West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein (review)

West of Eden has been widely reviewed. Those reviews have been mixed and have, for the most part, concentrated upon what the publishers call “the edge and feel of Hollywood during the golden age of glamour and noir.” I have been asked by the editors of the OHR to see if it might be possible to say something about West of Eden as an example of a genre of oral history—a not uninteresting question given the recent award of the Nobel Prize in literature to Svetlana Alexievich for Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (New York: Random House, 2017), the recent reissue of Ronald Blyth’s Aikenfield: Portrait of an English Village (New York: NYRB Classics, 2015) and the even more recent announcement of an annual PEN award of $10,000 for edited oral history (scholarly/academic works not eligible). There can be no doubt that the most popular and widely read “oral histories” are, and maybe always have been, edited compilations of testimony. They seem to exist as a stop on the continuum between the oral and the written, and despite the obvious issues raised about editing, shared authority, the nature of oral narratives, and historical construction and cognition, there has never been, as far as I know, a full-scale review of such works as oral histories.

In her London Review of Books (38 [20]: 27-30) commentary on Secondhand Time, Sheila Fitzpatrick takes a stab at trying to view Alexievich as an oral historian who is, seemingly, Fitzpatrick claims, “on the sloppy side as far as methodology is concerned.” After noting some of the problems, many similar to those found in Studs Terkel’s various works, she says she’d “just as soon Alexievich stayed labelled as a writer rather than a historian.” The distinction is, we are told, one of imagination rather than documentation. In a roundabout way, that is, perhaps, where we begin.

In some cases individual reviews, especially of the many books of Terkel, as well as Alan Wieder’s recent collage biography of Terkel (Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016]), have touched upon these issues, but a wider general analysis has not been forthcoming. This short space is obviously not going to be a venue for such an analysis but, maybe, we can say something about some of the problems posed using West of Eden as our model.

Before that attempt, some general comments on West of Eden are in order. Firstly, the title: We know what East of Eden is—the Land of Nod to which Cain was exiled. But where is West of Eden? A quick search of Amazon.com reveals that there are at least five other works titled West of Eden, two titled Eden West, and one Eden is West. In most of these, the reference is California, concentrated mainly on Southern California. In this particular case a clearer hint is found on the book jacket: the image of the famous Hollywood sign taken from a painting by Ed Ruscha, one of the key figures in the Los Angeles art community and one of Stein’s interviewees. What makes this image so interesting is that it is a view of Los Angeles from the back of the sign. West of Eden seems to be the Hollywood hills and by extension Malibu and the palisades, and Eden is the Los Angeles described by Reiner Banham as “the Plains of Id” (Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies [Berkeley: University of California Press, 200l]). This American place is the west side of Los Angeles, not the classic image of suburban life to which we are usually treated.

West of Eden is actually four family stories that Stein claims define this American place, each a family saga iterated and reiterated in the popular press but also preserved in community memory through whispered stories and hidden narratives. All involve some sort of scandal or pathology. Four chapters focus on...