The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  Once Hollywood’s Masonic Lodge, the El Capitan Centre (adjoining another restored older building, the El Capitan movie theatre proper, both owned by Disney) is a stately affair, and it houses an auditorium used for TV shows. A young woman in khakis and a blue polo shirt bearing the ABC logo—mile-high cheekbones and full, glossed lips, attractive enough to be a starlet—sits at a small table set up on the sidewalk, trying to give out free tickets to the Jimmy Kimmel Live show taping within. There are presently no takers (which anybody who’s ever actually watched that decidedly not-funny guy can easily understand), but somebody must have bit for the offer, because apparently a member of the studio audience has had some sort of a medical emergency inside (I hate to say it, but that’s what you get for accepting a free Jimmy Kimmel ticket). Already the wailing siren of an EMS unit can be heard, off a ways; still more people drift toward the commotion, blocking the sidewalk, as a panicking bald guy in the very standard tourist’s getup of a sport shirt with the tails hanging out and cargo shorts keeps hurrying in and out of the auditorium building, to see if the EMS has, in fact, arrived.

  All it takes is the sight of the gleaming scarlet rescue wagon coming this way through the traffic on the Boulevard to draw even more people. The truck swerves over to the curb, the siren ceases its atonal song in a truncated gulp, four muscular young guys in uniforms hop out; the one in charge holds a clipboard, and—the crowd large now—the three others yank from the back of the truck a collapsible stretcher with straps across its white sheet. I watch, stationing myself against a huge pillar of the El Capitan, again taking notes. I write down what those rugged EMS handsomes and their paraphernalia look like (their buzz cuts, their dark blue short-sleeved uniforms, the eerie rattling for the unfolding of the collapsible stretcher on wheels) and also a note to the effect that finally these people marching up and down the Boulevard have found a spectacle: for the crowd something is happening at last, even if it is at the expense of somebody else’s misfortune and certainly not what they were expecting in just a normal afternoon of sightseeing.

  I don’t wait for the conclusion. Notebook and pen returned to the back pocket once more, I simply wedge my way out of the pedestrian buildup, repeatedly offering a perfunctory “Excuse me” and trying to smile.

  But what transpired there seemed to say something—I find myself thinking about this while enjoying that cold, condensation-dripping brown bottle of Budweiser in the Powerhouse on Highland, where two friendly young guys sitting beside me at the bar and doing shots announce to me right off, for some reason, that they’re “Chicano,” proud of it and from East L.A., before casually talking about baseball with me as we watch together on ESPN highlights of the previous night’s Dodgers game—then I think about it more when I get back to work that evening on the manuscript at the glowing G4 Mac laptop on the desk fringed with cigarette burns in my motel in Chinatown; or, more exactly, it’s in the motel, the Royal Pagoda, that it really hits me, as I look up from the computer and right at me staring back from the framed mirror above the desk.

  4. Set Aside

  Set aside my taking notes in Hollywood, my busily scribbling what I observed regarding locales of scenes in The Day of the Locust. That was one thing, but this was another, beyond that, yet related, and for all intents and purposes I actually somehow found myself in the climactic scene of the novel, where on the Boulevard a crowd grows out of control in the course of a movie premiere one very frightening night in the 1930s, the big searchlight beams scanning the sky to announce the event (Tod is trampled; Homer kicks to death an obnoxious aspiring child actor who has been taunting him; star-struck, ever-daydreaming Faye maybe looks on at those walking the red carpet, wide-eyed, trying to get a glimpse of still another one of the glamorous actors and actresses stepping out of a limousine to enter the Chinese Theatre). Or, look at it this way: While my crowd scene wasn’t the wild and near apocalyptic one of the novel, I did end up in more or less a spookily identical scenario, complete with everyday and probably bored people, a throng in need of—and surely, for many of them, hoping very hard to find—some kind of event in their lives, as said. Why, when I was there the siren wailed loudly, and in the novel, yes, a deafening siren’s wail seems to express in that climactic scene—for a broken, half-hysterical Tod, anyway—the utter meaninglessness of just about everything in Hollywood, as encapsulated by the novel’s very last lines where Tod starts to madly howl along with it: “The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself…. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.”

  Do you see my point?

  I mean, I often try to locate the scenes of a novel I love, taking notes, and sometimes use it as a focus in travel, knowing I might write an essay about the book and the place of its setting like the one you’re reading now. But taking such notes could be deeper than that, I suspect, well beyond eventually writing any essay, and what is this need that any of us can have to affix to the unreality of literature a reality it doesn’t actually possess? And what does it mean—certainly more tellingly—to feel some ultimate satisfaction that in the reality of life (me in Hollywood, finding myself in a climactic crowd scene, one so similar to that in the novel) I proved the true power of the unreality of a novel, a product of the imagination and nothing more?

  Maybe keep this in mind as I continue, because I think I could be onto something here.

  5. That Place Where Literature Does Go to Die, a Second Short Movie

  Toward the end of the week, with most of what I feel is good work done on the long manuscript, I realize that I can ease off and do some other things while in the city, before I finish up the trip with a weekend spent by the ocean in Santa Monica. There are other spots to explore (the old downtown business-and-theater district with its main thoroughfare of South Broadway, rundown yet so wonderfully Latino now you could be in a large, teeming Mexican city, also the cluster of startling new glass-and-steel skyscrapers on the other side of Pershing Square, a textbook on ultra-hip American architecture in itself), and there’s an old pal from college, who twenty years earlier was an independent movie producer in L.A., for low-budget slasher and kung fu offerings, actually; following a few extended, laughing phone conversations with him from the motel (those after-all-these-years-and-whatever-happened-to kind of sessions), we’ve made plans to have dinner.

  Plus, there is one more thing to do with respect to West, at the Huntington Library.

  A couple of days before I left for L.A.—back in Austin and during my reading around about West—I noticed that there were holdings concerning him at the Huntington. It’s the rare books and manuscript library out at what had once been the rich railway magnate’s opulent estate in San Marino, a municipality next to Pasadena but even tonier. While I’ve sometimes flatly expressed my opinion before, in print, that I’ve never been a big fan of rare books and manuscript libraries, the way that the monetary value attached to their holdings can become more important to some than the literature itself, this time I found myself easing up a little. I thought that while on this quest of rereading and contemplating West as part of the trip, I might go out there and take a look at what they had on him.

  But my attempt to obtain a pass for “reader’s privileges” to use the library turned complicated. On what should have been routine approval for me as a faculty member at a legitimate university, the person handling registration noticed on the downloaded application I faxed from Austin that I gave no indication of the institution where I received my Ph.D., for which there was a line provided. A series of email exchanges ensued. I explained I was a creative writer in my English department, sans Ph.D., and I got windy (uncharacteristically so, I hope) and informed him outright that I was both a full professor and also somebody holding an endowed named professorship (no big deal, really, but I was trying to get by this guy); strict to the point of being schoolmarmish, he told me that rules were rules, a Ph.D. was mandatory, yet he suggested I could solicit two le
tters of recommendation for an “independent scholar” pass, which is done in the case of somebody not associated with a university, working on the assumption that any university prof is always a Ph.D.— it’s also a procedure, I knew, that would take weeks, though I was leaving in a couple of days. I wanted to tell the guy that if he really thought a Ph.D. meant anything when it comes to literature, I might point out to him that historically the bulk of the comment on literature that has, in fact, lasted has been done by actual writers themselves and not scholars (T.S. Eliot on poetry, for instance, not to mention Keats and Shelley and Wallace Stevens; Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, etc., on the novel; more specifically, D.H. Lawrence on American literature, Chinua Achebe on The Heart of Darkness, or poet Charles Olson in his powerful meditation on Moby-Dick, the study Call Me Ishmael, which was abandoned as his dissertation for a Harvard Ph.D.—a degree he never finished—and then went on to possibly mark, in its sheer originality and uncanny insight, the most significant of all criticism ever written on that supreme American masterpiece). And I also wanted to tell him that academic criticism lately seldom progresses beyond—to borrow the apt phrasing of eminent University of Virginia scholar Douglas Day—the “earnest drudgery” it sadly is. It’s practically a given that with its priggish, soporifically jargonized, perpetual-grad-student prose (did I cover everything in that crabby adjectival list?), such criticism is usually unreadable despite how much extensive research it entails, and because it operates according to whatever trendy critical theory is fashionable at the time, it seems by definition to be programmed to quickly evanesce: just think about how adolescently silly, close to parody, stuff from the 1980s Deconstruction Boom looks today. I guess I really wanted to tell him, or simply invite him, to stop by the old campus building with its dull green linoleum floors and blank yellow plaster walls that houses my own Department of English and step into a classroom, listen in on what gets passed along in lit courses by profs—surely good people, for the most part, but too often nowadays far removed from what’s genuinely important in literature (for a lot of them “scholarship” is basically an exercise in asserting personal causes as rigid doctrine—conventional sociology and political science more than anything else— with the whole idea of the transport or even outright magic and mystery of books becoming a rather lost, if not forbidden, concept to espouse on campus today, seen as elitist, while the students themselves seem to long for the message of that). In short, I wanted to tell this guy at the library that, everything considered, maybe a Ph.D. was the last thing he should be wanting from me.

  Nevertheless, up before dawn on the day I was to head out to the Austin airport for my morning flight on Southwest, I thought I might take a chance (i.e., attempt an end run) and email directly the person who was the library’s head curator for its literary collections. When I arrived in L.A. a few hours later, I was surprised to find in my inbox a message from that head curator; she informed me that everything had been taken care of—to some extent, anyway. I was being given a very temporary, two-hour access permit to use the library. The guy I originally dealt with emailed me to confirm it (I got the feeling he didn’t like me going above his head), and he instructed that I should go online, view the list of the library’s West holdings, and pick out specifically the documents I would like to see, then email him what they were; the requested materials would be “pulled” and be waiting for me on arrival.

  To be honest, I’d started to lose interest in the errand. But seeing that I had a bit of time at the end of the week, and seeing that it had taken much effort to get the clearance, I gave it more consideration. Upon checking, I saw that the L.A. Metro system’s brand-new Gold Line—light rail above ground—does go out to Pasadena, so getting to the library wouldn’t be too difficult. But maybe what sealed the deal for me was that the schoolmarmish guy said in an email that he would be off work the day I did finally propose for my two-hour visit, and I knew that might make it easy, too, as I was starting to have qualms about my own somewhat noisy dealings with him and probably didn’t want to face him personally—after all, he was just doing his job, trying to keep things organized. And, yes, I was feeling good about what I had accomplished on my fiction manuscript, the windows wide open to the balcony walkway of my room at the two-story Royal Pagoda—it looked out to the hill Dodger Stadium sits on, the lights of the ballpark glowing up there like so many clustered little moons this game night—so I could put that aside now, granting I hadn’t gotten quite all done on it that I wanted.

  So one evening at the motel I email the schoolmarmish guy, routinely thanking him for all his help. I confirm the proposed time of my visit and say I will have my selections to him pronto.

  Actually, I have no real particular materials in mind, and those I eventually do select are offbeat in some cases, but each catches my eye. In the next email I explain that the several items I would like to look at are all in what is listed on the library’s Web site as a collection donated by West’s biographer Jay Martin—apparently documents he used in his own research. (And I might note here, emphatically, that Martin’s biography, the 1974 Nathanael West: The Art of His Life, is admirably thorough and engagingly written, a first-rate study. Really try to avoid the newer 2010 biography, Lonelyhearts by Marion Meade, which treats West’s life alongside that of his wife Eileen McKenney; with its glib tenor announced beforehand by the very subtitle, The Screw ball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, the book is thin in pages and large in font, a narrative that often seems cannibalized from other earlier published accounts, as can be the case in too many recent biographies—much of it here is based on Martin, I’d say—and the entire thing presented in a flippant, off-putting voice more fit for a gossipy personal blog than a consideration of a major American writer’s life.) Before hitting the send button on the email to the Hunting-ton, I check again that my notation is right: I know that the schoolmarmish guy doesn’t fool around and I’m extra careful to give the precise annotation that identifies each item in the online catalogue:

  Box 1, folder 5

  The Day of the Locust, novel fragment

  Box 2, folder 29

  Map of L.A., with locations of West’s homes marked

  Box 2 A, folder 22

  Coroner’s Report, Imperial County—Photocopy of Jury Inquest on the Death of Nathanael West

  Box 2 A, folder 18

  “Three Eskimos”

  The next day, the Metro ride out to Pasadena is a pleasant half-hour trip—the profuse glass of the car providing large picture windows, the again immaculate train going slow as it first winds out of the old railway-yard tracks of creamy Union Station downtown and then picking up speed through the neighborhoods of houses often precariously tacked onto steep canyon walls (more palms and eucalyptus and blossoming trees of all variety in the honeyed sunshine, vines of red bougainvillea seemingly inundating in spots, swallowing everything whole, and a sky cloudless and blue)—but the two-mile walk from the station to the library in San Marino, in the direction away from the backdrop of the high San Gabriel Mountains in earnest here, isn’t so easy. Not caring that I might look goofy in this movie of me—because often when I travel, I somehow seem to be outside myself, watching myself as if in a film—I take from my daypack a mini black rain umbrella, for shade. I realize that the sun from the hours poking around Hollywood and elsewhere in the last few days, despite any promised SPF-50 blockage, has rendered me burnt; it’s my hottest day in L.A. yet, at least an even ninety, and for the half hour or so that the walk takes, a straight shot on the sidewalk of residential Allen Avenue, I move along under the impromptu parasol. I pass the groomed homes and apartment complexes of Pasadena, neat to the extreme, and I cross the wide main street of Colorado Boulevard with its restaurants and specialty shops, and I pass a small dignified sign on an iron post indicating the San Marino municipal boundary; up ahead, the impressive black gates of the grounds of the Huntington Library and Museum (a major art collection, of course) finally
come into sight.

  Nobody else is walking on the long, winding entry drive, bordered by flowers resplendent (the only word for it) in churned dark loam, also carefully sculpted shrubbery on either side. I approach the checkpoint and am met by a paunchy middle-aged guy wearing a security guard uniform of shorts and shirt; he steps out of his booth while putting on a white pith helmet, which assures me that though I’ve folded up the little umbrella and stuffed it back into the day-pack, the heat is serious and I wasn’t as goofy as I thought, to use it earlier. The Huntington estate comprises the original huge baroque mansion that’s now the art museum—opulent enough to rival anything in regal Europe, giving solid testament to what might be seen as the indulgence, and associated futile vanity, of having altogether too much money for one’s own good in this brief life—and the library building, as huge and itself probably more Georgian in architectural style, along with several assorted lesser structures (a domed ornamental temple and such); the entire enterprise is set in two hundred acres of a sprawling, park-like expanse of ponds and tufted lawns and extensive “botanical gardens.” Having found my name on his printout of an official visitors’ list for the day, the guard in the pith helmet smilingly decides that I’ve walked far enough in the heat already, and he says he will use his canopied golf cart to take me the rest of the way, deliver me right to the library’s steps. As we hum along the winding drive in the cart, there’s small talk about where I’m from—”Texas,” I tell him, then add, “but originally from Rhode Island,” something I always point out even if I have lived in Austin for thirty years, the guy liking the essential idea of a state being as altogether far away as Rhode Island— and he next asks me where I am staying in L.A.—“Chinatown,” I tell him, and he likes the idea of that, too, definitely: “Now that’s part of the real Los Angeles,” he assures me. I suppose I now appreciate the convoluted route it took to arrive here—through such vivid canyon terrain on the train, then walking alone down empty and oddly immaculate suburban streets in the heat under an umbrella, to be met by a stranger in a pith helmet who at last ushers me to my destination, an elongated, looming classical edifice maybe perfectly suited for a mysterious Paul Delvaux canvas—and there is the sense of a journey to it, something of a dream, maybe.