(son of Paramount’s production chief) turned Communist writer, he portrayed Hollywood capitalism with almost documentary realism in What Makes Sammy Run? (1940). Sammy Glick, the rising young mogul, battens off the creativity of the friends and employees whom he, in turn, betrays and crushes. As one of Schulberg’s characters observes, ‘he is the id of our society’.43
Schulberg’s psychoanalytic perspective, however, was exceptional. One of the distinguishing traits of first-generation ‘Los Angeles fiction’ was its emphasis on economic self-interest rather than depth psychology. Thus something like the labor theory of value supplied a consistent moralizing edge in the novels of Chandler and Cain. There is a constant tension between the ‘productive’ middle class (Marlowe, Mildred Pierce, Nick Papdakis, and so on), and the ‘unproductive’ declassés or idle rich (the Sternwoods, Bert Pierce, Monty Beragon, and so on). Unable to accumulate any longer through speculation or gambling, or having lost their inheritance (or merely desiring to speed it up), the noirs declassés invariably choose murder over toil. Invariably, too, the fictional opposition between these different middle strata suggests the contrast between the ‘lazy’, speculative Southern California economy (real-estate promotions and Hollywood) and America’s hard-working heartlands.
These motifs of the 1930s ‘Los Angeles Novel’ – the moral phenomenology of the depraved or ruined middle classes; the insinuation of the crisis of the semi-proletarianized writer; and the parasitical nature of Southern California – underwent interesting permutations in the film noir of the 1940s. Sometimes film noir is described in shorthand as the result of the encounter between the American hardboiled novel and exiled German expressionist cinema – a simplistic definition that leaves out other seminal influences, including psychoanalysis and Orson Welles. For our purposes, however, what was significant was the way in which the image of Los Angeles was reworked from novel to screenplay (sometimes incestuously as in Chandler rewriting Cain or Faulkner rewriting Chandler), then translated to the screen by such leftish auteurs noirs (some of them emigrés) as Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., Ben Maddow, Carl Foreman, John Berry, Jules Dassin, Abraham Polonsky, Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo and Joseph Losey. In their hands, film noir sometimes approached a kind of Marxist cinema manqué, a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise subversive realism.44
After the first adaptations of Cain and Chandler, film noir began to exploit Los Angeles settings in new ways. Geographically, it shifted increasingly from the Cainian bungalows and suburbs to the epic dereliction of Downtown’s Bunker Hill, which symbolized the rot in the heart of the expanding metropolis.45 Sociologically, 1940s noir was more typically concerned with gangster underclasses and official corruption than with the pathology of the middle class; politically, the implicit obsession with the fate of the petty producer was supplanted by representations of political reaction and social polarization. Of course, film noir remained an ideologically ambiguous aesthetic that could be manipulated in dramatically different ways. Thus Howard Hawks chose to flatten the deep shadows of The Big Sleep (Chandler’s most anti-rich novel) into an erotic ambience for Bogart and Bacall, while the more toughminded Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott (both future members of the Hollywood Ten) evoked premonitions of fascism and brainwashing in their version of Farewell, My Lovely (Murder, My Sweet).
The experiments of film noir were mirrored by new directions in hardboiled Los Angeles writing during the 1940s. John Fante, who together with Adamic and Cain had been discovered by Mencken’s American Mercury in the early Depression, founded a one-man school of ‘wino writing’ that autobiographically chronicled life in Bunker Hill’s single-room-occupancy hotels and Main Street taxi dancehalls during the Depression and war years.46 Charles Bukowsky would later acquire a hyped-up celebrity (including two ‘autobiographical’ films) for his derivative, Fantesque descriptions of a Hollywood demimonde of fallen ‘stars in bars’ – a world better evoked in the phantasmagorical autobiography of jazzman and junkie Art Pepper.47
Aldous Huxley’s two Los Angeles novels (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939] and Ape and Essence [1948]), on the other hand, prefigured the postwar fantastic novel (on a spectrum that includes Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 [1966] as well as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Gold Coast [1988]) that exploited Southern California’s unsure boundary between reality and science fiction. As David Dunaway has pointed out, Huxley’s important contributions to Los Angeles’s anti-mythography are seldom acknowledged these days. If Swan, with its grotesque and scarcely veiled portraits of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davis, inspired Welles’s Citizen Kane (1940), then Ape and Essence, with its savage vision of the post-apocalypse, was the ‘predecessor of science fiction films on the environmental destruction of Los Angeles and human devolution’ – a list that includes Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, and Blade Runner.48
The early science fiction of Ray Bradbury, meanwhile, showed a strong noir influence derived from his sci-fi mentor, Leigh Brackett, who styled herself after Chandler and Hammett. Bradbury’s uniqueness was that he was a son of the Folks turned ‘poet of the pulps’. A Depression emigré from Wisconsin, he attended L.A. High (but never learned to drive) and became an enthusiastic member of West’s dreaded fanocracy:
I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph-collectors and photographers. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other people’s dreams for their lives.49
Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950) revolves around contradictions between the Turnerian, ‘westering’ quest for new frontiers and poignant nostalgia for small-town America. In a sense, Bradbury took the angst of the dislocated Midwesterner in Los Angeles and projected it as extra-terrestrial destiny. As David Mogen has pointed out, Bradbury’s Mars is really Los Angeles’s metaphysical double: ‘a product of fantasies imposed upon it . . . magical promises and disorienting malevolence’.50
But the most interesting transit across Los Angeles’s literary scene in the 1940s was probably the brief appearance of Black noir. Los Angeles was a particularly cruel mirage for Black writers. At first sight to the young Langston Hughes, visiting the city in the Olympic year of 1932, ‘Los Angeles seemed more a miracle than a city, a place where oranges sold for one cent a dozen, ordinary Black folks lived in huge houses with “miles of yards”, and prosperity seemed to reign in spite of the Depression.’51 Later, in 1939, when Hughes attempted to work within the studio system, he discovered that the only available role for a Black writer was furnishing demeaning dialogue for cotton-field parodies of Black life. After a humiliating experience with the film Way Down South, he declared that ‘so far as Negroes are concerned, [Hollywood] might just as well be controlled by Hitler’.52
Hughes’s disillusionment in Los Angeles was recapitulated, more harrowingly, by the experience of Chester Himes. At the beginning of the war, Himes (who had spent the early Depression in the Ohio State Penitentiary on a robbery charge) headed West with his wife Jean for a fresh start as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers. Despite a formidable reputation as a short story writer for Esquire (the first ‘convict writer’ of renown), Himes encountered an implacable wall of racism in Hollywood. As his biographer describes the incident, ‘he was promptly fired from . . . Warner Brothers when Jack Warner heard about him and said, “I don’t want no niggers on this lot” ’.53 Racebaited from the studios, Himes spent the rest of the war years as an unskilled laborer in internally segregated defense plants wracked by outbursts of white violence. As he recalled later in his autobiography, it was a searing experience:
Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually, and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear: I had lived in the South, I had fallen down an elevator shaft, I had been kicked out of college, I had served seven and one half years in prison, I had survived the humiliating last five years of the Depression in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional; my mind was sharp,
