Darling (16 page)

And: New York, truly, I am sorry to say, is not New York
anymore. I say this having once been the boy who strained—the antenna on our roof raking through the starlight—to catch any shred of conversation from New York. I watched James Baldwin interviewed by David Susskind. I watched Norman Mailer chafing at America on
The
Dick Cavett Show
. New York was a conversation. I guess I am stuck there. Buckley and Galbraith, Yale and Harvard, W. H. Auden and Hermione Gingold.

Unread copies of the
New Yorker
slip and slide on the opposite end of my couch—damn slippery things. Still, every once in a while an essential article. When I was in graduate school, and for many years after, the
New York Review of Books
fed my ravenous appetite for Oxbridge-Manhattan conversation. But then . . . what? I got too old; the conversation got too old. And surely the world must be larger than New York and London. Even now, I can pick up right where I left off:
SWM seeks SWF, for argument's sake
.

On an April day in 1970, I saw Dwight Macdonald. We both were stranded on a concrete island in the middle of Broadway. He was an old man in a raincoat in the rain. I was a graduate student. The rain was glorious, tall, immoderate. Everything was glorious. Broadway. No, I did not dare congratulate Macdonald for his bravery as a public intellectual, the best of his kind, and for whom the rain, that day, at least from the look of him, was just one more goddamned thing. Then the light changed.

Because Irving Kristol correctly predicted the light would change; that the intellectual center of America would shift from the shores of the Hudson to the Potomac.

For the writer, the problem of the absence of New York is the problem of the absence of a critical center, where opinion can be trusted to support talent or call down the falsely reasoned text. Washington think tanks are too far gone in the thrall to political
power to provide that center. In the absence of critical structures, where does the young writer from California, or any writer, present herself for review; to what city does she apply for notice and contest? Nowadays, it is not Norman Mailer or James Baldwin who converse on television, it is Mitch McConnell or Harry Reid, and it is poor.

•   •   •

I was once interviewed on C-SPAN during the
Los Angeles
Times
Book Festival. Five minutes max, the producer promised. Put this in your ear. Look over there. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . I was standing on a crowded plaza at UCLA between two stalls, one for African American books, another for Latino books. I said to my interviewer, who was in Washington, DC, or a Virginia suburb, which was inside an electronic button, which was inside my ear, that I regretted these two neighboring book booths represented so little understanding of what California is becoming.

The earphone remained as neutral as a can opener.

. . . I mean California's destiny is marriage. All the races of the world . . .

Two-second delay. Obviously I have wasted . . . the earphone asked if I was going to attend the Great Debate.

I'm sorry?

“Our viewers are going to watch a debate between California and New York,” the earphone enthused (a brightening of tone).

(California would be “represented” by Ms. Arianna Huffington; New York, by Mr. Pete Hamill.)

You'd do better to stage a conversation between Duluth and El Paso.

The earphone paused for an awful moment (
cf
. Bishop
Proudie's wife,
Barchester Towers
“suspecting sarcasm”) before leaping from my ear.

•   •   •

Americans have been promised—by God, by the Constitution of the United States, by Edna Ferber—that we shall enjoy liberty to pursue happiness. The pursuit constitutes what we have come to call the American Dream.

Americans feel disappointment so keenly because our optimism is so large and is so often insisted upon by historians. And so often justified by history. The stock market measures optimism. If you don't feel optimistic, there must be something wrong with you. There are pills for disappointment.

The California Dream was a codicil to the American Dream, an opening. Internal immigrants sought from California at least a softer winter, a wider sky; at least a thousand miles' distance between themselves and whatever dissatisfaction they felt with “home.”

Midwestern California, the California of internal immigrants, was everywhere apparent when I was growing up—in the nervous impulse to build and to live in a house that had never been lived in or died in; where the old lady never spilled milk, the dog never died, the bully never lurked behind the elm tree; where widows and discomfited children never stared at the moon through runny glass, or listened to the wind at night. This California was created by newcomers from Illinois and Nebraska, and it shaped my life. This was California as America's America.

Simultaneous with Midwestern California was the California of Maxine Hong Kingston and William Saroyan, and of my Mexican mother and father and my uncle from India; a California of family secrets, yes, unorthodox ingredients—turmeric, cilantro,
curry,
Santa Maria Purisima
—but also some surpassing relief at having found in California a blind from tragedy. The relief California offered immigrants from other countries was comparable to the imagined restoration of the Joads. Though we lived next door to it, to the California of Nebraska and Illinois, ours was a California far removed from the drama of Midwestern disappointment, from the all-new-and-why-am-I-not-happy?

Thus, in my lifetime, I experienced two Californias concurrently. I discovered (because I was attuned to) a sort of hybrid of these two Californias in the writings of John Muir. Muir was born in Scotland; he moved with his family to Wisconsin when he was eleven. Muir saw California with a Midwesterner's delight in the refulgence of it—he called California “the grand side of the mountain.” Yet I recognized in John Muir as well the quiet, grateful voice of the immigrant from overseas. Muir sailed into California. He first saw the coastline, as if through Pacific eyes; he saw immediately the implication of the coastline: California (and America) is finite.

When I grew up in the 1950s, freeways offered freedom from implication. California was neurotically rebuilding itself as an ever-rangier house in a further-flung subdivision. As a loyal son of California, I believed in all this, in the “new” and the other “E-Z” adjectives real estate agents employed to lure Midwesterners. And though the advertisement the real estate developer placed in the Midwestern newspaper was not a bluff, too many people believed, too many people came. The traffic on the freeway slowed from Jetsons to “Now what?” to Sig-alert.

•   •   •

What is obsolete now in California is the future. For a century and a half, Americans spoke of California as the future when
they wanted to escape inevitability. Now the future attaches consequences and promises constriction. Technocrats in Sacramento warn of a future that is overwhelmed by students, pollution, immigrants, cars, fluorocarbons, old people. Or the future is diminished—water quality, soil quality, air quality, education quality, highway quality, life quality. There are not enough doctors for the state's emergency rooms; not enough blue parking spaces outside; not enough oil, not enough electricity. More blackouts, more brownouts; too many air conditioners, too few houses; frogs on the verge of extinction, a fugitive middle class. To the rest of the nation, California now represents what the nation fears to become. A state without a white center.

The brilliance of Midwestern California, the California that is founded upon discontent, and the reason why so much technological innovation springs from the West Coast, is that having confronted the finitude of the coastline, technologists in Silicon Valley have shrunk the needed commodity—the future (thousands of miles of Zen pathway)—to the size of a fleck of gold dust, to a microchip.

A few months ago, I went to have dinner in Menlo Park, where I met a young man who wore a linen jacket of the very blackest label and the scent of the winner's circle. He owns, very firmly owns, I imagine, on sheaves of legal-sized hard copy, electronic portals (virtual) through which the most ephemeral chatter and the finest thoughts of humankind pass as undifferentiated “content.” I imagine Ensor's painting of
Christ's Entry into Brussels
at the Getty.

When I answered the young man's uninterested inquiry by identifying myself as a writer, his only response was to recommend I consign every published sentence I now guard with copyright onto the Web and give it away.
No one owns an idea
in this age,
was his advice (and all of a sudden he sounded like someone one would have met on a riverboat). Except his idea, of course.

The young man's fortune comes not from the “content” his technology conveys, or conveys a quester toward, but rather from the means of conveyance—or, no, not even that. He will make more money by, at intervals, changing some aspect of conveyance or by padlocking the old portal (I imagine the Suez Canal) so that people have to pay to modify their means of access. He is set on weaning the minds of youth from the snares of merchandisers (“middlemen” he quaintly calls them). Young people are conveyed to the belief they should obtain intellectual property without paying for it, and without packaging. Packaging is sentimentality.

The young man is content to disassemble, by making “free,” all intellectual property and factories of intellectual properties (recording studios, for example, or publishing houses), and all clearinghouses of intellectual properties (such as New York, such as Los Angeles, such as Harvard, such as the Library of Congress), in order that he can charge advertisers more for his arch or his gondola or his Victorian bathing machine.

The technologist now publishes to the world that place is over. California used to be the summation of the expansionist dream; now we foretell constriction. The future has been condensed to the head of a pin. Not Go West, not even Go Home. Rather, stay at home. Run in place. You are still connected, whether you are in the air or on a train or never leave Wisconsin. The great invention—rather, the refinement—of Silicon Valley is iPortability.

For a long season, California was the most important purveyor of narrative to the world. Hollywood was filled with
stories in the last century, stories bought and sold, more stories than anyone could listen to or use. When other lures to California were exhausted or quieted down, Hollywood became its own narrative, became the golden dream; people wanted, literally, “to get into the pictures.”

But in a California where place is irrelevant, narrative is finished. California is finished. (Narrative “takes place.”) And whereas narrative used to take precedence, the argument in Hollywood now is not about the truth of a narrative, or even the salability of a narrative, but about which product format is going to pay off.

Toward the end of dinner, the optimistic young man from Silicon Valley, having imbibed a liter or so of Napa Valley pish-posh '69, got around to his detestation of the congestion of California. In the end, it would appear, he has to live in a real body, in real space, and in real time, and buckled into his hundred-thousand-dollar funk: “Traffic is a bitch every fucking morning.”

. . . When you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

I, too, was an optimist. Well, I took Saroyan's pronouncement for optimism. Like many children of immigrant parents, Saroyan and I grew up among shadows, grotesque shadows thrown from a grandmother's stories, stories that might show us up as foreigners if they ever saw the light of day. How could the Saroyan boy in Fresno not be beguiled in the direction of games and sunlight? And then limelight? And then Paris?

I saw him once, in Tillman Place Bookshop in San Francisco, a bookstore made of wood, now long gone. He dressed like a stage bohemian; he wore a walrus mustache, and a fedora hat, and his cashmere coat rested upon his shoulders. He threw back his head
to bellow, by which gesture he represented mirth. He was entirely admirable and theatrical. Saroyan's literary persona remained that of a carefree bon vivant, at ease with the world and delighted by it, tasting, breathing, laughing like hell. He'd never be a Princeton man—so what?

The legend: William Saroyan, the old man of Fresno, California, and Paris, France, was haunted by the early promise of himself. Critics had withheld from the middle-aged man the praise they once lavished on the youth. He was the same man. What gives? He became dark-minded and spiteful and stingy and mistrustful of friends and family and agents and stockbrokers and the IRS. The world smelled spoiled to him. He felt passed over by the world that mattered, the small, glittering, passing world.

The last time I was in Fresno, about a year ago, I gave a luncheon address at the African American Historical and Cultural Museum to a roomful of journalists from ethnic newspapers and radio and television stations. (The Pakistani radio station in San Diego. The Iranian television station in L.A. The
Oaxacan
. The
Mandarin
.) Everyone in the room spoke interestedly of a California that was crowded with voices, most of which they could not translate but they knew implicated them. No one knew what I was asking when I asked where Saroyan had lived.

The question for the night is the question of content, I think, not conveyance. A new generation of writers in California will not speak of separate neighborhoods, certainly not of brown hills and dairy cows, or of the taste of water from a hose, or of the sound of train whistles at night. Nor will they dote on New York, as I doted on New York. Oh, maybe they will, why deny them that? Perhaps New York will be Shanghai.

In the time of your life, live,
was Saroyan's advice. I believe the
difference between the literature of California's past and the literature to come will be the difference of expectation. There are children growing up in California today who take it as a given that the 101 North, the 405 South, and the 10 East are unavailable after two in the afternoon.