From the Editor

Abstract

F r o m t h e E d it o r M e l o d y G r a u l i c h California became, as it had to, the New World’s New World, its last repos­ itory of hope. In California, you come face to face with the Pacific and your­ self. There is nowhere else to go. Just as both Los Angeles and San Francisco are, in their separate ways, recognizably Californian, so is California recog­ nizably American. All that California does is magnify what is brought to it; and often, under the strain of magnification, there occurs a sea change. — Shiva Naipaul, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy In Jean Stafford’s satiric western novel The Mountain Lion (1949), a tough old ranchman wearing a “Jesse James vest” tells his sickly grandchildren, raised in an orange grove in Covina, that “California is not the real West.” Fantasyland had not yet been built in 1949, but apparently California was already “unreal.” So what is California? The New World’s New World? “West of the West,” as the title of the The Land of Sunshine was conceived in 1894 to “boost” Southern California economically, but when Charles Lummis took over the editorship in 1895, he turned to “boosting” western writers. Lummis published some of the most sig­ nificant California writers at the beginnings of their careers: Mary Austin, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, Sui Sin Far, Sharlott Hall. He broadened the magazine’s scope with a name change in 1902 to Out West and in his own col­ umns was an early advocate of the West’s importance in U.S. literary culture. M e l o d y G r a u l i c h 1999 Western Literature Association conference seems to query? Perhaps “postwestern”? When participants at the 1998 open editorial board meeting suggested that WAL should occasionally provide a forum for a “debate” or “conversation” about issues in the field, Krista Comer came up with an idea everyone liked: we could devote part of an issue to the place of California in western studies, as a kind of appetizer to this year’s conference banquet in Sacramento. So we offer you “California Dreaming.” It seemed particularly appropriate to ask one of this year’s Distinguished Achievement Award winners, California writer and longtime W LA member Gerry Haslam, to set a trail from which oth­ ers would diverge into their own less traveled byways. And then we sent the essay Gerry cowrote with his wife, Janice Haslam, to a bunch of folks who write about California. Multiethnic California calls out for a “babel of voices,” as David Wyatt argues in his piece, so we tried to enlist scholars working in newly emerging fields. With more than four bases to cover, we couldn’t hit a home run: we’re sorry, for instance, not to have an essay explor­ ing contemporary African American California writers. But “California Dreaming” does, I think, capture California’s diversity, offering a con­ versation among voices which will be familiar to W LA members and a host of new voices to WAL and the W LA. Some of these voices will be speaking at a special panel at the “West of the West” conference in Sacramento. Visually we include a mix of conventional images of California and “new West” images. Our vision was occasionally limited by per­ nicious details having to do with money, permissions, and availabil­ ity. Universal Studios, for instance, wanted to charge us $250 for an image from Bedtime for Bonzo of Ronald Reagan carrying books . . . . “California Dreaming” extends the cultural conversation to art, music, TV, performance art, and, of course, Disneyland. (Disney also wouldn’t provide images!) We’re happy to publish an essay on the work of this year’s other Distinguished Achievement Award winner, James D. Houston. Andrew Wingfield focuses on Houston’s exploration of California’s unique geology, climate, and setting on the Pacific Rim. And we particularly thank Jim Houston for his contribution to “California Dreaming” and artist Tom Killion for his wonderful woodcuts of the California coast. California, here we come. ...