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Home  Community Voices My Beef With The Editor Of The Times Book Review
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My Beef With The Editor Of The Times Book Review |
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Written by Lionel Rolfe
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Friday, 17 July 2009 |
I’m not talking about the editor of the New York Times Book Review or the literary section of The Times (of London). So don’t say I misled you by talking about anyone really important.
I’m talking about a fellow who edited the book section that appeared weekly in the Los Angeles Times, until it was downgraded to a couple of loose pages lost in the thickets of celebrity worship.
There was a time when the Los Angeles Times had a fairly decent book section—not a great one, but a pretty good one. I know, because I used to write for it. Indeed, the whole paper was a pretty good read—comparable with the New York Times. But sad to tell, that’s been longer ago than I like to admit. A newspaper can be a very personal thing, like a beautiful woman you married many years ago, who still looks like she did the first time you met her, even when you’re both in your dotage.
The Times’ rapid disintegration is about more than the passage of time. It’s more a parable like that of Dorian Gray, some sort of miserable deal with the devil. Presiding over it all is David Ulin, the current editor of the Times book pages.
Only because of a decades-long confrontation with Ulin, do I have such a personal take on the parable.
We who toil in the word factories, are used to being awash in soap operas. Us poorly paid ink-stained wretches fight not over money so much as our pitiful games of power. We really believe there is power in words, power in ideas. Thus, when Ulin and I exchanged in a series of e-mails recently, it left me with not only unpleasant memories but a sense of unreality. Maybe there’s really nothing there if it’s not about money.
It would help you to understand the high stakes involved here by looking at a web site at Mount St. Mary’s College that poses the question of whether there is indeed a Los Angeles literature. It is counterintuitive to insist the terms Los Angeles and literature have anything in common. The web site poses the question of whether a city with such a reputation for superficiality and shallowness could have a real literary tradition.
As it happened, I discovered that the city had an incredible but unrecognized literary tradition. When my book Literary L.A. came out from Chronicle Books in 1981, a lot of people said the term itself was an oxymoron, like “military intelligence.” Some cynical folks dubbed me “L.A.’s literary czar.” Since the job didn’t pay much, I didn’t take it too seriously—until Ulin arrived on the scene.
I had earned my title as literary czar because of serendipity. I happened to be the right man at the right time. I was the only writer who had ever written extensively about Los Angeles literature since Lawrence Clark Powell, the noted UCLA librarian, in the ‘20s. At the time, Powell was a protégé of bookseller Jake Zeitlin, who also became a good friend of mine.
I talked with Powell once, but had a long ongoing dialogue with Zeitlin, which gave me great insight into the city’s literary tradition.
It’s worth noting that the Mount St. Mary’s web site noted two books on Los Angeles literature. Mine, and a collection of Los Angeles writers edited by Mr. Ulin.
By now you’re probably beginning to say ah-ha. And you’re right.
I met Ulin a couple of decades ago. I was trying to recall the circumstances of my meeting with Ulin, probably back in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. I asked the help of Nigey Lennon, my ex-wife who joined Ulin and I on that auspicious occasion.
Nigey and I had written scores of cover stories about literature and culture for The Reader. That ended when publisher and editor James Vowell hired Ulin as some sort of deputy editor while he went out and tried to sell advertising. It was oil and water right from the beginning. Suddenly Nigey and I couldn’t get a word about anything in the paper.
Vowell had told the three of us to make up and learn to work together. We went to eat on the paper’s dime, but it wasn’t a good investment.
“I don’t remember much about him beyond that one meeting, in fact,” Nigey said. “He was pretty nondescript. I do remember he seemed vindictive and petty, a political sort of guy who belonged in academia rather than someplace like the Reader where the financial stakes, at least, were low.”
She said “Ulin didn’t seem particularly avant-garde in his taste, although he mentioned Alexander Trocchi as his favorite unknown writer—Trocchi was a Beat writer who was a pretty famous heroin addict; he also published a literary review in Paris and lived in Venice in the ‘50s. A decadent guy, for sure, but then it's not really avant-garde to espouse obscure Beat writers at this point in time—in fact, a few years ago it seemed every writer looking for a book contract went looking for especially obscure ones to discover and write the first book about. I suppose he's ideal for the L.A. Times—not very adventurous, but the fact that he's working on a book about Kerouac makes him seem sort of ‘with it’—for L.A., anyway.”
She recalled that “we went to the Marie Callender’s on Wilshire Blvd. near the Reader office. Ulin sulked palpably and made no secret of the fact that the only reason he was there was because Vowell had insisted he do it (he actually said that without mincing words). I remember thinking that he was both immature (for he seemed quite a bit older than I was) and arrogant—the politic thing to do, if he'd been socially adept, would have been to breeze through the lunch charmingly without saying anything of any importance, but he seemed to be intent on letting us know we were nothing more than a pain in the ass, as far as he was concerned. He obviously resented the fact that he’d ‘inherited’ you as part of his situation as the Reader’s literary czar, and he wasn’t going to give you the time of day. I was shocked at his blatant pettiness. Again, if he’d been astute he could have had breadth and depth in the Reader's coverage of literature by including our writing on literature and culture—but he was threatened by you and I guess he preferred to view you as an interloper and a rival than as a collaborator, so he treated you (and me) contemptuously. I suppose he was trying to establish himself as a literary maven—which for whatever reason he did eventually become (i.e., his anthology of L.A. writing a few years ago and the columns, etc., he’s written). I don't remember much about his tenure as the Reader’s literary czar.”
I saw things slightly differently. I saw that luncheon as being a confrontation of cultural ideologies. For months, I had been hearing this guy’s name as someone who was vowing to come after me, like we were involved in some sort of mafia wars. Maybe we were. As literary czar, people kept asking me my opinion on their manuscripts, as if my opinion meant a damn thing. Big fucking deal.
Still, when I met him, I felt my back arching. Not just because I had been forewarned, but also because I saw nothing but pretense, and a worshipping of form over content.
Later, Ulin “borrowing” my title, “Literary L.A.,” without crediting my work in any way, wrote a compilation of Los Angeles writers for for the Weekly .
Part of me wanted to shrug it all off, but I also knew I took seriously this business of discovering the true intersection of the city and its writers.
I mean the thought of Thomas Mann, discussing music composition over backyard barbecues in Brentwood with Arnold Schoenberg, and thus laying the groundwork for Mann’s monumental Doctor Faustus, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century—now that was of significance.
That’s what I was in this for. Capturing those fleeting moments that made sense not just of the city but the universe. Being able to write about Los Angeles and Thomas Mann, or Los Angeles and Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley or Malcolm Lowry, that was my holy grail.
I felt I had discovered something authentic and important in focusing on the California bohemian tradition created by Mark Twain, Jack London and John Steinbeck. In Los Angeles, that tradition met the apocalyptical tradition emerging out of World War II. If you saw Literary L.A. in this light, it wasn’t such an oxymoron.
Instead, people like Ulin and his cohorts blathered on about Joan Didion as if she were the Willa Cather of Los Angeles and T.C. Boyle as if he were Steinbeck
Literary criticism is politics. I personally chose to identify with a humanistic bohemian tradition. When I peered into Ulin’s soul, such as it was, I could see that this was a guy who was about packaging, not essence.
The Los Angeles Times Book Review was begun under the editorship of Digby Diehl in 1969. I wrote for Digby, and later another editor, Art Seidenbaum, where I had the odd honor of writing the longest book review the section ever ran.
Later, when Digby went to edit the old Herald Examiner’s book section, writing for him was a dream. He would give me the key to the room where all the new books were stored, let me pick out a stack of them, from which he would discard some. I still always went home with plenty of books to review.
The Herald was actually gaining in circulation when it was closed in a deal made between its proprietors and the Times’ proprietors.
The next editors of the Times Book Review included Jack Miles and Steve Wasserman. They had their strengths and weaknesses—Wasserman had the instincts of a real scholar and critic, but made no attempt to develop the city’s literary scene, in the way the San Francisco Chronicle had done with some success in Baghdad by the Bay.
Digby, who years ago abandoned Los Angeles for Pasadena, was by far the review’s most successful editor, in part because he understood there were as many good writers in Los Angeles as in Manhattan, and even more book buyers—and hence the ingredients for a nexus worth developing.
Diehl once told me that he didn’t want to rave about every old beatnik who stood up and read poetry on the Venice boardwalk but thought the section should be used as a bully pulpit for covering local people involved in books and publishing.
It is no accident, for example, that none of Charles Bukowski’s books were published in New York, but rather by someone operating out of a garage in Santa Monica. Yet Bukowski is the most original voice to develop in this country in recent decades.
But how could an Ulin, who is the exact opposite of an original, make the ground fertile for more geniuses like Bukowski.
My memories were jogged in June when I decided, just for the hell of it, to send Ulin something about my web site, www.boryanabooks.com, saying I didn’t expect him to give me a fair shake, but what the hell, I would try.
Ulin wrote back an angry e-mail.
“Look, Lionel, whatever the reason, it's always been you who has spoken and thought ill of me. I have never said (nor thought) a word against you. You're obviously entitled to feel what you feel, but feeling something does not make it true,” he said.
“Whatever happened,” I wrote back, “and after all these years, the details are vague—I’m obviously hurt by what I felt was ill treatment. I have worked hard over the years to record some then little known literary history of the area and I know that many people regard me as one of the more talented folks around. Maybe I'm not hip or trendy, but that is not a good reason to make me a nonexistent person. I felt you took an enormous dislike to me right from the beginning, and frankly I never figured out why. Of course I felt hurt. What can I say?”
I reminded him our relationship had started out with him being rude and nasty to me from the beginning.
He replied: “I don't recall being anything but polite at that lunch, but it's all ancient history.”
I guess it is. But spare me the bullshit, Ulin. We don’t like each other, and for our own good reasons. Besides, there’s still a lot to learn from ancient history.
*
Lionel Rolfe’s works are featured on
www.boryanabooks.com.
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