The There That Is There

NOWADAYS, whether or not we like the idea, it looks as if it's going to be important to understand the culture of Southern California. After all, it has formed two Presidents and provided a congenial atmosphere for the retirement of a third. James McMichael's Four Good Things, a new long poem about--of all things--Pasadena, makes such an effort. It is also about worry, death, sex manuals, taxes, domestic architecture, the Industrial Revolution, real estate, and the American soul.

Perhaps "culture" is the wrong word to describe what goes on. Perhaps not even Bertolt Brecht, who knew the middle class hates to be reminded that its comfortable life is political, could make it interesting. It is a land characterized by the atmosphere of a San Clemente golf club locker room; golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. It is a land of Jack Daniels and Vietnamese maids, of luxurious home sprinkler systems, of helicopters which hover over the city to catch purse snatchers making their grabs on the main streets and then disappearing into arroyos of impenetrable chaparral in the canyons.

The poem begins tranquilly, with recollections of childhood. The narrator's father is a real estate developer; his mother, in an upstairs bedroom of their pleasant suburban home, is dying of cancer. Here are the themes, announced at once: In the child's mind, place is a masculine proposition, a dubious promise of the good life sketched out in survey maps, prospective buyers, and the cheerful desolation of lots. The female propositions--death, repose--flower from the middle of that promise. Place, which is everywhere present and palpable, is not quite real; and death, which is not present and everywhere palpable, is very real. the two are somehow married, though they seem not to talk to each other much.

This is an accurate and a scary definition of Southern California or at least one regularly suggsted by the other writers of that place--Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald. It thus qualifies as classically American, written with the speculative range, freedom of imagination, and fierce, clear eye that have invigorated this country's proudest works. the verse is clean, quiet, and lapidary; all the excitement is in watching McMichael take up one "unpoetic" subject after another and illuminate it; he turns all the world on the emotions of a child who is trying to find out what his father does all day and why his mother is dying.

The central technique is making connections. What, for example, is the connection between Pasadena and the Industrial Revolution? McMichael notes that the rich of California, whom a world market brought into being, made houses out of William Morris's criticism of shabby machine production standards. Very beautiful houses, actually, and McMichael describes the principle of their construction with a wonderfully quiet (and faintly nagging) accuracy:

...Their stairs were furniture. /A bench along a landing had the same insistent/finish as an inglenook, the same square/ebony caps for screwheads as the tables and the chairs. Everything showed you how it went together.

The poet notices something else: not just that seeing how things go together reassures, but that reassurance was needed in the first place. There was an anxiety in adolescent California, a nervous need for place and careful planning, a twitching spring from the England of the 1830s and 40s which had replaced old wealth and property with active capital as the shield against uncertainty:

Free trade was Jesus Christ. They formed their joint stock companies and combines, and could count on/triple rows of sheds, eight miles of granite docks,/calm and deep water in all tides at Liverpool.'

They could also count on the help

As long as there were/workers enough, 'and not all so insanc as to prefer/dying to living,' their master had it as he wanted...

Uncertainties in the market combatted by mastery and planning. Every American presidential candidate has tried to allay our anxiety by showing us how we are all going to get somewhere. McMichael insists that planning and anxiety are almost Siamese twins. Americans, with their city planning, economic planning, estate planning, family planning, with their game plans and saving plans and lay-away plans, would seem to be the most anxious people on earth.

So, then, here's the connection to Pasadena's California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the planner's paradigm, the probability theory, took root:

...If we overlooked nothing,/no single difference of temperament or will,/if it were all accounted for and stored and if we/watched it periodically and found it yielded/more and newer orders, it would teach us how to/master what was probably and make it pure,/assign it a completeness like the past's.

Here also is the connection to insomnia and the way that worry keeps us awake, examined below in a creepy revision of Rene Descartes' idea that the only real place is what passes through our minds.

...So I don't/care if I go back to sleep. Since it never works to/care about it, since my calmness when I care is/feigned and crazy, I don't care. I'll get up,/I'm too tired to get up...The certainty/sleep isn't there is me.

FEELING ANXIOUS and hungering to be in a place--sleep--where you can't be, is a metaphor for American restlessness, for all our desires for place and roots. It is a central irony of the poem that in order to achieve the American--or any other kind of--dream, you must be asleep, which these displaced lowans who come to California aren't exactly:

...Living here was too much what they/thought it would be. The sequences of perfect days were unavoidably what they'd come for. They should be making/more of what was there and possible at any hour in that clean air. With all those possibilities aligned for them along the tracks and poles and wires/they should be somewhere else since where they were was/old already with their being there.

Hardly any of the 2,000 or so lines of the work seem to regard the world outside this uneasiness.

Knowledge of our displacement, knowledge of death--these are consciousness for McMichael, and what consciousness does is worry and plan, though it hungers like the wren to say "Here I am," to make a place out of sleep or to make "Pasadena" or a house like a nest, to make love. This is a long American poem remarkable in that it stays completely in the world of ordinary consciousness, of history and fact and daily life. It does not wander into myth, the dark of nature, or sexuality, fun as that might be to read. The passage about lovemaking is about sex manuals--technics--which is just another symptom of anxiety and planning ahead. These too are "as free of people as a garden is, or as a plan."

In the first book-length American poem, Walt Whiman, with a great sense of how comic the idea was, made love to all of us, to the whole future. We could, he said, make the future now with our imaginations--like the man in the TV ad says today. McMichael does the opposite. To him, the present is always future. Partly he sees this as the human condition (we are displaced; we do have to plan) and partly as an economic one, with capitalism as the engine which continually displaces the present. It exists in terms of consumption only, what is being used and passing out of our hands. The present is what is being eaten.

There may be another source for this vision. McMichael belongs to the generation of writers, now about 40, who grew up in the social and economic expansion of the postwar years. It was probably most intense in California. There, the young watched the planning and the confidence and the technical inventiveness turn, with callousness and efficiency and fury, on Vietnam. That war had no people in the plan, and as one Administration with a plan to win the war was replaced by an Administration with a plan to end the war, the suffering seemed to go on forever. So a generation of American writers has come to look at the central mechanics of American life with a deep, stunned, curious detachment.

Now we have yet another California President with yet another set of plans--including, it would seem, the intensification of civil war in Central America, the sacrifice of the elderly and the marginally employed to provide a shield against uncertainties in the market, and the export of adulterated foodstuffs to the underdeveloped world. The detachment of Four Good Things, its precision and meditative quiet, are new especially powerful, with the power art sometimes has of stinging us awake. In the last lines of the poem, as the narrator is falling asleep his wife describes to him an afternoon spent skiing:

The street was ice and hardly wide enough for/two of them at a time, or for a cart,/They felt showy in their bright nylon. /A woman with a bowl looked at them from her door. /Chickens. A covered water trough. She told me/more about the street and then remembered,/what she wasy saying, she said, was that there were/farmers out working in the snow.

After all the turnings, it seems radiant, this glimpse of the fact that there are people in the world.