Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays

565 Pages·1995·1.36 MB·English

by  David Fine

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Page iii
Los Angeles in Fiction
A Collection of Essays
Revised Edition
Edited by David Fine
University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Los Angeles in fiction : a collection of essays / edited by David Fine.Rev. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8263-1625-5 (pa)
1. Los Angeles (Calif.) in literature. 2. American fictionCaliforniaLos
AngelesHistory and criticism. 3. American fiction20th centuryHistory
and criticism. 4. English fiction20th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Fine,
David M., 1934-
PS374.L57L6 1995
813'.5093279494dc20
95-9764
CIP
© 1984 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved.
Revised edition © 1995 by the University of New Mexico Press
Page v
CONTENTS
Preface to the Revised Edition ix
Introduction 1
David Fine
Part 1
Starting Places
1 29
The Los Angeles Novel and the Idea of the West
Richard Lehan
2 43
Beginning in the Thirties: The Los Angeles Fiction of
James M. Cain and Horace McCoy
David Fine
3 67
The Day of the Painter; the Death of the Cock: Nathanael
West's Hollywood Novel
Gerald Locklin
4 83
John Fante's Eternal City
Stephen Cooper
Page vi
Part 2
Los Angeles and the Detective Novel
5 103
Behind the Territory Ahead
Paul Skenazy
6 127
Raymond Chandler's City of Lies
Liahna K. Babener
7 151
The Ultimate Seacoast: Ross Macdonald's California
Jerry Spei
Part 3
Perspectives
8 165
Fantasy Seen: Hollywood Fiction Since West
Mark Royden Winchell
9 187
Between Two Worlds: Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh
in Hollywood
Walter Wells
10 207
Home and Transcendence in Los Angeles Fiction
Charles L. Crow
Part 4
Fiction as History
11 227
Streets of Fear: The Los Angeles Novels of Chester Himes
Robert E. Skinner
12 239
Los Angeles from the Barrio: Oscar Zeta Acosta's The
Revolt of the Cockroach People
Raymund A. Parede
13 253
History as Mystery, or Who Killed L.A.?
Paul Skenazy
14 273
Chinatown, City of Blight
Liahna K. Babener
15 287
Double Agent: The Los Angeles Crime Cycle of Walter
Mosley
Gilbert H. Muller
Contributors 303
Page vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to all the contributors, who took time from busy teaching
and writing schedules to write these essays and make the various
editorial changes I requested. I am indebted to Paul Skenazy and
Liahna Babener, both of whom took on double assignments. I am
particularly grateful to Professor Babener for assisting me as well in
the editing of the manuscripts. She reveiwed each essay thoroughly
and professionally and made innumerable suggestions which have
been incorporated into the text. Finally, I want to acknowledge my
gratitude to Elizabeth C. Hadas and Barbara Guth, my editors at the
University of New Mexico Press, for their expert advice, constant
support, and help in guiding the manuscript through all the stages of
preparation and production.
DAVID FINE
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
Page ix
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
This second edition of Los Angeles in Fiction incorporates new essays
on three novelists who have come into prominence since the first
appearance of this collection in 1984-John Fante, Chester Himes, and
Walter Mosely. The inclusion of critical essays on these major writers
helps round out the portrait of Los Angeles as a major literary region
in this century. One could easily, of course, make cases for the
inclusion of still other writers. A multi-author critical collection like
this, however, cannot, as I state in my introduction to the first edition,
hope for the inclusiveness of a single-author history of the literature of
a region. In soliciting new essays on Fante, Himes, and Mosely, I
sought to broaden the context of the original volume's coverage by
bringing to it the work of three writers who are receiving increased
critical
Page x
recognition and whose work reflects the multicultural diversity of
modern Los Angeles. All the essays from the first edition of the
volume have been retained, as has my original introduction.
Of the three "new" writers, only one, Walter Mosely, whose Easy
Rawlins novels began appearing in 1990, is really new. The others,
John Fante and Chester Himes, have been around a long time but have
only recently received much critical attention. Fante's career spans a
full fifty years, from the stories he published in the early thirties in
H.L. Mencken's American Mercury through several novels and dozens
of stories right up to his death in 1982. Thanks to Black Sparrow Press
of Santa Rosa, all of Fante's fiction and two collections of letters are
now available (some for the first time) in uniform paperback editions.
Chester Himes, best known for his eight-volume Harlem cycle of
crime novels, wrote his two Los Angeles novels, If He Hollers Let
Him Go and Red Crusade a half-century ago, in the early 1940s,
before his move to New York.
The essay on the Italian-American John Fante is the work of Stephen
Cooper, who is currently at work on the authorized biography of
Fante. Cooper focuses his essay on the four novels that comprise the
"Bandini Cycle" (Wait Until Spring Bandini, The Road to Los
Angeles, Ask the Dust, and Dreams from Bunker Hill)-the saga of
Arturo Bandini as he traverses the rough road, as did his author, from
his Italian-American Colorado childhood, to back-breaking, underpaid
labor on the L.A. waterfront, to his struggles to become a writer, and
finally, to his ups and downs as a Hollywood screenwriter. While his
more celebrated contemporaries-Chandler, Cain, McCoy and others-
were exposing the nightmarish underside of the California Dream,
Fante's "writerly obsessions," Cooper observes, were focused rather
on "family, ambition, the perils of the writing life, and alienation, both
cultural and ethnic." Bandini, in Ask the Dust, the best of his novels,
inhabits a mixed-ethnic, impoverished neighborhood of ''downtown
dancehalls, all-night cafes, and pay-by-the-week hotels of 1930s Los
Angeles," and yet, Cooper acknowledges, Fante retains ''a deep
affection for the city that informs much of [his] work."
Chester Himes's fiction offers no such affection for the city. The two
Los Angeles novels converge on a wartime industrial city rife with
discrimination, racial hatred, and relentless violence. Robert Skinner,
author of Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective