Zócalo is exploring L.A.’s Literary Public Square, where writers and readers come together to share and write the story of their city.
When I left Manhattan for Southern California in spring of 1991, I was concerned that I had removed myself from the seat of American literary culture, that I had lost proximity, not to writing or publishing exactly, but rather to what let’s call a certain literary gravitas.
The reality is I didn’t know enough. I didn’t recognize that Southern California is a landscape of disruption, not only natural but also psychological and emotional. For me, such disruption was first a function of the space, both geographic and internal, I had put between myself and my New York roots. Where Manhattan was upright—all those buildings, rising into the cluttered sky above midtown, striving up and down—Southern California felt more horizontal. The city, as the clichés remind us, sprawled. What I was to learn was that this, like every cliché about the place, contained an element of authenticity, but not enough. Or more accurately, that everything we think or say about Los Angeles is equally true and false. City of sprawl, yes, but also of neighborhoods. City of surfaces but also history and depth. This was the thing about the place, that it defied our expectations, or even that we should have expectations at all.
Writers in Los Angeles? To the East Coast, such a notion was ridiculous. And yet, I was to discover, there was a freedom in the fact that nobody seemed to be paying attention. It made the boundaries permeable and thin. It is this quality of porousness that seems the most essential aspect of the city and its literature. In a region defined by fire, flood, drought, and earthquake—one in which the terrain itself is unreliable—stability becomes an illusion or a myth.
What does that mean for the literature of Los Angeles? Most fundamentally, we can take nothing for granted, least of all our narratives. And yet, the paradox is that this uncertainty, this seepage, is precisely the cultural fertilizer that writers (as well as other artists) require. We need to be able to upset the hierarchies, escape the strictures, to follow our work where it will go. This, too, is what Los Angeles taught me: that I would have to think for myself.
One place this emerges is in the area of genre, which, like so much in Southern California, is both meaningless and meaningful. On the one hand, it is a straitjacket, reductive, while on the other, it offers an array of possibilities. I think of Hollywood in that regard. “The very nicest thing Hollywood can possibly think of to say to a writer,” Raymond Chandler once sniped, “is that he is too good to be only a writer.” At the same time, the industry has long provided not just a sinecure but also a source of inspiration. “I am grateful rather than angry,” Nathanael West wrote in 1939 to the critic Edmund Wilson, “at the nice deep mud-lined rut in which I find myself at the moment. The world outside doesn’t make it possible for me to even hope to earn a living writing, while here the pay is large (it isn’t as large as people think, however) enough for me to have at least three or four months off every year.”
The studios, of course, offered West more than merely money; if we compare his 1933 masterpiece Miss Lonelyhearts with his final novel, 1939’s The Day of the Locust, we see the arc of his development. Miss Lonelyhearts, with its vivid, hopeless claustrophobia, a modernist exploration of mass alienation; The Day of the Locust with its three-act structure, tracking similar concerns via a more cinematic strategy. And yet, why not? The three-act structure goes back to Aristotle, after all. Classicism, meet the movie business. It’s all a mashup, no matter where you look.
We need to be able to upset the hierarchies, escape the strictures, to follow our work where it will go. This, too, is what Los Angeles taught me: that I would have to think for myself.
For me, such a realization took some time to assert itself. I had to give myself over to the place. I recall one night at Rosalind’s on Fairfax, reading with a group of writers for the PBS television series The United States of Poetry. This was the early 1990s and dozens of us were on hand, including Wanda Coleman, Luis Alfaro, and Ruth Forman.
Back then, the city’s literary scene felt under recognized, even locally. That was part of its challenge and its charm. And yet, here it was, edgy, amorphous, difficult to pin down. Coleman was a poet, but she also wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Alfaro was only a few years from receiving a MacArthur for his poetic, provocative playwriting and performance art. Forman worked on dance and film and other endeavors. There was a frisson at work, as if the boundaries had worn thin. It felt like an expanding universe. Most of the evening’s readers, myself among them, did not make PBS’s final cut, and yet, this was the first time I might say I belonged. It was not an experience, I remember thinking, I’d had in New York, all this overlap. Distance again, or perhaps a loosening: The only path to follow was one’s own.
In its way, that represents another form of porousness, the idea that there is no template, that there is no pre-existing mode. There is only the imagination, and the play of it upon the world. We are always wrestling with the conditional, with the constructed, with the tension between the human and the elemental world. That’s why in January, as the Eaton and Palisades fires exploded, part of the response took shape in narrative. On websites and opinion pages, Substacks and social media feeds, we as a region crowdsourced a collage of stories that together added up to a testimony larger than ourselves.
This expanse of Southern California stories tells us where we are. How, then, can we not cast a wide net and see what comes back? How, then, can we not blur the lines? Such a process, paradoxically, has allowed us, in this place derided as having no center, to recenter American literature.
Six months after I arrived in Los Angeles, I interviewed Carolyn See at her Topanga Canyon home. She told me about how to think about the breadth, the space, of Southern California. How to peel back the layers of its veneer. How to write when no one was paying attention. How to be porous, one might say. “I tell my students,” she explained toward the end of our conversation, “that in the year 2020, or in that decade, Los Angeles will be to the world what Paris was in the 1920s. And that’s what they should look for. It’s a good place to be.”
This is where we are now, and I can’t say I disagree.
David L. Ulin is the author or editor of 20 books, including the novel Thirteen Question Method and Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is an English professor at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light.
Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard