"Fallen Western Star" Wars (Part III)

Jack Foley

Dana Gioia continues:

V.

"What is West Coast jazz?
It's whatever the East Coast critics say it is."
- Unidentified West Coast jazz musician (quoted in Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz [1992])

The effects of California's remoteness from the centers of literary power are obvious. It is more difficult to create and sustain a major literary reputation from the West Coast. Not a single Californian--nor for that matter any Westerner--was appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in its entire fifty-year history. Even after the position was elevated by Congress into the Poet Laureate, only one Westerner, Robert Hass, has served in the sixty-two years of the office. It took only fifty-one years for a California poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize--George Oppen in 1969--but the winner at least had the good manners to have been born in New York.

Neither Jeffers nor Winters, Rexroth nor Duncan, Miles nor Everson ever won a Pulitzer. Did these estimable West Coast writers lose to greater talents? An examination of the Pulitzer winners suggests that literary quality mattered less than proximity to the Manhattan-based committee. For example, in the two decades that Jeffers published his best collections--from The Women at Point Sur (1927) through Hungerfield (1945)--the prize went to New York writers, Leonora Speyer, Audrey Wurdermann, William Rose Benét, Robert P. T. Coffin, Marya Zaturenska, Mark Van Doren, and Leonard Bacon, a New York-born Rhode Islander. (The Maine-born Coffin taught in New York at the time of his award.) Is even the best of these poets remotely comparable to Jeffers? A region unable to articulate and advance its native arts will find them ignored in the cultural capitals. Such marginalization has another destructive long-term effect. Overwhelmed by the mainstream canon, regions gradually lose the memory of their own traditions and accomplishments.

Criticism and creativity also reinforce one another. The informed and demanding discussion fostered by quarterlies and other serious journals helps readers understand and evaluate new literary work. The sustained critical attention of Southern quarterlies frames the poetry and fiction published in the same pages. It informs, enlarges, and sustains an audience. Cursory newspaper coverage is no substitute for serious criticism, which provides not only a context for new work but also possible criteria to judge it. When a region loses--or never establishes--a local critical milieu, the culture is diminished both inwardly and outwardly. Inwardly, it lacks local pressure for artistic excellence and authenticity. Outwardly, it offers the broader world no clear articulation of local goals and values.

Lacking a vital critical milieu, well-intentioned regional literati usually practice boosterism--the uncritical praise of all things local. Boosterism is not merely a poor substitute for arts criticism; it is its opposite, a slow poison to native excellence. Cities create artistic excellence by setting up standards to recognize and acclaim it. San Francisco once reveled in its own high standards. "It is my intention," wrote Ambrose Bierce, "to purify journalism in this town by instructing such writers as it is worthwhile to instruct, and assassinating those that it is not." Those sentiments might still be expressed in New York or London, but they are inconceivable in California. Out here it isn't chic to take literature so seriously.

Confidence is a necessary component of genius. Bierce believed that one person could make a difference to local culture. And West Coast literary history repeatedly demonstrates how influential a single writer or editor can be. Ferlinghetti virtually created the Beat movement with tiny City Lights' innovative Pocket Poets Series. John Martin of Black Sparrow transformed the down-and-out L.A. writer Charles Bukowski into an international celebrity. He also revived the reputations of John Fante and William Everson by publishing them in handsome standard editions. Although City Lights and Black Sparrow now seem to have aged as artistic enterprises along with their founders, their past achievements exemplify how much the survival of West Coast literature depends upon individual conviction and informed local sponsorship. Such enlightened investment is unlikely to come solely from commercial presses headquartered on the other side of the continent

Please don't misunderstand this argument. The Bay Area is still a sophisticated and literate region. San Francisco remains one of the few American cities that sustains a local literary identity. Berkeley maintains a modest bohemia in the shadow of its great university. San Francisco also has a rare and admirable sense of its own tradition and achievements. It has even renamed streets, though admittedly very small ones, after local writers like Hammett, Kerouac, Bierce, and Ferlinghetti. No American city publicly honors literature more than San Francisco. There are even commercial tours of literary sites.

The problem with San Francisco's admirable civic identity is that it is necessarily retrospective. Europeans, who for obvious reasons, understand this cultural dilemma better than Americans, use the term Museum City to describe a place that preserves its past artistic achievements but lacks present vitality. Literary San Francisco remains fixated in its last moment of national literary glory--the Beat movement of the 1950s. It is considered impolite, however, to remark that those celebrated events occurred half a century ago. The presence of Kenneth Rexroth Place and Jack Kerouac Street hardly compensate for the absence of current literary vitality. It is surely not coincidental that San Francisco's major industry is now tourism. One is reminded of contemporary New Orleans--a city where jazz is everywhere honored but in which almost no new jazz is created.

VI.

"Every night at the end of America
We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific.
How sad it is, the end of America!"

- Louis Simpson
"Lines Written Near San Francisco" (1963)

That is the public reality of San Francisco literary life--and by extension that of most major American cities outside the Northeast Corridor. A reader might argue the interpretation of a particular detail, but the general situation is inarguably clear. The pertinent question is whether the collapse of local literary culture and the disappearance of urban bohemia matters much to the individual West Coast writer? The answer, I think, is both not at all and very much.

Both literary history and common sense suggest that strong and dedicated major talents will prevail, if not always thrive, under almost any conditions. If great writing can be managed in the Siberian gulag or a tuberculosis ward, then it can surely be performed in Pacific Heights or Mill Valley. Yet literary history also demonstrates that a vital urban culture has a special power to focus literary talent. Urban literary culture is not a precondition of good fiction or poetry--though it certainly is for drama--but it does seem to help. And its absence is keenly felt in the atomized and individualistic communities of the American West.

The mythology of the Western writer usually dwells on the romantic individual alone with nature--Jeffers brooding by the Pacific, lusty Henry Miller in Big Sur, or London on horseback beside the smoking ruins of Wolf House. The myth of heroic individualism, however, may not be a particularly useful way to imagine the real possibilities of West Coast literature. Perhaps the metaphor of a winemaker serves the purposes better. A vintner spends a lifetime understanding exactly what grows best in a particular climate and location and then masters the art of preserving that essence for future enjoyment in other places. The best California wines are local but also coveted and appreciated internationally.

The purpose of this essay has not been to answer questions but to raise them--questions, that is, that are unlikely to be asked in New York or Boston. Comparing contemporary San Francisco literary life with the cultural scene fifty or a hundred years ago suggests certain uncomfortable issues not only about California literary life but about all American regional culture. The central question is whether regional literature can maintain a meaningful identity--something beyond local color and superficial accent--in the face of the global standardization of electronic media and the centralization of national literary opinion in New York. While this question has been framed here in terms of Northern California, it pertains equally to New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, or St. Paul. Another issue is how literary enterprises and institutions of national importance can be created and maintained outside the Northeast. Is urban culture still a viable reality for American cities outside the Northeast corridor? Or is some new social means of concentrating human talent needed? Is the delocalized and disembodied cyberspace of the Internet the American writer's only alternative to New York? These questions are especially pressing in the West where huge distances separate urban areas and the major cities often lack identifiable centers. Does the concept of Western literature still have meaning as a collective entity, or does it exist only as a remote abstraction in the work of isolated individual writers?

These are not abstract issues to California writers. Any serious literary artist in California, at least one writing in English, feels the competing claims of language and experience. However deeply immersed in the classics of English, the writer cannot help noting how this rich and various literary heritage stands at one remove from the physical reality of the West. Our seasons, climate, landscape, wildlife, and history are alien to the worldviews of both England and New England. The world looks and feels different in California from the way it does in either York or New York—not only the natural landscape but also the urban one. California also sounds different. Spanish, not French, colors our regional accent. The deepest European roots are Latin and Catholic, not Anglo-Saxon and Puritan. Asia and Latin America are omnipresent influences. There is no use listening for a nightingale among the scrub oaks and chaparral. Our challenge is not only to find the right words to describe our new and complex experience but also to discover the right images, myths, concepts, and characters. For us, this is an essential task, and one impossible to have done elsewhere. We must describe a reality that has never been fully captured in English. The earlier traditions of English only partially clarify what it is we might say. California literature is our conversation between the past and present out of which we articulate ourselves.

Local culture matters because human existence is local. Events happen in specific places to particular people. The climate and culture of a city, the landscape and language of a region, shape its inhabitants. The universal is most cogently found in the particular. To be local is not necessarily to be provincial. Regional literature is often initially dismissed in literary capitals, but a huge proportion of the imaginative writing that survives from the past century proudly bears its regional accent. James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Constantine Cavafy, Italo Svevo, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe, Robert Frost, and Willa Cather are all regional writers of international stature. Vital local culture enables writers to understand and articulate more of their own experience. Strong regional journals and institutions allow readers to discuss and evaluate local work from their own perspectives. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now?

Next week: Richard Silberg's response to Gioia's article

Jack Foley