first response: "I found someone who could help me with
my vision. . . . The climate suited me very well. . . . I
see better in a bright climate than in a dark one and I
feel better in a warm climate than a cold one."15
Because of the limitations of his sight, Huxley was
never able to participate in that great Los Angeles
preoccupation of automobile driving. Both his wives— for
Maria died of cancer in 1955, and he married Laura
Archera a year later— were called upon to chauffeur him
about. No doubt because of this limitation, "walking was
his favorite entertainment," and his biography is filled
15 Aldous Huxley Speaking Personally, Caedmon
Cassette CDL 52074, Recorded July 7 and 11, 1961,
Copyright 1963.
190
with charming anecdotes of situations he encountered
while doing that most un-Angelino-1ike activity of
walking. Anita Loos remembers how Huxley led their
social group, composed of Gerald Heard, Christopher
Isherwood, Edwin Hubble (astronomer, theorist of the
expanding universe), Grace Hubble, Charlie Chaplin,
Paulette Goddard, and Greta Garbo, on all number of
exciting treks. Once the Huxleys arranged a pot luck
costume picnic in the Los Angeles river bed with a number
of other celebrities including Chaplin and Krishnamurti
which was broken up by police who mistook them for a
bunch of vagrants or gypsies. They were all influenced
by Huxley’s passion for walking. As Anita Loos says,
"Those walks, by the way, set us apart from the majority
of Southern Californians, who are so dependent on
wheels.
Huxley granted an interview to the Library of Living
Journalism at UCLA, and an extract from that interchange
is relevant to this discussion:
Q: Mr. Huxley, Los Angeles is regarded by many of
its critics as being the epitome of all the worst
aspects of the chrome-and-neon civilization of the
United States. Now, it seems rather strange that a
person like yourself who has such a sharp eye for
16 Anita Loos, "Aldous Huxley in California,"
Harper's, 228 (May 1964), 52.
191
these tinsely things— and an acid pen for them
also— would come here to live.
A: Well, in spite of everything, it has many
merits, this extraordinary town. . . . Obviously
something is happening which you just can’t
foresee. . . . Until it gets 200 miles long and 100
miles wide, I think it's going to be all right.
And, of course everything is here. The most
fantastic and absurd things are here, but a lot of
extremely interesting things are here. You can meet
here very, very interesting people. They're all
here, scattered about in this immense
conglomeration.17
Christopher Isherwood recalls that
The Huxleys were great connoisseurs of doctors; it
sometimes seemed to their friends that they were
prepared to consult absolutely anyone, at least
once, in a spirit of disinterested
experimentation. . . . [His neighbors] laughed at
him for consulting unlicensed healers and
investigating psychic phenomena. 8
One of the reasons Huxley continued to be so happy in Los
Angeles was that it appealed to the basic eclectic nature
of his personality. As Anita Loos puts it:
No place in the world provides as much food for
laughter as Los Angeles and its environs: its
extraordinary assortment of kooks and goons? its
fantastic religious cults? the Four Square Gospel of
17 Huxley, Library of Living Journalism, 18 March
1957, conducted by Marion Brennan, Carman, Havs, Wayne
Johnson and Joe Morgan, UCLA Special Collections, p. 24.
18 Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley: 1894-1963
A Memorial Volume, ed. Julian Huxley (New York: Harper
and Row, 1965), p. 157.
192
Aimee Semple McPherson, the Holy Rollers, and the
Great I Am were a constant source of amazement and
delight to Aldous. He took as much pleasure in
speculating about these cults as their devotees did
in practicing them.19
In the Huxley Memorial Volume edited by his brother
Julian Huxley, Robert M. Hutchins, Gerald Heard and
Humphry Osmond all corroborate this view. Hutchins
suggests that ’ ’ the man of letters is tempted to live too
exclusively in only a few of the universes to which he
has access. . . . This is a temptation to which Aldous
never yielded."20 Gerald Heard put it a little
differently: "Beside the Sciences and Arts, his curiosity
was aroused by those innumerable quirks and oddities of
man. . . . [His mind was an] amalgam of curiosity with
skepticism. . . . He enjoyed the strange and the
anomalous."21 And finally, Humphrey Osmond, the
psychiatrist who first introduced Huxley to mescalin,
says: "I never ceased to be astounded and delighted by
the range, boldness, flexibility and sheer playfulness of
his splendid mind." He speaks of their discussions of
the serious and trivial while visiting Forest Lawn,
19 Loos, p. 52.
20 Robert M. Hutchins, Memorial Volume, p. 99.
21 Heard, Memorial Volume, p. 101.
193
gossiping about Los Angeles's water supply system, and
while on shopping expeditions to Ohrbach's department
store where Huxley introduced Osmond to what he called
"the art of escalator somatyping."22 It is easy to see
that the often bizarre amalgam that is Los Angeles was in
itself a reflection of Huxley's own mind and had
particular appeal to the satirist within him.
The Huxley home became a regular stopping place for
visiting British literary notables. When the literary
critic Cyril Connolly came to Los Angeles, he was amazed
at how well his friend had adapted, something he knew he
himself could not do. He spoke of his impressions:
The California climate and food creates giants but
not genius, but Huxley has filled out into a kind of
Apollonian majesty; he radiates both intelligence
and serene goodness, and is the best possible
testimony to the simple life he leads and the faith
he believes in, the only English writer, I think, to
have wholly benefited by the transplantation and
whom one feels exquisitely refreshed by meeting. 3
22 Osmond, Memorial Volume, pp. 116-17, 119.
Huxley "was keenly interested in the relationship between
physique and temperament and was a close friend of Dr.
William Sheldon, one of the notable pioneers in this
field. . . . People on escalators are unselfconscious,
unaware of scrutiny and at their ease. As we were wafted
by them passing in the opposite direction, Aldous would
call out, 'Humphrey, did you see that marvellously
somatotonic woman with the Aztec features?'"
23 Cyril Connolly, as quoted in Dardis, p. 207.
194
Connolly is not alone in expressing real exhilaration
from the Huxley contact. As the Huxleys continued to
live and thrive in Los Angeles, they gathered about them
a network of British, American, and European literary
friends and acquaintances; by sheer force of personality
and influence they had a strong impact, therefore, on Los
Angeles as it appears in the British novel.
By the time Huxley settled in Los Angeles he already
had a considerable literary reputation with novels like
Chrome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Point Counter
Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932). It is common to
divide his fictional oeuvre into two sections: the pre-
and post-Los Angeles works. The British scholar Keith
May, for example, separates his discussion of the novels
into two parts, labeling the 1921-193 6 works "Novels of
Exploration: Seeking Reconciliation of the Absolute and
the Relative" and calling the latter group "Novels of
Certainty: Seeking Perfection of the Life and of the
Work."24 There are those critics who feel he never
equalled the early works with his later California
productions, but Isherwood, among others, believes that
24 Keith M. May, Aldous Huxley (London: Paul Elek
[Scientific Books] Limited, 1972).
195
Huxley did his best work in the American half of his
life.
Isherwood also contends that Huxley thought of the
art of the novel as "a necessary nuisance. He had things
to say in fictional form, but the weaving of the fiction
bored him."25 The reader is inevitably struck by the
idea that Huxley is an inveterate essayist looking for a
place to expound his ideas. Huxley's real interest was
in ideas, but, as he told Heard, "Novels pay far better."
Sometimes he earned ten times as much for a "story" than
a "dissertation" would bring.26 But Huxley told George
Wickes and Ray Frazer in 1959 that he firmly believed
that fiction is the best way to present philosophy.
This, he said, is why
Dostoevski is six times as profound as Kierkegaard,
because he writes fiction . . . [which keeps] these
tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In
fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute
and the relative, so to speak, and the expression of
the general in the particular.
25 Isherwood, Memorial Volume, p. 159.
26 Heard, "The Poignant Prophet," Kenyon Review,
27, p. 53.
27 Huxley, 9 October 1959 interview with George
Wickes and Ray Frazer, Typescript with corrections by
Huxley, Library of Living Journalism, UCLA Special
Collections, p. 8.
196
Many of the themes that have become characteristic
of the sub-genre were first introduced in Huxley's first
American novel, written and published in 1939 and the
only one entirely set in contemporary Los Angeles— After
Many a Summer Dies the Swan. At first glance, the novel
seems very much a product of its era, falling into the
satiric house party category of 1930's English fiction—
typified by Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust (1934)— with
groupings of oddballs and bores, and with lots of
intrigues. Gerald Heard speaks of the near-compulsion
his fellow countrymen felt about putting their responses
to Los Angeles into print: "Every satiric author had to
win his spurs by driving their rowels into the flanks of
these circus mares and stallions."28 But there was a
noticeable turn from "sardonic rationalism toward some
form of spiritual faith" among a significant number of
prominent English authors of the period. W. H. Auden and
T. S. Eliot became High Anglican advocates; Waugh and
Graham Greene joined with the Roman Catholic Church.
Huxley chose
. . . less conventional doctrines adapted from
eastern mysticism. In none of these writers,
however, did their conversion mitigate the acerbity
of their satire, and Huxley found ample material for
28 Heard, "The Poignant Prophet," p. 59.
197
his scorn in the affluent pretentious mores of
Southern California."29
Huxley's mouthpiece in the novel, William Propter,
suggests himself that "a good satire . . . [is] more
O A
deeply truthful than a good tragedy.
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan seems a Thirties
product in yet another way— it picks up the concern with
the plight of the migrant farm workers that Steinbeck
immortalized that same year in The Grapes of Wrath.
Whereas Steinbeck focused on the Oakies, Huxley uses a
Kansas family who arrives in Los Angeles the same day as
Jeremy Pordage. And the difference between their
introductions to the city is startling: Pordage is
collected at the train station by Stoyte's chauffeur and
given a grand tour of the city; whereas the unnamed
Kansas family arrives sick and destitute in a broken down
vehicle and will be lucky to earn a few cents that day in
the orange groves. Thinking of the group of transients
as a whole, Propter realizes that "All of them had come
to California as to a promised land; and California had
29 Lionel Stevenson, The History of the English
Novel, 11 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 194.
30 Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
(1939; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 175. All
further references to this work appear in the text.
198
already reduced them to a condition of wandering peonage
and was fast transforming them into Untouchables" (73).
Jeremy Pordage, on the other hand, is the English
scholar imported by Stoyte at a ridiculously large salary
"to catalogue the almost legendary Hauberk Papers" (13).
He knows little about his prospective employer and is
utterly unprepared by his British upbringing for life as
he encounters it in Southern California. When the
chauffeur greets Jeremy at the station,
Anxiously, he began to wonder whether, in this
democratic Far West of theirs, one shook hands with
the chauffeur— particularly if he happened to be a
blackamoor, just to demonstrate that one wasn't a
Pukka sahib even if one's country did happen to be
bearing the White Man's burden. In the end he
decided to do nothing. (3) 31
Thus shortly after his own decision to settle in Los
Angeles, Huxley created something of a satiric alter-ego
who would respond to this new environment from a
characteristically British perspective. Huxley too had
come out to Los Angeles to perform an unfamiliar task in
concert with people who were, for the most part, unknown
to him. Though given in the third person, the speaker
31 Isherwood notes that Huxley himself "avoided
superfluous physical contacts" which "in a world of back-
slappers and soul-barers" put him decidedly in a minority
position. Isherwood, p. 159.
199
captures Jeremy's English terminology and perspective,
and the reader is immediately convinced that this man has
spent too much time reading and too little time living
and responding spontaneously. As Huxley adds, for Jeremy
"direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take
in, always more or less disquieting. . . . Life became
safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been
translated into words and confined between the covers of
a book" (19). He feels so far away from the Western
World as he has known it that he realizes a new set of
rules that he has little cognizance of may apply here.
He is the innocent stranger— in a reverse Jamesian
situation where the naive (though sophisticated in his
own way) Englishman enters the decadent (though more
vital and sensual) world of Los Angeles. (By novel's
end, however, it is evident the Old England that Stoyte,
Virginia and Obispo enter is every bit as corrupt as the
new world Jeremy encounters in America.) Most
reminiscent of James's Lambert Strether, Jeremy too is a
bachelor in his mid-fifties competent enough in his own
setting but poorly prepared for the life he encounters on
another continent. As the chauffeur squires him about
the town showing him Stoyte's investments and indicating
the nature of the properties, Jeremy thinks to himself:
200
No one had ever led him to expect this. The
humorous puritanism of his good taste was shocked,
he was appalled at the prospect of meeting the
person capable of committing such an enormity.
Between that person and oneself, what contact, what
community of thought or feeling could possibly
exist? (13-14)
He has no framework in which to pigeonhole the
overwhelming juxtapositions of this experience: how to
meet a man who has "a cemetery like an amusement park" as
well as "baboons and a sacred grotto"? The balding
Jeremy who still lives with his mother, is Prufrock-like,
indecisive, fastidious in his hyper-refinement. He even
uses words as a way of remaining remote from the major
actions of life, to stay disengaged, preferring always to
continue in his role as observer and classifier. While
no doubt he is something of a self-parody by Huxley of
the effete Britisher, he is also a travesty on th$? role
of historian. Jeremy seeks to ravish the virgin crates
of manuscripts, preparing to read them as one would for a
wedding night's activities: "flushed" by sharpened
pencils, feeling the thrill of files ready, intoxicated
by the dust of old papers, and perspiring with
excitement. Then he is thrilled to discover an abundance
of pornography amidst the documents— for him, "a well-
written piece of eighteenth-century pornography was
better than any Maunciple" (62), (the reference is to
201
Stoyte's mistress, Virginia Maunciple). Jeremy cannot
even take his sex in a direct fashion. After his mother
undermined the one love relationship he had formed at the
age of thirty with a woman named Eileen, Jeremy has since
rationalized that it was all for the best. Now he and
his mother both desire "nothing better than to go on
being just what they were" (150); Jeremy remains
infantile, in fact his brother even refers to him as
Peter Pan. Jeremy is a man dedicated to his schedule.
To him, this is life lived in a civilized manner:
Breakfast at nine, lunch at one-thirty, tea at five.
And conversation. And the daily walk with Mr.
Gladstone, the Yorkshire terrier. . . . And every
alternate week, between five and six-thirty, an hour
and a half with Mae or Doris in their flat in Maida
Vale. Infinite squalor in a little room, as he
liked to call it; abysmally delightful. . . the
erotic routine, so matter-of-factly sordid, . . . in
their kimonos from Marks and Spencer's . . . so
conscientiously and professionally low, with a
lowness and a sordidness that constituted, for
Jeremy, their greatest charm. . . . It was the
apotheosis of refinement, the logical conclusion of
good taste. (82-83, 96)
Lest any English reader feel too smug about his culture
compared with that of Los Angeles, Huxley makes sure that
Jeremy is seen, as above, in all of his own peculiarly
English absurdity. Jeremy is always retreating into
enclosures in a particularly puerile and furtive manner:
maintaining the symbiosis with his mother referred to as
202
a "closed universe of utter cosiness," enjoying sex as
"infinite squalor in a little room," hurrying through his
social obligations so as to be able to hole himself up
again in the cellar room with the Hauberk papers. He
exhibits what Robert S. Baker labels the "characteristic
traits of the Huxleyan inverse romantic, . . . a
pronounced aversion for human emotions and passion that
invariably expresses itself in acts of rejection,
regression, or withdrawal at the expense of more natural
impulses."32 As the novel progresses the nature of
Jeremy’s relatively inane yet typically scholarly
corruption becomes increasingly evident as he adapts to
the new environment and continues to rationalize his
existence:
One scratched like a baboon, he concluded; one
lived, at fifty-four, in the security of one's
mother's shadow; one's sexual life was
simultaneously infantile and corrupt; by no stretch
of the imagination could one's work be described as
useful or important. But when one compared oneself
with other people, with Tom [his brother], for
example, or even with the eminent and august, with
cabinet ministers and steel magnates and bishops and
celebrated novelists— well, really, one didn't come
out so badly after all. Judged by the negative
criterion of harmlessness, one even came out
extremely well. So that, taking all things into
32 Robert S. Baker, The Dark Historic Page'. Social
Satire and Historicism in the Novels of Aldous Huxley
1921-1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1982), p.
194.
203
consideration, there was really no reason why one
should do anything much about anything. Having
decided which, it was time to get back to the
Hauberks. (152)
Both Stoyte and Jeremy are great rationalizers; they
maintain their dignity in what to others would be highly
compromised situations by creating self-deluding
fictions. By the conclusion of the novel, Jeremy seems
happily ensconced in his role as highly-paid resident
historian who produces little or no scholarship but
provides an air of intellectual sophistication to the
surrounding milieu. And by the end Jo Stoyte seems
willing to take the extension of his life . . . at any
price, even at the cost of losing his humanity. Huxley's
message seems to be that man can rationalize even the
most bestial of existences rather than confronting or
transcending the unknown.
And the beast indicated is decidedly a simian.
Whether or not the image was a factor in suggesting the
simian motif to Huxley, it is interesting to note that
the furnished house the Huxleys were renting in Pacific
Palisades at the time the novel was written contained a
huge replica of King Kong, "a giant ape carrying off a
virgin in torn veils."33 Jeremy in the passage quoted in
33 Isherwood, p. 154.
204
the preceding paragraph admits his resemblance to a
baboon. His own possessive mother is like the baboon
mother in the early section of the novel who won't
recognize that her child is dead and therefore refuses to
abandon it. In addition, a scene Huxley had witnessed at
the Los Angeles zoo in July of 193 8 he incorporated
almost directly into the novel: "Aldous told of a jealous
old baboon at the zoo who tried to keep his mate to
himself, and when he went off to get a drink a young
baboon dashed in while his back was turned. 'That's the
lodger, sir,' the keeper remarked."34 As it occurs in
the novel, when Virginia witnesses the baboon cuckoldry
she cries out, "Aren't they cute! . . . Aren't they
human I" (64) This scene directly anticipates the affair
she and Dr. Obispo later carry on while Stoyte is lying
in a drugged state in a nearby room. She even thinks of
Stoyte in simian terms as "that barrel of hairy flesh"
(38). He is also one of the wealthy contributors to
Tarzana College, whose administration recognizes the
nature of its benefactors:
Dr. Mulge was a college president chronically in
quest of endowments; he knew all about the rich.
Knew, for example, that they were like gorillas,
34 Diary entry of Grace Hubble for 15 July 1928,
Hubble Papers, Huntington Library.
205
creatures not easily domesticated, deeply
suspicious, alternately bored and bad tempered. You
had to approach them with caution, to handle them
gently and with a boundless cunning. And even then
they might suddenly turn savage on you and show
their teeth. ((59)
Remsen Bird, then President of Occidental College in Los
Angeles, and someone who had befriended the Huxleys, was
clearly one of the models for Dr. Mulge. Bird wrote to
Huxley in December, 1939, just after the novel was
published: "There is something to be said of these
English writers who come to America, who never really
know us, who inevitably are outsiders and who write as
Dickens and Huxley, who jeer as the Hollywood English
actors j eer!113 5
It is easy to see Huxley's presentation of the city
as typical English scoffing but not particularly
productive to think of the response entirely in those
terms. One of the most frequently quoted passages in the
book is that which discusses the architecture,
advertising, and fashions that Jeremy sees on his first
automobile tour of Los Angeles. "On Sunset Blvd. . . a
young woman . . . was doing her shopping in a hydrangea-
blue strapless bathing suit, platinum curls and a black
35 Remsen Bird, Letter to Huxley December 13, 1939,
Huxley Archives, Box 1 File 2a, UCLA Special Collections.
206
fur jacket" (9). Signs advertising widely disparate
wares loom together before him: "JESUS IS COMING SOON.
YOU TOO CAN HAVE ABIDING YOUTH WITH THRILLPHORM
BRASSIERES. BEVERLY PANTHEON, THE CEMETERY THAT IS
DIFFERENT." There appears to him to be a general
confusion of time, history, and value. Churches, for
example, are designed out of sync with their own
religious traditions: the Methodist is built in a Spanish
(Catholic) style? the Catholic is modeled on Canterbury
Cathedral (Anglican)? the synagogue is "disguised as
Hagia Sophia" (Greek Orthodox); and the Christian
Scientist is made to look like a bank (5). Other
buildings are made to resemble animals (what Jeremy calls
"zoomorphs") completely unrelated to their functions: a
restaurant in the shape of a seated bulldog, a real
estate office in the form of an Egyptian sphinx. As they
drive through Beverly Hills Jeremy has a good look at the
houses. Though each is done in good taste, the effect of
the street itself is very disorienting:
Elegant and witty pastiches of Lutyens manor houses,
of Little Trianons, of Monticellos; lighthearted
parodies of Le Corbusier's solemn machines-for-
living-in? fantastic adaptations of Mexican
haciendas and New England farms. . . . The houses
succeeded one another, like the pavilions at some
endless International exhibition. Gloucestershire
followed Andalusia and gave place in turn to
207
Touraine and Oaxaca, Dusseldorf and Massachusetts.
(9)
This passage, similar in its architectural juxtapostions
to Nathanael West's oft-quoted section in Day of the
Locust (also written in 1939), indicates that even the
most wealthy citizens are anxious to present a sense of
heritage, to give a ring of authenticity to their lives,
even though the overall effect of the streets so composed
is decidedly ahistorical and disconcerting to the
unprepared viewer. With such incongruities between form
and function, time and place, the conscious visitor might
feel as though the stage sets had made their way to the
very streets of the city.36
Stoyte's castle on the hill at the northern edge of
the valley represents the ultimate architectural
anachronism: a thirteenth century gothic castle complete
with moat, drawbridge, portcullis, ramparts, and the
like? but the drawbridge is activated by photoelectric
cells, the main gateway has a telephone concealed in one
of its loopholes, and just inside the castle wall is a
36 Gavin Lambert explores this concept in an
article entitled "The Back Lot by the Sea," published in
Harper's Bazaar in 1963, and discussed at some length in
the Lambert chapter to follow.
208
tennis court with a replica of the grotto of Lourdes
underneath. As Jeremy realizes, it was
. . . medieval, not out of vulgar historical
necessity, . . . but out of pure fun and wantonness,
platonically, . . . medieval as only a witty and
irresponsible modern architect would wish to be
medieval, as only the most competent modern
engineers are technically equipped to be. (13)
In a small way the miniature golf courses of Los Angeles
which became popular in the Thirties both trivialized
cultures and mechanized their operation. There would
often be a Dutch windmill hole and a Chinese pagoda one,
as well as a medieval castle with a drawbridge that would
lift and lower to make access tricky. Huxley even
anticipated with Stoyte's castle what has come to be
Southern California's major tourist attraction, for one
is indeed reminded of Disneyland— which did not open
until nearly twenty years after After Many a Summer Dies
the Swan was published— in its mixture of older world
cultures with up to the minute technology operating
behind the scenes.
This defiance of both time and history is also
obvious at Stoyte's Beverly Pantheon which presents a
chaotic assemblage of Old World art and institutions,
209
such as a Poets' Corner37 and miniature versions of the
Taj Mahal and Shakespeare's burial site, Holy Trinity
Church at Stratford-on-Avon, but operates on the belief
that modern technology can improve upon the classics. So
here is a version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa that
doesn't lean, appropriately renamed the Tower of
Resurrection. Because the tower is filled by the
corporate offices of West Coast Cemeteries, the
implication is that business is the way to resurrection.
Stoyte's abode reflects the basic confusion of the
city he both dominates and overlooks. A man who once was
poor and ran away from his childhood home in Nashville
now has
. . . a peculiar hatred for the ragged hordes of
transients, . . . a hatred that was more than the
rich man's ordinary dislike of the poor. . . . [He
has] an ineradicable contempt for all those who had
been too stupid, or too weak, or too unlucky to
climb out of the hell into which they had fallen or
been born. The poor were odious to him . . .
because they reminded him of what he himself had
suffered in the past and at the same time because
the fact that they were still poor was a sufficient
37 Despite the fact that a reviewer for the New
York Times called this "Mr. Huxley's Hollywood novel" and
the publishers of the paperback edition chose to put the
comment on the back cover of the book, the only reference
of consequence in the book to Hollywood is a discussion
about whether the scenario writers will allow the public
relations writers to be buried with them in the new
Poets' Corner at the Beverly Pantheon.
210
proof of their contemptibleness and his own
superiority. (97)
To compensate Stoyte needs to feel omnipotent, to show in
effect that he has made a conquest of history, so he has
built this most outlandish of castles which belies at
every turn his utter lack of aesthetic discrimination.
He has made apparently random collections both within and
without the castle: arts works, libraries (though his
library in the house does not yet have any books), sick
children (though he doesn’t want the migrants'
"disgusting children who were so filthy dirty"), dead
people (not only the Beverly Pantheon but the mummified
Catholic nuns he is putting in a pagan sarcophagus in his
grotto), and scholars like Jeremy: Stoyte "expresses his
superiority to talent and education by means of
possession rather than destruction; by hiring and then
insulting the talented and educated rather than by
killing them" (146-7). Isherwood says that Huxley
believed— along with Matthew Arnold— that "official
idolatry of the arts . . . is one of our modern
substitutes for religion."3®
But Stoyte's artistic acquisitions are presented in
such as way as to underscore the juxtaposition of the
38 Isherwood, p. 159.
211
religious and the erotic: Jeremy discovers a prayer book
among the Hauberk papers with a copy of the Marquis de
Sade's work hidden inside it? Virginia's room has both a
painting of the pagan love goddess, the Venus of Cythera,
and a niche with the Christian "Queen of Heaven"? in the
main hall an overtly spiritual painting by El Greco faces
an obviously sensual Rubens portrait— one that in fact
seems to represent Virginia's condition, showing a naked
woman wearing only a fur coat. As Robert Baker points out
in his fine analysis of the paintings, the Vermeer is
relegated to the elevator, for its values of rational
order and proportion are discounted in Stoyte's world.39
Everything about his life and home gives a feeling of
chaotic assemblage? this lack of order and lack of a
sense of overriding intelligence is as disconcerting to
the visitor as is the city itself below. Jeremy, in
conversation with Propter says,
It's as though one were walking into the mind of a
lunatic. . .Or, rather, an idiot. . . . This is a
no-track mind. . . . It's the mind of an idiot of
genius. Positively stuffed with the best that has
been thought and said. . . . And every item is
perfectly irrelevant to every other item. . .
Disquieting at first. But do you know? I'm
beginning to enjoy it. I find I really rather like
living inside an idiot. (118)
39 Baker, pp. 198-212.
212
Stoyte and his castle can be a metaphor for Los
Angeles, at least as the newcomer sees it, and, just
perhaps, this no-track world is really a metaphor for
modern life; with people realizing existentially that
since there is no track or point to life they might as
well enjoy it in the here and now— particularly in the
Southern California sunshine. But some people cannot
live in a no-track city, and perhaps those who have found
a tracked life fairly congenial in the past— as the
average Briton might well have— experience the most
difficulty living in what seems to be a no-track system.
Propter responds to Jeremy's metaphor and elaborates on
what often happens to those who do not adjust to no-track
living:
Nothing like an idiot universe if you want a quiet
irresponsible life. That is, provided you can stand
the idiocy. . . . A lot of people can't. After a
time, they get tired of their no-track world. They
feel the need of being concentrated and directed.
They want their lives to have some sense. That's
when they go Communist, or join the Church of Rome,
or take up with the Oxford Group. Anything provided
it will make them one-trackers. . . . From no-track
idiocy most of them pass on to some one-track
lunacy, generally criminal. . . . Stick to idiocy.
(119)
Though the irony of the passage is evident, nonetheless
Huxley clearly believes a no-track world superior to the
213
one track variety, one version of which was already
beginning to wreak such havoc in Europe in 1939.
Joseph Panton Stoyte represents the epitome of yet
another set of impulses attributed to Southern California
life: the attempt to retard aging, to extend sexual
prowess, and ultimately to deny death. He enjoys the
California sunshine, notably because it keeps him from
feeling gloomy about the future:
The sun had melted away his dismal foreboding; he
was living again in the present, that delightful
present in which one brought happiness to sick
children; . . . in which the sky was blue and the
sunshine a caressing warmth upon the stomach; in
which, finally, one stirred out of a delicious
somnolence to see little Virginia smiling down at
one as though she really cared for her old Uncle Jo;
. . . a man is only as old as he feels and acts; and
where his baby was concerned did he feel young? did
he act young? Yes sir. Mr. Stoyte smiled to
himself, a smile of triumphant self-satisfaction.
(35)
Over and over again in the novel sex and death become
companion images, with emphasis on eroticism seen as a
way of avoiding or denying death. Huxley, whether
consciously or otherwise, incorporated Freud's concept of
Eros (The Life Instinct) being linked to sexuality and,
on the other hand, Thanatos (The Death Instinct) being
linked to aggression and destructiveness. Thus in the
214
novel Eros is used to ward off Thanatos.40 Jeremy's
initial encounter with this tendency was indicated above
in the chauffeur's opening tour of the city. Stoyte owns
the Beverly Pantheon but visits it himself as little as
possible, because of his absolutely irrational terror of
death. So the cemetery, in keeping with its proprietor's
view, does not appear like a graveyard, but seems to be
dedicated to the image of man's physical immortality
. . . with no apparent concern for his spirit or soul.
The statuary, for example, consists of "all nudes, all
female, all exuberantly nubile. The sort of statues one
would expect to see in the reception room of a high-class
brothel in Rio de Janeiro" (11). As Jeremy looks on this
he sees it as
. . . the victory no longer of the spirit but of the
body— the well-fed body, for ever youthful,
immortally athletic, indefatigably sexy. The Moslem
paradise had had copulations six centuries long. In
this new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt, would
have stepped up the period to a millennium and added
the joys of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and
swimming. (12)
Anyone who has ever visited Los Angeles is aware of its
hyperabundance of health addicts, body builders and
40 Evelyn Waugh undoubtedly recognized this same
impulse, so in The Loved One he names his "romantic
heroine" Aimee Thanatogenos.
215
athletic enthusiasts. And Britons, commonly thought of
as pale-skinned, potato- and sweet-eating and rather less
inclined to exhibitionism, might well be intimidated by
the frankly exposed attention to the physical of the
locals. The Beverly Pantheon (note the pagan
implications of the name— though ironically it was meant
to be a place where the illustrious dead are buried)
represents the pursuit of immediate pleasure. Its only
convincing religious aspect is the quest for permanent
hedonism.
Stoyte knows how to make the fear and denial of
death commercially successful. To this end, he employs
Charlie Habakkuk to run the Beverly Pantheon; he is the
one "who had first clearly formulated the policy of
injecting sex appeal into death; he who had resolutely
resisted every attempt to introduce into the cemetery any
representation of grief or age, any symbol of mortality,
any image of the sufferings of Jesus" (156). But Charlie
has his sadomasochistic side. His suggested projects
often mirror the viewpoints of the Marquis de Sade and
the Fifth Earl of Gonister, thereby emphasizing that
twentieth-century Los Angeles is not the first to realize
the powerful appeal of sex and violence: "Why couldn't
they have a Chapel of the martyrs with a nice plaster
216
group of some girls with no clothes on, just going to be
eaten by a lion? People wouldn’t stand for the
Crucifixion? but they'd get a real thrill out of that"
(158).
As this book will attempt to demonstrate, the
British novelists who wrote about Los Angeles
characteristically tended to focus at some point on death
and burrowing into the earth— rather curious when looking
at a society dedicated to sunshine and robust good
health. Certainly the Beverly Pantheon is the ultimate
in underground caverns, and this one is decorated with
erotic art. Habakkuk, knowing that people love caves and
having a clear sense of how to use modern technology
cheaply and effectively, suggests to Stoyte that they
create some Catacombs:
There, in that hump in the middle; they'd tunnel
down into that. Hundreds of yards of Catacombs.
Lined with reinforced concrete to make them
earthquake proof. The only class-A Catacombs in the
world. And little chapels, like the ones in Rome.
And a lot of phony-looking murals, looking like they
were real old. You could get them done cheap by one
of those W.P.A. art projects. (157-8)
That British fascination with burrowing down into the
earth which was responsible for the discovery of King
Tut's tomb, for example, is reflected not only here with
the plans for the catacombs but also in the numerous
217
times that characters elect to semi-entomb themselves by-
going into cellars and subterranean places, ironically as
a way of evading death: for instance, Jeremy is happiest
in his small cellar room, Peter Boone is at his most
adept working in the basement laboratory, and the Fifth
Earl creates a prison-like underground apartment in which
he elects to live for the remainder of his life.
In an attempt to remain young and virile, Stoyte at
sixty has set up Virginia Maunciple, a 22-year-old ex
waitress, as his child-mistress. She is in fact the only
female character of any consequence in the novel. But
the sexual confusion in their relationship is immediately
evident as Stoyte continually refers to her as his Baby
at the same time he desires to ravish her:
His sentiments were simultaneously those of the
purest father-love and the most violent
eroticism. . . . [Her] curiously perverse contrast
between childishness and maturity, between the
appearance of innocence and the fact of experience,
was intoxicatingly attractive. (35-6)
Such May-September relationships are not confined to Los
Angeles, but are indeed part of the myth of Hollywood
success— that a young woman can "make it" in the city by
sleeping with an influential man of means. And, like the
popular mind, Virginia's thinking has been molded by
Hollywood, for she refers to someone as having Hedy
218
Lamarr eyes or another as being a "Cary Grant sort of
boy." In other ways too she represents the common young
woman of her generation, who, in a time of bottle feeding
and fairly secure contraception, is disgusted by water
coming out of a statue's nipples and feels "a kind of
physical horror of maternity" (107). Like all the
hedonists in the novel, she can easily rationalize
herself into thinking that whatever she feels like doing
is right or justifiable. As she recalls a couple of
lesbian incidents that have occurred at the castle, she
calls them "accidents" that don't count:
She really wasn't that way at all; and when it did
happen, it was nothing more than a kind of little
accident; nice but not a bit important. . . . With a
man, those things generally did matter. Which was
the only reason for not doing them, outside of their
being sins, of course; but somehow that never seemed
to count very much when the boy was a real good
looker. . . . She just couldn't believe it was as
bad as Father O'Reilly said it was; and anyhow Our
Lady would be a lot more understanding and forgiving
than he was. (39-4 0)
Despite the obvious facts of her existence and because he
is a denier of facts in general as they pertain to his
life, Stoyte will not allow her to hear a dirty word, nor
will he "allow her to tell the truth about herself"
(129), not that she has any desire to do so, of course.
219
Instead he provides his Baby with a soda fountain in her
boudoir.
The parallels to the William Randolph Hearst-Marion
Davies relationship must be evident by now. Yet Huxley
told interviewers Frazer and Wickes, "I'd never met
Hearst; I'd only heard about him, like anyone else. . . .
I never visited Hearst's castle at San Simeon."41
However, there seems to be some discrepancy in the story,
for apparently the Huxleys were guests at San Simeon and
the remark about cotton sheets was a notation that Maria
« , , AO
Huxley had made at the conclusion of the visit. * In a
letter to Eugene Saxon, his publisher, he asks that
Virginia's last name be changed from DOWLAS, as it was in
the original manuscript, to Maunciple, a name "entirely
unlike the name of any lady having any kind of irregular
relationship with any millionaire."43 In 1949 Huxley
wrote to his son Matthew about some Hearst stories he had
heard from a reliable friend after the book had been
written:
41 Frazer and Wickes, pp. 12-13.
42 Bedford, I, 379.
43 Huxley Archives, Box 5 File lb, UCLA Special
Collections.
220
The old man, who is dying, emaciated almost to the
vanishing point, but desperately clinging to life
(he won't lie down, for fear of not being able to
get up again, but spends all his time sitting bolt
upright); Marion Davies permanently drunk, dressed
only in a dressing gown which constantly flies open
at the front, expressing genuine adoration for
Hearst, but meanwhile sleeping with the Young Jewish
_____ and announcing to all the world that she does
so and saying what a stinker he is, both in bed and
out; in the next breath confiding triumphantly to
fellow-Catholic _____ that she has persuaded the old
man to leave two million dollars to the convents of
Southern California. The reality sounds infinitely
more gruesome, and also more improbable, than the
fictions of After Many a Summer.
Virginia Maunciple is, however, the only character
in the novel who markedly changes her perspective during
the course of events— not that she wills the change,
though; rather she like Stoyte becomes the victim of
Obispo's Mephistophelian machinations. By the novel's
end she has become much more self-conscious, hates
herself for double-crossing both Stoyte and Pete; feels
unhappy, can't laugh, and is even "ashamed to look Our
Lady in the face" (153).
Because of his abject horror of death, Stoyte has
hired Dr. Sigmund Obispo, a longevity specialist, as his
personal physician, a man, the reader quickly deduces,
who is the most nihilistic figure in the work. Obispo is
44 Dardis, p. 188
221
Spanish for "bishop"? Sigmund refers to Freud,45 somewhat
appropriate in that Obispo has a degrading view of
sexuality. Like the Fifth Earl of Gonister, whom he
discovers through Pordage’s researches, Obispo enjoys
imposing his will on his sexual partners, convincing them
that love "consisted essentially of tumescence and
detumescence" (108) and thereby systematically reducing
them to gibbering and moaning epileptics. When he enters
with an injection of testosterone for Stoyte, he is
described as "Dark-haired and dapper, glossily Levantine"
(38)? often his white teeth flash. His Mephistophelian
qualities are patently obvious, but Stoyte like Faust
recognizes him as "an indispensable evil" (40). By the
end of the novel he has both Stoyte and Virginia entirely
within his power: Virginia, for the sadistic sexual
pleasures he has introduced her to, as indicated above;
Stoyte, because Obispo has cleverly engineered the cover
up of the murder of Peter Boone which Stoyte perpetrated
in a fit of misplaced jealousy.46 That Pete was shot
rather than Obispo, who is in fact the cuckolder, is
45 Huxley, Wickes and Frazer interview, II, 12.
46 The murder even resembles the rather well
covered up Hearst "scandal which only mighty money had
kept from breaking," according to Gerald Heard (p. 60).
222
further testimony to the success of his cynicism. And he
is literally given the last laugh in the novel. Stoyte
is so afraid of death (and hell, particularly) that he
indicates his willingness to follow the Fifth Earl's
longevity course— which necessitates the eating of raw
carp's guts— despite the attendant loss of human dignity
in such an approach to immortality. When Stoyte says,
"'Once you get over the first shock— well, they look like
they were having a pretty good time . . . in their own
way,' . . .Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence;
then threw back his head and started to laugh again"
(241). Stoyte is in fact "ready to submit to practically
anything . . . provided it offered some hope of keeping
him above ground a few years longer" (45).
Huxley draws on a long and venerable European
literary tradition in this portrayal. Lionel Stevenson
suggests a number of pertinent connections:
Huxley insists that scientific interference with
natural process can only intensify human
selfishness, and the gruesome picture of Mr.
Stoyte's senility [?] obviously recalls Swift's
Struldbrugs. A more exact literary prototype,
however, is to be found in the later eighteenth
century, in the tale of terror. Stoyte's gaudy
palace recalls Vathek's; the mouldering English
country house in the last chapters resembles the
Gothic castles of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe; and
the theme of vanquishing death parallels such
223
alchemical romances as St. Leon and Melmoth the
Wanderer.
Like Tithonus of Tennyson's poem by the same name,
Stoyte forgets to be concerned about the quality of his
extended life. In "Tithonus," from which the line "After
many a summer dies the swan" is taken, the central figure
bemoans his horrible fate— to have been granted physical
immortality but without everlasting youth. As a terribly
withered and aged man, he begs to be allowed to die:
. . . Let me go; take back thy gift.
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men.
. . . happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground.
(Lines 27-29, 70-72)
Thus the title warns that Stoyte may live to regret his
choice, especially since he, unlike Tithonus, knows the
whole picture in advance, having witnessed the Fifth Earl
of Gonister and his housekeeper cavorting around as
foetal apes. Huxley seems to be indicating by such a
conclusion that the purely hedonistic— more in evidence
in Southern California, but by no means confined there—
have given over an essential part of human life, the
maintenance of one's personal integrity and spiritual
Stevenson, pp. 194-5.
224
dignity. The concluding scene represents a miniature of
the entire novel: Gonister in the underground cage is one
of the many who seek out burrows or basement havens in
which to live out their avoidance of death and burial, at
the same time they are in fact imprisoned in their
monkeyhood. It is worth remembering that Huxley wrote
his brother Julian in July, 1939 that he had just
completed "a kind of fantasy, at once comic and
cautionary, farcical, blood-curdling and reflective.1,48
Unfortunately, the only other character in the book
besides Obispo who is presented as fully aware, William
Propter, is a less-convincing figure primarily because he
is rather inartistically long-winded. Propter will
lecture anyone at at anytime on any subject. Though he
is meant to be the advocate of the life well-lived by
Huxley’s standards49, he is more like the Shakespearian
48 Letters, p. 441.
49 Huxley admitted to Frazer and Wickes that
’ ’Propter does resemble Gerald [Heard] in some ways" (p.
13). And Grace Hubble in her diary entry of 15 June 1938
described the long philosophical discussions that used to
go on between Huxley and Heard in the following manner:
"Aldous and Gerald seem to me, in this pursuit of
"religion, like two small boys working over a conjuror's
box of parlour tricks. No, that isn't quite it, they are
looking for magic and power, for the secret word, the
open sesame that rolls back the door. It is not
religion, it is magic" (Hubble Papers, Huntington
Library).
225
fool who says the wisest things in the play but whose
advice is followed by no one— except for Peter Boone, who
in this case is an even bigger fool than Propter because
he naively believes everything people tell him. Despite
Propter's preachiness, Stoyte seeks him out; in fact this
is almost the only positive impulse Huxley grants Stoyte.
He continued to call Bill a fool; but he felt him as
a standing reproach. And yet the nature of this
standing reproach was such that he liked to be in
Bill's company. . . . [In looking for a site for his
castle,] he wanted to be near Bill Propter, even
though, in practice, there was almost nothing that
Bill could say or do that didn't annoy him. (99)
Peter Boone, too, is drawn to Propter; he "loved the
disquieting old man" (95). The role of gadfly, like that
of holy fool, has a long and distinguished British
tradition, and Propter is clearly meant to represent that
noble— though in this case nearly impotent— perspective.
When Propter, with humane dedication, attempts to harness
the abundance of the Southern California sun's energy to
provide the poor with some power and asks Stoyte to look
at his invention, the rich man cannot be bothered.
Despite the opulent countryside, the deprived Kansas
family continues to starve; this represents the failure
of the utopian dream of America. The acquisitive society
226
prevents the millennium. So as Propter looks at those
living about him, he pontificates:
You can't preserve them from collective madness and
suicide if they persist in paying divine homage to
ideals which are merely projections of their own
personalities— in other words, if they persist in
worshipping themselves rather than God. (116)
This is no demand on Huxley's part for a belief in God,
but rather a strong statement against the narcissistic
tendencies he saw in the society about him. But all his
wise words appear to be going for naught. As Heard
himself suggests, Propter, like an "ineffective . . .
Greek tragic chorus, is given lines that recall us to the
fact that the author is not a caustic entertainer but a
concerned if almost despairing prophet."50
What Huxley laid out in 1939 is his version of what
has since come to be known as the Los Angeles myth and
anti-myth.51 Dr. Mulge, more than any other character,
is the mouthpiece for the myth of Los Angeles: that
despite the seeming chaos and a-centrality, despite what
appears to be suburban sprawl without a heart, despite
the sense of the population as misfits, ne'er-do-wells,
50 Heard, p. 60.
51 See J.U. Peters' fine exposition in "The Los
Angeles Anti-Myth" Itinerary (Bowling Green: University
Press, 1978), pp. 21-34.
227
and pleasure-seekers (what Jeremy refers to as "complex
bastardies" p. 4), the city is a coherent center, in
effect a new hope for the world. To this effect Dr.
Mulge pontificates at the luncheon table:
The Athens of the twentieth century is on the point
of emerging here, in the Los Angeles Metropolitan
Area. I want Tarzana [College] to be its Parthenon
and its Academe, its Stoa and its Temple of the
Muses. Religion, Art, Philosophy, Science— I want
them to find their home in Tarzana, to radiate their
influence from our campus. (57)
The preceding speech, pompous though it obviously is, is
not particularly noxious when it is given early in the
novel. Later, after Dr. Mulge has been called upon to
give what the reader knows (though Mulge himself may not)
is a cover-up funeral service for Peter Boone, the value
of the college president's perspective is decidedly
undermined. The dramatic irony is apparent when he says,
in opening the new Stoyte Auditorium, that "the glory
that was Greece [is] reborn beside the waters of the
Pacific" (224) .
The Los Angeles anti-myth is just the opposite
notion, wherein "Los Angeles is seen not as a New
Jerusalem but as a new Babylon, or worse. The sunny
climate breeds ennui; the flowers are more often weeds;
and sudden wealth is either elusive or, if gained, only
228
the symptom of a debilitating greed endemic to the
place."52 With the exception of William Propter who is
utterly sincere and selfless in attempting to help others
cope with, understand and even mildly ameliorate the
prevailing order, every other character in the novel—
even including Mulge and Peter Boone— reveals the dark
side of his personality as he operates within the city.
In response to a world which often appears as an immense
bedlam, some are shown to be corrupt in their attempts to
rectify the status quo by imposing upon it a bankrupt
intellectual order. Jeremy's version of European culture
is utterly impotent in imposing order on the Southern
California chaos it encounters. Similarly, Mulge's
academic establishments are a whitewash. Rich men know
these pose no threat to their continuing domination of
society; as Propter tells Pete,
There1s an enormous social pressure on the rich to
make them become patrons of learning. They're being
pushed by shame as well as pulled by the longing to
believe they're the benefactors of humanity. And
happily with Dr. Mulge a rich man can have his kudos
with safety. No amount of arts schools at Tarzana
will ever disturb the status quo. Whereas if I were
to ask Jo for fifty thousand dollars to finance
research into the technique of democracy, he'd turn
me down flat. Why? Because he knows that sort of
thing is dangerous. He likes speeches about
democracy. (Incidentally, Dr. Mulge is really
52 Peters, p. 21.
229
terrific on the subject.) But he doesn't approve of
the coarse materialists who try to find out how to
put those ideals into practice. You saw how angry
he got about my poor little sun machine. Because,
in its tiny way, it's a menace to the sort of big
business he makes his money from. (111-12)
Wisely managed idealism like Propter*s could conceivably
set about reversing the entropic trend. But only Peter
Boone really listens to him, and Pete's naive, romantic,
utterly unrealistic view of the world is as useless in
achieving order as is Jeremy Pordage's. Rather, Dr.
Sigmund Obispo prevails in the community of this novel, a
man who manipulates his fellows coldly and scientifically
by means of their peculiar versions of corrupt
eroticism.53 Sexuality is a barometer of basic human
interaction. As it appears in the novel, it is incapable
of running smoothly. It is corrupt or perverted in its
every appearance. Obispo recognizes Jeremy's infantile
sensuality, Stoyte's senescent fumblings, Pete's
sophomoric romanticism, the Fifth Earl's sadomasochistic
practices, and Virginia's mindless promiscuity— and makes
the best of each of them. But above all, Stoyte and
Virginia represent the Los Angeles anti-myth in its most
obvious form in the novel. Neither lives by any coherent
system; these are the folks who set the world off toward
53 See Baker, pp. 194-6.
230
chaos and meaninglessness because they operate entirely
in the here and now with never a thought for others or
for the future:
[Virginia:] The best part of Virginia's life was
spent in enjoying the successive instants of present
contentment of which it was composed; and if ever
circumstances forced her out of this mindless
eternity into the world of time, it was a narrow
little universe in which she found herself, a world
whose farthest boundaries were never more than a
week or two away in the future. (38)
[Stoyte:] What could millions do to allay his
miseries? The miseries of an old, tired, empty man;
of a man who had no end in life but himself, no
philosophy, no knowledge but his own interests, no
appreciations, not even any friends— only a
daughter-mistress, a concubine-child, frantically
desired, cherished to the point of idolatry. And
now this being, on whom he had relied to give
significance to his life, had begun to fail him.
(163)
The narrative voice in the preceding excerpts is
abundantly clear, and the reader is left with the feeling
that Los Angeles— and by extension the modern world— is
populated with many Stoytes and Virginias, people so
mindlessly self-obsessed that they see all value in the
pursuit of personal pleasure and physical vitality,
regardless of its consequences. Huxley did speak of this
novel during the writing of it as "a serious parable,"
and it is surely a warning against the preoccupations of
self-love. But it is altogether unlikely that Huxley
231
meant to condemn Los Angeles alone in this respect, for
as he has Propter remark about regional literature, he
finds it pretentious, the absurdity of acting "as though
there were some special and outstanding merit in
recording uncoordinated facts about the lusts, greeds and
duties of people who happen to live in the country and
speak in dialect!" (173-4) So with After Many a Summer
Dies the Swan, Huxley uses his new home in Los Angeles as
the site of a wide-ranging rather than a culture-specific
satire on contemporary life.
232
A ld o u s H u x le y B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Works
Novels
After Many A Summer Dies The Swan. New York: Harper and
Row, 1939; rpt. Harper Colophon, 1983.
Ape and Essence. New York: Harper and Row, 1948; rpt.
Harper Colophon, 1983, pp. 166-271.
Nonfiction
Jesting Pilate. London: Chatto and Windus, 1926; New
York: George H. Doran, 1926.
Letters
Unpublished letters in Aldous Huxley Archives, UCLA
Special Collections, Los Angeles, California.
Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith. London:
Chatto and Windus, 1969.
Interviews
Interview by Marion Brennan, Carman Havs, Wayne Johnson
and Joe Morgan, 18 March 1957, Library of Living
Journalism, UCLA Special Collections.
Original Typescript of Interview by George Wickes and Ray
Frazer, 9 October 1959, With corrections of
Typescript by Aldous Huxley, Library of Living
Journalism, UCLA Special Collections.
Aldous Huxley Speaking Personally, Caedmon Cassette CDL
52074 lc and 2c, Recorded July 7 and 11, 1961,
Copyright 1963.
Secondary Sources
Baker, Robert S. The Dark Historic Page: Social Satire
and Historicism in the Novels of Aldous Huxley
1921-1939. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1982.
233
Baldanza, Frank. "Huxley and Hearst." Itinerary:
criticism: Essays on California Writers, ed. Charles
Crow. Bowling Green: University Press, 1978,
pp. 35-47.
Bass, Eben E. Aldous Huxley: An Annotated Bibliography
of Criticism. New York: Garland, 1981.
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 2 vols.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.
Dardis, Tom. Some Time in the Sun. New York:
Scribner's, 1976.
Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972.
Greenblatt, Stephen Jay. Three Modern Satirists: Waugh,
Orwell, and Huxley. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1965.
Heard, Gerald. "The Poignant Prophet." Kenyon Review,
27, pp. 49-70.
Hubble, Grace. Unpublished Papers. Hubble Collection,
Huntington Library.
Huxley, Julian, editor. Aldous Huxley: 1894-1963 A
Memorial Volume. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Huxley, Laura Archera. This Timeless Moment: A Personal
View of Aldous Huxley. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1968.
Isherwood, Christopher. "A Memorial Essay on Aldous
Huxley." In Aldous Huxley: 1894-1963 A Memorial
Volume, ed. Julian Huxley. New York: Harper and
Row, 1965.
Kuehn, Robert E., editor. Aldous Huxley: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1974.
Loos, Anita. "Aldous Huxley in California." Harper's,
228 (May 1964), pp. 51-55.
May, Keith M. Aldous Huxley. London: Barnes and Noble,
1972.
234
Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1969.
Peters, J. U. "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth." Itinerary:
criticism: Essays on California Writers, ed.
Charles Crow. Bowling Green: University Press,
1978, pp. 21-34.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. California Classics: The
Creative Literature of the Golden State. Santa
Barbara: Capra Press, 1971.
Rolfe, Lionel. Literary L. A. San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 1981.
Snyder, Stephen. "From Words to Images: Five Novelists
in Hollywood." The Canadian Review of American
Studies, 8, No. 2 (Fall, 1977), pp. 206-13.
Spatz, Jonas. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the
American Myth. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
Stevenson, Lionel. The History of the English Novel, 11.
New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967.
Watts, Harold H. Aldous Huxley. New York: Twayne, 1969.
235
EVELYN WAUGH
They are a very decent, generous lot of people out
here and they don’t expect you to listen. . . . It's
the secret of social ease in this country. They
talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they
say is designed to be heard.
For Evelyn Waugh, whose joy was in witty
conversation, people who talk but fail to listen to one
another would represent the ultimate social monstrosity.
Except for Wodehouse, of all the writers in this study of
the British novel in Los Angeles, Waugh was the oldest as
well as the most set in his ways by the time he came, and
he expected conversation, among other things, to be as he
had known it in Britain. It is not surprising, then,
that Waugh had the shortest stay in Southern California
of any of these authors. Yet his Los Angeles novel, The
Loved One, is one of the classics, the work that most
often comes to mind when one thinks of the British novel
of Los Angeles.
Waugh was born into a prominent and well-educated
English family in 1903. He left Oxford without a degree,
tried and failed at being a schoolmaster, attempted
1 Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American
Tragedy (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1948), p. 5. All
further references to this work appear in the text.
236
suicide, and then finally decided to try his hand at the
profession of writing. Both his father and his elder
brother Alec had been active in the literary world long
before Evelyn too entered it as a career. In the late
1920's and 1930's, he attracted an ever-growing following
by publishing a number of finely-honed satiric novels.
At the same time, he traveled a good deal and published
incisive reports of these journeys. (Both types of
writing prepared him for the satirical yet keenly
observant work he would write many years later after his
trip to Los Angeles.) His 1930 conversion to Roman
Catholicism gave yet another unique perspective to his
work. During World War II Waugh joined the Royal
Marines. He was stationed at a number of fronts during
this time and in each military situation exhibited his
characteristic intensity. "During the war Waugh
demonstrated total fearlessness in the face of enemy
action, yet he was often harsh and autocratic to his men,
and several of his superiors found him insubordinate and
difficult to get along with."2 Combining his war
experiences with his Catholic beliefs, Waugh wrote
Brideshead Revisited, the novel which both changed and
2 Paul A. Doyle, "Evelyn Waugh" in Dictionary of
Literary Biography, 15: British Novelists 1930-1959, ed.
Bernard Oldsey (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), p. 577.
237
broadened his reputation— and provided the reason for his
trip to Los Angeles.
Brideshead Revisited, subtitled The Sacred and
Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, was published
in 1945. Written in a less ironic and far more romantic
vein than anything else of his to date, the novel
achieved a far wider popularity both in Britain and the
United States than any of the earlier works. Agents for
MGM wrote to Waugh in 1946 proposing that they meet with
him in Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of their
filming the novel. As Waugh wrote to his literary agent
on October 3, 1946:
I have no insuperable artistic scruples about
their filming any book except Brideshead. I should
greatly prefer, however, to be allowed to write all
additional dialogue.
I should like to take Laura [his wife] for a
jaunt to Hollywood in February. The sort of offer I
should find most attractive would be a tax-free
trip, lecture-free, with a minimum of work of any
kind at the other end. Luxury not 1ionization is
the thing. And all trouble spared me of getting
permits & booking cabins etc.
The sum paid beyond that is not of great
interest. I should like to have it by instalments
if it is large. With enough pocket money for us to
do some shopping in New York.
Evelyn Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Naugh, ed.
Mark Amory (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p.
235.
238
The studio agreed to pay all the Waughs' expenses so that
they could travel as lavishly as they wanted: first class
passage on the steamship, accommodations at the Waldorf-
Astoria in New York, travel by sleeper on The Twentieth
Century Limited, stays in Los Angeles at both the Bel Air
and Beverly Hills Hotels, and generous use of a chauffeur
during their time in the Southland. The trip was
scheduled for early 1947. By that time Waugh was 43
years old, had traveled a good deal throughout the world,
and yet had never before expressed interest in visiting
the United States. Though he was not overly keen on the
idea, he responded to the studio's enticements as had so
many of the Los Angeles-bound British novelists— with
caution and restrained interest.
His entire sojourn in America was marked by almost
continual pain, and this no doubt affected his response
to the country. Just prior to departure, Waugh had
decided to have surgery on his hemorrhoids, thinking that
it would make him less pain-ridden and thereby more
pleasant company to Laura during the trip abroad; but in
fact quite the reverse was the case. Pain or no-pain,
however, it seems unlikely that a strict British
traditionalist like Waugh would have found life in
239
postwar America, and especially that of Los Angeles, very
much to his liking.
He felt alienated and isolated right at the outset
of the journey. As he noted in his diary about the boat
trip over to America, "the only [other] English on board
. . . are travelling second class, a sign of the times.
There was also a curious proletarian colony of GI
brides— trousers, babies, cockney accents— travelling
first class, another sign of the times."4
After spending a few days in New York, the Waughs
proceeded by train to Los Angeles. Waugh's diary entry
for February 6, 1947, the day he arrived in Los Angeles,
reveals a number of his preoccupations and idiosyncrasies
as well as his characteristic acutely perceptive
commentary:
Arrived at Pasadena at 9 am and were met by a car
from MGM. We drove for a long time down autobahns5
and boulevards full of vacant lots and filling
stations and nondescript buildings and palm trees
with a warm hazy light. It was more like Egypt— the
suburbs of Cairo or Alexandria— than anything in
Europe. We arrived at the Bel Air Hotel— very
4 Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed.
Michael Davie (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 669.
5 The usage of the term "autobahn" is interesting
in that Waugh had just recently return from the Nuremberg
Trials in Germany and one wonders whether he is making,
even subconsciously, a connection between the two
countries.
240
Egyptian with a hint of Addis Ababa in the smell of
the blue gums. The flabby manager had let my suite
to a man suffering from rheumatic fever— a prevalent
local affliction— and we have a pretty but
inadequate bedroom and bath. We unpacked, sent
great quantities of clothes to the laundry, bathed
and lunched. A well-planned little restaurant, good
cooking. We drank a good local red wine, Masson's
Pinot Noir. We were the only people in the room
drinking. Two tables of women with absurd hats.
Rested. At 6 sharp we were called on by the two
producers Gordon and McGuinness, who were preceded
with fine bunches of flowers— with their shy wives.
We sat in our bedroom and drank. Conversation
difficult. Bed early, after dining without appetite
in the restaurant, and slept badly; woke in pain.
Waugh found dress codes, sense of fashion, and
social demeanor in general in Los Angeles utterly
horrifying. His friend Harold Acton (who was the model
for Anthony Blanche in Brideshead) happened to be in Los
Angeles during the same interval as Waugh. They ran into
one another at what Acton calls the "super-civilized"
Huntington Library. Observing Waugh and the other
Englishman who was with him at the San Marino museum,
Acton says that they seemed "to belong more to the
eighteenth century than the pictures I had
examined. . . . No nonsense about open-necked shirts;
they were dressed as for the Eton and Harrow match at
6 Waugh, Diaries, p . 6 7 2 .
241
Lord’s."7 Waugh's diary entry just a few days after his
arrival includes a description of a writer who
. . . came to luncheon with us in native costume and
was refused admittance to the restaurant until I
provided him with a shirt. . . . It is impossible
for a man to find anything wearable— not collars or
shirts. . . . The women lunch together in large loud
parties with elaborate hats. Laura gets asked out
to luncheon alone. The men lunch in wineless
canteens. Jovial banter prevails between the hotel
servants and the guests, but our insular aloofness
is respected. We haved trained the waiters in the
dining-room not to give us iced water and our
chauffeur not to ask us questions. There is here
the exact opposite of the English custom by which
the upper classes are expected to ask personal
questions of the lower.
Waugh's disgruntlement with the habits of the Americans
he encountered is corroborated by Acton's observations:
Adaptability was not among his traits. . . . He
objected to the food [he "was a gourmet of honest
English delicacies"], to the showers in bathrooms,
to the chewing of gum, to the habit of smoking at
meals (women were the worst offenders since they
believed that cigarettes between courses prevented
them from getting fat), to the volubility of taxi
drivers, and so forth. 'How I wish the beasts would
stop talking to one,' he moaned. 'I tell them to
shut up but they will go on and on. One is totally
defenceless. It’s an outrage to be charged for such
boredom.' When a hostess expostulated with him for
handing round the cakes at a party held in his
' Harold Acton, More Memoirs of An Aesthete
(London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 223-4.
8 Waugh, Diaries, p p . 6 7 3 - 4 .
242
honour he replied: 'It will save me from having to
talk.'9
Considering the short length of his stay— Waugh
remained in Los Angeles through the month of February and
into late March, just a little over six weeks in all— he
did an incredible job of mastering the topography of
greater Los Angeles. Donald Greene attributes this
quickness of physical orientation to Waugh's prior six
years in the British Armed Services, during which he
spent time as an intelligence officer, no doubt
scrutinizing maps very carefully. In fact, all his
travel books reveal his great talent for capturing detail
of place quickly and accurately.10
For a man who reverences history and formal custom,
Waugh was struck by the fact that nearly everyone in the
city is a relatively new resident, so naturally
"tradition" is a sham. What history there is— the
9 Acton, p. 225.
10 Donald Greene, "Evelyn Waugh's Hollywood,"
Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 16, No. 3 (Winter, 1982), pp. 1-
4. Greene locates the actual sites Waugh used in The
Loved One and explains how accurately Waugh related them
to one another— amazing for a man who spent just six
weeks or so in the area. Greene finds only one slip on
Waugh's part: Dennis could not possibly make it from his
work in Burbank to Bel Air, the site of the Heinkel's
residence, in half an hour, especially given the nature
of the thoroughfares available to him in the late 40's.
243
Spanish— has been wiped out, except for occasional
atmospheric decorations. For example, in an article he
wrote for Life Magazine, he depicted the inhabitants of
Los Angeles as a very special breed:
The character of Southern California which
everywhere strikes the tourist as unique came from
its history. The territory was won by military
conquest only a century ago, but the Spanish culture
was obliterated and survives today only in ingenious
reconstructions. The main immigrations took place
within living memory and still continue. In 1930 it
was calculated that of the million and a quarter
inhabitants of Los Angeles a quarter of a million
had arrived in the previous five years and only a
third of the entire population could claim more than
15 years1 standing, and this vast influx differs
from all others in that it was the rich who came
first. There was no pioneer period in which hungry
and energetic young people won their living from the
land. They did not come in covered wagons or in
steerage bunks. Elderly wealthy people came in
comfortable trains, bringing their money with them
in order to enjoy it in the sunshine.11 There is
now an industrial proletariat and a thriving
11 Waugh's position is corroborated by Reyner
Banham, the British architectural historian and
environmentalist, who says in his classic book on the
city, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1971; rpt. 1976), pp. 24-5, "San
Franciso was plugged into California from the sea; the
Gold Rush brought its first population and their culture
round Cape Horn; their prefabricated Yankee houses and
prefabricated New England (or European) attitudes were
dumped unmodified on the Coast. Viewed from Southern
California it looks like a foreign enclave, . . . because
the Southern Californians came, predominantly, overland
to Los Angeles, slowly traversing the whole North
American land-mass and its evolving history. They
brought with them— and still bring— the prejudices,
motivations, and ambitions of the central heartland of
the USA."
244
criminal class, but the tradition of leisure is
still apparent in the pathological sloth of the
hotel servants and in the aimless, discursive
coffee-house chatter which the film executives call
'conferences.'12
As Waugh seemed to anticipate, his negotiations with
MGM proceeded poorly right from the beginning. On the
second day of his visit he went to the studio and
participated in "what was called a 'conference' which
consisted of McGuinness coming for ten minutes and
talking balls."13 Later, in a piece for the London Daily
Telegraph called "Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement,"
he wrote more extensively about the experience. He sees
the film community in Los Angeles as "a people apart":
They are like monks in a desert oasis, their lives
revolving about a few shrines— half a dozen immense
studios, two hotels, one restaurant; their 'sacred
texts' are their own publicity and the local gossip
columns. The only strangers they ever meet have
come to seek their fortunes; refugees from Central
Europe for whom the ease and plenty and affability
of the place, seen against the background of the
concentration camp, appear as supreme goods, and
astute renegades from the civilizations of the East
who know that flattery is the first step to
12 Evelyn Waugh, "Death in Hollywood," Life, 29
September 1947, p. 80.
13 Waugh, Diaries, pp. 672-3.
245
preferment. . . -.The seclusion of these hermits is
purely one-sided.
To illustrate this sense of the would-be artist1s
pathetically limited community, he makes some
particularly interesting comments about the differences
between stage and screen actresses. "There is an
essential inhumanity about a film star's life." The film
star tends to operate in isolation, whereas the stage
actress works as part of an ensemble: "The Hollywood star
lives in a remote suburb. . . . When her work begins it
consists of isolated fragments, chosen at the convenience
of the technicians." Her youth is also an essential
issue:
Her life is as brief as a prizefighter's. By the
time that she has become a finished actress she is
relegated to 'supporting' roles. . . . She has more
clothes than her counterpart, but her menfolk are
infinitely worse dressed. In only one substantial
particular does she differ. She has a swimming pool
which can be lit up at night. That is the mark of
respectability, like the aspidistra in the cottage
parlour.15
4 Evelyn Waugh, "Hollywood is A Term of
Disparagement," London Daily Telegraph', rpt. in New
Directions in Prose and Poetry, 10, ed. James Laughlin
(New York: New Directions, 1948), p. 34.
15 Waugh, " H o lly w o o d i s A Term o f D is p a r a g e m e n t ,"
p p . 3 6 - 8 .
2 46
One of Los Angeles's characteristic phenomena— the
swimming pool— is a frequent source of satire for Waugh.
A man who expected to see people fully and properly
attired would find lounging around publicly in states of
near-undress a decidedly distateful pastime.
Throughout "Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement,"
Waugh clearly stretches, exaggerates and embellishes the
truth in his typically ironic fashion. He fires his most
serious shots at the producers-directors, saying that
they are
. . . empty-headed and quite without any purpose at
all [other than making money]. Thus anyone
interested in ideas is inevitably shocked by
Hollywood according to his prejudices. The novelist
is shocked by their complete inability to follow a
plain story. . . . The producers, generally
speaking, read nothing. They employ instead a staff
of highly accomplished women who recite aloud, with
dramatic effects, the stories which filter down to
them from a staff of readers. The producers sit
round like children while the pseudo-nannie spins a
tale, two or three in an afternoon. . . . 'Bags I,'
says the producer, when something takes his fancy.
'Daddy buy that.' Agents negotiate, a price is
fixed. And from that moment the story belongs to
the studio to deal with as they please.
Waugh never felt that Hollywood really could
understand and support the artist. So he was prepared to
16 Waugh, " H o lly w o o d i s A Term o f D is p a r a g e m e n t ,"
p p . 3 8 - 9 .
247
hold his ground, refusing to surrender control of his
story, maintaining in fact the "artistic scruples" unique
to the filming of Brideshead he had mentioned in
correspondence with his editor prior to the trip. One of
the great ironies is that the final breakup occurred when
Waugh, a devout Catholic, refused to alter the extra
marital love affair between Charles and Julia in the
novel to meet the standards of a Catholic censoring
organization called the Legion of Decency. To the end
Waugh fought to retain control of his story, even when it
meant turning down MGM's generous offer of $125,000 for
the film rights to the property.17
Once negotiations with MGM were broken off, this
marked the artistic turning point in his career that is
particularly relevant to this paper; for Waugh then had
time to visit some spots in Los Angeles that had been
suggested to him by his British associates. Of primary
17 Waugh, Letters, p. 248. Mark Amory, the editor
of the Letters, sets the MGM figure at this amount.
However, Paul A. Doyle, editor of the Evelyn Waugh
Newsletter and the author of the Waugh biography in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists 1930-
1959 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), says on p. 579: "His
artistic feelings were not to be compromised even though
MGM offered him $40,000 (a princely sum in 1947)."
Whatever the actual amount, it was clearly a large
figure, and Waugh's refusal of it was an indication of
just how strong his aesthetic scruples were regarding
Brideshead Revisited.
248
significance— a lady acquaintance took him to Forest Lawn
Memorial Park in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. As
Waugh wrote to his publisher on March 6, 1947:
I am entirely obsessed by Forest Lawn and plan a
long short story about it. I go there two or three
times a week, am on easy terms with the chief
embalmer and next week am to lunch with DR. HUBERT
EATON [Waugh's caps] himself. It is an entirely
unique place— the only thing in California that is
not a copy of something else. It is wonderful
literary raw material. Aldous flirted with it in
After Many A Summer but only with the
superficialites. I am at the heart of it. It will
be a very good story. . . . MGM bore me when I see
them but I dont [sic] see them much. They have been
helpful in getting me introductions to morticians
who are the only people worth knowing. . . . Did you
know that the cadaver was referred to as 'the loved
one' at F.L. [?] I have seen dozens of loved ones
half painted before the bereaved family saw them.
In the Church of the Recessional at F.L. they have
Enid Jones National Velvet in a glass case with a
notice saying that it is comparable to Alice in
Wonderland and was inspired by Rottingdean Church
from which the Church of the Recessional derives. I
will try and get one of Eatons [no apostrophe] books
signed for you.
For Waugh, going beyond Huxley meant focusing very
specifically on the cemetery and making it a
representation of what had gone wrong with life in Los
Angeles, and by implication, the United States, and even
beyond that, the modern world. Huxley employed the
Beverly Pantheon as a major example of Stoyte's (and by
18 Waugh, Letters, p p . 2 4 7 - 4 8 .
249
extension the Angelino's) inability to confront death at
the same time that he was profiting from it, and also
used it as a further indication of the Southern
Californian's indiscriminate ravaging of European
"culture" in an attempt to establish a sense of artistic
milieu. Though Waugh realized that he was entering
territory Huxley had already traversed, he felt that by
going beyond "the superficialites" in the use of the
cemetery he would create an entirely original work. As
Lionel Stevenson notes in The History of the English
Novel, Waugh
. . . predictably found the New World even more
contemptible than the Old. As early as Vile Bodies
[1930] he had ridiculed a current American
phenomenon in Mrs. Ape, a caricature of the
revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson, and now in The
Loved One he devoted a whole book to the most garish
features of Californian culture. . . . These topics
scarcely merited another excoriation after the
thorough job performed by Huxley a decade earlier in
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Waugh, however,
felt an even stronger moral revulsion than Huxley.
Under the farcical surface the book is . . .
depressing; . . . it conveys a Catholic's abhorrence
for the blasphemous parody of religion practiced in
the modern materialistic world.
To prepare himself for the writing task, Waugh
devoted almost all his energies to finding out everything
Lionel Stevenson, The History of the English
Novel, 11 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), pp. 358-9.
250
he possiby could about Forest Lawn. As he says above, he
went there several times a week, befriended embalmers,
sought a personal meeting with Hubert Eaton, the founder
of the cemetery, and even acquired a book on embalming
and mortuary cosmetics called Embalming Treatments
published by the Dodge Chemical Company of Boston and
written by Ray Slocum.20
By the time Waugh returned to England at the
beginning of April 1947, he had all he needed to begin
work. He wrote to John Betjeman as early as April 2nd:
1 1 Just back from Hollywood. Did you ever get the Forest
Lawn album? . . . I am obsessed by american [no cap.]
morticians (undertakers) and am starting a book about
them."21 About the same time, however, he wondered
whether he would ever be able to publish the book in
America: "It will be unsuitable, I think, for publication
anywhere in the United States."22
20 Waugh's own copy of this book, published in
1937, with both side- and under-lining throughout is in
the Evelyn Waugh Collection at the Humanities Research
Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Robert
Murray Davis, Catalogue of the Evelyn Waugh Collection
(Troy, New York: Whitston, 1981), p. 335.
21 Letters, p. 248.
22 Evelyn Waugh as quoted by Charles E. Linck, Jr.,
"The Year's Work in Waugh Studies, Part I," Evelyn Waugh
Newsletter, 5, No. 1 (Spring 1971), p. 1.
251
Waugh developed a number of theses about Los Angeles
that he planned to illustrate in his work: 1) that Los
Angeles is a place for people whose life work is
finished, 2) that no creative work can be accomplished in
that environment,23 3) that Los Angeles is a place where
the dying gather together to forget their meaningful
pasts and warm themselves instead in the sunshine, 4)
that the inhabitants are prey to all number of religious
and/or philosophical charletans with plans for evading
death, 5) and, finally, that Forest Lawn was brought into
existence to provide a beautiful death and what passes
for salvation— at a price.
With these ideas in mind and before beginning the
novel, he wrote an article for Life called "Death in
Hollywood." It is well-worth reading in conjunction with
the novel which followed, for here, interspersed among
photographs of Forest Lawn itself, he tried out his
observations and some of his themes for the first time.
He begins by focusing on the climate as it relates to the
age and nature of the city’s residents, then gradually
23 Shortly after coming to Los Angeles, Waugh was
asked to comment on the state of creative writing in
Hollywood. His immediate answer was, "Creative writing
in Hollywood? I don't think it's ever been tried." As
quoted by Paul Doyle, Dictionary of Literary Biography,
p. 584.
252
shows how Dr. Eaton has provided the ultimate fulfillment
for those lives;
It is not the leisure of Monte Carlo or Palm Beach
where busy men go for a holiday. It is the leisure
of those whose work is quite finished. Here on the
ultimate sunset shore they lay themselves down, warm
their old limbs and open their scaly eyes two or
three times a day to browse on lettuce and avocado
pears. They have forgotten the lands which give
them birth and the arts and trades which they once
practiced. Here in profound oblivion you find men
and women you supposed long dead, editors of defunct
journals, playwrights and actresses your father
spoke of, glorious stars of theaters long-ago
demolished, novelists whose works line the shelves
of requisitioned billiard rooms. They are gently
spinning the cocoon which will cover their final
transition. Death is the only event which can now
disturb them, and priests of countless preposterous
cults have gathered round to shade off that change
until it becomes imperceptible. Old, old fancies
are here retold as the 'new' philosophy. Soon, they
are assured, they will migrate into new bodies.
Meanwhile Dr. Eaton is at hand to house the old
one. . . .Dr. Eaton is the first man to offer
eternal salvation at an inclusive charge as part of
his undertaking service.24
Waugh finished writing The Loved One by the fall of
1947. As he was working on revisions, he wrote to his
publisher, "I am sorry you don't like The Loved One. I
have been sweating away at it and it is now more elegant
but not less gruesome. . . . The tale should not be read
as a satire on morticians but as a study of the Anglo-
24 " D ea th i n H o lly w o o d ," p p . 8 0 , 8 3 .
253
American cultural impasse with the mortuary as a jolly
setting."25
In an attempt to bridge the gaps and emphasize the
seriousness of his intentions, he subtitled the novel An
Anglo-American Tragedy. Then because he was aware that
the "gruesome" detail might be offensive— but was
determined that it remain a part of his story— he
attached "A Warning," though one done with irony typical
of Waugh, and placed it just after the title page and
prior to the first chapter of the book:
This is a purely fanciful tale, a little nightmare
produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief
visit to Hollywood. . . . As I have said, this is a
nightmare and in parts, perhaps, somewhat gruesome.
The squeamish should return their copies to the
library or the bookstore unread, [vi]
The novel was first published by Cyril Connelly in
Horizon in 1948. For that edition, Connelly wrote a
preface which included some excerpts from an explanatory
letter Waugh had written to Connelly on January 2, 1948:
The ideas I had in mind in writing were: 1st & quite
predominantly over-excitement with the scene of
Forest Lawn. 2nd the Anglo-American impasse— 'never
the twain shall meet['], 3rd there is no such thing
as an American. They are all exiles uprooted,
transplanted & doomed to sterility. The ancestral
gods they have abjured get them in the end. I tried
25 Letters, p. 259.
254
to indicate this in Aimee's last hours. 4th the
European raiders who come for the spoils & if they
are lucky make for home with them. 5th Memento
mori, old style, not specifically Californian.26
Modern British novelists, beginning in the latter
nineteenth century and especially notable in the works of
Kipling, established a sub-genre of works set in colonial
outposts. As Waugh’s letter to Connelly shows, he was
well-aware of this tradition (the issues of cultural
impasse, living in exile, raiding another culture, and
then hopefully making for home). Such novels often focus
on the conflicts between British and native cultures,
juxtaposing norms and world views within the lives of the
characters and thereby showing the near-impossibility of
successful interchange. The opening scene of The Loved
One is a description of just such a seemingly desolate
outpost, almost a parody of a twentieth-century English
colonial novel by Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham or
Graham Greene— but this one actually turns out to be a
Los Angeles house by an empty swimming pool:
All day the heat had been barely supportable
but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing
from the heart of the setting sun and from the
ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby
foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf
and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-
26 Letters, pp. 265-66.
255
voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present
pulse of music from the neighboring native huts.
In that kindly light the stained and blistered
paint of the bungalow and the plot of weeds between
the veranda and the dry water-hole lost their
extreme shabbiness, and the two Englishmen, each in
his rocking-chair, each with his whisky and soda and
his out-dated magazine, the counterparts of
numberless fellow-countrymen exiled in the barbarous
regions of the world, shared in the brief illusory
rehabilitation. (3-4)
Waugh is decidedly enjoying the extended steretypically
colonial description, drawing out the metaphor with
expressions like "native huts," "dry water-hole," and
"barbarous regions." The slow tempo of the opening
parallels the lazy lives of the characters who are
rocking, drinking, and reading out-dated magazines in a
feeble attempt to keep in touch with their homeland.
Los Angeles as a place where those who are both
professionally and spiritually dead gather to spend their
last days in the sun— the picture that he portrayed in
the Life article— is exactly the point where Waugh chose
to begin the novel. But what he explained in Life as
happening to Americans who came to Los Angeles, he shows
here as also the fate of the British who have adopted it
as their home. Sir Francis Hinsley, one of the two
drinkers in the scene above, has lived in Los Angeles for
over twenty years and has become so highly adapted to the
somnolent environment that he is utterly incapable of
2 56
functioning without the sustenance the system provides.
"His was a weak, sensitive, intelligent face, blurred
somewhat by soft living and long boredom" (4). Not a
great artist by any standards, he readily admits to his
young companion, the poet Dennis Barlow, just why Los
Angeles has held him so long:
"I was always the most defatigable of hacks. I needed a
change. I've never regretted coming away. The climate
suits me" (5). But Sir Francis recognizes that his life
is a kind of thralldom, so he counsels Dennis to escape
now and thereby preserve his artistic integrity: "You are
a young man of genius, the hope of English poetry. I
have heard it said and I devoutly believe it. I have
served the cause of art enough by conniving at your
escape from a bondage to which I myself have been long
happily reconciled" (13-14).
But to what is Sir Francis enslaved? It is not just
the climate and easy life that bind him to the city. It
is specifically his dependence on the Hollywood system.
Within this world he is a man on the way down. His
heyday in Hollywood occurred some twenty years earier
when he was
. . . the only knight in Hollywood, the doyen of
English society, chief script-writer in
Megalopolitan Pictures and President of the Cricket
257
Club. . . . Sir Francis had descended to the
Publicity Department and now held rank, one of a
dozen, as Vice-Presdient of the Cricket Club. His
swimming pool which had once flashed like an
aquarium with the limbs of long-departed beauties
was empty now and cracked and over-grown with weed.
(6-7)
Waugh draws a strong parallel between the man's
usefulness to the studio, his position among his fellow
expatriates (the Cricket Club), and the attractiveness of
his swimming pool. Sir Francis has become a loser in all
these areas, and by extension all British people are open
to such fate if they succumb like lotus-eaters to the
enticements of Los Angeles. As the old knight explains to
Dennis in very graphic terms:
Did you see the photograph some time ago in one of
the magazines of a dog's head severed from its body,
which the Russians are keeping alive for some
obscene Muscovite purpose by pumping blood into it
from a bottle? It dribbles at the tongue when it
smells a cat. That's what all of us are, you know,
out here. The studios keep us going with a pump.
We are still just capable of a few crude reactions—
nothing more. If we ever got disconnected from our
bottle, we should simply crumble. (14)
He is what Jonas Spatz in Hollywood in Fiction refers to
as the sinister extreme example of the Fitzgerald image,
those who succumb to the allurements of Hollywood.27 And
27 Jonas Spatz, Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions
of the American Myth (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 108.
258
Waugh suggests by metaphor that these people are as good
as dead, only being kept alive artificially by what is
known today as a life support system. Such language
anticipates (both as it relates to animals and humans)
the atrocities to be found later in the novel at the
cemeteries.
Despite their de facto slavery, these expatriates
console themselves with thinking that they are keeping up
the old culture in this outpost by forming groups like
the Cricket Club, even though the very environment itself
is hostile to their efforts to maintain their national
identity:
Turf does not prosper in Southern California and the
Hollywood ground did not permit the refinements of
cricket. . . . [For most] the club was the symbol of
their englishry [no cap.]. Here they . . . talked
at their ease, maliciously, out of the hearing of
their alien employers and protectors. (32)
But to the objective observer they appear
ridiculous, for they play at their Englishness before
their seemingly naive American associates. The British
who stay in Los Angeles employ their national dress and
demeanor to create an effect, as of a theatrical
performance, but they are so disconnected from real
British life that they appear utterly ridiculous to the
knowlegeable observer. Sir Ambrose Ambercrombie, for
259
example, the current President of the Cricket Club and
thereby the leading representative of the British colony,
joins Sir Francis and Dennis in their talk beside the
empty swimming pool. He is shown in all the exaggerated
absurdity of his pretence by the outfit he wears for the
occasion, "dark grey flannels, an Eton Rambler tie, an I
Zingari ribbon in his boater hat. This was his
invariable dress on sunny days; whenever the weather
allowed it he wore a deer-stalker cap and an Inverness
cape" (5)— markedly inappropriate fashion for daily life
in Southern California.
Sir Ambrose sees his role as keeper of the
traditions. He attempts to teach Dennis about the
British position in the city, "We limeys have to stick
together. . . . We limeys have a peculiar position to
keep up. . . . They may laugh at us a bit— the way we
talk and the way we dress; our monocles— they may think
us cliquey and stand-offish, but, by God, they respect
us" (6,11). This is almost like the story of the
Emperor's New Clothes, where in order to keep a belief in
the "new clothes" everybody had to participate in the
pretense. To this end Sir Ambrose tells Dennis a story
designed to "keep him in line";
260
I often feel like an ambassador, Barlow. It’s
a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various
degrees every Englishman out here shares it. . . .
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—
except in England, of course. . . . There are jobs
that an Englishman just doesn’t take.
We had an unfortunate case some years ago of a
very decent young fellow who came out as a scene
designer. Clever chap but he went completely
native— wore ready-made shoes, and a belt instead of
braces, went about without a tie, ate at drug
stores. Then, if you believe it, he left the studio
and opened a restaurant with an Italian partner. Got
cheated, of course, and the next thing he was behind
a bar shaking cocktails. Appalling business. We
raised a subscription at the Cricket Club to send
him home, but the blighter wouldn’t go. Said he
liked the place, if you please. That man did
irreparable harm. . . . He was nothing less than a
deserter. Luckily the war came. He went home . . .
and got himself killed in Norway. (11-12)
By presenting the case this way Ambercrombie shows both
Dennis and the reader just how protective the British
colony is of its position, foreshadowing in fact what
Dennis's own fate is likely to be within the community.
Waugh saw Los Angeles as a dangerous trap for
postwar European artists. Waugh brings up, in fact, the
very issue that Hilton raises in Morning Journey, written
three years after Waugh's own novel: can great art be
produced in Hollywood? He says no, because by definition
Hollywood costs are too great. As Waugh states it, "It
would not be impossible to get together a team of first-
class players and producers and writers who would work
for a fraction of their present salaries if they could
261
take genuine pride in their art and make a film which
appealed only to a limited audience, but this would
barely affect the cost of the film." It is the unions,
he says, which drive the costs up. "In this miniature
p Q
class-war the artist vanishes. 1 1 Real art, he believes,
cannot be produced in the area:
As far as the home of living art is concerned,
Hollywood has no importance. It may be a useful
laboratory for technical experiment. The greater
danger is that the European climate is becoming
inclement for artists; they are notoriously comfort-
loving people. The allurements of the modest luxury
of Hollywood are strong. Will they be seduced there
to their own extinction?
Dennis, who "came to Hollywood to help write the life of
Shelley for the films" (23), has at the time of the
novel's opening already opted out of the Hollywood
system. He has recognized that the film community has
little use or reverence for poets, and learned from
witnessing Sir Francis's fate with his employers. As the
old man tells the young one, "I am your memento mori. I
am in deep thrall to the Dragon King. Hollywood is my
life. . . . I like to think that it was the example of
/
28 Waugh, "Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement,"
p. 40.
29 Waugh, "Hollywood is A Term of Disparagement,"
p. 41.
262
myself before your eyes day after day for more than a
year that inspired your heroic resolution to set up in an
independent trade" (14-15).
Yet both of them recognize that Dennis's new trade
is probably what has precipitated Sir Ambrose's visit:
"What did our late visitor say? 'There are jobs that an
Englishman just doesn't take.' Yours, dear boy, is pre
eminently one of those" (15). In order to be able to
write poetry during the day, Dennis has taken a night-
shift job with a pet cemetery modelled on the Forest Lawn
concept called the Happier Hunting Ground— a blatantly
unacceptable job for an Englishman, but one which offers
Waugh a marvelous opportunity to begin his disquisition
on the Los Angeles funeral industry at its "lowest"
level.
Because Dennis is both young and open to experience,
he functions well as a protagonist in the novel. His
British perspective is as yet relatively untarnished by
American exposure and for the most part unfettered by
aristocratic pretensions, but at the same time he has a
keen interest in exploring all the region has to offer.
The reader immediately recognizes that Dennis brings both
a more complex and more objective view of life to each
experience than any of other characters in the novel, so
263
his perspectives "feel'1 more valid, especially since—
like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway and Chandler's Philip
Marlowe— he is quite adept at withholding judgments.
English critics of the novel, nevertheless, reveal their
own cultural prejudices in describing Dennis's
superiority? Malcolm Bradbury, for example, writes that
Dennis represents "a civilization with a genuine past,"
though he then goes on to make a number of accurate
statements about Dennis's role:
Un-American and un-ethical, drawing on a more
complicated response to the world than any of the
American (and most of the English) characters,
Dennis Barlow has all the advantages of . . . [the
Englishman] over his environment; he sees the world
with greater reality and has the endurance to
survive, while those around him, in difficult social
or ethical situations, give up, commit suicide. The
others live in a world which tastes like Kaiser's
Stoneless Peaches, balls of damp, sweet cotton-wool,
a world of mechanical expressions, responses,
sensations.30
Dennis, like the other expatriates, however, is not
above using his Englishness to his benefit, discovering,
for example, that his new employers "... find me
reverent. It is my combination of melancholy with the
English accent" (15). It does not matter that Dennis is
30 Malcom Bradbury, Evelyn Waugh (Edinburgh: Oliver
and Boyd, 1964), p. 95.
264
not reverent; what matters is that he appear so, both in
voice and demeanor.
In this way Waugh makes the essential connection
between the world of the studios and that of the
cemeteries: in both, illusion is everything. There is
little concern for truth. Anticipating what happens at
the cemetery, Waugh shows how the studios, for example,
create utterly fictitious live people like Juanita del
Pablo. This young woman began as Baby Aaronson; then a
studio boss had "most of her nose cut off and sent her to
Mexico to learn flamenco singing." After that, Sir
Francis boasts,
I named her. I made her an anti-Fascist
refugee. . . . Now there's been a change of
policy. . . . We are only making healthy films to
please the Catholic League of Decency.31 So poor
Juanita has to start at the beginning again as an
Irish colleen. They've bleached her hair and dyed
it vermillion. I told them colleens were dark but
the technicolor men insisted. She's working ten
hours a day learning the brogue and to make it
harder for the poor girl they've pulled all her
teeth out. . . . I've spent three days finding a
name to please her. She's turned everything
down. . . . The truth is she's in a thoroughly nasty
temper. (8-9)
31 Note how Waugh uses this opportunity to get back
at the agencies which prevented his coming to terms with
MGM on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.
265
No wonder. The woman has been utterly deprived of her
identity. Her agent, Waugh adds, "was pressing a
metaphysical point; did his client exist?" She exists
only as a chaotic assemblage.
The film studios have no concern for individuals:
nor have they a concern for history— all emphasis is on
the new. And Sir Francis confesses, "I was never much
good at anything new." It is a place that quickly
forgets, with no reverence for what a person has done,
only what he is doing now. And an individual like Sir
Francis is left to consol himself with reminiscence.
"For the exile, rehabilitation is sought for in
nostalgia.1,32 Sir Francis discovers that he has been
terminated when no secretary comes to his house, no cars
will come for him, and his office has a new nameplate and
occupant. "His contract wasn't renewed" (33)— the worst
possible fate.
Waugh links the studio with the cemetery again as
the studio's rejects become "customers" of the cemetery.
The same false values prevail in both spheres. After
being ingraciously "replaced" by the studio, Sir Francis
32 J. U. Peters, "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth," in
Itinerary: criticism: Essays on California Writers, ed.
Charles L. Crow (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University
Press, 1978), p. 26.
266
Hinsley commits suicide, and Dennis is afforded the
opportunity to visit Whispering Glades, the model for the
Happier Hunting Ground and a place he has therefore been
anxious to explore. Chaotic assemblage, like Hollywood's
creation of Juanita del Pablo, immediately impresses
Dennis as a part of the cemetery too. Architecturally
the scene is reminiscent of Huxley's view of Los Angeles
in After Many A Summer Dies the Swan, for the cemetery
cannibalizes and parodies Europe for its decor and
landscapes. Despite the fact that these buildings are
"three-dimensional and permanent," "the illusion was
quite otherwise"; they seem less real than the studio
sets which he had been surprised to discover were really
billboards. "Everywhere in Whispering Glades failing
credulity was fortified by the painted word" (40). The
travel-film voice in the University Church that Dennis
enters tells him: "This is more than a replica, it is a
reconstruction. A building-again of what those craftsman
sought to do with their rude implements of by-gone ages"
(78). Waugh noted in Life that the Forest Lawn churches
were all British, though the area never was ruled by
Britain. And yet to each of the British models there
have been modifications which belie their lack of
understanding of the original. He is especially puzzled
267
by the dedication of one of the churches to Kipling,
"whose religion was highly idiosyncratic."33 The
religious rituals practiced therein are an amalgam too,
derivative but apparently without a cohesive philosophy.
As Dennis wanders through the cemetery, he
encounters yet other transpositions from the world of
film and stage illusion. Like failure at the studio
which, as mentioned earlier, has to be phrased
euphemisticly and camouflaged, death is seen as something
to be disguised, the ultimate failure.34 Both industries
are in business to put on an elaborate "show." There are
not only buildings like sets, but sound effects
33 Waugh, "Death in Hollywood," p. 79.
34 Herman Feifel, in "Attitudes Towards Death in
Some Normal and Mentally 111 Populations," in The Meaning
of Death (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), discusses that
though death is essential to life, Western culture often
attempts to camouflage and avoid it. There are many
euphemisms for death and people crave a happy ending.
Forest Lawn admittedly caters "not to the dead but to the
living." "One of our industries has as its major
interest the creation of greater 'lifelike' qualities of
the dead. Geoffrey Gorer, the English anthropologist,
has commented that death has become, in a certain sense,
as unmentionable to us as sex was to the Victorians. He
points out that in the nineteenth century most Protestant
countries would seem to have subscribed to the Pauline
beliefs concerning the sinfulness of the body and the
certainty of an afterlife. With the weakening of these
concepts in the twentieth century, there appears to be a
concomitant decrease in the ability of people to
contemplate or discuss natural death and physical
decomposition" (pp. 115-16).
268
mechanically produced to resemble the sounds of nature—
without the ill effects of the reality. Though Dennis
hears the buzzing of the bees, the actual hives have been
removed so that visitors will not be threatened.
Mechanical music is piped throughout the grounds with
speakers hidden away in the shrubbery. The very costume,
makeup and set decoration of Hollywood are essential to
the business of Whispering Glades. The Mortuary Hostess
shows him a shroud that appears like a suit of clothes,
"the apotheosis of the 'dicky.'" She tells him frankly,
"The idea came from the quick-change artists of
vaudeville. It enables one to dress the Loved One
without disturbing the pose" (48). Corpses are painted
to look as though in the blush of youth, then dressed in
all their finery and laid out on couches in parlor-like
Slumber Rooms where they can be "visited" by their
mourners. This of course is the grand show, the attempt
to dupe the living into believing that "the loved one" is
not really dead. But Dennis, realist that he is,
immediately sees the illusion for what it is and
perceives the monstrosity of the appearance. Looking at
Sir Francis's "reconstructed" face, he realizes, "The
face was entirely horrible; as ageless as a tortoise and
as inhuman; a painted and smirking obscene travesty by
269
comparison with which the devil mask Dennis had found in
the noose was a festive adornment” (75).
The funeral itself is no better. Waugh shows in
this ceremony too that illusion is all that matters
amongst these people. Once the news of the suicide is
out. Sir Ambrose comes to Dennis. Having already
. . . blandly managed the press, Sir Ambrose, also,
with the help of other prominent Englishmen composed
the Order of the Service. Liturgy in Hollywood is
the concern of the Stage rather than of the Clergy.
Everyone at the Cricket Club wanted a part.
'There should be a reading from the Works,'
said Sir Ambrose. 'I'm not sure I can lay my hand
on a copy at the moment. . . . Barlow, you are a
literary chap. No doubt you can find a suitable
passage. . . .'
'I don't ever remember seeing any of his works
in the house.'
'Find something, Barlow. Just some little
personal scrap. Write it yourself if necessary.'
(62-3)
So the funeral of Sir Francis Hinsley, who kills himself
because he is utterly useless to and forgotten by
Hollywood, turns out to be a major film colony event.
The British community argue whether to keep it "small and
British” or "include all the leaders of the film
industry. It was no use 'showing the flag' . . . if
there was no one except poor old Frank to show it to"
(63). They finally decide that it is worthwhile to
underwrite a major production: "It will be money well
270
spent if it puts the British colony right in the eyes of
the industry" (3 6). In keeping with the overall
dishonesty of the "show" and again in an ill-considered
effort to raise their own image, the expatriates ask
Juanita del Pablo to sing "The Wearing of the Green" at
the funeral. Demonstrating their basic lack of concern
for meaning, a phoney starlet offers a rendition of a
violently partisan IRA song at the funeral of an English
knightI Recognizing the bitter though not altogether
uncalled-for truth of Waugh's portrayal, Graham Greene
reviewed the novel shortly after it came out and added
his own pointed criticism of the Hollywood funeral scene:
It is only a few weeks ago that a famous film star
[Carole Landis] was buried at Forest Lawn and the
pall bearers were stopped for autographs and
interviews, and Mr. Pat O'Brian, a film actor, told
the Press, 'This is the hardest matinee that Carole
and I have ever played together.'. . . No, Mr.
Waugh's world is as near to ours as the country of
the Yahoos.
Neither the film colony nor the cemetery have any
conception of what Poetry really is. The Mortuary
Hostess pathetically attempts to be literary (in her
canned speech) by saying, "As Hamlet [italics inserted]
35 Graham Greene, "The Redemption of Mr. Joyboy"
(The Month, January 1949; rpt. The Portable Graham
Greene, ed. Philip Stratford, New York: Viking, 1973), p.
559.
271
so beautifully writes: 'Know that death is common; all
that live must die'" (53). She fails to distinguish
between playwright and character, and quotes
inaccurately. Like Huxley's Beverly Pantheon, Whispering
Glades has a Poets' Corner. But it is indiscriminate
about who is placed there— so long as they have money.
Though Sir Francis has never written anything of
consequence, he will be buried beneath a statue of Homer.
Even the great English poets seem to lose their power in
this wasteland, for when Dennis tries to court a young
woman and can create none of his own poetry for her, he
plagiarizes from the standard canon and tries to pass
them off as his own. But he discovers that "the English
poets were proving uncertain guides in the labyrinth of
Californian courtship36— nearly all were too casual, too
despondent, too ceremonious, or too exacting. . . .
Dennis required salesmanship. . . . The films did it; the
crooners did it; but not, it seemed, the English poets"
(106).
36 This adjectival usage of the word "Californian"
seems to be characteristic of the English (see also
Lionel Stevenson's quotation above and Peter Conrad's
quotation below), whereas a Californian would use the
word "California" adjectivally— here it would be
California courtship.
272
As Waugh's highest consciousness in the novel,
Dennis is touched by the old knight's death and what it
represents. So he does indeed try to write a poem for
his friend. He goes to the Lake Island of Innisfree at
Whispering Glades hoping for inspiration. The coxswain
of the electric launch that ferries him over informs him
that not only is this the most expensive site at the
cemetery (because it is the only one that cannot be
defiled by animals), but it is "the poeticest place in
the whole darn park" (82). Dennis is like Aeneas who
must pay Charon to carry him to the land of the dead.
Also Dennis symbolically drinks from the Lethe— the river
of forgetfulness— when he comes to the island (actually a
microcosm for all of Los Angeles or even America).37 so
it is no wonder that he cannot create truly fine poetry,
particularly a fitting eulogy, while he is there. All
that comes out is ironic doggerel:
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had laughed about Los Angeles, and now 'tis here
you'll lie;
Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a
whore,
Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost or gone before.
(85)
37 Gerald T. Gordon, "'Lake Island of Innisfree': A
Classical Allusion in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One,"
Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 5, No. 3 (Winter, 1971), pp. 1-
2.
273
The contamination of the area has dulled his artistic
sensibilities, and he falls prey to the allurements of
the false land.
In this respect it is significant that he is
interrupted at that site by the corpse cosmetician he had
met when he first came to make funeral arrangements for
Sir Francis. She says to him, "Aren’t you the friend of
the strangulated Loved One in the Orchid Room? My
memory's very bad for live [italics added] faces" (87).
This woman who becomes Dennis's love interest— in fact
his "loved one" in both senses of the word— in the novel,
Aimee Thanatogenos (her name literally means "love born
of death") believes that these carefully reconstructed
and painted corpses represent the highest of artistic
achievements. She is the ultimate believer in the Dream
of Wilbur Kenworthy, and, prior to meeting Dennis, is in
love with Kenworthy's chief disciple, the head mortician
Mr. Joyboy. Until Dennis meets Aimee, he is evidently
unmoved by the American women he has encountered.
Speaking in the voice of the narrator, but by implication
indicating that such is Dennis's own perception, Waugh
describes the Mortuary Hostess as the prototype of the
American female, in contrast with the mysterious
allurement of a woman like Aimee:
274
To the European eye the Mortuary Hostess was one
with all her sisters of the air-liners and the
reception-desks. . . . She was the standard product.
A man could leave such a girl in a delicatessen shop
in New York, fly three thousand miles and find her
again in a cigar stall at San Francisco, just as he
would find his favourite comic strip in the local
paper; and she would croon the same words to him in
moments of endearment and express the same views and
preferences in moments of social discourse. She was
convenient; but Dennis came of an earlier
civilization with sharper needs. He sought the
intangible, the veiled face in the fog, the
silhouette at the lighted doorway, the secret graces
of a body which hid itself under formal velvet. He
did not covet the spoils of this rich continent, the
sprawling limbs of the swimming-pool, the wide-open
painted eyes and mouths under the arc lamps. (54)
Instead, he falls for Aimee: a number of qualities
make this particular Southern California girl more
appealing to the "European." First of all, "her skin
[is] transparent and untarnished by sun." A traditional
English woman sought to keep her skin white as a sign
that she was among the upper classes and not forced to do
outdoor labor that would burn and toughen the skin.
Aimee's lips were "artificially tinctured, no doubt, but
not coated like her sisters' and clogged with crimson
grease; they seemed to promise instead an unmeasured
range of sensual converse." She is no made-up actress
with layers of paint, but rather an clean-mouthed and
freely sensual woman. Then too, "her full-face was oval,
her profile pure and classical and light," so that she
275
presents a picture of Hellenic restraint and balance.
Finally, "Her eyes [were] greenish and remote, with a
rich glint of lunacy" (55). This perhaps more than any
other aspect attracts Dennis, for this hint of madness is
the most appealing mystery. Like Dennis, Waugh too "was
immensely attracted by madness.When he first saw
Aimee, "Dennis held his breath."
But Aimde's mysteries turn out to be of a different
order than Dennis had expected: though the blood of her
Greek ancestors courses through her body and the American
culture she was born into has loaded her with advertised
truths to live by, she has no meaningful values to guide
her. In fact she is the human symbol of her culture: an
exile from the land of her forbears, she has no
connection with its ancient wisdom. Instead, her mind
appears to be Waugh's American prototype, and a uniquely
weak and inadequate Los Angeles subdivision of that:
Aimde Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles;
the sparse furniture of her mind— the objects which
barked the intruder's shins— had been acquired at
the local High School and University; she presented
herself to the world dressed and scented in
obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were
scarcely distinguishable from the standard product,
but the spirit— ah, the spirit was something apart;
it had to be sought afar; not here in the musky
38 Frances Donaldson, Portrait of a Country
Neighbor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), p. 62.
276
orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air
of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas.
An umbilical cord of cafes and fruit shops, of
ancestral shady businesses (fencing and pimping)
united Aimee, all unconscious, to the high places of
her race. As she grew up the only language she knew
expressed fewer and fewer of her ripening needs; the
facts which littered her memory grew less
substantial. . . . Her heart was . . . a small
inexpensive organ of local manufacture. (134-5)
Because she is utterly incapable of doing her own
thinking, she turns to one of Los Angeles's many sham
wisdoms. This one is called the Guru Brahmin, in reality
"two gloomy men and a bright young secretary" (117), a
newspaper column (not unlike Nathanael West's Miss
Lonelyhearts) that answers letters from the lovelorn.
She becomes prey to the journalist's whims. When he is
tired of hearing from her and has been fired from his job
himself, Mr. Slump, her correspondent, suggests
offhandedly that Aimee kill herself. This pathetic desire
to give reponsibility for one's life to another was a
view of man as a spiritually displaced person that Waugh
wrote about as early as 193 9 in Robbery Under Law: The
Mexican Object-Lesson:
Man is by nature an exile, haunted even at the
height of his prosperity, by nostalgia for Eden:
individually and collectively he is always in search
of an oppressor who will take responsibility for his
ills. . . . Anything will do so long as he can focus
on it his sense of grievance and convince himself
277
that his own inadequacy is due to some exterior
cause.39
Because she is never able to discriminate truth from
falsehood, she is everybody's dupe— the Guru Brahmin
(whose final advice she does take), Mr. Joyboy (who wins
her over by sending smiley-faced corpses for her to make
up and finish off), and Dennis (who woos her with
plagiarized poems from the Oxford Book of English Verse).
She, like Virginia Maunciple in Huxley's novel, is
completely the pawn of advertising and the generalized
commercialized hype of America; though unlike Virginia,
Aimee retains a certain indominable innocence throughout.
She lives and dies a virgin, for example, though one who
represents something of an archetypal figure of corrupted
innocence. Jonas Spatz suggests she represents the
"feeble-minded simplicity and immaturity of the New
World."40
Mr. Joyboy, the Chief Mortician, appeals to her
because he too is presented in simple American terms, a
man who expounds the local verities of a smiling face,
love of mom and sentiment. There is something
39 Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law: The Mexican
Object-Lesson (London: Chapman and Hall, 1939), p. 109.
40 Spatz, pp. 126-8.
278
infantalizing about his very profession. Waugh noted
that these mortuaries have a way of trivializing death by
making it appear like infancy: "There is a hint of the
bassinet about these coffins, with their linings of
quilted and padded satin and their filled silk pillows.
There is more than a hint, indeed, throughout Forest Lawn
that death is a form of infancy, a Wordsworthian return
to innocence,"41 and pictures of the statuary of Forest
Lawn in "Death in Hollywood" testify to the validity of
this perspective.
Waugh believed that "Americans are devoted to a
conception of innocence which has little relation to
life."42 And Dennis, like Jeremy Pordage in Huxley's
novel, has great difficulty initially coping with the
combination of blatant vulgarity and incredible innocence
he encounters in Los Angeles. Malcolm Bradbury suggests
that this may be "the last of a series, that line of
books in which the bearer of European experience comes to
expose American innocence and emptiness, as Dickens does
41 Waugh, "Death in Hollywood," p. 84.
42 Waugh, "Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement,"
p. 41.
279
in Martin Chuzzlewit. "43 But most importantly, Waugh had
been reading Henry James just prior to his American trip
and during the writing of The Loved One.44 Like several
James heroines, Aimee must chose between rival claimants.
Dennis too recognizes his Jamesian problem, for his art
is not flourishing in this alien land. Only his removal
from that environment will enable him to achieve his
artistic potential. Nevertheless, he recognizes that
Whispering Glades is his muse.
Americans, according to Waugh, have a technical and
or scientific mastery alien to the European sensibility.
In Cedric Belfrage's Abide With Me, another English novel
published in 1948 with an American mortuary setting, the
author "conjures up the fancy of engrafting virility upon
the overage from 'the bodies of men who had departed this
life in the high tide of youth.'"45 In his dedication to
his job of making the dead appear alive, Mr. Joyboy is
like Hollywood's technicians ("the least culpable" film
43 Malcolm Bradbury, "America and the Comic
Vision," in Evelyn Waugh and His World, ed. David Pryce-
Jones (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 170.
44 Robert Murray Davis, Evelyn Waugh, Writer
(Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim, 1981), p. 214.
45 Cedric Belfrage as quoted in Dixon Wecter, "On
Dying in Southern California," Pacific Spectator, 2, No.
4 (Autumn, 1948), p. 381.
280
workers, as suggested in his Daily Telegraph diatribe),
for they
. . . make the studio the vast, enchanted toyshop
which delights the visitors. . . . They came [to Los
Angeles] because in the early days they needed the
sun. Now almost all photography is done by
artifical light. The sun serves only to enervate
and stultify. .But by now the thing has become too
heavy to move. 6
Waugh admired technical expertise as it related both to
the studios— he referred to Walt Disney as one of "the
two artists of the place"47— and to the work of the
embalmers. Like Hollywood sets with false props behind
holding them up, it is cut cardboard behind the dead lips
that creates the illusion of a smile. Joyboy is what
Jonas Spatz refers to as the "travesty of the Thalberg
figure, an inspirational leader admired by his
subordinates for his pioneering in a unique art form. He
is an 'artist' whose medium is the rotting flesh of the
dead."48
46 Waugh, "Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement,"
p. 35.
47 The other was Charlie Chaplin: " We saw a highly
secret first performance of Charlie Chaplin's brilliant
new film." Waugh, Diaries, p. 675.
48 Spatz, p. 196.
281
But Waugh's satire falters a bit here, for Mr.
Joyboy often seems more British than American. He is
reminiscent of Dickens's Wemraick in his devotion to the
elderly parent, and in fact is something like Huxley's
Jeremy Pordage, the prototypical Englishman, in his
fussiness over detail and the rigidity of his routine.
Truthfully, even idealistic Aimee— despite the fact that
the details of her life appear very like those of a
British shop girl (137)— would find his life with his
mother all-too-dull and utterly declasse. When she comes
for dinner, they dine on "tinned noodle soup, a bowl of
salad with tinned crab compounded in it, . . . [while]
Mrs. Joyboy watched them malevolently from her chair"
(114). It is finally the death of Mrs. Joyboy's parrot
that brings Aimee to a funeral at the Happier Hunting
Ground where she learns the truth about Dennis1s
occupation.
At a deeper level, however, the misunderstandings
between Aimee and Dennis are a microcosm of Anglo-
American problems; though they speak the same language,
they really fail to communicate with one another. He
says to her, for example,
It is I who should be disillusioned when I think I
have squandered my affections on a girl ignorant of
282
the commonest treasures of literature.49 But I
realize you have different educational standards
from those that I am used to. No doubt you know
more about science and citizenship. But in the
dying world I come from quotation is a national
vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner
speech without the help of poetry. (139)
Despite their lack of common ground there is no doubt
that opposites attract. Though full of the stereotypes
and illusions of his own culture, except for his fondness
for Aimee, Dennis remains absolutely realistic amongst
the illusions of life he encounters in Los Angeles.
Aimee, on the other hand, is utterly devoted to the world
of illusion, so much so that her madness in this respect
becomes attractive to Dennis. Aimee believes that
Whispering Glades is holy because it proclaims that it
is. Named for Aimee Semple McPherson— though her father
tried to change her name when he lost money in the
infamous evangelist's religion— she is the prevailing
vestal virgin of Whispering Glades. It is she that
inspires Joyboy to endow corpses with smiling, almost
beatific, faces. And Joyboy is able to convince Wilbur
Kenworthy to allow Aimee to begin learning the art of
49 Though most of the poems Dennis plagiarizes are
familiar (Keats, Poe, Shakespeare), Paul Doyle notes that
one of the poems is decidedly obscure, a verse by Richard
Middleton called "Any Lover, Any Lass." "That Poem in
The Loved One," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 15, No. 3
(Winter 1981), pp. 6-7.
283
embalming— the first woman to be offered this knowledge
of the secret mysteries.
In every way Waugh means this to be seen as a land
of repugnant religious perspectives and practices. As
Director, Waugh's Dreamer (the Hubert Eaton figure that
Huxley called The Founder) appears to have gathered bits
and pieces of religious doctrine to make his philosophy,
calls it "The Dream," and finally inscribes it like
Moses1 tablets at the entrance to the cemetery he builds.
This appears both like credits at the opening of a movie
and like a wise man setting himself up as a new Christ
and showing the way to salvation:
The Dream
Behold I dreamed a dream and I saw a New Earth
sacred to HAPPINESS, There amid all that Nature and
Art could offer to elevate the Soul of Man I saw the
Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I
saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of
that narrow stream that now separated them from
those who had gone before. Young and old, they were
happy too. Happy in Beauty, Happy in the certain
knowledge that their Loved Ones were very near, in
Beauty and Happiness such as the earth cannot give.
I hear a voice say: "Do this."
And behold I awoke and in the Light and Promise
of my DREAM I made WHISPERING GLADES.
ENTER STRANGER and BE HAPPY.
And below, in vast cursive facsimile, the signature:
WILBUR KENWORTHY, THE DREAMER.
A modest wooden signboard beside it read: Prices on
enquiry at Adminstrative Building. Drive right on.
(39)
284
This is a secular gospel, offering a veritable paradise
on earth— for a price. As a believing Catholic, Waugh
made the blasphemy of such presumption abundantly clear.
What Waugh himself considers to be the truth is perverted
throughout the novel. Shown in all its absurdity, the
false order, he expects, will be seen for the sacrilege
that it is.
Dennis finally figures out that the best job for him
in Los Angeles is to join the ever-swelling forces of
apparently self-created religious practitioners. He
decides to become a Non-sectarian preacher, and offers
his justification to Aimee in the following words:
You as an American should be the last to despise a
man for starting at the bottom of the ladder. . . .
I have a future in the Non-sectarian Church. . . . I
have the makings of a great preacher— something in
the metaphysical seventeenth-century manner,
appealing to the intellect rather than to crude
emotion. Something Laudian— ceremonious, verbose,
ingenious and doctrinally quite free of prejudice.
I have been thinking a good deal about my costume,
full sleeves, I think . . . (141)
So many of the issues Waugh wanted to condemn Los Angeles
for are mentioned in this passage: that it is a place
where people live by cliches ("starting at the bottom of
the ladder"), that its religious practices are more show
business than belief, that what concerns its preachers is
manner not matter, and that costume is more important
285
than context. To compound the horror Dennis sends out
printed business cards:
Squadron Leader the Rev. Dennis Barlow begs to
announce that he is shortly starting business at
1154 Arbuckle Avenue, Los Angeles. All non
sectarian services expeditiously conducted at
competitive prices. Funerals a specialty.
Panegyrics in prose or poetry. Confessions heard in
strict confidence. (156-7)
By naming Arbuckle Avenue as Dennis's place of business,
Waugh links sexual scandal with corrupt religion, for the
notorious Fatty Arbuckle case would still have been fresh
in the minds of 1948 readers.
The British community is horrified that Dennis
chooses to break their code of honor. Religion of all
things is absolutely sacrosanct, though it has almost
nothing to do with belief— just tradition as it is done
at "home." Sir Ambrose Ambercrombie comes to see Dennis
at the pet cemetery after having received one of the
young man's new business cards. The community cannot
tolerate one of its own getting into anything that casts
a bad light on the expatriates as a whole— and
particularly one who quite openly advertises his entrance
into one of Los Angeles's unorthodox religious orders.
Sir Ambrose's argument follows from the implicit warning
that he offered in the early pages of the novel:
286
There are always a few politicians and journalists
simply waiting for a chance to take a knock at the
Old Country. A thing like this is playing into
their hands. I didn't like it when you started work
here. Told you so frankly at the time. But at
least this is a more or less private concern. But
religion's quite another matter. I expect you're
thinking of some pleasant country rectory at home.
Religion's not like that here. . . . Chuck it, my
dear boy, before it's too late. . . . Go home. . . .
That is your proper place. . . . I hope the time
will never come when we [the Cricket Club] are not
ready to help a fellow countryman in
difficulties. . . . We will send you home. (156-9)
Thus Dennis is offered return passage to England. His
religious infractions are the final straw.
Because the Christian perspective is so essential to
the foundation of the novel and Waugh chooses to make his
only commentary implicitly through the satire itself, it
will be helpful to look at what some Christian scholars
offer as the explicit religious principles behind the
book and how some non-religious scholars respond.
Critics on both sides reveal their absolute inability to
stick to the satire itself, but rather succumb to the
temptation to do some preaching of their own from their
own particular religious and/or national perspectives.
Christopher Hollis, in a book on Waugh published by The
British Council and the National Book League, writes:
The point of the book, if we retranslate it
from fiction into propositions, is the study of the
attitude of modern, irreligious man toward death,
287
and as such it is far from a jeu d'esprit but rather
one of the most serious of all Mr. Waugh's
works. . . . The sentimentality which, without any
evidence, claims to rob death of all its terrors,
eliminates all notion of a judgement, seeks to
comfort the living by in every absurd way minimizing
the gulf that separates dead from living, is alike
worthy of contempt and worthy of satire. . . .
Beneath all the fooling there is the bitter attack
on those clowns, who for their commercial purposes
and in total ignorance of the whole tradition from
which we come, are robbing death and life and the
human race of all its dignity.50
Hollis then explains his view that Waugh implies that
Aimee— "by nature an ordinary, if silly, girl"— could
have remained sane in a society that provided sustaining
influences--like that of her ancestors in Classical
Greece— but without such a support system, she doesn't
have the strength to prevent her personality from
disintegrating. Giving this a Christian twist, then,
Hollis adds, "The Loved One is a very deep, if somewhat
inverted, exposition of the doctrine of the Communion of
the Saints— of the doctrine that most of us can remain
human in human company, but that few are strong enough to
remain human in a sub-human company."51 Paul A. Doyle
takes a similiar stance:
50 Christopher Hollis, Evelyn Waugh (London:
Longmans, Green; Revised edition, The British Council and
The National Book League, 1958), p. 23-4.
51 Hollis, p. 24.
288
Instead of stressing the soul entering into union
with God, the spotlight is focused on Hollywood
entertainers who are preening and showing off. . . .
No genuine feeling for the departed one exists, and
there is no awareness that the deceased is any more
than a stuffed animal decoration. Indeed animals
are given as much attention as man. . . . Animals
are treated like human beings and human beings are
handled like animals. The natural order has been
turned topsy-turvy. Man has been robbed of his
importance and dignity; his spiritual nature and
eternal destiny have been disregarded. Nothing in
Whispering Glades is placed in proper perspective.52
Graham Greene, another practicing Catholic, offers his
religious assessment of The Loved One;
We cannot help recognizing the genuine note of hate,
the hate of a man who loves, of one aware that it
was for this grotesque world a God died, who is
bitterly ashamed of what we have made of ourselves.
There was a dignity about those who mocked in the
presence of Christ absent from this world of Bel Air
and Beverly Hills, of Sunset Blvd. and the floodlit
motels [there are none in Waugh's novel, however],
where dogs are buried with religious rites and the
mourners receive their cards of remembrance, . . .
where Mortuary Hostesses discuss the choice of
inhumement, entombment, innurement, immurement, or
insarcophagusment to the strains of the Hindu Love
Song, and the non-sectarian clergyman advertises
'Confessions heard in strict confidence.'53
52 Paul A. Doyle, Evelyn Waugh (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 1969), p.31
53 Graham Greene, "The Redemption of Mr. Joyboy"
(The Month, January 1949; rpt. The Portable Graham
Greene, ed. Philip Stratford, New York: Viking, 1973), p.
558.
289
Edmund Wilson, however— who was in general a great
admirer of Waugh's work— best portrays the non-religious
reader's response to the Christian nature and
interpretation of the novel. To such a reader,
The patrons and proprietors of Whispering Glades
seem more sensible and less absurd than the priest-
guided Evelyn Waugh. What the former are trying to
do is, after all, merely to gloss over physical
death with smooth lawns and soothing rites; but for
the Catholic, the fact of death is not to be faced
at all: he is solaced with the fantasy of another
world in which everyone who has died in the flesh is
somehow supposed to be still alive and in which it
is supposed to be possible to help souls to advance
themselves by buying candles to burn in churches.
The trappings invented for this other world by
imaginative believers in the Christian myth— since
they need not meet the requirements of reality— beat
anything concocted by Whispering Glades.54
The British critic Peter Conrad suggests that the
religious satire doesn't work both because Waugh imposes
English codes and because his object is to make America
Catholic, but in the process Conrad reveals his own
prejudices:
California is immune to Waugh's satire because
its truths are stranger than its most wounding
fictions. In the implausible reality of Los
Angeles, Waugh's exaggerations— a street called Via
Dolorosa, a studio hack called Lorenzo Medici— are
54 Edmund Wilson, "Spendors and Miseries of Evelyn
Waugh," in Classic and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle
of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company,
1950), pp. 304-5.
290
harmless. The only way Waugh can subdue the unruly
fictitious actuality of California is to import
codes of honor and gentility which California itself
has never recognized. His characters are therefore
English expatriates, constrained by the rules of
clubmanship and fearful of social disgrace. The
novel harries those who betray the club. . . . The
satirist can threaten the penalty of 'exclusion from
British society,' but in California that is hardly a
deterrent.
Waugh wants to make a colony of California.
[But his presentation of this just like his
description of the funeral practices] . . . is an
outraged defense of orthodoxy against innovation.
Waugh's Californians are heretics, schismatics,
rebels against his grand design to incorporate
America into the universal empire of the Catholic
Church.55
Aimee's death is made to appear as the ultimate
ridiculous sacrifice to the religion of Whispering
Glades. It is her inability to discriminate between the
real and the phoney that brings about her downfall. For
newspaper psychology is another of the city's false
prophets. She puts all her confidence in Guru Brahmin to
whom she has written of her dilemma:
He [Dennis] is British and therefore in many ways
Un-American. I do not mean just his accent and the
way he eats but he is cynical at things which should
be Sacred. I do not think he has any religion.
Neither have I because I was progressive at College
and had an unhappy upbringing as far as religion
went and other things too, but I am ethical. . . .
He also has no idea of Citizenship or Social
Conscience. . . . He is very distinguished looking
55 Peter Conrad, Imagining America (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 304-5.
291
in an Un-American way and very amusing when he is
not being irreverent. Take the works of Art in
Whispering Glades Memorial Park, he is often quite
irreverent about them which I think an epitome of
all that is finest in the American Way of
Life. . . . Also he is not at all cultured. At
first I thought he must be being a poet and he has
been to Europe and seen the Art there but many of
our greatest authors seem to mean nothing to him.
(103-3)
Guru Brahmin favors the American Mr. Joyboy, because he
personifies the staid virtues of "respectability" and
success by Los Angeles' standards, over Dennis, who is
un-American, amoral, dangerous, poor, and very much
alive. This Guru then is an unwise man who fails to
recognize talent and sincerity. Dennis, who by then
understands and capitalizes upon her inability to think
for herself, forces her to keep the vow she made to him
in the Lover's Seat at Wilbur Kenworthy's Wee Kirk o'
Auld Lang Syne. He knows that if he uses arguments
couched in the terms of her own warped value system he
will be able to confound her:
It may be that by the Dreamer's standards there are
defects in my character. The parrot looked terrible
in his casket. So what? You loved me and swore to
love me eternally with the most sacred oath in the
religion of Whispering Glades. So you see the
dilemma, jam or impasse. Sanctity is indivisible.
If it isn't sacred to kiss me through the heart of
Burns or Bruce, it isn't sacred to go to bed with
Old Joyboy. (14 3)
292
Even when she learns that Guru Brahmin, the oracle of the
city, is really Mr. Slump— who has been fired— she
follows his fatal advice. And when she decides to commit
suicide, she chooses Whispering Glades' inner sanctum—
like some Greek tragic heroine in her ancestry. But as
she leaves no note, the act is utterly pointless.
She is denied the rites of her religion by its chief
priest, for when Mr. Joyboy discovers her on his
embalming table, he is anxious to dispose of the body
lest it cast a shadow on his position in the mortuary
hierarchy. He turns to his "rival" for help: "You've
gotta help me . . . through you it happened . . . simple
American kid . . . phoney poems . . . love . . . Mom
. . . baby . . . gotta help . . . gotta" (155). Joyboy
is like Aimee: their American upbringing has failed to
prepare them for taking charge of their own lives.
The novel repeatedly underscores Waugh's belief that
people in Los Angeles tend to exalt the monetary and
ignore the spiritual. Behind the glamor and
sentimentalility of both the studios and the cemetery,
money is always the basic consideration. The studio
executives coldly dismiss Sir Francis after so many years
of service because they feel he can no longer pay his way
among them, thereby driving him to suicide. Similarly,
293
despite Mr. Joyboy's glorious reputation and vaulted
position at Whispering Glades, he is really a small-
minded weakling with utterly mundane inclinations. His
major concern over Aimee's suicide is that it might
injure his professional reputation.56
Dennis capitalizes on his understanding of the lack
of ethics in Los Angeles. As he tells Joyboy what story
to give out to account for both his own disappearance and
Aimee's, he explains what he has learned of ethical
considerations since he has been in the area: "No one in
Southern California, as you know, ever inquires what goes
on beyond the mountains. She and I perhaps may incur
momentary condemnation as unethical. You may receive
some slightly unwelcome commiseration. There the matter
will end" (160).
So the title is completely ironic, for no one is a
loved one in this novel. In fact it is a work about all
kinds of non-love being pawned off to the unsuspecting or
uncritical as love. Aimee, who no doubt assumed that she
would be prepared as the most loved of Loved Ones, ends
up being incinerated "for a price" in Dennis's pet
56 For a fuller elaboration of this perspective see
Joseph F. Vogel, "Waugh's The Loved One: The Artist in a
Phony World," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 10, No. 2 (Autumn,
1976), p. 3.
294
crematory oven. Thus he makes some additional money (the
Cricket Club has already paid for his return trip) so
that now he can travel first class to England.
The travesty that is her funeral scene brings the
three— Aimde, Dennis, and Joyboy— together for a grand
satiric finale. Dennis suggests that, because she will
take an hour and a half to incinerate, he conduct his
first and last service as Non-sectarian clergyman for
her. He then recites one of the plagiarized poems and
registers for an anniversary card to be sent annually to
Mr. Joyboy from the Happier Hunting Ground: "Your little
Aimee is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of
you" (162-3). Everything that should be meaningful is
trivialized. That she should have an animal funeral
underscores Waugh's view that everything human has become
demeaned. So her funeral is an appropriate ritual—
beastial. The poem Dennis recites, "Aimee, thy beauty
was to me. . . ," (162) is a parody of Poe's poem "To
Helen." Her own Greek origins are indicated by the
original title; but more than that, Aimee has been
Dennis's Helen, one who leads him into the fray, but in
this case it is she rather than he who perishes in the
process. Ironically she becomes his muse unknowingly
because by her death she insures his return to Britain,
295
thereby liberating him from the poetic inhibitions the
area breeds. Had she lived, he might well have prevailed
over Joyboy and then been forced to continue to
participate in her corrupt and illusive world. Dennis
would have been doomed to inanity had he stayed. By
burning her in the animal oven he fully renounces her.
Waugh stated in an interview that "an artist must be a
reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of
the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some
little opposition."57 Furthermore, as Charles Crow
mentions, what happens to Dennis relects Waugh's "belief
that the artist is created by the savage destruction of
innocence.1,58 In the Jamesian tradition the innocent
American sometimes triumphed over the corrupt European,
but in this case the innocent and vacuous Americans are
really boorish pragmatists unworthy of emulation or of
providing inspiration.59 Their innocence, rather than
being inspirational, is a mockery. And the now even
57 Evelyn Waugh, as quoted by Julian Jebb, "Evelyn
Waugh" in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews,
3rd Series, ed. George Plimpton (Middlesex: Penguin,
1977), p. 113.
58 Charles Crow, "Home and Transcendence in Los
Angeles," in Los Angeles in Fiction, ed. David Fine
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1984), p. 193.
59 Bradbury, "America and the Comic Vision," p.
1 7 0 .
296
wiser European returns to his homeland— having escaped
like Odysseus from the somnolent lives of the lotus
eaters and the attractive but murderous sounds of the
sirens.
Just what does Dennis learn from his experience?
For one, earlier on he determined that he would never die
in America. "I am a foreigner. I have no intention of
dying here." (52) Not surprisingly, Waugh himself felt
the same way. When musician Robert Craft, along with
Igor Stravinsky, met Waugh in New York a year after the
publication of The Loved One, he noted:
Mr. Waugh prefers to talk about the Undertaking
Industry and the ban it has imposed against burying
him should he, as the industry fervently hopes,
expire in the United States. He is keenly
interested in our own burial plans, too, and eager
to know whether we (our beaux restes) are destined
for family vaults. . . . The sight of the Funeral
Home at the corner of Lexington and 52nd Street
restores his joie de vivre to the extent that for a
moment we fear he may actually take leave of us to
explore the Service Entrance. 0
Secondly, because of his encounters with illusion
and death during his sojourn in Los Angeles, Dennis knows
that he has the vision, the kernal of truth he needs to
60 Robert Craft, "Stravinsky and Some Writers,"
Harper's Magazine, 237, No. 1423 (December, 1968), p.
105. The incident narrated occurred on February 4, 1949
in New York City.
297
return to England prepared to create great art out of his
maturing experiences. What he leaves behind is "his
young heart," thereby indicating his own progression from
innocent romantic to wise realist. Waugh revised the
ending and thereby "emphasized more clearly Dennis's
personal triumph. . . . Because of his dedication to his
art, he not only escapes but promises to make something
positive out of his experience."61
So often British novelists choose to have their
protagonists have their moment of vision while they are
at the beaches in Los Angeles. Something about having
reached the edge, extending out west as far as it is
possible to do so— to the very brink of the Pacific—
brings about whatever revelatory insights the author
decides to offer his protagonist. The final paragraphs
of The Loved One could even be a description of just what
Waugh himself did with his California adventures:
On this last evening in Los Angeles Dennis knew that
he was singularly privileged. The strand was
littered with bones and wreckage. He was adding his
bit; something that had long irked him, his young
heart. He was carrying back instead a great,
shapeless chunk of experience, the artist's load;
bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless
shore; to work on it hard and long, for God know how
long— it was the moment of vision for which a
lifetime is often too short. (163-4)
61 D a v i s , p . 2 1 2 .
298
As the foregoing pages suggest, much of Waugh's
contribution is unique within the world of the British
novel in Los Angeles, but there are ways that his style
and work are comparable to those of his fellow
countrymen. Waugh had a somewhat mixed relationship with
the other British novelists who wrote of Los Angeles— he
openly admired the work of P. G. Wodehouse, going so far
as to say "P. G. Wodehouse affected my style directly."
But in the same interview he took a stab at Raymond
Chandler, "I'm bored by all those slugs of whisky. I
don't care for all the violence either."62
Isherwood is one of the British novelists with whom
Waugh is most often compared, and yet it is curious that
they had almost entirely different views of Los Angeles.
Isherwood's will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter,
but it is relevant here to look at what the two men said
or did in relation to one another. David Lodge reports
that "Isherwood was the only one of the Left-wing writers
of the Thirties for whom Waugh had any respect." Waugh
said of him, "Not only does he seldom use a cliche, he
never seems consciously to avoid one; a distinction due
62 Waugh a s q u o t e d i n J e b b , p . 1 1 1 .
J
299
to a correct habit of thought."63 When Stravinsky and
Robert Craft were in New York with Waugh, the only other
writer they could get him to make reference to was
Isherwood. As Craft recalls, Waugh gave his
"commendation, in which the last two adjectives are
wickedly emphasized, of Christopher Isherwood as 'a good
young American novelist.'"64 After Waugh's death in
1966, Paul Fussell wrote in the New York Times, "Now that
Waugh is gone, who besides Isherwood writes sentences
whose structures are so calculated to delight, regardless
of what they are saying?"65
Isherwood, however, disliked what he believed was
Waugh's facile criticism of Los Angeles. In Imagining
America, Peter Conrad shows how Isherwood got his
revenge. As so often happens, when Hollywood decided to
film a British novel, it sought a British writer to help
with the scenario. Terry Southern planned to adapt The
Loved One for the screen and asked Isherwood for
assistance. Because he had so disliked the book,
63 Evelyn Waugh as quoted in David Lodge, "The
Fugitive of Letters" in Evelyn Waugh and His World, ed.
David Pryce-Jones, p. 194.
64 Robert Craft, p. 106.
65 Paul Fussell as quoted in Evelyn Waugh
Newsletter, 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1977), p. 11.
300
Isherwood at first declined. Then he realized that it
would provide him with an opportunity to have
. . . his revenge on Waugh's doctrinal chastisement
of California. The script he and Southern wrote for
Tony Richardson's film sabotages the novel.
Travestied, The Loved One becomes a parable in
praise of the Californian accord between mysticism
and mechanism. Waugh's plot is suppressed.
Instead, a scientific boy wonder who launches space
rockets from the pets' cemetery inspires the Blessed
Reverend, the founder of Whispering Glades, to offer
his clients a technological resurrection: bodies
will be disinterred and fired into space. The
lucrative acres of the mortuary will then be free
for development as an amusement park. The first
customer to be loaded onto a missile is the luckless
Aimee. Isherwood and Southern warp Waugh's satire
into a surreal, mock-mystical comedy. . . . The film
reunites technological miracle and mystical prodigy:
the Blessed Reverend travels by helicopter, and the
mummified corpses he sends into space have likewise
been freed not only from mortality but from gravity,
reclaimed as orbiting angels. 6
Waugh's concern about the filming of Brideshead Revisited
had revolved about his fear that his story would be
warped by Hollywood into something other than what he
intended. Had he lived to see what his fellow
countryman, the man whose style of writing was most
frequently compared, to his own, had done with The Loved
One he would have known that his fears about how
Hollywood can mangle one's artistic properties was all
C. # •
Peter Conrad, Imagining America (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 303-04, 306-07.
301
too true. It is like the bitter ironies in the ending of
a Waugh novel that his forebodings about Hollywood were
proven to be correct— but finally at his own expense.
From another perspective, Waugh is similar to his
fellow countrymen in his portrayal of Los Angeles. Many
of them tend to see Hollywood as the essence of American
life, so that in writing about it they imply that they
encompass something about the entire country in their
portrayal.
There is an obvious irony in the fact that
[Hollywood] the popular image of excitement and
fulfillment should seem to the intellectual a
wasteland of ennui and frustration. For it is this
uncritical acceptance of material comfort and
pleasure that writers like Huxley and Waugh believe
is the prelude to the loss of all freedom. 7
The British have "a more general emotional and
metaphysical contempt for the Hollywood image" than do
the American writers. In addition, whereas Americans
like West and Fitzgerald tend to focus on Hollywood's
love images, the British are much more taken up with its
death images. Kingsley Widmer attributes this to "an
innate conservatism of imagination and a moralistic hand"
67 S p a t z , p p . 3 2 - 3 .
302
among the British.68 Dixon Wecter, writing with
incredible foresight in 1948, the year that The Loved One
was published, asked, "Why does a good deal of recent
British satire focus upon the greater necropolitan
[italics added] area of Los Angeles?" His answers tend
to follow along with theories mentioned elsewhere in this
paper: that the unusual religions combined with a unique
local preoccupation with health faddism has quite the
opposite effect on the British— it makes them think of
death. And spiritually, the area seems to support a cult
of nonsectarian Christianity based on a Protestantism no
longer doctrinal, but merely sentimental— manifestations
of which are to be found in the Pilgrimage Play offered
in the hills beside the Hollywood Bowl, at Clifton's
Cafeteria, and Knott's Berry Farm (these are of course
offered from Wecter's 1948 perspective). "They are
exposed to our theosophists and swamis, our nutburgers
and high colonics— matters which exert a morbid
fascination upon the masochistic Oxford aesthete."69
They see American life in terms of its standarization,
ultra-sanitation, its immense childishness, and the fact
68 Kingsley Widmer, "The Hollywood Image,"
Coastlines V, 1961, p. 24.
69 Dixon Wecter, "On Dying in Southern California,"
Pacific Spectator, 2, No. 4 (Autumn, 1948), p. 378.
303
that its aesthetics are wedded to salesmanship. Then, as
they look at the activities of the cemeteries, they see
the cult of the body evident even at the moment of its
renunciation.70 Seen from a British viewpoint, this
same phenomenon in Waugh's literature comes out a little
differently:
It is a macabre comedy, but an intense realisation
of two contrasting spirits of life: American
innocence turned bland and mechanical, European
experience turned anarchic, decadent and death-
centered. But the symbiotic relation of the two
gives macabre comedy at its best, a grotesquerie
cooler and more controlled than West's, but
decidedly in the same tradition.71
The bleakness of both their visions has led a number of
critics to compare West and Waugh.
Waugh goes beyond any of the others, however, in the
pervasiveness of his satire. Jeffrey Heath suggests that
The Loved One doesn't belong to 'the Hollywood
novel' tradition, Hollywood belongs to The Loved One
tradition: it is an American version of the City of
Man, which parodies the City of God by attempting to
do away with pain, death and mutability. Waugh's
70 Wecter, pp. 377-87.
71 Bradbury, "America and the Comic Vision," p.
1 8 1 .
304
diagnosis of Hollywood's ills is entirely distinct
from those offered by Fitzgerald and West.72
In Walter Wells' terms, Waugh "internationalized the
Hollywood novel":
The Loved One explicitly makes Hollywood a metaphor
for the fate of Western Civilization in the mid
twentieth century. Less than two years after the
revelation of the Holocaust, Waugh's Los Angeles
. . . has become the place to which the torch of
European barbarism has been passed, from a defeated
Germany to an ascendant America, over the moribund
body of English culture. 3
Both Waugh and Huxley have seen the horror manifested in
the dress in Southern California. "Informal fashion is
treated not as a hallmark of leisure in anti-myth
fiction, but rather chiefly as a sign of vulgar efforts
to cope with newness and change."74 Huxley's girl on
Sunset Blvd. goes "shopping in a hydrangea-blue strapless
bathing suit, platinum curls and a black fur jacket"
72 Jeffrey Heath, "The Year's Work in Waugh
Studies," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 13, No. 1 (Spring
1979), p. 5.
73 Walter Wells, "Between Two Worlds: Aldous Huxley
and Evelyn Waugh in Hollywood," in Los Angeles in
Fiction, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico, 1984), pp. 181-82.
74 J. U. Peters, "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth," in
Itinerary: Criticism: Essays on California Writers, ed.
Cahrles L. Crow (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University
Press, 1978), p. 27
305
(Swan, 9); and Waugh describes one of Dennis's pet
cemetery customers: "He was formally dressed for the
evening in the high fashion of the place— Donegal tweeds,
sandals, a grass-green silk shirt, open at the neck with
an embroidered monogram covering half his torso" (18-19).
Huxley and Waugh were originally members of what
Lionel Stevenson refers to as the school of satiric
drawing-room comedy. But the almost decade separating
them made quite a difference. Huxley, born in 1894, grew
up in "the golden Edwardian afternoon," and therefore
found the postwar era disgusting as it contrasted with
the confidence and prosperity he had known. Waugh,
however, born in 1903, reached adolescence as the war
ended, so he was conditioned to the post-war world.
Stevenson, who continued the series begun by Ernest A.
Baker called History of the English Novel, puts Huxley as
"the ultimate figure in the parade of literary dandies
who, paradoxically uniting Augustan elegance with modern
disillusionment, were even more effective than the
serious realists in eliminating the vestiges of Victorian
restraint from English fiction."75
75 Lionel Stevenson, The History of the English
Novel, 11 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), pp. 197-98.
306
An interesting and effective way of linking both
Huxley and Waugh’s novels about Los Angeles is to look at
the overwhelming amount of what Northrop Frye calls
"demonic imagery" they both employ.76 Frye defines such
works as these which show a world of
. . . perverted or wasted work, ruins and catacombs
[Charlie Habakkuk's suggestion in Swan], instruments
of torture and monuments of folly [the cemetery
statuary in both works]. . . . [It] is closely
linked with an existential hell, like Dante’s
Inferno, or with the hell that man creates on
earth. . . . One of the central themes of demonic
imagery is parody. . . . In the sinister human world
one individual is the tyrant-leader, inscrutable,
ruthless, melancholy, and with an insatiable will,
who commands loyalty [Obispo and the Dreamer] only
if he is egocentric enough to represent the
collective ego of his followers. The other pole is
represented by the pharmakos or sacrificed victim
[Peter Boone and Aimee!. who has to be killed to
strengthen the others. 7
As the insertions in the brackets within the quotation
indicate, this demonic symbolism forms the very bases of
these works. It is notable in both cases that the
nihilistic survive. One might question whether Dennis
can be defined as nihilistic, but he does have a certain
detached coldness or desensitization, even in the earlier
7 f •
Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Three Modern Satirists:
Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1965), pp. 112-13.
77 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton:
Princeton Universtiy Press, 1957) p. 148-49.
307
pages of the novel when, for example, he takes his lunch
from the refrigerator which also holds animal cadavers.
To James Carens, Dennis's "cynicism and his incapacity
for feeling mark him as another hollow man."78 Max
Schulz separates Dennis from the heroes of Black Humor
Fiction because he remains "aloof, dismissing society
. . « 7 Q
with cold imperviousness."
With this kind of demonic imagery, what happens with
the characters, Frye suggests, is reflected
inorganically, either in natural scenes in the desert,
among rocks, or in a wasteland; it is found in perverted
workplaces— prisons or dungeons (Huxley), or "the sealed
furnace of heat without light [Waugh's crematory
ovens]. . . . [It is a] world of fire."80 Now when one
recollects Waugh's "Warning" to his readers, the
nightmare quality and gruesomeness he describes have a
theoretical base.
The parody characteristic of demonic imagery works
in The Loved One not only as a critique of American
78 James Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh
(Seattle; University of Washington Press, 1966), p. 22.
79 Max Schulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties:
A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World (Athens,
Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1973), p. 17.
80 Frye, p. 150.
308
popular culture but also of scholarly theoretical
interpretations that are often applied to Southern
California literature. Both Waugh and Huxley make sure
that their readers know that the West is utterly corrupt
so that the hopes of Manifest Destiny and the opening of
the frontier are entirely without foundation. In
addition, if this is the Garden of Eden, it preserves
innocence to the detriment of every other potential
virtue. The implication is that balanced against such
innocence, European sophistication is to be preferred.81
One of the most interesting discoveries I made about
Waugh and Huxley in the course of my research is that in
1947-48 both men chose to write about visions they had of
Los Angeles a thousand years hence. Waugh began the
"Death in Hollywood" article for Life Magazine in the
following manner:
In a thousand years or so, when the first
archaeologists from beyond the date line unload
their boat on the sands of Southern California, they
will find much the same scene as confronted the
Franciscan missionaries. A dry landscape will
extend from the ocean to the mountains. Bel Air and
Beverly Hills will lie naked save for scrub and
cactus, all their flimsy multitude of architectural
styles turned long ago to dust, while the horned
toad and the turkey buzzard leave their faint
81 For an elaboration of this approach, see Charles
Crow, p. 192.
309
imprint on the dunes that will drift on Sunset
Boulevard.82
He then goes on to describe what in 2947 "the Holy Wood
Archaeological Expedition" will be likely to discover
about the area. After they have "speculated hopelessly
about the meaning of a temple designed in the shape of a
Derby hat and a concrete pavement covered with diverse
monopedic prints," they will head toward Glendale.
Foremost among their discoveries in the region will be
the ruins of Forest Lawn. Curiously enough, this picture
of Los Angeles a thousand years hence, especially as
archeologists will take a look at Forest Lawn, is just
exactly what Huxley chooses to focus on in Ape and
Essence, written in 1947 and published in 1948— the
subject of the next chapter.
82 Waugh, "Death in Hollywood," p. 73.
83 Waugh, "Death in Hollywood,” p. 74.
310
E v e l y n Waugh B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Sources
Novel
The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy. Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1948.
Articles
"Death in Hollywood," Life, 29 September 1947, pp. 73-84.
"Hollywood is A Term of Disparagement," London Daily
Telegraph; rpt. in New Directions in Prose and
Poetry, 10, ed. James Laughlin. New York: New
Directions, 1948.
Letters and Diaries
The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1976.
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.
Interviews
Julian Jebb. "Evelyn Waugh" in Writers at Work: The
Paris Review Interviews, 3rd Series, ed. George
Plimpton. Middlesex: Penguin, 1977, pp. 103-14.
Secondary Sources
Acton, Harold. More Memoirs of An Aesthete. London:
Methuen, 1970.
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four
Ecologies. Middlesex: Penguin, 1971; rpt. 1976.
Bradbury, Malcolm. "America and the Comic Vision." In
Evelyn Waugh and His World, ed. David Pryce-Jones.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, pp. 165-82.
Bradbury, Malcom. Evelyn Waugh. Edinburgh: Oliver and
Boyd, 1964.
311
Carens, James. The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966.
Conrad, Peter. Imagining America. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 198 0.
Craft, Robert. "Stravinsky and Some Writers," Harper's
Magazine, 237, No. 1423 (December, 1968), pp. 101-
08.
Crow, Charles. "Home and Transcendence in Los Angeles."
In Los Angeles in Fiction, ed. David Fine.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1984, pp.
189^205.
Davis, Robert Murray. Catalogue of the Evelyn Waugh
Collection. Troy, New York: Whitston, 1981.
Davis, Robert Murray. Evelyn Waugh, Writer. Norman,
Okla.: Pilgrim, 1981.
De Vitis, A. A. Roman Holiday: The Catholic Novels of
Evelyn Waugh. New York: Bookman Associates, 1956.
Donaldson, Frances. Portrait of a Country Neighbor.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.
Doyle, Paul A. Evelyn Waugh. Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1969.
Doyle, Paul A. "Evelyn Waugh" in Dictionary of Literary
Biography, 15: British Novelists 1930-1959, ed.
Bernard Oldsey. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983, pp.
570-86.
Doyle, Paul A. "That Poem in The Loved One," Evelyn
Waugh Newsletter, 15, No. 3 (Winter 1981), pp. 6-7.
Feifel, Herman. "Attitudes Towards Death in Some Normal
and Mentally 111 Populations," in The Meaning of
Death. New York: McGraw Hill, 1959.
Fine, David, editor. Los Angeles in Fiction.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1984.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957.
312
Gordon, Gerald T. "'Lake Island of Innisfree': A
Classical Allusion in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One,"
Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 5, No. 3 (Winter, 1971),
pp. 1-2.
Greenblatt, Stephen Jay. Three Modern Satirists: Waugh,
Orwell, and Huxley. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1965.
Greene, Donald. "Evelyn Waugh's Hollywood," Evelyn Waugh
Newsletter 16, No. 3 (Winter, 1982), pp. 1-4.
Greene, Graham. "The Redemption of Mr. Joyboy." The
Month, January 1949; rpt. The Portable Graham
Greene, ed. Philip Stratford, New York: Viking,
1973, pp. 557-60.
Heath, Jeffrey. "The Year's Work in Waugh Studies,"
Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 13, No. 1 (Spring 1979),
p. 5.
Hollis, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh. London: Longmans,
Green; Revised edition, The British Council and The
National Book League, 1958.
Lane, Calvin W. Evelyn Waugh. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Linck, Charles E., Jr. "The Year's Work in Waugh
Studies, Part I," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 5, No. 1
(Spring 1971), p. 1.
Lodge, David. "The Fugitive of Letters." In Evelyn
Waugh and His World, ed. David Pryce-Jones. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
Peters, J. U. "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth," in Itinerary:
criticism: Essays on California Writers, ed. Charles
L. Crow. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University
Press, 1978, pp. 21-34.
Schulz, Max. Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A
Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World.
Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1973.
Spatz, Jonas. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the
American Myth. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.
313
Stannard, Martin, editor. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical
Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Stevenson, Lionel. The History of the English Novel, 11.
New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967.
Stopp, Frederick J. Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist.
London: Chapman and Hall, 1958.
Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1975.
Vogel, Joseph F. "Waugh's The Loved One: The Artist in a
Phony World," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 10, No. 2
(Autumn, 1976), pp. 1-4.
Wecter, Dixon. "On Dying in Southern California,"
Pacific Spectator, 2, No. 4 (Autumn, 1948), pp. 375-
87.
Wells, Walter. "Between Two Worlds: Aldous Huxley and
Evelyn Waugh in Hollywood." In Los Angeles in
Fiction, ed. David Fine. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico, 1984, pp. 169-188.
Widmer, Kingsley. "The Hollywood Image," Coastlines V,
1961.
Wilson, Edmund. "Spendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh."
In Classic and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of
the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company,
1950, pp. 298-305.
LIMEYS IN THE ORANGE GROVE:
THE BRITISH NOVEL IN LOS ANGELES
VOLUME II
by
Sheryl Gail Banks
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1986
Copyright 198 6 Sheryl Gail Banks
UMI Number: DP23107
All rights reserved
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fh.D,
E
HUXLEY'S APE AND ESSENCE
*2.
3*22/ ,
In 1948, nine years after After Many a Summer Dies
the Swan appeared, Huxley published the second of his two
novels set in Los Angeles, Ape and Essence. The book
reflects not only Huxley's experiences with Hollywood
during those intervening years but also the added
perspective of his having lived on the Southern
California deserts nearby Los Angeles. About that time
Huxley readily admitted to his brother, "Unlike Dr[.]
Johnson, I prefer climate to conversation."1 Waugh would
have been horrified by such a remark. But the truth is
that by then, as Anita Loos says, Huxley's "American
roots were too firmly implanted for him to pull free."2
And Christopher Isherwood recollects that "Aldous was
attached to California by a love for the terrain itself;
this was perhaps his strongest reason for remaining there
in later years."3
1 Letters, 27 October 1946, p. 554.
2 Anita Loos, "Aldous Huxley in California,"
Harper's, 228 (May 1964), p. 52.
3 Christopher Isherwood in Aldous Huxley: 1894-1963
A Memorial Volume, ed. Julian Huxley (New York: Harper
and Row, 1965), p. 156.
315
Even more important that his commitment to life in
Southern California, however, Ape and Essence reveals his
responses to World War II and especially to the atomic
bombs the United States had dropped on Japan. On August
10, 1945, just the day after the Nagasaki bombing, Huxley
wrote a letter which shows the seeds of a set of
connections basic to this new novel beginning to
germinate in his mind:
I find a peace with atomic bombs hanging overhead a
rather disquieting prospect. National states armed
by science with superhuman military power always
remind me of Swift's description of Gulliver being
carried up to the roof of the King of Brobdingnag's
palace by a gigantic monkey: reason, human decency
and spirituality, which are strictly individual
matters, find themselves in the clutches of the
collective will, which has the mentality of a
delinquent boy of fourteen in conjunction with the
physical power of a god.
Huxley believed tihat the basic enemies of peace were
1) nationalism 2) supported by science 3) in the hands of
inordinately powerful leaders 4) that act like enormous
monkeys and are 5) quick to forego reason, human decency
and spirituality 6) in the pursuit of their delinquent
and adolescent aims. All these elements became part of
the novel he would begin to write about a year and a half
4 Aldous Huxley, Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed.
Grover Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 532.
316
later. Louis Epstein, the proprietor of Pickwick
Bookshop in Hollywood and a friend of Huxley's, remarked
that "He was a very worried man in the sense that he had
a total worldwide feeling for people. . . . He was
fearful that the world was really going to be
exterminated."5 In March of 1947— exactly the same time
that Waugh had his single brief trip to Los Angeles,
though this coincidence may be irrelevant to an
understanding of Huxley's work— Huxley wrote to Anita
Loos that he was thinking about writing a novel about a
post-atomic-war society in the future
. . . in which the chief effect of the gamma
radiations had been to produce a race of men and
women who don't make love all the year round, but
have a brief mating season. The effect of this on
politics, religion, ethics etc. would be something
very interesting and amusing to work out.
At this time Huxley was living in Wrightwood, a Southern
California desert community, which, as Loos herself
5 Louis Epstein, The Way It Was: Fifty Years in the
Southern California Book Trade, interviewed by Joel
Gardner (Los Angeles: Oral History Program, Regents of
the University of California, 1977, 2 Volumes, UCLA
Special Collections), I, p. 333.
6 Letters, p. 569.
317
explains, offered Huxley's never-too-strong lungs a
respite "when smoke and grime polluted the air."7
The fact remains that living on the desert at least
for part of the time must have given Huxley the necessary
distance he needed to take the "outside" look at Los
Angeles that appears in Ape and Essence. Yet as a
resident of Southern California he was anxious to show
what could happen if the bombs fell there. One can
speculate that he chose Los Angeles for yet another
reason. As has been suggested several times in this
paper and, the novel's opening sequences at the studio
illustrate, Hollywood represents what Western
Civilization has become in the mid-twentieth century: a
culture where materialism and eroticism reign supreme.
There history has been demeaned by being reduced to
jumbled imitation "properties" on a stage set:
We emerged from the street of executive
bungalows, crossed a parking lot and entered a
canyon between towering sound stages. A tractor
passed, pulling a low trailer, on which was the
bottom half of the west door of a thirteenth-century
Italian cathedral.
'That's for "Catherine of Siena."'
'What's that?'
'Hedda Boddy's new picture. I worked on the
script two years ago. Then they gave it to
Streicher. And after that it was rewritten by the
0'Toole-Menendez-Boguslavsky team. It's
7 L o o s, p . 52.
318
lousy. . . . [The film avoids both Catherine's
involvement in church politics and her saintly
qualities.] We play safe— concentrate on the boy
she dictated her letters to. He's wildly in love—
but its's all sublimated and spiritual, and after
she's dead he goes into a hermitage and prays in
front of her picture. And then there's the other
boy who actually made passes at her. It's mentioned
in her letters. We play that for all its worth.'8
So here, in yet another British novel, Hollywood becomes
much more than itself. It demonstrates just those modern
elements that Huxley was fearful of in his post-Nagasaki
letter: in this case, most notably, spirituality in the
hands of the powerful studio bosses is sacrificed to
greed and lust.
Part One of Ape and Essence, the introductory
section, accounts for less than a fifth of the entire
novel, but it identifies the defects or weaknesses in
contemporary society that can lead to the horrifying
future society posited in the second and longer part.
The opening lines of the novel underscore the tragic turn
of the human spirit, away from spirituality and the
heroic act toward narcissism compounded with eroticism
and materialism:
8 A ld o u s H u x le y , Ape and Essence (1 9 4 8 ; r p t . New
York: H arper and Row, 1983), p. 1 7 1 . A l l f u r t h e r
r e f e r e n c e s t o t h i s work a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t .
319
It was the day of Gandhi's assassination
[January 30, 1948]; but on Calvary the sightseers
were more interested in the contents of their picnic
baskets than in the possible significance of the,
after all, rather commonplace event they had turned
out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can
say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the center of the
universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead;
but across the desk in his office, across the lunch
table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was
concerned to talk only about himself. (166)
The set of juxtapositions that this opening paragraph
rests upon pervade the whole first section of the novel—
and then are reflected, though severely warped, in the
events of the second half. Gandhi, the pacifist, the man
of peace, seems to represent the last hope that our
civilization will avoid the suicidal course— perpetrated
mostly, Huxley believes, in the name of Progress— that it
has been bent on for the last several hundred years.
Like Jesus, whose death on Calvary was ignored by
picnickers out for a day of fun, Gandhi's murder goes
unmarked in the studio commissary. All that concerns
Hollywood writer Bob Briggs is a verbal recounting of his
latest financial problems and sexual escapades. At one
point the narrator of this section (an unnamed, Huxley-
like, highly educated individual, comfortably conversant
with literature, art, and political philosophy and rather
skeptical of Hollywood) introduces Gandhi into the
discussion:
320
'Do you think Gandhi was interested in art?' I
asked.
'Gandhi? No, of course not.1
'I think you're right,' I agreed. 'Neither in
art nor in science. And that's why we killed him.'
'We?'
'Yes, we. The intelligent, the active, the
forward-looking, the believers in Order and
Perfection. Whereas Gandhi was a reactionary who
believed only in people. Squalid little individuals
governing themselves, village by village, and
worshiping the Brahman who is also Atman. It was
intolerable. No wonder we bumped him off.'
But even as I spoke I was thinking that that
wasn't the whole story., The whole story included
an inconsistency, almost a betrayal. This man who
believed only in people had got himself involved in
the subhuman mass-madness of nationalism, in the
would-be super-human, but actually diabolic,
institutions of the nation-state. (169)
The key words "mass-madness of nationalism" and "would-be
super-human, but actually diabolic, institutions of the
nation-state" show both what led to and then finally how
the post-nuclear culture Huxley posits in the second half
of the book could develop the way it did.
Climate interested Huxley— but not nationalism.
Speaking personally, he said, "I never strongly felt that
the place where I lived had great importance to me."9
Several passages in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
reveal his aversion to viewing the world from a
9 Aldous Huxley, as quoted by George Wickes and Ray
Frazer, in Interview recorded 9 October 1959, the
typescript of which is in UCLA Special Collections, p.
12.
321
nationalistic perspective. On one occasion he refers to
"the ferocious lunacies of nationalism" (Swan, 190).
Pete Boone recollects that William Propter demeaned
regional literature, dismissing it as pretentious,
emphasizing the absurdity of acting "as though there were
some special and outstanding merit in recording unco
ordinated facts about the lusts, greeds and duties of
people who happen to live in the country and speak in
dialect!" (Swan, 173-4)10 The character with the most
Propter-like role in Ape and Essence, the novel he was to
write, echoes Propter's perspective when he notes that
people's minds were "filled by the lunatic dreams of
Progress and Nationalism" (233).
In addition to the several references to Gandhi
early in the novel, the life and sacrifice of Jesus are
measured by Hollywood's standards. Bob Briggs, by all
Huxley's innuendos a mediocre talent, employs a Jesus
metaphor to underscore Hollywood's ignorance of value in
10 One of the interesting factors in this study is
that one of its foremost subjects, Aldous Huxley, would
have found the very thesis of the dissertation
fascinating: that British national origin would
presuppose or predetermine a particular attitude or set
of attitudes toward Los Angeles and reveal itself in the
novels produced by these "foreigners." Though he abjured
nationalism personally, he acknowledged the influencing
point of view of nationalistic training and despaired
about the extent to which nationalism did affect people's
behavior.
322
its quest for commercial success. He quotes a studio
boss, who told him when he asked for a raise: "Bob, . . .
in this Studio, at this time, not even Jesus Christ
himself could get a raise" (168). Here is yet another
instance where the truth looks like satire: Huxley had
actually heard such a remark being made while he was
working at the studios. Afterwards, as he wrote in a
letter, he imagined what a wonderful subject for a
religious painting that scene would be: "The Savior
before Mannix, Katz and Mayer, pleading for a hike in his
wages, and being turned down cold."11
As should already be evident, Ape and Essence is
much more Huxley's "Hollywood" novel than Swan ever was.
Swan takes place in Los Angeles and makes no direct
references to the studios, though Stoyte's rags-to-riches
rise and self-created make-believe world have all the
superficial trappings of a Hollywood romance. Ape and
Essence, however, begins right on the studio lot,
discusses the attributes of the studio powers, and even
has a Hollywood scenario (albeit a rejected one) as the
format of its second section. By the time Huxley wrote
this novel, he had had a number of personal experiences
writing screenplays. To write a parody, then, of the
11 Letters, 4 J u l y 1947, p. 572.
323
form, to focus on a rejected manuscript, is a way of
dealing with his own observations and discomforts within
the genre. Because this particular scenario has been
rejected by Hollywood, and Huxley uses it as the basis
for the entire second half of the novel, one can safely
conclude that for Huxley film studios seem to have little
concern about what properties contain significant
truthtelling. The satire on Hollywood goes even farther
in the second section when the Graverobbers are
particularly interested in the booty they can unearth
from the burial sites of Hollywood's moguls. And the
statue of actress Hedda Boddy (who was to play Catherine
of Siena, as mentioned in Part I) is notable among the
ruins.
Bob Briggs is the modern man who is blind to his
humanitarian commitment, guilty of the egotism that
Huxley believed could allow for the destruction of the
civilization. He has no concern about the larger issues
of the world, and as such does not seem particularly out
of place in the film world environment, where nobody
sterns to be effected by the disastrous turns of world
events. Bob is one of the typical "users1 1 of Hollywood,
someone who exaggerates his importance and makes
reference to his position in the film industry as a way
324
to seduce women. When Bob and the speaker journey to the
desert to search for William Tallis, the writer of the
screenplay they picked up as it fell off a truck on its
way to the incinerator, Bob makes a typical Hollywood
"play" for a gullible young woman he meets there. The
narrator, who is always creating unlikely scenes in his
mind, at first sight had cast this girl, ironically, as
"Lady Hamilton at sixteen, Ninon de Lenclos when she lost
her virginity to Coligny, . . . Anna Karenina in the
schoolroom" (177). Bob Briggs, however, is only too
happy to oblige the girl, who "wants to get into the
movies." He leads her to believe that he will be able to
arrange a screentest for her, and even the girl's
grandmother is so blatantly gullible as to remark, "'It's
more than luck,' Mrs. Coulton was saying, 'it's
Providence. A big shot in the movies coming here, just
when Rosie needs a helping hand."' The grandfather
absorbing himself in the Sunday comics is no better.
Tallis is dead, the enquirers discover, and the world is
left to the likes of Bob Briggs, the studio powers, and
the Coultons— certainly not a very hopeful group for the
propagation of the higher spiritual concerns of mankind.
The only potentially positive elements in the first
section are that the narrator continues to be a thinking,
325
questioning man and that the Coultons have a second
granddaughter, one who devotes herself to the care and
feeding of her infant child— though mostly it belches
after nursing and dirties its diapers. This young woman
is, in fact, mirrored in the second section in the
mothers who nurse and fondle their deformed babies
destined to be exterminated.
Until the second section called "The Script" begins,
the title of the novel seems decidedly irrelevant. This
part opens, however, with a scene in
. . . a picture palace filled to capacity. . . . The
audience is composed entirely of well-dressed
baboons of both sexes and of all ages from first to
second childhood. . . . (182)
Then the Narrator speaks Shakespeare's words from Measure
for Measure:
But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority—
Most ignorant of what he is most assur'd.
His glassy essence— like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
12 Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 2, lines 12 0-
25; quoted by Huxley on p. 183 of the novel. Huxley had
written to Cass Canfield on 24 February 1948, "I am
choosing a Shakespearean title, as one can't go far wrong
with the Bard." (Letters, p. 581)
326
Modern man has lost track of his "glassy essence," Part I
has made clear. If he doesn't rectify things quickly,
the likelihood of the ape-like dystopia of Part II taking
over is all-too-frighteningly possible. Shakespeare's
words are followed by more of the Hollywood and baboon
imagery echoing the opening episodes of the novel and at
the same time anticipating much of the imagery to follow:
Cut to the screen, at which the apes are so
attentively gazing. In a setting such as only
Semiramis or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could have imaged
we see a bosomy young female baboon, in a shell-pink
evening gown, her mouth painted purple, her muzzle
powdered mauve, her fiery red eyes ringed with
mascara. Swaying as voluptuously as the shortness
of her hind legs will permit her to do, she walks
onto the brightly illuminated stage of a night club
and, to the clapping of two or three hundred pairs
of hairy hands, approaches the Louis XV microphone.
Behind her, on all fours and secured by a light
steel chain attached to a dog collar, comes Michael
Faraday.
NARRATOR
'Most ignorant of what he is most assur'd. . .' And
I need hardly add that what we call knowledge is
merely another form of Ignorance— highly organized,
of course, and eminently scientific, but for that
very reason all the more complete, all the more
productive of angry apes. When Ignorance was merely
ignorance, we were the equivalents of lemurs,
marmosets and howler monkeys. Today, thanks to that
Higher Ignorance which is our knowledge, man's
stature has increased to such an extent that the
least among us in now a baboon, the greatest an
orangutan or even, if he takes rank as a Savior of
Society, a true Gorilla. (183)
327
Never one to leave any doubts in the satire about his own
true feelings, Huxley has made his point abundantly clear
at the outset, this time using the Narrator as he did
William Propter in Swan.
Immediately after this, Huxley piles on a series of
scenes with baboons who dress and act suspiciously like
the somewhat bestial Southern California humans presented
in the opening section of the novel. These provide the
transition from the America of 1948 to that of 2108.
They show, for example, "A stout baboon housewife frying
sausages, while the loudspeaker brings her the imaginary
fulfillment and real exacerbation of her most unavowable
wishes" (184). Other scientists in human form in
addition to Michael Faraday— notably Louis Pasteur and a
pair of Albert Einsteins— have become tools of this
society, emphasized by the fact that they also appear
collared and chained, "captive intellect" servants of the
simian world. Preceded by the oft-repeated refrain "Ends
are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s," several pages
later the hairy hands that clapped for the garishly made
up baboon female entertainer now force the Einsteins to
pull the switches that set off "the Thing":
Huge paws hoist the Einsteins to their feet and, in
a close-up, seize their wrists. Ape-guided, those
fingers which have written equations and played the
328
music of Johann Sebastian Bach, close on the master
switches and, with a horrified reluctance, slowly
press them down. (189)
Limiting himself to the allegory of the apes and the
chained scientists, Huxley is able to avoid a realistic
depiction of the nuclear war itself.
Other than the chained and collared scientists, the
first identifiable "humans'’ in the second part of the
novel are the boatload of scientists comprising the New
Zealand Rediscovery Expedition to North America. The
narrator explains that only New Zealand and Equatorial
Africa survived the Third World War because they were
"too remote to be worth anybody's while to obliterate"
and were far enough away from the "dangerously
radioactive condition of the rest of the world" (185).
After remaining in isolation "for more than a century,"
both cultures have decided to explore the ruins of former
civilizations:
The black men have been working their way down the
Nile and across the Mediterranean. What splendid
tribal dances in the bat-infested halls of the
Mother of Parliaments! And the labyrinth of the
Vatican— what a capital place in which to celebrate
the lingering and complex rites of female
circumcision! (185)
Nothing further is said of the Equatorial Africans. The
focus is entirely on the small group of scientists from
329
New Zealand that, Huxley says, have preserved a culture
with "no heights or abysses, but plenty of milk for the
kids, and a reasonably high average IQ, and everything,
in a quiet provincial way, thoroughly cozy and sensible
and humane" (185)— really the simple model of British
family life. The idea that Huxley should use a group of
New Zealanders whose ancestors survived the twentieth-
century holocaust Dixon Wecter believes is derivative of
"Macauley's mythical New Zealander, [though Huxley ]
. . . sets him not amid the archeological ruins of London
but among the rubble of Southern California in the
postatomic era."13
America, therefore, is rediscovered by British
explorers "from the West"— a curious and significant
version of the British view of Southern California. It
is almost the mirror image of those novels which show Los
Angeles as Britain's furthest and most bizarre extension
or even as the dropping off point of Western
Civilization. Using binoculars while yet a mile or two
offshore, the explorers' first sight is of three oil
derricks silhouetted "against the sky, like the equipment
13 Dixon Wecter, "On Dying in Southern California,"
Pacific Spectator, 2, No. 4 (Autumn 1948), p. 384. In
Macaulay's essay on von Ranke's History of the Popes, a
man from "down under" is visiting London at a time in the
distant future when it has become a ruined city.
330
of a modernized and more efficient Calvary" (190).
Huxley chooses another Calvary image as he did the
opening line of the novel, thus emphasizing again both
the seriousness of his intent and the apparent futility
of such sacrifices in the modern world. Here
mechanization has done away with the human symbol,
leaving in his place a monument to industrialization from
a people who worshipped such powers. Coming across it in
such a circumstance, however, makes it very like the
broken statue with its ironic inscription "Look on my
Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" in Shelley's
"Ozymandias." Huxley was thinking about Shelley when he
wrote this novel, for the protagonist rescues a copy of
Shelley which he reads to his beloved as they flee.
Though the first sighting is of oil wells, a huge
sewer is in fact the first man-made artifact the
Rediscovery Expedition contacts as they land on "the
coast of Southern California, twenty miles or thereabouts
due west of Los Angeles" (193) . Huxley wants to begin
his portrait of the future in Southern California by
focusing immediately on its refuse:
The grandeur that was Franklin Delano
Is this by far the biggest drainpipe ever—
Dry now and shattered, Ichabod, Ichabod;
And its freight of condoms (irrepressibly buoyant,
Like hope, like concupiscence) no longer whitens
331
This lonely beach with a galaxy as of windflowers
Or summer daisies. (193)
A number of scholars locate this particular spot as
Redondo Beach because it was a site that especially
intrigued Huxley:
Fascinated by the irrigation system of Los Angeles,
Huxley delighted in tracking down the city's sewage
outlets. This was a satirist's triumph, for he'd
located the orifices through which a pristine
paradise flushed its bowels, and demonstrated that
even angels were obliged to shit. A favorite spot
was Redondo Beach, which an offshore sewage pipe
often littered with a jetsam of soggy condoms. This
beach is the landing place of the rediscovers [sic]
of America in Ape and Essence, but the sewer in 2108
is in ruins, and the sand no longer has its
counterpane of soiled rubbers. The narrator recalls
the magnitude of the elephantine drainpipe which
evacuated the mess of Los Angeles, and touts
sanitary engineering as the noblest achievement of
civilization.14
The only problem with suggesting Redondo Beach as the
place of debarkation is that it is not twenty miles due
west of Los Angeles by any reasonable method of
calculation— rather it is east and south of Los Angeles's
beaches. A more probable site would be the sewage
treatment center in the Playa Del Rey area.
Whatever the actual site Huxley had in mind, he
makes clear his intention to depict the refuse of
14 Conrad, pp. 2 6 3 - 4 .
332
Southern California society devoid of its cultural
context right at the moment the strangers enter this new
yet old land. And when the scientists come ashore and
begin their investigations, they meet their first
inhabitants of Southern California— rather appropriate
occupants of this garbage-laden landscape— "three
villainous-looking men, black-bearded, dirty and ragged,
[who] emerge very quietly from out of the ruins of [a]
house" (196) and abduct one of the scientists who has
become separated from the group. As presumably they are
in the process of transporting their victim to Los
Angeles, the camera "dissolve[s] to a panoramic view of
Southern California from fifty miles up in the
stratosphere" (196).
Most often pointing to this aerial photography
section of the novel, several critics contend that
Huxley's novel is derivative of H. G. Wells in a number
of respects. Tom Dardis, whose study Some Time in the
Sun details the experiences of five novelists (Huxley is
the only British one) in Hollywood, maintains that Ape
and Essence is highly reminiscent of the 193 6 British
film version of an H. G. Wells "tract about the immediate
holocaustal future of Europe" called Things to Come done
by William Cameron Menzies. According to Dardis, "Huxley
333
saw this film in London at the time of its much heralded
premiere and recalled it strongly enough to reproduce it
in toto twelve years later in Ape and Essence."15 Peter
Conrad adds that Huxley employed
. . . those aerial perspectives which Wells
considered to be the cinema's special prerogative: a
view of southern California from fifty miles up
plummets down to investigate devastated Los Angeles
from a height of five miles; a montage of aerial
views of London in 1800, 1900, and 1940 illustrates
[for Wells] the disaster of overpopulation. . . .
Film is the form best able to represent the world's
incendiary apocalypse, since it is a product of the
same scientific revolution which has wrecked the
world.15
As Huxley's camera plummets downward, the Narrator's
voiceover is heard:
NARRATOR
The sea and its clouds, the mountains glaucous-
golden,
The valleys full of indigo darkness,
The drought of lion-colored plains,
The rivers of pebbles and white sand.
And in the midst of them the City of the Angels.
Half a million houses,
Five thousand miles of streets,
Fifteen hundred thousand motor vehicles,
And more rubber goods than Akron,
15 Tom Dardis, Some Time in the Sun (New York:
Scribner's, 1976), pp. 186-87.
15 Peter Conrad, Imagining America (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 255.
334
More celluloid than the Soviets,
More Nylons than New Rochelle,
More brassieres than Buffalo,
More deodorants than Denver,
More oranges than anywhere,
With bigger and better girls—
The great Metrollopis of the West.
And now we are only five miles up and it
becomes increasingly obvious that the great
Metrollopis is a ghost town, that what was once the
world's largest oasis is now its greatest
agglomeration of ruins in a wasteland. Nothing
moves in the streets. Dunes of sand have drifted
across the concrete. The avenues of palms and
pepper trees have left no trace. (19 6-97)
This is a view of Los Angeles written by a man who has
grown to cherish it as one does a outlandishly flawed but
unique and irrepressible individual. He gives it his own
made-up term "Metrollopis": a combination of metropolis
and metropolitan, with a trollop in the middle and maybe
a touch of solipsism. The distancing of the aerial views
was made easier by Huxley's forays back and forth to the
high desert. As Lionel Rolfe says in his generally thin
and gossipy book called Literary L.A., "It is no doubt
significant that Huxley described L.A. in that gloomy
work created on the high desert as 'the world1s largest
oasis,' for it was as if he were viewing L.A. from the
perspective of the desert."17 The first part of the
17 Lionel Rolfe, Literary L.A. (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1981), p. 49.
335
novel, too, included some appreciation of the desert
landscape. As Briggs and the speaker make their journey
to find the author of the scenario, Huxley writes:
To the north, far out in the desert, the sun was
shining in a long narrow strip of golden light. All
around us were the soft rich grays and silvers, the
pale golds and russets of the desert vegetation—
sagebrush, burrowbrush, bunch grass and buckwheat,
with here and there a strangely gesticulating Joshua
tree, rough barked, or furred with dry prickles, and
tufted at the end of its many-elbowed arms with
thick clusters of green metallic spikes. (173)
It had even been William Tallis's wish to be buried all
by himself "under a Joshua tree" (180), no doubt the very
same Joshua tree with the grave underneath it "overgrown
with bunch grass and buckwheat" (270) that Huxley employs
for the final scene in the novel. Such sensitive
descriptions support Christopher Isherwood's
recollection, mentioned early in the chapter, that Huxley
had grown to love the landscapes of Southern
California.18
From the desert as graveyard to the city as a giant
burial ground for a lost civilization, the camera settles
more specifically on Los Angeles and pans down "over a
large rectangular graveyard, lying between the ferro
concrete towers of Hollywood and those of Wilshire
18 Ish er w o o d , p. 156.
336
Boulevard. We land, pass under an arched gateway, enjoy
a trucking shot of mortuary gazebos" (197). This is
Forest Lawn as transformed in yet another British novel
set in Los Angeles. Huxley himself had used it in Swan,
and he may not have been aware that Waugh was at about
the same time writing The Loved One which employed Forest
Lawn as the primary setting. Huxley clearly was not done
with the site himself. Whereas Huxley’s Swan and Waugh's
The Loved One detail the establishing of the cemetery and
the preparation of corpses, Ape and Essence looks at it
from the other end of the process. Huxley wanted to show
how it would look to "archeologists" digging among the
ruins generations hence. Walter Wells's comment on
Huxley's reuse of Forest Lawn in this setting is
particularly apt. Like the gravediggers who disinter
bodies and rob them of their clothing and jewelry, "The
Great Hollywood Necropolis of the twentieth century
remains the only source worth plundering.1,19 The
Britons' fascination with death in Los Angeles reaches
its ultimate incarnation when it becomes the only
valuable mining site left.
19 Walter Wells, "Between Two Worlds." In Los
Angeles in Fiction, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 175.
337
Fashion in Los Angeles is made a mockery of in a new
way by showing the digging up and donning of the clothing
of the dead. Whereas both Waugh and Huxley had noted the
absurdity of dress on the mid-twentieth century streets
of Los Angeles, this tendency is now further exaggerated
by inhabitants of 2108 who wear outrageously absurd
outfits composed of the items they have taken off the
corpses; they, unlike the reader, are utterly unconscious
of the social implications of the clothing they have put
on: the Chief wears a "much bemedalled uniform of a Rear-
Admiral of the United States Navy" and the Director of
Food Production dons "homespun trousers . . . and a
cutaway coat that must once have belonged to the English
butler of some twentieth-century motion picture
executive" (254).
How well Huxley succeeded in his return to the
cemeteries of Los Angeles is debatable. Even his dear
friend Gerald Heard believed that the portrayal was
overdone; that, given the time, Huxley had lost his sense
of perspective and hope for a change of the course of
world events:
Huxley had no faith left in angels. In spite of his
intention, the book is not about passionate apes
screaming at their own faces seen in truth's mirror.
It is literally ghoulish. Waugh's The Loved One and
more recently Jessica Mitford's documented attack on
338
the corpse racketeers make Huxlev's attempt to get a
wince out of us terribly dated.
The hodge-podge of concoctions produced by the
grave-robbing mirrors the juxtapositions of vastly
different historical materials Part One had shown
happening on the Hollywood studio lots.
The studio in 1948 is an exact anticipation of the
wrecked California of 2108. . . . The studios, like
the grave robbers, are pillagers of the past. . . .
The graveyards, like the film studios, are images of
world history collapsed into a grubby costume-
wardrobe. . . . So similar are the cemeteries and
the studios that death is defined as a permanent
affixation of make-up: the disinterred brewer's
cheeks are still rouged, his lips 'stitched into a
perpetual smile.'21
This is a society that can only utilize the
superficialities— like fashion— of twentieth-century
life. Because the civilization that has survived can
produce no "energy" of its own, it has no use for all the
marvels of technology which lie about rusting. And
books, for example, are of absolutely no use other than
to provide fuel for the bonfire: Los Angeles's downtown
Central Library is ravaged of its "treasures" in the
20 Gerald Heard, "The Poignant Prophet," Kenyon
Review, 27, p. 64.
21 Conrad, p. 254-55.
339
hopes that the paper will keep the communal fires burning
for a while longer. *
All of this demonstrates the chaos of derivative
life. Los Angeles appears in many of the novels in this
study as a city that selects and employs what it wants
from other cultures, then combines this with its own
characteristic artifacts, often producing in the process
its own unique aura. The homes and neighborhoods of
Beverly Hills in Swan are just such a conglomeration.
But in the devil-worshipping society that exists in 2108
Los Angeles, all the original sense of purpose related to
these artifacts is gone. Books are not for reading, but
for burning.
The more the reader finds out about this "new"
civilization the more he is convinced that it is meant to
be an exaggeration of what already existed in Huxley's
Los Angeles. Unbridled amoral sexual couplings occur
without raising any eyebrows among the inhabitants.
Those who succeed best don't think: "You mustn't think.
If you think, it stops being fun. . . . If you think
. . . it's terrible, terrible" (248). And fun is the
22 Huxley was unfortunately prophetic in writing
this, for on 29 April 1986, the Central Library in Los
Angeles actually burned, and many of its rich collections
were lost.
340
highest goal. These are a people openly devoted to the
devil whereas contemporary Angelinos, as shown in the
first section, while often presuming to be God-fearing,
seem more dedicated to their pursuit of devilish
enterprises than the reverse.
The setting is very specifically Los Angeles. In
addition to the opening sequence at Forest Lawn, the
camera pans through the ruins of the city— almost
recapitulating Jeremy Pordage's first ride through the
city in Swan. But here rather than seeing active gas
stations, busy sidewalks and colorful advertisements for
brassieres, hamburgers and religion, there are only
abandoned filling stations and office buildings. And
everything is silent. Despite the fact that a few
thousand living people inhabit the city, their presence
is hardly perceptible. There are two and a half million
skeletons: "Nothing stirs. The silence is total and, in
the midst of all these cozy little bourgeois ruins, seems
conscious and in some sort conspiratorial" (264).
Specific places like the Biltmore Hotel, Pershing
Square and the University of Southern California are—
like the clothing— no longer used for their original
purposes. The Administration Building of the university,
for example, is being used by the Director of Food
341
Production. In a former biology lab at USC are the
remains of students, a testimony to death, rather than a
place dedicated to the investigation of life: "Scattered
about the room lie half a dozen skeletons, still
associated with the crumbling remains of slacks and
sweaters, of nylons and costume jewelry and brassieres"
(254). Officials in the society are given titles
emphasizing the extent of their domain: one priest is
called the "Patriarch of Pasadena" and the highest
religious figure is "His Eminence the Arch-Vicar of
Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant
of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood."
In every way, Los Angeles has become a huge rubbish
heap— both literally, with heaps of skeletons, ruins of
buildings, unused and rusty cars and trains scattered
about, as well as people going about garbed in clothing
reclaimed from the dead— and symbolically, for people are
both demeaned (made to act and appear more animalistic)
and deformed (something like four-fifths of the babies
are destroyed because of gross deformities). In effect
there is little that is human or humane left in what
remains of life in Los Angeles.
Twentieth-century science and religion, both of
which could have been used to "save" society, are shown
342
to be so misguided as to have actually brought about the
atomic holocaust. During the period that Huxley was
conceiving this novel, English visitors to Los Angeles
were frequently impressed with the scientific genius the
area exuded. In Jesting Pilate Huxley had suggested that
the movies needed scientists to create special effects
and develop ever-more sophisticated film techniques (see
first Huxley chapter). But there was also the rapidly
developing postwar aircraft-aerospace industry with its
never-ending demand for engineers and scientists of every
variety. Evelyn Waugh's friend Harold Acton offered his
impressions of Los Angeles in about 1947:
I felt I should soon wither in such a place, and I
could understand why its residents hankered after
strange gods. Comfort rather than beauty seemed to
be their criterion and the most brilliant intellects
were scientific, which might explain why Huxley felt
at home there.
But this novel makes clear that Huxley meant to teach
scientists and their supporters about their
responsibilities. He often portrays scientists
themselves as immature— as with Peter Boone in Swan and
Alfred Poole in this novel. The "warlike, egocentric,
sensual, and materialist . . . baboons live as we live
23 Harold Acton. More Memoirs of An Aesthete
(London: Methuen, 1970), p. 222.
343
and keep their human scientists . . . on chains, much as
we do, forcing them to construct missiles and bombs that
will ultimately lead to their own destruction.1,24 Famous
scientists like Faraday, Einstein and Pasteur represent
the creative side of science (the means) used by ape-
minded men for their misguided ends. ("Ends are ape-
chosen; only the means are man's.") Huxley also points
specifically at mild-mannered suburban-living scientists
who spend their days figuring out ways to destroy life in
ever-more sophisticated ways, then
. . . after a hard day at the lab, coming home to
their families. A hug from the sweet little wife.
A romp with the children. A quiet dinner with
friends, followed by an evening of chamber music or
intelligent conversation about politics or
philosophy. Then bed at eleven and the familiar
ecstasies of married love. And in the morning,
after orange juice and Grapenuts, off they go again
to their job of discovering how yet greater numbers
of families precisely like their own can be infected
with a yet deadlier strain of bacillus mallei. (187)
The Arch-Vicar, the most knowledgeable man and
philosophical spokesperson for the civilization of 2108,
suggests that if philosophy and science represented by
the East and West in the twentieth century world had
24 Sanford E. Marovitz, "Aldous Huxley's
Intellectual Zoo," in Aldous Huxley: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Robert E. Kuehn (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 43.
344
joined forces as they should have, they would have
created the best rather than the worst of worlds:
"Eastern mysticism making sure that Western science
should be properly used; the Eastern art of living
refining Western energy; Western individualism tempering
Eastern totalitarianism. . . . Why, it would have been
the kingdom of heaven" (261). This statement counters
the opening remarks about the assassination of Gandhi,
and the implication is that had his non-violent approach
never connected with nationalism, it could have saved
twentieth-century civilization and, thereby, the earth.
Though the old world was destroyed by misguided
science, the new world is being rediscovered by
scientists— this time British ones from New Zealand. And
the only person who enters the new society (because he is
kidnapped and brought to the Chief) and really
understands "what things are for" by the reader's
standards is Dr. Alfred Poole D.Sc., the man Huxley
selects as "our hero." He is
. . . the Chief Botanist of the Expedition. Like a
browsing sheep, he moves from plant to plant,
examining flowers through his magnifying glass,
putting away specimens in his collecting box, making
notes in a little black book. . . . Better known to
his students and younger colleagues as Stagnant
Poole, . . . a Fellow of the Royal Society of New
Zealand. . . . It is as though he lived behind plate
glass, could see and be seen, but never establish
3.45
contact. . . . The fault lies with that devoted and
intensely widowed mother of his— that saint, that
pillar of fortitude, that vampire, who still
presides at his breakfast table and with her own
hands launders his silk shirts and sacrificially
darns his socks. (193-94)
He is a curiously inept and unlikely hero. Poole in fact
resembles Jeremy Pordage of Swan in a number of respects.
First of all, he is inordinately devoted to his mother,
so much so that he has never been able to marry:
Out of the enormity of his respect for his mother,
our poor friend here is still, at thirty-eight, a
bachelor. Too full of an unnatural piety to marry,
he has spent half a lifetime surreptitiously
burning. Feeling that it would be a sacrilege to
ask a virtuous young gentlewoman to share his bed,
he inhabits, under the carapace of academic
respectability, a hot and furtive world, where
erotic phantasies beget an agonizing repentance and
adolescent desires forever struggle with the
maternal precepts. (206)
Like Pordage, Poole's prudery veils his incestuous
devotion to his mother. One can anticipate that uptight
Poole, separated from his overbearing mother and
confronted by whatever might remain of permissive Los
Angeles, is likely to have a thoroughgoing unleashing of
libidinal impulses.
Poole too is the stranger who enters the city: and
it is through his very twentieth-century British eyes
that the reader learns the specific nature of the
346
civilization that has developed in post-holocaust Los
Angeles. As in the earlier Huxley book and in Waugh's
novel, the British figure presents a new version of the
Jamesian traveler. This time Poole is at once the most
innocent and the most experienced of observers. Though
he knows nothing of the new society, he is the only one
who understands how the old civilization really
functioned and how the artifacts that are now just ruins
in Los Angeles operated in an integrated fashion. The
citizens of Los Angeles in both Swan and Ape and Essence
introduce and attempt to assimilate the newcomer to the
world they have made. In both cases, this decidedly
circumspect individual who has something about him of the
likable bumbler has to learn a new set of behaviors in
order to survive in a Southern California society his
conventional British upbringing has not prepared him for.
Loola, the young woman Poole meets at the first
grave-robbing scene, immediately attracts him— in much
the same way that Aimee fascinates Dennis Barlow in The
Loved One when he first sees her at the mortuary.
Southern California woman always release the British
protagonist's inhibitions. Earlier in the novel, Alfred
Poole had rebuffed the advances of Miss Hook, another of
the New Zealand scientists, a woman who evidently has had
347
her sights on him for a long time. For Poole, however,
Loola seems to be the first real threat to his attachment
to his mother. Loola resembles Virginia Maunciple of
Swan in that she exudes sexuality at every turn. Even
her deformity suggests this: she has three breasts.
Huxley even dubs her one of the "Hots," those people who
ignore the strict social edicts and make love when they
want to, not just during the prescribed annual two-week
mating period.
Loola is the only fully delineated woman in the
novel. Given sexually-provocative names like Flossie and
Loola, Huxley shows that women in this misogynistic
society are to be thought of merely as sexual beings
without minds. In fact they are referred to by the
eunuch priests as "Vessels of the Unholy Spirit," and the
implication is that out of such defiled vessels,
naturally only deformed babies can be born. George
Orwell found the misogynism combined with perverted
sexuality in the novel absolutely horrifying; he
commented that the book was
. . . awful. . . . The more holy he gets, the more
his books stink with sex. He cannot get off the
subject of flagellating women. Possibly if he had
the courage to come out and say so, that is the
solution to the problem of war. If we took it out
348
in a little private sadism, which after all doesn't
do much harm, we wouldn't want to drop bombs etc.25
Probably because the warm Southern California
climate allows ample opportunities for abbreviated dress
and the area appears, to the outsider, overrun by the
motion picture and entertainment industries, Los Angeles
is seen as a sex capital by much of the world. Yet, as
the earlier chapter on Huxley suggests, he had a basic
repugnance of physicality. Harold Watts notes that there
is "an unresolved ambiguity in Huxley's depiction of sex.
Only a prudery of a deep and temperamental sort can
explain Huxley's all-too-frequent depiction of heroes who
embrace their mistresses with a sense of disgust for what
they are doing."26 Sexuality in this novel, except as
practiced by Alfred and Loola, is portrayed as a
disgusting and degrading act. Specific imagery
dramatically highlights the sexual confusion in this
novel: once the slaughter of the deformed babies is
accomplished and their young mothers are flagellated with
"consecrated bull's pizzles" (226), the crowd emotions
25 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism,
and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian
Angus (London: 1968), IV, p. 479.
26 Harold Watts, Aldous Huxley (New York: Twayne,
1969), p. 118.
349
build to a frenzy, people rip off the NO labels covering
each other's sexual organs, and the public mating orgy at
the Los Angeles Coliseum is then carried on amidst
priestly chanting and the accompaniment of Wagner's most
sacred music from Parsifal.
The ironic incongruity of this scene called Belial
Night, portrayed as the one of the society's most holy
rituals, is not entirely lost on Poole. He and Loola
have their first sexual episode together under these
degraded circumstances. In this "Walpurgisnacht of human
slaughter and sexual indulgence, [Alfred is] forced to
admit to himself the existence inside his own body of a
very powerful baboon."27 As Keith May suggests, Poole
finds that, as authors like Heraclitus, Donne, Blake, and
Dostoevsky among others indicate, once he is degraded man
has the impulse to love.28 And from this source comes
whatever hope the novel posits for the future. Poole
begins to read Shelley's love poetry to Loola, much like
Dennis Barlow in The Loved One who attempts to woo Aimee
with the words of the English poets. Alfred tries to
27 Peter Firchow, Aldous Huxley: Satirist and
Novelist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1972), p. 135.
28 Keith May, Aldous Huxley (London: Barnes and
Noble, 1972), p. 189.
350
show her the saving humanity of romantic visionaries like
Shelley. But the hope that Alfred and Loola's love
engenders is on a very small scale in proportion to the
dimensions of evil: it is that of individuals who love
and attempt to achieve peace and harmony within their own
lives. They are no more than a single couple concerned
with no one but themselves, maybe an archetypal Adam and
Eve, this time escaping from Hell rather than being
ejected from Eden— but at the same time a mirror image
perhaps of Bob Briggs and his Hamiltonian Rosie of the
first part of the novel. As Peter Firchow writes,
"Paradise, even the very imperfect sort known in
California, so [the] prologue seems to [warn] us, is all
too easily lost, and all too arduously regained."29 The
"burying party" that pursues Alfred and Loola as they
attempt to escape is a real threat, so the reader never
knows whether Alfred and Loola will make it to Fresno and
freedom. Jerome Meckier makes an interesting connection
between the foetal apes at the end of Swan and the ape
like civilization that Loola and Poole are fleeing from;
he sees their degradation as the basis of a new beginning
rather than as a symbol of the essential apeness of their
lives:
29 F irch o w , p. 137.
351
Like the Fifth Earl of Hauberk in After Many a
Summer Dies the Swan, the inhabitants of post-World-
War-III America have fallen from the world of time
to become more simian than human. As Propter would
have realized, if men descend to the animal level,
they must regain the human before attempting to
climb onto the level of eternity. Dr. Alfred Poole
and the simple-minded Loola become the potential
Adam and Eve of a new race once they escape from the
ape-like society of twenty-second-century California
to go in search of a more complete way of life.
Because they fall truly in love, Alfred and Loola
can live on the 'animal level1 in a different and
more promising way than those they flee from. What
they discover on this 'animal' or physical level
awakens Poole to the higher possibilities. It is on
the animal level that he begins to fight for good.30
Meckier's analysis may just be too positive for what
seems like such a dark work of satire. The final words
of the novel hold out a frail hope:
There is a silence. Then Loola hands him a hard-
boiled egg. He cracks it on the headstone and, as
he peels it, scatters the white fragments of the
shell over the grave. (271)
The symbolic scattering of eggshells on William Tallis's
grave— reminiscent of the picnickers on Calvary— reveals
the paradox of high romantic aspirations and the ironic
mockery of human life. They seem hardly strong enough to
withstand the evil forces driving their pursuers.
Because the highly detailed worship of Belial as well as
30 Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley: Satire and
Structure (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 190.
352
the emphasis on man's innate bestiality take up such a
large proportion of the scenario, the balance is
definitely tipped in favor of the negative perspective.
The Arch-Vicar's carefully conceived satanism
combines the perception of a William Propter with the
nihilism of a Dr. Sigmund Obispo. On this dark side of
the spectrum is Philip Wylie's unpublished commentary on
the novel. He finds Los Angeles a uniquely appropriate
setting for such a novel:
I am relieved that the scene of the perennial Black
Mass Mr. Huxley forsees is Los Angeles. . . . The
survival of genetic monsters by parasitism upon the
sand-sifted ruins of Los Angeles and Hollywood, is
eminently just in the poetical sense. Hollywood
gave substance to the American dream of Heaven; it
is thus the ideal grave for the hellish ghouls we
seem bent on becoming.
In the same letter Wylie also notes in reference to
Huxley, "It is an amusing pity that the most brilliant
American author is an Englishman.
Ape and Essence offers the most apocalyptic view of
Los Angeles to be presented in these pages. Such visions
were not confined to the British novelists who set their
31 Philip Wylie, Letter to Harper and Row, 25 May
1948, Huxley Archives Box 5 File 4, UCLA Special
Collections.
32 Wylie, Huxley Archives.
353
tales in the city, for Nathanael West's Day of the Locust
is probably the preeminent novel in the genre, and
Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Pynchon added their significant
contributions. Several characteristics of Los Angeles
make the genesis of such apocalyptic writing more
understandable: the ever-present threat of earthquakes,
the transitory nature of Hollywood sets and notoriety,
the make-believe world of entertainment that keeps
invading everyday life, the Santa Ana winds and the all-
consuming brushfires33 and mudslides, and the indefinable
seasons— all blend to give the area a prevailing sense of
unreality that makes a tradition-bred Englishman think of
nightmarish happenings and apocalyptic events, makes him
feel he has reached the dropping off place at the end of
the world.
But Huxley realized he was looking at modern life
from an older man's perspective. Though he showed he had
33 One of Huxley's most difficult moments as a
Southern California resident came in 1961 when the house
he and his second wife Laura Archera had bought in the
Hollywood Hills was "destroyed by a swift, erratic brush
fire. The house was replaceable; its contents were not.
They included his annotated library of 4,000 volumes, the
manuscripts of most of his books; his diaries; letters
from such famous contemporaries as Andre Gide and D. H.
Lawrence; and most precious of all, Maria's letters and
the memorabilia of their long loving life together."
(Lawrence Clark Powell, California Classics, Santa
Barbara: Capra Press, 1982, p. 368.)
354
little cause for hope left, he wrote less than a year
after Ape and Essence was published:
'What a world.' We who were born near the end of
one of history's rare Golden Ages, have a criterion
by which to judge it. The young who have never
known anything else, cannot compare the present with
a better past and so (let us hope) find it a little
more tolerable. 4
He wrote Ape and Essence as a warning. Modern man, Part
I tells, has lost track of his essence. A culture like
that shown in Los Angeles and its environs dominated by
full blown egotism, unchecked hedonism, rampant
materialism, misdirected technology, and false
intellectualism is all-too-likely to produce the ape-
directed horrors of Part II. What he hoped to do with
his novel was to warn the young to recognize the threats
and take charge of events before societal suicide was an
inevitability.
34 Letters, 9 J a n u a r y 1 9 4 9 , p . 5 8 9 .
355
B i b l i o g r a p h y f o r Ape and Essence
Primary Works
Novels
After Many A Summer Dies The Swan. New York: Harper and
Row, 1939; rpt. Harper Colophon, 1983.
Ape and Essence. New York: Harper and Row, 1948; rpt.
Harper Colophon, 1983, pp. 166-271.
Letters
Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith. London:
Chatto and Windus, 1969.
Interviews
Original Typescript of Interview by George Wickes and Ray
Frazer, 9 October 1959, With corrections of
Typescript by Aldous Huxley, Library of Living
Journalism, UCLA Special Collections.
Secondary Sources
Acton, Harold. More Memoirs of An Aesthete. London:
Methuen, 1970.
Conrad, Peter. Imagining America. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1980.
Dardis, Tom. Some Time in the Sun. New York:
Scribner's, 1976.
Epstein, Louis. The Way It Was: Fifty Years in the
Southern California Book Trade, interviewed by Joel
Gardner. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, Regents
of the University of California, 1977, 2 Volumes,
UCLA Special Collections.
Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972.
Heard, Gerald. "The Poignant Prophet," Kenyon Review,
27, pp. 49-70.
356
Isherwood, Christopher. In Aldous Huxley: 1894-1963 A
Memorial Volume, ed. Julian Huxley. New York:
Harper and Row, 1965, pp. 154-62.
Loos, Anita. HAldous Huxley in California," Harper1s,
228 (May 1964), pp. 51-55.
Marovitz, Sanford E. "Aldous Huxley's Intellectual Zoo,"
in Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Robert E. Kuehn. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall, 1974, pp. 33-45.
May, Keith. Aldous Huxley. London: Barnes and Noble,
1972.
Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1969.
Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and
Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian
Angus. London: 1968, Volume IV.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. California Classics. Santa
Barbara: Capra Press, 1982.
Rolfe, Lionel. Literary L.A.. San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 1981.
Watts, Harold. Aldous Huxley. New York: Twayne, 1969.
Wecter, Dixon. "On Dying in Southern California,"
Pacific Spectator, 2, No. 4 (Autumn 1948), pp. 375-
87.
Wells, Walter. "Between Two Worlds: Aldous Huxley and
Evelyn Waugh in Hollywood." In Los Angeles in
Fiction, ed. David Fine. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1984, pp. 169-88.
Wylie, Philip. Letter to Harper and Row, 25 May 1948,
Huxley Archives Box 5 File 4, UCLA Special
Collections.
357
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
It’s no good explaining to people why one lives
here— either they understand it’s the only place or
they don't.1
The foregoing was Christopher Isherwood's commentary
on Los Angeles when Gavin Lambert, a younger British
writer, asked him for a statement in 1966. By that time
Isherwood— who had been hailed by Somerset Maugham in
conversation with Virginia Woolf as the young man who
held "the future of the English novel in his hands"2— had
already lived in Los Angeles for twenty-five years,
longer than he ever had in England. In fact, Christopher
Isherwood must be considered as Los Angeles's most
enthusiastic British novelist-in-residence.
Unlike any of the other novelists in this study,
Isherwood’s biography bears a very special relationship
to his fiction, for he quite openly violates the
traditional demarcations that characterize each genre,
making for a very decided blurring of boundaries and
1 Isherwood as quoted by Gavin Lambert,
"Christopher Isherwood," in Double Exposure, ed. Roddy
McDowell (New York: Delacorte Press, 1966), p. 107.
2 Somerset Maugham, as quoted by Christopher
Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind 1929-1939 (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 325.
358
forms. Whereas biographical/autobiographical nonfiction
works like Kathleen and Frank (the portrait of his
parents) include a great deal of conjecture, fictional
works, such as Down There on a Visit, are very
substantially "the truth" of Isherwood's life. The
narrator, like that of the famous Berlin stories, is even
called Christopher.3 The speaker is as distant from the
young Christopher Isherwood in his book as from any other
created character:
We have in common the label of our name, and a
continuity of consciousness; there has been no break
in the sequence of daily statements that I am I.
But what I am has refashioned itself throughout the
3 Thomas Wolfe was also troubled by the rather
arbitrary dichotomy between fact and fiction,
particularly as the writer might attempt to separate his
life from the contents of his works. In the opening
words of "To the Reader" in Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe
explains: "This is a first book, and in it the author has
written of experience which is now far and lost, but
which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any
reader, therefore, should say that the book is
'autobiographical' the writer has no answer for him: it
seems to him that all serious work in fiction is
autobiographical— that, for instance, a more
autobiographical work than Gulliver1s Travels cannot
easily be imagined. . . . We are the sum of all the
moments of our lives— all that is ours is in them: we
cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the
clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all
men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not
fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood,
fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose."
359
days and years, until now almost all that remains
constant is the mere awareness of being conscious.
It one of the great ironies perpetrated by Isherwood that
he speaks of himself in the third person in the
autobiographical works and most often selects a first
person narration for the novels.
Because Isherwood incorporates so much of his own
life into his fictional works, his biography takes on a
far greater significance to the understanding and
analysis of his novels than any of the other authors
considered in this research. In this chapter, then,
biographical material that might normally be excised on
the basis of its tangential relevance to the fiction
under consideration has been included because it is so
intertwined with the works themselves. Thus, because
Isherwood elects to ignore some of the traditional
distinctions between fact and fiction, so will this study
of his Los Angeles novels. Indeed, when Isherwood speaks
of being "factual,1 ' he really means, he says,
. . . being true to himself, his personal myths, his
memories of how things were. As he told Edward
Upward [a friend] . . . 'As soon as I've arranged
4 Christopher Isherwood, Down There on a Visit (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 14. All further
references to this work appear in the text in parentheses
as DTOAV.
360
all these dates in order, I can start to remember—
or to invent, it doesn't matter which.' Isherwood
has always constructed his fiction on a foundation
of fact and has constantly reiterated his conviction
that what interests him is the interpretation of
existing experience rather than the invention of new
experience."5
What Isherwood says of Katherine Mansfield's work is
equally true of his own, "She is among the most personal
and subjective of all modern writers; and, in her case,
fiction and autobiography form a single, indivisible
opus."6
Though Isherwood has written a number of
autobiographical books that detail his parents' lives
(Kathleen and Frank, 1971), his childhood years (Lions
and Shadows, 1938), his time in Berlin and his pre-
American life (Christopher and His Kind, 1976), and his
relationship with Swami Prabtavananda (My Guru and His
Disciple, 1980), memoirs of his life in Los Angeles have
yet to be published. For this reason biographical
details of the Los Angeles period need to be gleaned from
lectures and interviews he gave during more than four
decades, as well as from incidental references in
5 Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical
Biography (New York; Oxford University Press, 1979), p.
281.
6 Christopher Isherwood, "Katherine Mansfield," in
Exhumations (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1966), p. 65.
361
subsections of the four autobiographical works mentioned
above. For future scholars, Isherwood let it be known
that he kept extensive diaries of the Los Angeles period
and expected that these would be published after his
death. Because he died so recently— on January 4,
19867— it is still too early to have a clear indication
about the disposition of his papers.
Born in 1904 into an old and distinguished family in
Cheshire, England, Isherwood entered St. Edmund's
preparatory school at the age of ten. During his four
years there, two events occurred which radically altered
the course of his life. First, in May of 1915 his
father, Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Bradshaw-Isherwood,
was killed in action near Ypres, France. Though
Isherwood was little affected by the loss at the time, he
was later to dwell upon his father's death and its
significance both to his mother— who grieved both for her
husband and for the past for the remainder of her life—
and to himself. Though but a child when the tragedy
occurred, Isherwood later felt ashamed that he had not
fought in World War I himself. The second key event for
Isherwood at St. Edmund's was the lifetime friendship he
7 His death occurred almost a month after the first
draft of this chapter was completed.
362
was able to form there with W. H. Auden, a student two
and a half years his junior.
In the years that followed at Cambridge, Isherwood
began to speak to his friends of his hatred of English
middle-class life, which he believed denied affection and
feared sex.8 As an act of rebellion against these
establishment values, he deliberately failed his
examinations by answering the questions facetiously and
was "sent down," or asked to withdraw from the
university. Having openly acknowledged his homosexuality
to himself and his mother,9 Isherwood left England in
1929 at the age of 24 for Berlin, in search of what his
biographer Brian Finney calls "a sexual homeland."10 His
experiences in Berlin formed the basis of the now famous
Goodbye to Berlin, published in its final form in 1939.
John Van Druten's theatrical adaptation of the work
became I Am a Camera, which in turn was further adapted
to become the musical Cabaret.
8 Stephen Spender. World Within World: The
Autobiography of Stephen Spender (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1966), p. 104.
9 Claude J. Summers, Christopher Isherwood (New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), p. 3.
10 Finney, p. 279.
363
Though Isherwood returned from Berlin to live in
England for a time before he immigrated to the United
States, he never again considered it his "home." In
193 3-34 during a period of residency in England,
Isherwood worked on the screenplay of a movie in London
directed by Los Angeles resident Berthold Viertel.11
Viertel, as Isherwood remembers,
. . . was eternally talking to me about his life in
California and about Santa Monica Canyon, where he
lived, and about all the people he knew, and I got a
tremendous yen to come out here and visit it, at
least to see what it was like."
Speaking of himself in the third person, he writes, "He
couldn't have known definitely yet that he would want to
stay in the States; he might find that he couldn't take
root there. . . . [His friends] had grown used to
thinking of him as a chronic wanderer."13
Because Auden and Isherwood had been friends since
their days at St. Edmund's, by 1939 they had already
11 Viertel is called Bergmann in Prater Violet, the
novel Isherwood wrote in 1945 based on the experience.
This is the first novel Isherwood wrote in America, and
though it deals with film writing, it takes place
entirely in Europe.
12 Isherwood, unpublished lecture given at UCLA 4
May 1965, Isherwood Archives Catalogue #100, Box 174,
UCLA Special Collections, TS. 11.
13 Christopher and His Kind, p. 33 0.
364
lived, traveled, and written a good deal together. When,
as hostilities were flaring in Europe, they decided to
set sail for America, their departure created a
considerable furor. Not everyone lauded their motives or
action. Cyril Connolly, for example, wrote in Horizon in
early 1940 that the
. . . departure of Auden and Isherwood to America is
the most important literary event since the outbreak
of the Spanish War. . . . Auden is our best poet,
Isherwood our most promising novelist. . . . They
are far-sighted and ambitious young inen with a
strong instinct of self-preservation, and an eye on
the main chance, who have abandoned . . . European
democracy, and by implication the aesthetic doctrine
of social realism that has been prevailing there.
Are they right? It would certainly seem so.
Whatever happens in the war, America will be the
gainer. . . . England will be poverty-stricken, even
in victory. 4
Though Evelyn Waugh had never met Isherwood and did not
consider himself his enemy— in fact he was usually
complimentary about his books— he caricatured the
departing Auden and Isherwood in his novel Put Out More
Flags, published in 1942. There he depicts the two as
the poets Parsnip and Pimpernel1 who leave for the United
States when Britain is on the brink of and finally
actually engaged in a war. A number of other
14 Connolly, as quoted in Paul Piazza, Christopher
Isherwood: Myth and Anti-Myth (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978), p. 108.
365
distinguished literary figures got involved in the Auden-
Isherwood controversy, generally accusing them of
selfishness and of abandoning their native land at a time
of grave danger as well as forsaking their previously
professed political principles.
But others understood. As his longtime friend John
Lehmann wrote, Isherwood had already
. . . left Europe in spirit long before, rejecting
at last the categories of its conflicts and dimly
discerning that California might reveal itself as
the home he had looked for in vain since the break
up of his Berlin life and German circle of
friends."
Finney sees Isherwood's decision to leave England at the
time as part of his overall rejection of his mother and
her perspectives:
Her growing tendency to mourn the past rather than
live in the present is to be matched by her son's
subsequent determination to turn his back on the
past in all its forms— the ancestral home, class
distinctions, the study of history, Cambridge, and
finally England itself. Much of Isherwood's life
and writing was determined by a compulsive reaction
against selected aspects of his mother's
personality.16
15 John Lehmann, In My Own Time (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1969), p. 222.
16 Finney, p. 24.
366
Thus leaving England was tantamount to abandoning both
mother and motherland at the same time.
Auden and Isherwood landed in New York, and
Isherwood's thoughts as they sailed into the harbor
reflect his keen awareness of the ambivalences of his
position:
There they stood in the driving snow— the made-in-
France Giantess with her liberty torch, which now
seemed to threaten, not welcome, the newcomer. . . .
God, what a terrifying place this suddenly seemed!
You could feel it vibrating with the tension of the
nervous New World, aggressively flaunting its rude
steel nudity. We're Americans here— and we keep at
it twenty-four hours a day, being Americans. We
scream, we grab, we jostle. We've no time for
what's slow, what's gracious, what's nice, quiet,
modest. Don't you come snooting at us with your
European traditions— we know the mess they've got
you into. Do things our way or take the next boat
back— back to your Europe that's falling apart at
the seams. 7
Once he arrived, he realized that wanting to see America
should have been the natural inclination of every Briton:
What amazes me . . . is why we all didn't have far
more curiosity about America much earlier in our
lives, because it is for English-speaking people so
very much the other half of the coin. And really,
what do you know until you have seen America?18
17 Christopher and His Kind, p. 338.
18 Christopher Isherwood as quoted in George
Wickes, "An Interview with Christopher Isherwood,"
Shenandoah 16, No. 3 (Spring 1965), p. 34.
367
Because of their individual climatic preferences,
however, Auden and Isherwood were destined to go separate
ways and live on opposite coasts. As Stephen Spender
writes of his two friends,
Each selected that part of the country to live in
which was most suited to his temperament— with the
result that they were the whole breadth of the
continent apart. Auden chose the fog and humidity
and darkness of New York. . . . Isherwood, with his
love of the bronzed, the sandy and the naked, had
made his home at Santa Monica near Los
Angeles. . . . In their physical environment and in
their philosophic development, the vastness of
America had offered Auden and Isherwood each his
opportunity. 9
Besides climate, Isherwood had yet other reasons for
choosing California. On May 2, 1939, he wrote to John
Lehmann:
I myself am in the most Goddamawful mess. I have
discovered . . . that I am a pacifist. And now I
have to find out what that means, and what duties it
implies. That's one reason why I'm going out to
Hollywood, to talk to Gerald Heard and Huxley.
Maybe I'll flatly disagree with them, but I have to
hear their case, stated as expertly as possible.
19 Spender, p. 301.
20 Isherwood as quoted in Jonathan Fryer, Isherwood
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1978), p. 188. Isherwood
retells this same discovery in fictional form in Down
There on a Visit (2 32-3) and then again in the
autobiographical works Christopher and His Kind (3 36-7)
and My Guru and His Disciple (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1980, pp. 4-8).
368
Both Huxley and Heard had gained repute as the most
eloquent philosophers of Pacifism, so Isherwood was
determined to hear them out. He had known Heard while he
was still living in London and, as he says,
I already knew Gerald well enough to feel sure he
would be understanding. The Huxleys I had never
met. I was eager to talk to Aldous, whose Ends and
Means, published two years earlier, was regarded as
a basic book for pacifists.
Yet some vague gossip had filtered back to him that Heard
and Huxley "had entangled themselves in some Oriental
religion; but he could reject the religion and still
adopt their pacifist ideology."22 He wrote to Heard, who
urged him to come out to Los Angeles, as he was anxious
to form a support group of pacifists. Heard suggested,
as Isherwood recalls, that
Order and creative accuracy must be opposed to
disorder and destruction. . . . The idea of
belonging to a like-minded group appealed to me
strongly. Since my decision to be a pacifist, I had
felt isolated, fearing that many of my friends must
disapprove.23
21 My Guru and His Disciple, p. 6.
22 Christopher and His Kind, p. 33 6.
23 My Guru and His Disciple, p. 7.
369
Isherwood clearly also anticipated the British outrage at
his immigration and turn toward pacificism that in fact
took place. He must have sensed that Heard and Huxley
could provide him with a philosophical base from which to
counter the attacks. In addition to those public
outcries indicated above, many questionings came from
within his own conscience, for he had some sincere doubts
about his own motives in becoming a pacifist.
There was yet one more compelling motive behind
Isherwood's move to California: the attraction of The
West. Isherwood told the interviewer for Paris Review,
I'd always wanted to see the West, in a romantic
sort of way; so I just took off. . . . I see certain
places as symbols in one's consciousness. I found
the notion of the Far West infintely romantic. I
used to be thrilled by the expression 1'extreme
Orient.
So just a few months after his arrival in the United
States, on May 6, 1939 Isherwood set off by bus for Los
Angeles, noting in his diary, "I must be anonymous until
I discover a new self here, an American me."25
24 Isherwood as quoted in W. I. Scobie,
"Christopher Isherwood," Paris Review, The Art of Fiction
49 (Spring 1974), pp. 164 and 177.
25 My Guru and His Disciple, p. 4.
370
He detailed his entry into Los Angeles and his first
impressions in an article he wrote for Horizon in 1947.
(It would be fifteen years after his arrival before he
actually included Los Angeles in his fiction, and then at
first in a very minor role.) The article, called "Los
Angeles," begins in the following manner:
In order to get the worst possible first
impression of Los Angeles one should arrive there by
bus, preferably in summer and on a Saturday night.
That is what I did. . . . As we passed over the
state-line at Needles (one of the hottest places,
outside Arabia, in the world) a patriotic lady
traveller started to sing 'California, here I come!'
In America you can do this kind of thing unself
consciously on a long-distance bus: a good deal of
the covered wagon atmosphere still exists.
Nevertheless, the effect was macabre. For ahead of
us stretched the untidy yellow desert, quivering in
its furnace-glare, with, here and there, among the
rocks at the roadside, the rusty skeleton of an
abandoned automobile, modern counterpart of the
pioneer's dead mule. We drove forward into the
Unpromising Land.
Beyond the desert, the monster market-garden
begins. . . Himalayas of fruit. To the European
immigrant, this rude abundance is nearly as
depressing as the desolation of the wilderness.
. . . Downtown Los Angeles is at present one of
the most squalid places in the United States. Many
of the buildings along Main Street are comparatively
old but they have not aged gracefully. They are
shabby and senile, like nasty old men. The stifling
sidewalks are crowded with sailors and Mexicans, but
there is none of the glamour of a port and none of
the charm of a Mexican city. In twenty-five years
this section will probably have been torn down and
rebuilt; for Los Angeles is determined to become at
all costs a metropolis. Today, it is still an unco
ordinated expanse of townlets and suburbs, spreading
wide and white over the sloping plain between the
371
mountains and the Pacific Ocean. The Angeleno26
becomes accustomed to driving great distances in his
car between his work, his entertainment and his
home. Most people have a car or the use of one. It
is essential, not a luxury.
Despite this uneasy beginning, the collage of
influences and inhabitants in Los Angeles made Isherwood
feel immediately at home; in fact, he would have little
compassion for a writer like Waugh, who was never
comfortable in Los Angeles. Isherwood told an
interviewer from Foyle's Bookshop in London, "California
is a place in which it is very easy to be a foreigner
because almost everybody is from some other place. For
that reason one always relaxes there completely as soon
as one understands that."28 In coming to Los Angeles, he
admits,
I simply became slightly more of a hybrid than ever
before. I have always challenged the idea that
writers have to have roots in the conventional
sense. You have roots, of course, but they don't
need the geographical context necessarily. I think
that being a foreigner is very stimulating for a
writer. . . . California is preeminently a place
26 Both Angeleno and Angelino are accepted
spellings of the term used to descibe an inhabitant of
Los Angeles, though Angelino seems to be the more
frequently employed of the two.
27 Isherwood, "Los Angeles," pp. 156-7.
28 Christopher Isherwood in Foylibra, June 1977,
Isherwood Archives #113, UCLA Special Collections, p. 3.
372
that you don't have to belong to, in the sense of
having been here since birth. If I had settled down
in Maine that might be another matter, but here I
feel very much at home and quite as much that I have
a right to the place as anybody else I meet on the
street.
So there was something unique about place and writer that
came together for Isherwood when he arrived in Los
Angeles. "When I first came out here, this place was
absolutely enchanting. It was much sleepier and there
was much more sense of the wilderness and sense of the
spirit of place, of the mountains, and I loved that."30
Isherwood looked up Gerald Heard immediately and was
struck by the difference which residence in America had
made in his appearance. In London Heard had been clean
shaven and neatly, even elegantly, attired; in Los
Angeles he was bearded and dressed in patched jeans with
ragged cuffs.31 Years later Isherwood compared Heard to
Carl Jung, and appreciated how sensitively the elder man
had schooled him in the ways of pacifism.32
Heard introduced Isherwood to Aldous Huxley in June
of 1939; their first meetings were reserved but positive.
29 Isherwood as quoted by George Wickes, p. 35.
30 Isherwood as quoted by George Wickes, p. 34.
31 My Guru and His Disciple, p. 9.
32 Scobie, p. 164.
373
Isherwood was intially intimidated by Huxley's immense
erudition, thinking him bookish and inclined to be
pontifical, never losing the feeling that they were two
very different sorts of people: "I think we're the most
dissimilar creatures alive. I'm very fond of Huxley
personally, . . . but Aldous, in the first place, is an
intellect, and I'm purely an intuitive person."33 Once
when Heard and Huxley went to Swami Prabhavananda, the
guru to whom they had introduced Isherwood, to seek his
help in remonstrating the younger man for the lifestyle
he had established, Isherwood recalls his own response:
"I found it much easier to forgive Aldous for his
interference than Gerald. Aldous didn't know any better,
he was essentially a square."34 Isherwood remembers in
My Guru and His Disciple that
When Aldous and I were alone, I felt uneasy because
I was aware . . . that Aldous, with all his
liberalism, found homosexuality and the homosexual
temperament deeply distasteful. I am sure that he
liked me personally and that he fought against his
prejudice. He was a nobly fair-minded man.
Nevertheless, my uneasiness remained.35
33 Christopher Isherwood, as quoted in Paul Piazza,
p. 210.
34 Isherwood describes his life during that period
as "sex-absorbed and drunken and angry." My Guru and His
Disciple, p. 201.
35 My Guru and His Disciple, p. 50.
374
Frequently Isherwood felt that his homosexuality
distanced him from other Britons in Los Angeles. In
Chapter Two, it may be recalled, Raymond Chandler spoke
of meeting Isherwood, saying "I think he is the only
queer I have felt entirely at ease with."36 Isherwood,
on the other hand, was tense and on edge with Chandler,
whom he believed to be anti-homosexual.37
Isherwood told an audience at UCLA in 1965, "I
consider that Huxley was really one of the best writers
of English prose m this century," For this reason,
because of their common interests, and because he finally
found him to be a lovable and gregarious man, Isherwood
remained a devoted friend throughout Huxley’s life.
Isherwood was, in addition, enormously fond of Huxley’s
first wife Maria, whom he referred to as his first
honorary sister in America. In 1940 Maria wrote:
Christopher Isherwood often joins us now; we like
him very much indeed. On Tuesdays we all meet for
lunch at a market [Yolanda's at the Town and Country
Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters of Raymond
Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1981), p. 416.
37 Jonathan Fryer, Isherwood (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1978), p. 256.
38 Isherwood, unpublished lecture given at UCLA 25
May 1965, Isherwood Archives Catalogue #100, Box 174,
UCLA Special Collections, typescript page 11.
375
Market] . . . and we can eat our vegetarian and
medical faddist food under the olive trees. And
talk for ever under the umbrellas. 9
Robert Craft, who along with his mentor Igor Stravinsky
eagerly joined the outdoor lunches, has captured
something of the spirit of those gatherings and
Isherwood1s role in them in an article he wrote in
Harper's, in this case detailing a lunch that took place
on August 10, 1949:
The other tables are held down by drugstore cowboys,
movie stars, Central European refugees, and— judging
from awed glances in our direction— Aldine and
Igorian disciples. All, for the nonce, are
vegetarians, and all nibble at their greens like
pasturing cows. Virginia Woolf's likening Isherwood
to a jockey is perfect. Not the clothes, of course,
though they are less conspicuously suited to
Hollywood (or Hawaii) than those of Aldous or I.S.,
the sense of the dapper in the older men having run
to seed . . . at such a remove from the centers of
discriminating haberdashery; but the stature, bantam
weight, somewhat too short legs, and . . .
disproportionately, even simianly long arms. . . .
He is a listener and an observer— he has the
observer's habit of staring— rather than a
propounder or an expatiator. . . . At the same time,
his sense of humor is very ready. . . . But he is
not at ease [speculating] in spite of
drollery. . . . Isherwood conveys a greeting to All
deuce, as he pronounces it, from a Swami. . . . How
do the men regard each other, apart from their very
evident mutual affection? Isherwood cannot match
the soft orating Huxleyan delivery or the Huxleyan
intellectual ammunition; . . . and am I wrong in
detecting on the Huxley side just the faintest tinge
39 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1974), II, p. 10.
376
of doubt as to the the hundred-percent
impregnability of his younger colleague's spiritual
dedication and final severing from The World? . . .
Whatever the truth of these speculations, how
improbable a team the two of them make to represent
Vedanta in the Wild West!
Not only were Huxley and Isherwood devoted friends
until Huxley's death in 1963,41 but they also
collaborated a number of times. Oddly enough, though
both men were highly successful individually, none of
their collaborative efforts ever came to fruition. One
frustrated literary adventure was an original 1944
screenplay about a faith healer, called Jacob's Hands.
They could never sell this property because of the
supposed objections of the medical profession. Huxley
had wanted Isherwood to work with him on the film version
of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and had even written to
Frieda Lawrence42 to tell her about it, but Isherwood's
contract with MGM forbade it.
40 Robert Craft, "Stravinsky and Some Writers,"
Harper's Magazine, 237, No. 1423 (December, 1968), pp.
106 and 108.
41 According to his wishes, Huxley was cremated
without a service of any kind. Isherwood joined the
family in their only ceremony, a walk around the
Hollywood Reservoir, Huxley's traditional route. Finney,
p. 250.
42 Aldous Huxley, Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. by
Grover Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969) pp. 456-
58.
377
Early in his career in Los Angeles, Isherwood made
his peace with Hollywood. He spoke to Prabhavananda
about the contradictions between Vedanta religious
practices and life in the flashy world of film
production. The Swami told him that "One had only to
live like a lotus on a dirty pond, living in the world,
but being manifestly pure."43 Like Huxley, Isherwood saw
movie work as a relatively simple method of subsidizing
the activities he really cared about in life. He even
likened himself to Shakespeare, in this respect:
I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot;
anybody who's in entertainment does to some
extent. . . . There's a most awful daintiness in the
idea that everything you write should be just so—
perfection— and all the rest carefully destroyed so
that it won't hurt your image. Often this is a
dangerous kind of vanity.
Also, because movie work is such a cooperative venture,
he had little personal stake in the fate of the scripts
he wrote; for this reason he was remarkably unperturbed
by the fact that few of his scripts were ever made into
films and actually distributed.
One of Isherwood's film assignments is of particular
interest to this study. As noted in the chapter on
43 Fryer, p. 194.
44 Isherwood, as quoted in Scobie, p. 176.
378
Waugh, Tony Richardson had asked Isherwood to work on the
screenplay of The Loved One that Terry Southern had been
given the primary responsibly for writing. Isherwood had
objected to the novel:
I didn't like the novel. The ending isn't at all
resolved. . . . The hero is such a boring kind of
heel that it's really very distateful. The book is
very snobbish about California, and I didn't like
his use of the Aunt Sally of Forest Lawn: it was far
too trivial a reason for condemning the whole
place. 5
Nevertheless, because Richardson was directing it, he
agreed to work on the film. "Christopher wrote the scene
in the chapel, when a wedding is transformed into a
funeral, . . . and [even] appeared fleetingly in the film
[himself], as an extra in a crowd scene, frowning
ferociously."46
Once in Los Angeles, Isherwood immediately became a
part of the European intellectual network in the city.
The MGM connection, for example, came about in the
following manner: Salka Viertel, Berthold's wife, had
worked on the screenplay of a film that was never made.
Gottfried Reinhardt, the younger son of Max Reinhardt,
45 Christopher Isherwood, as quoted in "Isherwood
on Hollywood," interview by Charles Higham, London
Magazine, New Series 8, April 1968, p. 37.
46 Fryer, p. 273.
379
lived with Salka and her sons and was going to produce
Rage in Heaven, based on a James Hilton novel. They
needed help with the mores and speech patterns of the
wealthy London upper-middle-class characters.47 Because
of Salka's influence, Isherwood was hired to help write
the script, with particular attention to the dialogue.48
Many of the immigrants in Los Angeles during and
just after the war used the city as a refuge, but never
became engaged with it in any artistic sense. In an
interview published in Transatlantic Review in 1972,
Isherwood distinguishes between the many Los Angeles-
47 It appears that Hilton himself did not do the
scenario because he was back in England at the time,
perhaps working on and/or arranging for the publication
of Random Harvest (1941). In 1940 Hilton returned to
Hollywood to make it his permanent home. (Current
Biography, ed. Maxine Block (New York: H. W. Wilson,
1942), pp. 373-4.)
48 Fryer, pp. 197-98. On pages 329-30 of
Christopher and His Kind Isherwood recalls that a psychic
read his palm at the British embassy in Brussels toward
the end of 1938 or the beginning of 1939. She "saw the
letter H in it. This letter, she said, was of great
importance in his life. Christopher [note his speaking
of himself in the third person] was impressed. Apart
from the obvious reference to Heinz [one of Isherwood's
longtime European lovers], there was Vernon [an American
lover], whose real name began with an H. (Christopher
was even more impressed when, in 1940, he reflected that
he was now in Hollywood; that he had met Heard once again
and, through him, Huxley; that he had embraced Hinduism;
that he was living on Harratt Street; that he had just
written a screenplay based on the novel Rage in Heaven by
James Hilton!)"
380
based European writers of the past and those that were
then currently working in the city:
What we had during the war was a very large
emigre intellectual population, an artistic
population. And if you counted noses you found all
kinds of major talents in the arts were here, but
they were just sitting it out. It was quite natural
that later on many of them went back to Europe.
What we have now, I feel, is much more
indigenous. I feel that, in fact, a great deal does
go on here. I think that in the truer sense of the
word there's more life here artistically than there
used to be. Because whatever artistic life there is
now is related to the place; it isn't something that
happens just by accident.
In the work done by the emigre writers in
California during the war, I don't think that you'll
find very much which has any mention of, or relation
to, Los Angeles. . . . They brought their own world
with them, in their heads, and wrote about that.
They were working here, residing here, but this
wasn't their home. Their art never became, in any
49
sense, ours. ^
49 Christopher Isherwood, "Christopher Isherwood,"
interview by Robert Wennersten, Transatlantic Review, No.
42 and 43 (Spring and Summer, 1972), p. 18. Howard
Warshaw, in Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait, an
interview by Susan Einstein in the UCLA Oral History
Program, 1977, mentions that his own decision to settle
in Los Angeles and that of many other established artists
was dependent upon their sense of the European artistic
community that was already here— notably Stravinsky,
Huxley, and Isherwood. Warshaw says, "I don't think it's
ever really been written about or properly considered
historically, the number of really first rank artists who
were in Los Angeles during that time. . . . There was a
sense that when you did something, it would be seen by
artists whom you respected in various fields. . . . Our
sights were very high. We were with people of great
achievement, and it kept us up in many ways." (pp. 34-5,
143)
381
Of all those artists who worked in Los Angeles before,
during and after World War II, Isherwood, according to
Gavin Lambert, is "the great survivor" of that era. He
lives on as a bridge to that
. . . 'great period' of a quarter of a century ago,
when bars were noisy and tacky and Salka Viertel's
informal salons drew a medley of emigres, including
Garbo and Thomas Mann, Chaplin and Aldous Huxley,
Brecht and Christopher himself. . . . Since
'survivor' can imply 'relic,' I must point out it
means the opposite in this case. I use it in the
active, embattled, animating sense that Christopher
is fond of using himself. 'There is no question of
stopping.' . . . Perhaps this explains why people
often remark how young he looks and feels and is—
true but not true enough, because it's only an
aspect of someone who has, as they say, 'found a
solution.' . . . It is personal, dynamic, flexible
except on one point. You can be tired, euphoric,
depressed, in great form, drunk, dogged, like the
rest of us; but there is no question of stopping.
Like George in A Single Man, you're stuck with the
This physical vitality no doubt accounts for
Isherwood's comfort with the Los Angeles lifestyle. As
many of their friends noted when Auden and Isherwood
separated to establish themselves on the opposite coasts
of America, Isherwood is body-oriented— a characteristic
much in keeping with the health and body consciousness
prevalent in the west. At 72 he was still going for a
daily swim in the Pacific or jogging along the tree-lined
50 L a m b ert, p . 1 0 7 .
382
median strip on San Vicente Boulevard in West Los
Angeles.51 And in his last published work, October,
Isherwood writes at the age of 76 about the pleasure he
gets from physical exercise in the morning:
Running down the street by myself, past neighbors
walking or standing outside their houses, I make a
conscious effort to run springingly, lightly. This
isn't exactly vanity, at least, not of the usual
kind— I'm too aware of my baggy old belly and
thinning legs for that. No— it's an effort to
reassure all who see me that old age isn't
necessarily grim and crippling; they needn't dread
it. . . .It seems preferable to being a memento
mori on crutches or in a wheelchair or shuffling
along head down and bent double.52
The particular irreverence for the past
characteristic of Los Angeles immediately appealed to
Isherwood. In December of 1940, he wrote to John
Lehmann, "I love California more than ever— it is without
nostalgia or regret or apprehension of the future— you
are free here, you can be anything you make yourself."53
The tendency to slough off the old and focus instead on
the new and ephemeral, so frustrating for a
51 Ben Reuven, "Christopher Isherwood: Reading the
Sands of Time," West (Los Angeles Times Magazine), 5
December 197 6, p. 3.
52 Christopher Isherwood, October (Los Angeles:
Twelvetrees Press, 1980), p. 8.
53 C h r i s t o p h e r I s h e r w o o d , a s q u o t e d i n F i n n e y , p .
1 7 4 .
383
traditionalist like Waugh, absolutely fascinates
Isherwood and seems to fit with his views about the
impermanence of life:
In a way this country is fundamentally desert
country. It has been adapted and planted and
settled, but there is always a mirage about it. I
like that. As a devotee of Hindu philosophy, to me
it's very much like the Hindu account of the
universe as being a kind of projection, or Maya.
And sometimes the great, noble, traditional
buildings of Europe seem rather too solid in
comparison. On the Coast it's all rather dreamy and
strange. It's very characteristic that when one
travels in Los Angeles there are streets you simply
cannot recognise, because they've built other things
on them. And since it always consisted of large
bill-boards and signs and neon, more than buildings,
you can change the whole place by just changing the
lights. There's a sort of theatrical
impermanence.
In 1952, almost twenty years before the interview above,
Isherwood wrote an article called "California Story" for
Harper's. In it he detailed this characteristic of mind
which cherishes the transitory:
I, it seems, belong to a tiny perverse minority who
prefer the ignoble ruins of the day before
yesterday, and would rather wander through an
abandoned army camp or the remains of a world's fair
than visit Pompeii or Chan-Chan. Perhaps it is
simply that, in the former instance, one's sense of
impermanence is stronger. What was there, on this
shore, a hundred years ago? Practically nothing.
54 Christopher Isherwood, "A Fortunate, Happy Life-
-Christopher Isherwood Talks to Derek Hart," The
Listener, 83, No. 2140 (2 April 1970), p. 448.
384
And which, of all these flimsy structures, will be
standing a hundred years from now? Probably not a
single one. Well, I like that thought. It is
bracingly realistic. In such surroundings, it is
easier to remember and accept the fact that you
won't be here, either.55
The very land in Los Angeles, he emphasizes, is
extraordinarily impermanent. And every resident must
accommodate himself to the mutability of life through his
relationship to the land he lives on:
Geologically speaking, the Hollywood hills will not
last long. Their decomposed granite breaks off in
chunks at a kick and crumbles in your hand. Every
year the seasonal rains wash cartloads of it down
into the valley. In fact, the landscape, like Los
Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence
haunts the city, with its mushroom industries— the
aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil
which must one day be exhausted, the movies which
fill America's theatres for six months and are
forgotten.
In yet another way American life in Los Angeles
suited Isherwood's personality: it was a culture ready to
admit its failings and then learn from its mistakes:
This place seems to fit me like a glove. . . . [The
English] don't understand a bit what the feeling is
here, what its's all about. I feel it's so easy to
condemn this country; but they don't understand that
this is where the mistakes are being made— and made
55 Christopher Isherwood, reprinted as "The Shore,"
in Exhumantions, pp. 165-66.
56 Isherwood, "Los Angeles," p. 158.
385
first, so that we’re going to get the answers first.
I feel that very strongly. I feel it's marvellous
the way we talk about our failings. . . . 'We shall
not perish, because we are not afraid to speak of
our failings, and thus we shall learn to overcome
our failings.' It's a quotation from Stalini
Really! But it could be said here. We really do,
in spite of our failings, in spite of everything,
really air things here. Quite brutally. It's a
violent country, and this, at least historically, is
one of the more violent states. It's no place for
people who want to sleep quietly in their beds.57
Isherwood never was one to sleep quietly in his bed, and
after moving to Los Angeles become actively involved in
the civil rights and, later, beginning in 1972, the gay
rights movements in Southern California.
One of the great ironies of Isherwood's immigration
is that after World War II, when England was no longer an
imperial power of the first magnitude, Isherwood really
began "to love it, for the first time in his life. It
had turned into the kind of country he had always wanted
it to be."58 Finally his native country gave some
evidence of being the transitory, fleeting kind of place
that has always attracted Isherwood, for his natural
inclination has been to resist anything that reeks of
being establishment. On a return visit to Britain after
the war, he remarked to Kenneth Allsop,
57 Isherwood, Paris Review, pp. 181-82.
58 Christopher and His Kind, p. 316.
386
'I used to imagine what a heavenly place England
would be if only she could rid herself of her
Imperial obligations. * . . There's so much more fun
and excitement than there used to be, it's so much
less stuffy, nicer in every way.' . . . But he did
not say he belonged here.55
As a testimony to his devotion to his adopted city,
he has established roots there unlike any others he has
ever made in his life: in 1939, he took up Vedantism, a
set of religious beliefs and practices that he remains
devoted to; in 1946, he became a naturalized citizen of
the United States; in 1953, he found a life partner in
the person of Don Bachardy; and in 1956, he finally
bought a house. Previously, even though he had made
great sums of money from film work, he had resisted
acquiring possessions or incurring any liabilities. He
openly listed his home address and telephone number in
the Los Angeles telephone directory.
Many Britons refused to accept Isherwood's decision
to settle permanently in Los Angeles, and they continued
to make up excuses for his abandoning his homeland, often
linking it to his taking up of Vedanta. Early on, even
his close friend Stephen Spender, expressed some doubts:
One cannot read [Heard, Huxley, and Isherwood's]
books without asking is it right that they should be
59 A l l s o p , p . 3 7 .
387
living in Hollywood and wondering whether one
couldn't oneself submit to yogi exercises in such a
pleasant climate. 0
Speaking of that period during the late 1930's and early
1940's in My Guru and His Disciple, Isherwood reveals
that all the time a part of himself was mocking his
activities from the viewpoint of a Briton:
I was acutely aware of myself playing this exotic
game, and I seemed to be playing it in the presence
of all my friends, over there in England.
'Christopher's gone to Hollywood to be a yogi,' I
heard them saying— it would be Hollywood rather than
Los Angeles, because Hollywood represents the movie
world and all its phoniness. I knew, of course,
that my real friends wouldn't sneer at me so
viciously. . . . They would take it for granted that
my motives for doing what I was doing were at least
honest. No, it was I myself— or, rather, a hostile
minority in me— who was sneering. 1
Auden wrote to Spender defending the authenticity of
Isherwood's spiritual transformation and the seriousness
of his choices:
What he is trying to do must seem meaningless unless
one believes, as I do, firstly that there is such a
vocation as the mystical contemplative life, and
secondly that of all vocations it is the highest,
highest because it is the most difficult, exhausting
and dangerous. . . . Christopher felt that he is
called, and is certainly taking it very seriously.
60 Stephen Spender in 1940, as quoted in Piazza,
pp. 107-8.
61 My Guru and His Disciple, p. 20.
388
I think his friends should have enough faith in him
to trust his judgement for himself.62
But the hostile comments continued. Kenneth Allsop
wrote, "Curiously enough it was in Hollywood, the most
barren of suburbs, the most crowded nowhere in the world,
that he found an anchor."63 And, in a recent study,
Peter Conrad goes so far as to suggest that Isherwood
adopted Vedanta as an antidote to living in Los Angeles:
Vedanta supplies the resistance, maintaining the
mind's alertness. . . . California has made a
philosophy from comatose mental inertia. Its jargon
extols an anesthetized bliss which is variously
described as 'mellowing out,' 'going with the flow,'
'staying loose,' or being 'laid back.' Isherwood
declares that salvation in Los Angeles depends on
'the art of staying awake.' Vedanta is his counter
soporific. 64
In reality, Isherwood's openness to and acceptance of a
wide variety of religious outlooks— certainly unlike
Evelyn Waugh— makes his success in Los Angeles all the
W. H. Auden to Spender, 13 March 1941, as quoted
in Finney, p. 182. Huxley offered a similar defense of
Isherwood's stance: "The world . . . would be even more
horrible than it is, if it were not for the existence of
a small theocentric minority working along quite other
lines than the anthropocentric majority." (Huxley,
Letters, p. 470)
63 Kenneth Allsop, Scans (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1965), p. 36.
64 Peter Conrad, Imagining America (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 302.
389
more likely, for Southern California has long been known
for its profusion of religious perspectives. In fact
Isherwood has even berated many of those who take his
former position of atheism for being just as intolerant
as all the others. He urges instead widespread
recognition and support for the spiritual side of man's
nature.65
As he continued to live in Los Angeles, he began to
feel himself a unique amalgam of the British and the
American:
The situation of being technically American . . .
but at the same time being extremely British in many
ways is just exactly what I need. I can understand
every single word the natives say, since we share
the same language. Since everybody in California
practically is a newcomer, I'm perfectly at home
here and have quite as much right to be here as
anybody else. Yet there is this distance, this
sense of foreignness. 6
This doubleness of perspective was important in
establishing the language and approach to the city he
needed in order to include it in his fiction. On
December 5, 1949, he wrote to Edward Upward:
I am feeling my way toward an Anglo-American style,
and this is itself very hard. It ought
65 Fryer, p. 23 0.
66 Isherwood, as quoted in Wennersten, p. 12.
390
theoretically to be wonderful and funny to be a
detached mongrel, talking a bastard jargon, but I
fear this will only come with much more practice.67
For many years Los Angeles had needed a British
novelist to portray it fully, and, as early as 1947,
Waugh's friend Harold Acton wrote of the city's potential
for the British fiction writer and suggested that
Isherwood might be the man for the job:
One felt sorry for the agents who had to build up
[the film stars'] 'public images.' . . . Those who
did not take to the bottle fell a prey to some
psycho-analyst or joined some new-fangled sect.
Consequently it was the haven of every type of
quack, and I doubt if any novelist has done it
justice. Here was fantasy waiting. . . . Perhaps
Christopher Isherwood will do it, for there is a
seamy side to this fantasy— the pathos of
innumerable failures, the sudden meteors that have
fizzled out in obscurity, the village belles and
beaux who had relied on attractive physique to
become box office stars overnight. Some had been
extras but most of them had never reached the silver
screen. . . . The cleverest of the failures became
interior decorators. Hispano-Mexican influence
prevailed and the modest villas which had cost as
much to build as palaces in Italy seemed as wide
open as the 'nice guy grins' of the convivial
Californians: none of them looked private.68
Isherwood has managed to capture Los Angeles from
the dual perspective of the British foreigner at the same
67 Isherwood, as quoted in Fryer, p. 240.
68 Harold Acton, More Memoirs of An Aesthete
(London: Methuen, 1970), p. 223.
391
time he explains it with the understanding and coherence
of a native inhabitant. As most newcomers do, Isherwood
had to deal with the Hollywood element first before he
could move beyond it to explore the real life of the
city. Like James Hilton, whose first novel written in
the United States had nothing whatever to do with his new
home, Isherwood's first novel created in America was
Prater Violet (1945), a story based on his screenwriting
experiences with Viertel in London.
Isherwood's second novel composed in Los Angeles,
The World in the Evening, was published in 1954, and it
includes some scenes from his newly-adopted home, but
these are predominantly negative views and nearly all
Hollywood-oriented. It is noteworthy that each of the
British writers in Los Angeles begins his novel with
attention to the area's architectural characteristics,
and these are, almost without exception offered as
evidence for derision. Isherwood got Hollywood out of
the way with this first Los Angeles novel, writing here
the standard outsiders' view of the city. Narrated in
the first person by the protagonist Stephen Monk, the
story begins at a Hollywood party given by some people
named Novotny:
392
The party that evening was at the Novotnys'. They
lived high up on the slopes of the Hollywood hills,
in a ranch-style home complete with Early American
maple, nautical brasswork and muslin curtains; just
too cute for words. It looks as if it had been
delivered, already equipped, from a store; and you
could imagine how, if the payments weren't kept up,
some men might arrive one day and take the whole
place back there on a truck, along with Mrs.
Novotny, the three children, the two cars and the
cocker spaniel. Most of the houses Jane and I
visited were like that. 9
There is nothing exceptional about this particular party;
it is just one of countless such parties in the lives of
the hosts and the guests that evening. And the bitterly
ironic tone conveys the narrator's evident hostility to
suburban family life with its predictable wives,
children, dogs and architecture— or lack thereof. In
addition, the rottenness and sterility of Stephen and
Jane's marriage is matched by the mindless sameness of
their current environment.
As could be expected, the next paragraph introduces
drunkenness and boredom as responses to such a life.
Stephen has taken to dressing in a inappropriate fashion
("a white tuxedo jacket, with a crimson bow tie and
carnation to match my moire cummerbund") in an effort to
69 Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening
(New York: Random House, 1954; rpt. Popular Library,
1955), p. 5. All further references to this work appear
in the text in parentheses as TWITE.
393
attract some attention of his own, for in Los Angeles he
has unfortunately been cast in the role of Mr. Jane Monk.
He sees himself through the eyes of the screenwriters,
producers and actors at the party as
A cold, bored boring highbrow: that was how I seemed
to them, no doubt. Or else a snooty, half-
Europeanized playboy with a limey accent and a
Riviera background, who knew Italian princesses and
French counts. An alien, in any case, who didn't
belong to their worried movie world, where you lived
six months ahead of your salary and had to keep
right on spending lest anyone should suspect that
your credit wasn't good. I had no part in their
ulcers and anxieties, their mortgages and their
options. I had never sweated it out at a sneak
preview or a projection-room post-mortem. And so,
when these people thought of me, they certainly
envied me my unearned money but probably also
despised me for my irresponsible freedom. (8)
So Stephen projects the image of the English gentleman
out of his natural environment, awkward among those who
must work for a living— and especially in a quandary
amidst the pretensions of Hollywood. "Somehow or other,
I'd wandered into this gibbering jungle of phonies and
now here I was, floundering stupidly in a mud of my
jealous misery and sinking deeper with every movement"
(8) .
At the opening of the novel, it is April of 1941 and
the the Monks have been in Los Angeles for about a year.
While the war rages in Europe, Stephen experiences the
394
guilt of one who lives on in luxury while others are in
torment. He sees his personal unhappiness reflected
against the distant background of a world gone mad; he
feels
. . . the guilt of having dared to indulge in
private misery in an exculsive Beverly Hills home,
rented at $4 00 a month. All through this last year,
the war had existed merely as a loud ugly
appropriate background music for my expensive
private hell. Why shouldn't London blaze, why
shouldn't Jews be tortured, why shouldn't all Europe
be enslaved, as long as the great tyrant Me was
suffering? It had seemed no more than natural.
(17)70
Like Huxley and Waugh do, Isherwood focuses for a
time on the swimming pools of the city. For Stephen they
represent the glittery pretenses of his own life;
The water of the . . . small kidney-shaped swimming
pool . . . must have been heated for it steamed
gently in the beams of submerged lamps, its green-
lit fumes rising theatrically against the enormous
cheap-gaudy nightscape of Los Angeles which sparkled
away out to the horizon like a million cut-rate
engagement rings. (9)
70 In actuality, Isherwood had responded to the war
in just the opposite fashion. In My Guiru and His
Disciple he writes poignantly about the refugees coming
to Southern California during the thirties: "These people
were already dwelling in a future, a wartime, which very
few native Californians could even imagine. To myself,
as a European, the war atmosphere which the refugees
breathed was more native than the ignorant peacefulness
of the California air" (p. 45).
395
The water steams gently like Stephen's submerged
jealousy, even lit by green lights. But after a while he
realizes that he has projected his own seething psyche
onto the pool, that it is, in fact, "brilliantly clean."
So he turns on it in yet another way, accusing it of
exemplifying
. . . this antiseptic, heartless, hateful neon
mirage of a cityi May its swimming pools be dried
up. May all its lights go out for ever. I drew a
deep dizzying breath in which the perfume of star
jasmine was mixed with chlorine. (9)
Life around a swimming pool in Los Angeles never seems to
be particularly alluring to the British novelists in this
study.71
In this setting at the Hollywood party, with such a
consonance between outside confusion and inner turmoil,
Stephen comes upon a giant-sized child's doll house
"fixed up to look like the witch's candy cottage in
Hansel and Gretel" (10). Here he overhears Jane in the
midst of an adulterous affair with actor Roy Griffin.
71 Isherwood has said in another context that "the
development of the private swimming pool has killed Santa
Monica as an elegant seaside resort; the fashionable
prefer to swim and sunbathe a few miles inland, beyond
the reach of the coastal. As for the rest of the
population of Los Angeles, it comes swarming down to the
shore." ("The Shore," Exhumations, pp. 163-4) For
Isherwood, the beach and shore are endlessly attractive.
396
This is just what Stephen has been waiting for: a chance
to trap her in the act. "I felt what I had never guessed
I would feel; a great, almost agonizing upsurge of glee,
of gleeful relief. Caught. Caught her at last" (10).
The infantile, fake and corrupt society produces the
corrupt and infantile act— adultery in a child's doll
house. Stephen himself has childishly avoided dealing
with the realities of his life, waiting passively for
things to happen— like the scene in the doll's house—
rather than confronting unpleasant issues directly. Now
he has found his way out— out of Hollywood, out of his
life with Jane. He pounds the top of the playhouse,
leaps over a flower bed, jumps into his car, smashes
someone else's fender en route, and takes off for his
house. There he scrawls obscenities all over the mirrors
and walls with Jane's lipstick, brutally slashes one of
her best dresses, packs a suitcase and departs for
Pennsylvania and what he hopes will be the healing
presence of his old Quaker guardian.
As he flies over Arizona on his way back East,
Stephen looks out of his airplane window and sees the
badlands:
I should have remembered this more often, I said to
myself, looking down. I should have remembered that
it is out here, always, beyond their dirty coast of
397
movies and oil wells and advertisements and unreal
estate. Beyond their swimming pools and their
doll's houses. This would have been a place to come
to in my mind. She couldn't have followed me here.
(15)
Isherwood uses the desert as a foil to the city, the
simple place for meditation in contrast with the
overwhelming maya of Hollywood. It forms a physical
barrier between the "bad" life in the West and the "good"
life he seeks in the East. He craves the plainness that
infuses Sarah Pennington's life and even creates an
extended food metaphor to explain the comparison:
Sometimes, after a long illness, when the tired
stomach recoils from every kind of sauce, spice or
sweetness, you ask for that [plain homemade] bread
and you munch it humbly and gratefully, admitting
sadly to yourself that this is your sane and proper
diet, that all those fancy dishes were unwholesome
and that you had better eat more wisely in the
future. Well, here I was at the beginning of my
convalescence from Jane. . . . It was so wonderfully
horribly drearily wholesome that the mere prospect
of it made me want to weep. (18)
Once having removed himself from the corrupting
excitement of Hollywood, Stephen begins to reassess his
life. And the choice of the title of the novel from the
first stanza of John Donne's "The Progresse of the Soule"
begins to make sense. Stephen gradually reexamines his
life while confined to bed recuperating both emotionally
(from the breakup of his life with Jane) and physically
398
(from a pedestrian injury) in Pennsylvania. No other
scenes take place in California, though later, in a
letter to Jane, Stephen recalls a really profound dream—
one which he calls "a hate-nightmare"— that he had while
they were living in Beverly Hills. In this dream he hits
bottom and feels his hatred about ready to explode. The
dream anticipates the climactic events that occur at the
Hollywood party,
Unless I got rid of it, I would have to use
it. . . .It was so utterly loathsome, that filthy
bog, that it scared me sick. . . . I knew I had to
do something to be rid of it before it destroyed
me. . . . Thank God, you took the decision out of my
hands. You see, it was less than a week later that
we went to the Novotnys* party. (198-99)
In this first novel with a Southern California
setting, Isherwood casts Los Angeles in the stereotypic
sin city role— with the whole portrayal dominated by
Hollywood. Once out of California, even Jane looks
better. When Stephen sees her later in New York, he
remarks, "In California she had gotten a tense, even, at
times an almost haggard expression. Now her face had
smoothed out. That wonderful skin of hers was in full
bloom" (218).
Aesthetically speaking, there are a number of
problems with The World in the Evening, almost none of
399
which relate to the fact that Isherwood has chosen to set
part of the story in Los Angeles. He did, however, admit
that the opening in Hollywood
. . . was too exciting. Beware of very exciting
first chapters. It left you thoroughly bored.
There was no place to go from there. There was a
terrible letdown after this thrilling scene in
Hollywood. You didn't exactly want to stay on in
Hollywood, but you most certainly didn't want to go
to Philadephia.
But the problem is more than one of exciting settings
followed by dull ones. Isherwood repeatedly refers to
this as his worst novel;73 he confessed to a friend that
"It is terribly slipshod, and vulgar and sentimental at
times in a Hollywoodish way." And scholars agree:
Many people felt that The World in the Evening
confirmed their worst fears about the effect of
Hollywood upon good novelists. There is little of
the old Isherwood sparkle, and some passages do tend
to read like dialogue from a B movie. Of course,
many people in real life speak as fictional
characters do in a B movie, but in this case the
characters are complex beings capable, surely, of
much more.
72 Isherwood, UCLA lecture, 11 May 1965.
73 Isherwood says that were he to rewrite the
novel, he would change the point of view and use instead
a hostile minor character's point of view rather than
Stephen's.
74 Fryer, pp. 248-49.
400
Carolyn Heilbrun, however, defends the novel,
particularly pointing to Isherwood's handling of the
Hollywood section:
Surely Mr. Isherwood's ability to portray America
without satire, sneer, or sentimentality is one of
his most notable characteristics. His are amongst
the very few brilliant pictures of Hollywood;
Fitzgerald and West alone rival him. 5
One has to assume that Heilbrun is including the later
novels that Isherwood wrote about Los Angeles in her
encomium.
Isherwood goes beyond Hollywood to embrace a broader
picture of Los Angeles in his next novel, Down There on a .
Visit, published in 1962. Just after its publication,
Isherwood told a local reporter,
I never made the mistake of identifying Los Angeles
with Hollywood. The oil wells and aircraft
factories, and all these teeming, spreading suburbs
are a different place entirely— frighteningly
so. . . .1 don't find Hollywood a terribly
interesting subject to write about. I prefer to use
it only as scenery for the characters in whom I
really am interested. Naturally, I made Hollywood
look very ugly in World in the Evening because
that's how the main character saw it. The Hollywood
75 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Christopher Isherwood (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 37.
401
section in Down There on a Visit is more accurate
because the book is more autobiographical.
This next novel, narrated by a character called
Christopher Isherwood, shows the maturing of an
individual as he travels through the time and the spaces
of his life. Isherwood explained its philosophical
genesis:
I got involved with the idea of what it means to
cross a frontier, and the feeling of going from one
country to another and I superimposed on that the
idea that a country can be both itself, a perfectly
ordinary country with inhabitants, and at the same
time can be a sort of limbo or purgatory for all
sorts of people who are living there, not
necessarily connected very closely with the country
at all. That's to say, various kinds of expatriates
living in the place.
Christopher lives in England, then for a time in Germany
and Greece, and finally in Los Angeles during the course
of the novel. The fourth and final section— the one
entitled "Paul"— is set in Los Angeles.
The book is a peculiar kind of bildungsroman, for
Christopher, the modern young man, undergoes a series of
formative experiences, yet is not especially changed by
76 Christopher Isherwood, as quoted in Larry
Goldstein, "Christopher Isherwood: Writer in Residence,"
UCLA Daily Bruin, 6 February 1963, p. 5.
77 Isherwood, 18 May 1965, UCLA lectures, TS. 1.
402
them. He protects himself by being the observer and
recorder.78 This in fact explains the title, for Paul
accuses Christopher of being "down here on a visit,"
meaning that he is a perpetual tourist who gapes at the
hells of others but is never condemned himself to their
torments. When they meet for the last time, Paul berates
Christopher, encouraging him thereby to transform his
life by getting involved, committing himself:
You know, you really are a tourist, to your bones.
I bet you're always sending post cards with 'Down
here on a visit1 on them. That's the story of your
life. . . . You have to let yourself get hooked.
Deliberately. Not fighting it. Not being scared.
Not setting any time limits. (DTOAV, 315-16)
These words come near the very end of the novel and
resonate with such power that one is tempted to commit
the intentional fallacy and say that they represent
Isherwood's own statement of committment to the world
about the new life he has chosen in America. But the
book is much more than an apologia for having emigrated.
78 This appears to be the same Christopher who
writes at the beginning of Goodbye to Berlin the now-
famous lines, "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite
passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man
shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the
kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to
be developed, carefully printed, fixed." Isherwood,
Goodbye to Berlin (New York: New Directions, 1935), p. 1.
403
The concept of "the visit" relates philosophically
to Isherwood's view that all life is transitory, and that
Southern California seems especially so. In an essay
describing this appealing quality of the geography, he
explains that just a short drive from Los Angeles are
Yosemite and the mountains, Sequoia forests, and Death
Valley as well as other deserts:
This is the real nature of California and the secret
of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated,
aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly
reminds the traveller of his human condition and the
circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. 'You
are perfectly welcome,' it tells him, 'during your
short visit.,79
All human life is a visit.
Though Isherwood moves beyond Hollywood in Down
There on a Visit, he appropriately begins the section
called "Paul" there, as tourists would be likely to do:
Another look into a mirror— my own face dimly
reflected through the fashionable twilight of a
Beverly Hills restaurant, confronting three people
on a banquette with their backs to the glass. This
is the autumn of 1940. We are just getting ready to
start lunch. Six thousand miles away is the war.
One step outside is the flawless blue sky and the
California sun, which will hardly lose its warmth
till Christmas. Here inside is richly dark leather
with gleams of brasswork; an ambiance of movie
agents, mulled contracts and unhungry midday greed.
(191)
79 "Los A n g e l e s , " Exhumations, p . 1 6 2 .
404
Christopher goes to have lunch with some people he hardly
knows. And, characteristically for a British writer, he
is keenly attuned to their accents. Paul has a "peculiar
drawling tone, which is probably the result of mixing a
Southern accent with the kind of pseudo-Oxford English
spoken by cultured Europeans— the people he has been
running around with during the past few years" (192) and
Ronny has a "different kind of Anglo-American drawl
(Maryland, Harvard and a postgraduate year at Cambridge
plus English country house parties" (193). The
pretentiousness of their language reflects the studied
hodge podge he later begins to notice that they make of
their lives.
Real Britons, in contrast, form a literate enclave
and can be distinguished by their ability (unlike Aimee
in The Loved One) to recognize "each other's quotations
from Victorian literature" (231). There are also other
British "in" jokes buried within the pages of this novel.
When Christopher meets a certain woman in Greece, she
says that she knows his work:
'Only lately, I read your delightful
novel. . . . This young man who is a schoolmaster
and becomes imprisoned for the traffic in white
slaves— quel esprit.'
'I'm afraid that's by Evelyn Waugh,' I said not
charmed. (117)
405
Christopher expects to take his luncheon companions
to the studio, but instead they go off, leaving him to
pay the bill for the meal. In his response to this
situation, Isherwood no doubt incorporates some of his
own feelings about the absurdly large amounts of money he
was making as a studio employee and what changes of
perspective— especially the overwhelming sense of
unreality— it brought about in his life:
They leave, and I pay. The bill is
astronomical. But that doesn't matter, because the
money I earn here somehow doesn't belong to me. I
feel I have to keep spending it before it vanishes
away.
But what am I to spend it on? For nothing that
I buy seems to belong to me, either. My nice big
blue convertible certainly doesn't belong to me; how
could the sort of person I imagine I am conceivably
own such a car? Such pretentiousness isn't even
shameful, it's merely absurd. I get into it now, as
I always do, with a sense of being an impostor: if
this is my car, then I must be somebody else. But
there's my name on the registration slip, and I have
a key in my pocket which fits the ignition. (199-
200)
Unlike Stephen Monk, Christopher is already a part
of this culture, so he speaks as something of an insider.
When he goes to his office the the Writers' Building at
the studio, the reader gets a sense of what it feels like
to go beyond the public barriers:
The girl doesn't even glance up as I pass; this is
part of her act. But she has recognized me and
406
pressed her electric button, and the door to the
interior opens for me— a plain, smallish, hardwood
door, if you can get by it; a magic door to
unsuccessful actors, minor agents without pull,
tourists. There are always some of these people
sitting in the entrance lounge and staring at it,
hoping to get in, or at least to see a star or a
producer come out. (201)
But the sense of the doubleness remains; he still
remembers what it feels like to be outside the inner
sanctum.
One of the key figures in "Paul" is a character
named Augustus Parr, clearly modeled on Gerald Heard. In
fact Sybille Bedford suggests that "If one wants an idea
of the cadences and subject matter of [Heard's]
conversations, one should go to Christopher Isherwood's
novel Down There on a Visit."®0 Augustus lures
Christopher to California by writing to him while he is
still abroad:
He had heard I was coming to America myself in the
near future. Wouldn't I visit him? . . . Was it I
who decided to go to California, or was it Augustus
who decided for me? His letters implied from the
start that he expected me to come out there; and at
length he even suggested sending me bus fare. This
touched me all the more because I now had at my
disposal a free first-class ticket on the train, if
I cared to use it. A few days before, my agent in
New York had got me the offer of a screen-writing
job at one of the Hollywood movie studios. This
seemed like a signal from fate. So I went. (232-3 3)
80 B e d f o r d , 2 , p . 1 2 .
407
Once the men meet, there is the shocking difference in
Augustus's appearance. In London he "was fastidiously
clean-shaven, barbered and tailored" (231); in Los
Angeles Paul criticizes "the studied shabbiness of
Augustus's clothes," but Christopher defends the change:
It wasn't spiritual pretentiousness which made
Augustus dress like this, I argued, but an instinct
to make fun of his environment. In London, the home
of the Bond Street tailor, he had been exaggeratedly
elegant. Here in Los Angeles, the home of casual
men's wear, he had naturally exaggerated in the
opposite direction. (263)
Augustus susequently gets back at Paul "by ostentatiously
changing into a better jacket as soon as we arrived at
the house" (263). Again, the question of what is
appropriate attire is of great interest to British
writers in Los Angeles.
One of the themes that continues to emerge in
British novels set in Southern California is the sense
that the characters have that they have come to the end,
to the dropping off place, or even that they have already
hit bottom. Death and suicide abound in these novels.
Paul comes to Christopher and tells him that he is
planning to commit suicide:
Until yesterday evening, there was always something
left to stop me from being certain— some tiny little
thing, like feeling curious about a movie . . . or
408
just what was going to happen next. Well, yesterday
I suddenly found I'd come to the end of all
that. . . . I knew this must be the end, because I
saw that now I'm not good for anything— anything at
all. . . . I've come to the end. It's as simple as
that. (217)
What Paul is saying, he means emotionally,
psychologically, but the impetus may also be
geographical. Isherwood lived in the Santa Monica Canyon
area of Los Angeles, a section adjacent to Santa Monica
Bay. In 1972 he said in an interview:
I think you can still find elements of everything I
talked about. You feel the pathos of people who have
come out to the very edge, who are living far from
their base; the pathos of people who couldn't drag
another inch and have created a far away model of
the home-place.81
In October he goes on to explain that this has a lot to
do with watching sunsets over the ocean and how it
affects one's psyche:
They make us more aware that we are living on the
last edge of the land and therefore partly belong to
the Pacific water-world. Being always in its
presence inclines us to belittle it sometimes and
think of what we see from our house merely as Santa
Monica Bay. But when the ocean sunsets begin, they
seem to open everything up. There is nothing behind
them but vastness.82
81 Anne Taylor Fleming, "Christopher Isherwood: He
is a Camera," LA, No. 23 (9 December 1972), p. 14.
82 October, p. 36.
409
That emptiness both geogrqaphical and spiritual is just
what Paul is experiencing, a feeling that leads him to
think of suicide.
One of the ways Isherwood extends his focus on Los
Angeles in Down There on a Visit is to incorporate more
of the landscapes of the city into the daily lives of the
characters. For example, when Christopher drives into
the hills to the house where Paul has been living with
Ruthie and Ronny, the description reveals an intimate's
knowledge of the terrain and its inhabitants. Isherwood
does this in two stages: first, by demonstrating the
fantasies such landscapes can inspire in the imagination,
and, secondly, by showing just how such fantasies are
quickly shattered by reality— in much the same way that
the city lures the stranger and then, once he arrives,
shows him its drearier face:
[1] The Rambla de la Cumbrera was up in the hills,
which in those days had few houses and formed a
wild, romantic no man's land between Los Angeles and
the Valley; maybe there were still canyons untrodden
since the Indians had hunted in them. At night the
hills rose dark and mysterious above the drifting
sea fog and the constellated lights of the plain;
and teenagers drove up there to neck in their
parents' cars. (204)
[2] The Rambla must have been planned as a great
scenic drive; there were lamp standards and a
sidewalk. But now the glass of the lamps was
410
broken, the sidewalk was overgrown with mesquite
bushes and dodder, and there were cracks across the
road, probably caused by the small earthquake jolts
we had been having during the past year. . . . The
house . . . was California Spanish, with white
stucco walls and heavy red tiles on its roof. I had
expected luxury? but this place had an air of
abandonment. Weeds were growing out of the
driveway. . . . Below the terraces was a swimming
pool. It was staringly empty, with a huge crack
zigzagging across it. Beside the pool's edge, on
mattresses, lay Ruthie and Paul, stark naked. (2 04-
5)
Not since Raymond Chandler had a British novelist
captured the Southern California landscape with such
astuteness and sensitivity.
But in A Single Man Isherwood even exceeded his own
precedent. Not only is it the best of the British novels
examined thus far, but it may well be the finest of the
lot. It also may be the most representative novel in the
study because it fully engages with the city in a number
of important ways, incorporates much more than the
Hollywood scene and its attendant sets of characters, and
goes beyond cemeteries, crimes, and the rich to present
an alternative lifestyle fully realized in the midst of
the more suburban aspects of the city. Isherwood quite
openly referred to it as his best work— this despite the
incredible notoriety of Goodbye to Berlin and the
relatively unknown status of A Single Man.
4 11
A Single Man, published in 19 64, consists of a day
in the life of George, a homosexual, middle-aged,
British-born professor of English at a local college.
Because George's lover Jim has recently died in an
automobile accident in St. Louis, he is having difficulty
coping with the loss and the fact that he must live his
life alone. Because their relationship was a non-
traditional one, the establishment world fails to give
formal acknowledgement of his loss and, thereby, whatever
solace official recognition might provide.
In an attempt to keep the reader aware of the
unpredictable flow and flux of existence, the novel is
narrated entirely in the present tense and encompasses
just a day of this single man's life— from the time that
he awakens and takes on his George consciousness in the
morning to the time that he falls asleep and becomes one
again with the celestial movements beyond man's control.
Isherwood takes the day's birth and death analogies to
something of an extreme by actually positing George's
death at the end of the novel.
Any fictional work that takes place on a single day
must almost inevitably be compared with Joyce's Ulysses.
And in this case the inquiry is pertinent. Both the
modernist classic and Isherwood's novel delineate middle-
412
aged protagonists that appear rather ordinary to the
outsider, but in the course reveal themselves to be men
with a good deal of integrity and a will to carry on
despite the setbacks and evident imprudences of their
lives. The events of each one's day are relatively
unremarkable, and both include a morning sequence on the
toilet, part of a day at work, a sense of moving through
the city and encountering a number of its typical
inhabitants, a visit to a hospital, some interaction with
friends and colleagues, and finally a retiring to bed.
Isherwood has not mentioned Ulysses specifically in
connection with the novel, but he is open in discussing
his novel's "very familiar concept of a day equalling a
lifetime." His own comparisons are more with
Shakespeare's Jacques and the presentation of the seven
ages of man:
You have the ages of man all revealed in one day.
And since all life ends in death there has to be a
death included. . . . What I did in fact was to have
a kind of optional death because I phrased it very
carefully, in such a way that I do not say that he
actually died on that particular night.83
When Isherwood explains the genesis of the novel, he
says that he wanted to incorporate his experiences as a
83 I s h e r w o o d , 25 May 1 9 6 5 , UCLA L e c t u r e s , TS. 1 7 .
413
professor at Los Angeles State College (now California
State University, Los Angeles) and to have done with
Christopher Isherwood as a character. He came up with
. . . the idea of a sort of solitary person, a sort
of person representing in fact, an almost laboratory
specimen of middle age. And I began to think, what
an interesting thing middle age is, and how
peculiar, and how most people think that it's a
period of calm and very beautiful in a sort of
rather boring way. . . . When as a matter of fact,
it•s probably the most protean of all ages. That•s
to say, part of the time one is absolutely senile
and at other moments monstrously juvenile, and it's
a great age for committing indiscretions of all
kinds. . . . But the real object of the book was to
show an extraordinary variety of responses on the
part of this central individual. . . . I heightened
the reactions so that he seems really quite insane
during large passages in the book, because of
course, another great fact about middle-aged people
is that many of them are practically insane and are
very strange indeed— what's going on inside— and if
people but knew how worn out and loose the safety
valve is they perhaps wouldn't provoke eruptions the
way they're apt to. 4
This is the only one of Isherwood's Los Angeles
novels that is set entirely in Los Angeles. And it is
important to note that neither George nor the book have
anything whatsoever to do with the film and entertainment
industries. Rather, Los Angeles in its fullness is
presented as a very essential backdrop to the events of
the novel, and George moves through the city as a long-
84 I s h e r w o o d , 18 May 1 9 6 5 , UCLA L e c t u r e , TS. 1 9 - 2 2 .
414
time resident would, focusing on the authentic details of
Southern California life and avoiding the superfluous
moments that often startle or befuddle the newcomer.
Much of the interaction is dependent upon the unique
nature of the environment in which it occurs. Beyond
just telling his story, Isherwood quickly emphasizes: "I
tried consciously to give, not a picture of Los Angeles,
because that would be too ambitious, but at least a kind
of cross section of Los Angeles and a great number of
interrelated tiny worlds which exist here.”85
But it would be a mistake to give the impression
that the novel is a paean to the city. On the contrary,
Isherwood sees it with the clear eyes of the intimate.
As Claude J. Summers, a frequent commentator on
Isherwood, suggests, "His portrait of Los Angeles in the
early 1960's is comparable in irony and insight to his
• q /:
portraits of Berlin.m the early 1930's." One of the
finest passages is an interpolated short history of
Isherwood's own home turf— Santa Monica Canyon. Unnamed
in the novel, the canyon, he suggests, was first
inhabited by bohemian visionaries and later taken over by
overbreeding suburbanites. The first he describes as
85 Isherwood, 25 May 1965, UCLA Lecture, TS. 15.
86 Summers, p. 108.
415
. . . pioneer escapists from dingy downtown Los
Angeles and stuffy-snobbish Pasadena who came out
here and founded this colony back in the early
twenties. They referred to their stucco bungalows
and clapboard shacks as cottages, giving them cute
names like ’The Fo'c'sle' and 'Hi Nuff.' They
called their streets lanes, ways or trails, to go
with the woodsy atmosphere they wanted to create.
Their utopian dream was of a subtropical English
village with Monmartre manners: a Little Good Place
where you could paint a bit, write a bit, and drink
lots. They saw themselves as rear-guard
individualists, making a last-ditch stand against
the twentieth century. They gave thanks loudly from
morn till eve that they had escaped the soul-
destroying commercialism of the city. They were
tacky and cheerful and defiantly bohemian,
tirelessly inquistitive about each other's doings,
and boundlessly tolerant. When they fought, at
least it was with fists and bottles and furniture,
not lawyers. Most of them were lucky enough to have
died off before the Great Change.
The Change began in the late forties, 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,
which had been their last nostalgic glimpse of home
before they shipped out to the Pacific. And what
better breeding ground than a hillside neighborhood
like this one, only five minutes' walk from the
beach and with no through traffic to decimate the
future tots? So, one by one, the cottages which
used to reek of bathtub gin and reverberate with the
poetry of Hart Crane have fallen to the occupying
army of Coke-drinking television watchers.87
Anyone who has ever visited this part of Los Angeles will
appreciate the veracity of the history and the portrait
87 Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964; rpt. Avon Bard, 1978),
pp. 15-16. All further references to this work appear in
the text in parentheses as ASM.
416
even if he is not charmed by the overall irony of the
picture and Isherwood's anti-family stance.
Living in this environment in the house that he and
Jim shared for many years, George feels extraordinarily
isolated: even geographically so, because the house is
situated alone amongst a grove of trees and is only
accessible by a bridge across a creek. At the time they
bought it George had said, "As good as being on our own
island" (17). But now he is bereaved, and in the
neighborhood no one knows, so this makes him even further
disconnected from the others.
For George it is a dream gone bad; things have not
turned out the way he planned. People come to Los
Angeles with their dreams, and many a vision of the good
life is manifest only fleetingly, as George's was, if at
all. As Isherwood wrote a number of years before A
Single Man,
California is a tragic country— like Palestine, like
every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-
chart of migrations— the land rush, the gold rush,
the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking
rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories—
followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of
417
the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving
sorrowfully homeward.88
Los Angeles is a place where the dreams of immigrants
often fall apart.
But George refuses to give up, despite the fact that
his inner life is a shambles and he has no tangible
source of strength. For that reason, Isherwood has
spoken of him as heroic:
I really admire the sort of person that George is:
it isn't me at all. Here is somebody who really has
nothing to support him, except a kind of gradually
waning animal vitality, and yet he fights, like a
badger, and goes on demanding, fighting for
happiness. That attitude I think rather
magnificent. . . . George is heroic.89
This is what makes George the prototype of what J. U.
Peters calls "the anti-hero of the Los Angeles anti
myth, "
. . . the champion of awareness in the face of
absurdity. He enters a world where existential
freedom is a banal commonplace of everyday life, and
88 Isherwood, "Los Angeles," p. 159. Though it
doesn't relate to George's situation, Isherwood offers
another interesting perspective on immigration to Los
Angeles as Promised Land: "Most of us come to the Far
West with somewhat cynical intentions. Privately, we
hope to get something for nothing— or, at any rate, for
very little. . . . But if we don't, we have no one to
blame but ourselves."
89 Isherwood, as quoted in Scobie, pp. 157-58.
418
he achieves his awareness by analysing the
implications of his environment. . . . Not natives
of the city . . . [they] sense from the moment of
their arrival their alien identity . . . [knowing]
they come bearing the dead weight of their own
cultural traditions. . . . Disillusionment is . . .
the essential rite of passage into the life of Los
Angeles. . . . It is seen not merely as a temporary
problem, but as the characteristic mood in which the
resident is forced tb confront the spacial [sic] and
temporal discontinuities he sees. . . . The
individual's isolation and the concomitant
preoccupation with present time impel what becomes a
recurrent theme in Los Angeles novels: the effort to
cope with life as it must be lived in the temporal
and spacial [sic] emptiness.
Nearly everywhere George goes he feels different, a
member of a minority. As a single man and a homosexual
he is an anomaly among the families. As an educated man
he is an oddity among the masses. As a man of
independent means he has security among the struggling.
As a Briton he is a foreigner amidst the Americans, no
matter what their ethnic origins.
He also has, by virtue of being a homosexual, the
added artistic advantage, that even the death of the
person that he was most attached to is sort of
socially unacceptable— I mean he can't have an
accepted place in society even as a widower, so to
speak; but on the other hand he is, in fact,
accepted by society (and this is, of course, the
paradox of social life) and is even quite looked up
90 J. U. Peters, "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth,"
Itinerary: criticism: Essays on California Writers, ed.
Charles Crow (Bowling Green: Univeristy Press, 1978), pp.
29-30.
419
to and is regarded as a sort of serious person and a
possible source of wisdom.91
Even at school, as he stands before his students— many of
whom revere him— he is aware of his differences from
them:
He feels brilliant, vital, challenging, slightly
mysterious and, above all, foreign. His neat dark
clothes, his white dress shirt and tie (the only tie
in the room) are uncompromisingly alien from the
aggressively virile informality of the young male
students. (48)
After many years in Los Angeles, George still
occasionally forgets that his humor fails to work if he
delivers it as he would have in Britain: "Nobody sees
this joke. George still sometimes throws one away,
despite all his experience, by muttering it, English
style" (56).
Despite the culture's tendency to isolate him, in
other respects George is entirely comfortable in the
city. Driving the freeways— one of Los Angeles's most
challenging tasks for the newcomer— is an activity George
has wholly adapted to. He uses it as a testimonial that
he has been able to fit in with the environment:
91 Isherwood, 25 May 1965, UCLA Lecture, Typescript
pp. 15-16.
420
George feels a kind of partriotism for the freeways.
He is proud that they are so fast, that people get
lost on them and even sometimes panic and have to
bolt for safety down the nearest cut off. George
loves the freeways because he can still cope with
them; because the fact that he can cope proves his
claim to be a functioning member of society. (29)
Unlike Huxley, who because of his poor eyesight was never
able to engage in this most typical of Los Angeles
activites, Isherwood really captures the sense of driving
in Southern California in his novel. For residents,
driving is certainly far more important than Hollywood is
to their lives. And Isherwood's passages on the actual
experience of freeway driving are exceptionally fine:
There's always a slightly unpleasant moment when you
drive up a ramp which leads on to the freeway and
become what's called 'merging traffic.' George has
that nerve-crawling sensation which can't be removed
by simply checking the rearview mirror: that,
inexplicably, invisibly, he's about to be hit in the
back. And then, next moment, he has merged and is
away, out in the clear. . . . And now, as he drives,
it is as if some kind of auto-hypnosis exerts
itself. . . . The reflexes are taking over. . . .
After all, this is no mad chariot race— that's only
how it seems to onlookers or nervous novices— it is
a river, sweeping in full toward its outlet with a
soothing power. There is nothing to fear as long as
you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover,
in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of
indolence and ease. (31)
Later George refers to this automatic pilot aspect of the
self as "the chauffeur-figure," one of many personae his
psyche creates during the course of the novel.
4 21
Driving in Los Angeles is a metaphor for life. And
driving the freeways competently is a way that George can
demonstrate he is still youthful, still full of life. He
drives in such as way as to reassure the others on the
road that he is totally in control. Neither decrepit old
age nor bad driving are tolerable in the Southern
California mainstream:
The cops on their motorcycles will detect nothing,
yet, to warn them to roar in pursuit flashing their
red lights, to signal him off to the side, out of
the running, and thence to escort him kindly but
ever so firmly to some beautifully ordered nursery- -
community where Senior Citizens (•old,1 in our
country of the bland, has become nearly as dirty a
word as 'kike' or 'nigger') are eased into senility,
retaught their childhood games but with a
difference: it's known as 'passive recreation'
now. . . . Anything to keep them busy and stop them
wandering around blocking the traffic. (3 0)
It is worth noting that in the preceding passage
Isherwood uses the expression "our country," however
ironically, indicating that he has assumed the insider's
view for his narration. He appears to be taking some
responsibility for the way things are. Perhaps even more
than Raymond Chandler, Isherwood has captured the
insider's view of the city— while yet retaining the open
perspective of a Briton. And, moreover, Chandler never
openly revealed his British background in the novels
themselves.
422
Another way that George demonstrates his affinities
with his adopted city is to enjoy an afternoon's workout
at the gym. He goes, even though it "isn't one of his
regular days," (86) because, after visiting a dying
acquaintance in a hospital, he needs to feel alive: "J am
alive, he says to himself. . . . How good to be in a
body— even this old beat-up carcass— that still has warm
blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome
flesh!" (8 6) The experience at the gym is one of the few
totally positive moments in the book:
How delightful it is to be here. If only one could
spend one's entire life in this state of easygoing
physical democracy. . . .Even the half-dozen quite
well-known actors put on no airs. The youngest kids
sit innocently naked beside sixty- and seventy-year
olds in the steam room, and they call each other by
their first names. Nobody is too hideous or too
handsome to be accepted as an equal. (90)
Angelinos expend an extraordinary amount of time and
energy on their bodies, and, more than most, they tend to
talk about their physical activities at social
gatherings. So Isherwood's protagonist experiences these
familiar pleasures: "It is so good to feel the body's
satisfaction and gratitude; no matter how much it may
protest, it likes being forced to perform these tasks"
(91) .
423
Isherwood said in an interview that he preferred
being old in Los Angeles to the experience he expected he
would have at his age and with his status in England:
It suits me very well. In Los Angeles, the old
aren't made a tremendous amount of. In England I
feel I'd be embalmed. I'd be paid more attention
to, but it's the kind of attention used for putting
on mummy cloths, getting ready for the tomb. I hate
the dark breath of the tomb which is often mistaken
for death. In England I'd be inclined to die. . . .
The institutions, those heavy monuments— I feel I'm
free of that here.
Though George is somewhat fixated on his body, his
is not the preoccupation of a Jo Stoyte. It is of
interest that the book George is teaching that day is
Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, for there are
a number of significant points of comparison between the
two books: the authors were, obviously, dear friends;
both were well-respected English novelists attempting to
show something of their adopted city to the world; and
both deal thematically with the issues of aging and
death. In addition, Isherwood has George mirror his own
life experience by having him teach a British work to his
American students. When Isherwood began lecturing at
California universities, he offered to teach American as
well as English literature. It is one of the great
92 F l e m i n g , p . 1 4 .
424
ironies of immigration and naturalization in this country
that one continues to be considered inexorably attached
to one's former culture, so
The university authorities preferred that he limit
himself to Contemporary British works. The American
literary establishment continued to consider him
British, despite his obtaining American citizenship
in 1946, and his election as member of the United
States National Institute of Arts and Letters in
1949. In 1976 Time magazine was still calling him a
British writer.
And, of course, so does this research, which looks at him
as a British novelist rather than as an American who has
written about Los Angeles.
When George teaches a lesson on After Many a Summer
Dies the Swan at the college on the day in question, he
needs to retell the myth of Tithonus to his students, and
there is a certain poignancy behind the humor of the
telling:
'So poor Tithonus gradually became a repulsively
immortal old man— ' (Loud laughter.) 'And Eos, with
the characteristic heartlessness of a goddess, got
bored with him and locked him up. And he got more
and more gaga, and his voice got shriller and
shriller, until suddenly one day he turned into a
cicada.' (55)
93 F r y e r , p . 2 6 6 .
425
Isherwood has been open in saying that the reason he
enjoys giving lectures at American universities is that
he garners a great deal of vitality from the interchange:
What I find here in California is great stimulation
from the young--and I don't mean this in a
homosexual sense. . . . I'm stimulated by the
predicament of being young. And I feel most at ease
with American college students— I'm stimulated by
the questions they ask, and it helps me think.
It seems that George is seeking just such interaction
with his students but is less successful than Isherwood
himself has apparently been in making these connections.
He leaves the school thinking that nearly everyone has
missed the points he had been trying to make about
Huxley's novel.
Whereas I find George a realistic and sympathetic
figure attempting to ward off the invasions of the aging
process, and therefore a far more believable figure than
Jo Stoyte, critic Alan Wilde accuses both characters of
gross narcissism, in fact seeming to prefer the Huxleyan
version:
For George is . . . Tithonus, a less crude and
perhaps a less honest version of Huxley's Jo Stoyte
or the fifth Earl of Gonister: 'A withered boy'
furiously intent on putting off age by devoting
himself to the pursuit of now. His ambition
94 I s h e r w o o d , a s q u o t e d i n R eu v en , p . 3 .
426
mirrored in the use throughout the novel of the
present tense, George, like some Vanitas figure in a
medieval painting, is at his happiest during the day
in the 'easygoing physical democracy1 of the gym,
where with satisfaction he recognizes, after a
detailed survey of his body, that 'he hasn't given
up.'95
Peter Conrad makes a relevant point in comparing Huxley
and Isherwood's approaches to the city. Huxley makes it
a site of collective disaster whereas Isherwood concerns
himself with individual destiny. But when Conrad
suggests that the Isherwood protagonist is "mired in
depression and regret, impatient for his own
annihilation,"96 he misunderstands the ultimately heroic
thrust of George's actions.
As George is aware of the decay going on within his
own body, he recognizes the same changes happening in the
Southern California environment. One of the most vivid
passages details the way that he has watched the
relatively unpopulated hills and valleys of the city
evolve into areas of suburban overkill. Their attendant
loss of vitality matches his own:
Years ago, . . . when George first came to
California, he used to go to the hills often. It
95 Alan Wilde, Christopher Ishexwood, (New York:
Twayne, 1971), p. 131.
96 Conrad, p. 299.
427
was 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. . . .
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 swerve sharply. . . . 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 ranch lands 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.
Alas, how sadly, how certainly George knows
this! He stops the car and stands at the road's
rough yellow dirt edge, beside a manzanita bush, and
looks out over Los Angeles like a sad Jewish prophet
of doom, as he takes a leak. Babylon is fallen, is
fallen, that great city. But this city is not
great, was never great, and has nearly no distance
to fall.
Now he zips up his pants and gets into the car
and drives on, thoroughly depressed. . . . The day
wanes and the lights snap on in their sham jewel
colors all over the plain, as the road winds down
again onto Sunset Boulevard and he nears the ocean.
(91-3)
428
George heads for the supermarket; and it must
signify an effort to reconnect with life rather than
remaining in his depressed state. He also steps to the
phone to see if it is too late to change his mind and
accept a dinner invitation from a friend he had turned
down earlier in the day. She is only too happy to accept
his excuse, for she too is among the lonely foreigners in
the city. Isherwood sensitively narrates the sequence:
'Of course it isn't too latel' She doesn't even
bother to listen to his lying excuses. Her gladness
flashes its instantaneous way to him, even faster
than her words, across the zigzag of the wires. And
at once Geo and Charley are linked, are yet another
of this evening's lucky pairs, amidst all of its
lonely wanderers. If any of the clerks were
watching, they would see his face inside the glass
box brighten, flush with joy like a lover's. (95)
The evening with Charlotte (Charley) is primarily an
evening with his past, for she was also Jim's friend, so
she understands and shares his loss. She too is alone:
many years ago, after immigrating to America from
Britain, she was abandoned by her husband, Buddy; and
just recently her son Fred has gone off to live with a
girl, so she turns to George, as he does to her, for
solace amidst her loneliness. As he pours drinks for
them both, "He begins to feel this utterly mysterious
unsensational thing— not bliss, not ecstasy, not joy—
429
just plain happiness" (103). He has made a real
connection with someone who knows him better than anyone
else he has met during the day.
Not only do their lonely existences cause them to
draw together, but Charlotte too is a British expatriate
who has been attempting to live a happy life in the West.
She, like George, cannot give up some of her Britishness.
Some of the qualities which distinguish her from the
locals are conscious attempts on her part to remain
different. Other times, though she tries to fit in, to
look the same, she is inept at capturing the California
style and thereby gives her foreign origins away. George
is convinced she just doesn't know how to do it:
Her dress shows a grotesque kind of gallantry, ill-
advised but endearing: an embroidered peasant blouse
in bold colors, red, yellow and violet, with the
sleeves rolled up to the elbows; a gipsyish Mexican
skirt which looks as if she had girded it on like a
blanket, with a silver-studded cowboy belt. . . .
Oh, and if she must wear sandals with bare feet, why
won't she make up her toenails? (Maybe a lingering
middle-class Midlands puritanism is in operation
here.) . . . She hasn't gotten it yet. This is her
idea of informal California playwear, and she
honestly cannot see that she dresses any differently
from Mrs. Peabody next door. (102)
As has been noted several times earlier, fashion is an
issue in all of the British novels that take place in Los
Angeles. But whereas most of the other British novelists
430
have pointed to the garb of the native Californians as a
preposterous melange, Isherwood maintains that it is the
immigrants who fail to understand just how the native
dress fits together. Though George contines to dress as
an Englishman, Charlotte tries to use her attire to
convice the world that she fits in.
But, unlike George, Charlotte refuses to learn to
drive. In Los Angeles that is tantamount— despite any
other accommodations— to declaring one's wishes to remain
a foreigner forever. Charlotte uses her idiosyncrasy to
her advantage, however, and as a fellow Briton, George
completely understands the approach:
If she needs to go someplace and no one offers to
give her a ride, well then, that's too bad, she
can't go. But the neighbors nearly always do help
her; she has them utterly intimidated and bewitched
by this Britishness which George himself knows so
well how to employ, though with a different
approach. (99)
4 31
Isherwood once mentioned to an interviewer, "What's
irritating about being British here is that people think
it's cute."97
What Charlotte especially wants to discuss this
night with George is that she is thinking of returning to
England now that her son is gone. As it must be for all
immigrants who have been away for a long time, this is an
exceedingly complicated issue. First of all, in an
effort to assure her family that she had been all right
after her marriage split up— and as a way of saving
face— she had written her sister "saying I was blissfully
happy here, and that never never would I set foot on her
dreary little island again" (118). Secondly, she has
grown accustomed to life in California, and thinks about
all she will miss by returning to Britain:
I know I'll find it all changed. I know there'll be
a lot of things I'll hate. I know I'll miss all
these super markets and labor-savers and
conveniences. Probably I'11 keep catching one cold
after another, after living in this climate. And I
expect you're quite right— I shall be miserable,
living with Nan. I can't help any of that. At
97 Christopher Isherwood, as quoted in "Christopher
Isherwood," an interview by Jeffrey Bailey, California
Quarterly 11/12 (Winter/Spring 1977), pp. 95-6. The same
awareness is behind Christopher's remark in Down There on
a Visit that "Since the war began, all things English are
the rage out here; the bar of this restaurant has lately
been renamed Ye Mermaid Tavern Taproom, and redecorated
accordingly" (DTOAV, 196).
432
least, when I'm there, I shall know where I am.
(119)
Her last statement is the most poignant of all— the
others are rather predictable. To wonder where one is,
and in that respect to have a sense of loss or
disorientation, must be a feeling lots of British people
experience deeply in their unconsciouses while living in
California. Though they speak the same words, the
lifestyle is so utterly different from what they have
been brought up with that they are bound to feel the
duality of being at home (if only for the language) and
at the same time in a foreign land. So only when
Charlotte returns to Britain will she be entirely sure
where she is.
Unlike Paul of Down There on a Visit, George has
physically and emotionally engaged himself with his
adopted environment. He even suggests to Charlotte that,
rather than returning permanently to England, "Why not
just go back there on a visit?" (119) For him now, Los
Angeles is the only place to live.
When he leaves her house that evening, George,
though already rather drunk, goes down to his local bar
at the beach. There he encounters Kenny Potter, one of
his students, who has surmised that George frequents this
433
place and is waiting in the hope of meeting him there.
While the get-together with Charlotte predominantly
focuses on the past, relating to Kenny forces George to
think about the future. During this sequence, the
climactic event of the novel takes place. Aware of the
lights of the city behind them, George and Kenny run down
to the ocean, throw off their clothes, and immerse
themselves in the pounding surf. George experiences the
moment as a turning point in his life, and Isherwood's
prose reaches its richest and most poetic level:
Intent upon his own rites of purification, George
staggers out once more, wide-open-armed, to receive
the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving himself to
it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood,
desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes? again and
again he returns, becoming always cleaner, freer,
less. He is perfectly happy by himself; it's enough
to know that Kenny and he are sole sharers of the
element. The waves and the night and the noise
exist only for their play. Meanwhile, no more than
two hundred yards distant, the lights shine from the
shore and the cars flick past up and down the
highway, flashing their long beams. On the dark
hillsides you can see lamps in the windows of dry
homes, where the dry are going dryly to their dry
beds. But George and Kenny are refugees from
dryness ? they have escaped across the border into
the water-world, leaving their clothes behind them
for a customs fee. (135-36)
This ocean baptism evokes the birth of a new spirit
within George. He becomes the complete manifestation of
the anti-hero of the Los Angeles anti-myth: he "learns
434
fully to accept— even welcome— his loneliness and his
freedom" and even achieves something of a "cosmic
consciousness,1,98 for in the final pages he becomes one
with the creatures and movements of the tidepools along
the Pacific coast. He is surely a Briton who has gone
the full distance in engaging with the soul of the West.
Unlike Stephen in The World in the Evening and Paul
in Down There on a Visit, who merely hit bottom as they
reach the westernmost point, George goes over the edge,
so to speak; but rather than dying spiritually, he is
reborn from the experience. As he looks back to shore,
he sees what he has left and senses that it will never be
the same for him. The image of a man standing in or
beside the ocean and looking toward the east occurs
frequently in the British novels about Los Angeles.
George, however, has achieved what most spiritual seekers
in Los Angeles hope for; a transfiguration of the spirit.
When George falls asleep that night, he is a
genuinely happy man, making this the first of the British
novels in Los Angeles with an entirely satisfying happy
ending. Some may argue that the optional death Isherwood
posits prevents such a conclusion, but losing
consciousness with sleep is symbolically akin to death,
98 P e t e r s , p p . 3 2 - 3 .
435
and death is eveyone's end after all, so it can hardly be
seen as uniquely tragic in this instance. And, most of
all, George is finally happy:
George smiles to himself, with entire self-
satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is
my secret; my strength.
And I’m about to get much crazier, he
announces. Just watch me, all of you! . . .
He falls asleep, still smiling. (152)
This is not the smile of a crazy man, but rather that of
the anti-hero of the Los Angeles anti-myth: the
existential man who fully recognizes, like Camus's
Sisyphus, the absurdity of his position but nonetheless
goes contentedly to meet his fate.
Angus Wilson, among others, recognized that
Isherwood has always been at the forefront, the moral
center, of his generation: this is true of his work about
Berlin, America, the Gita, and California— in every case
he has pushed beyond the provincial and the
conventional." Gavin Lambert speaks of Isherwood’s
home, and how it is an architectural reflection of this
way that he confronted life and literature:
The gift of showing people in a society at a
particular vivid moment of change, the way they
celebrate and squirm and walk the tightrope and
" H e i l b r u n , p . 4 6 .
436
wait, is uniquely his. Less obvious is a submerged
link that comes at moments to the surface: . . . the
wry but urgent passage on fear (of age, loneliness,
death, war, etc.) .... You don't conquer it by
managing not to feel it anymore. You deny it at the
expense of denying yourself. So? The house in
which Christopher lives stands almost sheer on a
high cliff. A balcony has now been added, sticking
enthusiastically right out over the cliff. When
you're on it, the drop is more vertical than ever.
Christopher is susceptible to vertigo and likes the
balcony. . . . Which is a way of saying he is unsafe
and sound.100
And Jack Miles, writing in Isherwood's local paper, the
Los Angeles Times, on the occasion of the author's
eightieth birthday, said,
The real achievement of the several fine novels
Isherwood wrote after moving to Los Angeles in 1939
is that they extract from the tangle of experience
the truth that being different in one way need not
entail being different in every other way; need not,
above all, entail being a universal rebel.101
Though Isherwood's oeuvre has been acclaimed throughout
the English-speaking world, A Single Man has never had
the recognition it justly deserves— neither in Britain
nor in Los Angeles, the city it captures so well. Though
Isherwood never wrote another novel about Los Angeles,
100 Lambert, p. 107.
101 Jack Miles, "Christopher Isherwood's Promise,"
Los Angeles Times Book Review, 4 November 1984, p. 2.
437
with this fine work his position is secure as a central
figure among the city’s Anglo-American writers.
As he learned and was supported by his European
mentors and the artistic network in California, Isherwood
has gone beyond the examples provided by his own books to
influence and support the work of the younger generation
of British and American writers, and especially those who
have found their way to Los Angeles. At Isherwood's
death, many younger writers spoke about how much he had
supported and even influenced their work— that his home
was to them a Southern California kind of salon where
they could meet and exchange ideas with the great as well
as the aspiring.
Gavin Lambert, the subject of a subsequent chapter,
was particularly close to Isherwood, and their
relationship is somewhat reminiscent of the Huxley-
Isherwood bond of a generation ago. Twenty years ago
Isherwood told a group in Los Angeles that he always
showed his work to Lambert, and the younger man speaks
about the lessons, particularly on openness, he has
learned from his friend and mentor:
I think he believes very strongly that anyone should
be given a chance and that you must, from your own
point of view, take that chance as well. Who knows
what will come; its a way of living, I suppose, that
you don't close yourself off, you don't
438
automatically say, on principle, 'No, I can't be
bothered with that, I don't want that.' All
Christopher would say is 'Who knows, let's give it a
try, let's see where it will lead to.' Of course,
some of the time it leads to a waste of time, or
disappointment or a maddening thing. But it has
paid off, really, because it has enlarged him, and
it's what keeps him so open and free. 02
No doubt his openness of mind, his willingness to listen
and take a chance, as well as his insight and great
stylistic gifts made it possible for Christopher
Isherwood to meet Los Angeles on its own terms, to find a
meaningful niche for himself there, and then to capture
it so masterfully in print.
102 Gavin Lambert, as quoted in Carolyn G.
Heilbrun, "An Interview with Gavin Lambert," Twentieth
Century Literature, 22, No. 3 (October 1976), p. 336.
439
C h r i s t o p h e r I s h e r w o o d B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Works
Novels
Goodbye to Berlin. New York: New Directions, 1935.
The World in the Evening. New York: Random House, 1954;
rpt. Popular Library, 1955.
Down There on a Visit. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1962.
A Single Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964;
rpt. Avon Bard, 1978.
Autobiographical Works
Christopher and His Kind: 1929-1939. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1976.
My Guru and His Disciple. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1980.
October. Los Angeles: Twelvetrees Press, 1980.
Collections
Exhumations. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. "Los
Angeles," originally published in Horizon, 1947;
"The Shore," originally published as "California
Story" in Harper's Bazaar, 1952.
A Memorial Essay on Aldous Huxley. In Aldous Huxley
1894-1963, ed. Julian Huxley. New York: Harper and
Row, 19 65.
Lectures
6 Unpublished Lectures delivered at UCLA 27 April-1 June
1965, Typescript, Catalogue #100, Box 174. UCLA
Special Collections.
440
Interviews
"An Interview with Christopher Isherwood." Interview by
George Wickes. Shenandoah 16, No. 3 (Spring 1965),
23-52.
"Isherwood on Hollywood." Interview by Charles Higham.
London Magazine, New Series 8, April 1968, 31-3 8.
"A Fortunate, Happy Life— Christopher Isherwood Talks to
Derek Hart." The Listener, 83, No. 2140 (2 April
1970), 449-50.
"Christopher Isherwood." Interview by Robert Wennersten.
Transatlantic Review, No. 42 and 43 (Spring and
Summer, 1972), 5-21.
"Christopher Isherwood." Interview by W. I. Scobie in
Paris Review, The Art of Fiction XLIX (Spring 1974),
138-62.
"Christopher Isherwood: An Interview." Interview by
Carolyn G. Heilbrun. Twentieth Century Literature,
22, No. 3 (October 1976), 253-63.
"Christopher Isherwood." Interview by Jeffrey Bailey in
California Quarterly 11/12 (Winter/Spring 1977), 87-
96.
Secondary Sources
Acton, Harold. More Memoirs of An Aesthete. London:
Methuen, 1970.
Allsop, Kenneth. Scans. London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1965.
Barrett, William. Article from Atlantic, April 1962 in
Isherwood Archives #113, UCLA Special Collections.
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 2 vols.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.
Conrad, Peter. Imagining America. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1980.
441
Craft, Robert. "Stravinsky and Some Writers, " Harper's
Magazine, 237, No. 1423 (December, 1968), pp. 101-
08.
Eimeral, Sarel. Article from Time, 23 March 1962 in
Isherwood Archives #113, UCLA Special Collections.
Finney, Brian. Christopher Isherwood: A Critical
Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Fleming, Anne Taylor. "Christopher Isherwood: He is a
Camera." LA, No. 23 (9 December 1972), 14-16.
Foylibra. Foyles Bookshop Magazine. In Isherwood
Archives #113, UCLA Special Collections.
Fryer, Jonathan. Isherwood. Garden City: Doubleday,
1978.
Goldstein, Larry. "Christopher Isherwood: Writer in
Residence." UCLA Daily Bruin, 6 February 1963,
p. 5.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Christopher Isherwood. New York:
CEMW53, Columbia University Press, 1970.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. "An Interview with Gavin Lambert."
Twentieth Century Literature, 22, No. 3 (October
1976), 332-42.
Lambert, Gavin. "Christopher Isherwood." In Double
Exposure, ed. Roddy McDowell. New York: Delacorte
Press, 1966, pp. 106-7.
Lehmann, John. In My Own Time. Boston: Little, Brown,
1969.
Miles, Jack. "Christopher Isherwood’s Promise." Los
Angeles Times Book Review, 4 November 1984, p. 2.
"New Fiction." London Times. 10 September 1964, p. 15.
Peters, J. U. "The Los Angeles Anti-Myth." Itinerary:
criticism: Essays on California Writers, ed. Charles
Crow. Bowling Green: University Press, 1978, 21-34.
Piazza, Paul. Christopher Isherwood: Myth and Anti-Myth.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
442
Reuven, Ben. "Christopher Isherwood: Reading the Sands
of Time," West (Los Angeles Times Magazine), 5
December 1976, pp. 3 and 16.
Savage, D.S. "Christopher Isherwood: The Novelist as
Homosexual." Literature and Psychology, 29, Nos. 1
& 2 (1979), 71-88.
Spender, Stephen. World Within World: The Autobiography
of Stephen Spender. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951;
rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 19 66.
Summers, Claude J. Christopher Isherwood. New York:
Frederick Ungar, 1980.
Summers, Claude J. "Christopher Isherwood," in
Dictionary of Literary Biography, 15: British
Novelists 1930-1959, ed. Bernard Oldsey. Detroit:
Gale Research, 1983, I, pp. 206-19.
Warshaw, Howard. Los Angeles Art Community: Group
Portrait. Interview by Susan Einstein. UCLA Oral
History Program, 1977.
Wilde, Alan, Christopher Isherwood. New York: Twayne,
1971.
443
BRIAN MOORE
This chapter begins the discussion of the third
generation of British novelists who wrote about Los
Angeles. The first came in the Thirties, during the
early days of talking pictures: these were established
writers— such as Wodehouse who had a reputation for
writing quickly— brought in right at the beginning as
experts who could provide words for films almost
immediately. By the late Thirties through the Forties,
Britons such as Hilton, Huxley and Waugh came to Los
Angeles because of the motion picture industry and
afterward wrote novels of substance based on their
experiences. Isherwood is the bridge figure between the
second and third generations. Although he arrived in
Hollywood the same year as Huxley, he was younger and did
not publish his first Los Angeles novel until a decade
after Huxley's final one appeared. Finally, the third
generation, dominated by Brian Moore and Gavin Lambert,
are writers who did not even arrive in Los Angeles until
the late Fifties and mid-Sixties. By that time Chandler
and Hilton were already dead, and Waugh and Huxley had
written all of their Los Angeles novels. Like their
forerunners, Moore and Lambert were attracted to Los
444
Angeles because of the prospect of writing for films.
Their Southern California novels span the period of the
late Fifties through the early Eighties.
Brian1 Moore was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland
on August 25, 1921, one of nine children and the second
son of Dr. James and Eileen (McFadden) Moore. Educated
entirely in Catholic schools, Moore, like his father,
attended St. Malachy's College in Belfast. He went on to
enroll in some University of London courses in Belfast in
the late 1930's, but abandoned school to join the Belfast
Air Raid Precautions Unit and the National Fire Service
Unit during World War II. In 1943, he moved on to work
for the British Ministry of War Transport and the Allied
occupation forces, during which time he came into close
proximity to some of the historic events taking place in
Europe: he saw the the death camps at Auschwitz and the
1 His name is pronounced BREE-AN, which is, as he
said in an interview on February 13, 1986, "the Irish
pronunciation." When he came to America he intended to
call himself BRY-AN, "because it was easier, but people
who knew me from home and England kept calling me [BREE-
AN] , so it's been mixed up." Throughout the remainder of
this paper, all uncited quotations by Moore are to be
understood as quotations from this two-hour interview
conducted at his home in Malibu, California, during which
time Moore freely responded to all the questions I had
prepared and commented extensively on my theories about
British novelists who wrote about Los Angeles. The only
question he refused to answer concerned what he was
currently writing. He did, however, assure me that it
was not a novel either about or set in Los Angeles.
445
Russian army moving across Poland. After the war, he
continued to work in Europe as an official with the UNRRA
Economic Mission in Warsaw and later as a free-lance
journalist in Scandinavia. By this time, his propensity
for living as an exile was firmly established: Moore
spent time in seventeen different nations during the
period between his leaving Belfast and his emigration to
Canada in 1948.2
Moore remained in Canada for over a decade. It was
there that he first established himself as a writer, the
first of his family to select such an unorthodox career.
He married his first wife, Jacqueline Sirois, in 1951;
became a Canadian citizen in 1953? had a son Michael in
1954; and published his first novel, The Lonely Passion
of Judith Hearne, in 1955. During this period he wrote
some pulp fiction under the pseudonyms of Bernard Mara
and Michael Bryan in order to make additional money while
at the same time keeping up his serious writing. He left
Canada for New York in 1959 when he received a Guggenheim
Fellowship. Then in 1965, a year after he wrote his
first film script, based on his own novel The Luck of
Ginger Coffey, Alfred Hitchcock asked Moore to come out
2 Hallvard Dahlie, Brian Moore (Boston: Twayne,
1981), pp. 15-16, 21.
446
to Los Angeles to write the screenplay for Torn Curtain.
Moore candidly admits that he would never have come out
to California had it not been for screenwriting. For a
while he alternated between New York and Southern
California, but finally he and his second wife Jean
Denney decided to buy the Malibu beach house that they
had been renting.
Moore's determination to settle in Los Angeles was
based on a number of factors that reveal the region's
appeal to a well-established British novelist. One was
Moore's discovery that, contrary to the popular
conception of the city as garish, superficial and
endlessly pleasure-seeking, the atmosphere for him was
decidedly conducive to long periods of writing and
meditative seclusion.
The strongest reason I had for staying here was
simply that when I was a child my father used to
take us every summer to the sea for a month. . . . I
always associated living on the beach or on the sea
with a holiday. I rented this house at first, and
when I lived here, I realized I was getting a lot of
work done. . . . I began to live a more monastic
existence. I think it's influenced my writing. The
sea comes into my writing a lot since I've lived
here. I've written books like Fergus, Catholics,
The Great Victorian Collection and Cold Heaven. All
of those books have been influenced by the fact that
I lived here. They've been books about people who
were withdrawing in a sense from the world.
447
Moore's house is quite a distance north of Santa Monica
along Pacific Coast Highway, four miles beyond Trancas,
near a recreational area known as Zuma Beach. At the
time Moore settled there, it was more remote than it is
now; even television reception is fairly recent in the
area. Nevertheless, it is ironic that Moore chose the
spot because of its relative isolation, for recently chic
society has come out to meet him. A Who's Who of
contemporary success figures now have beach homes at the
Malibu Colony just down the Pacific Coast Highway from
Moore's beach retreat.
Though many berate Southern California as the land
of the body rather than the mind, Moore finds the
physical preoccupation a very supportive adjunct to
serious literary work;
The weather's always viable. . . . I can run here in
the morning, and I don't meet anybody or see
anybody. It's almost an enforced period of
mediation. If you swim laps in a pool, which people
think of as a very non-intellectual activity, it is
actually another form of meditation. So you have
maybe two hours of the day in which you're
theoretically doing something which is only to help
your body, but those are often the hours of the day
when I find I'm actually mulling over what I'm
448
writing. Life here is conducive to solitude, and
the exercise is part of that.3
This isolation is sustained by the fact that Los Angeles
does not have a seemingly mandatory literary milieu, such
as that in New York, where to survive as a writer one is
almost required to travel on the party circuit. Such a
lifestyle, Moore believes, saps talent and energy
enormously; therefore he lives quite contentedly in a
non-literary environment, driving into the city only when
he has an important commitment or feels a strong
compulsion to leave his personal oasis. This bent toward
isolation affects his literary popularity and his book
sales. He never actively publicizes his books by going
on tour or getting involved in the numerous publicity
campaigns common to established writers in America that,
although they may increase sales and popularity, do also,
unfortunately, often sap the creative powers. Probably
because he prefers his secluded life, Moore has never
3 Moore’s current dedication to exercise may not
only be a function of living in Southern California, but
also a response to two years of serious illness he had in
1977-78. During that time he had two major surgeries for
stomach ulcers, the first one in Dublin was botched and
he nearly died; the second, a year later at the UCLA
Medical Center, was successful. "Now, minus half a
stomach, and thirty pounds lighter, Moore feels that he
has been given a new lease on life." Hubert De Santana,
"The Calligraphy of Pain," Macleans, 93, No. 38 (17
September 1979), p. 44.
449
been as well-known in this country as he is in Britain
and Canada. Indeed, he has come to be thought of as a
writer's writer. "His coterie of admirers includes
Kingsley Amis, Joan Didion, a longtime friend, and Graham
Greene, who calls Moore 'my favorite living novelist.'"4
Because he is a stranger himself, Moore recognizes
the difficulties outsiders have in coming to terms with
Los Angeles. He believes that distances in Los Angeles
and the domination of the automobile alter the social
life, making it quite different from that of most other
major metropolitan areas:
You don't have friends here as you have them in
other places because you can't drop in on them, and
because things are much more planned, and because it
is not a city in that way. . . . The different
societies here don't interact. Movie people live
with movie people; professors see professors, the
academic ghetto; that's the strange thing about the
city. Maybe it's because it's 450 square
miles. . . . There are many communities, but no one
community.
As a result, driving a car, which seems a luxury to the
inhabitants of most cities, is almost a basic necessity
in Southern California. Moore employs this as one of his
examples to explain some misconceptions foreign visitors
have about the area:
4 Elizabeth Venant, "A Mischievous Leprechaun with
Words," Los Angeles Times Calendar, 26 May 1985, p. 3.
450
It's difficult for Europeans coining here . . . to
understand how harsh life is (you can be rich and
famous one day and poor another) and to understand
the poverty, because everyone is driving a car.
There are yet other misconceptions about the city
that Moore is anxious to dispel. Visitors often get very
inaccurate impressions of the area because of the parts
of the city they are most likely to see:
Los Angeles is damaged by its tourist attractions,
the Universal Tour, Disneyland, Anaheim. All the
worst elements of Los Angeles seem to be dragged
forward and presented to the stranger. The
beautiful things in Los Angeles, I'd say the
scenery, the beaches, the oddness of places like
Venice, the Greenwich Village element of Los
Angeles, are things that are not seen by the casual
tourist or by the person coming here. I remember
laughing years ago when I read that Eisenhower came
to Los Angeles: the thing that impressed him most
was Farmer's Market.
Each of these attractions has so much make-believe about
it that it does little to dissipate the newcomer's belief
that Los Angeles is just as he imagined it to be. Moore
suggests that most visitors who really take the time to
look in fact discover something almost diametrically
opposed to what they had expected to find in Southern
California:
To most of us Europeans who come here, we see
something which is the opposite of the cliche of
Hollywood or Los Angeles. We see that this state is
enormous. It's partly a desert, it's wild. It's
451
the opposite of Lotusland. It has flashfloods,
fires, storms. It is quite magnificent scenery, and
it's also quite frightening. That is what . . . is
the truth about it. It's not boring. . . . People
from New York and of course many people from Europe
come here with this complete blinkered idea of what
they're seeing. . . . They drive around this
gigantic city which has no center, and they go to
see those horrible tourist attractions, and they
don't see the other side of life here, which is that
you have desert, mountains, snow, wilderness, . . .
and the people who live in the canyons are as odd as
the Piedmontisers or the Greek villagers.
In addition, because it is the background location
for so many motion pictures, Los Angeles automatically
takes on an air of unreality for the visitor or temporary
resident; it's "familiar" without really being so. Moore
notes that many newcomers are unable to shake the ever
present juxtaposition of illusion and reality engendered
by the actual movie locations they keep encountering;
Another reason why, for Europeans, Los Angeles is a
very special place is that it's changed and
disguised— we've seen it before— as the scene of
many movies. Pacific Coast Highway is probably a
highway I've seen hundreds of times in films but
never knew it was Pacific Coast Highway. When I
first saw Chatsworth, I realized this was the scene
of the old cowboy movies I'd seen. That's what I
call the chameleon quality. It is a city which has
disguised itself to pretend to be other places, to
pretend to be Italy, to pretend to be France. And
because it has disguised itself so often, you
suddenly see it naked when you come to it. You
don't at first recognize it as any place you've
seen. But in your fantasy memory, in the back of
your mind, you've seen it before, you've seen it in
black and white in a darkened cinema in Belfast when
452
you were a little kid. And that's probably the
secret thing for me about Los Angeles.
For this reason, Los Angeles things don't stay fixed in
the imagination as really belonging to Los Angeles.
Employing Gertrude Stein's notion that in Oakland,
California, "there's no there there," Moore suggests that
"because there's no here here you can live in California
and go into a trance and be taken from the sea in
California to the sea in your native country." Irish
poet Seamus Heaney visited Moore not long ago at his
Malibu home, and had just such a reaction:
When he came here he was expecting to see starlets
and a warm Southern California beach. And he came
on a day like today [rainy, cold, blustery and
wild]. He said, 'My God, this is like being on a
beach in Ireland; it's lonelier than a beach in
Ireland.' It's true. But he said, 'Even though it
is lonelier than a beach in Ireland, it isn't real.'
Heaney in fact was so struck by the unreality of the
reality that he wrote a poem dedicated to Moore called
"Remembering Malibu" which he has published in his latest
collection, Station Island. In this poem Heaney suggests
that beaches he has never actually visited in Ireland are
still more real to him than the actual beach in Southern
California he saw and walked along with Moore:
453
The Pacific at your door was wilder and colder
than my notion of the Pacific
and that was perfect, for I would have rotted
beside the luke-warm ocean I imagined. . . .
I was there in the flesh
where I'd imagined I might be
and underwent the bluster of the day:
but why would it not come home to me?5
Though he discovered the opposite, something about the
fantasy image, the preconceptions about Los Angeles,
endures in the European mind despite whatever opposing or
negating experiences the foreigner actually has when he
arrives.
Moore, like most foreigners, was surprised to
discover a culture of significance in Los Angeles— though
one quite different from that of the more elitist cities
in the world. One of Moore’s favorite retorts to the old
saw that Los Angeles lacks culture is that it only lacks
what he calls "parochial” or narrow-minded culture, that
which the denizen of such cities as Dublin, Boston, and
even San Francisco feel is "essential" to life. When he
was appointed as a Regents' Professor at UCLA, Moore
discovered a new side to the city:
5 Seamus Heaney, "Remembering Malibu" in Station
Island (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), p. 30.
454
I very much like the informality of UCLA. . . . My
cliched ideas about California having no culture
were totally wrong. That's nonsense. There's as
much culture here in a town and gown sense as there
is in any other place in the world. UCLA, I
discovered to my amazement, had one of the greatest
libraries I'd ever been in. . . . The Eastern notion
that there's no culture here is absolutely parochial
and wrong. There are many brilliant people working
in the universities here; there are brilliant people
working in every field here. The thing I like about
Los Angeles is that it's not parochial. San
Francisco is parochial, Boston is parochial, Dublin
is parochial, because they are always telling you
what a wonderful city they live in; they are always
telling you as citizens do what's special about
them. Los Angeles is like some great big
troglodytic city which doesn't feel it needs to tell
you anything about itself. And I like that.
One of the pitfalls of such a cultural setting, however,
is its lack of discrimination, a characteristic somewhat
frustrating to Moore;
Anyone who comes to town is interviewed, as if this
were Podunk. That's one of the things that's given
it a bad name. There's an amateurishness in their
approach to the arts. There seem to be no
standards. When people like Charlton Heston are
consulted on cultural matters, you can't take it too
seriously.
But this all-inclusive characteristic has another element
to it. Seen from the perspective of his own Irish
Catholic background, Los Angeles for Moore is the great
Protestant melting pot:
Los Angeles is to me the great white American WASP
city— much more than New York is. A sociologist by
455
the name of Morris wrote a very interesting book
pointing out that this was the genuinely American
city, the white Protestant American city. . . . San
Francisco is a Catholic city; this is a Protestant
city. So, I would think of it as a Belfast.
In addition, Southern California's focus on the cult
and culture of youth distinguishes it from many of the
more sedate urban centers in the world, and keeps it from
taking itself very seriously, a trait Moore believes to
be absolutely stultifying for a city:
No one has realized that this is the city of eternal
youth. . . . If you speak to very young people
anywhere, Australia, or in Ireland, or anywhere,
they want to come to Los Angeles. They think of it
as we used to think of Paris; but older people,
people in their thirties on, don't. . . . I'm a bit
of an outsider here, but I feel there is a different
set of values here. This is a city in which
everyone wants to be young, and everyone wants to
have a good time, and they are not terribly
impressed with the rest of the world. That's the
other thing that makes it not parochial. They are
not secretly dying to go to Paris or New York the
way we were.
In the mid-Sixties, then, Moore established his
permanent home in exile in Los Angeles, and settled down
to his present life style, spending roughly eight months
of each year living and writing in Malibu and four months
living and traveling abroad, mostly in Europe:
My wife and I do something which makes our life here
viable. We live here for about eight months a year,
and we go away for about four: we go to New York at
456
Easter, and in the summer we almost always go to
London and Ireland and France. . . . I've always
felt Los Angeles is a dangerous place for a writer
who wasn't born here to spend all his time in,
because its values are not the values of the rest of
the world— or even the rest of America. I find it
not only healthy but almost obligatory for me to go
back to other roots every year to hear the way
people still speak there and see what they do. For
my writing that's very important.
Much of Moore's self-concept centers on his sense of
being an exile, and this, almost more than any other
element of his life, makes its way into his novels.
Moore told Hallvard Dahlie in 1967:
It's almost as though fate had cast me in the
perfect role of the outsider without my even being
aware of it. It starts with this: [though I am a
Catholic] I have a Protestant name, and I come from
the North of Ireland. Therefore, when I wrote a
book about Catholics, all the Catholics tended to
discount it, because they thought it was written by
a Protestant. Then, when . . . someone in Ireland
might have started writing about me, it was
announced that I was living in Canada and was really
a Canadian who was pretending to write Irish novels.
I embraced the Canadians with both arms and became a
Canadian citizen and announced to everyone that I
was a Canadian writer, whereupon I spent my life
being told by Canadians that I'm not really a
Canadian. . . . When I had lived in New York for
several years, I don't think I met an American
publisher or writer who didn't still believe I lived
in Montreal, and I'm sure that nobody knows where I
am living now except you!6
6 D a h l i e , p p . 1 3 - 1 4 .
457
Nor is he altogether sure himself who he is. He feels
himself to be a stranger wherever he lives:
•I lack all certainty, all conviction, about every
one of the countries I have lived in. When I go
back to Ireland I'm not really accepted as an Irish
person, and I've never ever really been accepted as
a Canadian, and certainly the minute I open my mouth
in America, I'm a foreigner.' But being a stranger
does have its advantages: 'an outsider can sometimes
have great insights into the sickness of a
society.'7
And Los Angeles, he finds, is a place particularly well-
suited to life in exile:
I am nomadic by nature, and I think of myself as an
outsider in any place I live. And Los Angeles is a
place to which many people come from other places
and are allowed to live their own kind of lives
here. [Because most everybody is from someplace
else], it's a community of immigrants.
Nevertheless, Los Angeles is as far away from his
land of origin as Moore ever desires to go. To him, it
represents the limit:
Having reached the Pacific Ocean at Los Angeles, I
feel that I couldn't go any further. I couldn't go
on, then, to live in Japan or to live in the Far
East. . . . As a writer, . . . I have a secret
feeling that they're not my fictional terrain. . . .
There seems to be a periphery. This is the
periphery for me. I have no desire to leap off.
7 B r i a n M oore a s q u o t e d i n De S a n t a n a , p . 4 6 .
458
Because he lives as an Irish writer in exile,
neither Moore nor his critics can forbear comparing him
with James Joyce. George Woodcock suggests that
Brian Moore, in fact, is the last— perhaps the very
last— of the tradition of fine Irish writers of
English prose and, like so many of his predecessors,
he lives as a physical exile from the land which
mentally he cannot leave.
No matter how distant he is emotionally and physically
from Ireland, Moore knows that those formative years will
forever color his writing. He agrees with Mauriac that
The door closes at twenty on many writers' lives.
It's the experiences which you have before you're
twenty which form you as a writer. You cannot
escape them. You may have other experiences later
on which change you completely, but there's a
residue of your early self there always.
However, this gives Moore's Ireland an archaic flavor;
that remembered Belfast haunts him, not the one we read
about in the newspapers today. As the critic John Frayne
puts it:
Moore's attitude toward Ireland shares with Joyce's
the tendency of the exile to fix a milieu at a
certain moment in time and to refuse to admit that
change is possible or even desirable. The Irish
past is the dead, unchanging component of Moore's
work, but this dead past comes alive when it is
8 George Woodcock, "A Matter of Loyalty," Canadian
Literature, No. 49 (Summer 1971), p. 82.
459
brought into conflict with some exotic and
challenging present.
Nor is there a sense that the people left behind really
appreciate what the writer-in-exile has accomplished in
his fiction. In Moore’s only Los Angeles novel, the
protagonist's sister appears before him and tells how the
Irish citizenry have crassly commercialized Joyce:
Your old hero Mr. James Joyce? Wouldn't it sicken
you, the Dublin people making a shrine out of that
blinking Martello Tower he used to live in? Of
course, it's just a trick for the Yankee tourists,
the Dublin people will do anything for the almighty
dollar.10
Though he realizes that there is a large British
community, Moore has no sense of a British literary
network operating within Los Angeles.
There may be [one], but they haven't even contacted
me. I met Christopher Isherwood here and that was
through Joan Didion and John Dunne (who are not
British), and I wouldn't have met him otherwise, I
don't think, and I can't remember any other people.
9 John P. Frayne, "Brian Moore's Wandering
Irishman— The Not-So-Wild Colonial Boy" in Modern Irish
Literature: Essays in Honor of William York Tindall, ed.
Raymond J. Porter and James D. Brophy (New York: Ilona
College Press, 1972), p. 233.
10 Brian Moore, Fergus (New York: Holt Rinehart and
Winston, 1970), p. 51. All further references to this
work appear in the text in parentheses.
460
Nonetheless Moore is well aware of the other British
writers who have used Los Angeles as a setting for their
novels, and he feels a certain affinity for them. He
even recognizes some similarities in their experiences,
one of which is Southern California's basic lack of
interest in serious writers:
I came to California the way many British or Irish
writers come to this place. We never intended to
stay. It seems the last place in the world in which
we would stay. . . . There's no literary society
here, and it's a very non grata place. . . . People
like Huxley and Isherwood and myself would have that
in common: we're all people who chose to live
outside a literary society when we could have been
part of it. . . . It's a society in which the writer
is a very unimportant person. Screenwriters are
taught to be humble, and they are almost forced to
be hacks.
Speaking specifically of the other Los Angeles
novelists encompassed in this study, Moore says of
Chandler,
I know he worked for Hitchcock, as I did, and didn't
get on with him. And I know that he went to Dulwich
College and that's about all that I know about
him. . . . I do remember reading Chandler and
thinking he was very good about California. I
remember him writing about how hill real estate
anywhere was where the rich lived, so they always
drive up into it, and I thought that's so
11 In this vein, P. G. Wodehouse wrote a delightful
sequence in America, I Like You (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1956), pp. 175-6, in which he draws an analogy
between Hollywood screenwriters and caged pet dogs.
461
California. It's absolutely right. He had very
good feeling— because he was sort of a left-wing
character with an upper middle class background— for
that overlay which exists here of almost fascistic
right-wing business people, the William French
Smiths and the sort of people you see in the Santa
Barbara Country Club, the Reagan White House sort of
people. He was very good on those people that Los
Angeles is full of, people who are like William
Buckley but without his vocabulary. It's basically
full of Buckleys, dumb Buckleys.
Moore was unaware that James Hilton had ever written
about Los Angeles, but he does remember thinking when he
first visited Ojai (a town a little more than an hour's
drive to the north of Los Angeles), "Oh, this is Shangri-
La." Speculating on some of the others, Moore suggests,
If I can be frank, probably Isherwood came here, as
he went to Berlin, for boys. And I'm not really
sure why Huxley came came here [but probably it was]
because he was actually a bit of a mystic, and he
was attracted to odd religions and that sort of
thing.
In thinking about those British writers who stayed in Los
Angeles, rather than those like Waugh who came to observe
and then wrote their novels elsewhere, Moore
hypothesizes,
They've all been people who came here when they were
a little older. It's a healthier place to grow old,
as I say, not purely because of physical reasons,
but because you are insulated from the jealousies of
the literary life here— if you want to be. I could
never take the Los Angeles Times seriously, the book
reviews, etc. And they don't have any influence in
462
my life. I am a 'serious writer' and therefore
unfortunately book reviews are the most important
thing in helping my sales, and I'm dependent on New
York, as everyone else is, or London. 2
Of the Los Angeles-based British writers, Moore says,
The only one I remember reading and having some
affinity with, strangely enough, was Gavin Lambert's
The Slide Area [this was published in 1959]. I read
that shortly after I came here, and I thought,
'Well, he's hit on a few things that I thought at
that time were very much a British reaction to
California: the idea of the man who goes to lie in
the sun all the time. That's a sort of British
notion of what California is. Now I know it isn't.
Also, the whole idea that this was a slide area.
There's an old saying— they used to say it about
Vancouver and its much truer here— all the rolling
stones roll all the way to the Pacific and then they
can't go any further. I felt there was a bit of
truth in that. When you've reached this point you
just have to turn and go back.
The only writer of the group that Moore sets apart is
Waugh. And, though he himself is quite content in Los
Angeles, Moore believes that Waugh's caustic wit touched
on an aspect of the city that none of the others reached:
Waugh is interesting because he comes here and he's
a great hater. I'm the opposite. And yet of all
On 4 March, both Moore and Gavin Lambert
mentioned in conversation that the New York Times Book
Review practically dictates the success of a novel in the
publishing world today. A favorable review can just
about guarantee good sales for the book; but
unfortunately, the converse is also true. A bad notice
there can sound the death knell for a work that has been
highly-praised elsewhere.
463
the people I've read— because I'm a great admirer of
Waugh, even though he's such a shit— in some curious
way, with all his hatred and his silliness with the
pet cemetery and so on, he caught something that is
essentially Southern California that nobody else
has. . . . The opening, the brilliant opening
immediately set a tone for it. And the idea when
[Dennis Barlow] came here that instead of writing
the script he was supposed to write, he went to the
pet cemetery shows that in the hands of a genius,
any place is literary territory.
Naturally Moore began thinking about writing a novel
set in Southern California once he had spent time there,
especially as he prides himself on the fact that
One reason I've remained a writer with a small
audience in two or three different countries is that
I don't think . . . I've ever written the same book
twice. I've moved from one country to another and
written about different things in different
places.1
So it seemed reasonable to incorporate some of his
experiences and impressions of this new part of the world
into one of his novels. But Moore had and continues to
have some reluctance about using Los Angeles as a
setting.
The minute you set a novel in Hollywood you know
that you're going to have to face the test of the
Hollywood novel, a despised genre, and anyone who is
13 Brian Moore as quoted in Donald Cameron, "Brian
Moore: The Tragic Vein of the Ordinary," in Conversations
with Canadian Novelists (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada,
1973), pp. 68-9.
464
canny or sage or managing their [sic] career would
not ever attempt such a book.14
Despite all his reservations, he determined to
employ Los Angeles as a location. But he knew at the
outset that he would not use the ironic/satiric mode that
characterizes so many of the British novels of Los
Angeles. Such an approach, he vehemently maintains,
. . . is the last thing I would want to do. . . The
totally cliched way to deal with Los Angeles is to
deal with what I call 'the Woody Allen
suppositions': the New York suppositions that
there's nothing here, or Fred Allen who said, 'It's
a great place to be if you're an orange.' I find
that really boring, and it's just so totally wrong.
It makes the people who do it— be they English or
New Yorkers— automatically declaring themselves to
be parochial because they wouldn't write that way
about Katmandu, or they wouldn't write that way
about Teheran^ which is probably just as provincial.
But they come out here with a chip on their
shoulders.
Instead, given the nature of his previous works,
Moore responded to Southern California as the inevitable
next step. Michael Paul Gallagher, writing in an Irish
journal, puts it well:
He is something of a Henry James among Irish
writers: his fiction seems to grow out of the
collision of two worlds of experience, the false
security of received meaning and the entry into
another world of painful relativity. All of Moore's
14 B r i a n M oore a s q u o t e d i n C am eron, 6 8 - 9 .
465
characters undergo some clash of horizons, some
radical change from where they started to where they
find themselves in the now of the novel.
A writer with Moore's inclinations would have a difficult
time resisting the obvious clash between his Irish
background and the Southern California environment in
which he was already living and working.
What came out of this experience was Fergus, Moore's
novel published in 1970, and his only work to date
actually set in Southern California. It concerns a
thirty-nine year old Irish Catholic writer by the name of
Fergus Fadden who comes out to Los Angeles from New York
to write a screenplay and thereby finance what promises
to be a very costly divorce. Fergus is living in a
rented house on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu with his
twenty-two year old girlfriend, Dani Sinclair. He is
having an artist's problems of conscience about altering
his screenplay to suit the demands of the director and
the producer of the film. If he refuses to make the
changes, he is out of a job. On the single day the novel
takes place, Dani has left the house in anger because
Fergus has once-again broached the subject of marriage.
15 Michael Paul Gallagher, "The Novels of Brian
Moore," Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 60, No. 238
(Summer 1971), p. 180.
466
The novel begins just after Dani's departure. Fergus
goes out on the terrace facing the ocean and cries, after
which he returns to the house to discover his father,
twenty-one years dead, sitting on the couch in the living
room. This begins what becomes a long series of
apparitions from his Irish past who visit him and
converse with him on the day in question. What
complicates the situation is that several live figures in
his current life— Dani, her mother, and the producer
Boweri— also come into the house and onto the beach
outside while he is still beset by these ghosts from his
past. Fergus, however, is the only one who sees them.
The specters become increasingly more aggressive and
verbally abusive as the day and then the night go on,
forcing Fergus to confront all the deeds of his past.
Toward the end of the novel and quite late that night on
the beach, Fergus has a heart attack, which he survives.
After this, he is ready to bid goodbye to his ghostly
family and make his way, as dawn breaks, back toward the
house and Dani.
Both parts of the name Fergus Fadden appear to be
carefully chosen. McFadden was Moore’s mother's maiden
name, and Moore is quick to agree that there are numerous
467
autobiographical elements in the novel, including its
exact setting.
It had something to do with my own life because I
got a divorce and came out here. My present wife is
younger than I am, so it had an autobiographical
basis. She is ten years younger, and it seemed a
lot more to me then. . . . A lot of the action takes
place in this very house. This is the house and the
beach is there. I used the real location.
The name Fergus was chosen, first of all, because it is
"Irish and yet pronounceable." But perhaps most
importantly, it recollects to most modern readers the
legendary hero out of Ireland's misty past who became the
subject of Yeats' famous "Who Drives with Fergus?"
Because this poem is frequently quoted in the opening
pages of Joyce's Ulysses, Moore further grounds his
protagonist as a part of the Irish literary tradition.
Michael J. Toolan submits,
The poem suggests that Fergus is an elemental
leader, unshackled by cares and reflections, a man
of action, of seductive physical power in control of
all the disparate elements of nature.17
16 When I interviewed Moore on 13 February 1986, it
was at this house in Malibu, and, because I had already
studied Fergus extensively, I actually felt as though I
had been there before.
17 Michael J. Toolan, "Psyche and Belief: Brian
Moore's Contending Angels," Eire-Ireland, 15 No. 3 (Fall
1980), p. 103.
468
There is a certain irony about such a name being applied
to Moore's agonizing figure. However, as Jeanne Flood
points out, the name
. . . expresses a retreat, for Fergus is the deposed
king in the sagas of the Ulster cycle whom Yeats
presented in a poem admired by Stephen Dedalus as a
man who left the real world for the world of
dream.
In his own way Fergus is feeling deposed? whatever was
secure, somehow, is now gone. And, it seems that, at
least unconsciously, he is seeking answers in the realm
of memory. Not just his Irish connections, but all the
communities which he has felt a part of seem to be
questioning his position among them. Even the apparition
of his friend Chaim Mandel from his Greenwich Village
days attacks him with,
This man is not living in history. His work, such
as it is, ignores the great issues of the age. His
life is narcissistic: he is completely ensnared by
the system. True, he has rejected his ethnic
background and has denounced the class, race, and
religion into which he was born. But to reject is
not enough. Lacking a true foundation, he has
fallen back on cliche: the romantic sacerdotal ethic
of art for art's sake, which was already dead and
buried forty years ago. And so, ultimately, made
reckless by his rootlessness, he has been led
sheeplike, to the final solution. Hollywood! (90-1)
18 Jeanne Flood, Brian Moore (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1974), p. 83.
469
So Fergus, like his ancient namesake, has tried to escape
into a fantasy world, in this case justifying his
actions, as to some extent Stephen Dedalus does, by
seeing literary art as a good in itself and a substitute
for religious belief. Therefore, Fergus' very name
suggests something of his situation.
As a man recognizing the extent of his isolation,
Fergus is similar to other characters within the Moore
oeuvre:
The dilemma faced by Moore's important characters
. . . is in fact a primitive rather than modern
dilemma. It is created by the characters' exclusion
from the community and their subsequent occupation
of a ritual limbo through which they seek to pass as
quickly and as successfully as possible. . . .
Ritual displacement occurs when the individual is
unwilling or unable to perform rites of
incorporation into a new society and thereby find
happiness and fulfillment. . . . 'Ritual' [here
refers not] . . . to specific rites and ceremonies,
but rather to the rhythms of separation, initiation,
and incorporation common to all societies and
communities.
Fergus feels alone, unique in Los Angeles— this is the
core of his "ritual displacement." The dominant figures
in his life in Los Angeles are demanding something he is
unable to cope with. He knows he cannot rewrite the
19 John Wilson Foster, "Passage Through Limbo:
Brian Moore's North American Novels," Critique: Studies
in Modern Fiction, 13, No. 1 (1970), pp. 5-6.
470
script the way his bosses want, nor can he accept the
non-committal kind of relationship that Dani wants.
The opening paragraph immediately addresses the
youth vs. age issue, one of the work's major themes. The
novel begins, "When his girl left, Fergus wept." For a
grown man, crying is a very profound act. A few pages
later he weeps again and wonders why:
Fergus felt his tears come back. Why do I weep? he
asked himself. Is it because the tears ease me?
I'm afraid I will lose her. That's why I weep (12).
In the opening paragraph Dani is introduced as a "girl"
who leaves the house wearing "a very short skirt and
. . . a schoolgirl bow in her long red hair. He knew he
was too old for her" (1). Los Angeles, as Moore noted
above, represents the land of the youth culture. As such
it makes Fergus' dealing with his own sense of mortality
that day particularly poignant and relevant.
Even the epigraph from Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras
of Autumn" substantiates the age concerns, for Fergus is
sensing at thirty-nine the beginning, perhaps, of the
autumn of his life. But the Stevens quotation also
suggests something of the uniqueness of this day, that it
is a special time when one goes back to connect with
figures from one's old country:
471
We were as Danes in Denmark all day long
And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,
For whom the outlandish was another day
Of the week, queerer than Sunday. . . .
What could be more bizarre than to have figures— most of
them long-since dead— of one's Irish past invading one's
beach home on the Southern California coast? Toolan
mentions that
This poem celebrates an unsurprised acceptance of
conventionally 'outlandish' events, just as Fergus,
fairly calmly, comes to accept the paranormal
scenarios he finds himself entering.
Being "Danes in Denmark" also brings Hamlet to mind—
another man whose ghosts made him reconsider his
existence. Like Hamlet, Fergus experiences "a sense of
mental crisis of considerable poignance and pathos, . . .
[concerned] with the isolation and responsibility of
personality in time."21 Fergus' state of affairs is
inextricably linked to his physical location. The
landscape setting itself is parallel to the real/unreal
nature of his day and shows the simultaneous effect of
the juxtaposing memory and actuality:
20 Toolan, pp. 102-3.
21 De Witt Henry, "The Novels of Brian Moore: A
Retrospective" Ploughshares, 2, No. 2 (1974), p. 23.
472
Behind the house were mountain slopes, . . . a
landscape existing contiguously in his mind as a
real range of mountains and also as a fantasy
backdrop from which, rearing out of the film screens
of his childhood, Hollywood cowboys might clatter
through a mountain gulch. The house, like this
landscape, existed both in the present and in his
past, as this real house by the sea in California
and as the house he now imagined it was, that house
overlooking Belfast Lough, with a view of distant
shipyard gantries, the house he was born in. (37)
Indeed, the place itself precipitates the moment of
recognition:
He opened the glass doors and stepped out onto
the terrace overlooking the sea. He stood facing
the deserted beach and the waves breaking over it.
And wept.
After a little time he turned away from the
sea, went back into the living room, and sat down in
an orange armchair. Opposite him was a large yellow
sofa, and above the sofa a picture window gave a
view of the high bare mountains at the rear of the
house. Morning sun faded the gay Mexican colors of
the room. Behind him, waves slammed on the beach
monotonous as a banging door.
In the bottle-brush tree outside the picture
window an unseen bird began to sing. Fergus took a
piece of Kleenex from his pajama pocket, wiped his
eyes, then blew his nose. When he had finished, he
looked across the room. His father was sitting on
the yellow sofa.
His father was dressed as Fergus remembered him
(1-2) .
Like so many British characters in Los Angeles novels,
Fergus feels he has reached the end when he faces West at
the Pacific. He can no longer flee; he must finally deal
473
with what he has made of his life. But so much of his
life
is alien to the setting in which he finds himself. Even
the colors are foreign to an Irish living room: they are
"gay1 * and "Mexican," an orange armchair and a yellow
sofa. They hint at what, from the old country viewpoint,
can be seen as the garishness of Fergus' current life.
More of this comes out later when numerous Irish
apparitions, dressed traditionally as he remembers them
from twenty years before, begin to confront him in all
the physical corners of his present-day life— the
kitchen, the spare bedroom, an unused children's
playhouse on the beach.
Time and space combine to bring on a midlife crisis.
Not only has Fergus reached what Moore calls the
"periphery," the geographical edge, but he is thirty-
nine, the notorious dividing line between young manhood
and full maturity, the time at which thoughts of
mortality traditionally become a real presence in daily
life. Fergus remembers Father Kinneally, who seemed old
at the time he knew him, and yet "with a shock, realized
that he himself was now the age Father Kinneally had been
when Father Kinneally taught him English at St. Michan's
College" (14). Then he recalls hearing that Kinneally in
474
later years had been "pensioned off and sent to be a
parish priest in Down" (15), quite obviously a demotion
on the way to doddering senility and death. Evidently
Moore himself had a similar recognition at Fergus' age:
"Something great happened to me at forty, when, in a way
I hadn't realized it before, I realized I was going to
die, and I knew I had better enjoy what was left of
life."22 More than a decade later, writing Fergus, he
could look back with some distance and appreciate what a
natural turning point in a man's life thirty-nine is.
There are signs right in that opening paragraph that the
process, though agonizing, will be a positive one for
Fergus. "He wiped his eyes, then blew his nose," thereby
indicating his readiness to begin anew, especially to
begin dealing with the sources of his sadness.
Similarly, "an unseen bird began to sing," suggesting
that the day will have a positive conclusion.
Once again the Briton, as a man literally on the
edge, has his moment of recognition in Los Angeles. He
feels the juxtaposition of the eternal ocean on one side,
"there, as always, was the sea, the long Pacific breakers
beginning their run two hundred yards from shore" (4),
and on the other, the mundane reality that he has "no
22 B r i a n M oore a s q u o t e d i n C am eron, p . 2 0 .
475
money left," that he can't even go back East, though he
wishes he could "leave here and not come back, not ever,
unless it was on his terms, not theirs" (9). He even
fantasizes that he can escape north a bit to Oxnard,
abandoning all his commitments and relationships and
hiding out uninvolved and unknown for years. This
disappearing act, while yet remaining in Southern
California, constitutes Fergus' version of "dropping
out":
It would be so easy to vanish. Twenty miles north
of here was the perfect town: Oxnard, Ventura
County, California. A living tomb, a Navy missile
base, home of the Pacific Seabees, and an Air Force
installation, with lemon groves, rail yards, Mexican
fruit pickers, Japanese vegetable farmers, a
wasteland of shopping centers, tract houses, trailer
camps, marinas, a town filled with the migrant Okies
of the seventies, their license plates a gazetteer
from the main streets and back roads of Louisiana,
Texas, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Illinois, a
staging ground for strangers, a town where you would
never in twenty years meet anyone you had known.
Hidden in Oxnard, he would send out money to feed
and clothe his daughter, mailing it in unmarked
envelopes from postal drops in other American
states. . . . He smiled at the sea. Not finding
him, [his estranged wife] would have to pay those
bills. And her charge accounts. Subterranean, he
would hide for five years, silent, unfindable, until
she, forced to abandon her search, must divorce him
and marry a new protector. Five years of no
identity, driving an old Oldsmobile registered in
his friend Dick Fowler's name, working as a
anonymous checkout helper in Oxnard's Thrifty
Drugstores, Pic 'N Saves, and Food-O-Marts, living
in twenty-dollar-a-week rooming houses (those lay
monasteries of our age), his nights spent in the
monkish company of fellow drifters and loners. . . .
476
Five years of this; five years to write his Notes
from Underground, his hermit's book. In all that
time, no correspondence, no phone calls, no visits
from or to friends. But what about Dani? My God,
how could he have forgotten DaniI (75-6)
With a jolt he is back to his real dilemma and the
recognition that, despite what may appear to others as
his temporary fling with a young California girl, he is
deeply committed to her.
In addition to his age and his location, Dani is a
major precipitating factor in the momentous day Fergus
has. Besides refusing to clarify their relationship in
ways that can make him feel secure, she has been forcing
him to pick up the phone and call Redshields, the
director, to resolve the issue and face the truth;
You've simply sat around all day letting it get to
you. Phone him! Nothing's worse than not knowing.
. . . You do give a damn, Fergus. You need the
bread. That's why you came out here in the first
place. . . . So stop pretending you don't care. (26)
He can no longer ignore her entreaties, recognizing that
the tears, whatever else they represent, definitely
express his fear of losing her:
I'm afraid I will lose her. That's why I weep.
'Dani? That little broad?' . . .
477
Fergus remembered Boweri as he had said it
. . . his smile showing white, capped teeth (12).23
Fergus thinks back to how Dani looked that morning— even
repeating some of the same exact words— aware of his
differences from her, knowing that he is the older man,
the non-Californian, the exile:
Young Miss California in a miniskirt, waist-
length red hair, a schoolgirl bow tied in it. She
was beautiful. He knew he was too old for her. How
did you talk to someone like that? He tried to
smile at her. She ignored his smile.
He should have apologized: now it would be
angst all day. . . . It was so easy to make mistakes
with someone from another country, or another
generation, someone from California, for godsakes.
(11-12)
His past has left him unprepared for such a woman and
such a life.
How they met is of interest to the topic at hand,
for everything about the meeting captures the wonder and
the irony of Southern California life from the
perspective of a foreigner. Once he had accepted the
screenwriting job with Boweri and Redshields, he had
turned to Dick Fowler, the soap opera actor he had
23 Capped teeth appear to be characteristic of
Southern Californians, according to several Britons.
Andrew Lloyd Weber's famous London musical Song and Dance
includes a song entitled "Capped Teeth and Caesar Salad"
sung by a British young woman who goes to Los Angeles and
later recounts her experiences.
478
befriended in Greenwich Village, for advice on where to
live in Los Angeles. Dick suggested an
. . . efficiency apartment in a West Los Angeles
motor court. . . . 'It’s near the action, and a
groovy place to pick up chicks.'. . . Dick's
efficiency apartment was a twin to Fergus' in the
same block of the motor court. . . . [Later, Fergus
had noted,] 'There are twenty apartments in this
motor court, all exactly alike. . . . Everything in
these apartments is made of some type of synthetic
material, which, if possible, is designed to look
like the natural material it replaces. And these
materials repel wear and tear. Stains wash off. I
could live here for a year and leave no mark on
anything. My presence would count for nothing.
Last week I burned a hole in the green rayon spread
which covers my bed. . . . The same day there was a
new spread, same color, on the bed. No one
mentioned the damage.* (131-3 3)
It's hard to take a relationship seriously that begins in
such an environment, but it is there that they meet.
Dani is with Dick Fowler, at the time maybe even living
with him in his efficiency apartment. The Indian motif
of her outfit may be part of her appeal. She appears all
the more exotic to a Briton as she dresses in an up-
scaled version of the local historic costume.
Dick Fowler had asked him over for a drink. When he
arrived, there was Dick wearing a buckskin shirt,
colored neckscarf and moccasins, and with him this
beautiful young girl, her long red hair bound at her
temples by a squaw headband, and she wearing a short
khaki tunic dress with no brassiere and it front-
laced so loosely by leather thongs that Fergus had
trouble keeping his eyes on her face. Hippies, he
had thought, and kids, he had thought, and sad
479
jealousy he had felt against Dick (unemployed, for
godsakesi), who nevertheless had this lovely girl to
go to bed with. (104)
By the end of the novel, Fergus himself is in exactly the
same position as Dick Fowler— unemployed but with "this
lovely girl to go to bed with." This represents a common
version of the single man's fate in Southern California.
During that first evening, Dani demonstrates,
despite her youth, some sensitivity to Fergus' ideas.
When he explains his sense of the city's unreality in
terms of the motor court, she mentions Robbe-Grillet:
Because she knew that and was beautiful, Fergus
began to think her brilliant, and so explained his
fancy, which was that Los Angeles was an interesting
location for an antinovel because it was post
capitalist and postpossessions. . . . [Then he went
on to explain] the strange buried feeling he had,
living in Los Angeles. 'It's as though everything
here is designed to deny one's existence.' . . .
[Dani later adds,] 'People [in California] don't
listen to what you're saying. It's how you soundI'
(132, 134, 136)
Moore is not the first one to mention that the content of
conversation in Los Angeles is less important than its
sound and social values24: Waugh, for example, said that
24 At two other spots in the novel Moore adds,
"Direct conversation was, to Redshields, a secondary form
of communication" (30) and "Boweri used words as other
men use handshakes: they were a form of polite contact, a
convenience, not at all indicative of what he really felt
or thought" (61).
480
the inhabitants love to talk but that nobody expects
anyone else will listen. Clearly, however, Fergus and
Dani do talk meaningfully. And it is their discussion
that morning which precipitates many of the events which
follow. They have also taken pains to establish
themselves in a house far different in every respect from
the motor court with its standardized and synthetic
appurtenances. Many critics of the book, however, have
failed to distinguish between the two environments and,
thereby, misunderstand the book. Derek Mahon in The
Listener, for example, says, "Everything in the
meticulously described beach-house is 'made of some type
of synthetic material designed to look like the natural
material it replaces.'"25 The reader hopefully still
remembers this phrase from the passage quoted a few pages
earlier in the description of the motor court. If this
were all Fergus knew of Los Angeles life— both in a
utility apartment and at a Malibu beach house— it would
be no wonder that Mahon could go on to refer to it as
that "city of dreadful day." In actuality, though the
furnishings seem not to be of Fergus' own choosing, he
appears to get a great deal of satisfaction from the
25 Derek Mahon, "Ghosts of Ghosts," The Listener,
85 No. 2192 (1 April 1971), p. 422.
4 81
personalized environment he has established with Dani.
Though it continues to have its unreal qualities, Fergus
gets a certain kind of proprietary satisfaction mixed
with a rather typical British irony as he looks both
objectively and subjectively at himself that evening at
sunset:
Crimson, mauve, violet, orange, black, the mixture
as before, each evening slightly different in its
vulgar palette, but recognizably the same Pacific
picture-postcard sunset, exotic, warm, beautiful,
exactly the kind of sunset to be watching, as
slightly high, one squatted on the terrace of a
rented beach house in California, turning prime
steaks on a discount-store hibachi grill. (106-7)
Lest the preceding leave an inaccurate impression,
it is important to note also that despite his evident
sense of commitment to Dani, he has never introduced her
to Redshields or brought her over to Boweri*s. Given the
subsequent descriptions of these two, he may be
attempting to prevent her from being contaminated by
their presences at the same time he keeps the two parts
of his life in Los Angeles separate from one another.
"Redshields is the animal who characterized my writing as
'lacking warmth1 and advised me to 'tell an honest love
story about normal human relationships.'" Yet, hearing
about Dani, Redshields told Fergus, "I never screw
anything over twenty if I can help it. . . . These kids
482
all lie down, they think nothing of it. You should try a
piece of eighteen-year-old ass." When Fergus thinks of
these two concepts together, he says to himself, "Is it
any wonder I'm beginning to see visions first thing in
the morning?" (13)
Reacting to Dani's earlier suggestion, he imagines a
telephone call with Redshields that gets him nowhere,
incorporating in the process Redshields' own
characteristic use of typical Southern California
cliches: "When you relate to a person you are making
contact with that person as a human being, which is the
name of the game, which is where it's at. Right?" (27)
In fact Fergus does nothing until Boweri appears at his
house, when Fergus once again chooses to do nothing, to
refuse to make the asked-for changes. This is not to
demean the power of his choice, for inaction in this case
is a decision, and Boweri even tells him that he can
still call that evening if he changes his mind.
Nonetheless, Fergus determines his future passively, by
refusing to act. Such inaction seems to characterize his
life in California. Whether tranquilized by the
environment or not, he has accomplished little since his
arrival and seems to have made few friends. Other than
the above-mentioned Dick Fowler, who became his friend in
483
New York, there is only Dani. No doubt this accounts for
the isolation he feels on the day in question.
With the figures of Boweri and Redshields, and
peripherally with Dani's mother Dusty, Moore comes as
close as he ever has to writing a Hollywood novel. And
these figures do little to change a readers's mind about
certain standard fixtures of the Hollywood novel. His
visits to both Redshields' and Boweri's houses exhibit
the unreality he had felt from the beginning about the
city and corroborate the falseness he experiences in
their responses to him and to his work. When Redshields
greets him at the door, Fergus sees him as
. . . a man who was a film director by avocation,
but, in reality, like many of his kind, a salesman,
a carnival barker who, from the moment he opened the
door to Fergus, gave no conversational quarter:
'Well, come in, so here you are, you found the
place, how are you, hey, good to see you, let's go
in here, yeah, right in here into my private little
shithole, buried in this goddam big palazzo, my own
room, yes, Daddy, I got my own room at last, well,
how are you, are you enjoying Los Angeles, no, don't
answer that, let me say this, first, I myself hate
this town with a passion, I despise it, it makes me
sick to my stomach, I mean physically, upchuck,
sick, if it wasn't for my family and a few good
friends and my music and my books, look, by the way
I want you to hear something, sit here, in this
chair, you have speakers coming at you from that
corner and that corner and up there in the ceiling,
perfect acoustics, no kidding!' (28)
484
Though he has ostensibly come to discuss the film, the
whole evening is taken up by numerous phonecall
interruptions, "the temper tantrums of [Redshields']
five-year-old daughter, who ate with them, [and] a
screaming argument with his wife on the demerits of Los
Angeles as a place to live" (29-30). Communication on
any level is impossible.
Boweri, his environment, and his language are no
better. Though his first words to Fergus are, "I am your
fan. I read both your books, and I love them. It's an
honor to meet you, believe me," (64) Fergus later has
cause to question the producer's literary judgment:
They entered a large library. Fergus noticed a
beautifully bound set of the Harvard Classics. . . .
•I like sets of books,' Boweri said. 'Look over
there. That's the entire Modern Library. When a
new book comes out in the series, Bennett Cerf sends
it along. And look. That's every fiction selection
of the Book of the Month Club, since World War Two.
A year ago, I took a rapid-reading course. I liked
it so much that for kicks I bought the company that
sells the course. I put some money in, and since
then it's doubled its growth rate. I like to do
things that are worthwhile. Cultural things, you
know?' (64-5)
Boweri even keeps his bar in fake bookshelves— more
characteristic of a Prohibition gangster-type bootlegger
than, one would think, a successful Hollywood producer of
the 1970's. Because Boweri's wife Melia spends the
485
evening giving Fergus seductive looks, she fits the
adulterous mold one has came to expect of rich and
powerful men’s wives in Hollywood novels:
Melia picked up a martini and smiled at Fergus. 'No
man is indispensable,' she said and winked. Fergus
found himself blushing. He avoided her knowing eye
and looked past the fake bookshelves of the bar, to
real bookshelves . . . which contained row upon row
of titles such as Placer Mining in Early Oregon,
. . . Lasers in Industrial Practice, Growth Stocks
Versus Bonds, Computer Retrieval Systems, . . . all
of them subjects beyond his competence. And then,
for the first time, it began to nag at him as it did
so often in the ensuing months: perhaps Boweri's
gaucheries and Philistinisms, perhaps even Melia's
come-hither behavior, perhaps all was stage-managed,
a trick to make Boweri's opponents feel
overconfident. Perhaps Boweri was, in reality,
infinitely more intelligent than Fergus? With
Boweri it was hard to know. Words did not help.
Motives were concealed. (66-7)
Moore's inclusion of the business and industrial books
rounds out what otherwise would be caricatures rather
than characters. In so far as Boweri is concerned, too,
Moore frankly admits that the portrait was
. . . based on a producer I dealt with here. I
thought he was quite a good character, because he
was sinister and yet sort of bland. I felt that was
very California, the way his language brought out
the special Los Angeles language [he keeps referring
to Fergus, for example, as 'amigo']. They are being
very sweet to you at the same time they are
threatening you.
486
Indeed, Jeanne Flood believes that the power-wielding
aspects of both these Hollywood moguls are modified by
the names Moore has chosen for them:
Moore names the pair for maximum effect. Each one
is associated with failure: New York's Bowery and
the Salvation Army's second-hand stores. The
assignment of such names to such men seems
calculated to reveal their falseness. At the same
time, the names capture a truth: their emptiness,
the real poverty at the core of their wealth.26
Neither is native to Southern California. These are men
from the East who have invaded the West, set up their
questionable empires, and now are not-too-subtly coercing
others into portraying the world as they believe the
public wants to see it:
'With the ending you gave us, we can't make the
picture. I keep telling you we need some hope.
Some little life so's the audience can walk out,
they don't want to commit suicide. Now, nobody's
leaning on you, Fergie, I don't want you to think
that.'
'I've thought about it. I'm not going to make
those changes.'
'Now, listen, amigo,' he said. 'Somebody's
going to change that ending. Believe me. It might
as well be you. You got personal troubles, you need
money, you got the talent. . . . If you change your
mind, you call me tonight.' (72)
26 F l o o d , p p . 8 1 - 2 .
487
Fergus knows that he never can, so in effect severs his
relationship with both Hollywood and his potential source
of monetary rescue.
There is yet another aspect of Hollywood and its
film industry introduced in the novel through the figure
of Dusty Sinclair, Dani's mother. She is the would-be
actress, one who is all-too-anxious to talk about her
"experiences” as an actress, and who, at fifty-four, is
still waiting for her big part to come along. In the
meantime, she sustains herself as a hairdresser, but
spends her free time in group therapy sessions, in
seances, and pot-smoking, even though these are generally
thought of as activities of a more liberated younger
generation. Though fifteen years older than Fergus,
unlike him she is entirely comfortable with the
activities and mores of the Southern California youth
culture. She has no qualms about spending the night in
the home of her unmarried daughter's boyfriend and,
further, has no compunctions about asking Fergus to find
her a part in television. She is preeminently the bit
player who remembers
'. . . the old days when I was under contract
to Metro— '
'Come on, Ma, you never were under contract to
Metro,' Dani interrupted.
'I was. In forty-six, I was.'
488
'You were not.'
'What do you know?' Mrs. Sinclair asked. 'You
weren't even born.' She turned to Fergus. 'Kids
these days, they're full of crap, they walk all over
you. . . . About Fox. I was under contract to Fox.1
'You told us it was Metro you were under
contract to,' Dani said, laughing. 'Metro you
saidi'
'Did I? Well, I worked for all the majors, one
time or another. You'd never believe it to look at
me now, Ferg, but one thing I was, and that was
beautiful. Beautiful! . . . The trouble is a person
can't stand still. I mean it's a whole new bag for
me. For the last ten years, well, maybe even more
than ten, I've had to go for character roles. . . .
I mean I'm not ready to play Victoria Regeena,' Mrs.
Sinclair said. 'And I never was the Doris Day type,
you know. I've told my new agent he should think of
me for a Lucille Ball situation. Attractive older
woman, maybe in a comedy segment. . . . I mean, it
doesn't have to be comedy. . . . Maybe you have
something you're writing? There might be such a
part, hmmm?' (113-16)
Moore readily admits that he sees her as "a kind of
California woman. The mother is optimistic in a way that
the facts don't bear her out, still waiting for things to
489
happen."27 Many critics have suggested that Moore is at
his comic best in this portrayal of Dusty: Richard Sales,
for example, believes that these passages "show Moore's
comic talents at their sharpest"28 and Dahlie links it
with
. . . Moore's characteristic success with older
people whose dilemmas, though perhaps somewhat
ludicrous, are nevertheless genuine. Dusty
represents the faded marginal, continually on the
lookout for bit parts to sustain her illusions,
. . . in her brazen soliciting . . . she is the
liberated New World woman brought almost to the
point of caricature.29
Though Fergus has more real success than Dusty
evidently has had, he is bound to see a certain number of
Moore is proud of his ability to write
convincingly about Americans and to use the American
idiom properly. Neither of these talents are, he
believes, especially characteristic of Irish writers, for
whom Americans are generally somewhat enigmatic: " I
think I'm the first Irish-born writer who came to America
and has made the transition to writing about American
people: Americans who are Irish, and Americans who are
not Irish. . . . I have never been faulted by anyone in
that I wrote bad American idiom, or that my Americans
don't seem real. Maybe that might be my little niche in
history because the Irish writer and the English writer
have a curious inability to leave home fictionally."
(Brian Moore as quoted in John Graham, "Brian Moore," in
The Writer's Voice, ed. George Garrett (New York: William
Morrow, 1973), p. 73.)
28 Richard Sale, "Irish Ghosts," Nation, 211, No.
10 (12 October 1970), p. 347.
29 Dahlie, p. 103.
490
resemblances to his own life. Like Dusty, he has failed
to fulfill the career change he has sought, and, most
importantly on this day, he realizes certain limitations
that his age places on him. In addition, both spend the
evening going back and forth between the worlds of
reality and illusion.
At six feet one inch in height, with short red hair,
wearing jeans and going barefooted, Dusty is a sharp
contrast with the figures of Fergus' Irish life who
"visit" him that day. That she is the only live person
who is present when he speaks to the apparitions makes a
great deal of sense. She has opted for alcohol as a way
of coping with the harsh realities she needs to face,
whereas Fergus seems to be using the ghostly appearances
for a similar purpose. In her own boozy state as the
evening wears on, she too totters on the edge of sanity,
so she is barely fazed by Fergus' seemingly incongruous
remarks— which are in fact directed toward spirits she
can neither see nor hear in the room.
In this world where at least some of the real people
have an almost hallucinatory quality about them— and most
of the British authors in this paper have indicated such
feelings about life and characters in Los Angeles— the
4 91
illusions one constructs may seem more real than the
actual world one is living in. Nevertheless, the
employment of such specters marks a shift away from the
realism that defined Moore's writing prior to 1970.
Typically, the characters in his novels are beset by
problems of conscience? in general they are people rather
on the margins of two worlds, searching for self
justification. The conflict goes on internally in the
earlier novels. It is only in Fergus, however, that
Moore first crosses over the boundaries of the realistic
mode:
What [Fergus] shares with [Moore's] other American
books is the element of moral inquisition. What is
new is the break with realist presentation, or at
least the complex play of fantasy, comedy, and
seriousness. And its simplest change is the
externalizing of what had always been present, the
internal play of consciousness.30
Moving into such a fantasy format seems to have happened,
at least partly, because he was in Southern California.
Seamus Heaney's response is exemplary here and, as Moore
himself recalls,
In some way I was probably influenced by the fact
that I was living here. It's written a little like
a film. You can almost see it as a film. It's
full of scenes, hallucinations and that sort of
30 G a l l a g h e r , p . 1 9 1 .
492
thing. . . . All the things I write . . . in Fergus
were things that I was observing at that time. . . .
And I was trying to write, I suppose in my way, my
California novel. . . . There's a mystery to it. I
feel in California . . . if you're up on Mulholland
Drive and you're driving along, you could be in
Tuscany. You could also be in an area which is not
America at all. You could be in any country. You
might have trouble deciding where you are. If
you're down in some tacky part of Los Angeles, like
Laguna Beach, you could be in some Southern Italian
beach town. So Los Angeles to me is full of dream
palaces of memory, in a sense, places which remind
you of other places but they aren't that place.
It's that chameleon quality which it has which
intrigues me.
Even though Fergus is on the edge, and the
apparitions, at times, seem to be taking the upper hand
and overwhelming him, he eventually recognizes that they
can tell him nothing he does not already know, that in
some part of his psyche he is in charge and directing the
entire presentation. There is something very sad in
this:
Since the apparitions are simply the reifications of
Fergus' memories they have in their hands no keys to
transcendence or to a liberating self-
understanding. 31
As the ghosts are figures of his imagination, so must
their answers or advice be material he already
31 Kerry McSweeney, "Brian Moore: Past and
Present," Critical Quarterly, 18, No. 2 (Summer 1976),
pp. 63-4.
493
apprehends, at least in the recesses of his mind. But
this does not mean that their effect is any the less
devastating. One of the most poignant as well as apt
passages is the following:
A judge spoke, his accent Scots, his tones measured,
stern. "Your future? Very well, my son. Look over
there. Do you see that fool of a man standing there
in a rented house in California, hearing voices,
seeing ghosts, not knowing if he has taken leave of
his senses? Take a look at him, laddie. That man
there wi' his teeth loose in his jaws, combing his
hair over his bald spot, telling himself he's in
love wi' a lassie who's young enough to be his
daughter!' (97)
Shortly after this speech, the illusory figures
temporarily disappear, and Fergus is left alone in the
stillness. Though this occurs only half way through the
novel, Moore anticipates the end when he writes, "The
room was empty as a church, a minute after its closing.
He stood for a moment. Then he heard the sea.
Trembling, suddenly nauseated, he walked forward" (98).
But Fergus is not yet ready to let up on himself. He
must complete the process, one aspect of which is the
confrontation with his own younger self. Later in the
day, his younger self leads him on the beach, telling
him,
'You'll not get out of this.' . . .
'What am I in, what's happening to me?' . . .
494
'Come on. They're waiting.1 . . .
'Get rid of that pipe; it makes you look
silly.'
'What do you think you look like to me? Some
middle-aged half-Yank, living with a girl my own
age, working for films or something. Jesus, you're
enough to make a person puke!' . . .
'It's your birthday.'
•But my birthday's in August.' [Moore's own
birthday] . . .
'It's not a normal situation,' his young self
said. 'It's not even your birthday, by your
reckoning.' (181-3)
Apart from the figure of his own younger self, the
most significant apparitions are probably those of his
family. The ghost of Paddy Donlon, a friend who by all
accounts has committed suicide, gives Fergus an idea
about why his parents have returned to him that day:
'The parents we remember aren't our real
parents at all. Just our childish misconceptions
about them.'
'Maybe you've got something. Maybe that's why
my parents have come back; maybe after what happened
today, those masks I put on them for so many years
will fall away and I'll see my parents as they
really were! I'll stop blaming and misjudging them
as I did when I was a kid? By God, Paddy, maybe
that's it! They're trying to reveal themselves to
me!' . . .
'Your real parents may have been smaller,
duller, and less intelligent than those "parents"
who live on in your memory.' (178-9)
Certainly dealing with one's parents is notably a way of
coming to terms with one's past. "Until now, he had
thought that, like everyone else, he exorcised his past
495
by living it. But he was not like everyone else. His
past had risen up this morning, vivid, uncontrollable,
shouldering into his present" (37). And Fergus seems to
want this, for he is genuinely disappointed when that
first vision of his father vanishes. Fergus' father not
only is the first to appear but also the last to leave,
and, for a man, it is probably the ghost of his father
which is the external figure he must reckon with most as
he deals with his own maturity and mortality. Most of
the major issues in the novel are raised in connection
with the father, though they are often elaborated later
by some other figure. When Fergus utters "Jesus Christ!"
on first seeing the hallucination, "At the mention of the
Holy Name, Fergus' father began to make the Sign of the
Cross," after which he "exhaled sadly . . . [and] looked
at Fergus with hurt eyes" (2-3), thus introducing the
issue of religion, a subject taken up later by a number
of clerical and family figures.
Then Dr. Fadden questions Fergus' profession and
current lifestyle:
•You know very well,' his father said, 'that if I
were around I'd be proud about your writing. I'd be
as pleased as punch. . . . Yes, I'd be delighted
about your writing. . . . But your present life,
well, that's another matter. Thank God I'm not
around to make judgments on that. I should hope,
496
though, that if I were, I'd be kinder to you than
you are to me.' (25)
This makes Fergus think about other writers who came to
Los Angeles and ask himself whether they had succeeded in
averting the traps that he has fallen into:
How do other writers deal with these situations?
How did, say, Faulkner manage to come out here time
after time and take the money and run, when I can't
even handle one job? The thought of Faulkner
steadied Fergus, for Faulkner had endured and
prevailed over this stoop labor in the Hollywood
vineyard. If Faulkner started seeing his dead
parents first thing in the morning, he would settle
right in and make use of it. (34)
Not only is Fergus unable to complete the film script as
his bosses would like, but he, like many of his preceding
British literary compatriots— Dennis Barlow in Waugh's
The Loved One and Stephen Monk in Isherwood's The World
in the Evening— discovers he is unable to do any of his
individual creative work in the Southern California
environment. Both Dennis and Stephen are released from
whatever inhibits them and can begin to write only when
they leave Los Angeles:
In a briefcase under his desk was the novel he was
writing, the book he had been forced to put aside
when he came out to California. Every morning in
the past three weeks of waiting for Boweri and
Redshields to decide on the film script, he had
briefly considered starting the novel again. Now he
briefly considered it. As soon as this business was
497
settled, he would get back to work on it. As soon
as this business was settled. (48-9)32
Of his two parents, his mother is the least central
to the day's issues and agonies. At one point he even
locks her outside the house. She is most interested in
the material effects of Fergus' current life and speaks
to him in a vocabulary laden with old world platitudes.
Her presence seems to be most important as a foil to the
California women. She and her sister Kate, a nun, watch
at the dinner table as Dani disputes her mother's
Hollywood pretenses:
His mother and Reverend Mother had their heads
together, whispering. What shocked them, as it
shocked him, was Mrs. Sinclair's hand, under the
table, caressing his thigh. Reverend Mother, her
breath hissing in scandalized intake, joined her
hands together gothically, and at once began what
must be a silent prayer for the salvation of Fergus'
immortal soul. His own mother looked as though she
might, at any moment, do Mrs. Sinclair some bodily
harm. (115)
32 It is perhaps only of passing interest that some
critics, like John A. Scanlan, misunderstand the nature
of Fergus' impasse in saying that he is "unable to write
anything in the United States except movie scripts."
John A. Scanlan, "The Artist-in-Exile: Brian Moore's
North American Novels," Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish
Studies, 12, No. 2 (1977), p. 32.
498
The scene forces Fergus to wonder which are more real—
the remembered or the living women? Watching his mother
and Aunt Kate in the room,
The movement was so vivid in his memory that, set
against the clarity of it, Dani and Mrs. Sinclair
seemed improbable characters in a wide-screen color
film of American life. Reverend Mother and his own
mother, hallucinations though they might be, moved
in this room with a presence stronger than that of
the living women— Dani and Mrs. Sinclair— he had
known as an adult. His mother and Aunt Kate he had
seen, smelled, and sensed with the special strong
perceptions of a very young child. (114)
Though he questions his present life through his mother's
eyes, shortly thereafter he looks on fondly as these same
Los Angeles women perform after-dinner chores with modern
devices undreamed of in his Irish past:
Dani and her mother with easy, efficient Californian
movements began to load the electric dishwasher,
dispose of waste through the electric garburator,
and prepare coffee in the electric grinder. . . . He
. . . looked in at the kitchen, where mother and
daughter stood, busy at the efficient sinks,
handsome, red-haired women, personification of the
American way. Affectionate, almost sisterly in
their bright play clothes . . . this pretty picture,
this world so different from the old worlds he had
known. (118, 12 0)
Other women from his family perform notable
functions on this his day of reckoning. His Aunt Mary
relives the day of her death— but this time in his spare
room— to remind him, no doubt, of his own mortality. Her
499
death rattle, that sound he has never forgotten, is on
the horizon for him too: "Death was not something in a
book. She was dying. He would die" (48). His sisters
present two different approaches to religion. Amidst
what appears as a nearly godless world, only populated by
door-to-door salesmen peddling God (to whom he responds,
"I'm afraid I'm not interested"— 8), he recollects his
sister Kathleen and her husband
. . . that praying mantis, down on their knees, the
pair of them, saying the rosary at night before they
got into bed to screw, oh, it would make you want to
laugh if it didn't make you want to kick them. (141)
By way of contrast, however, is the other sister Maeve,
who speaks to Fergus quite directly yet sympathetically
about the critical philosophical issues he ponders:
'If you don't believe in an afterlife— and you
say you don't— then, if you died this minute, I
would cease to exist. For you. In that sense. I'm
your invention. But, in fact, I would still exist.
Heaven depends on more than your belief in
it.' . . .
'I'm not in the least bit interested in the
question of an afterlife.'
'No? . . . Then why do you worry about your so-
called literary reputation? I'll tell you why.
Because, in your case, it's a substitute for
belief.' . . . Your trouble is, you can't be sure of
anything. You have no laws, no rules, no spiritual
life at all. You have to make up your own rules of
conduct. You have to become your own wee ruler, and
found your own wee religion.' (54-6)
500
But Maeve leaves the enigmatic plum pit, still moist with
her saliva, verification for Fergus that "something
happened here today, something phenomenal. . . . In my
hand I have empirical proof that these apparitions are
not ordinary hallucinations" (77).
As the novel progresses, Fergus* confrontations with
figures from his past take on an increasingly menacing
quality. Simultaneous to this, his sphere of action
moves out of the house— at first nearby to an unused
child's playhouse, and later at night far out to the sand
dunes along the edge of the sea. The landscape parallels
his removal from his rational, objective, conscious mind.
While he is in the house and on the patio just outside,
the ghostly figures he encounters are family members,
close family friends, teachers, schoolmates, those people
one readily knows and remembers: in other words, people
in one's everyday "house" of memory. In the early part
of the evening, he walks out to a children's playhouse.
Here one cannot help being reminded of the opening scene
at the Novotny's party in Isherwood's The World in the
Evening where Stephen Monk discovers his wife Jane and
another man making love in a giant dollhouse. In a
doll's house one can act out one's immature fantasies,
and Britons may feel that life in Los Angeles uniquely
501
offers such opportunities. But Fergus' experience is,
nevertheless, quite different from that of Stephen Monk.
At first it becomes a confessional for Fergus, and then
it is the hidden place where he savagely beats Dr. Keogh,
the President of St. Michan's College for Boys in
Belfast, "hitting at that which he had wanted to hit all
his life" (12 6). But suddenly he realizes how out-of
control he has become and weeps until he feels weak:
Fergus threw aside the cane and sat, slumped on the
child's bench, . . . weeping. . . . I am just like
they were, he thought, I am no different. I stood
there yelling with pleasure as I beat him. . . . And
there, in the child's playhouse, he put his head
between his knees as though warding off a faint. I
could have killed him. (12 6-7)
But in this scene, Fergus has only left the big house for
the little house, and the moment of recognition comes
easily.
At night, very much as in the "Nighttown" or "Circe"
section of Joyce's Ulysses, Fergus escapes the confines
of the house and goes out beyond his personal boundaries
to confront the deeper and darker recesses of his mind.
He begins by running after his friend Paddy who committed
suicide, a man who dealt with his own darkness and death,
but after a while Paddy disappears, and Fergus continues
on alone:
502
Fergus, running, winded, feeling his years, came to
the edge of a dune, jumped, although he knew he
shouldn't, and fell heavily on his hands and knees
in the sand. On all fours, panting, too old for
these boyish antics, missing a sandal. (18 0)
Another incarnation of his younger self comes to
accompany him, though Fergus knows not where. It
transpires that a kangaroo court of sorts has been set up
for him on the far reaches of the beach. Earlier in the
day, a more manageable version of this had occurred. At
that time all the figures said things that were already
very much in Fergus1 own everyday thoughts; his younger
self beginning with,
'I'm asking you, Fergus Fadden, what have you
accomplished? Do you realize that, at thirty-nine,
you're already on the westward slope?'
'Washed up on a beach in California!' someone
called out.
'You don't understand! I'm here for special
reasons. I have to pay alimony— '
'Immoral bastard,' said the dentist. [Fergus
as a child had lusted after the dentist's wife, and
earlier that day he fondled her apparition on the
patio.] 'Always some excuse for his filthiness.'
'Pure selfishness,' said Isobel Montrose [a
painter he had known in Paris]. 'Why should being a
writer constitute an excuse?' (96)
Unlike this kangaroo court, the nighttime encounter is
far more mysterious. Fergus really doesn't comprehend
the proceedings and feebly attempts to defend himself by
503
explaining the confusion of the exile, how difficult
"remembering" becomes for him:
Most people live their lives in one place, and they
meet, essentially, the same people, year after year.
But I've lived in Ireland, worked as a newspaperman
in England and France, came to America and worked on
Long Island, then in New York, and now I'm here on
the Pacific. I'm trying to say I've lived in so
many places, it's impossible to remember— (200-1)
He is condemned for forgetting. The crowd chants at him,
"Remember? Remember? Remember?" And he finally
answers, "Forgetting is the most terrible thing that can
t
happen to a person" (210, 214). Nevertheless, the mob
lunges, hurling debris, sticks, and stones at a girl he
has failed to identify. He takes her hand, and they dash
ahead of the others along the beach. Finally, when they
leave the crowd behind, he does remember who she is; they
stop and talk briefly, then she too is gone.
The outer reaches of the beach to which he has come
are now deserted. When Fergus calls, the only response
is his own echo; but shortly thereafter, "There was not
even an echo of his voice. . . . He called again, but
knew his shout was rhetorical. He was alone" (221-2) In
this state, having confronted the ghosts from the
farthest recesses of his life and mind on this stretch of
beach at the western extremity of the New World, this
504
exile from the Old World is finally left to himself and
turns to go back toward the house.
But the night has one more surprise in store for
him:
At once, pain overcame him, a pain so intense it
seemed as though someone had driven a large knife
into his chest. He went down on his knees, bending
over, the moonlight going black. Then, his sight
clearing, he stared at the sands, alone, in
terrible, lancing pain, sweat running in cold little
rivers down his face, dripping off his nose and
chin. . . . Breathing harshly, he looked, first
right, then left. He saw lights above him at the
edge of the beach. (223)
Like the other surprises of the day, this is one which
had been anticipated earlier:
He had read in Newsweek that more and more youngish
men were having heart attacks nowadays, and that
most first attacks were fatal. . . . His dead father
and these others were 'arranging' something for him.
Was that something his death? (152-3)
The lights he has seen are the headlights of his father's
old car. The family is packing up in it, preparing to
leave. The Klaxon horn sounds as Dr. Fadden steps out to
say goodbye to his son, who, with great effort, tries to
rise to meet him:
'Ready?' he asked Fergus. 'Time to go, isn't
it?'
The knife of pain cut into Fergus' chest. He
opened his mouth but could not speak. Up at the
505
road, the ghostly old car stood in the moonlight,
its engine running. . . . He willed himself to
stand. He willed himself, and stood, the pain so
intense that he lost his vision, standing, swaying
blind, as the pain fell on him like a wave. It
receded. He heard his breathing, stertorous, loud
as a tearing rag, a sound like Aunt Mary on her
deathbed, long ago.
•Yes,' said Dr. Fadden, nodding in
confirmation. 'You've just had a heart attack.'
(223)
The two men walk briefly together in a friendly farewell
conversation, with Dr. Fadden giving his son advice about
exercise and diet, generally suggesting he use moderation
in his life:
He smiled at Fergus, and reaching out, patted his
shoulder in a friendly manner. . . . The pain seemed
to have gone. His face was wet. He took a deep
breath and smiled at his father. (224)
The pain of the day is gone, and Fergus' deep breath is a
sigh of relief. One of the major effects has been the
de-mythologizing of his father. Still, he seeks some
answers to lingering questions, and his father tells him,
" We have to live and die here." Then his last words to
his son are, "Don't you see? If you have not found a
meaning, then your life is meaningless" (226-7). The
whole book can be seen, in fact, as Fergus' search for
meaning.
506
On this far distant shore Fergus has come to terms
with his past, his homeland and his current life, and, as
he waves goodbye, he releases these figures he no longer
needs:
The family sat in the car. . . . His father did
not look back at the beach, and Fergus could not see
if the others, inside the car, were looking out. It
was not their move; it was his.
And suddenly, knowing this, Fergus raised his
arm and waved, releasing them. His father looked
up, saw the good-bye wave, and, grateful, raised his
old white hat in salute. . . . Now, from the opened
car windows, hands waved, the family saying good-bye
as the car, gathering speed, swung grandly around a
curve. . . . At the road junction it paused, elderly
and out-of-date on Pacific Coast Highway, and then
with a clashing of gears and a whine of
acceleration, it was gone.
In the east, dawn came up. Breakers slammed on
the morning shore, monotonous as a heartbeat. He
walked toward the house. (227-8)
Recovered from his "heart attack," Fergus is ready to go
on with his life. This is no contrived happy ending, but
a credible conclusion to twenty-four hours of soul-
searching. The dawn coming up in the east, the breakers
on the morning shore, and their regularity compared to
that of a heartbeat— all this works to convince the
reader that Fergus has emerged from his ordeal with more
self-understanding, now ready to meet the new day that
awaits him. This stage in his rite of passage is
reminiscent of the moment at the end of The Tempest when
507
Prospero gives up his magic and releases the spirits he
has imprisoned. Fergus too will be freer without these
ghostly figures he has directed.
When Moore finished writing the book, he admitted
that he feared for its success. He wrote to his English
editor and predicted that Fergus "would probably be of
more interest to people on your side . . . than it will
be here."JJ Moore recollects those concerns,
I was very afraid of the book because I felt it
would fall into the awful trap of the Hollywood
novel. If you write abut Hollywood, you're
absolutely asking for trouble because everybody
considers it's a fantasy world . . . , and they
expect clichds on it, even if the books are not
cliched. Waugh's book is not cliched, but it
confirms people's prejudices about living here. I
was afraid of that so I thought I took a chance in
making him write screenplays. But looking back on
the novel, I think it's quite well-written, and it's
an interesting book because it was a forerunner,
actually, of things that other people did. 4
Unfortunately for Moore, his fears about his likelihood
of success with a novel set in Los Angeles were all-too-
accurate. John Scanlan, writing in Eire-Ireland, called
it
33 Brian Moore as quoted in Dahlie, p. 103.
34 He mentions then as an example the play Da,
which came out many years after Fergus, "in which the
dead father reappears."
508
. . . probably Moore's worst novel— peopled with
one-dimensional characters, who are physically
present, and scores of hardly more credible
apparitions, who enter and re-enter the novel wi
all the subtlety of Marley rattling his chains.
But others liked it; George Woodcock in Canadian
Literature says it is "a masterpiece of the best kind of
fantasy— that which succeeds because it presents
impossible happenings with impeccable verisimilitude.1,36
Moore was right about the book's acceptance in Britain as
compared with that in America. Paul Binding, in an
English publication Books and Bookmen, wrote just a few
years ago:
Fergus, his masterpiece, is indeed an account of
. . . the complexities of American/Californian life
while coming to further terms with the ghosts of his
Irish past. . . . Indeed it is America, with its
vigorous non-realistic, especially Gothic literary
tradition, which would seem to have supplied Brian
Moore with the fictional forms he needed, that can
express— with their violent epiphanies and their
distortions and eruptions of the irrational— the
anguishes of the uprooted and spiritually homeless,
and the baffling diversities of Western society
which can contain both puritan, taboo-ridden,
pleasure-fearing Belfast and hedonistic, lost,
restless California.
35 Scanlan, p. 32.
36 Woodcock, p. 83.
37 Paul Binding, "Brian Moore in Interview," Books
and Bookmen, 25, No. 5 (February 1980), 48.
509
Moore realizes now that for him Los Angeles is
"terra non grata to write about because I saw that if I
wrote about Los Angeles, I'm dealing with the cliches of
Los Angeles. I don't have a mystique about Los Angeles
the way, say Joan Didion has." As a result, he has never
again chosen to set a novel in Los Angeles. The closest
he has come is Carmel, California— decidedly in the
central rather than southern part of the state.
Carmel,38 like Malibu, is on the sea, so Moore can adapt
some life experiences rather easily without actually
using the Southern California location again.
I have used Carmel because it has a sort of mystic
thing about it. I thought if anything out of the
ordinary would happen in California, Carmel is the
place where it would happen because it1s both very
banal and it's also very beautiful, and it is
mysterious.
The two novels with Carmel settings depart radically from
realism, as Fergus does, so that Moore's three California
Ironically, Carmel has recently chosen as its
new mayor motion picture star Clint Eastwood, so even
this art-oriented community far to the north of Los
Angeles may be taking on some of the circus-like
qualities its larger sister to the south is often accused
of presenting. The swearing-in ceremonies, for example,
had to be conducted outside, rather than in the intimate
chambers where they normally take place, in order to
accommodate the vast press corps sent to cover the event.
510
novels all substantiate his contentions that California
has a very unreal quality about it.
The Great Victorian Collection (1975) is the story
of Canadian Tony Maloney, who has a dream of the Great
Victorian Collection being installed in the motel parking
lot just outside his window in Carmel. He awakens to
discover that it has become a reality. One brief
sequence in the novel takes place in Los Angeles: Tony,
with Mary Ann and Vaterman, escapes to Los Angeles
because he believes he is going to have another dream.
They enter the city by freeway, dance all night and go
from club to club until dawn, eat in a pancake
restaurant, and finally try to sleep in a motel/hotel in
Hollywood— but nothing remarkable happens. The new dream
never comes and they move on.
The second of the Carmel novels, Cold Heaven (1983),
is only partially set in California— though some of the
most pivotal events occur there. Marie Davenport had a
vision of the Virgin Mary while on vacation in Carmel and
has tried hard to forget the occurrence. On the one year
anniversary of the vision, her husband dies in a boating
accident in Europe and then "comes to life" again many
hours after he has been pronounced dead. She returns to
Carmel to have yet another vision and to deal with the
511
philosophical, emotional and spiritual issues that are
demanding her attention. There are phone calls to Los
Angeles, and characters who come from Los Angeles, but
the city itself never becomes a setting for any of the
actual events of the novel.
More than any of the other British novelists who
wrote about Los Angeles, Moore grapples with the question
of belief. Although Waugh's method is so ironic that he
never speaks his mind directly, he is the only other
novelist who even obliquely touches on the subject of
religious belief and the question of afterlife as they
relate to life in Southern California.
Moore differs from the others in yet another major
respect: although in each of his California novels a
death or near-death occurs, Moore is almost the only
British novelist who is not preoccupied with the subjects
of death and/or cemeteries and funerals as they relate to
life in Southern California. He tends to believe that
ending with a death is a decidedly uninspired way of
resolving things in a work of fiction. After noting the
above-mentioned absence in his work, I asked him whether
he had ever written about Forest Lawn, the cemeteries and
the funerals. In answer to that, he offered an
intriguing response: "No, and I find that so
512
boring. . . . That's just the obvious thing. I've never
been to Disneyland." Moore did not realize at the time
that he had responded "Disneyland" when I had asked
"Forest Lawn"— in its own way a fantasy and never never
land where the nightmare world of death is domesticated
and euphemized. Later he clarified his remarks, saying
that in fact he had once taken a lady visitor to Forest
Lawn, but that to this date he has never been to
Disneyland. But the unconscious response tells a
profound tale.
Finally, as a British writer of Los Angeles, Moore
can claim a unique position among his colleagues.
Whereas his fellow countrymen tend to forget that they
are exiles and as Britons to look at contemporary
Southern California with astonishment, horror or
amusement, Moore is forever the exile, inclined to be
haunted by his past somewhere else and to use that as a
way of getting a perspective on his present whereabouts.
This tends to make him much more accepting of the
exigencies of modern life in Los Angeles, smiling at the
gaucheries and refusing to be bitter about the
inadequacies. Like Isherwood's George at the end of A
Single Man, Moore's Fergus has found his own kind of
peace at the westernmost edge of the English-speaking
513
world, and the final image is of a man in harmony with
the environment he has, at least temporarily, chosen to
inhabit.
514
B r i a n M oore B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Works
Novels
Fergus. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Interviews
"Brian Moore: The Tragic Vein of the Ordinary."
Interview by Donald Cameron in Conversations with
Canadian Novelists. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada,
1973, 64-85.
"Brian Moore." Interview by John Graham in The Writer's
Voice, ed. George Garrett. New York: William
Morrow, 1973, 51-74.
"Jean and Brian Moore: In Their Home by the Sea, He Turns
Memories into Fiction." Interview by Marshall
Berges in Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, n. pag.,
n. d. Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences Library.
Personal Interviews. 13 February and 4 March 1986.
Secondary Sources
Binding, Paul. "Brian Moore in Interview." Books and
Bookmen, 25, No. 5 (February 1980), 48-9.
Dahlie, Hallvard. Brian Moore. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
De Santana, Hubert. "The Calligraphy of Pain." Macleans,
93, No. 38 (17 September 1979), 44-48.
Flood, Jeanne. Brian Moore. Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1974.
Foster, John Wilson. "Passage Through Limbo: Brian
Moore’s North American Novels." Critique: Studies
in Modern Fiction, 13, No. 1 (1970), 5-18.
515
Frayne, John P. "Brian Moore's Wandering Irishman— The
Not-So-Wild Colonial Boy." In Modern Irish
Literature: Essays in Honor of William York Tindall,
ed. Raymond J. Porter and James D. Brophy. New
York: Iona College Press, 1972, 215-234.
Gallagher, Michael Paul. "The Novels of Brian Moore."
Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 60, No. 238
(Summer 1971), 180-94.
Heaney, Seamus. "Remembering Malibu." In Station
Island, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985,
30-1.
Henry, De Witt. "The Novels of Brian Moore: A
Retrospective." Ploughshares, 2, No. 2 (1974),
7-27.
Mahon, Derek. "Ghosts of Ghosts." The Listener, 85, No.
2192 (1 April 1971), 422.
McSweeney, Kerry. "Brian Moore: Past and Present."
Critical Quarterly, 18, No. 2 (Summer 1976), 53-66.
Sale, Richard. "Irish Ghosts." Nation, 211, No. 10
(12 October 1970), 346-7.
Scanlan, John A. "The Artist-in-Exile: Brian Moore's
North American Novels." Eire-Ireland: A Journal of
Irish Studies, 12, No. 2 (1977), 14-33.
Studing, Richard. "A Brian Moore Bibliography." Eire-
Ireland, 10, No. 3 (1975), 89-105.
Toolan, Michael J. "Psyche and Belief: Brian Moore's
Contending Angels." Eire-Ireland, 15, No. 3 (Fall
1980), 97-111.
Venant, Elizabeth. "A Mischievous Leprechaun with
Words." Los Angeles Times Calendar, 26 May 1985, 3.
Woodcock, George. "A Matter of Loyalty." Canadian
Literature, No. 49 (Summer 1971), 81-3.
516
GAVIN LAMBERT
I
The youngest of the major British writers in this
study, Gavin Lambert came to Los Angeles in 1957, as so
many of his predecessors had, to write screenplays in
Hollywood. Unlike the others, however, Lambert was
already quite knowledgeable about film prior to his
arrival. Perhaps for this reason, his filmwriting
success has been commensurate with that of his novels.
Among the authors encompassed in this research, only
James Hilton has had as successful a career in film as
Lambert.
Although Lambert no longer lives in Los Angeles, he
spends a substantial portion of every year there, writing
for film and television. And he continues to use
Southern California as the setting for much of his
fiction. His most recent novel, Running Time (198 3),
takes place entirely within the confines of the city and
is, in many respects, the most comprehensive of these
British novels of Los Angeles.
Gavin Lambert was born in Sussex, England on July
23, 1924, the second son of Mervyn and Vera (Pembroke)
Lambert. The family moved from the country to London
when Lambert was two years old. The son of an upper
517
middle class family— his father was the Rootes automobile
agent for the south of England— Lambert went to St.
George's boarding school in Windsor at ten, then on to a
prestigious public school, Cheltenham College, at 14. In
both schools he received scholarships for his musical
ability. He attended Magdelen College, Oxford, for a
year, but withdrew because the courses in both English
and French literatures (the fields that really interested
him) required extensive study of Medieval languages, and
Lambert had no interest in being an academic, the only
profession for which, he felt, such an exhaustive
background was really needed.
Lambert's education as a novelist and screenwriter
did not come so much from Oxford, then, as from the hours
he spent as a youngster at the movies. He told
interviewer Robert Wennersten:
It must have been in the blood. I just took to them
from a very early age. I was always going to movies
as a child, always wanting to see movies I wasn't
supposed to see. It was obviously fantasy,
daydreaming. I loved all those beautiful movie
stars up there? I loved the whole never-never land
of it. From that absolutely classic childhood fan
situation, I got to be seriously interested in the
518
art of the movies as well as the fun of the movies.
Not that I think they should be separated.
He continued his education from films immediately after
leaving Oxford. His first job was the writing of one or
two minute narrative publicity films to be shown in
motion picture theaters as advertising. In 1947, while
living in London, Lambert began to write short stories
for British magazines and to contribute articles to the
New Statesman, the Observer and other periodicals.
Between 1950 and 1956 he was the editor of the highly-
respected publication of the British Film Institute,
Sight and Sound, to which he also contributed some of his
own film criticism. In 1951 he took a six-week trip to
New York to do an article on "Cinerama." This sojourn
definitely spurred his interest in both film and America.
Then in 1956 he went to Morocco where he wrote and
directed a feature film entitled Another Sky. Upon his
return to London, he met Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel
Without a Cause, who offered Lambert a job as his
personal assistant at Twentieth-Century Fox Studios in
Los Angeles. Lambert had an aunt, his father's sister
1 Gavin Lambert as quoted in Robert Wennersten, "On
Gavin Lambert," Coast, November 1972, p. 72, Files of
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library,
Beverly Hills.
519
Claudine West, who had been a screenwriter at Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer during the Thirties, and he had heard
fascinating things from her about the life there; this,
in addition to his life-long interest in film, made his
decision relatively easy;
1 came here when I did . . . because I was in a mood
to leave England. . . . [My reasons for leaving were
not unlike Christopher's.] I'm sure I felt, at
least unconsciously, not at home. . . . The time was
obviously right, because at the same time I got a
job offer. . . . So it was an opportunity to come
here in a working situation, which I'd always wanted
to do, and I took it.
Lambert arrived in Los Angeles in 1957 and
immediately set to work. During his years in the film
industry, he has accumulated an impressive list of motion
picture credits. Some of his more famous screenplays are
those he wrote for Bitter Victory in 1958, Sons and
Lovers in 1960 (for which he received an Academy Award
Nomination), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone in 1961,
Inside Daisy Clover in 1965 (based on his own novel), and
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in 1976 (for which he
received another Academy Award Nomination). He has, in
addition, written several nonfiction books on film
2 Lambert as quoted in Wennersten, p. 65.
Bracketed material is from a telephone interview I
conducted with Lambert on 1 February 1986.
520
subjects: On Cukor in 1972, GWTW: The Making of 'Gone
With the Wind' in 1973, and he is currently working on a
biography of Norma Shearer. During his most recent trip
to Los Angeles, he even began to write for television.
All this testifies to the fact that Lambert has been an
enormous success in Hollywood.
Lambert's ideas about living in Los Angeles differ
somewhat from those of most of the other British authors
who came to the city and wrote about it. He deliberately
chose to come to Los Angeles because it wasn't European.
Unlike Waugh, Lambert never wanted to have things in Los
Angeles to be the same as he had known them in Britain:
That's one reason I left Britain: to go somewhere
else. In fact when people would say when I came
here, 'You really must go up to San Francisco.
You'll love it. It's so European,' they were saying
the wrong thing. I didn't want to find Europe on
the west coast of California.
Los Angeles, for Lambert, is the preeminent example of
the contemporary world. He said in "From a Hollywood
Notebook," published in Sight and Sound in 1959, Rebecca
3 Personal interview with Gavin Lambert, 28
December 1985 and subsequent telephone interview 1
February 1986. Throughout the remainder of this paper,
all uncited quotations by Lambert are to be understood as
quotations from these three hours of interviews, during
which time Lambert freely responded to all the questions
I had prepared and commented extensively on my thesis
concerning British novelists who wrote about Los Angeles.
521
West was right when she said in 1930, "The English
dislike of the contemporary is sometimes thoroughly
tiresome.114
Lambert liked the city immediately. He expected it
to be exciting and it did not disappoint him:
I was almost determined for it to live up to my
expectations. To begin with there were the obvious
things. There was the whole Hollywood thing: the
myth and the glamour of Hollywood, of beautiful
people, of glamorous lives. And I guess I liked the
relaxation and, it seemed to me, comparative freedom
of life here. It seemed to offer, just in the most
general terms, creative and sexual freedom and
stimulation. I did take to it very much, I must
say. And the weather, which is very important.
Weather is a significant factor to Lambert, as it is to a
number of his characters, especially Mark Cusden who
appears in several of the books. British people, Lambert
believes, particularly yearn for warm climates;
certainly, he shares that propensity. He now says that
he would never live anywhere where there was not a
substantial amount of sunshine during the year. The
beach is one of his favorite places. In fact, once in
Los Angeles, it seemed natural to him to live near the
4 Rebecca West as quoted in Gavin Lambert, "From a
Hollywood Notebook," Sight and Sound, 28, No. 2 (Spring
1959), p. 73.
5 Lambert as quoted in Wennersten, p. 67.
522
beach. He says, "I found other English people here, like
Isherwood, whom I hadn’t met in England. I can only say
it was like a very successful vaccination: it absolutely
took."6
The Isherwood introduction came while Lambert was
working at the Fox studios; Ivan Moffett, another Fox
writer, introduced the two in 1958 or 1959, and they
became great friends. Isherwood, it may be remembered,
said that he always showed his work to Lambert for
criticism. And Lambert dedicated Norman's Letter—
ironically, not one of the Los Angeles novels— to
Isherwood in 1966.
Despite the fact that Lambert met a number of the
writers in this study upon various occasions in Los
Angeles, he had not realized until I interviewed him that
the region has an identifiable British literary
tradition.
I was conscious of being an outsider, but not
specifically British, even though I was. But I
remember everybody said after The Slide Area came
out, 'Oh, well, it takes an outsider to have that
kind of slant on a place.'
So far as Lambert is concerned, of those British
novelists who used Los Angeles as a setting for their
6 L am bert a s q u o t e d i n W e n n e r s t e n , p . 6 7 .
523
novels, Richard Hallas (the pseudonym used by Eric
Knight) in his You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
(1938) ranks among the highest. "I think the image of
Southern California is wonderful, this idea that he has
that it's all back projection. That's a marvelous image.
The novel is very good." Although Lambert mentions James
Hilton's Lost Horizon in two of his novels, Inside Daisy
Clover and Running Time, he was unaware when I
interviewed him that Hilton had ever written about Los
Angeles in any of his novels.7 Concerning Waugh, Lambert
believes that The Loved One is a continuation of a
recurring pattern in Waugh's work and somewhat dismisses
it by saying that it is
. . . really only the one book [of his about Los
Angeles] and that's very Evelyn Waugh. That's his
own style just transposed, so that's kind of on its
own. . . . It 's brilliant in its way, but it's kind
of narrow.
Lambert offers an interesting assessment of Huxley's
work, especially as it relates to his decision to live in
and write about Southern California:
I think his California novels are much the best.
The English, who never forgive anybody for leaving,
7 Lambert's aunt, Claudine West, wrote the
screenplay of Hilton's Random Harvest and was one of the
screenwriters on Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
524
think that his work was much better over there.
They think Point Counterpoint, etc., is his best
stuff. I can't read that now.
Lambert met Brian Moore several times at the home of Joan
Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and later at my house, but
is familiar only with Moore's Belfast masterpiece, The
Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. For himself as a
writer, Lambert feels much closer to the Los Angles work
of Isherwood than that of either Waugh or Huxley.
Why does Los Angeles continue to be such a
fascinating locale for British novelists? Lambert
contends that Los Angeles is not considered a
particularly serious subject by Americans, that in fact
the New York literary establishment is totally anti-Los
Angeles, and he uses the Edmund Wilson essay "The Boys in
the Back Room" as an example of the notoriously
patronizing view Easterners take toward Southern
California: "He starts talking about this weird place out
there. Can anything remotely interesting possibly come
out of it?"8 In contrast,
8 Lambert is referring to Edmund Wilson's essay
"The Boys in the Back Room" published in his Classics and
Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New
York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), pp. 19-56. Moore too felt
antipathy toward this same article.
525
The British find it much more intriguing. For the
British, Los Angeles is a kind of extraordinary
invention that they still can't entirely believe is
real. The novels about it sort of reinforce two
things: they reinforce their fantasy and also they
do make it clear that it's real as well. So it's a
sort of fantasy that obsesses them. For the
Americans (I'm talking of the literary scene)
anything about Los Angeles is the branch of the
family they're rather ashamed of. But the British
having no stake in it, as such, . . . well the
British have always been fascinated by this country
anyway. It's like the little child that grew up
into a giant. Again, we're talking extremes. Los
Angeles is the most extreme example of that. It's
the part of America that went further in certain
ways than any other part. And that fascinates the
British. And they're not quite sure: they envy it,
they disapprove of it; they would like to go there,
they wouldn't be seen dead there. They are
marvelously ambivalent about it and ambivalence
keeps a thing going. It creates a tension.
Here Lambert elucidates what has been evident throughout
this study: the notion that there is something decidedly
special about Southern California to the Briton, that it
indeed forces him to come to terms with something of the
often-unacknowledged extremity in his own nature.
"'Living on the edge' is a feeling I always had here,
from the very start." The very geography of the city
demands such an approach. Lambert has offered a couple
of observations on the particular effect of the
geography, "There's the weird contrast: you've got the
ocean, the bluffs, and then half an hour inland you've
got desert. Geographically the whole makeup of the place
526
is very strange." Even though British people are used to
land that fronts on an ocean or sea,
The ocean looks terribly final here. Perhaps one
knows how final it is if you have any sense of
geography. There is this absolute image that you’ve
come here and there you are and it’s 2,000 miles
before there's even Hawaii, and after that there's
another 3,000 to the East. There's this enormous
feeling of space and finality. . . . Here, it's
drastic.
When asked why such a number of Britons9 embraced forms
of Oriental religion and philosophy when they came to
Southern California, Lambert uses this same geographical
argument to explain the phenomenon:
I always think this place has a connection with the
East already, in the sense that we are facing Asia;
we're the last stop. And right across the other
side of the ocean there is the East. The British
have always had that interest. Maybe that's,
incidentally, one thing that might bring them here.
Lambert developed a metaphor for Los Angeles in an
article called "The Back Lot by the Sea" written for the
January, 1963 edition of Harper's Bazaar. He has
continued to use and adapt this metaphor in various ways
in his fiction. The image is not entirely a new one, for
both Waugh and Huxley— as well as Fitzgerald and West—
9 These are, notably, Heard, Huxley, Isherwood and
Lambert himself— who formed a deeply-committed friendship
with Krishnamurti.
527
show how the studio sets seem to have made their way out
onto the streets of the city, and, in Waugh's case, into
the very concept of Forest Lawn (Whispering Glades)
itself. Lambert, however, gives this image its most
extensive elaboration— and in the process makes it his
own unique metaphor for the city. Clearly, his own
familiarity with the studios infuses his description. He
begins by describing the back lot itself as "an
extraordinary poetic landscape, the studio back lot— a
surrealist sprawl across time and place, as if someone
had left a series of incomplete life-size jigsaw puzzles
laying around." From there he moves out beyond the
gates, and his prose is unexcelled:
There remains . . . an even larger back lot, vaguely
called 'Greater Los Angeles' and extending for
almost five hundred square miles. It is bordered on
the west by the Pacific, where for most of the year
the surf thuds to a monotonous full stop. It
stretches south to Venice, the rotting remains of an
imitation of the Italian city, built in the early
years of this century. To the north, the back lot
tapers off into barren mountain ranges, which
contain deer, old ranch houses and new missile
bases. There's another, more inhabited stretch of
mountains to the east, with houses constantly being
planted and swimming pools— strangely resembling in
shape various body organs— carved into the hillside.
Then comes a vast suburban settlement in the valley
below, yielding at last to the desert, to Death
Valley, the ghost towns and the Joshua trees.
An epic confusion: grotesque, romantic, and in
the purest sense surrealist— . . . like Max Ernst's
collages in which he deliberately built up images of
dream-like inconsistency, all designed to meet (as
528
he said) 'on the highest level of unsuitability.'
The only difference is that the surrealism is
natural, the accidents are all unplanned. . . .
The point is: once you understand this place as
a kind of Theater of the Absurd brought to life, you
see both its appeal and its meaning. No accident, I
think, that it has always attracted (apart from the
movies) some extraordinary people, past and present,
musicians like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, writers
like Mann, Huxley, Isherwood, Heard . . . .All were
or are extreme individualists, pioneers, Loners.
Part of the attraction they've felt must be
something like the original surrealists' love of the
circus. There, you watch a series of apparently
mad, beautiful, disconnected and risky things all
going on at once. . . . There's a moment when it all
comes together, brave and funny, tawdry and
sophisticated. Partly fantasy, partly real— in
fact, surprisingly like life at many moments— some
of it doesn't mean what it appears to, and some of
it means nothing at all. And though the circus only
comes to town about once a year now, the back lot is
open twenty-four hours a day.10
In subsequent decades, Lambert returned to this image of
Los Angeles as a giant studio back lot in two of his
fictional works. In The Goodby People (1971) the
narrator bemoans the fate of the Twentieth-Century Fox
back lot, "jumbled up places, continents and centuries
under the sky," which have been bulldozed, then rebuilt
as "boxes of metal and glass . . . above patios with
relentless automated fountains"— Century City— typical of
transformations throughout the city where, "if you know
its past, there's a ghostliness behind the lack of
10 Gavin Lambert, "The Back Lot by the Sea,"
Harper's Bazaar, 96, No. 3014 (January 1963), pp. 90-91.
529
charm."11 Then, twelve years later in Running Time,
Lambert puts into the mouth of Baby Jewel, his child-star
protagonist, yet another version of Los Angeles as studio
back lot. In this particular instance, Baby is talking
about her experiences while filming a series of movies on
location in Southern California during the Twenties, in
which she, though a child, portrayed a variety of
historical female figures:
Los Angeles itself was a series of incredible open
air movie sets, the biggest back lot in the world.
For Spain we went to Olvera Street and the plaza in
the Mexican quarter, for my Butterfly we moved on a
few blocks to Little Tokyo, with its kimono market
and Pagoda Inn. Venice-by-the-Sea, some of which
looked more like Old Bagdad on a budget, came in
handy for Salome's palace in Galilee, Cleopatra's in
Alexandria, even Madame du Barry's private
apartments at Versailles. . . . Joan of Arc raised
the siege of Orleans on an empty stretch of land in
the Hollywood foothills, a French-type chateau
complete with drawbridge in the background. . . .
Catherine the Great drove her buggy through a street
in the downtown section known as Russian Village,
founded by a religious group from Siberia. They
made perfect extras because they walked around in
Cossack boots and embroidered blouses, although they
weren't too pleased at being sprayed with artificial
snow. I even got to see the desert for the first
time when they filmed Cleopatra delivering herself
to Julius Caesar in a rolled up carpet. Set in
motion by concealed wheels, I was trundled along and
11 Gavin Lambert, The Goodby People (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1971), pp. 57-8. All further
references to this work appear in the text in parentheses
as TGP.
530
unrolled at the foot of a cardboard pyramid just off
the road to Palm Springs.12
In the case of each of the novelists discussed in
this study, there has been some analysis of the way that
each distinguishes, if in fact he does, between Hollywood
and Los Angeles. Lambert, because of his success in the
former, is uniquely in a position to comment. For him,
the issue of reality vs. illusion, which is so generally
blurred in America, is particularly so as Hollywood
juxtaposes through the years with Los Angeles:
They overlap so much. The odd thing is that
Hollywood started as a suburb of Los Angeles, and
then Los Angeles became a suburb of Hollywood. Now
it's changed again, because now Los Angeles has
become such an enormous entity. Apart from the
movies and TV, there's so much else going on now,
such an enormous industry center and computers and
all that. Everything has moved in. But now it's
all one thing, in a weird way. . . . What's happened
in the last ten or fifteen years, Hollywood has
gotten less and LA has gotten more. Now Hollywood
geographically means nothing. It's a sort of weird
run-down area— a crazy slum. . . .
It's one enormous place now and each is a part
of the other. And it all looks the same. They've
pulled down so much of the old stuff. There's less
of the great Spanish architecture everyday,
practically. And all the new stuff looks the same.
I was often struck that when I watch television, I
think you see something that is rather like a set
here. There is absolutely no difference between
what you see on the screen and what you see outside.
12 G a v in L a m b ert, Running Time (New Y ork:
M a c m i l l a n , 19 83 ), p. 94. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s t o t h i s
w o rk a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t i n p a r e n t h e s e s a s RT.
5 31
The cop on the screen looks the same as the cop
outside. Everybody’s typecast. . . . Venice had a
marvelous flavor in the Sixties; Topanga Canyon was
kind of wild. Now it's become fashionable and rich.
Venice has been pulled down. It's all becoming one
anonymous place, much more than it used to be. [The
attempts at renovation in areas] that used to be
wonderfully sleazy and full of atmosphere are now
sort of a Disneyland of boutiques.
Although Lambert is quick to admit that it was the
film industry which initially attracted him to Los
Angeles, once he began living there, "I discovered all
this much more about LA which intrigued me, which is what
I began writing about, really— this whole strange
illusory quality of the place that began to hit me." He
was challenged to take a look at the city's history as a
way of explaining the unusual characteristics he found—
and later much of this made its way into his novels,
especially Running Time, which is the most historical of
the works set in Los Angeles. The following historical
overview he provides of Los Angeles is somewhat chatty in
style because it came from an informal interview
situation; nevertheless, his insights are profound:
It happened and developed incredibly quickly.
I think that's the unique thing about it. I don't
think anyplace has grown that quickly and
considerably. And when you think that there were
some remains of the Indians in the first place, then
the Spanish, then the great middle-class migrations
from the Middle West, and then the movies. Of
course the movies included a lot, not only the movie
532
stars but the set designers. Art Deco was so
important here. A lot of things changed their look
here. Clothes became very important, obviously. So
there was in a sense by mid-192 0 almost a little
mini-civilization growing there. Well, when you
think that a hundred and thirty or forty years
previously there was practically nothing, that’s
very quick. Plus after the Middle West thing, then
the movies started, then people were coming from all
over. You’ve got the great European influx as well.
Sometimes Los Angeles seems like a separate
country. People say all sorts of things about Los
Angeles. They say, it happens here first and the
rest of America catches up. Other people say the
famous Frank Lloyd Wright thing that it's like the
continent was tilted one way and all the nuts and
bolts slipped down. So when one's talking about LA
it's like talking about Monte Carlo inside a bigger
country and that there are certain things that are
almost specifically LA. I remember the first time I
came back here after I'd been away for a long time
and there was quite a bad recession which you never
felt here at all. It was like you cross a frontier
here and you're somewhere else. And its
recognizably American, of course, and yet there's
another element. There's this curious LA thing. If
you look at LA historically, what happened here
during the Depression, for example, was quite
different from the rest of the nation: they felt it
on the whole much less. And there was a lot of
building going on here in the Thirties when it was
going on nowhere else. They were starting these
great buildings Downtown and that fantastic Beverly
Hills Post Office. That's all out of the
Depression. I think LA still has it. There are
certain things that seem to be happening nowhere
else. I think Rodeo Drive is completely unique to
itself. This particular idea, this mad hysterical
idea of what is chic, what is in, suddenly one year
every restaurant is serving warm goat cheese and
arugala. That kind of thing. That's very LA.
That's uniquely LA. Next year it's all gone, as if
it never happened. Certain things in fashion are
the same way. It's a great place for fads.
533
As nearly all the chapters of this paper have
emphasized, life in Southern California seems to inspire
British novelists to write about death. And Lambert is
no exception. When asked why Los Angeles uniquely
conjures up death-imagery on the part of the British,
Lambert had an immediate reply and even showed its link
with the Southland's characteristic youth and health
fetishes,
Los Angeles is very death-conscious. I can't
remember any other city I know, and I know quite a
few, where there are so many ads for mortuaries,
even the ones on benches on busstops— they're
everywhere. I remember the very first time I went
to the MGM studios. I was absolutely struck by the
fact that right by the entrance is a little
mortuary. It is around. And such a thing is made
of it. The whole idea of Forest Lawn, and so on.
The LA attitude toward death is kind of special. I
think it's the supreme enemy, more than anyplace
else, perhaps. And I think it's not by accident
that the Huxley character in [After Many a Summer]
is trying to cheat death. This is the right place
to try and do that. I think that if the secret of
eternal life were discovered, it would be discovered
here. LA needs to believe that it can go on, and I
think it's rightly rather terrified of posterity.
Just as people tend to feel unreal when they
leave Los Angeles, I think the idea of death is very
threatening and unreal to them. It's somehow
against everything they've worked for. It's just
not been taken into account in the whole ethos of
the place.
I think the whole cult of youth probably
started here so that has a very obvious tie up with
the fear of death. [Because of the movies,] people
are very conscious of how they look, and there's
nothing more ruthless than the producer saying about
the star, 'Oh, she or he is over the hill.' . . .
The health orientation is all part of it, to keep on
534
looking good longer. It's not just a question of
living longer but looking younger longer.
The inevitable result is the emphasis on rejuvenation
rituals so characteristic of the city. "You hear of
husbands and wives having his and hers facelifts."
Such material is overwhelmingly attractive to
English writers, who have a tendency almost by nature
toward the satiric. Their natural inclination is to
stand back and observe, making comments in a wry manner;
whereas the American is much more likely to jump in
headfirst, then try something quite different the next
time, but maintaining an intense seriousness about each
endeavor. Lambert's commentary on this phenomenon
clarifies further distinctions between English and
American writers;
In general American authors are freer and more
prone to surprise you that English writers. I think
that's the difference. For instance, you have
someone like Mailer, who has a career, first of all,
as a novelist, and then suddenly astonishes you by
turning into this combination brilliant journalist-
actor-TV personality-whatever. You have Isherwood—
whom I now regard as an American novelist— who,
after the early works, suddenly produces something
to me very extraordinary and bitter and haunting: A
Single Man. . . . I don't find that with writers in
England nearly so much. What they do is what you
expect them to do. There, writers like Anthony
Powell go on writing endless sequels to books
they've been writing for twenty years.
It may be, also, simply that there's more to
write about here. The American experience is so
535
vast and complex and confusing that there's always
more of it to find out about and to explore. I know
that if I were living in England and were writing
novels about England, my big problem would be what
to write about. Here, for good and bad, you always
have a feeling of things happening. (I don't think
that what is happening is altogether as agreeable as
it used to be, but it's still happening.) When I
went back to Europe I noted that you could see this
difference by comparing English newspapers and
newspapers here. There's just more going on here.13
A decade ago Lambert made a study of Chandler's
work, along with that of several other mystery writers,
called The Dangerous Edge (1975). In that book Lambert
developed several of the historical motifs mentioned
above and suggests that the special partnership which
developed between wealth and illegality in Southern
California was uniquely rich terrain for a budding crime
novelist:
The outlook for such a partnership was grand-scale
and almost hallucinatory. Los Angeles had a major
Depression-proof industry, the movies, and movie
wealth lay superimposed on the older millions of
land and oil. As a background for the novelist it
was equally rich, although none had yet taken
advantage of it. A mainly immigrant accumulation of
people and power was occurring in a vast boom town
spread out between an ocean and a desert. A sense
of lonely space and prehistory haunted its machinery
of ambition and dreams. Authority and crime soon
interacted like movies and life, at the same
exorbitant pitch. 'This is a big town now,' Marlowe
says in The Big Sleep (1939). 'Some very tough
people have checked in here. The penalty of
13 L am b ert a s q u o t e d i n W e n n e r s t e n , p . 6 8 .
536
growth.' The full penalty of growth only became
apparent thirty-five years later, when the president
of the United States, born and educated in Los
Angeles County, resigned in order to evade multiple
criminal charges on which fifteen of his appointees
had already been indicted. 4
Chandler is the only one of the novelists in this
paper that Lambert has written about extensively? in
fact, this is the only case where one of the subjects has
made a study of another— interestingly, the last major
writer analyzing the work of the first. Although they
never actually met, Lambert readily admits:
I admire him very much. I think he's very
underrated. People tend to put him on one side as a
throwaway writer. That's nonsense. He1s a very
good novelist. He was the first in a big way to
cotton onto LA. It's the first real body of work
about LA. Well, I don't think I was consciously
influenced by him, but then I remember rereading him
when I was doing The Dangerous Edge, which was after
I'd written several novels, and I thought, 'Oh, God,
yes. How right he was!' And how I felt that too.
Not only is Lambert exceedingly astute on issues
pertaining to the mystery genre, but, more to the point
here, he is keenly aware of Chandler's own interaction
with Los Angeles and the nuances implicit in his use of
Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge (London:
Barrie and Jenkins, 1975), p. 214. All further
references to this work appear in the text in parentheses
as TDE.
537
certain Southern California material. Of Chandler's
early writing for Black Mask, Lambert comments:
It released the imagination of a private diffident
exile, on the threshold of middle age, who sought
the protection of women much older than himself.
The man without a country suddenly embraced a
fiercely alien country, full of youth and danger and
brutality. But the outsider often reacts more
sharply and deviously to many things that the native
son takes for granted. Chandler's decision to
settle in Los Angeles coincided with the rise of
organized crime in the United States (TDE, 213).
These early stories, just like Lambert's own, cut out the
territory he was later to develop in his novels:
Like a sketchbook of Los Angeles, they contrast
sleazy beach cities or downtown areas with rich
exotic houses in remote foothills, they indicate the
haunting presence of desert and ocean and power
behind the scenes (TDE, 217).
His success Lambert attributes in part to the fact that
"Chandler's primal remoteness from Los Angeles allowed
him to look at it in a way no one had done before" (TDE,
218) .
The reader who cares to read between the lines might
sense some projections of Lambert's own feelings about
himself and the city as he writes about Chandler.
Whereas Chandler's milieu was crime, Lambert's is
Hollywood, the beach and canyon drifters, and at times
the middle-class drug culture. What Lambert says of
538
Marlowe's world is equally true of that of his own books,
no matter how glamorous the facade and subject matter:
"However extravagant the surface, there is always
something alarmingly ordinary beneath it" (TDE, 215).
As the analysis of the specific novels will show,
Lambert frequently speaks through an American narrator,
and in the instances where a British character tells the
story, the reader is generally told very little about his
previous life. For this reason it is especially
interesting that Lambert says,
Like Chandler, Marlowe communicates only fragmented
details of his background . . . and feels
emotionally exiled from it. All the years of his
pre-Los Angeles past seem to belong to another
person. Asked why Marlowe came to southern [no
cap.] California, Chandler said only that
'eventually most people do, though not all of them
remain.' (TDE, 214)
In addition, Chandler, Lambert notes, was well-aware that
in giving Marlowe a "lively sense of the grotesque" as
well as a "rude wit" (TDE, 226) he was making him
uniquely qualified to cope with and fully respond to the
Los Angeles scene. Just as Lambert's protagonists are
often more naive or at least honest in their approaches
to life in Los Angeles, Marlowe is different from those
he interacts with in Southern California: "Honesty
isolates him from a great many people, policemen and
539
lawyers and public officials as well as mobsters, and
from the prospect of making much money" (TDE, 215).
Power politics and the lust for money often so blatantly
out-in-the-open in Los Angeles seem to be particularly
repugnant to the British. Lambert commends Chandler's
portrayal of that side of life:
His restless expanding southern California community
interacts with the sexual and success fantasies of
the movies, creating a pre-Watergate movement
towards profit and power as politicians and lawyers
and police chiefs combine with gangsters in
organizations of crime (TDE, 2 67).
Lambert is sympathetic with what he regards as Chandler's
intentions: "In general Chandler seems to have found the
Hollywood experience wasteful and depleting. . . . The
over-emphasis . . . on Marlowe's 'honour' reflects
Chandler's feeling that Hollywood had betrayed him" (TDE,
225-6). However, when Lambert mentions that "it seems
probable that Chandler, like many exceptionally gifted
novelists, disliked the collaborative process" (TDE,
22 6), he is certainly not speaking of himself. For, as
the following pages will illustrate, Inside Daisy
Clover— both in its novel and film versions— was for
Lambert a mostly-satisfying product of the Hollywood
"collaborative process" between scriptwriters, producers,
540
directors and actors called for in the creation of a good
film.
Lambert is similar to Chandler, but unlike all the
other subjects of this study, in that he did not achieve
notoriety as a fiction writer until after he came to Los
Angeles. When he arrived, he had "the reputation as the
best of the English film critics,after which he
established himself as a screenwriter, and thereafter had
time to concentrate on what he had always expected would
be his real career— fiction writing. When it came to
writing about Los Angeles, Lambert could not limit
himself to the role of the satirist. It seems that the
place charmed him too much and supported him too well.
Speaking of the city, he says,
I found humor in it, I found irony in it, but not
only that. I wanted to do more than that. I was
aware of the humorous side and I was aware of the
ironic things, but, no, I didn't want to simply
confine myself to that.
II
In many respects a prologue to Lambert's entire
oeuvre, his first book of fiction was The Slide Area,
published in 1959, and subtitled Scenes of Hollywood
Life. One of the ironies about it is that, despite the
^ W e n n e r s t e n , p . 6 5 .
541
subtitle, this work has rather less to do with Hollywood
than all except one of the later works. A recent
resident and an employee of the gargantuan film
corporations seems to have perceived Hollywood as
incorporating nearly all of Los Angeles. In fact,
Lambert's major preoccupation in The Slide Area is his
attempt to capture, in a generalized way, the sense of
the place and its inhabitants. As a prologue or overture
to all five of the Lambert novels of Los Angeles, The
Slide Area sets the tone, elaborates the landscape more
than any other, introduces the types of people, and
establishes the themes to be developed in all the
subsequent novels. Perhaps after Inside Daisy Clover,
the next novel, the entire roadmap for Lambert's journey
through Los Angeles is laid out, and the rest can be seen
as elaboration of particular elements that have already
been sketched-out earlier.
The form The Slide Area takes is significant in a
number of respects. Rather than being a novel, it is
r
more a series of essay portraits and perspectives on Los
Angeles. When asked whether he had deliberately used
Isherwood's "camera eye" technique with its resulting
vignettes, Lambert was quick to affirm:
542
I chose that form because I thought, 'I don't have a
grand idea. All I'm ready to deal with at this
moment are these linked lives.' So I purposely kept
it in that form. The model of course was The Berlin
Stories, because I felt, 'I don't have a novel as
such.1
Like Isherwood's narrator, Lambert's observer speaks in
the first person and is clearly of British origin. But
unlike the earlier model, he is always the chronicler and
never emotionally involved, though he is always
sympathetic. In fact he is never named. Lambert admits
that this was his attempt to avoid the complications
involved in giving his character a name different from
his own while at the same the figure is clearly very like
the author himself. Whereas Isherwood was comfortable
with the character of Christopher Isherwood in his
novels, Lambert feels that he wants the freedom of
invention an unnamed narrator allows.
Because the issue of narrative personality is so
ephemeral in The Slide Area and the book is composed of a
set of episodes in a wide variety of people's lives with
no common plot threads to bind them, the location where
it all takes place— Los Angeles— looms as the dominant
figure in the work. This happens not by default, but
because of the excellence of Lambert's apprehension and
543
portrayal of place. Attesting to this quality, Digby
Diehl, writing in the Los Angeles Times Calendar, says:
It is Lambert's 'sense of place,' his writer's
awareness of physical landscape merged with mental
landscape, which impresses me. There is never any
doubt that the characters and events— like those in
Durrell's Alexandria or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
County or O'Hara's Philadelphia— emerge as
unmistakable products of the environment of Malibu,
Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica and Hollywood.16
An opening note explains that events in the book
occur over a several month period and that some take
place simultaneously, so the reader should "not be
surprised if a character who dies or disappears at the
end of one section turns up again in part of another
one." In the first section, fittingly titled "The Slide
Area," the narrator, a screenwriter who is hoping to get
time to start on the novel he plans to write, leaves his
studio office and, like Jeremy Pordage at the beginning
of After Many A Summer Dies the Swan, drives through the
city. But whereas Jeremy is the stranger experiencing
his first startling views of the environment, this
narrator has eventually come to understand it, if not to
make sense of it. His description combines the first
1 Digby Diehl, "New Lease on Life for Lambert
Novel," Los Angeles Times Calendar, 9 April 1972, p. 49.
Files of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Library, Beverly Hills.
544
impressions of the newcomer— just as Isherwood's "Los
Angeles" essay does— with the subsequent knowledge of the
initiated. Although he offers an overall view of the
city, he is still not as comfortable with it as
Chandler's Marlowe is, and the narrative has something of
a satirical tone to it. Lambert sets the scene in a car,
and anyone familiar with Los Angeles can almost plot the
routes his narrator takes:
It is only a few miles' drive to the ocean, but
before reaching it I shall be nowhere. Hard to
describe the impression of unreality, because it is
intangible; almost supernatural; something in the
air. (. . . Like everything else the air must be
imported and displaced, like the water driven along
huge aqueducts from distant reservoirs, like the
palm trees tilting above mortuary signs and
laundromats along Sunset Boulevard.) Nothing
belongs. Nothing belongs except the desert soil and
the gruff eroded-looking mountains to the north.
Because the earth is desert, its surface always has
that terrible dusty brilliance. Sometimes it looks
like the Riviera with a film of neglect over villas
and gardens, a veil of fine invisible sand drawn
across tropical colours. It is hard to be reminded
of any single thing for long. The houses are real
because they exist and people use them for eating
and sleeping and making love, but they have no style
of their own and look as if they've been imported
from half a dozen’different countries. They are
imitation 'French Provincial' or 'new ' Regency or
Tudor or Spanish hacienda or Cape Cod, and except
for a few crazy mansions seem to have sprung up
overnight. The first settlers will be arriving
tomorrow from parts unknown.
Los Angeles is not a city, but a series of
suburban approaches to a city that never
materializes. The noisy populous down-town section
with its mixture of Americans and Mexicans, Negroes
and Orientals, its glass and concrete new structures
545
jostling fragile wooden slums, its heavy police
force and ugly untidy look of sudden industrial
growth, is a little like Casablanca. The older
parts are exotic but tired, collapsing under the
sleek thrust of commerce. . . . There are oil
derricks and power plants massed like geometrical
forests, and a thin bitter smoke hangs in the air on
a windless day.
No settlement can ever have grown more
wastefully and swiftly. . . . Now Los Angeles is a
welter of nearly five hundred square miles and four
million people making aeroplanes and pumping oil,
assembling automobiles and movies, processing food
and petroleum, building quick frame-houses that you
can see being drawn along the streets at night by a
truck and placed on a vacant lot like scenery for a
movie set.
Along the main boulevards, between the office
blocks, plots of untouched land are still for sale.
On one of the plots, not long ago, the skeleton of a
prehistoric animal was excavated. In the paleozoic
past, before the land dried and crusted into desert,
this was a quagmire under a hot sun, sloths and
mastodons were trapped and dying there. Now the
last victim has gone, the grave is cleared and the
offices of a great insurance company can go up.
How to grasp something unfinished yet always
remodeling itself, changing without a basis for
change? So much invisible impatience to be born, to
grow, such wild tracts of space to be filled:
difficult to settle in a comfortable unfinished
desert. Because of the long confusing distances,
the streets are empty of walking people, full of
moving cars. Between where you are and where you
are going to be is a no-man's-land. At night the
neon lights glitter and the shop windows are lighted
stages, but hardly anyone stops to look. A few
people huddle at coffee stalls and hamburger bars.
Those dark flat areas are parking lots, crammed
solid. . . .
The ocean appears suddenly. You turn another
hairpin bend and the land falls away and there is a
long high view down Santa Monica Canyon to the pale
Pacific waters. A clear day is not often. . . . The
Pacific is a sad blue-grey, and nearly always looks
cold.
Each time I drive down here it feels like the
end of the world. The geographical end. Shabby and
546
uncared for, buildings lie around like nomads' tents
in the desert. There is nowhere further to go,
those pale waters stretch away to the blurred
horizon and stretch away beyond it. There is no
more land ever.
High lurching cliffs confront the ocean, and
are just beginning to fall apart. Signs have been
posted along the highway, DRIVE CAREFULLY and SLIDE
AREA. Lumps of earth and stone fall down. The land
is restless here, restless and sliding.
This land just adjacent to the ocean gives its name
to the work, for here even the earth that supports life
itself is unstable. Indeed, the landscape is analogous
to human life. And the metaphor which develops for the
city comes from this stretch of land above Pacific Coast
Highway, from Santa Monica northward, which is
particularly prone to produce landslides with no apparent
warning. On this particular day, three old ladies who
have set up a picnic on the bluffs above, suddenly slide,
picnic table and all, down to the highway below.
"Absolutely silent at first, the ground beneath them
disappeared. The slide meant for a moment that there was
no ground at all, it ceased to exist" (TSA, 18). These
women survive the slide without a scratch, and in fact
seemed effected by the accident. Similarly, at another
17 Gavin Lambert, The Slide Area: Scenes of
Hollywood Life (New York: Viking, 1959; rpt. New York:
Dial, 1968), pp. 14-17. All further references to this
work appear in the text in parentheses as TSA.
547
spot below a posted SLIDE AREA, beaches are full of
unaffected bathers, either totally oblivious to or at
least unconcerned about the hazard looming above them.
Yet for the narrator the threat is always there— the
sense of imminent apocalypse ("It looked more than ever
like the end of the world" TSA, 35). So, behavior which
might be odd elsewhere is somehow appropriate here. This
is life on the edge of the world as Lambert portrays it.
Sometimes he paints it gently, with tender strokes, as in
the opening section of the final chapter of the book,
"News from the Slide Area," where he evokes the
atmosphere of a fading summer in Southern California:
Summer is always reluctant to go. Sometimes it
makes a false departure and comes back for
Christmas. For a few weeks now, signs have presaged
the end. One night it rains gently. A wind from
the ocean swiftly wraps a sparkling afternoon in
fog. Electric storms break out over the desert at
night, salvoes of thunder are heard and prongs of
lightning flash like exclamations in the sky. Every
day at the beach, the young lifeguards sit in their
towers. By the end of summer they are deeply
tanned, yet somehow autumn creeps into their eyes.
Each time they scan the ocean with its swimmers
waiting for surf to ride, it seems like a last
glance before saying good-bye (TSA, 211)
Later on in the chapter, the final words of the book more
boldly reinforce the sense of imminent apocalypse. It is
autumn, and at sunset the narrator drives out along the
coast highway past the WATCH FOR ROCKS signs to the slide
548
area. He stops to question a pipe-smoking engineer
brought in to consult with city officials about the
situation:
'I guess you could call the last one a little
serious.1 He puffed at his pipe. 'Quite a bit of
land fell away that time. Took quite a few houses
with it.'
'People, too.'
'Sure. People, too.'
'Shouldn't something be done?'
'We need more information.' . . .
'You mean, wait for the same thing to happen
again?'
'So what else can you do?' The engineer
shrugged. 'Make a big project out of it and spend a
lot of money? Scare a lot of people and take their
business away? It's hot worth it. Time's on our
side.' He gave a reassuring nod. 'Maybe the
foundations are shaky, maybe we'll have another
slide after the rains next year, but it's a slow,
easy process. It'll take years and years before you
notice a real difference.'
'A few houses more or less don't really
matter,' I said.
Well, that's not exactly the way I'd put it.'
He shrugged again. 'You know what I think? People
should be a little careful and not live too near the
edge, that's all.' (TSA, 223)
Who are the inhabitants that Lambert choses to
populate his slide area with? Most all are "near the
edge" in some way. Mark Cusden, the ultimate sun-
worshipper, though once an English public school boy, now
frankly admits that "the sun's the only thing that
matters," and asks the narrator, "I don't understand how
you can come and go here as you please. . . . Doesn't the
549
sun mean anything to you?" A post-World War II
Englishman, Mark feels that as long as life as
essentially meaningless, he might as well spend his time
lying in the sun; in effect, escaping into the sun:
I'm nearly thirty and I've spent all but a few
months of my life in England. It was all a
waste. . . . Everyone there's so pale. Almost grey.
They go off to the south of France or somewhere for
three weeks and look wonderfully tanned when they
come back, but it doesn't last. A month later
they're pale and grey again and it's another long
winter. . . . The idea of a pale body disgusts me
now, I couldn't touch one. . . . I'll tell you
another thing. . . . If your life is meaningless and
you feel vaguely ashamed but you don't see a way
out, you should lie in the sun. It makes you forget
things. If you've had an operation and it's left a
bad scar, the doctor usually advises you to lie in
the sun. It helps the scar to heal (TSA, 37-8).
His words characterize the feelings of an entire group of
Southern Californians— the beach people. "I think we
recognize each other instinctively, not just because
we're so tanned, but there's something relaxed about
people like us" (TSA, 40). And, as far as this book is
concerned, beach people of the purest form are jobless
and, after the sun is down, are inevitably scrounging for
money. The justifications Mark offers are typical:
Nothing's good unless you're free . . . to lie on
the beach. [Reading a book or talking with someone
at the beach] . . . is not worth it. Gets in the
way [of] just being there. . . . I've kept my
independence in spite of them all. And yet . . .
550
There's something missing now. . . . I feel a bit
lost, except when I'm out in the sun. Then I'm warm
through and through and it's like being on an
island. I can glow and dream, and nothing touches
me. . . . If I did anything, I'd lose it all (TSA,
41, 49).
But the ephemeral nature of such lives and relationships
is captured by the words left written in the sand at the
end of the day:
When the sun cools and everyone leaves the beach,
only messages remain. Often there are dozens of
them traced with a stick or a finger in the
sand. . . . JIMMY LOVES ELLA. And a little further
away, MY NAME IS GRIFFIN. . . .I'M MAD ABOUT BOB,
JOHNNY WAITED HERE and OH BILL I WANT TO MAKE YOU
and a dead gull. All this will be washed away
tomorrow (TSA, 21).
Just as Los Angeles attracts British-born sun
worshippers, it appeals to aging European aristocrats.
The Countess Marguerite Osterberg-Steblechi, widow of a
distinguished European banker, is rather like Waugh's
figures who come to Los Angeles to die when they are no
good for anything else. Fittingly, her chapter is
entitled "The End of the Line." At first she attempts to
create a salon, but is not particularly effective. Most
of her guests are interior designers trying to buy her
antiques. Her whole house and garden, in fact, are
emblematic of her vacant life. In her area of the
Hollywood hills,
5 51
Stateliness hangs in the air. Most of the houses
are large, but you have the impression half their
rooms are closed now, furniture draped with old
sheets and blinds pulled down. . . . A door in the
patio wall leads to an neglected garden, the ground
slopes down to a swimming pool shaped like a half
moon. There are usually a few hundred eucalyptus
leaves floating on the water, and a faint sour-sweet
perfume haunts the air. A chipped stone cupid with
a broken arrow presides over the deep end (TSA,
55-6).
Here again is one of the recurring symbols in the British
novel in Los Angeles— the awful swimming pool. This one
is long past its prime and neglected, just like the lady
of the house. Houses in Lambert’s Los Angeles works tend
to be lonely places, generally inhabited by rather
isolated people or by groups of strangers very casually
attached to one another.
Most of the business of the Countess's episode
concerns her nieces' efforts to keep her from squandering
on ceaseless travel what little is left for them to
inherit. Instead, making almost the equivalent of a
studio stage set, they transform her house in such a way
that the blind and almost deaf old woman believes that
she is traveling abroad. They have a railway carriage,
three record players, a wind machine, and quite a bit of
ingenuity. When the dowager finally dies, the nieces,
true to form, insist on a relatively inexpensive funeral.
552
But some of Lambert1s description could be included as
addenda to The Loved One:
On the morning of the funeral, Mrs. Leota
Sperling from Boomtower Mortuaries calls to advise
on costume and makeup. . . . The outside of the
Chapel is calm and secular, it looks like a
residential hotel. In a sense, I suppose it
is. . . .On one side of the Chapel is a laundromat,
on the other a restaurant.
Inside it is cool. Attendants lay the Countess
in an air-conditioned Slumber Room. It looks like
any living-room in a comfortable Californian house,
with a corpse on the couch.
There are armchairs with restful patterns,
soothing lights and flower paintings on the wall.
Music comes from a concealed loudspeaker like sweet
religious scent. . . . Standing by the Countess with
her painted cheeks and splendid gown, I can only
think there is something horribly fitting about this
final pretense of many pretenses. The last journey
is the only real one, yet more fantastic than the
Countess imagined (TSA, 88-9).
The nearly impossible distinction between reality
and illusion in Los Angeles, as Lambert has suggested
above, is illustrated in a number of ways in his book.
It opens with that frequent image of Hollywood novels:
the "artist" working at a studio and looking out at the
unreality which passes for reality on the shooting stages
outside. In attempting to understand the differences he
feels, the narrator postulates,
I suppose that Europeans, accustomed to a world that
changes more calmly and slowly, are not much
interested any more in imitating its surface. It
becomes more exciting to see appearances as a mask,
553
a disguise or illusion that conceals an unexpected
meaning. The theme of illusion and reality is very
common in Europe. In America, illusion and reality
are still often the same thing. The dream is the
achievement, the achievement is the dream (TSA, 17).
Seasons with their appropriate holiday celebrations
cause perhaps the most confusion for the newcomer to
Southern California. Christmas as it appears in the
Southland still shocks the narrator. For him, the
English version is real; that of Los Angeles is absurd
illusion. Indeed, the same falsity that reigns in the
funeral parlor carries over to the Los Angeles streets at
Christmastime:
Two days before Christmas it is impossible to
believe in Christmas, with a light summer haze in
the air and blue unbroken sky over my head. Down at
Santa Monica the beaches are still full, while
artificial Christmas trees flank Hollywood Boulevard
ten feet high, like white cardboard cut-outs.
Icicles resist the sun, snow is paint, baby pines
dyed pink, white and blue are ranged on vacant lots
and look as if they're made of sugar. Coloured
lights weave in and out of the hot dusty palms.
Waiting to buy a bottle of whisky at a liquor
store, I listened to a man and his wife arguing with
each other whether they wanted bourbon or vodka with
a musical box attached. When you lifted it up the
bourbon played Away in a Manger the vodka Oh Come
All Ye Faithful.
'I've been looking for Good King Wenceslas
everywhere,' said an English voice behind me. 'Do
you think it only comes with cream sherry?'
I turned and saw Mark Cusden (TSA, 2 9-30).
554
The two had last met outside the chapel of the English
public school they attended together. At that time the
other boys were singing real though boring religious
songs inside. Quite a contrast to the singing Christmas
liquor bottles in sunny California.
Until Running Time, which is entirely about the life
of a Hollywood star, Julie Forbes of The Slide Area is
the preeminent actress of the Lambert oeuvre. She
follows pretty much to type, for she is an enormously
successful and a very determined, cold-hearted lady. The
narrator finds her such an insubstantial person that he
extends a mortuary analogy to absurdity in order to
explain her:
I thought of a joke about the mortuaries in
California; they supply human ashes to the cannibals
in the South Seas, who make them flesh by adding
water. Instant people, like instant coffee. Julie
Forbes, I decided, was an instant person. That must
be her secret. Every few years she was reduced to
ashes, then reconstituted in a new form. Different.
Shining. Instant (TSA, 98).
Lambert is especially fascinated by the "secret
rejuvenation courses" that wealthy Hollywood ladies
undergo, and he speaks of their $2,000 price tag and
that, after ten days in seclusion, some of them emerge
"not always recognized by their closest friends" (TSA,
92). Looking young involves the body too, and Julie puts
555
on the outfit— she has kept it in a window-case display
in her house— that she wore when she had her first big
break thirty years earlier: "I wore this in nineteen
twenty-seven. . . . You'll notice it's still a perfect
fit" (TSA, 140). Valiant though her efforts are against
demon Time, Julie is sitting alone on the set after a
post-picture party when the narrator interrupts her:
A curious thing happened. It seemed to me that
the light went out of her eyes. They became like
empty lakes. 'I feel that I'm in the middle of a
purposeless, hostile universe. . . . Isn't that
strange?' Her eyes grew bright again. She got up,
yawned, and stretched her arms.
'Well, maybe,' I said, 'maybe you are.' (TSA,
143)
The issue of money vs. artistic integrity arises
when Julie arranges to hire an "artistic" director and
then attempts to manipulate everything not only about him
but also about the picture. Though he agrees to do the
film, Cliff Harriston knows, like Paul in Hilton's
Morning Journey, that he has sold himself. "Behind
anything he said was always an implied contempt for
Julie's films and Julie's talent. . . . 'My only real
problem . . . is Hollywood. If I can get out of this
place, I'll be all right.'"(TSA, 106, 110) When things
get especially tight for Cliff, he says to the narrator,
556
I took off in the car, drove down to the ocean, then
along the highway, turned into the mountains, said
to myself all the way— trees. Look, the ocean.
Sky. They're still here, why aren't you? (TSA,
134-5)
Driving is a method many Lambert characters use to get
off alone in Southern California, to attempt to get a
perspective on their problems. The narrator, who is both
a friend and scriptwriter for Cliff, says about him:
In the end, with a taste for self-punishment that
was sometimes theatrical, sometimes despairingly
real, he always seemed to trap himself. To earn
money, he had to make 'bad pictures'; as soon as he
earned it, he spent it, and the struggle started
over again (TSA, 111).
But they dream on; Cliff and the narrator "hoped to work
together, one day, on a film we really wanted to do"
(TSA, 113).
Though a number of his characters in the novels
struggle with the problem of money vs. personal or
artistic integrity, and a number of the earlier British
novelists had such difficulties when they came to Los
Angeles and began making vast sums of money, Lambert
doesn't seem to have experienced the problem:
I enjoyed screenwriting for many reasons. I
enjoyed it in itself. I obviously enjoyed it
because it was well-paid. It was also very good
when one didn't have any idea of a novel or a novel
in progress, to be writing to keep your hand in. I
557
liked it for that reason because I like to keep on
working.
I never found it any threat to my integrity, in
the sense that I don't see just because one is paid
a lot that it's necessarily being corrupted. If
they want to pay you, fine; and I don't think many
serious writers can really write trash. And if we
could, we would all make much more money at it.
Actually, what we do is to try to do our best within
the system. I've always been quite realistic about
it. I've known that you could only go so far, that
you're supposed to be appealing to a much larger
audience than you are usually in your novels; there
you are restricted in certain ways. But then why
not work as well as you can within that?
Several other elements and character types that
appear first in The Slide Area recur in subsequent
Lambert novels. Clyde Wallace is the handsome, rich
playboy-son of a highly successful, influential Hollywood
agent. He is "the man on the edge," bored and burned-out
about life, not unlike Paul in Isherwood's Down There on
a Visit. Clyde is the man who toys with throwing himself
off the Malibu pier;
'You know how I feel? Like this pier. I mean, look
at this great ocean. It's always there, isn't it?
It doesn't feel, the ocean doesn't know anything,
but it's great and big and blind, and it lasts for
ever. Look at this pier, this stupid little pier
sticking out in this great ocean!' He beat the
railing again. 'It isn't even steady, it hasn't got
a chance.' (TSA, 2 04)
Then there is Emma Slack, the fourteen-year-old
runaway from Galena, Illinois, who just wants to "get-in-
558
the-movies" (147) with "a kind of fanaticism . . . [that]
made her really helpless. In a city full of dreamers,
she clung with such fierceness to an obviously fragile
dream." The narrator finds her "naively heartbreaking,"
and frankly concedes, "She struck me as about the most
impermanent person I could imagine in the world" (TSA,
154)— quite a statement from a man who keeps finding
impermanence a major characteristic of Los Angeles. One
day while on the back lot with the narrator, Emma notices
a set and stops, transfixed,
It's exactly like Galena. . . . Well, just for a
moment I really thought I was back in Galena again.
It came as a shock, after running away two thousand
miles! . . . It's a funny feeling . . . finding
yourself back where you came from (TSA, 172).
By the end of her section of the book, she has become a
star of sorts: she appears in a series of monster films,
but the still-fragile dream is shattered finally when she
makes the following realization:
Although I've got in the movies now, nobody cares.
I thought, once I get in, that's it! But I've been
to see my monster picture five times, and I listen
to what people say when they come out, and they
never talk about me. Only about the monsters (TSA,
220) .
Though much of Emma's spunk one notices later in the
character of Daisy Clover, Lambert radically changes the
559
latter youngster's motivation: Daisy just wants to sing
(Inside Daisy Clover, 23), and is relatively uneffected
by the movie star aspect of her career.
Several characteristics common to Lambert's novels
appear in this first work. One of the ways he subtly
keeps the unsettled quality of life in Southern
California forever in his readers' minds is by writing
substantially in the present tense. Only some narrative
used to fill in background exposition is presented in the
past tense, so the overall effect is to keep both
narrator, characters, and reader "on the edge."
Seemingly, nobody knows what is going to happen. This
stylistic mode is true of all the Lambert Los Angeles
novels.
A Lambert procedure worth noting that begins with
The Slide Area is the inclusion of various characters who
will reappear in subsequent novels, either in major or
minor roles. Mark Cusden, for example, meets Dora Poley
in A Case for the Angels; Daisy Clover sings at Julie
Forbes's house. When asked about this characteristic,
Lambert explains,
I remember thinking very early on when I wanted to
write novels about this place that really you have
to be in some way a kind of Balzac. There are so
many levels and there is so much happening. It's a
bit like all the people coming to Los Angeles [are]
560
like all the people trying to make their fortunes in
Balzac's Paris. . . . [The repeated use of certain
characters] was my Balzac. [After A Case for the
Angels, though,] they didn't seem to fit in.
The spectrum of economic and residential levels in
Lambert novels of Los Angeles is quite astonishing. The
Slide Area alone includes runaway Emma Slack, beach
drifter Mark Cusden, as well as the enormously successful
and very rich Julie Forbes. Elva Kay of Running Time
combines the two perspectives in her own lifetime; she
achieves the American Dream by going from poverty (as a
nearly penniless widow, she brings her young daughter to
Los Angeles by train) to riches (at the time of her
death, she heads a multi-million dollar enterprise that
she created all on her own initiative).
Lambert characteristically employs the first person
point of view. In The Slide Area and The Goodhy People,
his narrator is an unnamed male English-born
screenwriter, and these two works are the least
"connected" or linear of his Los Angeles fiction. But in
Inside Daisy Clover, A Case for the Angels, and Running
Time, he has real protagonist-narrators who tell
relatively linear stories, and each one is a woman. Only
one of them, Dora Poley in A Case for the Angels, is
English. As Lambert himself moved toward his own
5 6 1
decision to become a naturalized American citizen (which
took place in 19 64), he was brave enough to take on the
voice of an American woman— and a young one at that.
Although Inside Daisy Clover represented quite a
change of voice for Lambert, the material seemed to
dictate the shift. His initial concept was to have "a
washed-up teenage movie star living on the East Coast,"
and then later he knew that "it had to be told by her."
After much reflection and some discussion with the man
who would later make the movie, Alan Pakula, Lambert
realized that "what I thought was my beginning was the
end almost." But the decision to retain Daisy's first-
person narration remained. "When I started to write that
way, after the false start, I was somehow 'visited.'
Because the moment I started that way it worked."
For Daisy, Los Angeles is reality. She is the first
protagonist in any of the novels in this research to feel
utterly comfortable in Los Angeles, to regard it as
normal (the standard of comparison) and judge, respond
to, or measure everywhere else accordingly. It is
curious that Inside Daisy Clover begins exactly where The
Slide Area left off— near the sewage disposal plant in
Playa del Rey (the same one Huxley focuses on in Ape and
Essence). This time there is nothing "odd" about the
562
area or its surroundings, however, for Daisy sees this
dingy beach area— the seedier parts of Playa del Rey,
Hermosa Beach, Venice, Santa Monica in the Fifties— as
"home," and compares every place else in the book with
this place of origin. She loves it with all its foibles
just like she loves her mother, The Dealer. Even though
the rest of the world thinks of her as crazy and/or
incompetent, Daisy makes sense out of The Dealer's
seemingly incoherent responses— she nods when she means
no, and shakes her head when she means yes— just as Daisy
sees her home territory in an integrated way, as a
constellation of images and functions fused with meaning.
In the latter part of the novel Daisy hears carousel
music in Central Park and makes all the connections:
Carousel music drifted faintly in my direction, and
of course reminded me of the old pier at Santa
Monica. I caught myself sniffing for a whiff of
salt on the breeze, even straining my ears to catch
a thud of surf. A pretty ridiculous thing to do
while you're at the zoo in Central Park.
This old Venice pier is Daisy's favorite place,
especially the booth where for twenty-five cents anyone
can make a voice recording. As a fourteen year old, she
18 G a v in L a m b e r t, Inside Daisy Clover (New Y ork:
V i k i n g , 1 9 6 3 ) , p. 212. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s t o t h i s
w ork a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t i n p a r e n t h e s e s a s IDC.
563
spends all her money singing her heart out in this spot,
presided over by the man she refers to as Twitcher. This
booth becomes, in effect, the womb wherein her new life
is conceived, for her career begins when she submits one
of the recordings she has made to a Magnagram studio
competition. Later, after her incredible success,
whenever she begins to sing on the soundstage,
As far as I'm concerned, this whole enormous barn
shrivels right up and I'm back in that booth and can
just hear the sound of the ocean. . . . For some
reason Twitcher's face comes back to me, . . . and
even the smell of seaweed and fog, it's all I can do
not to stand up in front of everyone and myself and
split my guts laughing. (IDC, 3 3,70).
It is just this attitude that makes Daisy so likable.
Though she gains amazing prominence, she never takes her
situation terribly seriously, and thereby Lambert writes
one of the most appealing of Hollywood novels. Daisy is
never impressed with herself or the power of those, like
the Swans, who attempt to mold her to their needs. Her
standard of comparison is the rundown beach community she
knows, and it keeps coming back to her— as the madeleines
do for Proust's Swann— to remind her of her origins.
The beach landscape tends to reflect her life. On
her fourteenth birthday, she feels especially neglected
564
and goes down to the beach and senses that she is being
followed by a sex maniac:
The beach was all gray sand and silence like a
desert on the edge of an ocean, no one in sight,
rows of empty lifeguards' towers stretching away, a
bad smell of fog, tar, and seaweed. She was alone
with the elements and a maniac, and it was her
birthday, but she felt surprisingly relaxed and
calm. She took off her sneakers and paddled in the
water. Chilly, not too clean, but she acted as if
it was a beautiful summer's day. She turned her
face to the sky, making believe there was sun
instead of fog and cloud (IDC, 17).
This is Daisy the survivor, and the scene is emblematic
of how she makes the best of things. Just a bit later,
when she feels that her life is rather in a muddle, the
fog predominates at the beach:
The tram back to Santa Monica was full of old people
not talking, and fog was spilling over everything
like a stain. Only the chess players were out, and
a dog and two women with rods and baskets, going to
the pier to fish. Daisy walked up to Palisades
Park, the really elegant section with trees and beds
of flowers laid out, and a path along the edge of
the cliff [those same cliffs that fell in The Slide
Area]. There was no one around except an old lady
painting. She saw Daisy, sniffed the fog, and
called out in a very British accent, 'Lovely dayi'
Daisy didn't answer but walked on and sat down under
a palm tree. She had no idea what to do (IDC,
17-18).
When her popularity at the studio is soaring and she is
beginning to lose touch with herself, she takes off for
the beach:
565
It's cold and the beach is empty. . . . What is
Daisy Clover, child star, doing in an empty
lifeguard's tower on her sixteenth birthday?
I only know she suddenly walked out of the
house, told Gloria [her sister and guardian] she
wouldn't be back for lunch, and took a cab all the
way down to the old pier at Venice. . . . Nothing
was changed, even the people seemed the same, until
she came to Twitcher's booth. It was a hall of
distorting mirrors now, and when she went inside she
saw herself twelve feel tall, as if she'd been run
over and flattened out. She made horrible faces at
herself. . . . She was alone with the long line of
her footprints in the sand. . . . The sun flickered
through and made that closed-up lifeguard's tower
very white and mysterious. . . . She could stand
looking at the huge sulky ocean. It suited her
mood, the way it always did. She felt marvelously
cut off from everything and quite depressed
too. . . . The wind had swept everything clear and
the horizon seemed at least a million waves away.
It occurred to her that she was trying to find out
how it felt to live in a tower {IDC, 131-2).
Again the beach mirrors her moods and provides a
centering element in Daisy's life. Later on, when she
feels crazy after The Dealer's death, the beach landscape
again becomes a reflection of her life:
Well she certainly wasn't going to let that kind of
thing happen [people say she was crazy]. Even
though the cliffs were getting TALLER and the ocean
DEEPER every minute, she felt completely trapped
between land and water, she'd sit it out. She gave
those clouds a dirty look, and it worked, they
backed up at once. She decided not to drink any
more, and threw the flask into the ocean (IDC, 196).
Even though she has the breakdown, when she finally
starts to come around, almost her first words are, "I've
5 6 6
been thinking about Playa del Rey. It's pretty restful
there!" (IDC, 203)
The reverse is also true for Daisy. Places that
aren't Los Angeles seem strange to her. She can't
understand their appeal, has no standards by which to
judge them, and actually feels disoriented. Her
honeymoon trip with Wade is her first foray outside the
greater Los Angeles area, and it bewilders her. They
drive off right after the wedding:
I said a honeymoon in Playa del Rey would be okay by
me. . . .1 was a bride after sixteen years and nine
months on my first trip outside California. Wade
looked the same, but everything else was certainly
different. It was still a kind of desert, dry and
rocky, more scraggly trees and cactus, and no one
around as far as you could see. . . . The country
was definitely wild. It really looked as dead as
the moon. I couldn't believe the size of it
either. . . . 'Jesus, where is everybody?' I asked.
'Where are the Indians?' He laughed and told me we
hadn't reached Indian country yet. 'Why are we
going there, anyway? Maybe I won't like it!'. . .
'It'll wipe out everything back there, dear heart,
all the contracts and close-ups and pools and
premieres. It's beautiful and appalling, and
there'll be absolutely no one we know. . . . Doesn't
that appeal to you?' 'I'm not sure.' 'You really
like it back there. It's your town, as they say.'
'I'm used to it anyway. I've never been anywhere
else. . . . Don't you think there's just too much
land around here? And what are the Indians really
like, anyway?' 'What would you be like if the first
thing you opened your eyes to was this?' The desert
and the mountains seemed to grow bigger and emptier
as he spoke. 'How would the world seem to you then,
Daisy?' I thought it over. 'Like it hadn't really
got started, I guess. I'd imagine I was some kind
of prehistoric baby. Maybe later I'd start
567
wondering where everybody had gone.' . . . I was
grateful to have seen the light of day at Hermosa
Beach (IDC, 166-8).
One way she attempts to cope with the strangeness is to
make it fit in with what she knows— Hollywood. She asks
him to stop the car:
I ran very fast into the scrub, then stopped and
looked around. . . . I stretched out my arms to them
and broke into a Jeanette MacDonald soprano.
When I ’m calling You-oo-oo
Will you answer too-oo-oo?
Her misgivings about leaving Los Angeles are
substantiated: the next morning, Wade abandons her. She
subsequently returns to Los Angeles, dissolves the
marriage, and takes up with Ridge Banner. One of Ridge's
charms is that he agrees with her about the beach;
neither one could "live anywhere else" (186). Though
nothing permanent is established between them, Daisy has
a child, Myrna, by him. (He in the meantime has begun a
romance with Julie Forbes.) Finally Daisy decides to
leave town:
I headed for New York because I didn't like the
stuff in the papers. It made me understand what
Melora [Swan] once said about having this town on
your side. I certainly didn't. You hardly needed
to read between the lines to know that I'd always
been strange, now I'd become impossible, and no
studio would ever touch me. Screen Time asked WHY
568
DID DAISY HAVE HER BABY IN LONG BEACH? . . . Some
darned photographer got a picture of me leaving the
hospital with Myrna, it turned up in Time with a
caption about an Aging Cine-Moppet. All things
considered, it seemed unfair of this town to be
anti-Clover but completely pro-Swan, but I suppose
it was just another case of what everyone calls the
way the wind blows. . . . To avoid reporters, I left
town on a very late flight and got airborne without
anyone noticing. When I took off my dark glasses
and looked down from the sky at a crazy winking
network of light, I thought, Good-by you few million
(IDC, 210-11).
Living in New York, she is grateful for the change
and has time to think about her life rather than just
living it haphazardly. "It wasn't until I stopped, and
came out here, and started to mature, that I realized I'd
never had time to think about what I wanted out of life"
(IDC, 218). Ten years after the novel begins, Daisy
prepares for a comeback in Atlantic City. In order to
sing, she says, "I close my eyes, and would you believe
it, there's Twitcher! I can see a tiny wax disk turning
on his machine, I think I smell tar and seaweed" (IDC,
2 3 2-3). Most of the key people in her life— Ray and
Melora Swan of Magnagram, Wade Lewis with his boyfriend,
her sister Gloria— gather for the opening. Not sure she
can go through with it, she begins an attempt at suicide.
But phone interruptions and the smell of burnt-coffee
prevent her. As she waits to smell the gas,
569
I began to sniff another element in the air,
stronger and more appealing. . . . I remembered I'd
left the coffee percolator on top of the stove. Now
it was boiling and spilled out a rich burnt-coffee
aroma, something I've never been able to resist,
it's exactly like life, because I always fall for
the wonderful smell even though I know the taste
will be ghastly and bitter (IDC, 242).
Daisy is a survivor, and something about her place of
origin continues to be both her sustenance and her
standard of judgment. Though it takes place in Atlantic
City, the last paragraph of the novel corroborates this
kinship dramatically:
I was snugly alone in my dressing room, which
suddenly reminded me of the trailer in Playa del
Rey. It was just as small and crummy. This made me
think about The Dealer, and wonder why I'd always
felt she was a kind of genius. I realized it was
because she had the best answer in the world to bad
dreams and craziness and the nerve of practically
everybody. She shook her head when she meant yes,
nodded when she meant no, and laughed when she
wanted everybody to go to hell. So I laughed now,
harder and harder, until I was completely exhausted
and had a pain in my belly. Then I hummed a snatch
of 'I've Got the World on a String,' walked through
the big dark empty theater, and came out on the
boardwalk. Beautiful silence, except for the ocean.
I decided to walk home along the beach and maybe
laugh some more, loud enough for the sound to break
(like those waves) on the other side of the world
(IDC, 245).
It seems entirely appropriate that, once the novel was
published, Daisy Clover became something of a heroine in
Los Angeles. Ronnie Knox wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
570
The charm, warmth and humor of the book made quite
an impression on Daisy's real life equivalents
living in and around the beach area. For a while a
huge inscription in lipstick on one of the seaside
walls along the boardwalk read DAISY FOR PRESIDENT.
Rain has since washed the wall clean.
The novel was hailed as a breakthough in the
Hollywood genre. When The Slide Area had come out,
Arthur Knight, writing in the Saturday Review, had sensed
that Lambert had the ability to portray Hollywood from a
new perspective. His comments, though written in 1959,
four years before the publication of Inside Daisy Clover,
demonstrate just how good critics can anticipate a
writer's future developments long before he has thought
of them himself. Though much of what he says relates
specifically to The Slide Area, a substantial part
predicts the nature and value of Inside Daisy Cloven
Ever since Budd Schulberg tried to discover
'What Makes Sammy Run,' Hollywood fiction has
followed pretty much in Sammy's sordid footsteps,
emphasizing the seamy side of the industry as viewed
from within. The stories have been, for the most
part, thinly-veiled romans a clef; and one of their
chief attractions has been the game of guessing just
which producer it was who turned what pretty extra
into a star by sleeping with her. The game can
still be played with some of the characters in The
Slide Area, but that is by no means the sole
19 Ronnie Knox, "Lambert— Britain's Bundle for the
Southland," Los Angeles Times Calendar, 22 October 1967,
p. 13. Files of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library, Beverly Hills.
571
satisfaction in this sensitive, keen-witted little
book. For Gavin Lambert, a British film critic
turned scriptwriter and novelist, has chosen to
write not about Hollywood the industry so much as
Hollywood the place— a curious, twilight world whose
very insubstantiality is summed up in his title.
The inhabitants of The Slide Area are, in the
main, the kind of freaks and grotesques that John
O'Hara and Nathanael West wrote about a generation
or so ago. . . . The only difference is that where
O'Hara and West were frightened by such people to
the point of hysteria, . . . Lambert accepts them,
humors them, pities them just a little, and vastly
enjoys their eccentricities. Perhaps it is because
he is English: the English have always cherished
their eccentrics.20
Arthur Marx, writing four years later in the same
periodical, assesses Inside Daisy Clover and, in so
doing, echoes the earlier view of Lambert as the new
chronicler of Hollywood:
[Inside Daisy Clover is] one of the best and most
unusual novels about Hollywood and its people . . .
mainly because the author's pen was not dipped in
the juice of sour grapes. . . . Laid bare in
skeletal form, the story of Daisy's rise to stardom
and her inevitable downfall may not seem out of the
ordinary, but . . . it is. It is superbly written
and fast-moving; its dialogue is witty and stiletto-
sharp; it is sexy but not pornographic; and it
contains not one stereotyped Hollywood character.
Somehow Gavin Lambert has pulled off the miracle of
modern literature: he has been able to tell a story
about Hollywood without including in its cast of
20 Arthur Knight, "The Other Hollywood," Saturday
Review, 19 December 1959, no page number. Files of
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library,
Beverly Hills.
572
characters one Semitic, cigar-chomping, balding
producer who mangles the English language.21
The final way in which the novel became a watershed work
is that it was made into a film that, for the most part,
satisfies its author. "On the whole, [I was] fairly
happy" with the movie. Clearly Lambert’s comfortable
relationship with the film industry carries over into its
dealing with his material. He doesn't regard the details
of the original text as pristine and inviolable. For
example, the time period was changed for the film
version:
We had to set it in a more recognizable period
because in 1965 the Fifties wouldn't mean anything,
so you had to go further back. The moment you went
further back, things started to change. Actually, I
quite enjoyed that because it was to me more
stimulating to have a whole shot at the whole thing
than simply to adapt what I'd already done. I
thought, 'Well, this is really like a variation on
the same theme.'
Lambert didn't write another novel about Los Angeles
for five years, and in the interim his perspective
changed a good deal. Southern California and life in
general seems to have a much grimmer aspect in A Case for
the Angels (1968). The protagonist-narrator is a female
21 Arthur Marx, "Cinderella Full Circle, Saturday
Review, 46, No. 17 (27 April 1963), p. 37.
573
again, but this time a British-born one, Dora Poley. She
is thirty years old and lives in a Santa Monica Canyon
house not unlike Lambert’s own. The novel begins four
days after her American husband Keith has walked out on
her, and she discovers a dead dog on her doorstep— the
two are seemingly unrelated. Dora’s background is rather
hastily disposed of in the first few pages. As a
youngster she had lived on the Cornish moors. Her
father, "Graham Parkhust, M.A., a sweet liberal, hopeless
person" had moved from London to his countryside farm
because he "disliked remote control." But Dora's mother
committed suicide in that environment. Then after the
war, Dora felt she had to get away from post-war British
life. She was living in London at the time:
I knew I'd never be able to deal with it, and hated
things falling away, hated scars and break-up and
mutilation and death. At fifteen I was certain that
I couldn't, eventually, go on living in that city.
I vowed never to fall in love there, never to commit
myself to it.22
Later, when she comes into some money as an
inheritance from her grandfather, Dora uses the
22 G a v in L a m b ert, A Case for the Angels (New Y ork:
D i a l , 1 9 6 8 ) , p. 13. A l l f u r t h e r r e f e r e n c e s t o t h i s w o rk
a p p e a r i n t h e t e x t i n p a r e n t h e s e s a s ACFTA.
574
opportunity to leave England immediately, because
although
. . . things have perked up on the surface, . . . I
found an underlying sadness to it all. Nothing has
really changed, you see. We sink deeper into the
past while flying a few gallant flags of the
future. . . . I flew to New York, stayed there a
week, then rented a car and drove out here (ACFTA,
51-2).
When, during the course of the novel, a Los Angeles
policeman comes to her house— in conjunction with the
dead dog— Dora wins him over by convincing him of "a very
simple, moving fact. I actually preferred America— his
country— to my own, because it had given me something
England never could give me" {ACFTA, 54). Just what she
has gotten is one of the major questions of the novel.
One acquisition is company:
I lost the connections in Bond Street, found them in
Venice-on-the-Pacific. Why? In Venice I wasn't
alone. In Bond Street I was all alone, offered
things I didn't want {ACFTA, 123-4).
But she is unsure she wants to pay the price of such
companionship. She and Keith meet, just a short time
after she arrives, at a Beverly Hills couturier's fashion
function where they are the only two dressed in funky
casual clothing: "The link established by our clothes was
575
overwhelming" (17). Dora feels there is a certain
destiny about their meeting:
That six-day drive across America was a journey
intended to obliterate my own past. I saw Keith as
a figure out of the future, stepped directly from
that new landscape (ACFTA, 97).
In escaping her land of origin, she has come up with the
perfect replacement— a handsome American man who is even
part American Indian. In this respect he is like Dani in
Moore's Fergus, who is dressed in Indian-inspired garb
the day Fergus first meets her. When a Briton is
interested in escaping his origins, the American Indian
looks especially appealing. However, it isn't long
before Dora recognizes that she has just given up one
confusion— that of postwar Britain— for another— the
Southern California lifestyle. As she gets out of
Keith's bed after their first time together, she says,
Oil pump shuttled up and down beyond the kitchen
window. The view seemed just as confusing as that
afternoon in Bond Street, but the difference was,
this time I'd committed myself to it. . . . Keith
was staring at me with the same ironic, challlenging
smile. He lit a cigarette, coughed, spat into the
sink. 'Excuse me,' he said. 'Welcome to
California' (ACFTA, 21-2).
Because she wants to believe that he is her
salvation and, to some extent, because she is the naive
576
foreigner, she fails to read the signs of incipient
difficulty in their relationship: he asks her to marry
him while they are on Olvera Street (a Mexican-style
tourist area) ; he won't buy a house, though he doesn't
object to living in one if she finds it and pays for it;
and, their marriage ceremony takes place on the balcony
of a friend's rented hotel suite in Hollywood. She
doesn't quite believe that values such as his really
exist. Yet Lambert makes clear that during the Sixties a
substantial number of people in Los Angeles saw the world
the way Keith and his friends, the Prells, did:
That novel came out of my involvement with a lot of
people like [the Prells and Keith] who seemed to me
to be very much around at that time. I found them
mad. The feeling that there was this particular
thing in the air here at that time, this sort of
weird druggie LA cool that was going on then, both
very naive and very cruel without meaning to be— it
was a very strange phenomenon, I thought. . . . The
novel was partly written out of a conviction that
they were really frauds and that their so-called
freedom was nothing.
Lambert acknowledges that this is a much "harder-edged
book than the others. It seemed to me that the material
needed that." Much of the dialogue of the novel is taken
up by discussions between Dora and various members of the
Prell group (including Keith) on their values and
philosophy. Jim Prell tells her,
577
He accepted the fact of being completely alone. ’I
don't want any answers. All I want is release, when
I need it.' Feeling lonely, or lecherous, he went
out to search for whatever might provide some
satisfaction, always leaving it at that, never
pretending it was anything else, never allowing it
to become serious, to turn ordinary or ugly or
permanent, like love. Feeling depressed by all the
other ordinariness and ugliness, of lovers or
parents or murderers or nations, he did a joint with
people he liked, who were equally happy and alone.
Then the troubles, whatever they were, receded into
true perspective and he saw their endless
insignificance. People and events tried so hard to
appear important, and the point, the condition, the
security, whatever one called it, was reached by
cutting them down to size (ACFTA, 170-71).
Their appeal is obvious, even to Dora, who believes and
wants to continue to believe that there is something
radically wrong with them:
They were attractive, of course; plausible; experts
at inducing false security, knowing I got lost in
disconnected streets and dreamed of deserts, leading
me into a luxuriant maze of permissive so-called
love, pretending there is no other place to
go. . . . A kind of evil innocence (ACFTA, 124-5).
Looking for Keith, Dora drives to Prell Hall, the large
gray Hollywood Gothic mansion with turrets and buttresses
that the 2 6- and 27-year-old sons of a "shrewd, retired
movie star" have "bought simply as headquarters for
official way-outness" (ACFTA, 62). When she find him
there, Dora realizes just how much she has been fooling
herself into thinking that she could mold their
578
relationship into the kind she wants and needs: "People
accuse me of being a puritan . . . because I like to keep
my relationships personal and approach them with the idea
that they may be lasting" (ACFTA, 96). Instead, "There,
up in the hills, in that terrible house, I discovered the
real Keith" (43). She should have realized it long
before, but something in her personality— nurtured by her
British origins— keeps her from the awful recognition.
When they had had a terrible time in Tiajuana, Mexico,
Dora had plenty of warning. Later, when she thinks about
it, she admits, "I suppose this is something disgustingly
English coming out— I told myself it was in a foreign
country and didn't really count" (43). Keith in fact
cuts her down to size by telling her honestly,
You just happen to be unlivable-with. . . . I
can't live with you. . . . Because I hurt you. When
I hurt people, I've got to withdraw. . . . You're a
hopeless and scared little romantic who needs total
attention, physical and otherwise. . . . You're
scared of the Prells, and this house, because
there's a kind of freedom here and you can't accept
it. You take it as a personal threat.
She responds, 'What's so free about sitting
around, turning on, sometimes getting into bed with
each other— and never really committing yourself to
anything? Just bullshitting, as you call it.'
'It's an attitude. Do what you like and don't
worry about who cares, who judges' (72-3).
In speaking to her homosexual friend Chad, who is not a
member of the Prell group, Dora explains that to achieve
579
her vision of the good life she would have to separate
herself off from all she has come to enjoy and appreciate
in the new world she has settled:
'It's easier to do what people call good if you cut
yourself off, remove yourself from the main action.
Then you can solve nineteenth-century problems in a
twentieth-century world. . . . I suppose I could cut
myself off now, find a solid citizen I admired and
respected but didn't love, and settle for security,
but that's nineteenth-century too.' Still weak in
the knees, I felt strong in the head. I saw with an
almost disembodied clarity. There were no
unquestionable friends, enemies, prospects or fears.
There was only the exhilaration of open country and
limitless suspense (ACFTA, 13 6).
At this point in the novel, she continues to defend her
"archaic" views:
You may consider it a last vestige of romanticism if
I insist that the act of making love can imply a
commitment beyond the act itself; all the same, I
insist on it. Whatever else one may or may not do,
the possibility remains of a special, deeper
attachment (ACFTA, 12 6) .
The dead dog is the harsh reality she can no longer
avoid confronting. No one wants it or claims it, yet
everyone subtly accuses her of its death and holds her
responsible for its being there. It's somehow wrong, it
doesn't belong in the California environment— just like
Dora's perspective on loving:
5 8 0
I stood by the window and watched a blazing sunset
over the Pacific. In winter, California colors
become summery. No haze to dredge away brilliance
and intensity, but green of trees, blue of ocean,
bird-of-paradise orange and bougainvillea crimson
stand out vividly tropical. Since there are few
deciduous trees, anyway, you might even overlook the
change of season. After sludge, freeze and bareness
of English winters, personally welcome this. Also,
it abstracts time. The basic flow is undisturbed.
Arrival of coolness and sudden, concentrated periods
of rain are not enough to interrupt it. The zone
here is temperate, the climate's even keel makes
people facile and optimistic; and the unexpected, by
contrast, is doubly so. Hence, I believe, enormous
shock of my dog problem, which enters the category
not only of shouldn't happen, but shouldn't happen
here. Believe, too, that my refusal to move the
remains in spite of police permission, my continual
outraged, cryptic stares, are protest against a
violation of the rules (ACFTA, 79-80).
As the dog is something unasked for that has suddenly
dropped into her life and forced her to cope with its
presence, so too is the philosophical position of the
Prell group. Lambert notes, "It was not only a symbol of
the decadent life. It was the feeling that there's a
monster outside your door; it's suddenly turned up and
you wonder why." Taking action and finally dealing with
the dog parallels her taking charge of the Keith
situation; it "means I've gotten over Keith" (118). At
the end, Octavia tells Dora, "You were sitting there
looking at Keith exactly the way you stared at that dog"
(179) .
581
Unfortunately, it’s all not as clear at the end as
the reader might wish. Dora has put up a monumental
fight against the lifestyle she questions. Because Keith
has already made up his mind, she is forced to join the
group and their "way" or else forget him. A rather
depressing prospect, she "remained unconvinced that mass
screwing held the key, only that it was preferable to no
screwing at all; at the moment, these were the only
choices offered" (ACFTA, 156). Andy Prell suggests to
her that her choice is "a leaking boat or the
ocean. . . . Why don't you take the plunge, instead of
going down with it and complaining?" (119) In a
conversation toward the end of the novel with Jim Prell—
the theoretician of the group, whereas Keith just lives
by the philosophy— Dora continues her agonizing soul-
searching:
'I feel more secure when things are relatively
clear, or clear cut. . . . All of you get a kind of
security out of confusion. I see how it can be
done, but I can't do it.'
'Now you're wrong. None of us feels secure in
confusion. We accept it, is all. It's corny to
find confusion confusing.'
I believe in certain basic rules. . . .
You . . . try to live so that nothing adds up. I
can't accept that. Something's got to add up.'
'What to?'
'Some kind of inner order. . . . I want, in my
life, an acceptable and harmonious arrangement.'
(ACFTA, 168-9)
582
But at novel's end, she remains undecided, literally at
sea on the group's yacht, at one point saying that "if,
by the time we get to Mazatlan, nothing at all has been
settled, I shall leave. I shall go off somewhere by
myself," but on the same page she maintains,
Very well. If you can't lick'em, join 'em. Three
mornings ago a screech of brakes brought you out of
a dream, and you found a dog blocking your view.
How's your view today? Well, it's different.
You're not just looking at the ocean, you're on it.
(ACFTA, 18 0)
Though she says the words, Dora herself seems unconvinced
at the end. She has more life force than the others, but
whether or not she prevails remains an open question.
Perhaps all that both she and the reader are left with is
the frustration caused by the clash of lifestyles and
life philosophies. Surely people of the nature of the
Prell crowd can be found in nearly all cosmopolitan
areas, but this one seems a more extreme version, perhaps
because it appears in Southern California— to the British
mind, the land of extremity.
Something must be said of Keith's grandmother, the
Native American, who is almost as much an exile in Los
Angeles as Dora is. Though both the Native American and
the British cultures provided foundations for the
contemporary city, both women are forever aware of being
583
foreigners there. Malowaka comes, uninvited, for
Christmas. And Keith, whom she calls Skippy, rejects her
almost as much as he does Dora. "We were both exiles;
had come, as Malowaka said, from a long way" (98).
Although part of Keith's appeal to Dora appears to be his
Indian heritage, he is no more conscious of commitment in
this sphere than he is in marriage. He wants to pack his
grandmother off as soon as possible. So Dora is left to
house and entertain her. One of the most satirical
scenes in the book, and one to place alongside Dennis
Barlow's intitial visit to Whispering Glades in The Loved
One, is the excursion to Aunt Clara's Pancake Kitchen in
Santa Monica. Here Lambert at his best captures this
aspect of Americana for his readers:
From the outside, Aunt Clara's was a gingerbreadish
house with pink gables, diamond windowpanes and a
canary-yellow front door. Inside, low-rafters and
checkered tablecloths created a beerhall atmosphere.
No liquor license, however; tables were packed with
families apparently pleased to celebrate the season
with coffee, tea or milk. A Christmas tree winked
colored lights. Carols, orchestrated as richly as
Viennese waltzes, were piped in. . . . Picking up a
menu the size of a newspaper, Malowaka whistled with
approval. 'They got everything here, buckwheat,
potato, apple, chicken, blue cheese, boysenberry,
German and Swedish.'. . . A waitress came up in
baby-blue uniform, swinging an order pad attached by
a chain to her waist. She was tiny but gave herself
inches with high heels and bouffant hair; her
pretty, friendly face, painted as bright as a doll's
suggested she'd been born smiling. 'Hello 1 * Voice
had a slight Southern drawl. 'My name is Dora.'
584
Pointed to a button on her lapel which confirmed it.
* Can I help you?'
•I'll be darned. My name is Dora too.'
Her smile remained broad, but her eyes
flickered uncertainly. 'You're not putting me on,
are you? We have to do it this way, it's a rule of
the management.' (ACFTA, 104)
In a response reminiscent of Waugh's, Dora feels slightly
embarrassed that she actually carries on a conversation
with the waitress:
As a rule I don't enter into conversations with
strangers? especially if, to use a dreadful phrase,
they are ordinary people. This is not superiority,
but defensiveness; feel I have nothing to offer
them; they do their job, let me do mine. Always
discourage the nuisance who strikes up eager,
meaningless conversations at bus stop or any waiting
line, the cabdriver, the plumber or man who comes to
read one's gas meter and wishes to discuss politics,
gardens, teenagers. These people will talk to
anybody, and I find it insulting (106).
Even the ordinary folk of American life are often a
trial to foreigners. "My clarity, I know, is
occasionally mistaken for coldness" (79). There is a
decidedly anti-bourgeois quality to Dora and her life.
She speculates, as George does in Isherwood's A single
Man, just what her neighbors must be thinking about her.
She imagines what Mrs. Cody's thoughts must be about the
dog outside the house: "Mrs. Poley is sitting alone in
her house with somebody else's dead dog on the steps
outside. Can you imagine? Can you conceive of the state
5 85
of mind of a woman like that?" (82) Even for those with
alternative lifestyles, Christmas still generally has
some tradition, but Dora knows that hers is decidedly
atypical. Unnatural things happen in Los Angeles, like
the Christmas Day, Santa Monica, California picture Dora
envisions as a snapshot in an album:
One sees Dora Poley in sweater and trousers,
clutching turkey and cartons of potato salad,
standing on her steps, dead dog at her feet. She
looks toward ocean and frowns with alarm. In the
background, Malowaka waits and smiles (110).
Just as time is frozen in a bizarre fashion in the
imagined picture and reflected in the anti-historical
behavior of the Prell crowd, the next day Dora decides
not to wind her watch which has run down, to leave it
. . . in a kind of waking dream. . . . Choose
deliberately to numb my carping intellect, and
thereby embrace more fully anything that
occurs. . . . All the same, if I sniffed danger in
the wings, I would snap out of it; would react;
would certainly rewind my watch. (ACFTA, 163)
No matter how much she tries to talk herself into
accepting their way of life, she is not really converted.
One sees the mind of the foreigner, at once attracted and
repulsed by what he or she encounters in the new land.
In this vein, Lambert defends the work, deliberately
inconclusive though it is:
586
It's funny, I have a rather soft spot for a rather
hard novel, just because I feel it got onto
something that nobody else did at the time, that to
me was very much a part of the Southern California
scene.
Lambert's next Los Angeles novel, The Goodby People
(1971), combines many of the elements of the earlier
works: it is episodic and has a British male narrator
like The Slide Area; it concerns itself primarily with
the doings of the Hollywood folk and their fringes like
Inside Daisy Clover; and it has a certain bitterness of
perspective about it like A Case for the Angels. These
are tales of drifting insubstantial lives that might look
somewhat glamorous to an outsider but readily reveal
their deeply rooted meaninglessness; no matter how they
appear, these people are unhappy. This series of
portraits of Los Angeles people presents figures who are
all lost in some unidentifiable way. They are looking
for something, but at the same time also resigned to the
sameness they have found, with its miniscule amount of
pleasure each day. They wander off, but inevitably end
up again in Los Angeles, and, unfortunately for them,
they all are irretrievably alone. Such are The Goodby
People.
The Prologue is set in a graveyard. Nearly every
one of the British authors has his foray into death
587
and/or cemeteries in Los Angeles, so it seems fitting
that Lambert's novel entitled The Goodby People should
begin there. It is a curious passage, though, for the
narrator hides out to see a young man who comes to
decorate a young star's grave. Nothing is ever made of
this young man, nor does the narrator ever explain why he
is there observing. What does emerge is the cemetery's
proximity to the streets, the cars, the commercialism,
and the smog— all these as deathly in their own ways as
the activities within the cemetery proper:
On a late afternoon in late summer the air-
pollution count is 0.37, and sunlight mists the
headstone of a star who was born, then died young.
Beyond the lines of markers a boulevard growls with
traffic and a billboard on stilts announces Elvis
Presley in Las Vegas. The distant Santa Monica
mountains, blurred with heat and smoke, look as
desolate as a photograph of the moon.
Between the graves, through the haze of gas and
carbon, someone approaches (TGP, 9).
This is a deteriorating environment (the word "late"
is repeated twice in the first sentence) in which bizarre
events seem somehow appropriate, yet is at the same time
touted to be nearly paradisal. This time, the reality of
earthquake danger is the most obvious geological flaw in
paradise:
Because of the San Andreas fault, earthquake fear is
a recurring neurosis in California. This long
588
fracture in the earth's subterranean crust extends
for more than two hundred miles below the sunlit
state, and nothing can be done about it. Everything
else, theoretically, could be perfect. But the
fault is irremediable, like a wound that will never
heal and can always be reopened (TGP, 33).
As in The Slide Area, Lambert begins by drawing implicit
parallels between the inherent physical dangers of the
city and the lives of its inhabitants. In each of the
three main episodes, there are gaping holes— like San
Andreas faults— in the lives of each of the central
figures.
Susan Ross, the subject of the first section, is at
odds with the environment. "I love the sun, you know,
but I'm allergic to it. Isn't that unfair?" (36)
Lambert said that Susan's inability to be in the sun
represents her distance and "her being in the wrong
place, her being so exiled from where she should be."
She protects herself from the sun and from life with
hats, glasses, barriers. Her house on a cliff
overlooking the ocean has "a sundeck enclosed in glass"
(49). The narrator goes on to elaborate:
She was living like quite a few other people here,
only more so. After all, it's so easy. There are
plenty of houses large and isolated enough to guard
you from everything except the hills and the ocean
(53).
589
Now a widow, Susan had been married to Charlie Ross, a
prominent local figure, and the two had given lavish
parties in their home a few miles north of Malibu such as
those once given only in Hollywood. The descriptions of
the house and of the parties capture the essence of the
local life and society— perhaps even more characteristic
of Julie Forbes in The Slide Area and the Swans in Inside
Daisy Clover:
. . . Hollywood aristocratic, which meant many
immaculate rooms, Chagall and Matisse, a projection
theater, a library, a pool of course, and an
elaborately floodlit garden. Night-blooming jasmine
spread its sweet and heavy scent across the patio
with its walls of Spanish tile and its brick
barbecue like an altar in the center. The Ross
parties were fairly large, from forty to seventy
people, and they had a casual, assured, slightly
outlandish elegance that you find only in
California— movie stars, expatriate writers, a
visiting film director from India or Italy, a
Moroccan princess, a South American diplomat
recently involved in an unsuccessful revolution, an
old Russian lady who remembered Rasputin, an
anthropologist just returned from New Guinea, a
ballerina, a marine biologist who talked about
dolphins and sharks and how they communicate (TGP,
18) .
But once Charlie dies, Susan is separated from the group
that had provided her with a social base, and she is
unalterably alone. Lambert postuates that aloneness in
Los Angeles is something of a tribal phenomenon:
5 90
There are so many different worlds here, separated
by distances of twenty or thirty miles, that people
live in tribes rather than as a community. The
world outside is something you see from a car.
Members of the same tribe meet regularly, but if you
belong to different ones it usually takes some kind
of a powwow to bring you together, a rite or
celebration involving marriage, death, visiting
chieftains, festivals, victories. Since Charlie
died, Susan had been without a tribe (TGP, 43).
Brian Moore too noted Angelinos' proclivity to gather in
tribes of the like-minded, rather than in other
metropolitan areas where social groupings have a more
heterogeneous nature. Susan's inclination toward
isolation finds satisfaction in the very landscapes of
Southern California. One day, she takes the narrator on
a secret excursion to her special hideaway location in
Topanga Canyon. It's easy to see the appeal of this
almost primeval environment that is not far removed from
the luxuries of the city:
Up here the landscape becomes almost savage; it
might be Greece or the true, secret interior of
Provence. You expect a flock of goats to wander
across the road. Everything appears luscious and
barren at the same time, wild flowers overrun the
earth and tall, burdened pines stretch above it, but
the mountains are scarred-looking and desolate and
the gorges very deep. . . . Behind us the road
twisted back to the Pacific, and in front, beyond a
lower range of hills, lay the edge of the desert.
There was no hint of a huge city only twenty miles
away. . . . 'You get a feeling up here,' she said,
'like going back to the beginning of the world.
Wasn't the beginning something desolate and hidden
like this?' (TGP, 52)
591
She does everything she can to isolate herself, even
flits in and out of town without apprising even her
closest friends of her whereabouts. It is altogether
fitting then that she should finally be attracted to
David Almont, a Howard Hughes-like character, "a person
who's famous but whom practically nobody has ever seen"
(61) .
Susan is another instance of that by-now-
characteristic figure in Los Angeles novels: the person
on the edge. Early in the book, she tells the narrator
as they sit together, "What a couple we make, sitting
here at the edge of the world" (25). Not long after, at
a Mendocino beach, a young painter discovers her nearly
drowned; yet, "There was nothing in her manner or her
state of mind, everyone agreed, to suggest she might have
tried to drown herself" (29). Despite her famous
connections and her own obvious sophistication, Susan
remains enigmatically alone. During her one attempt at
being charitable she accompanies a student who volunteers
at an organization called "Assist." The group goes into
slum areas, offers coffee and cookies and tries to
discover how they can assist people. On this day that
finally brings Susan out of her self-imposed isolation,
592
an old woman flings coffee into Susan's face. Susan is
greatly disturbed.
She was determined to run off as soon as possible.
When she was leaving for the airport and saying
goodby, she got this phone call inviting her to join
these people on a yacht. I [her friend Juliet is
speaking] said for God's sake, darling, this time go
off and enjoy yourself, somewhere you belong (TGP,
49) .
The parallels to A Case for the Angels must be evident:
here is another woman who escapes to a yacht, presumably
filled with mindless people, in her attempt to avoid
confrontation with the realities (perhaps represented by
the coffee-flinging old woman) of her own life. There is
another exploration of the vagrant or transient life of
Los Angeles.
The most transient of figures is Gary Carson. In
trouble with the government for draft evasion, he must
constantly be moving on. Both he and Susan are deeply
alone people, forever picking up and leaving, rather
spontaneously, without ever being pinned down. One
suspects that the town appeals to vagrants, mainly
because no one expects anyone to be stable. Yet despite
his poverty, Gary is a cosmopolitan. He compares the
narrator's home in Santa Monica Canyon (clearly in the
593
same location as Dora Poley's and Lambert’s own23) to
those in the south of France. He also suggests that
"California's middle class. Almost everyone's drunk,
Martini drunk or Scotch drunk. How about some white
wine? It's the only cool thing to drink when you're by
the ocean" (TGP, 83).
Lora Chase is the subject of the third and final
major section. Unlike Susan and Gary— as central figures
in the Goodby triumvirate— she is so elusive that the
reader nearly comes to believe that she no longer exists
as a reality but only as vision and/or a recollection.
Keelie, the young woman who makes contact with movie star
Lora Chase, knows that their relationship is primarily
mystical, a notion which can somehow be tolerated in Los
Angeles where it would be thought ludicrous elsewhere.
Keelie questions the narrator, "Nothing's as real to me
as she is. And she's not even real. So how can that be,
and what does that make me?" (151) Once the two do make
real contact, Lora encourages Keelie to leave— another,
then, of the mushrooming horde of Goodby People:
23 According to Ronnie Knox (page 13), Lambert
lived in a two-story house in Santa Monica Canyon "with a
palm-flanked swimming pool in the front patio and a
commanding view of the Pacific from the back patio."
594
'She wants me to leave, all along she's been warning
me not to stay. And she ought to know. Look at
what this town did to her— . . . What's the first
thing that happens to me when I arrive in this
town?1. . . They always call it 'This town' when
they've decided to leave. 'She comes out of
nowhere, like out of the sea. She was warning me.
And she's right, this town is dying, it's a place to
die. I've got to get out.' (TGP, 173)
Lora's other message has to do with age: America rejects
its past, and Southern California is especially
susceptible to this propensity. On this subject, Lora
speaks to the narrator, a man in his middle years, rather
than to the youthful Keelie:
'Have you found, in this country, a cruelty
about the past?'
'Yes, they're too eager to decide something is
too old, out of date, useless I' . . .
'And pull it down or break it up or in some
other way erase it from the present. But the past
is beautiful as well as . . . ' A little shiver
passed through her body. 'Really unforgivable,'
she said. (TGP, 179).
The novel concludes with a brief epilogue called
"Etc." which captures the Goodby People and their
Southern California lives succinctly. The narrator wakes
up in Judd's house the morning after an orgy celebrating
Judd's thirty-fourth birthday. As others get up and come
out by "the pool with orange bougainvillea leaves
floating in the water," they vaguely recognize one
another, exchange half-hearted farewells, and drift off.
595
Judd unconsciously keeps passing his hands across his
stomach while he responds to one parting guest, "Thirty-
four feels like a pretty good age to die. Especially
when people bring you such beautiful presents for your
birthday. . . . I got everything I wanted" (TGP, 190).
The novel ends when one last girl, who seems to have been
left by the people she came with, emerges dripping from
the pool and goes off into the house with Judd. When he
asks her, " Is there anyone you should call, Frances?
Anyone who'll be wondering where you are?" She answers,
"No. There's no one in the world" (191).
In one respect The Goodby People represents a
significant departure for Lambert. Although the narrator
begins by being the same Isherwood-like camera eye figure
that he was in The Slide Area, in the "Gary Carson"
section he becomes "involved" in some respects. Gary
watches the narrator in his role as observer-of-life and
accuses him of being "basically a voyeur" (106).
Subsequently the narrator does show some weakness or
emotion— albeit infrequently— when he remarks a while
later, "I wanted to get away. Why was everything he said
suddenly so grating and dreary?" (122)
What is even more important is that the narrator
reveals his homosexuality. Though his relationship with
596
Gary never takes on great significance in the book or,
presumably, in either character's life, this is the first
time that a male Lambert narrator has responded sexually
to someone else. The narrator recognizes that Gary uses
people, but that doesn't seem to matter a lot. He
expects very little in return for opening both his home
and himself to the transient young man. After they sleep
together for the first time, the two go off to a typical
all-night coffee shop in Santa Monica where, according to
Gary's wishes, they eat ice-cream sundaes together as a
kind of ritual pact between them. This is as much
romantic commitment as the narrator ever makes in the
novel. The dialogue that takes place between the two the
next day characterizes the lives of these Goodby People:
I said, 'I get the impression you're making
plans to stay more than one night.' . . .
'Will I be in your way if I do?'
'No. I'm glad you're staying.'
'Don't be too glad. . . . There's no one
special in your life right now, right?'
I nodded.
'Why is that?'
I said, 'No reason. There just doesn't happen
to be.'
'Wish there were?'
'Sometimes.'
'Hmmm!1 he said. 'You don't really wish,
because if you did, there would be.'
I said that he was probably right.
'I know it. You're basically a loner, like
me.' (TGP, 90)
597
Neither says or commits himself very much, undoubtedly a
typical dialogue for these people who are all so very
much alone.
The novel received a mixed critical response. An
American, James Linroth, wrote,
Anyone familiar with Nathanael West's Hollywood will
recognize the macabre landscape of Gavin Lambert's
The Goodby People. But the changes are striking.
West's spiritually dispossed mid-Westerners have
been replaced by the rootless young with their
Cardin suits, Gucci shoes, sneakers, cowboy hats,
crash helmets, rock cassettes and acid. It is they
who now play psychic games with aging actresses and
writers in an atmosphere of flamboyant despair.24
Walter Wells speaks of it as a portrait of the city so
much in keeping with what preceded it that it tends to
look like cliche' even if it isn't:
The dissolving dream which was Hollywood to the
earlier writers has its death acknowledged and taken
for granted in the forties and after. The
perversities and unrealites of the place become
accepted conventions. The forties see comic
obituaries like . . . Waugh's The Loved One (1948)
(anticipated by the Huxleyan parody of After Many a
Summer in 1939). Comedy gives way in the fifties to
the ennui of Mailer's Deer Park (1955) and the
nihilist escapism of Morris's Hollywooders in Love
Among the Cannibals (1957). Into the sixties and
seventies, the irony of earlier Southland fiction
gives way to an existential resignation to the
region's spiritual malaise. . . . Smog, drugs, and
freeway incessance become new correlatives for the
24 James R. Lindroth, "The Goodby People," America,
124, Nol 15 (17 April 1971), p. 415.
598
same old prevailing toxicity, illusoriness, and
kinetic rampancy of the earlier fictions. So
consistent, in fact, does the influence of the
Southland continue to be that any writer seeking to
take its measure in fiction runs the great risk of
cliche', a fate that befalls Gavin Lambert's The
Goodby People after his earlier and more successfu
Southland efforts The Slide Area (1959) and Inside
Daisy Clover (1963). [Note that he forgets A Case
for the Angels (1968).] By now it takes the
vitality of a comic picaro like Daisy . . . to
resist the danger in this tendency of Southland
elements to repeat themselves again and again. 5
But perhaps more relevant for our purposes are the
British perspectives on The Goodby People. D.A.N. Jones,
writing in The Listener, suggests that
This narrator is something of a Herr Issyvoo,
observing the eccentric and beautiful with affection
and desire, but treating their social and spiritual
aspirations with a patronizing skepticism. . . . He
remains as non-committal as a sociologist evading
personal involvement. . . . The freedom-lovers are
determined to avoid being labelled, put in 'bags':
But the narrator relentlessly lists their
labels. . . . All the time the narrator is hinting
that most individualism leads to uniformity.26
Auberon Waugh, Evelyn's son, published perhaps the most
interesting review in The Spectator. So much his
father's son, he wrote, "One cannot help wishing that Mr.
25 Walter Wells, Tycoons and Locusts: A Regional
Look at Hollywood Fiction of the 1930s (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1973), p.
124.
26 D.A.N. Jones, "Bags," The Listener, 87, No. 2238
(17 February 1972), p. 221.
599
Lambert would write a proper novel and justify a proper
review. It must be the Californian climate which seduced
• • • 0 7
him [italics mine]
Within a year after the publication of The Goodby
People, Lambert decided to leave Los Angeles, and,
although he returns frequently and has many friends in
the city, he no longer considers it his home. It seems
clear that things shifted for him at that time, probably
in more than one aspect of his life, so he was ready to
make a change. He told a Hollywood reporter that
"Everything I wanted to do nobody seemed to want to do,
and everything they wanted me to do, I didn't want to
do."28 He was feeling that the movie industry was not
what he had known, so his continuing to live in Los
Angeles was like a relationship that has outlived its
vital years and goes on just for the sake of memory. He
said in 1972:
With the collapse, more or less, of the movies, you
see how much they meant to this place. They did
create a kind of ambience that made it unlike
anywhere else. There was a marvelous sense of
27 Auberson Waugh, "Pen Sketches, The Spectator,
228, No. 7496 (26 February 1972), p. 317.
28 Joseph McBride, "New World Plans 'Avalanche'
Disaster Pic; Lambert Writing," Variety, 2 September
1976, no page number. Files of Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills.
600
arrival and departure. Because there was work, all
kinds of people were coining here from England, from
France, from anywhere. There was an openness. Now,
because so few movies are being made and the whole
movie society is splitting up, people are going to
New York, to Europe, or wherever. That whole thing
is gone, and I miss that very much. I don't
personally find anything as good has taken its
place. I'm sure there's much going on here; but, to
a certain extent, I think one inevitably cultivates
one's own garden. My garden has been taken away
from me. Or, should I say, greatly uprooted? I
don't think of anything as permanent in that sense.
I mean, I just think of leaving as a decision for
the moment. I would love to come back if there were
good reasons for coming back. [His plans at the
time were to go] . . . back to Europe. . . . Not to
England, I hasten to add. . . . The great thing
about Europe is that what you have there is several
countries in several places, and they're all very
accessible. The problem with Los Angeles is that,
unless it's marvelous, you're stuck; every other
place is so far awav. At the moment I'm getting a
stuck feeling here.29
Now, looking back on those times, Lambert says, "I didn't
feel that I ever left Los Angeles in bitterness really.
I was just looking at certain things and feeling, 'Well,
I've had that. Time to move on!"'
But it seems that there may be a bit more to the
decision to leave Los Angeles that is relevant to the
material in this research. The Goodby People was
Lambert's first literary self-disclosure of his
homosexuality, and the effect this revelation had was far
different from what he expected. He hadn't considered
29 L am b ert a s q u o t e d i n W e n n e r s t e n , p . 6 7 .
6 01
that, there was anything particularly shocking about it—
and there wasn’t, as long as the material remained in
novel form.
I wanted to write about it in a certain way: without
making any kind of thing of it or cause of it. I
was pleased about that part of the book, because I
felt that I had written it in a very cool, but very
direct, way, without making it cause-y or without in
any way drawing attention to it. It just was, as
everything else in the book was. It was given no
less or more weight. 0
But Los Angeles's response surprised him. He had
"completely misjudged the consequences" of writing about
his homosexuality:
I thought that— as people do, reading between the
lines and hearing gossip— most people knew I was a
homosexual. I think that was so, but there's an
immense difference socially in people knowing about
it and your actually writing about it. I shocked
people whom I didn't expect to be shocked. Some
acquaintances thought I'd been indiscreet and said,
Won't it affect your work and standing in the
movies? . . . I didn't expect it. I thought
Hollywood had a long tradition of tolerance,
cosmopolitanism, sophistication, knowing everything
about everyone; but it's surprising how provincial
its point of view still is in some quarters. 1
Not long after its release as a novel, Lambert was
approached to turn The Goodby People into a screenplay—
30 Lambert as quoted in Wennersten, p. 68.
31 Lambert as quoted in Wennersten, p. 68.
602
which he did. Because it includes both heterosexual and
homosexual affairs, it seemed natural to approach the two
episodes similarly. Although Hollywood was by that time
willing to feature quite explicit sexual sequences, the
benign and extremely muted homosexual liason that occurs
in the story was rejected with a venom unlike that
Lambert had ever previously encountered. He still
recalls that time quite vividly:
I was realistic enough to know that it would be very
difficult to get it off the ground. . . . I do
remember being at a party when the script had been
circulating around two or three studios, and the
head of one studio came over to me and said to me,
*1 just want you to know that I've read your script
and I think it's the most disgusting thing I've ever
read.' I said, 'What have you read?' He turned
away. The odd thing was that people said, 'We'll
use you for other things. Forget that.' . . .
Things haven't really changed, a bit on the surface
perhaps, but nobody's really making serious gay
films.
Lambert left Los Angeles within the year, and has since
established residence in Tangier, Morocco. Of his new
home base he says,
I always loved it there, and I'd been back there
once or twice to see friends in Tangier, and there
was just something at the back of my mind that if I
ever decided not to go on living in Los Angeles,
that's where I might move to. I knew I didn't want
to move back to England. And so it happened. I
spend about half the year there.
603
Although he returns to Los Angeles at least once a year,
the city for him is still inextricably linked up with
what is going on in Mthe industry":
Frankly, coming back is not so much fun anymore, not
for me. . . . What's being turned out in the movies
and television is so poor now, with a few
exceptions. There isn't what there was. There is
this awful gap between the energy expended and the
result— which seems to hit me every time I come
back.
Blatant greediness, he believes, seems to motivate much
that the city produces:
It was not quite so naked before. . . . Here I think
Los Angeles does link up with the rest of the
country. It's like Reagan has pressed that button,
the big greed button. . . . The older generation of
producers and so on who were here when I was first
working in Hollywood, they were greedy all right,
but that wasn't the whole story. There was a
genuine passion for what they were doing. I don't
feel that now. . . . You see it in the results. I
think it was Joan Didion who said, 'They're more
interested in making deals than making movies.'
Once he gave up Los Angeles as a place of residence
Lambert also gave it up, for a long time, as a setting
for his novels. Though he continued to write novels,
they took place elsewhere. He wrote books about motion
picture figures (Cukor) and motion pictures (The Making
of Gone with the Wind), but the city itself was never a
focus. Then, in researching these nonfiction works, he
604
began to accumulate a lot of Los Angeles and film
history, and about 1976 Daily Variety announced that
Lambert was writing a new book about Los Angeles,
. . . a subject on which he is regarded as an
expert, after writing such fiction as Inside Daisy
Clover, The Slide Area and The Goodby People [again,
note the omission of A Case for the Angels]. The
new one, for Viking Press, is a blend of history and
personal experiences called The Happening of Los
Angeles.
The book never materialized. As Lambert relates it now,
I got it commissioned. I worked on it for quite a
long while. I wrote five or six chapters of it, and
I wasn't satisfied. I thought, 'I haven't got this
right.' And I decided to drop it. A year or two
later, I said, 'I know what I want to do with this.'
That's how Running Time happened. So that I had the
advantage of all the research I'd done for the
nonfiction book, quite of lot of which found its way
in.
If only for that reason alone, the novel is quite
different from its predecessors: it is a veritable
compendium of film history, with a good deal of Southern
California description and insight to support it as it
moves through the years. The years are another radically
different factor. Whereas the earlier Lambert novels set
in Los Angeles covered relatively circumscribed periods
of time— the longest being Inside Daisy Clover, which
encompasses ten or eleven years— Running Time includes
605
sixty-three years in the lives of Elva Kay, her daughter
Baby Jewel, and of Hollywood itself. The novel is larger
chronologically then, but it is also much broader in
scope, encompassing a far wider view of society, as it
includes big business developments, oil, scandals, and
the lives of a number of Hollywood luminaries. It
focuses less on a particular element of society with the
nuances of relationship that go along with such a
narrowed perspective. Its nearest relative in the
Lambert oeuvre is Inside Daisy Clover, and in some
respects it can be seen as something of a retelling of
the Daisy Clover story, but one accomplished on a much
grander scale. Lambert says, "I think I wrote Running
Time because I realized that I had never written a
frontal story about the movies, and I wanted to do that."
Unlike Isherwood who wrote less and less about Hollywood
with each succeeding work, this is the novel in which
Lambert focused the most attention on Hollywood. In many
ways it is the subject of the novel.
Because the scope of the novel is so different from
anything else he had ever written, Lambert knew he had to
come up with a format that could span the years,
encompass the history, and yet at the same time give the
individual insight into selected characters that
606
exemplifies his work. He does that by devising the Elva
Kay diaries with their appended commentaries by her
daughter:
I wanted a device to carry me through a long period
of time. I knew that I wanted to start in the
twenties and go all the way through. And there were
certain areas about the movies that had never really
been covered. I was not interested in people
surviving in retirement, because that's been done,
the whole sort of Sunset Boulevard saga. I wanted
people who could somehow go on. I just had the idea
of this mother-daughter team. And that the mother
would be this ultimate California woman. That's the
genesis of it.
Whereas Lambert had used the narrative device of
including characters that he had introduced in earlier
novels— that is, until The Goodby People, where he said
"I just couldn't find any place for it"32— in Running
Time he tries a new technique, interpolating real people
and their histories into the fictionalized events of the
novel:
I felt it was necessary for the very simple reason
that in all the Hollywood novels I'd read everybody
was fictionalized. And it strikes me as unreal,
since everybody knows the famous here. To write
about Hollywood, and especially fifty or sixty years
of it, without having real people around was just
not right. So I decided to do that blend.
32 L am b ert a s q u o t e d i n W e n n e r s t e n , p . 6 8 .
607
Because Lambert manages the blend so well, the reader has
to fight to keep remembering that all the people and
events are not uniformly of the same order— either true
or imagined.
The main characters themselves were pastiches of
real figures that Lambert knew of or discovered in his
research. "Elva was a sort of invention of all screen
mothers of the whole California optimism, material drive,
upbeat, invincible thing." But Baby Jewel was more than
a representation of type:
The daughter was a compendium of lots of child movie
stars and their experiences. I did some research
for that. In the early twenties there was this
invasion of moppets and ambitious mothers. I read
about a whole lot of child stars, moppets of the
Twenties; there were half-a-dozen I read about. I
used some of their experiences and again some of
their situations, but not their characters.
The children in Lambert1s works are the only youth
of consequence in any of the British novels about Los
Angeles. And even these of Lambert are a very special
breed: mostly, the child movie stars, either would-be or
otherwise. None of the other novelists seem to have been
able to envision youngsters in the Southern California
environment and use them in their works. There are no
little children of consequence in Chandler? Hilton only
refers to some neighborhood children at one point; Huxley
608
has none in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and only
the babies in Ape and Essence; Waugh never uses any as
characters in The Loved One; nor does Isherwood deal with
children in any of his three Los Angeles novels; Moore
includes a brief hallucinatory episode with Fergus's
daughter but never makes her a character of any
significance in the action. Certainly there is no
absence of children on the streets of Los Angeles, but
nonetheless they never seem to find their way into
British novels set in the city.
Though Lambert includes children, there is a decided
difference between the way he portrays the fate of the
boys as compared to that of the girls. Julie Forbes's
son in The Slide Area has an almost Machiavellian nature;
and Peaches, the boy whose mother wants him to be a star
like Baby Jewel, becomes a childhood drunk, runs away
from home, and ends by dying in the California brush.
Lambert commented, "A lot of the most mixed-up kids I've
known were nearly all male. [Then he went on to mention a
number of prominent movie stars' sons and male child
stars.] They were all disasters." By way of contrast,
the girls fare much better. Both Emma Slack of The Slide
Area and Daisy are already fourteen years old when their
stories begin, and rather knowledgeable adolescents at
609
that. Along with Baby, though, they are survivors. The
schoolteacher in Running Time tells Elva:
It's a woman's town whichever way you look at it.
All doors open for the female of the species out
here. She can become a star, or the Mother behind a
star, she can write photoplays, she can even direct
pictures and run her own studio (RT, 2 6).
This statement becomes a real inspiration to Elva, who,
by the time she dies at the end of the novel, has become
one of the grand dames of the town, fully competent and
enormously successful as a woman in a man's world. "The
women are the great survivors here," Lambert believes.
The primary geographical perspective on the city is
the view that Elva dubs the One Big Look. From the time
that they arrive in Los Angeles in 1919 to Baby's final
moment in the hills above the city after her Oscar
presentation, Lambert employs the act of looking out over
the city and noting its changes as a leitmotif throughout
the novel. In 1919 when she and Baby ascend the Court
Flight (Angel's Flight) cable car, Elva says as she takes
her first One Big Look:
For the first time since we arrived in Los Angeles I
could see it whole, and see it wasn't whole at all.
It reminded me of a jigsaw puzzle I once started and
gave up, scattering a lot of pieces on the floor.
In the long spaces between all those pieces there
seemed to be no connections, nothing to help you
guess how the pattern might turn out. So much
6 10
desert. One Big Look showed that all the way from
the mountains to the ocean was just basically
desert. You had to cross the biggest stretch to get
from Hollywood to Santa Monica and the beaches,
along dirt tracks or a railroad that passed nothing
except a few tall spindly palm trees and a few
derricks where oil had been struck. Today all the
tracks looked very lonely, occasional automobiles
and a Big Red Car moving as slow as camel caravans.
Between Hollywood and downtown the roads were at
least paved, but they passed through acres of
wilderness, broken up from time to time by clusters
of houses with whitewashed walls and red tiled roofs
like the Yucca Riviera. But on some of the front
lawns, oil pumps nodded up and down. Only the
foothills looked cultivated, bright green oases with
planted estates and houses as grand as castles on
the Rhine. Two things struck me as especially
strange through the telescope. First, on a hillside
above the Hollywood Hotel, was an ugly bare patch of
land hollowed out in the shape of a huge bowl, an
old ranch house stuck in the middle. Then at the
edge of downtown, stood a gleaming artifical lake
with dark Des Moines [the town she came from] houses
dotted along the shore. People were out in
sailboats, but the air was so still that the boats
hardly moved. They looked stranded forever, like
everything else in the desert (RT, 29).
By 1930, when they make the trip up to take another One
Big Look, the city has changed rather drastically. In
many ways, this device effectively marks the aging of the
city, rather like one follows the major characters in a
chronicle as they grow, thrive and deteriorate through
the years. This time the deteriorization of the downtown
area has begun, the development of the Miracle Mile is in
the works, and generally the city is growing, filling up
what formerly were the empty spaces:
611
The city had grown and spread so much that empty
spaces became an event, and the desert had almost
vanished beneath houses, office blocks, buildings of
all kinds. Most extraordinary of all, fantastic
towers were springing up everywhere. No one lived
in them, it was forbidden on account of the
earthquake risk, but they rose in all shapes,
dimensions and colors. . . . It seemed all of Los
Angeles was reaching to the sky. 'No yellow brick
road needed here,' Baby said. 'Could it be anywhere
else but Oz?'
By the 1940-41 visit Elva goes with Bugsy Siegel, the man
she calls Ben. These fairly regular decade by decade
trips continue throughout the book and mark the shifting
and changing patterns and issues in the lives of the
central figures. As the reader catches up on the
decade's developments in the lives of the characters, he
also notes in what ways Los Angeles has changed in the
interim. The last One Big Look is incorporated into
Baby's final scene in the novel. As a woman of seventy,
having been honored with a special Academy Award, Baby
uses theatrical terms to signal what she feels is the end
(the last act) coming— but not before she has an
opportunity to look out once more over her city. She
drives her specially-outfitted Rolls Royce to the top of
Laurel Canyon, gets out and stands
. . . facing the glittering city below. In the
years I'd seen it grow from hopeful hick town to
anxious metropolis, it couldn't have changed more
than the world. . . . After one last One Big Look, I
612
turned the Rolls into a dark winding dead end lane
and parked in front of a vacant lot. No lights came
from the only nearby house with its rows of plastic
garbage bags at the entrance to the driveway. I
drew the window blinds, pressed the button that
turned the back seat into a bed, wrapped myself in
the fur rug and felt the third act starting to
happen. Not the one I’d been waiting for, the one
waiting for me (RT, 405) .
How appropriate that the star child of Los Angeles, the
city of the automobile, should elect to end her days in
her luxury car overlooking "the glittering city below."
The juxtaposition of this with the plastic garbage bags
stacked and waiting for the refuse pickup underscores the
old reality vs. illusion motif so prevalent in the Los
Angeles novels.
Other than in the One Big Look sequences, there is
very little concern with the geography of the city in
Running Time. This novel focuses primarily, as Lambert
admits, on the "houses, habits, parties, the interior
life and how it changes in time. They are hardly aware
of the land." A reader interested in popular history,
police corruption and assorted scandals, some of which
find their way into the Chandler novels, will revel in
much of this book's detail. For example, William Desmond
Taylor is one of the "real" figures whose actual life
events are interwoven into the story. He and Elva have
an extended affair in the early days of Hollywood. He
613
assures her that police raids are "never a problem out
here" and that "most of us come from nowhere and we get
somewhere very fast" (38). Later, when she sees him with
another woman, after she has already felt a dwindling of
his affections, she stabs him. The murder is to this day
unsolved, so Lambert has used this opportunity to blend
fact with his fiction.
Certain aspects of life in the city are revealed in
this book, as they have been in none of the other British
novels. Cocaine use, for example, plays a significant
role in Elva's life: she is a user until her death at
93!33 There are many corrupt doctors; even Will Hays,
the man brought out to Hollywood to be the moral overseer
for the motion picture industry, is ultimately "brought
around"; the message is that everyone in town is
corruptible. "In those balmy Los Angeles days many
borderline things went on, and no one called them insane"
(208). When Baby looks back, she says,
33 Lambert confesses that he got quite a kick out
of portraying Elva as a thriving yet fully addicted drug
user: "The cocaine thing is rather different from the
grass thing in A Case for the Angels, because that was
somehow associated with being on the fringe. . . . I
think drugs are a very integral part of life here. Coke
is the success drug, whereas marijuana was the drop out
drug. That's the big difference. . . . What amused me in
doing it with Elva was that usually you're supposed to
disintegrate after a certain amount of time, and I
thought it would be amusing to show someone who didn't."
614
Between the first and last of the purple exits,
Starlight City turned into Sodom and Gomorrah West,
where America's reckless idols paid out half their
salaries to pushers, held orgies, carried on secret
affairs, seduced minors and were hauled off
screaming to padded cells. If you want to escape
the rumor mill, Mother used to say, for God's sake
go to church (RT, 45).
These revelations, extreme as they are, seem somehow
appropriate to the common conception of Los Angeles.
What is often astonishing in the novel is just how
ordinary the lives of these people are— despite the
apparent excitement of their lives. Baby just wants to
settle down with Jimmy Gabriel, her husband, but that
never happens for any length of time. Instead, she
becomes just one of a long string of his wives, and never
marries again. She is, for the most part, the image of
the hard-working woman, albeit that her endeavors are in
movies.
A predominating theme in the works British novelists
write about Los Angeles is the inordinate amount of
energy inhabitants give attempting to stay— or at least
to look— young. Certainly Huxley's Jo Stoyte is the most
obvious case in point, but Elva Kay is a close second.
She begins to lie about Baby's age right from the time
they come to Los Angeles, based on her very firm belief
615
that younger is better. In keeping with this lie that
she must continue to perpetrate, Baby mentions that she
. . . took an IQ test at the University of Southern
California, which was a favorite publicity gimmick
for kiddie stars in those days. I scored 172, which
put me in the genius class and gave a completely
false impression of me . . . and I was three years
older, anyway, than my official age of five. ('What
a blessing you're still so small,' Mother said, 'and
likely to stay that way.') (RT, 63-4)
Elva also dedicates time, energy, as well as money to her
own search for eternal youthfulness and is willing to try
all forms of seemingly crackpot schemes— and all of this
she manages to accomplish in seclusion. Late in life
Elva is the subject of an Enquirer article called "The
Twilight of Elva Kay"; mortified, she tells Baby,
As we speak millions are talking about your Mother.
Sex-crazed octogenarian clinging to the illusion of
youth! Dressed for the party that was over long
ago! Fading away to a world of tinsel Hollywood
dreams! Almost as much a ghost as the ghosts she
claims to . . . (RT, 353)
After this, she breaks off and sobs. Baby only learns
the truth about all the treatments Elva has endured when
she reads her mother's diaries after her death.
Baby has her own difficulties with time; she keeps
seeing herself in a disconcerting double capacity, both
as the all-too-real child on the screen and the growing-
616
older woman that she really is. Which is she, since both
have reality in time? Here Lambert elucidates the
meaning of the title of the book:
The running time of my old movies was never more
than ninety minutes and yet half a century later the
movies are still running, still catching up with me,
and I can never escape them. If Mr. [Orson] Welles
is right, I'm freeze-framed in a rearview mirror.
Everything about me except the movie image has died
under the gaze of the Medusa's eye (RT, 392).
In one way Elva actively goes against the general
mind-set of those in Los Angeles— which tends to be now
and future-oriented: instead, she feels great reverence
for the city's past, but continually finds herself alone
in wanting to preserve and restore the heritage. "I
continue to campaign against the destruction and neglect
of our historic local monuments" (319); "How many moons
since I saw a Hollywood crowd, at a cemetery or premiere,
that really glittered?" (318) She even gives a large
anonymous donation to restore the famous HOLLYWOOD sign,
her theme being "If you can't save the sign, you can't
save Hollywood" (377). It is one of many ironies that
Baby is unable to preserve Elva's amazing house after her
mother1s death.
Elva has a number of other beliefs that inform her
actions. One is that it would be very dangerous for her
617
to leave Los Angeles, almost as though she were in an
enchanted Oz and the magic powers that have enveloped her
and Baby since they first arrived by train from Des
Moines in 1919 would somehow go out of her life were she
to leave town:
Make fun of me if you like. But the City of the
Angels is my home, and I've always had a strong
vibration I'll regret the day, or even the hour, I
leave it. . . . I always had this belief or
superstition, call it what you will, that bad luck
would follow if I ever traveled beyond the Los
Angeles city limits. The pueblo had always been so
good to me, taking both Baby and myself to its
heart, and seemed to create a magic circle around
the two of us (RT, 233).
She is uninterested in traveling outside of Los Angeles
because she believes she has everything other places have
to offer all the while she stays at home:
The movies take us everywhere, from Venice to Rio,
from Buckingham Palace to Shanghai, and improve on
the originals every time. To travel the world, I
feel sure, is to risk severe disappointment as well
as illness. . . . Why leave a city that allows us to
live wherever we care to imagine we're living? (134)
In fact, one of the major problems for Elva is that
she gradually begins to believe that she is living in the
movies— she can no longer separate movies from life.
Early in the novel she employs her version of Lambert's
back-lot idea when she says, "Sometimes it's difficult to
618
tell a movie set from a real place out here. . . .
Everywhere you go is like a movie” (3 0, 3 6). Later, she
encourages people to solve their problems by watching
movies: "Find the movie. There's no mystery of the human
heart that a movie hasn't solved” (24 3). But Baby begins
to be alarmed by her mother's growing inability to
distinguish between reality and illusion: "I feared the
movies were making serious inroads on Mother's
mind. . . . Movies had taken her over completely and
become much more real than life" (245, 321). In those
days Elva intones, "Hollywood will last as long as the
world" (268). Nearing the end of her life, she
hallucinates that she is with film stars acting in their
movie roles (343) and, almost as a way of avoiding death,
has
TV sets all over, the house really comes alive—
Spence in the den, Lombard in the library, Bogie in
the bedroom, Ronnie Colman in the poolhouse. The
medium is the medium, turning me into all my loved
ones (341).
This finally becomes dangerous to her life, because only
the movies are real and she can no longer respond
directly— without the intervention of film— to the events
of her existence:
619
It was strange. When Mother saw an actual fire, she
began living in a disaster movie. She only got
herself out of it when she saw the same fire on the
tube. Images on a screen led her away from reality
and brought her back to it, as if she could only
recognize something by its shadow (JRT, 358) .
Just moments before she dies in 1980, Elva makes the
ultimate connection, for a movie actor is actually
running for president— just what Elva has always
expected— justifying her long-held idea that Hollywood
really is the backbone of American life. Beyond the
obvious British irony that one reads between the lines,
her words have an uncannily accurate ring to them:
Get America back on the track with an alumnus of
Hollywood's golden age in the White House! This has
got to be the blockbuster package of the century:
Washington provides Mr. Reagan with the big chance
and the big picture Warner Brothers always denied
him, and Mr. Reagan provides the nation with the
image it's been waiting for. With a head full of
folk wisdom and a heart as great as the world,
small-town American boy walks off with the game. An
image to rank alongside Garbo's for romance and
Baby's for eternal childhood. An image to erase the
shameful memory of the Carter family turning the
White House into Tobacco Road. Ignore the
nitpickers objecting that Mr. Reagan never made the
Top Ten. No man who played a scene with Bette Davis
or a whole picture with Barbara Stanwyck is likely
to forget what we stand for. Bred in our unique
tradition, he'll move heaven and earth to restore it
(RT, 373).
Sometimes, truth is more incredible than fiction. What a
gem for a British satirist, and Lambert must be commended
620
for the way he has so dexterously interwoven it into his
novel.
For a woman whose final words are "my kind never
runs out of rainbows," (374) Forest Lawn is her obvious
resting place. Indeed, Elva had made the arrangements
many years earlier; and this time Lambert has his
opportunity to have a go at Forest Lawn. Not since the
passage in The Slide Area, pertaining to the countess's
death and the quick opening scene in The Goodby People
had he entered that most tempting of territories to the
British novelist: the Southern California funeral
industry. Just like the British all seem to do, Baby
recalls her first trip to Forest Lawn:
I followed her on a private tour of Forest Lawn,
where she planned for us to be side by side
throughout eternity and picked out a couple of
plots. We strolled through a Shangri-La of tropical
flowers, bright pavilions and marble statuary,
sniffed mimosa in the Mystery of Life garden, stood
in a chapel where artificial sunlight streamed
through the windows while Wurlitzer music played,
lingered on a hillside terrace with white doves
circling above our head. 'I know we're living in
the movies,' I whispered, 'but do we have to die in
Lost Horizon?' [note the references to Hilton's
work] Speaking personally, Mother felt there was no
movie in which she would rather die. After checking
out the graves of Jean Harlow, Lon Chaney and old
Dressier, she advised me to think of my cemetery lot
as real estate. 'Naturally I want us to stay
together for ever, among the stars and under the
stars, but imagine the resale value if you change
your mind. Property's got nowhere to go but up,
even for the dead!' (RT, 206)
621
Here the emphasis is on the cemetery plot as a sound real
estate investment. Later, as Elva gets closer to death,
she begins to prepare herself to take her place among the
famous dead who will surround her— surely a unique
version of the British preoccupation with the Los Angeles
funeral scene. In many ways, Elva is playing this last
scene for her public, thereby qualifying herself to be
buried among the Hollywood greats:
'This could be the last reel starting. . . . Yours
truly will show that twilight can be the most
beautiful hour of the dayi' Socially speaking, she
took the veil and became a fascinating
recluse. . . . She grew more dependent on external
stimuli than ever, not only media-conscious but
media-dominated. In this last phase she had no
direct contact with the present, knew it only
through newspapers, magazines, TV, and she relived
the past through old movies, her scrapbooks, her
beloved ghosts. . . . 'I'm just retiring to inner
space.' . . . She . . . arranged private visits to
her cemetery lot at Forest Lawn. Laying flowers on
her future grave, she viewed it with peculiar
satisfaction. Let the world say what it likes about
me, I shall spend eternity only a stone's throw from
Carole Lombard.' (RT, 3 53-5)
Here then is a new version of The Loved One motif, where
the dying gain comfort from knowing the "beauty" that
will encircle them. Lambert carries this one step
farther yet, for when Elva dies, Baby— the child of
Hollywood— determines to do her mother's final make up
herself. She enters the Forest Lawn work room and sees
622
her mother lying in "a white hospital gown, her face
drained of color, worn, shattered." This would never do
for Elva, who, no matter what the impass, could always
take charge of herself and the situation, and then come
out in grand style. So Baby approaches the cosmetician,
and even he is shocked by what she proposes:
I opened Mother's makeup case, and his face
went almost as pale as hers. 'You can't do that,
it's unheard of.' I began laying out pots and
brushes. 'One of your slogans is Comfort the
Bereaved,' I said. 'If you don't live up to it,
I'll take Mother somewhere else. And no one has to
know. I don't want credit, officially you did
another great job.'
He backed away, as if expecting me to pull a
gun from the case, then watched silently as I set to
work. It wasn't difficult. I had seen Mother set
to work so often, knew how to apply the special Pan-
Cake mixture that glazed her skin, knew how she
stretched it and smoothed out facial lines with
gauze tape stuck under her hair, knew the correct
amounts of green eyeline and silvery coral lip
gloss. Finally we slipped her into an Adrian
creation I'd brought along, a blue and gold cocktail
number with Egyptian motifs and a headdress. 'The
image is She,' I explained. And there was a touch
of Tutankhamen as well. . . . 'That was a true labor
of love,' I said to the cosmetician. . . . 'Please
go away now, I'd like to be alone with her.' He
closed the door. I stared at Mother and remembered
her saying there was no movie in which she would
rather die than Lost Horizon. Serene and beautiful,
she was now the pride of Shangri-La. Nowhere a
trace of the cruel actual movie of her death. I
shivered a little on account of the artificial
chill, and felt we had our last moment together.
But when the funeral service ended and her body
whizzed discreetly down a chute, I felt cheated
again. Why should that last loving tribute to
Mother's image be burned to a crisp? 'Because
that's the way I want it, Baby. Promise you'll
62 3
never let me rot six feet under until I look like
something out of a horror cheapie.1 (RT, 378).
The scene is not painted with the bitter brush Waugh
would have used, for despite the absurdity there remains
a poignancy. This is what Lambert has managed to capture
so well in his novels of Los Angeles. While written from
the jaundiced perspective of the Briton, they retain some
respect, some understanding of the cultural milieu in
which they are set.
Lambert even suspects that his sympathetic view of
Los Angeles in the novel cost him the good reception in
Britain that his earlier works had received:
They didn’t like it at all. I think because from
the point of view of the English if you're going to
write a novel about Hollywood, you've either got to
put it down or expose it in some way, and they were
very thrown that I didn't. From their point of view
it's got to be ultimately an expose' or something
like The Loved One. They were mystified by the fact
that it wasn't. That I took it as a place like any
other place.
Despite its poor British recepion, when asked which is
his favorite of his own Los Angeles novels, he replies
quite readily, "In some ways I like Running Time because
I feel it is a summation. I like that aspect of it,
because I feel it's something I haven't done before."
The American critics agreed, and generally liked it much
624
better than the British did. Elisabeth Jakab in the New
York Times Book Review said, "Hollywood's a glamorous
place, even when it isn’t and nobody understands that
better than Gavin Lambert."34
Ill
Because he is the youngest of the authors discussed,
because his work brings together elements of each of
those who preceded him, and because he has transformed
the essence of Los Angeles so masterfully onto the page,
Lambert deserves the last word in this study. Thirty-
five years after Huxley and Waugh offered their
apocalyptic visions of Los Angeles, Elva Kay, in her own
way a classic visionary of the city, devotes her last
thoughts to contemplating the future of the town she
loves. Her impassioned state of mind, crying out like a
Cassandra amidst the corrupt, infuses the passage. Its
blending of nightmare insight and irony characterizes all
the British novels set in Los Angeles:
If you don’t keep watering the desert, it goes
back to rock and sand and wrinkled joshua trees,
which is how I saw the City of the Angels in my
dream. A wind moaned through the dunes of Beverly
Hills and Death Valley reached all the way to
Universal. In Hollywood the land began to crack and
explode with drought, buildings toppled crazily as
34 Elisabeth Jakab, "Points West and South," New
York Times Book Review, 1 May 1983, p. 14.
625
another volcanic age began. Soon only saber-toothed
cats prowled the ruins of the Pantages Theatre, and
out Culver City way the most famous studio in the
world was a nest of mammoth snakes.
My God. What a warning of the end of an era.
Apocalypse Now and how to avoid it. The decline of
Mr. Brando— no, the problem's even vaster than that.
The problem is that sixty years ago we had no past
here, if we're talking style, if we're talking
aspiration, and then the movies turned a creative
desert into a new Athens or Rome. But now, with the
old spirit drying up, we could return even more
quickly to desert again. And as the City of Angels
goes, they say, so goes America (RT, 372).
626
G a v in L am b ert B i b l i o g r a p h y
Primary Works
Novels
The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life. New York:
Viking, 1959; rpt. New York: Dial, 19 68.
Inside Daisy Clover. New York: Viking, 1963.
A Case for the Angels. New York: Dial, 19 68.
The Goodby People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.
Running Time. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
Nonfiction
"From a Hollywood Notebook," Sight and Sound, 28, No. 2
(Spring 1959), 68-73.
"The Back Lot by the Sea," Harper's Bazaar, 96, No. 3 014
(January 1963), 90-91.
The Dangerous Edge. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975.
Interviews
"On Gavin Lambert." Interview by Robert Wennersten.
Coast, November 1972, 65-76. Files of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
"An Interview with Gavin Lambert." Interview by Carolyn
G. Heilbrun. Twentieth Century Literature, 22, No.
3 (October 1976), 332-42.
Personal Interview. 28 December 1985.
Telephone Interview. 1 February 1986.
Secondary Sources
Diehl, Digby. "New Lease on Life for Lambert Novel."
Los Angeles Times Calendar, 9 April 1972, 49 and 55.
Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library.
627
"Hollywood Hangover." Times Literary Supplement, No.
3,653 (3 March 1972), 239.
Jakab, Elisabeth. "Points West and South." New York
Times Book Review, 1 May 1983, 14 and 22.
Jones, D.A.N. "Bags." The Listener. 87, No. 2238 (17
February 1972), 221.
Knight, Arthur. "The Other Hollywood." Saturday Review,
19 December 1959, n. pag. Files of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
Knox, Ronnie. "Lambert— Britain's Bundle for the
Southland." Los Angeles Times Calendar, 22 October
1967, 13. Files of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences Library.
Levin, Martin. "A Reader's Report." New York Times Book
Review, 19 May 1963, 32.
Levin, Martin. "A Reader's Report." New York Times Book
Review, 123, No. 15 (14 April 1968), 31.
Lindroth, James R. "The Goodby People." America, 124,
No. 15 (17 April 1971), Whole No. 3209, 415.
Marx, Arthur. "Cinderella, Full Circle." Saturday
Review, 46, No. 17 (27 April 1963), 37.
McBride, Joseph. "New World Plans 'Avalanche* Disaster
Pic; Lambert Writing." Variety, 2 September 1976,
n. pag. Files of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences Library.
"Other New Novels." Times Literary Supplement, No. 3,468
(15 August 1968), 880.
Shanker, Israel. "Briefly Noted." New Yorker, 59, No.
10 (25 April 1983), 153-54.
Waugh, Auberon. "Pen Sketches." The Spectator, 228, No.
7496 (26 February 1972), 316-17.
Wells, Walter. Tycoons and Locusts: A Regional Look at
Hollywood Fiction of the 193 0s. Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1973.
628
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