Dancing On the Brink of the World

A journalist recently asked me in an interview, “What is your inspiration as a California writer?” Unhesitatingly I answered, “Jack’s pigs.”

“What do you mean, Jack’s pigs?”

“Come with me, I’ll show them to you.”

I drove the puzzled journalist across the Golden Gate Bridge into the deep country, where high atop a knoll studded with oak trees stands a formidable stone house, now a museum. Inside, a scratchy old home movie was playing on a video monitor. Images of a 40-year-old man at his ranch flickered on the screen. Suddenly came a close-up of the man gleefully nuzzling two squirming piglets in his arms. He gazed into the camera with an expression that seemed to ask, “Does it get any better than this?” The image was eloquent of life bursting out, the smell of earth on animals, the full-blooded archaic riff of man and beast, jump-starting nature’s life cycle. Six days later that man, Jack London, was dead.

London wrote as he lived, all-out, producing 53 books and engaging in countless exotic adventures around the world. He was a searcher for the wisdom to be found deep in the psyches of those struggling against natural or man-made odds. He was a believer that the written word could pack a punch of truth and marvel. He wore his California-ness as a badge of honor, a true inspiration--one I held in mind as I spent eight years carving my novel, “Rabbit Boss,” from the history of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, from the 1846 Washo Indian witness of the Donner Party cannibalism to the plunder of natural resources reaching into the present time.

If that journalist were to ask me about my inspiration today, I would still take him to see Jack’s pigs--then hand him a thick handsome book, “The Literature of California, Volume 1: Native American Beginnings to 1945.” The selections in this anthology reveal California in all its dazzling accomplishments, its dismal shame, its empire builders and dream fabricators, its multitudes of the damned and driven, possessed and dispossessed.

Standing, as the millennium turns, at a time more propitious than ever (with nearly 34 million residents, most of them strangers to the state’s literature, if not to its history), a reader will hear, within these pages, a cacophony of voices: Native American totemic animal deities, explorers, men of commerce and men of common means, farmers, hustlers, mothers, pioneering feminists, scoundrels and saints, all miraculously merging into the great opera called California.

“The Literature of California, Volume 1” should not be viewed solely as an anthology of writings that extends from Native American creation myths to selections from famous literature. It is more wide-ranging than that, as expansive and varied as California’s own geography. What has happened in California is the tumultuous eruption of a sociological volcano, lighting the sky with the fire of a new experiment, the impossible dream, the myth of riches, the heroism of common folks and their chance to simply make it. California, reflected in the mirror of its writers, is as diverse and complex as Europe, yet it coheres, held by the glue of the new: Here people are defined not by their past but by their future. But also flaming from that volcano is the wholesale appropriation of land and power, the near extinction of native peoples and the shameless exploitation of generations of immigrants.

Part 1 of the anthology, “Indian Beginnings,” including creation myths, Coyote Trickster tales, stories, poems, songs and chants of California’s indigenous peoples, offers up glittering jewels from a rich and transforming landscape. Part 2, “One Hundred Years of Exploration and Conquest, 1769-1870,” begins with a fictional romance (circa 1510) titled “La Sergas de Esplandian” by Garci Rodriguez Ordon~ez De Montalvo, containing the earliest known use of the word “California” and the concept of its being a paradise. (It should be noted that this first paradise was claimed by De Montalvo to be “peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the fashion of Amazons.”)

“Now you are to hear the most extraordinary thing that ever was heard of in any chronicles or in the memory of man. . . . Know then, that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise. . .”

“One Hundred Years of Exploration and Conquest” could easily be ripped from the anthology and offered up as a historical canon. Within these pages (and in Part 3, “The Rise of California Literature 1865-1914”) are the tallest of true tales and the most troubling accounts of actual exploits. They describe the “discovery” of this new land and the subjugation and near-annihilation of its indigenous peoples by megalomaniacal explorers, mercenaries and hardened padres cloaked in piety, all seeking to “liberate” a heathen world in order to exploit its natural and human resources. All of this plays out against a land rush and gold rush led by a wild mix of pioneers: hunters, trappers, scouts, sailors, miners, farmers, gunslingers and a parade of others, viewed through the eyes of such writers as Richard Henry Dana, John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), Samuel Clemens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ina Coolbirth, Helen Hunt Jackson, John Muir, Gertrude Atherton, Yone Noguchi, Charles Lummis, Jack London, Frank Norris and Mary Austin.

“Dancing on the brink of the world,” quoted in Part 1, is a line of chant from the Costanoan, an indigenous tribe. The notion of dancing on the brink of the world could refer to much of the California experience, as we can see clearly in the following piece of 1872 fancy from Joaquin Miller, who was, among other things, a miner, Pony Express rider, horse thief and poet and who wore a resplendent buckskin costume to recite to the English gentry who proclaimed him the Byron of the West:

Dared I but say a prophecy,

As sang the holy men of old,

Of rock-built cities yet to be

Along these sliming shores of gold,

Crowding athirst into the sea,

What wondrous marvels might be told!

Enough, to know that empire here

Shall burn her loftiest, brightest star;

Here art and eloquence shall reign. . . .

Another dancer on the brink was George Sterling, “best remembered as the model for Brissenden, a debonair and jaded poet” in Jack London’s 1908 “Martin Eden.” Sterling was one of the prime movers of the Carmel artists’ colony that was at the center of California’s “Seacoast of Bohemia.” He committed suicide with cyanide, the same way his wife had. He wrote:

The world was full of the sound of a great wind out of the West,

And the tracks of its feet were white on the trampled Ocean’s breast.

And I said, “With the sea and wind I will mix my body and soul,

Where the breath of the planet drives and the herded billows roll.”

Probably the dancer who came closest of all to the brink was Robinson Jeffers, whom the East Coast literary-critical establishment eventually tried to write off as an archaic romantic and philosophical crackpot. It was the generation of the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats and radical environmentalists, who saw Jeffers’ poetry rise up, precise and solid as the stone tower (called Hawk Tower) he built himself at the edge of the thrashing Pacific Ocean. His poetry declared something immutable and implacable, right on the very brink of land and water where so many dances were being danced. Jeffers spoke for those outraged at the desecration of California’s natural beauty. Before Edward Abbey walked across the desert’s hot sands for the first time and gazed up at the endless western sky, Jeffers was already there, had already voiced it in his poem “Hurt Hawks”: “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk. . .”

Prescient, reclusive Jeffers felt the rhythm of this dance on the brink in his poem “Continent’s End”:

Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I

never learned it of you.

Before there was any water there were tides of fire. . .

Jeffers knew the California dance was ancient, the brink was real, the jagged edge of the continent was defined by the tumultuous thrust of earthquakes. The Earth herself, the ultimate dancer, humbled all others. What was perceived by many as Jeffers’ brooding misanthropy was nothing more than his bright idea, his hope, that the Earth would soon dance its havoc and return what had been despoiled to its natural splendor. Here is his expression of that in “Carmel Point”:

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses--

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs. . .

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. . .

Perhaps one way to read Part 4, “Dreams and Awakenings,” is to begin with one of the most sublime fatuities ever uttered: “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ ” Since Hemingway said that, it is supposed to settle the matter. But it doesn’t. To suggest that all modern literature, let alone California’s, sprang from one book is to profoundly miss the point. For example, to assume that America is solely defined by its race relations with only two races is to presuppose that there are only black and white. Hemingway’s assertion is definitively refuted by this anthology.

In “Dreams and Awakenings,” we are confronted with proof of that diversity in the form of disparate realities--sweet dreams and fractured nightmares, colossal aspirations and catastrophic phenomena, served up by Upton Sinclair, Dashiell Hammet, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, John Fante, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Jaime De Angulo, Carey McWilliams, Josephine Miles, Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, M.F.K. Fisher, Toshio Mori, Carlos Bulosan and Chester B. Himes.

“The Literature of California, Volume 1” makes clear how many cultures and voices there are in America. Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” for example, owes nothing to Twain; the vernacular of its impoverished but proud characters carries the terseness born of a harsh landscape and vents itself with bursts of irony in the face of adversity. West, McCoy and Raymond Chandler, among others, owe their language less to a sense of the modern than to a sense of the disintegration of discourse expressed by theHollywood filmscripts of their time, many of which were ground out by men and women in the boiler rooms of moviedom’s writers’ mills. Their work was treated as an assembly line product of factory toil that resulted in a cynicism toward language itself and toward life as it was falsely portrayed on the silver screen, thus giving rise to a scorched prose writ small in the writer’s own blood. With California writers such as these, forget the Marquis de Sade. These writers didn’t see wordplay as transcendent sex play, as anti-morality play; they saw it as a spirit-killing sport, a hacking off of the sublime in order to substitute a blunt directness. They had to destroy to invent.

One of the last entries in “Dreams and Awakenings” is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s haunting unfinished novel, “The Last Tycoon,” in which the East Coast word-man meets the West Coast picture-man and the tectonic shift of their opposing philosophical plates portends a cultural earthquake. Glenway Westcott wrote upon Fitzgerald’s death at the age of 44, “He was young to the bitter end. He lived and wrote at last like a scapegoat, and now he has departed like one.”

If this anthology were being published at the time of Fitzgerald’s death, it is certain that he would have been left out, for he had been written off by most academic critics as a flamed-out pop phenomenon and a Hollywood hack. At his death, his books were mostly unobtainable. All anthology editors must live in terror that they will exclude the Fitzgeralds of their time, that they will have failed the test to divine true talent in the heat of the literary-political battle. This will be crucial in Volume 2 of “The Literature of California,” which concludes with contemporary writing and will be published next year. Already the perceived errors of omission and commission of Volume 2 are reverberating throughout the academic and writing communities, preparing some to think the book will be a balanced portrayal of the last half century, and others to seek elsewhere writers of true merit for their vision of California. To assess the literary reputations of the living is always to walk the razor’s edge.

“The Literature of California, Volume 1” concludes in 1945, the year the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and World War II ended. And with it ended the California that once was, in myth and in reality. From that point on, California was a rapidly accelerating place of growth and power, changed by the thousands of military men from across America who had glimpsed the new world and stayed. (My own mother was one of four California sisters, all of whom married U.S. sailors; my own father didn’t return from the war.) Social upheaval and the physical degradation of the once golden state would follow. The boomer generation would come of age in the 1960s and alter perceptions and mores forever. High technology would explode, redistributing the balance of wealth and ideas to a new epicenter. Tidal waves of immigration would come from Mexico, from Asia after the Vietnam War, from Central America during its civil wars of the 1980s, from all over the world in the high-tech 21st century.

If the first volume of “The Literature of California,” with its individual stories, poems and essays, rising in songs that strike every human note, is the great opera, then Volume 2 promises to be CALIFORNIA, THE MOVIE! To be continued.