A Literary Leap

The most modest man in Los Angeles is enduring a modest man’s hell. Jim Krusoe’s new book, “Blood Lake” (Boaz), spent its first four weeks in print on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Krusoe has to give readings. He has to go to parties in his honor. Writers like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan “ring him up” to tell him what a marvel he is.

“So, what are you reading?” This is how Krusoe begins nearly every class in creative writing, leaning back in his chair, his white hair pulled back in an odd little bun, his huge eyebrows raised expectantly. He has been teaching creative writing at Santa Monica College for 10 years, was one of the original founders of Beyond Baroque, the literary salon in Venice, and the founding editor of the literary journal the Santa Monica Review.

If you mention Krusoe’s name to any self-respecting writer in Los Angeles, they will thaw immediately and blurt something out.

“He’s a genius,” author Carolyn See says. Like See, he has encouraged, launched and inspired so many writers in Los Angeles: young, old, talented, terrified, certain, uncertain, published, unpublished.

“Jim Krusoe,” says writer Charles Baxter, “has been a guide and teacher in Los Angeles for many years and has given unfailing support to the whole literary enterprise of Southern California writing. He has the funniest and most moving insight into disaster since the French surrealists, and the wildest imagination. He is also one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I know.”

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Krusoe’s career path has been alarming, hilarious and bizarre. Until now, in all these years of shepherding L.A. writers, Krusoe, 55, has published very little himself (four books of poetry, three chapbooks, several essays and reviews). So his loyal fans are amazed and delighted by the appearance of his first book of fiction.

Talking about literary Los Angeles, Krusoe likes to cite Aldous Huxley’s remark that L.A. is full of “solitary gardens with strange plants growing in them,” meaning, he says, “that we have history without tradition. This means, for a writer, that there is never a sense of progression from beginner to professional.”

Krusoe has spent years organizing conferences for Southern California writers, teaching and editing anthologies--before bringing forth his own work. “Some people call it self-sabotage. But I think all those years working with other writers kept me from making a fool of myself before I was ready to.”

You can catch Krusoe’s spirit in his classes. His students talk and talk and talk about their work. Students in one recent advanced class read some Flannery O’Connor stories, and a story by Alice Munro. O’Connor, says Krusoe fondly, is not afraid to be mean to her characters. Sometimes students disagree with him. Once in a great while he will say something about his own experience.

“The solace of being a writer,” he says, “is that in your worst moments you can say to yourself, this is great material.” He describes a point in his life when he was truly miserable and tried out various solutions on a wide range of fictional characters. “What’s so bad,” he asks the class, “about being taken into the woods and shot?”

Munro, Krusoe tells the class, is all about inner life. There’s hardly any action in some of her stories.

“There are two great philosophical questions,” he says. “ ‘What am I supposed to do?’ and, ‘Is what I’m seeing really there?’ O’Connor most often takes on the former; Alice Munro, the latter.’ ”

A hand shoots up in the back of the class. “I was, uh, really bored by the Munro story.”

It is clear that everyone feels safe talking about books in here.

Students then critique each other’s work, above all gently, but definitely and specifically. Then Krusoe offers his thoughts on the work. Suggestions range from “try reversing the first two sentences,” to “try not to have characters do anything literary; it calls attention to the artifice,” to a question about the wisdom of letting a story “reverberate on a single note--a modernist idea that isn’t exactly true to real life.”

Krusoe, who counts among his students such success stories as poets Amy Gerstler and Eloise Klein Healy, novelist Erika Taylor and screenwriter Charles Eastman, never tells students that they are not good writers, because he says he has been wrong so many times. “My theory is that you can always at least become a better reader,” he says.

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Krusoe’s own reading began in Cleveland, where his father was a house painter and his mother a secretary. He had one wild uncle, an artist (“actually, a church decorator”). This seems to be the first artist he encountered, for better or worse, and as an artist he seemed to be somehow exempt from ordinary living.

He lives today with his wife, Jenny Cornuelle (a writer and puppet-maker who Krusoe says is “chaos personified”), her daughter, Kaitlin, from a previous marriage, and their son, Henry (after Henry James).

Part of Krusoe’s genius is certainly his humor. Material seems to fall from the sky and into his lap. He went to Occidental College, premed, in 1962.

“It was like a Marx Brothers movie,” he says, “me trying to do titrations and being colorblind. I switched to English because I could do my homework.” (For years, his mother told friends that her son was “in the medical profession.”) He was drafted in 1965, but was kicked out of the Army after deliberately losing 80 pounds.

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At 25, he went to work in the Los Angeles County Health Department as a public health investigator, on the trail of rabies and VD. “There was a lot more of the latter than the former,” he recalls. “It was a wonderful job. We were sent out on the streets with a knife and a can of ether, not knowing what either was for.”

He also set type for want ads, painted houses, worked in the parts department of a car dealer and as an orderly in a hospital. To his great delight, he has learned that the government unemployment office has a special designation for poets.

Krusoe had been writing poetry for several years when his first poem was published in 1970. “They changed the title, cut four lines, and there were 25 typos. That’s when I began to think that art was imperfect,” he says.

“One day,” he marvels, “I wrote a decent poem by accident. The difference was that I let this poem say what it wanted.”

Krusoe talks about poetry the way you might talk about a first love who took up way too much of your life before dumping you, although it is not clear who left whom.

“Poetry is safe in many ways,” he says. “It’s about the way things are, whereas fiction is about action. I spent years trying to figure out how to move. Writing fiction, you have to enter the world at large and make judgments.”

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In “Blood Lake,” Krusoe poses several questions that he has been chewing on for years. Questions like: What is remorse? What are we actually responsible for in this life? What is beautiful?

For some fans, Krusoe’s humor and fatalism call to mind Franz Kafka. “Kafka’s characters,” he says, “wake up as insects. Mine wake up as monsters. When they walk, things get crushed.”

One story, “Remorse,” about an addict who falls in love with a gorilla, was inspired by a television documentary on gorillas. “Blood Lake” was inspired by Krusoe’s wondering what it meant that he wasn’t in the Vietnam War; wondering who died in his place.

Beyond Kafka, critics, usually so quick to make comparisons, so far are hard put to compare Krusoe’s sensibility to anyone else’s. This makes him happy.

“If I’m going to fail,” he says, “I want to fail in my own category. My literary heroes haven’t come out of schools or universities. I love Dickens and Whitman and Stephen Crane, and Melville for his eagerness. Oh, and Henry James because he tried so hard to be honest.”

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Having spent so many years trying to figure out how to “make things happen,” Krusoe says he now wants “to figure out how to have nothing happen, like in a landscape by Ansel Adams. While I’m at it, I think I’ll renounce irony.” He quotes Czeslaw Milosz, who says that “Irony is the glory of slaves.”

“Once, when I wrote poetry,” he says, telling a story that is vintage Krusoe, “I wrote 12 poems on silence. Six months later, I read them and thought, these are good, except for three. Three months later I thought, these six could really go. After a whole year, I was left with one decent poem on silence. It really is like sculpting figures hidden in a lump of marble. You just keep scraping and scraping.”