Excerpt
“For about twenty years it has been my business to try, at least, to understand California. In those years I have felt certain of only one thing: that to satiate the world’s curiosity about this golden coast, an unprecedented mass of ill-informed, shallow and contradictory interpretation has been spewed out. California has been hailed variously as the archetype of the future or the regurgitation of the past. Raymond Chandler wrote of Los Angeles as ‘a tired old whore,’ but the critic Clifton Fadiman, while living in that city, wrote of it as in the ‘vanguard of American social development.’ It was easy for both men to advance convincing arguments. From the start, California has been shrouded in controversy and misinformation. This is a land so new, so large and so varied that it may provide evidence of almost anything, and so those who would play the role of booster or those would show it to be a monster can seem to draw proof from within its seemingly limitless scope. Perhaps there is no other part of the world about which so much pap has been written.”
“It has been easier over the years to deride this yeasty California culture than to explain it. Some of the cultural scene in California is embarrassing in its naïve enthusiam, but that is a symptom of the people’s arts. I remember a weekend of discussion of the arts on the hyperthyroid campus of the University of California at Los Angeles, when the New York critic Howard Taubman inexplicably stood meekly in a cafeteria line for ten minutes waiting for a fresh pot of coffee to brew. Carey McWilliams drew knowing smiles with his comment that ‘all civilizations are man-made, but California’s is more manmade than most.’ Aldous Huxley, his eyesight failing, held close to his eyes the yellow pad on which he had scrawled notes for his address, and concluded with a whimsical inquiry into the literature of the nightingale.”
