Mike Davis and Disaster Stew
The Death of the Dam, Charles H. Lawrance. 1959
Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis. 1998
from Great God Pan #12, 1998
For every Nathanael West whose California book is begrudgingly admitted by the East Coast gatekeepers of the American canon, and for every Raymond Chandler or James Cain whose blunt refusal to act smart continues to confound and offend those critics—for each of these, there are a hundred more California writers whose foil to the New York literary establishment is an optimistic, sincere, and utter ignorance of it.
Case in point: The Death of the Dam, an epic poem in rhymed iambs chronicling the construction, collapse, and disaster of the San Francis Dam in north Los Angeles County in 1928. The poet Charles H. Lawrence, who also illustrated and published the first (and only) edition, remains a shadowy figure in West Coast letters. According to his “About the Author:”
He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, a Diplomate of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers, and a Member of the American Water Works Association, Water Control Federation, Instrument Society of America, and Southern California Water Utilities Association, Inc.But none of these accolades offers adequate explanation of Lawrence’s inspiration, some five decades after the dam’s disintegration, to sheath his protractor for a quill pen, and in 243 well-metered sextuplets of iambic quadrameter, reincarnate himself as the Homer of San Francisquito Canyon and the Santa Clara River bed.
“We’ll build the dam across that draw,”As gauche as Lawrance’s verse may appear to literary connoisseurs, it is not particularly unusual in the Golden State. In fact, it fits rather nicely into a niche outlined by Mike Davis in his essay, “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles.” The two characteristics of this niche seem to be an unadulterated disregard for taste and subtlety, and an insistence that the City of Angels be burned, flooded, zapped, blown-up, consumed by Bermuda grass, overrun by space aliens, miscegenated by non-white races or otherwise stripped of its fantasy status as an irrigated Eden for the master race, i.e., Iowans.
Bold Bill Mulholland said.
“Then will the skeptics stand in awe,
Of concrete shape and massive size,
Two hundred feet her crest will rise
Above the river bed!
Davis, the world’s most erudite man to wear a Pete Rose haircut (runner-up: Milan Kundera), has unearthed over 150 instances in print and celluloid of Los Angeles being reduced to rubble. He writes:
The city’s propensity for spectacular disaster—its chief product according to some postmodernists—obviously provides a quasi-realist context for its literary destruction, but environmental exceptionalism only takes us part of the way toward an explanation of why Los Angeles is the city we love to destroy. There is a deeper, Strangelovian logic to such happy holocausts.
Davis raises from the crypt such preserved corpses as Marie Corelli’s The Secret Power (1920), in which Nietzschean “protofeminists” survive an apocalypitc earthquake, then determine that “the secret Makers of the New Race are the gods of the Future.” Davis characterizes the prose style as “unparalleled for its neurasthenic desperation and romantic breathlessness. (‘Oh, big moon of California, why? Oh, pagan gods and goddesses and fauns and fairies, tell me why?’)”
In Beulah Marie Dix’s Pity of God (1932), the fictional town of San Andreas is swept away in the flood waters from the broken pseudonymous San Vincente Dam: “Cornelia gave a glance up the canyon. Nightmare. Never to be forgotten. A solid wall rolling down the canyon. Towering wall that reached from ridge to ridge. Black marble wall marching.”
We are left to speculate about Dix’s influence on the poet Charles Lawrance.
For now the western portion went,What makes Davis refreshing is his disregard for standard literary criteria. Because he reads books as a social scientist more than as a literary critic, he foregoes the deathly dull business of splitting hairs about merit and style and theory. Literateurs may be offended that he cuts into Day of the Locust with the same scalpel he’s bloodied on the neo-nazi fantasy The Turner Diaries, but Davis’ purpose is not to canonize books, but to glean from them an understanding of the culture that created them.
Exploding with a blast
Which with the rush of water sent
The final fragments, and the wall,
One hundred eighty-five feet tall,
Surged forward, free at last!Within its path, the cottage, neat,
Of Tony and his wife
And little boy was smashed complete
And swallowed by the muddy blast,
The frightened tenants drew their last,
Full breath of mortal life.
Now imagine if you will the poet Lawrance ladling from the same disaster stew Davis has been simmering. Davis’ glib take on the conflict between man and nature—epitomized by the recurring Malibu fires (he’s pro fire) and the surge of wild animal attacks in “edge city” suburbs (he’s pro-animal, too)—may be a bit spicy for many sentimental middle-class palates. Perhaps his gleeful fetish for tornados, tsunamis, and killer bees retold with Lawrence’s archaic solemnity could spawn a brand new genre of “disaster epic.”
A cougar eyes the lycra shortsThe disasters of which Mike Davis writes, and the hubris which brings them on, are as great in scope and drama as the ancient tragedies, and even if he never learns to rhyme his sentences, we are lucky to have him as our bard.
On plump suburban thighs
“My habitat is lost,” he snorts
“Where chaparral it once grew tall
MacFrugal’s, Gap, a mini-mall”
The puma eats tonight.
The fireman’s hose does imitate
A cowboy’s lariat
To save a Malibu estate
Meanwhile a downtown hotel burns
It’s cash for blood the slumlord earns
Rise up the proletariat!