Here more than anywhere else in...

Here more than anywhere else in America I seem to hear the coming footsteps of the Muses.

--W.B. YEATS

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. . . I

Who live in Los Angeles and not in London

Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be

Still more like Los Angeles.

--BERTOLT BRECHT

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Southern California, as poet Hildegard Flanner once wrote, is “a land toward which it is impossible to remain indifferent.” That’s why the world of arts and letters has long been divided into those who regard Los Angeles and environs as a place of fear and loathing and those who feel obliged to explain why the others are so hopelessly wrong.

The literary life--or the lack of it--is often the focus of the debate, which has burned hot for at least a century or so and shows no sign of cooling off. Los Angeles remains “the city American intellectuals love to hate,” as Mike Davis writes in “City of Quartz,” and the otherwise cranky naysayers among the intelligentsia seem to delight in denouncing Southern California as a wasteland, a reclaimed patch of desert where--as Woody Allen so famously put it--the only cultural advantage is the ability to make a right turn on a red light.

But Allen is wrong, and I suspect that he knows full well that Southern California is not (and never has been) a benighted backwater. Indeed, the community of writers and readers is (and always has been) vigorous and passionate, even if it sometimes resembles a river that disappears underground and then bubbles up in odd and unexpected places. The trick, as in all desert terrain, is to know where to look for it.

In fact, the literary arts are in full flower in Southern California. Carey McWilliams, writing in the mid-1940s, announced to the world that there were “more poets per square inch in Southern California than in any other section of the United States,” and the same is arguably true today, not only of poets but also of novelists, biographers, memoirists, critics and screenwriters, both working ones and aspiring ones, published ones and self-published ones.

Their raw passion, always in evidence in their work, was confirmed a few years ago when the Los Angeles Times Book Review decided to print poems from newly published collections rather than reviewing the books in their entirety. A crowd of angry bards rallied in front of The Times building and dumped a load of manure at the portals to signify what they thought of the decision. (Today, Book Review both publishes poems and reviews books of poetry.)

McWilliams himself, of course, is a good example of how deep the roots of the literary intelligentsia run in the soil of Southern California. Promptly upon his arrival in the ‘20s, he found his way into one of the earliest salons in the Southland, a coterie that included antiquarian bookseller Jake Zeitlin, critic and librarian Lawrence Clark Powell, publisher and printer Ward Ritchie and poet Flanner.

Other constellations of luminaries flared up briefly and then burned out in the hothouse climate of Southern California, which has always attracted dreamers, schemers, opportunists and refugees from around the world. During the ‘30s, for example, the great American novelists who were slumming in Hollywood gathered at the Stanley Rose Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard and spent their studio paychecks a few doors away at Musso & Frank, where William Faulkner was reputed to mix (and drink) his own mint juleps until he literally turned blue in the face.

World War II brought a harried crowd of German artists, musicians and writers to Southern California, where they sought refuge from fascism in the neighborhoods of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. At the home of Lion Feuchtwanger in the Palisades gathered the unlikeliest of bedfellows, ranging in style and sensibility from Thomas Mann to Bertolt Brecht, each of whom enjoyed the cooling ocean breezes and the scent of citrus in the air while politely detesting each other.

Such tales are irresistible to the aspiring Faulkners who nowadays tote their laptops to the local Starbucks and tippy-type their novels-in-progress in the company of high-school kids doing their algebra homework. Indeed, when my first novel was published back in the ‘70s, I proofread the galleys at a booth at Musso & Frank because I had once read that F. Scott Fitzgerald did the same, but the only celebrity I encountered was the pioneering radio shock-jock Bill Ballance, who complained to the waiter about the bones in his fish.

In fact, the sparseness of watering holes for writers is often cited as evidence that the literary life in Southern California is parched and stunted. But the whole argument is misbegotten: Writers who hang with each other are writers who are not writing. And when I snagged an invitation to one of the longest-running literary lunches back in the ‘70s--the one hosted by Los Angeles magazine Editor and Publisher Geoff Miller at Butterfield’s in West Hollywood--I remember how disheartening it was for me, a hardscrabble freelancer living from one check to the next, to hear Arthur Marx and Tommy Thompson exchange the latest intelligence on how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were being paid to other writers for their novels and screenplays.

Los Angeles is much different but no less alluring today than the place that attracted Nathanael West in the ‘30s, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood in the ‘40s and Henry Miller in the ‘50s. The big red barn on La Cienega that once housed Zeitlin’s antiquarian bookstore was selling carpeting the last time I looked, and the “bookseller’s row” that once thrived in the shadow of the Central Library is an office block today. But the working writers of Southern California--and their ardent readers--are much too busy to concern themselves with such nostalgia.

Nowadays, the literary lights of Los Angeles include Ruth Seymour, general manager of KCRW-FM (89.9), who produces on-air readings and performances ranging from the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer to the absurdist political comedy of Harry Shearer. KCRW also provides a home for “Bookworm,” hosted by Michael Silverblatt, one of the city’s most cultivated literary interlocutors. Larry Mantle’s “Airtalk” on KPPC-FM (89.3) has become a way station on the pilgrimage route of touring authors from all over the world. The Lannan Foundation’s literary program, under the direction of Jeanie Kim, dips into a million-dollar purse every year to support small presses, readings, lectures and a distinguished series of literary prizes. And our own mayor, Richard Riordan, is unique among American politicians in his commitment to books; when Immaculate Heart College closed its doors, he purchased the entire 36,000-volume library, including a card catalog, which he keeps in his basement.

The literary landscape is vast, lush and various, full of shocks and surprises. The antipodes range from the Huntington Library in San Marino, where one can venerate a first folio or a Gutenberg Bible in church-like grandeur, to Beyond Baroque in Venice, where the latest issues of such ‘zines as Angry Young Woman and Baby Split Bowling News are available for sale. But there are a thousand points of light in between--one can gaze on illuminated manuscripts from medieval Europe at the Getty Museum in Malibu, richly decorated ritual marriage contracts at the Skirball Cultural Center in the Sepulveda Pass, letters written by Japanese American high-school students from internment camps during World War II at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo and a selection of African American children’s books in the research collection of the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park.

Above and beyond these shrines to the written word are hundreds of venues where people who care about books can pump the flesh of a living author or, perhaps more to the point, share the passions of a fellow book lover. Indeed, the weekly listings of readings and signings in Book Review function as a kind of Dow Jones of a superheated literary and social marketplace: On any given night at Dutton’s in Brentwood or Book Soup in West Hollywood or Vroman’s in Pasadena, a small army of authors will show up with their “media escorts,” unpack their books and flex their signing fingers, all in the hope of connecting with the largest book market in the nation.

But readings and signings at bookstores, classes at university extensions and adult education programs and lecture series at churches, synagogues and libraries are only the most obvious gathering places for the literati, whose passions are wide-ranging and far-reaching. Dawson’s Bookshop in Larchmont Village is a shrine to the Southern California tradition of fine printing and antiquarian books. Bodhi Tree and the Phoenix were offering crystals, Tarot cards, statues of the Buddha and copies of the Bhagavad-Gita long before the publishing industry fell in and out of love with the New Age. A Different Light is a “one-stop shop” for the gay and lesbian community, a place where you can pick up the latest bestseller or get the name of a gay rabbi.

Of course, thanks to Borders and Barnes & Noble, the bookstore has also become a venue for activities that have little or nothing to do with books--sipping espresso, doing homework, listening to a jazz ensemble. A mega-store tends to be regarded by independent booksellers as the functional equivalent of the Death Star, and yet the sight of so many young people hanging out at a bookstore on a Saturday night is surely good news for those who fret about the fading interest in books and newspapers among young people. And the independents are fighting for their share of turf; Sisterhood Books in Westwood greeted the arrival of a Borders mega-store across the street with a banner of their own: “Thousands and Thousands of Books by and about Women.”

Perhaps the most stirring symbol of the literary renaissance is the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, a place that was already in decline when a fire broke out in the stacks and burned much of the collection in 1986. Now, the Central Library has risen from its ashes, and the place is thronged with crowds of spirited visitors, young and old. And the biggest and noisiest crowd is not the one at the upscale gift shop or the stylish cafeteria or even the auditorium where Sherman Alexie or Lawrence Ferlinghetti may be reading; it is the line to check out books.

The fact is that the literary scene in Los Angeles is just as decentralized and diffuse, just as entrepreneurial and self-inventive, as Southern California itself and--like L.A.--it is constantly renewing and reinventing itself in surprising ways. Significantly, the villa in the Palisades where the refugees from the Third Reich were once sheltered is now a sanctuary for writers and artists who have fled newer strains of oppression in the Balkans and the Near East.

Something crucial was revealed about the community of book lovers in Southern California on a balmy April weekend last year, when the Los Angeles Times inaugurated its own celebration of words on the printed page, the annual Festival of Books. “Suppose they gave a book fair in Los Angeles,” the skeptics thought to themselves, “and nobody came?”

Ten hardy souls might show up for a bookstore signing by a first novelist, 200 might fill an auditorium at the Museum of Contemporary Art for a lecture by an author with a few books on the backlist, 2,000 showed up one night to hear Joseph Heller at Wadsworth Auditorium and, God help us, five times as many thronged Westwood Boulevard when Howard Stern was signing at Borders. But how many would spurn the malls and movie houses on a spring weekend to mingle with their fellow readers?

To the surprise of no one except the cynics, the crowd that surged into Westwood in search of books and authors, readings and signings, panels and lectures numbered more than 75,000, an upwelling of the passion for books that has always bubbled just beneath the surface. The literati of Los Angeles had voted with their feet, and the rest, as they say, is history.