Southern California: A hotbed of creativity or merely a hothouse where creative juices evaporate?

Because life is too easy here, Southern California may never produce a major novelist, but its yield of letter writers is abundant.

Dan Brennan’s notion that our blissful climate has undone all but two major novelists--John Steinbeck and Jack London--has at least stirred several Angelenos from their lethargy to their typewriters.

Brennan included the whole state in his hypothesis, but I think it is only Southern California that has the kind of blissful climate and occult temptations that are said to be the ruin of major novelists.

Gladwin Hill, who was long a correspondent for the New York Times but now lives here in easy retirement just below the Hollywood sign, says the rationale for Southern California’s low incidence of major novelists is “quite simple.”

“As you know,” he writes, “California is composed largely of people from somewhere else, who migrated here for one of two reasons: escapism or the entrepreneurial spirit, the yen for adventure or novelty.

“Neither sort is essentially the novel-writing type. Novel-writing . . . is possibly the poorest-paid occupation there is. . . . Your escapist Californian is probably going to be diverted into some form of cultism and lose interest in completing his/her novel. . . . He’s going to go into real estate or invent something or go into quiche franchising. . . .

“The weather indeed attracts people to California. But the crucial point is the sort of people who are attracted by weather, and California’s numerous other attractions.”

Hill certainly has a point. In analyzing the effect of migration on any city we have to consider the kind of people who have migrated to it.

I have always believed that one reason for the vitality, the freshness of spirit and the buoyancy of America was the kind of people who came here from other continents. They were not the same as those they left behind. They were daring; they had energy; they had the desire to be free, to leave the past behind, to challenge the unknown; they followed the sun.

The people who migrate to Los Angeles are still following the sun; but they are not as tough as the Europeans who turned up at Ellis Island with their strange names and their bundles, reckless of danger, undismayed by hardship, determined to strive and succeed.

Perhaps the Asians who are streaming into Los Angeles today are of that kind, burning with entrepreneurial zeal and a hunger for freedom--but most Americans who migrate here from other quarters of the nation are drawn by visions of balmy winters, warm swimming pools, easy morals, casual clothing and laid-back life styles. To begin with, they are tired. They want warmth and comfort, not challenge.

Of course there are the young who migrate here by the thousands. They may not be tired, but they come here, too, for the easiness, for visions of sugarplums, of instant stardom and riches. They come here for identity, and they are lost. One of them, some day, may write a major novel.

Howard Decker of North Hollywood calls Brennan’s idea “specious,” and asks “What about Richard Henry Dana?”

Dana was the Harvard man who sailed to California as an ordinary seaman and wrote “Two Years Before the Mast.” It was a popular and influential book, but it was not a novel.

Decker also nominates Raymond Chandler, “who is considered a major novelist in more civilized climes, like Europe, and especially Great Britain.”

I must have read each of Chandler’s four major novels at least three times, and while they enjoyed a wide popular success as detective stories, they were indeed serious novels in depicting the efforts of a modern knight-errant to right wrongs and vanquish evil against a Southern California landscape that reeked of greed, corruption, the exploitation of the innocent and old orchids.

Still, Chandler was not untouched by the degenerative afflictions that Southern California visits on good writers. He finally drank himself to death in his La Jolla apartment.

“Faulkner . . . wrote some of his best stuff here (in Hollywood),” Decker goes on. “So did Fitzgerald. What about Cain and Nathanael West? How about Lillian Hellman? She prospered in Hollywood and I can’t believe that this fact didn’t help ‘produce’ her work. A novelist uses every ounce of his/her life’s blood and experiences. . . .”

Faulkner wrote movies here, and drank. I don’t think any of his novels has a California background. F. Scott Fitzgerald, also a heavy drinker, was working on a Hollywood novel, “The Last Tycoon,” when he died in Sheilah Graham’s apartment.

James M. Cain wrote “Serenade” and “Mildred Pierce,” both set in Southern California. Does anyone still read them? Lillian Hellman? Did she write a novel?

Nathanael West? He wrote one highly praised short novel about the destruction of the innocents in Hollywood.

“The smog didn’t hurt Aldous Huxley’s muse,” writes novelist Marianne Ruuth. “Christopher Isherwood thrived next to the Pacific Ocean. . . .”

She also mentions Ray Bradbury, Henry Miller and others. Huxley and Isherwood, it seems to me, wound up in left field courting the occult. Bradbury will outlast them both, but his greatest novel was about Mars, not Los Angeles. (Maybe there isn’t that much difference.)

Contrary to Hill’s law, Jacqueline Briskin, Judith Krantz, Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon have all got rich writing novels, but have not won critical acclaim.

As Ruuth says, Los Angeles has produced many good writers. But I’m not sure that any is a “major American novelist.”

I do know that Hill and Decker are never going to make it. Not if they go on writing “his/her.”