Kevin wrote:
"I think you're misreading Mark's comments, but he can speak
for himself."
Okay, I think I will.
First of all, I do not dislike Ellroy. I'm proud to say I was
the first on my block to read him and turned numerous friends
on to him. I think the LA Quartet is a stunning piece of
work.
And I was certainly not advocating that Ellroy should have
deleted any of the racial, ethnic, sexual and/or gender slurs
contained within the LA Quartet. As numerous of you have
pointed out, that language was true to time, place, vocation
and character, was crucial to the books' verisimilitude and
to have changed any of it would have gone against the work,
trivialized it.
Sure, much of that language and those attitudes made me
uncomfortable, but that is a good thing. One of the reasons I
read good hardboiled is to confront uncomfortable realities
(from a safe distance). I certainly do not think like Iceberg
Slim, but I read him.
Eddie brings up a good point about Willeford. He created some
abominable characters and usually wrote about them with
deceptively value-free language, letting the reader decide.
However, loathsome characters can be fascinating, especially
when they are so casually nasty as were Willeford's, as
opposed to the exaggerated evil of, say, Chaingang (I forget,
is that the name of Rex Miller's behemoth?).
As I wrote before, the thing I liked best about Ellroy was
that even his good characters did bad things, even his bad
characters sometimes did good, even Dudley. It was this moral
complexity that made me think so much of Ellroy.
And the pseudo-bebop, speed-amped scatting provided the
perfect voice for White Jazz. The language seemed wholly
appropriate to the characters within the dysfunctional,
symbiotic relationship between the LAPD and the local
hoods.
Neil wrote:
". . . Ellroy, whose White Jazz was an epiphany for me. But
it was more the writing than the other things. Since MY DARK
PLACES, in all the GQ fiction and non, he's Ellroy "doing"
Ellroy."
Neil summed up nicely what I was trying to get at, except I'd
place the shift a little earlier, with American Tabloid. When
Ellroy moved his focus beyond LA, I expected the language of
at least some of his characters to change. Are we supposed to
believe that every male in the US in the early '60s spoke
alike, in the voice of a '50s LA cop/crook, or of Ellroy
himself?
To me, it was becoming just a schtick. Michael mentioned that
he was once skeptical of Ellroy due to his overuse of the
word "fuck." I felt that the slurs were becoming as
gratuitous as the vulgarities.
This was aggravated by Ellroy's heightened public visibility.
I found it increasingly hard to separate the author from the
work. I know this is very unfair, but Ellroy worked very hard
at this self-promotion, publicly employing the same voice of
his books. On top of this, he overtly tied his person to his
art in the numerous interviews, articles and, ultimately,
book about how his mother's murder was responsible for his
working the crime fiction field in the first place.
Again, I know that's unfair, but I now find it near
impossible to separate his public persona from his fiction.
And that public persona is much as Kevin describes it, a
little boy trying to impress his friends and shock the
grown-ups through his use of dirty words.
On another, related point, Anthony wrote:
"they put it into the concept of the setting that its written
in and in the case of period authors show a truer word than
what the contemporary authors of a period could get away
with."
I don't buy this for a second, that later authors, scholars,
reporters, etc., can depict a "truer" sense of an era than
those immersed in it. The later writer may be able to use
words that were once said, though not allowed in print, but
that does not necessarily lead to a truer overall
picture.
If it is an older person writing about his/her younger days,
well, memory is faulty, we all rewrite our own history.
Memories have as much to do with who a person is now and
recasting the past as prelude as it has to do with who a
person was when that now-prelude was the current
chapter.
If it is a younger writer who did not live through the era,
but is relying on extensive research, well, what is that
research but the accumulated detritus left by that past, the
"less true" works of the era.
Look at it the other way, writing about the future -- all of
the sci-fi books and movies produced during the '50s reveal a
hell of a lot more about their present than they do about the
future.
At best, works set in a different era are a dialog between
that era and the present. Which brings me to nostalgia, but
I'll leave that for another post, this one's too long
already. . . .
Mark
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