by Joan Didion
This is interesting, a quite naked expression of what has been the California conundrum. Scaled against Yosemite, or against the view through the Gate of the Pacific trembling on its tectonic plates, the slightest shift of which could and with some regularity did destroy the works of man in a millisecond, all human beings were of course but as worms, their “heroic imperatives” finally futile, their philosophical inquiries vain. The population of California has increased in my lifetime from six million to close to thirty-five million people, yet the three phrases that come first to mind when I try to define California to myself refer exclusively to its topography, a landscape quite empty of people. The first of these phrases comes from the language of broadcast weather reports, the second from John Muir. The third, and most persistent, comes from Robinson Jeffers. Point Conception to the Mexican border. The Range of Light. Beautiful country burn again, / Point Pinos down to the Sur Rivers.
This is the point in the California experience when discussion stops, and many voices fade. Broadcast weather reports could be seen as nominally neutral on the question of whether human beings have any rightful place in California, but John Muir and Robinson Jeffers could not. Muir traded the Calvinism of his Scottish childhood for an equally Calvinist wilderness, a landscape in which he could tolerate only Indians, because Indians “walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of woodrats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.” Jeffers tolerated no one at all, taking this aversion to the point at which he came to favor war, which alone, as he saw it, could return the world to its “emptiness,” to “the bone, the colorless white bone, the excellence.” “Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,” he advised his twin sons, and referred to mankind as a “botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.” He was accused of “proto-fascism.” He called himself an “Inhumanist.” (As in, from a posting on the Jeffers Studies web site, “I’m interested in the relationship between Inhumanism and Deep Ecology and would welcome any thoughts or comments.”) He seemed to many an easy target: his poetry could be pretentious, his postures ugly. Read in situ, however, Jeffers makes fatally seductive sense: Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel water. And: When the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
I am thinking and writing face to face with a mighty and lovely Nature, Josiah Royce wrote, by the side of whose greatness I am but as a worm. Royce in fact seems to have maintained an exhausting but finally vain alert against the undertow of this localized nihilism. His 1886 California: A Study of American Character bore on its title page these peculiar but premonitory lines, spoken by Mephistopheles in the Prologue to Faust: On suns and worlds I can shed little light I see but humans, and their piteous plight. At sixty, in despair at the prospect of World War One and a few months short of what would be a fatal stroke, he encountered in Harvard Yard one of his students, Horace Kallen, who, according to Robert V. Hine’s Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard, reported of Royce that “When I greeted him, his round blue eyes looked staring, and without recognition. And then he said in a voice somehow thinner … ‘You are on the side of humanity, aren’t you?’” A few months before, describing himself as “socially ineffective as regards genuine ‘team play,’ ignorant of politics, an ineffective member of committees, and a poor helper of concrete social enterprises,” as well as “a good deal of a non-conformist, and disposed to a certain rebellion,” Royce had acknowledged that the idea of community to which he had devoted his career remained in some way alien to him: “When I review this whole process, I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness. This is what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley, and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains.… So much of the spirit that opposes the community I have and have always had in me, simply, deeply, elementally.”
So much of the spirit that opposes the community: of course he had it in him, considering what he was: “… because I am a Californian,” he himself had written, “as little bound to follow mere tradition. …” In 1970 I spent a month in the South, in Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi, under the misapprehension that an understanding of the differences between the West and the South, which had given California a good deal of its original settlement, would improve my understanding of California. Royce had fretted over the same question: “Very early … this relatively peaceful mingling of Americans from North and South had already deeply affected the tone of California life,” he noted in California: A Study of American Character. “The type of the Northern man who has assumed Southern fashions, and not always the best Southern fashions at that, has often been observed in California life…. He often followed the Southerner, and was frequently, in time, partly assimilated by the Southern civilization.” One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.
7
THOMAS KINKADE was born in the late 1950s and raised in Placerville, El Dorado County, where his mother supported him and his siblings by working as a notary public, piecework, five dollars a document. The father had left. The family lived much of the time in a trailer. By the early 1990s “Thomas Kinkade” was a phenomenon, a brand on his own, a merchandiser who could touch a snow globe or a stoneware mug or a night-light or a La-Z-Boy chair with the magic of his name and turn it to money, a painter so successful that by the end of the decade there would be throughout the United States 248 Thomas Kinkade “signature galleries,” seventy-eight of them in California alone, most of those in malls or tourist areas, four for example in Monterey and another four in Carmel, two exits down Highway 1. Since very few of Thomas Kinkade’s original oil paintings were by that time available, and since those that were had risen in price from about $15,000 in the early 1990s to more than $300,000 by 1997, the pictures sold in these 248 “signature galleries” were canvas-backed reproductions, which themselves sold for $900 to $15,000 and were produced by the 450 employees who labored in the hundred-thousand-square-foot Morgan Hill headquarters of Media Arts Group Incorporated (“MDA” on the New York Stock Exchange), the business of which was Thomas Kinkade.
The passion with which buyers approached these Kinkade images was hard to define. The manager of one California gallery that handled them told me that it was not unusual to sell six or seven at a clip, to buyers who already owned ten or twenty, and that the buyers with whom he dealt brought to the viewing of the images “a sizeable emotional weight.” A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire. The cottages had thatched roofs, and resembled gingerbread houses. The houses were Victorian, and resembled idealized bed-and-breakfasts, at least two of which in Placerville, the Chichester-McKee House and the Combellack-Blair House, claimed to have been the models for Kinkade “Christmas” paintings. “There’s a lot of beauty here that I present in a way that’s whimsical and charming,” Kinkade allowed to the Placerville Mountain Democrat. He branded himself the “Painter of Light,” and the postcards Media Arts provided to his galleries each for a while bore this legend: “Thomas Kinkade is recognized as the foremost living painter of light. His masterful use of soft edges and luminous colors give his highly detailed oil paintings a glow all their own. This extraordinary ‘Kinkade Glow’ has created an overwhelming demand for Thomas Kinkade paintings and lithographs
worldwide.”
This “Kinkade Glow” could be seen as derived in spirit from the “lustrous, pearly mist” that Mark Twain had derided in the Bierstadt paintings, and, the level of execution to one side, there are certain unsettling similarities between the two painters. “After completing my recent plein air study of Yosemite Valley, the mountains’ majesty refused to leave me,” Kinkade wrote in June 2000 on his web site. “When my family wandered through the national park visitor center, I discovered a key to my fantasy—a recreation of a Miwok Indian Village. When I returned to my studio, I began work on The Mountains Declare His Glory, a poetic expression of what I felt at that transforming moment of inspiration. As a final touch, I even added a Miwok Indian Camp along the river as an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God’s glory.”
Affirming that man has his place in the Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park Visitor Center’s recreation of a Miwok Indian Village is identifiable as a doubtful enterprise on many levels (not the least of which being that the Yosemite Miwok were forcibly run onto a reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush, and allowed to return to Yosemite only in 1855), but is Thomas Kinkade’s Sierra in fact any more sentimentalized than that of Albert Bierstadt? Were not the divinely illuminated passes of Bierstadt’s Sierra meant to confirm the successful completion of our manifest destiny? Was it by chance that Collis P. Huntington commissioned Bierstadt to undertake a painting celebrating the domination of Donner Pass by the Central Pacific Railroad? Was not Bierstadt’s triumphalist Donner Lake from the Summit a willful revision to this point of the locale that most clearly embodied the moral ambiguity of the California settlement? This was the lesson drawn from the pass in question by one of the surviving children of the Donner Party, Virginia Reed, who wrote to her cousin: “Oh, Mary, I have not wrote you half of the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is. But thank God, we are the only family that did not eat human flesh. We have left everything, but I don’t care for that. We have got through with our lives. Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody. Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.”
Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.
Did the preferred version of our history reflect the artless horror and constricted moral horizon of Virginia Reed’s firsthand account?
Or had it come more closely to resemble the inspirational improvement that was Bierstadt’s Donner Lake from the Summit?
The confusions embedded in the crossing story can be seen in unintended relief in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon, the 1913 novel that has at its center the young woman Saxon Brown. At the time we meet Saxon she is orphaned, boarding with her hard-pressed socialist brother and his bad-tempered wife, and spending six hard days a week as a piecework ironer in an Oakland laundry. On their Saturday night off, Saxon and a friend from the laundry splurge on tickets to a Bricklayers’ picnic, where Saxon meets a similarly orphaned teamster, Billy Roberts, to whom she confides that she was named for “the first English, and you know the Americans came from the English. We’re Saxons, you an’ me, an’ Mary, an’ Bert, and all the Americans that are real Americans, you know, and not Dagoes and Japs and such.” If this seems a thin reed on which to hang one’s identity, it would not have seemed so to London, who, Kevin Starr noted in Americans and the California Dream, once protested an arrest for vagrancy by arguing to the court “that no old American whose ancestors had fought in the American Revolution should be treated this way.” The moment in which the judge nonetheless sentenced him to thirty days is described by Starr as “one of the most traumatic” in London’s life.
Assured by Billy Roberts that he too is a “real” American, that his mother’s family “crossed to Maine hundreds of years ago,” Saxon asks where his father was from. This extraordinary exchange ensues:
“Don’t know.” Billy shrugged his shoulders. “He didn’t know himself. Nobody ever knew, though he was American, all right, all right.”
“His name’s regular old American,” Saxon suggested. “There’s a big English general right now whose name is Roberts. I’ve read it in the papers.”
“But Roberts wasn’t my father’s name. He never knew what his name was. Roberts was the name of a gold-miner who adopted him. You see, it was this way. When they was Indian-fightin’ up there with the Modoc Indians, a lot of miners an’ settlers took a hand. Roberts was captain of one outfit, and once, after a fight, they took a lot of prisoners—squaws, an’ kids an’ babies. An’ one of the kids was my father. They figured he was about five years old. He didn’t know nothin’ but Indian.”
Saxon clapped her hands, and her eyes sparkled: “He’d been captured on an Indian raid!”
“That’s the way they figured it,” Billy nodded. “They recollected a wagon-train of Oregon settlers that’d been killed by the Modocs four years before. Roberts adopted him, and that’s why I don’t know his real name. But you can bank on it, he crossed the plains just the same.”
“So did my father,” Saxon said proudly.
“An’ my mother, too,” Billy added, pride touching his own voice. “Anyway, she came pretty close to crossin’ the plains, because she was born in a wagon on the River Platte on the way out.”
“My mother, too,” said Saxon. “She was eight years old, an’ she walked most of the way after the oxen began to give out.”
Billy thrust out his hand.
“Put her there, kid,” he said. “We’re just like old friends, what with the same kind of folks behind us.”
With shining eyes, Saxon extended her hand to his, and gravely they shook.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she murmured. “We’re both old American stock.”
To assume that London was employing irony here, that his intention was to underline the distance between Saxon and Billy’s actual situation and their illusions of superior lineage, would be to misread The Valley of the Moon. “Times have changed,” Saxon complains to Billy. “We crossed the plains and opened up this country, and now we’re losing even the chance to work for a living in it.” This strikes a chord in Billy, which resonates again when the two happen into a prosperous Portuguese settlement: “It looks like the free-born American ain’t got no room left in his own land,” Billy says to Saxon. A further thought from Billy: “It was our folks who made this country. Fought for it, opened it up, did everything—”
This truculence on the question of immigration was by no means an unfamiliar note in California, which by the time London wrote already had a tenacious history of vigilance committees and exclusionary legislation. “The fearful blindness of the early behavior of the Americans in California towards foreigners is something almost unintelligible,” Josiah Royce wrote in 1886 of the violence and lynchings to which “foreigners”—mainly Sonorans but also Chinese and native Digger Indians—had been subjected in the gold fields. Sixty-some years after Royce, Carey McWilliams, in California: The Great Exception, characterized the pervasive local hostility toward Asians as “a social and psychic necessity of the situation,” the “negative device” by which a state made up of newly arrived strangers had been able to achieve the illusion of a cohesive community joined against the menace of the foreign-born.
Such hostility was by no means unknown in more settled parts of the country, but rarely was it so intricately codified by law. The Foreign Miners’ License Tax of 1850 had exacted a monthly fee of any non-citizen who wanted to work a claim. In 1854, an existing law prohibiting Negroes and Indians from testifying in court had been extended to also prohibit testimony by Chinese. The state legislature had barred “Mongolians, Indians, and Negroes” from public schools in 1860; had barred Chinese from employment in corporations or on public works projects in 1879; and had amended an existing miscegenation law to include Chinese in 1906. The state Alien Land Acts of 1913 and 1920 would for more than thirty years effectively prohibit land ownership in California to both Asians an
d their American-born children.
It was in this spirit that the two “real” Americans, Saxon and Billy, set out in search of government land, the 160 free acres which were, as they saw it, their due. This conviction of entitlement was another familiar California note, and a particularly complicated one, since the idea of depending on the government of course ran counter to the preferred self-image of most Californians. Yet such dependence was, even then, almost total. It had been, as we have seen, federal money, spent on behalf of a broad spectrum of business interests, that built the railroad and opened the state to the rest of the world. It had been and would be, as we have seen, federal money, again spent on behalf of a large spectrum of business interests, that created what was no longer locally even called agribusiness, just “ag.” The rationalization that resolves this contradiction is, in The Valley of the Moon, fairly primitive: the government owes Saxon and Billy free land, Billy reasons, “for what our fathers an’ mothers done. I tell you, Saxon, when a woman walks across the plains like your mother done, an’ a man an’ wife gets massacred by the Indians like my grandfather an’ mother done, the government does owe them something.”
The land on which Saxon and Billy finally settle is the actual Valley of the Moon, in Sonoma County, and their discovery of it prefigures many of the doubtful sentiments that would later surface in the paintings of Thomas Kinkade. They arrive in the valley just as “sunset fires, refracted from the cloud-driftage of the autumn sky” turn the landscape “crimson.” They see a stream, “singing” to them. They see “fairy circles” of redwoods. They see, at a distance, a man and a woman, “side by side, the delicate hand of the woman curled in the hand of the man, which looked as if made to confer benedictions.” This magical bonding continues, again as if touched by the Kinkade Glow: