Itinerary: Criticism, Essays on California Writers ed. by Charles Crow (review)

Reviews 67 Itinerary: Criticism, Essays on California Writers. Edited by Charles Crow. (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1978. xviii + 144 pages, $2.95.) We approach collections of essays with a measure of skepticism. We expect them to be uneven. Articles of only marginal quality will be included, we imagine, because of their topical relevance. Our initial misgivings may be slightly deeper if we note that the majority of the contributors are associated with the same institution (in this case, Bowling Green Univer­ sity) . If that institution is also responsible for the publication of the collec­ tion, then our doubts will probably become graver still. Experience tells us that collections of this description tend to be on the weak side. It would be unrealistic to expect too much. But no measure of experienced skepticism could have prepared us adequately for this negligible offering on California writers. At their worst, the essays are careless, banal, critically naive. At their best, they are plausi­ ble but rarely penetrating, useful but hardly brilliant. The volume is a scant 144 pages in length. We never wished it longer. Even the better pieces in Itinerary fail to reward prolonged attention. Mechanical in organization and argument, only occasionally do they press much beyond the obvious and familiar. True, as J. U. Peters points out in “The Los Angeles Anti-Myth,” there is a marked literary tendency to view California’s largest city “not as a New Jerusalem but as a new Babylon, or worse.” But we knew that. And while David M. Fine’s “Landscape of Fantasy” makes some rather interesting connections between the imagery of The Day of the Locust and the lunatic design of Los Angeles architecture in the thirties, it does little, if anything, to modify the accepted reading of the novel. “Way Out West: The Exploratory Fiction of ‘Ronald Sukenick’,” by Alan Cheuse, is a sympathetic appreciation of a baffling novelist. M. L. Lewandowska’s “Feminism and the Emerging Woman Poet: Four Bay Area Poets” is a generous, critically astute, and very welcome introduction to some new voices in and around San Francisco. Finally, Frank Baldanza’s “Huxley and Hearst” is copious in its facts and sensible in its inferences, but contributes little to our critical understanding of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In his lucid (though much too forgiving) “Introduction” to Itinerary, Kevin Starr notes that the articles in the collection fail “to come to some common conclusions, to reach some centrality of consideration.” But, he continues, this is a failure of California’s culture, not of her critics. “Cali­ fornia is in the throes of a massive eclecticism of culture that almost defies either conceptual or symbolic understanding.” Perhaps so. Kevin Starr knows California as well as anyone, and we are inclined to take him at his word. But the failure of so many of these essays to attain internal coherence is a critical, and not a cultural, phenomenon. In his commentary on Vilhelm 68 Western American Literature Moberg’s A Time on Earth, Kenneth A. Robb observes: “Elsewhere in the novel, [sic] Carlson refers to California frequently — almost insistantly [sic] — as the ‘land of orange trees,’ with the variations ‘the land of orange trees.’” Can California culture be blamed for that? Or for this statement in Richard C. Carpenter’s essay on The Crying of Lot 49: “For, like Voltaire or Lewis Carroll, Pynchon is aiming his shafts in our direction, his book is for the reader to grapple with”? What are we to make of Larry R. Smith’s remark (in his “The Poetry-and-Jazz Movement in the United States”) : “Like the fist that alternatly [sic] clenches and extends itself to you, the jazzman’s communication is an emphatic experience of his world and self”? Our irritation with such confusion and banality is materially intensified by the fact that the production of the book is unbelievably sloppy. We count 34 errors of spelling and punctuation, and doubtless we missed some. With lines running off at bewildering angles and itinerant footnote numbers, the page layout appears overcome with the delirium tremens of type. As if to add insult to injury, the otherwise alphabetical list of contributors...