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FROM WEST TO EAST is a book for those who want to understand California from an original, sophisticated historical and philosophical perspective.

EXCERPT:

Simultaneously with the arrival of Henry Miller in Big Sur, a new intellectual tendency had emerged in Berkeley, in a little magazine called Circle. Edited by George Leite, who became one of Miller’s associates, Circle produced ten issues beginning in 1944, with what Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters described as 11 antiwar, anarchist, or antiauthoritarian, civil libertarian attitudes, coupled with a new experimentation in the arts.

Henry Miller appeared in its first number; later contributors included Anas Nin, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, the composers Harry Partch and Darius Milhaud, and such nationally known poets as William Carlos Williams. Circle also published William Everson (still in the Oregon camp for conscientious objectors), along with the Nebraska modernist poet Weldon Kees, and other experimental writers such as Thomas Parkinson, Judson Crews, and Gil Orlovitz.

The first issues of Circle were mimeographed, but George Leite soon Secured a letterpress contract with Jack Werner Stauffacher, a printer then in his early twenties. Stauffacher had founded The Greenwood Press on his family property in San Mateo in 1934 at age 13. He was on his way to becoming a leading figure in West Coast fine printing, but with the coming of the war he, like the rest of his peers, found his assumptions about the world profoundly shaken. He served in the Army Corps of Engineers, but contracted pleurisy and was discharged. He later recalled, "my age of innocence was somehow broken.… We were trying to find some answers.… Somehow I met George Leite, maybe through Henry Miller."

Circle’s second mimeographed issue had included work by a San Franciscan, Philip Lamantia, then only 16. Lamantia was a Surrealist, an authentic one, rather than an imitator who had been published in 1943 in VVV, an annual printed in New York under the sponsorship of the war exiled French Surrealist poet and theoretician Andre Breton. (Breton himself came as far west as Reno, but seems never to have visited San Francisco.) The son of a Sicilian-American businessman, Lamantia grew up in the Outer Mission district of San Francisco, an early refuge of gentility for successful Italian-Americans fleeing their traditional quarter of North Beach. Lamantia’s verse was brilliant, romantic, and erotic; one of his most important poems begins,

I am following her to the wavering moon
to a bridge by the long waterfront …

Some thirty years later, Kenneth Rexroth described Philip Lamantia as the best of the third generation of [international] surrealists.… I have never known anyone else who started out, without preliminaries, with no five finger exercises or scales, as an achieved poet," he added. Lamantia had been sent to Rexroth by "Someone I didn’t know who was an English teacher" at Balboa High School, where young Philip was enrolled. Marilyn Zito, daughter of Carmelo Zito the editor of Il Corriere del Popolo, was in the same class at Balboa High. She later recalled that Philip Lamantia’s father had gone to Carmelo Zito and asked Zito to speak to his son about the latter’s increasingly perturbing behavior. Marilyn recalls that her father came away from the meeting with Lamantia dismayed, for something was going an with the young author that was beyond the understanding of most of the older generation, even a radical like the Corriere editor. The meeting of Carmelo Zito and Philip Lamantia took place across a widening cultural gap. For an intellectual revolution indeed, the long-awaited California literary revolution had begun, with consequences beyond all expectation.

Lamantia was, like Rexroth, a pacifist; indeed, Rexroth was the first individual granted conscientious-objector status on appeal in San Francisco and Lamantia was the second. Lamantia, Duncan, who had been discharged from the Army as a homosexual, and other new voices associated with Circle had something else in common beside their opposition to war: according to Rexroth, "one of the characteristics of all these new people was, to put it bluntly, mysticism." Rexroth’s own poetry was increasingly concerned with occult matters as he read, for example, the seventeenth-century German shoemaker Jakob Boehme’s Signature of All Things (De Signatura rerum, 1622). Henry Miller, now the leader of a recognized local literary movement, had also plunged into esoteric study, including Boehme. Lamantia wrote in a poetic homage to Miller,

just when my head is swimming in a pyramid in Mexico
just at that time you crawl forth

The appearance of Circle marked the beginning of the overt phase of the California literary revolution. As Rexroth recalled, "the ideological foundations of the San Francisco Renaissance had been laid poetry of direct speech of I to Thou, personalism, anarchism." Soon an antistatist Libertarian Circle, led by Rexroth, Lamantia, Duncan, Everson (after he left Waldport), and friends, was holding meetings, literary seminars, and dances with the support of a few surviving Italian and Spanish anarchists, and furnishing a challenge, however minor at first, to Communist domination over California radicals.

STEPHEN SCHWARTZ was born in Ohio but has lived since infancy in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was active in the radical left until the early 80s, when he joined the freemarket Institute for Contemporary Studies. Since then, he has published several major studies in political history. He is bilingual in English and Spanish and publishes widely in the Hispanic world. In 1989, he joined the San Francisco Chronicle as a staff writer. He also contributes frequently to the Wall Street Journal and other national periodicals.

CONTESTED EDEN: California before the Gold Rush, edited by Raymon A. Gutierrez and Richard J. Orsi ($60.00 cloth, ISBN: 0520212738, $27.50 PAPERBACK, ISBN: 0520212746, 395 pages, 13 color photographs, 76 b/w photographs, 5 maps, notes, bibliography, index, California History Sesquicentennial Series, University of California Press)

CONTESTED EDEN combines topics of interest to scholars and armchair historians alike foreign exploration, the Mexican-American war, the missions, immigration, and the economy with essays on newer areas of inquiry-environmental issues and the experiences of women and American Indians. Accompanied by 89 black-and-white and color illustrations, some never published before, CONTESTED EDEN celebrates California by offering a fresh perspective on the forces of long ago that shaped the state into what it is today.

Contributors: M. Kat Anderson, Michael G. Barbour, Antonia I. Castaneda, Iris H. W Engstran, Michael J. Gonalez, Lisbeth Haas, Steven W Hackel, Anthony Kirk, Douglas Monroy, Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., William Preston, James A. Sandos, William S. Simmons, Valerie Whitworth.

Ramon A. Gutierrez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and History at the University of Callfornia San Diego. Richard J. Orsi is Professor of History at California State University, Hayward, and editor of the journal California History.

PARADISE LOST: California's Experience, America's
Future by Peter Schrag ($25.00, hardcover, 344 pages, New Press, ISBN: 1565843576)
In the years after World War II, California, always regarded as an experiment for the American future, became an encouraging model for the nation. It was admired and envied for the quality of its education system, its environment, and its progressive social outlook. However, beginning with the passage of the tax-cutting Proposition 13 in 1978, and continuing through a barrage of voter initiatives, the state has pursued a determined course of retrenchment and reaction, sending it tumbling to the bottom of the nation’s "quality of life" rankings.

In PARADISE LOST , Peter Schrag examines the relationship between the politics of that retrenchment and the great demographic changes of recent decades. His book makes a powerful case for reinvigorating our traditional structures of representative government against the increasing power of a "populism" that is often disdainful of minority rights and interests. It shows that California is still a test for the nation, and a frightening indicator of our society’s readiness to assimilate and serve its new citizens. More focused upon the current political economy of the State Schrag shows the cleavages of conflict between ethnic groups and established segments of privilege.