Chronicle of the California adventure

KEVIN STARR’S latest book about California opens in 1510, when the name was first used -- in a Spanish novel, to describe a purely mythical place -- and closes 342 pages later with the recall election that transformed Arnold Schwarzenegger from an aging action hero into a sitting governor. The fact that Starr has managed to pack 500 years of historical scholarship into a single manageable volume is impressive enough, but he also accomplishes the feat with skill, grace and verve.

Starr, formerly the state librarian and now university professor of history at USC, is the author of the magisterial “Americans and the California Dream” series from Oxford University Press, a definitive and exhaustive history of the state that already takes up six fat volumes and will include a seventh before it is complete. Clearly, he is accustomed to telling California’s story in greater detail and at a more leisurely pace than a single volume will allow. But “California: A History,” which appears as part of the Modern Library’s Chronicles series, proves that the long-distance runner can also sprint.

Starr has been over this ground long enough to be wary of its pitfalls, and he declines to characterize California as either utopia or dystopia. “At times, California seemed imprisoned in a myth of itself as an enchanted and transformed place,” he writes in the preface. “Such a utopian expectation also brought with it, when things did not go well ... , the common complaint that California had been hyped beyond recognition: that for all its media-driven pretenses to glitz and glamour, California was, all things considered, just another American place, and sometimes even worse than that.” The reality, as Starr patiently and painstakingly demonstrates, is no less colorful and compelling than the myth but a good deal more complex.

No longer is it possible to write history that consists of great deeds by dead white males, of course, and Starr’s panorama includes all colors and both genders. He sees in California’s polyglot Native American population, for instance, “a paradigm of linguistic and cultural diversity anticipating the population patterns of a later era when the peoples of the world arrived in the region.” He reminds us as well of the hard fact that upon the arrival of the European conquerors and settlers, “the First Californians would soon be encountering social forces, diseases, and genocidal violence that would bring them to the brink of extinction.”

Early in the book, Starr characterizes contemporary California as a “nation-state [of] global stature,” but he also points out that the western edge of North America has always figured prominently in global geopolitics. By 1806, he tells us, California was a place where the ships of the United States, Spain, England, France and even Russia were likely to encounter one another -- and not always on friendly terms. Some interlopers were even more exotic: “[T]he French-born privateer Hipolito de Bouchard ... flying the flag of the revolutionary Republic of Buenos Aires, sailed two black-painted vessels into Monterey Bay on November 20, 1818, and spent the following week sacking the town before heading south to loot two ranchos and Mission San Juan Capistrano.”

Starr finds plenty of room in his fast-paced and wide-ranging history to include the telling detail and the illuminating incident. Anyone who has attended grade school in California knows the story of Father Junipero Serra and the founding of the missions, for example, but I suspect that the particulars of Starr’s account will come as a surprise:

“A snake or insect bite suffered en route [from Veracruz to Mexico City] resulted in an ulcerated leg that would bother him throughout his life,” he writes. “No matter: the diminutive friar (slightly over five feet in height) relished physical suffering and mortification as part of the ferocious asceticism that would characterize the rest of his life. Serra slept on a board bed, scourged himself, and lacerated his flesh with stones in the course of highly emotional sermons.”

Virtually every episode in the long history of California contributes to Starr’s overarching goal of capturing and conveying the state’s complexity. He acknowledges, for example, “the phantasmagoria of horrors, including murder and cannibalism,” that made the Donner Party of 1846-47 notorious, a saga that “remains to this day a fixed and recurring statement of California as betrayed hope and dystopian tragedy.” But he points out too that “even the survivors of the Donner Party managed to fit in, even thrive, in California after their ordeal was over.”

Whereas the Gold Rush effectively “fast-forwarded California into what historian Hubert Howe Bancroft would later describe as ‘a rapid, monstrous maturity,’ ” Starr argues that the state’s forward momentum since then has never really flagged. He aptly likens the rapid growth of Southern California to “the construction of a set at a motion picture studio” and ascribes a rich symbolism to the set erected in 1916 for D.W. Griffith’s epic “Intolerance”: “Intended to depict the essence of the city of Babylon at the height of its power,” he writes, “the three-hundred-foot-high set ... functioned ... as a dream city referencing the past and suggesting the future.”

No aspect of the state goes unobserved or unappreciated. At the outset, Starr cites philosopher and historian Josiah Royce on the subject of its natural history (“There is nothing subtle about the landforms and landscapes of California”) and he turns once again to Royce at the conclusion, to describe its zeitgeist: “California, Royce noted, was a promise; but it was also a struggle for redemption in the face of failure.” Between these two points of reference, Starr has come as close as any other of the state’s chroniclers to capturing the very essence of California. *