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James Ellroy’s latest novel, This Storm, drops at the end of the month. Just in time, too. I’m in the mood for one of Ellory’s dark, jagged, Benzedrine-fueled rides through the neon-lit landscape of the American Century. I consider Ellroy one of the great ones — put him on a par with Cormac McCarthy. His ambitions are huge, both stylistically and thematically, his shtick can get tiresome, and he doesn’t always hit the mark — but, man, when he does, he blows out the x‑ring.
James Ellroy’s homeland.
Being an LA boy — born by a river that was paved with cement — I was readily drawn into Ellroy’s depiction of that sunny, sordid land of illusion and desperate hustle. I consumed The Black Dahlia in a frenzied binge and moved immediately into LA Confidential, which I consider to be a masterpiece. But for me the pinnacle of Ellroy’s work came when he moved beyond Los Angeles to take on the salad days of the American Empire in American Tabloid.
*
Ellroy’s frontiers are different from the trails I usually haunt, but any explorer of borderlands history knows in his bones the truth contained in Ellroy’s legendary and oft-quoted opening to AT:
America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.
Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.
The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab.
Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It’s time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall.
They were rogue cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it.
It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.
Here’s to them.
In an outstanding analysis of Ellroy’s work, Grant Nebel writes:
Ellroy needs these characters for the history he creates; he is a truly epic writer, attempting books that have the scale of myth and he needs mythic characters to bring that off.
Ellroy strips American history — really all history — of its innocence, which means he does it to us, too, the inheritors of that history. In the Enlightenment model of the freely choosing individual, we are all innocent; how could we not be? We are independent, choosing entities and those choices, nothing else, make our lives. Ellroy reminds us that to live in history, to live with history’s legacy, costs you your innocence. He writes about the creation of the modern world, and the violence and hate that bought whatever peace and ideals we have.
*
Ellroy’s beat is urban — the dazzling dark sunshine of LA and Cuban-exile-Miami, nightclubs and diners, precinct stations — but some of his rough men could have easily ridden in a previous era with John Joel Glanton’s gang of scalphunters in Northern Mexico (AT’s bagman and CIA asset Pete Bondurant actually goes on scalping raids in Cuba). Las Vegas, Nevada, c. 1958 isn’t really much different from Tombstone, Arizona, c. 1881.
Big Pete Bondurant.
I remarked to Marilyn the other night as we watched AMC’s Texas epic The Son that the dark protagonist Eli McCulloch is an Ellroyvian character — savagely traumatized in his youth, ruthless in adulthood, fully aware that he’s more than waist deep in the Big Muddy and (at least to appearances) giving zero fucks, despite the collateral damage that strews the blast radius of his compulsions and ambitions.
History is the raw material of myth and historical myth is weaponized for political purposes. Ellroy — like McCarthy — panders to neither the triumphalist faith that asserts the fundamental righteousness of the American project, nor the pearl-clutching moralizing that would pretend that we can have “whatever peace and ideals we have” without the underpinning of violence.
McCarthy once said that:
“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
Ellroy might say the same — in trademark scandal sheet style.
*
It may seem perverse, but there is a certain comfort to be found in understanding that we are all complicit in the sins of past and present, that we, the inheritors of history, are not and never can be innocent. The gap between our expectation of what life “should” be and what it actually is can create a crushing psychological burden. Recognizing that the fallen world is simply what it is allows us to forgive ourselves for being the frail and fallible creatures we are, allows us the grace of believing that doing what we can do just has to be good enough.
Because in James Ellroy’s mythic universe, those rogue cops and shakedown artists, wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers pay the price — one way or another — for a multitude of sins.
So, yeah, here’s to them.
Matthew says
The older I get the more I believe in Original Sin. (Interestingly, I believe in the message of the opening of Genesis now more than when I believed they were literal events.) I also believe that sins of the past effect the present. Look at how are history of racism still effects us today.
I’ve been reading A Splendid Savage the biography of Francis Russell Burnham. You obviously know who he was. What struck me is that the frontier conflicts he participated in weren’t black and white. I don’t mean in the post-modern moral relativist sense, but both sides had their iniquities. The white settlers stole land from the natives, and the natives butchered every settler the could: man, woman, and child.
Quite so. The Ndebele (Matabele) were treated rough — but then they’d slaughtered thousands in a decades long rampage across southern Africa themselves, so…
One of the things I admire about AMC’s The Son is that it humanizes the Comanche without flinching from their utter brutality. Similarly, it’s hard not to root for Eli McCulloch, though you are not allowed to forget that he committed a terrible crime against the Garcia family.
Matthew says
History seems to be one group conquering the other only in turn being conquered by another.
I haven’t seen the Son. I’ve been watching a series called A French Village which is about the Nazi occupation of France. The Nazi’s of course come across the bad guys, but the other side isn’t pure. The ones most willing to fight are the communists but they aren’t treated as pure heroes. People collaborate for a variety of motives including ones that are sympathetic. The de facto mayor of the village works with Germans because he genuinely believes its for the best (though he eventually resigns.)
That sounds very interesting. Strip away the mythologizing and the Resistance becomes a very murky picture.
The bolshevik presence in pre-war France was considerable. The Stalin-Hitler pact for Poland shattered many of their idealistic visions of communism, and most french communists never forgave. Some books that might interest you: Road to Resistance and Maquis by George Millar, Fighters in the Shadows by Gildea, and The Resistance by Potter. All excellent works on the French Resistance that illuminate the subject and the people involved quite well. Millar’s story in particular is incredible, as he was captured by Germans, escaped, made it back to England, joined the SOE, and parachuted back into France to help organize scattered fragments of the Maquis. Quite incredible adventuring.
Matthew says
One of the characters is a communist who wants to fight the Germans but finds himself at odds with the the Party during the Pact era. Later in the second season he takes part in a botched assassination and is blamed for it though it was no fault of his own. I haven’t seen every episode (I’m not sure every season is even available in America) but he seems growing disenchanted with communism.
John M Roberts says
I agree with the above. Original Sin runs through the American (or human) line like a hereditary disease. No matter how fervently we wish to see peace and justice, that urge to stick the knife in always prevails.
Thom Eley says
Great article, Jim! You always come up with intriguing books and ideas. We fighting the battle up here of the Old Alaska, 70’s and earlier versus becoming California. We’re fighting to talk our parks and public lands back. I can’t camp in a city park, yet other folks can with no repercussions.
Some of you may have seen this, but I will stick it in here.
A friend of mine, Art Chance, wrote the following about Alaska.
He and I arrived about the same time. I concur with his assessment.
“One of the things I liked most about Alaska when I came here in the 1970s was that nobody cared what you did so long as you didn’t do it to them or expect them to do it. Alaska’s essential lawlessness was acceptable when we had an essentially lawful populous. We had some rough parts of town, and we all knew what a “Spenard Divorce” was. But unless you were doing bad things, it was unlikely a bad thing was going to happen to you.
Today, we have gunfights on the streets. We have roving gangs of thieves scouring cars and garages in neighborhoods all over town. I live in what most would consider a “good” neighborhood, but I am compelled to have motion detector lights, game cameras, and a readily accessible firearm.
We shouldn’t have to live like this. I want to live in a clean, well-lighted place again.”
The key paradox.
Matthew says
Personal virtue matters more than laws. If people could behave perfectly we’d have no need of laws. That’s never going to happen, but we need more virtue and less laws.
Sheriff Bell in “No Country For Old Men,” Cormac McCarthy
Saddle Tramp says
Interestingly, I just came across this from John Huston while stumbling around for some different information:
“I’m against dictatorship in any form. And I believe in the principles of decentralized government, not as interpreted by Ronald Reagan but as interpreted by Franklin D. Roosevelt. I have never felt so well about our society as when FDR was in the driver’s seat. I never believed what his enemies said about his assuming the prerogatives of a monarch. I’ll go even further than saying I am a Jeffersonian Democrat. Down deeper, I am an anarchist. Theoretically, doesn’t every right-thinking person desire a society so virtuous that no laws are required? But that’s nonsense, isn’t it?
I will also say if you are going to practice nepotism then do it in the fashion that John Huston did with casting his father in a role in The Treasure Of Sierra Madre. My favorite character and the heart of the film for me. It doesn’t hurt that he also played Trampas in The Virginian. A good guy playing the bad guy. Works for me…
Right? Brilliant performance.
John M Roberts says
Then he closed out his career directing his daughter Angelica in “The Dead.”
Saddle Tramp says
John M. Roberts,
Yes, but also worth mentioning is that it was not before casting her in a role that matched her Grandfather Walter Huston (in all but gender) by garnishing an Academy Award for best supporting [actress] in Prizzi’s Honor…
John M Roberts says
Woo-Hoo! THIS STORM just arrived in today’s mail. Some good readin’ ahead!
Send us dispatches fro LA 42.