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BOOK REVIEWS:
THE LITERATURE OF CALIFORNIA, VOLUME 1: Native American Beginnings to 1945

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Sunday, January 7, 2001

BOOK REVIEW
Dancing On the Brink of the World

By: THOMAS SANCHEZ

THE LITERATURE OF CALIFORNIA, VOLUME 1: Native American Beginnings to 1945
Edited by Jack Hicks, James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston and Al Young
University of California Press:
870 pp., $24.95 paper

     "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 Esplandián" by Garci Rodriguez Ordoñez 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 the
Hollywood 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."

* * *
Thomas Sanchez is the author of "Rabbit Boss," "Zoot-Suit Murders," "Mile
Zero" and, most recently, "Day of the Bees."