In the matter of Southern California novelists, is it a case of the bland leading the bland?

In examining novelist Dan Brenner’s notion that Southern California’s bland climate and sensual temptations keep great novelists from writing great works here, I did not mean to undertake a serious study of the Los Angeles novel.

I am neither a novelist (yet) nor a literary critic, nor even a serious student of the form.

However, for suggesting that there might be some truth in Brenner’s thesis, I have been called everything from blasphemous to sexist, both of which I well may be.

I was more interested in the implied slur on the Los Angeles scene than I was in a comparative analysis of the Los Angeles novel.

I’m sure the “great American novel” is an ideal that has never been achieved, and never will be.

As I said, James M. Cain, Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg and Raymond Chandler have written gutsy and eloquent novels with a Los Angeles scene, and F. Scott Fitzgerald had six chapters of one going when he died.

Of course I have received protests from champions of every other novelist who ever passed through Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus, and some who didn’t even get that close.

Tracy Cummings, a philosophy major at UC San Diego, calls me a sexist for not naming any women among those whom I dismissed as not having written the “great American novel” about Los Angeles, and names such women writers as Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather and Emily Bronte--none of whom, so far as I know, ever breathed a breath of L.A. smog.

“Let me warn you,” she says, “it is not wise to rankle a philosophy major or a philosopher, since we and they can tear you to shreds with logic.”

Ms. Cummings also deplores my description of Southern California women as “long-legged, golden . . . young nymphs,” and points out, quite correctly, that not all Southern California women have long legs and suntans.

“None are nymphs,” she insists, “unless you prefer to refer to women in somewhat poetic terms that make us seem like magical creatures with nothing better to do than have fun. . . .”

Don Weddle of Buena Park argues that the malaise, frustration and conflict that underlie great novels are to be found here in Lotus Land.

“I doubt that even you could be such an astute observer of life,” he writes, “if you had not experienced at least a little bit of tension, rage, anxiety, depression, unhappy marriage, unfulfilled dreams, impotency, problems with children, chronic physical illness, addictions, competition for employment, mid-life crisis, fears, child and spousal abuse--who could be happy without one or another of them now and then?”

Well, I can’t plead guilty to all those afflictions, but I have experienced mid-life crisis.

Weddle also points out, in reference to the first line of my own unfinished novel, that there is no such thing in Los Angeles as “ . . . the end of summer.”

Hilda Reach reminds me that the Nobel novelist Thomas Mann lived in Pacific Palisades from 1941 to 1952.

“I was his secretary for almost 10 of those 12 years, and (he) managed to stay out of the pools and away from the booze and the beach girls.”

Mann won the Nobel Prize in 1929, when he lived in Germany. He came to the United States as a refugee from the Nazis in 1939, and in the years that he lived here he continued to write in German and about Europe. I might have liked his books better if he had written more about booze and beach girls.

“You mention no female scribes in Lotus Land,” writes Corinne Greiner of Iowa City, Iowa. “Have Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman and their peers written off into the sunset?”

Ms. Greiner says she is “normally” a Californian, but in the past year she has experienced “every glory of life in the Midwest--dragon-sized mosquitoes, humidity that transformed me into an oozing blob; hay fever which made my nose resemble Bozo’s; 70-below temperatures; winds so fierce they literally knocked me over. According to Mr. Brennan and yourself I should be a Nobel laureate by now. . . .”

Ms. Greiner notes that she has had several short stories published, “perhaps because I’ve been enlightened by Iowa’s lack of sunsets and orange trees, (but) I find it difficult to believe that last summer’s allergies and this winter’s frostbite will turn me into Jane Austen. . . .”

Carl Karnig Mahakian of Burbank describes William Saroyan, quoting Prof. Donald Heiney, professor of English at UC Irvine, as “one of the most American of 20th-Century writers.”

But Saroyan’s native territory was Fresno . He knew nothing of Los Angeles and its beach girls.

“What about Joseph Wambaugh?” asks Arline Stone. “A Times reviewer said that if Southern California had produced a better author he couldn’t think of who it was.”

Neither can I. Wambaugh may be as good as any we’ve had. His books, even more than Chandler’s, reflect the utter corruption of character in the Los Angeles environment, but his cop heroes, like Chandler’s Marlowe, are sustained by some untouchable core of integrity.

As long as we’re trying to be thorough, I ought to mention Horace McCoy, whose 1935 novel, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” used the dreary marathon dances of the Depression as a metaphor for the despair of life in Los Angeles, and Alison Lurie, whose satirical “The Nowhere City” gave us one of our most lasting epithets.

Now, back to my own novel, which, I promise you, will be full of women who seem like magical creatures with nothing better to do than have fun.

I’m shooting for a miniseries.