"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part II)

Jack Foley

Dana Gioia continues,

II

"O powerful western fallen star"
- Walt Whitman,
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865)

Today California is--by a huge margin--the richest and most populous state in the union (with over 30 million people compared to New York's 18 million). The San Francisco metropolitan area in particular has grown immensely with nearly 7 million people living between Silicon Valley and the Golden Gate. If real estate prices are a reliable measure, the Bay Area is the most desirable place to live in the continental United States. The population is notably affluent and well educated. San Francisco itself is often considered the most beautiful big city in North America. It is also a renowned center of music and the visual arts. What a smart, sophisticated, and pleasant place to live.

And yet San Francisco no longer ranks as an influential literary center. The demise of its cultural power does not result from a paucity of talent. The Bay Area probably has more established literary writers currently than any other urban area except New York and Boston. Within a twenty-mile radius of the Golden Gate Bridge one can find such diversely distinguished figures as Czeslaw Milosz, Thom Gunn, Carolyn Kizer, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Robert Hass, Mary Gaitskill, Tillie Olsen, Robert Silverberg, Kay Ryan, Annie Lamott, Gary Snyder, Al Young, Jack Foley, Edgar Bowers, Armisted Maupin, Ishmael Reed, Ron Hansen, Isabelle Allende, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Richard Rodriguez. The Bay Area is also ringed by major universities--Berkeley, Stanford, San Francisco State, the University of San Francisco, San Jose State, and others--that employ thousands of academics, including hundreds of critics and writers.

What San Francisco--and by extension all West Coast cities--lacks is a vital and complete literary milieu. In 1899 an aspiring author could come to the city and make a living writing while mastering the craft. There was a diverse literary ecosystem of newspapers, magazines, publishers, and theaters that not only fostered but also promoted local talent. Today the publishers have mostly moved to New York. The newspapers have either folded up or downsized by using wire service copy to fill their pages. The theaters perform plays from New York and London. Few national magazines still publish in San Francisco. There are numerous literary journals in Northern California most with limited circulation, but only Threepenny Review commands national readership. Most major literary magazines quickly fail like Francis Ford Coppola's City, Evan Connell and William Ryan's Contact, Al Young and Ishmael Reed's Yardbird Reader, and George Hitchcock's San Francisco Review--to name only four particularly ambitious and short-lived examples. In California, literary magazines almost inevitably become events--sometimes important ones--rather than ongoing enterprises.

Ironically, however, even success proves fatal to local culture. Rolling Stone, the quintessential San Francisco magazine, grew so large that it eventually moved to New York. Why did the booming journal leave its adoring hometown? Because New York--so insiders later admitted--was where the best freelance writers and advertising revenues were. The economics of contemporary publishing favor large journals located in the Northeast. After the failure of City, Coppola began his next literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, in Manhattan, although he continues to live in the Bay Area. The few large magazines remaining in San Francisco, like Wired and Salon, are nearly all related to computers and tied to the expertise and advertising base of Silicon Valley. There are no longer enough non-technical journals to create the critical mass necessary for a thriving world of freelance writers. To have a literary career, young Bay Area writers must enter the academy, survive on non-literary jobs, or, like Rolling Stone, move to New York.

The term critical mass may be a metaphor, but it is an illuminating one for understanding cultural life. In nuclear physics, critical mass refers to the minimum amount of fissionable material necessary to create a self-sustaining chain reaction. Something similar occurs in urban culture. A city or region needs a certain critical mass of enterprise and opportunity to create a self-sustaining local culture. Part of the reason is pure economics: artists need employment. Post-World War II Los Angeles had dozens of nightclubs and dance halls that provided jobs for jazz musicians, even rank beginners. There was also abundant work in film and television studios, as well as numerous local record labels. These various institutions provided the economic base for artistic vitality. The wealth of employment for jazz musicians in L.A. also created a fluid local culture in which soloists and sidemen could move from club to club and group to group without penalty. One quarrel did not end a career, or undistinguished colleagues permanently stifle a strong soloist. Musicians followed opportunities according to their temperament or instinct, and created a living tradition that focused and developed local talent. The result was the great West Coast jazz movement of the 1950s. Dozens of major players appeared seemingly ex nihilo from the streets of Los Angeles--Art Pepper, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Hampton Hawes, Zoot Sims, and Eric Dolphy, to name only a few. No single intelligence or program willed this international phenomenon into being. It grew naturally out of a dynamic milieu that gave public context to individual talent--and it created art at once local but worthy of export.

If literature is an affair of individual genius, it is also the product of special circumstances in specific places. Fourteenth-century Florence, eighteenth-century London, nineteenth-century Paris created extraordinary literature because these milieus provided ample opportunity for diverse talents to develop and succeed. No poet can fail to note how often great writers appear in groups often surrounded by secondary (but still genuine) talents, as in 1920's Paris where Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, E. E. Cummings, Malcolm Cowley, and other émigrés shaped modern American literature. Whether through competition or companionship, great talents spur each other on.

San Francisco once provided critical mass for a thriving literary culture. A writer fired from one paper could quickly find another post. A strong talent at one journal could be attracted to a better-paying position at another. There was room for literary feuds and rivalry--the necessary friction of cultural life. In true bohemian fashion, the various arts intermingled promiscuously. Poets Weldon Kees and James Broughton became filmmakers. Kees also wrote and produced the Poets' Follies, a literary cabaret whose cast encompassed writers, jazz musicians, actors, and printers, including Ferlinghetti, Adrian Wilson, and Phyllis Diller. William Everson developed into one of America's greatest fine-press printers--not a surprising turn of events in a city that had recently become the nation's leading center for the book arts. Bay Area printers published local writers in superbly designed letterpress editions. Adrian Wilson issued Kees's last book, Poems: 1947-1954. Jane Grabhorn's famed Colt Press printed Janet Lewis's The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941). Meanwhile Ferlinghetti opened the originally all-paperback City Lights Books and soon began publishing inexpensive pocked-sized editions of new poetry, including Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), which went on to sell more than eight hundred thousand copies. Rexroth helped found KPFA, the first listener-supported radio station where Kees and Pauline Kael hosted a talk show on film. The newsroom and bohemia together created a culture of local character and international stature.

III.

"There is only one trouble about the renaissance in San Francisco. It is too far away from the literary market place."
- Kenneth Rexroth,
The Alternative Society (1970)

A Bay Area writer may still win a national reputation--witness the fame of Annie Lamott or Amy Tan--but that notoriety will be brokered, built, and administered elsewhere. San Francisco still produces literature, but it no longer exports much literary opinion. In American cultural life, opinion and reputation remain a mostly Northeastern monopoly. That is where one finds the vast majority of publishers, editors, agents, reviewers, arts administrators, foundation directors, prize committees, and literary institutes. The South understood this cultural imbalance early on, and it countered Yankee imperialism by developing a powerful alternative network of literary quarterlies like the Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. These journals provide substantial critical coverage of regional writing and discuss national trends from a Southern perspective. As a result, the South has both maintained and evolved its regional character.

Significantly, there is not a single major literary quarterly currently published in California. Indeed, there has never been one that lasted beyond a few issues. San Francisco Review probably set a record in the early Sixties by publishing twelve issues. Moreover many--perhaps most--California journals like ZYZZVA publish neither critical essays nor reviews. The best San Francisco now manages is the Sunday Chronicle Book Review, which publishes a few pages of extremely short and mostly positive notices--a USA Today approach to criticism. Under such conditions, even a good critic like Tom Clark hardly manages to say anything interesting. Only the two Berkeley-based tabloids, Threepenny Review and Poetry Flash, include a significant amount of literary criticism. (Pundits are never in short supply in Berkeley, which is probably why it produced--albeit twenty-five years ago--the last influential local literary trend, Language Poetry.) The other journals mostly leave opinion making to the East, and the results are tangible. There are single city blocks in Manhattan that generate more national literary opinion than all of Northern California.

The absence of quarterlies and other opinion-making journals will seem trivial only to those who do not understand how much the cultural milieu of a city nurtures or stifles local talent. Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance--perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie.

San Francisco's current inability to create a critical milieu has a subtle but profound effect on local culture. First, it relegates the examination and evaluation of local art and literature to editors and critics three thousand miles away. But it also limits the options for serious young writers. The best critical minds either enter the university where they focus on the professional discourse of their academic discipline, or they publish in the East. Yvor Winters, the only major New Critic to live west of Ohio, published almost solely in Eastern journals like the Hudson Review, New Republic, and Hound and Horn. The closest he regularly got to California was Poetry in Chicago. More recently Winters's former student, Robert Hass, publishes his poetry column in the Washington Post Book World. Only after Eastern validation did his column become reprinted locally. The same situation has existed for many California writers from Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion. They lived in the West but published in the East. They achieved local reputation only by gaining national recognition. The situation does not necessarily rob the local scene of talent, but it does make it harder for an idiosyncratic regional talent to be heard. And it considerably weakens the relationship between the writer and the local audience. They will no longer directly collaborate in creating a city or region's literary image of itself. That definition will probably be filtered though a New Yorker.

IV.

"Out here you can gravitate to places like San Francisco or Los Angeles where life is easy in terms of climate. You find yourself falling into pockets of your own kind where there is no necessity for struggle."
- William Everson,
"The Archetype of the West" (1982)

No one has ever adequately explained why California has failed to develop influential institutions of literary opinion and reputation. If Gambier, Ohio and Baton Rouge, Louisiana can create important quarterlies, why can't San Francisco or Los Angeles? Why, too, is almost every major literary award--the Pulitzer, National Book Award, Bollingen, National Arts Medal, Frost Medal, Tanning, Caldecott, PEN/Faulkner, Leonore Marshall, and so on--administered somewhere along the Northeast Corridor? Wealth is surely not the issue--unless perversely California is too comfortably affluent to care much about literature. The newness of West Coast urban centers initially seems a plausible explanation for the cultural imbalance--until one notices that San Francisco currently exercises less influence than it did in 1899 or 1959.

New Yorkers, of course, believe they know the answer to California's cultural inferiority. The weather is too good; Californians simply don't suffer enough. This is the Woody Allen theory of West Coast culture, and it reveals far more about Northeastern fantasy life than it does about the nature of the West. If a temperate climate destroyed intellectual and artistic development, how does one explain Athens, Rome, Florence, and the rest of Mediterranean culture? And yet perhaps California's intellectual reticence does have something to do with the characteristic geography and history of the urban West.

Modern Western cities are built horizontally across huge stretches of land crossed by highways. The scale of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Las Vegas, and Seattle is not designed for the urban pedestrian. These cities are experienced most naturally from an automobile. The ""neighborhoods" of Los Angeles are not square sections of the city, but the long horizontal axes of the major boulevards--Wilshire, Sunset, La Cienega--stretching across town. Even San Francisco, which was once a European-scale centralized city, has now developed into a vast and complex megalopolis linked by bridges and freeways across six counties. The automobile protectively seals the driver from both the city and other people. The communal exhilaration of the crowds and the chance encounters of the city pedestrian are alien to the automobile commuter who moves privately from home to workplace, and then back again. The Western commuter's life may not be lonely, but it is mostly solitary.

In the major Eastern literary centers--New York, Boston, and Washington--cultural life tends to be public and social. The sheer density of literary activities ensures that writers constantly meet one another--by design or chance. Accidental friendships result in new artistic ventures--magazines, theater companies, reading series, conferences, or collaborations. Rivals or enemies frequently cross paths--in editorial offices, prize committees, public panels, and at social functions. Private arguments become played out in public print. Take, for example, the countless volleys fired by New York intellectuals during the Culture Wars of the 1980s in journals like Commentary, New Criterion, Nation, New Leader, Hudson Review, and New York Review of Books. Merely the literary articles and essays could fill a sizeable bookshelf, and they created a national debate on the topic. Northeastern literary culture thrives on argument and invective. New York intellectuals like Alfred Kazin, Hilton Kramer, Susan Sontag, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe did not become famous for keeping opinions to themselves. They strove to make them public policy. And they often succeeded.

Western literary life, by contrast, tends to be private and individualistic. Writers live far apart, and there are few occasions that bring them together in significant numbers. A California writer is more likely to see local colleagues in a Manhattan publisher's office than near home. Accidental meetings rarely occur, and hostile literati can easily avoid one another forever. In the process Western writers gain privacy but lose the considerable intellectual energy of social interaction, which is especially crucial both to criticism where ideas are rehearsed and even discovered in unplanned conversations and arguments and to institution-building, which necessarily depends on collaboration and community. Solitary and reflective, the Western writer is also often skeptical about the merits of the intrinsically social acts of criticism and institutional organization.

The Western writer's most influential relationship is usually not with the cultural milieu but the natural environment. Jeffers's lines from "Boats in a Fog" express an idea that is repeated in one way or another through a dozen major California writers:

. . . all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.

When urban culture and the natural world compete in the imagination of a Western writer, nature always wins.

If New York literary life can be exemplified by figures like Lionel Trilling or Irving Howe--unadulterated urbanites--then California can be represented by writers like Wallace Stegner or Jeffers, true intellectuals but also naturalists and outdoorsmen. One can no more imagine Trilling in a pup tent than Jeffers at a Manhattan PEN conference. Rexroth hiked and camped for recreation. Frank O'Hara visited painters' studios for gossip and conversation. Both writers lived the values of the local culture.

The differences between New York and San Francisco were less marked fifty years ago. San Francisco still had an active and independent-minded bohemia full of influential writers, musicians, and artists. Rexroth, Kees, Ginsberg, Connell, Duncan, and others argued aesthetics and ideology in North Beach cafes while in local nightclubs, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Vince Guaraldi, or Cal Tjader were changing the course of modern jazz--actively recorded by Fantasy Records in Berkeley. Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, and Nathan Oliviera adventurously adapted the techniques of Abstract Expressionism to figurative painting. But as Bay Area intellectual life spread out and suburbanized, bohemia slowly broke up. Artists and writers took university jobs or moved to Sonoma or Santa Cruz, and the city gradually lost its cultural independence and vitality. Today San Francisco is no longer an active literary center, merely a geographical one for the dozens of important writers living in and around it. What Oakland-born Gertrude Stein said rather unfairly in 1937 about her hometown now seems prophetic of the sprawling and unfocused Bay Area: "There is no there there."

(Continued next week)

Jack Foley