Memory and the Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature

A Reading and Analysis of Spatial Forms

Alice Levick

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350184596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the paving of the Los Angeles River in 1938 and the creation of the G.I. Bill in 1944, to the construction of the Interstate Highway System during the late 1950s and the brownstoning movement of the 1970s, throughout the mid-20th-century the United States saw a wave of changes that had an enduring impact on the development of urban spaces. Focusing on the relationship between processes of demolition and restoration as they have shaped the modern built environment, and the processes by which memory is constructed, hidden, or remade in the literary text, this book explores the ways in which history becomes entangled with the urban space in which it plays out. Alice Levick takes stock of this history, both in the form of its externalised, concretised manifestation and its more symbolic representation, as depicted in the mid-20th-century work of a selection of American writers. Calling upon access to archival material and interviews with New York academics, authors, local historians and urban planners, this book locates Freud's 'Uncanny' in the cracks between the absent and present, invisible and visible, memory and history as they are presented in city narratives, demonstrating both the passage of time and the imposition of 20th-century modernism. With reference to the works of D. J. Waldie, Joan Didion, Hisaye Yamamoto, Raymond Chandler, Marshall Berman, Gil Cuadros, Paule Marshall, L. J. Davis, and Paula Fox, Memory and the Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature unpacks how time becomes visible in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Lakewood, and New York in the decades just before and after the Second World War, questioning how these spaces provide access to the past, in both narrative and spatial forms, and how, at times, this access is blocked.

1

The Garden and the Grid

D. J. Waldie and Raymond Chandler in Lakewood and Los Angeles

“Los Angeles is a city without a past” states Michael Dear (1998), arguing that its perpetual self-effacement and reinvention has disconnected it from its own history (76). Central to Marshall Berman’s thesis in All That is Solid Melts into Air is the idea that twentieth-century modernity as made manifest in the city stands for the relentlessly new. The encroachment of urbanization often necessitates the erasure of traces of the past, with cities paving over signs of their own history in different ways. The urbanized spaces of Los Angeles seem to perfectly exhibit this sense of discontinuity between the past and the present. This disconnection leads to a feeling of absence in the place of an expected presence, as though one thing has surreptitiously replaced another. Sigmund Freud argues in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny” that this feeling marks the return of that which has been removed and/or repressed. In modern urban spaces wherein the past in physical form is continuously rearranged—demolished, rebuilt, reimagined—the sensation of the uncanny is ever-present.

Cities themselves can be uncanny (haunted, spectral) in that they are built upon a repressed or hidden landscape, evidenced in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles-set novel, The Big Sleep (1939) (throughout this chapter I refer also to Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The High Window (1942)). This is evident in Chandler’s novels not only in, for example, the relationship between the Sternwood mansion and the family oil fields in The Big Sleep, but also in the interiors of places like Arthur Geiger’s house and store and the Fulwider building in the same novel, and the Murdock family residence and the Idle Valley Club in The High Window. These spaces also reflect the repressed history of characters such as Carmen Sternwood (in The Big Sleep), Philip Marlowe (in all three novels), and Miss Davis (in The High Window), and their “spectacular form[s] of amnesia” (Baudrillard [1986] 2010: 10). The return of the repressed in Chandler’s novels presented here is the result of the fact that cities are sedimented with histories made sporadically manifest in various ways in the built environment, persisting even when supplanted or reimagined by new urban forms. Dolores Hayden (1995) argues that the “traces of time embedded in the urban landscape of every city offer opportunities for reconnecting fragments of the [. . .] urban story” (13). For both Chandler and D. J. Waldie, the ability of the landscape, both man-made and natural, to alternately conceal and expose the past, is of paramount concern.

The ways in which we remember the past through space, through embedding or inscribing memory in space, is perfectly symbolized by Waldie through his use of the familial home as a historical site. In his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996), Waldie depicts with delicate specificity a particular area of suburban Los Angeles County during the early to late 1950s, namely Lakewood, one of what Becky Nicolaides (2003) refers to as the “Sunbelt suburbs” constructed after the Second World War (24). Martin Dines (2015) contends that suburbs like Lakewood have long been deemed to possess a “fabricated and tamed modernity,” making them spaces which are utterly removed from history “and devoid of memory” (81). But in fact, he argues, it is possible for the suburb to retain traces of history and hold memory “palimpsestically” (a term which proves significant throughout this book) (84). Similarly, despite Chandler’s many depictions of a city apparently set on excising traces of its history, his novels demonstrate that the past can be physically located in those wild or pre-urban spaces of Southern California which have not quite been completely paved over, for example in the oil fields of The Big Sleep, and the intermittent glimpses of the ocean in Farewell, My Lovely.

In Civilization and its Discontents ([1930] 1961), Sigmund Freud compares the unconscious mind to the buried life of the modern city. Each stage or era of city life, he writes, is preserved, ready to be excavated, and thus continues to exist. The city is not only a physical place but a “psychical entity [. . .] an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the previous phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one” (7). Referring to Rome, Freud notes that remnants of the ancient city still appear in the present-day, scattered in fragments across the city that has “grown up in recent centuries” (17). He continues that “much of the old is still there, but buried under modern buildings. This is how the past survives in historic places.” Freud contends that when we see physical evidence of different stages of the past juxtaposed next to one another, we can finally experience spatially and tangibly these other permutations of history. He names these stages, or layers, of history in the city, “different contents” (18). In order to track the passing of time in the city and understand the ways in which, as Maurice Halbwachs ([1952] 1980) describes, it is “preserved by our physical surroundings” (140), I seek out the material changes in the landscape of the world inhabited by Chandler, Waldie, and others.

Paving the Garden

In the years between 1880 and 1932, Los Angeles grew “from a town of 10,000 people to covering roughly 29 square miles to become the country’s principal western metropolis with 1.2 million people and a territory of 442 square miles” (Dear 1998: 89). As Mike Davis ([1990] 1992) points out: “Los Angeles was first and above all the creature of real-estate capitalism: the culminating speculation, in fact, of the generations of boosters and promoters who had subdivided and sold the West from the Cumberland Gap to the Pacific” (25).¹ Unlike other prominent American cities, such as New York with its adjacent harbor, Los Angeles seemed to possess no natural or locational advantages, and was merely an isolated tract of land “in the middle of the empty, semi-arid coastal plain” (Fogelson 1993: xv). It was not until the late 1800s that Los Angeles became known as “the capital city of an agricultural empire” and it was through its difficult relationship with water and the land that the city and the state of California invented itself (Starr 1985: 13). The uninhabitable landscape of Los Angeles and its peripheral land was eventually pummelled into submission, and the garden of America was cultivated and contrived. In American mythology, notes Richard Slotkin (1973), “the image of the wilderness east of the Mississippi changes from ‘desert’ to ‘Garden’ in a century and a half” (9). As Carey McWilliams ([1946] 1973) reports, the garden was “super-imposed on this semi-arid land; it is not native” (200).

Before the agricultural village that was Los Angeles could become the biggest city in the West, the problem of properly irrigating the land had to be solved. As Kevin Starr (1985) explains, Southern California is “not naturally blessed with water” (4). Providing sustainable power through water was eventually introduced through such feats of engineering as the Los Angeles Aqueduct (completed in 1913 by William Mulholland), before which “nearly 65 percent of [California’s] yearly precipitation was either immediately evaporated by the sun or ran uselessly to the sea” (Starr 1990: 3). During the early 1900s, the chasm between the available supply of water and the growing population grew ever wider, leading to concerns over a possible water famine in the near future. These fears led to the formation in 1905 of a syndicate of powerful men, who slowly began to buy up land in the San Fernando Valley (the entirety of which touched the watershed of the Los Angeles River), eventually acquiring control of over 108,000 acres of land (as fictionalized in Mary Austin’s 1917 novel The Ford). Once in possession of this land, the group proposed to the water board of the City of Los Angeles that the city should tap the waters of the Owens Valley to better irrigate the city. Ultimately, rather than bringing water to Los Angeles, it was funneled straight to the north end of the San Fernando Valley, and to the newly-acquired land that was then sold at huge profit. The Owens Valley farming community was destroyed, and the Gabrielino Indians and Spanish settlers who relied on the Owens River for food, water, and transport, were devastated. Carey McWilliams devotes much of Southern California: An Island on the Land ([1946] 1973) to a discussion of irrigation, providing an excellent report on the whole sordid affair.

“The drama of water,” writes Kevin Starr, “would long remain the essential metaphor of the struggle in Southern California for a regional civilization” (1985: 7). The problem of irrigation resonates into the mid-twentieth century. During the 1930s city planners decided to cement over the Los Angeles River in order to put an end to a series of disastrous floods, turning the source of the city’s lifeblood into a drainage ditch. Huge concrete troughs running through the city, built to control and direct the Los Angeles River, were built at the expense of the greenbelts and parks imagined by early urban planners. The mercurial and troublesome history of water in Southern California is a story that brings this history to light over and over again. In Alison Lurie’s The Nowhere City ([1965] 1994), we are told that there has been no rain at all “for months,” and by the time Paul Cattleman has flown to New England and back, it has not rained “for a year and a half” (239, 266).

The struggle to irrigate the region provides one explanation for Southern California’s famous horizontal sprawl—the funneling of water from the Owens River in 1913 encouraged the molding of the city into one continuous form, connecting the various townships which required water. The grid system, another method by which this wilderness was controlled, trammeled over the erratic topography of the natural landscape in order to impose a sense of rationality, as James Howard Kunstler (1993) contends: “relentlessly straight section lines followed the compass, marching through swamps, across rivers, and over hilltops” (30). In “L.A.’s Crooked Heart,” Waldie explains that it was Thomas Jefferson who first envisioned the “rational geometry penetrating forests, fording rivers and passing across prairies” which would leave in its wake a uniform series of townships all the way to the Pacific Ocean (2010b: n.p.). In The Beer Can by the Highway, John A. Kouwenhoven ([1961] 1988) argues that the grid system is quintessentially American, externalizing and making possible its “fluid and ever-changing unity” (44). The “gridiron pattern of the city’s streets” is the same pattern which makes “almost any American town” legible, and is “the same pattern which, in the form of square townships, sections, and quarter sections, was imposed by [Jefferson’s Land] Ordinance of 1785 on an almost continental scale [. . .] each man’s domain clearly divided from his neighbor’s” (44–5).

However, in Los Angeles these distinct domains are complicated by the fact that there are two conflicting grid systems at work, the denied co-existence of which adds to the city’s spatial duplicity, incongruity, and de-centeredness. In “L.A.’s Crooked Heart,” Waldie clarifies that the “north-south grid” is the manifestation of Jefferson’s vision of “filling in the empty places on the blank page of the continent” (2010b: n.p.). But in downtown Los Angeles the system is different. These streets do not conform to the cartographic standards imposed by the Americans when they captured the city in 1847; “do not lead to the cardinal points of the compass but to the uncertain spaces in between,” because they follow the grid within the American grid. This is “another, four Spanish leagues square, that conforms as best it can to the 16th century Laws of the Indies,” which required “that the streets and house lots in the cities of New Spain have a 45-degree disorientation grid from true north and south.” Maps and real-estate surveys of the 1870s continued to show the grid within the grid, and “House lots and streets continue to replicate its off-kilter orientation,” which persisted into the nin eteenth century. This duplicate system is not limited to Los Angeles alone. Samuel Stein (2019) explains that settlements and villages were planned across the Americas by indigenous nations, with “European imperialists and settler colonists [building] on these plans” and superimposing “their street grids over existing native trails” (15). In this instance, as in many others across the nation, a ghostly parallel city haunted the new one, and as this new version of the city expanded, the original grid began to look more and more like an aberration. Contemporary maps were re-drawn to show a “corrected” version of the downtown streetscape that aligns it with the national grid, straightening out the skew and maneuvering Figueroa Street so that it “appears to point due north or sometimes even east” (Waldie 2010b: n.p.). In simultaneously looking at the map and following the streets as they appear before us, Waldie remarks, we feel two separate imagined schemes crossing over each other, and it is this kind of “cartographic lie” that makes it so much harder in Los Angeles “to know where you are.” History may wish for us to forget this clash, “but the streets themselves remember.”

In The History of Forgetting, which traces the use of erasure in conceptions and (re)presentations of history in the culture of Los Angeles, Norman M. Klein (2008) notes the many ways in which Los Angeles has been transformed from a city of open farmland to one of inaccessible, introverted spaces. Instead of being used to build more verdant public spaces like parks, land was divided into an endless series of backyards, shopping malls, and theme parks. Farming, the precursor to oil as the defining industry of Los Angeles in the nineteenth century, had necessitated the construction of railroads to make it easier to transport what was grown and to ship it. The construction of the railroad in turn encouraged the promotion of land development along its new lines (for example in Pasadena, Hollywood, and Glendale). In 1876, Los Angeles was connected to the national rail network by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The first electric streetcar was used in 1887, and within three decades “the streetcar system would extend over 1600 miles and link up all the far-flung settlements in the Los Angeles basin” (Kunstler 1993: 208). Along the mainline tracks from the East sprung up several suburban enclaves “at convenient intervals.” The concomitant real-estate market quickly collapsed, but, regardless, both the people who had traveled East to West (many looking for a country pile that would provide respite for respiratory complaints) and the infrastructure that had been installed to tend to the requirements of these new suburbs, remained. “At the heart of all suburban growth,” notes Kenneth Jackson (1985), “is land development” (133). Waldie (2011a) explains in “How We Got This Way” that the irrigation systems that turned into suburban water companies provided “the essential ingredient to turn so much empty space into small farms and house lots” (n.p.). Mike Davis tells the tale of Harrison Gray Otis, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, who, during the late 1880s, allied himself with the largest landowners of the region, the transcontinental railroads, plus a coterie of various “developers, bankers and transport magnates,” all of whom collectively set out to, as he puts it, “sell Los Angeles—as no city had ever been sold” ([1990] 1992: 25). Over the subsequent twenty-five years there was a huge mass migration of people seeking the panacea of California sunshine and its “open shop” (25). During the late 1800s, several semi-rural towns which had been born along the railway line (such as Pasadena and Hollywood) were incorporated. The streetcar system was consolidated by Henry E. Huntington, who named it the Pacific Electric Railroad, meanwhile buying up land scattered around the margins of the city which he tied together using this same Railroad. Other developers followed suit, filling in the gaps across Southern California. Later, the Pacific Electric Railroad was superseded by parkways, freeways, and super highways. Reyner Banham (2000) notes that these “sub-cities” were the starting point for Los Angeles’ “peculiar pattern of many-centred growth” (20). The “dispersal and decentralisation of the landscape” in Los Angeles is in turn indicativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Garden and the Grid: D. J. Waldie and Raymond Chandler in Lakewood and Los Angeles
• 2 The Imago City: Joan Didion, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Alison Lurie in Los Angeles and Sacramento
• 3 The Suture: Marshall Berman and Robert Moses in the Bronx
• 4 The Palimpsest: Paula Fox and L. J. Davis in Brooklyn
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright