I find the office of the schoolmarmish guy’s assistant, named Juan and as friendly as the security guard. He has me sign some papers I don’t bother to read, then gives me a giant yellow Ticonderoga pencil with thick blunt lead and a virgin-pink eraser, what could be a parody of a pencil, and tells me only notes in pencil are allowed, which is common procedure in such libraries, I know. He escorts me to a small room with lockers, for storage of my daypack, and directs me toward the reading room. There, I am handed a printed sticky-back nametag by the serious, whispering woman staffing the counter, who tells me I must wear the tag at all times (it clearly states: “Non-Renewable”). I choose a table, getting down to making the most out of my two-hour window of opportunity.
I’ve been in rare books and manuscript libraries like this before—here little glowing lamps on the long light-mahogany tables, where the scattering of researchers read or click away on keyboards, green carpeting for the room in this case and tasteful beige walls. Along the shelves around the periphery are the usual busts of luminaries: the bronze casts in the Huntington offer a dramatis personae ranging from Aristotle to Shakespeare to, maybe not so predictably, John Paul Jones. Big toy-like pencil on the table, my pocket notebook open and ready, I start going through the folders, manila with gray ribbon ties, taking out the artifacts one by one and soon completely immersed in how interesting they are. I start with what should be the most routine of them, the map, telling myself I will work my way up to that one folder with some manuscript pages of the very novel I have been ruminating on—thinking and thinking about it here in L.A.—The Day of the Locust; actually, once I get going, I have no idea where I really am, the stuff is so damn interesting.
I open the folder marked neatly on the tab label, Box 2, folder 29: Map of L.A., showing the locations of West’s various residences; it’s a 1967 common Mobil street map for the City of Los Angeles with the long-gone red Pegasus logo adorning the cover, the kind they used to give out for free at gas stations and once called “glove-compartment maps”; I spread it out; I know this is what Jay Martin must have used in his biographical research; there are ovals scrawled in ballpoint around several street names, a half dozen or more of them, and I locate Ivar Street, then write down a note about the other streets marked; a few are in the swank hills above Hollywood, as West (a bachelor with his hunting dogs) did go to live in rented houses there when his screenwriting career became solid; I fold up the map, concentrating and figuring which flap goes where, the way you do with an accordionized map, and slip it back in the manila folder, put it aside. I pick up the next folder in the stack, Box 2 A, folder 18: “Three Eskimos,” carefully remove the several sheets of yellowing loose-leaf, the lines of it black rather than the usual light blue; in West’s own handwriting, dark pencil, is the manuscript of a short story unpublished in his lifetime but later included in the Library of America definitive edition of his collected works; I like looking at West’s handwriting itself, oversized and boxy, for this satiric tale about a family of Eskimos brought to Hollywood from Alaska as extras for a movie, and I write in my notebook that this same family becomes the Gingo Eskimo Family, who in The Day of the Locust are friends of Faye Greener’s vaudevillian father and have decided they like Hollywood life, refusing to return to Alaska and surviving on raw fish bought from Jewish delicatessens; I am especially careful with these pages, dry and fragile, and after I skim through the story I put the sheets back in that folder, placing it on the folder with the map. I pick up the third folder, Box 2 A, folder 22: Coroner’s Report, Imperial County—Photocopy of Jury Inquest on the Death of Nathanael West, and I lift out the dozen or so elongated legal pages, beginning with preprinted boilerplate where blanks are filled in with the names of the judge and inquest jury involved in this investigation into West’s accident and then offering the typed transcript proper as recorded by a court reporter, like a play’s format, and quite frank and detailed when it comes to the question if West had been drinking (empty Mexicali Beer bottles were found in the wreckage, a state trooper testifies, though he concedes they could have been consumed at any time well before the accident, left bouncing around in the wood-paneled station wagon); that’s followed by even more uncomfortable exchanges indeed, such as one that’s indicative of a whole other sorry era in America, let’s hope—there’s the particularly awkward moment when the driver of the other car, a family man, testifies, and then one of the jurors (in what I hear as a slow, bigoted country voice) has an additional question for the trooper, with the Deputy D.A. coming in after that, regarding the matter of who exactly West was:
JUROR: Is West a Spanish or American boy?
OFFICER TILLMAN: Evidently American.
DEPUTY D.A. FREEMAN (perhaps exasperated with a question like that—my insert): He and his wife lived in North Hollywood, didn’t they?
I write down some notes, including the dialogue lines from the transcript that you’ve just read here in this movie of me, and I put the stapled-together photocopy of the report back into the folder and place it on top of the two others I’ve already been through.
I had only a roll and coffee for lunch, and all the walking, those couple of miles in the sun earlier, is starting to catch up with me. I’m getting tired in the library (I look around—a prim elderly woman working at her laptop next to me smiles; I see a young guy a few tables over examining manuscripts and wearing a baggy sweatshirt and a black knit cap that says “Berlin” on the side, and I like the fact he doesn’t seem, well, scholarly), as I do finally get to that last folder, the one I have in a way been saving, Box 1, folder 5: The Day of the Locust, novel fragment; before long I’m completely lost, and then some, in the less than a dozen pages of faint typescript on crisp onionskin, and, as it turns out, I go way beyond my 1:30-3:30 begrudgingly issued time slot (however, now here, I doubt anybody cares about any of that, and I suspect it wouldn’t even bother the schoolmarm-ish guy of the rules-are-rules mindset if he was around and this wasn’t his day off); for me, to actually see West at work, with his penciled-in word changes and in two cases complete typewritten rewrites of pages, proves the very best thing of all in the Huntington; sometimes it’s just a small alteration that results in large difference, and at one point I write in my notebook how it constitutes a master stroke, the way West in the manuscript originally introduces Tod Hackett as a personage who would become famous for his well-known painting “The Burning of Los Angeles” then changes that to Tod Hackett who is simply working on a painting of that title, as he is in the published novel (the former would have been trite, making Tod subsequently famous like that, not the right oblique touch whatsoever); at another point I write in my notebook that I am now seeing up close the composition of some of the earliest pages in the novel, where Tod, at the end of his work day, walks leisurely from his movie studio to where he lives at the San Bernardino Arms, and I also write down that I myself followed the same walk described in those pages the day I was first out in Hollywood, retracing his steps from the studio that used to be Columbia and then up the hill of Ivar Street to the Pa-Va-Sed Apartments (odd that the pages of this brief manuscript “fragment” should contain that exact scene—another mirror mirroring?); I linger over the manuscript pages, eventually finish.
I look around the room again before packing everything up for return to the front desk, the same serious woman there, nodding but not smiling. I tug on the light suit jacket I brought with me to wear with the black Levi’s and another open-collared dress shirt, perhaps to appear presentable in these surroundings. I’m really tired, and I tell myself that as very interesting as the afternoon has been, I do know what I’ve always known—that never mind the off-putting practice of collecting literary artifacts as pricey possessions, it’s true that the whole concept of a rare books and manuscript library, with so many scholars busily working away—the never-ending routine of research and by-the-numbers academic critical analysis, more often than not mere fuel for the promotion-and-tenure machine—really has little to do with the rhaps
odic transport of the literature itself, read by the amazed reader himself or herself, ultimately excited; when all is said and done, a room like this undeniably is what it is: a place where literature goes to die.
After leaving the library, I make an attempt at wandering around the grounds of the Huntington beyond the library building, in back where the art museum and those touted, supposedly renowned botanical gardens are, but the project is pretty short-lived: I am suddenly absolutely tired at the end of this long day (the nametag still stuck on my shirt elicited a nod from an attendant and then her waving me through the turnstile, gratis, at the little colonnade concourse for tickets, twelve bucks otherwise), and I don’t even muster the energy to go into the museum to see any of the paintings.
I know that with my trip just about over I look forward to dinner with my old college pal that evening (truth of the matter is that I’m both tired and even a touch depressed, which can happen toward the end of a trip, the realization that “Now this is over, what the hell do I do next in my life?” and I am already thinking again of what I came here to get away from, the sadness of my friend’s illness back in Austin—because to have a debilitating stroke at just fifty is colossally unfair—and also the absurdity of the departmental politics I foolishly let myself get roped into at the end of the semester), yes, I look forward to meeting up with the pal from college, a guy with little interest in books—sometimes I have to take a break, I know, from literature and its trappings, wondering too much about books and letting that eat up my life.
But my afternoon in the Huntington Library does have something to do with what happened to me that other afternoon up in Hollywood, when I seemed to not only track down more of the settings of The Day of the Locust but also walk right into a scene from the novel, diligently taking notes about it all the while as well.
And if I’ve served up two short movies of me here, there’s still a transcendent—or maybe metaphysical—trailer of sorts to come, an attempt to bring everything here together, after a belated brief “intermission” with my college pal. (I really hope I’m not sounding altogether too hokey with this movie motif—and there is the excuse that I am in L.A.) I leave San Marino.
I ride the Gold Line light-rail train back to Chinatown.
6. Time and the Sneaky Way It Somehow Passes
My college pal, despite the fact he currently lives in West-wood, knows Chinatown well. After finishing law school in Los Angeles years before, he worked for the city’s legal aid program, downtown, often going to one of the dozens of restaurants to choose from within those several self-contained blocks that make up Chinatown, the neighborhood’s trademark pagoda rooflines everywhere (like the roofline outlined in red neon at night of my funky Royal Pagoda Motel where I’ve been so comfortable, an establishment that proudly advertises, “Built in 1964 and a hotspot for Asian celebrities of the era,” among them, as boasted, “Apasra Hongsakula—Ms. [sic] Universe 1965”). On the phone he tells me he’ll be there by seven, his voice gentle and even-toned:
“No, you just wait for me at your motel, Pete, relax after your long day, rest for a while. And I’ll try to relax, too, in the traffic, get on the freeway with some music playing and be there in less than an hour. I’m really up for some awesome Chinese food.”
After he navigates me on the walk through the back streets of Chinatown, we sit wielding chopsticks at the restaurant—one he remembers as his favorite for seafood when working legal aid, an inexpensive place where I have possibly the best scallops in stir-fried crisp vegetables anybody could ever long for—and we are relaxed. We talk more about old friends, laugh, and we do an awful lot of filling in on what has happened to us in life, successes and failures, not only on what passes for the career front but also in experiences with women, both of us on our own again at this stage, admittedly rather old to be “dating”—but both of us do date, albeit awkwardly at our age, have a lot of fun with it, and we laugh about that. Athletically tall, buff from working out in the gym—something obvious, with him wearing a tight, bright yellow T-shirt, complete with a thin gold necklace, L.A.-ish—he’s a good-looking guy; his hair is still dark and cut short, and most of all it is his very white smile that shows that while both of us qualify for all that AARP stuff embarrassingly clogging the mailbox, he now and then seems entirely the same guy I knew in college. He was a great skier back then and on the university’s varsity team, after that a full-time member of a ski manufacturer’s sponsored promotional team before law school, an acknowledged innovator in “hot-dog skiing” when the sport was just being invented. He’s proud of his two grown children, whom he raised largely on his own after his marriage didn’t work out, balancing that with some law work conducted out of his office at home and, more so, business deals; he tells me that with a recently acquired degree in finance, his twenty-two-year-old daughter (“bright as all hell”) is living with him in the house in Westwood at the moment and working in L.A., while she waits to start a job she’s excited about on Wall Street in the fall.
Having not seen him in years, since right after graduation, to be exact, I’ve heard from other college friends that for a while his business ventures included movies, an independent producer with a small production company for low-budget films. I ask him about it now and he explains it was all modest and very low budget—the slasher and American kung fu movies—though there was opportunity with such in the late eighties and early nineties. With a cameo from a recognizable actor booked cheaply—Lee Marvin, one time—he could sell a package for good distribution and see a decent return on the investment, Sony involved at least once. Still, in the end he was glad he got out of it, noting: “The whole movie thing is all sleaze—not that I wasn’t doing my part.”
I laugh, and he asks me how I, a short story writer and novelist, never got caught up in the movie thing myself. I tell him I’ve probably always been too impractical, perhaps naive; also, I grew up in a house where books were what mattered (before marriage my mother was a school librarian) and I lived in a semi-rural area and didn’t even go to movies much as a kid, to develop any early hunger to get involved in them. But I go on to explain there was that one occasion, what I’ve told people about before to get a laugh.
After the appearance of a novel of mine years ago, I was approached by a producer who liked the book and my work overall; he asked me to write an original treatment for development, hopefully, into a full-fledged screenplay. The producer was Ronnie Shedlo (he died recently, not all that old), who had a reputation of being an honorable maverick in Hollywood and was involved in some good work (he did the film Back Roads with Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones, the latter at Harvard with my pal and me in the late sixties, Tommy Lee characteristically leathery and gravelly voiced even then as an undergrad, when I’d encounter him in the teacup of Sever Lecture Hall for the full year of Chaucer that was required of all honors English majors at the time; I also later learned—weird, too, in the context of what I’m writing here—that Shedlo was the original producer who put together the package for the fine 1975 film of The Day of the Locust directed by John Schlesinger, which had Karen Black with bleached golden hair set in a shimmering Marcel wave as a convincing Faye Greener and Donald Sutherland, hauntingly blank-faced, as a perfect Homer Simpson, yet accounts indicate that Shedlo withdrew from the final project when pressure from others who were part of it demanded certain casting or perhaps even asked for textual compromise, maybe on the script written by Waldo Salt of Midnight Cowboy notoriety). I tell my pal now that at first I didn’t take it seriously whatsoever, saw it as but a dreamy long shot that might mean some easy money, and when I sent Shedlo a fifteen-page treatment I whipped up quickly, replete with every cliché you’d find in any Clint Eastwood tough-guy-cop performance, Shedlo bluntly told me on the phone—calling from his own home in Beverly Hills, no less—that if he wanted crap like that he never would have approached me to begin with and could have found a million people there in L.A. to give it to him. Two things resulted: first, an amazemen
t from literary-snooty me that a Hollywood producer had read so much, knew literature inside out, I soon learned, and, secondly, once we did move toward a screenplay, based on a subsequent, much better treatment I gave him, I realized that while a treatment was like a short story and easy for me, I was no good at delivering a finished working script—it’s hard to get dialogue in a script to both sound natural and carry the machinations of plot, taking a skill that I, for one, didn’t possess, am still sort of intimidated by, actually.
“So nothing came of it?” my college pal asks me.
“No, it all got more absurd. As Shedlo started to talk about points, what my cut would be according to a contract if the thing ever were made and that kind of financial stuff, and with him about to fly to Texas to work on the script with me, well, at that stage my publisher—or maybe the film agent I had then, because there was a Hollywood agent who represented me through the publisher—in any case, somebody got word that there was big-time interest with real big-time money on another front for movie rights, coming from a group of secretive investors who were apparently crazy about my novel and its somewhat noir portrait of decadent life in the fast lane of booming urban Texas in the 1980s.”
The City at Three P.M. Page 19
