
Advertisement
James Ellroy: In this coming winter of '11, my television show, James Ellroy's LA: City of Demons debuts. I am the star. I am the on-camera interlocutor, interrogator, personality, and narrator. It features historical Los Angeles crimes as I tell the story. I write every word that I speak. I also have a sidekick, who is a computer-generated dog. His name is Barko. He's based on my real dog, Barko, the Bull Terrier, who I'll see on the other side. He is immortal. The show is inimitably me. It's deeply about Los Angeles. It is shamelessly self-promotional and autobiographical. It's a wonderful opportunity to present literature, autobiography, crime, Los Angeles, social commentary, and humor as pertains to all of the above on television.Sounds great. So, The Hilliker Curse is your second memoir, after My Dark Places in which you investigated the unsolved murder of your mother. This one isn't so much about your mother's murder, though, as it is about the reverberations of her death throughout your life and relationships with women.
It's about the male romantic and the sexual urge and how it was, in my case, traumatically formed. It's deeply about romanticism and its antecedents going back to the greatest artist ever, Ludwig Von Beethoven. It's the story of my astonishingly detailed, varied, passionate search for love, and it is a memoir, certainly. It's also an autobiographical essay and it's the first one I've written in that it's all true, but as a memoirist and an essayist I am allowed to emphasize omit and retrospectively comment, so there are two narrative voices at work at all time. There is Ellroy the older man describing Ellroy the younger man, and editorializing upon it. It's also a treatise on the writing of fiction and how real life romance informs fiction, at least in my case. It's a treatise on someone who was a very ruthless and self-absorbed man, finding family later in life.
Advertisement
On the occasion of my tenth birthday, March, 1958, my mother Jean Hilliker, a 43-year-old alcoholic, gave me the choice to live with my father or her. I chose my dad. She hit me. I fell off the couch. I gouged my head on the edge of a glass coffee table and called her a drunk and a whore. She hit me again. I wished her dead.I had read a book pertaining to witchcraft and curses only a few months before, and have carried a deep sense of shame, self-loathing--a ridiculous sense of complicity which pertains to her death. I did not kill her. I did not arrange for her to be killed. I was a ten year-old child. Nevertheless, it was the defining moment of my life to date--the issue of the curse--just as much as her death was.I was already girl-crazed and looking in windows before I knew formally what sex was. There was a joke from the 1950s, it's deeply ironic, and I think says it all. It goes "I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he's working on now." I live in that construct. I am that romantically fixated. I am religious. I am very conservative. I hang through the prism of God, and there is the sacred conjunction of men and women. I have never gotten over it. I have been looking for the mythical "her" for most of my lifetime, and I found her. Of course I would find her. I always get what I want. That's the point of The Hilliker Curse. It comes from slow to fast, but it always costs a great deal.
Advertisement
Well that's an interesting perception. Both Because The Night and The Hilliker Curse are books where a lot of things happen that I haven't contemplated in many, many years. It's the pre-Black Dahlia me. I have always been a mystic. You go back and you take a look at Blood's A Rover, it's entirely about belief. Entirely. Blood's A Rover, and this memoir are addresses of the stylistic access of cults. I made a conscious decision to write a more fulsomely romantic and emotional book with Blood's A Rover, and I got to the point in my life--this was in the fall preceding my first meeting with [girlfriend] Erika--when I was hooked up with a woman named Karen in an adulteress liaison. She was impervious to my pleas to leave her husband for me. I began to more consciously address what I had known unconsciously or semi-consciously for a long, long time. Which is that the key journey in my life is not crime, it's not my mother as a murder victim, but my mother as a founding spirit.The Hilliker Curse suggests that each of your novels has a muse at the core of it.
As I became more conscious and my books became larger and more steeped in history, the theme emerged: bad men in love with strong women. It's there prevalently in L.A. Confidential, which Erika read just recently. It's a very, very complex, mystifying, bewildering, densely plotted book. Erika is not a big fan of crime fiction, so she went right to the three men and their tortured, ultimately transcendent relationships with the women. Women were muse, but I had never addressed the phenomenon as consciously as I was forced to after my marriage to Helen Knode exploded.
Advertisement
It's as if she's there, I'm here, and I can't touch her.Is there any baggage that comes with writing and speaking about your mother and her murder repeatedly for so many years?
I have a very, very deep and proud will to be happy, and I am happy. I have never been depressed. I have no grievance. I am not possessed of much irony. I'm a straight-ahead, hard-charging, religious right-wing heterosexual American, out of another era. I do not think the world is going to blow up. I do not think America is a demon. I think America will prevail in the world of geopolitics. I'm a nationalist, a militarist, a capitalist, and a Christian. People find this shocking.
Advertisement
It's another gig. Erika attends some of the gigs. I will tell the story. I will do the readings. I will tell the truth and then I will be happy for it to go away so I can sit down and apply myself more consistently to a novel.Do you mind if I ask for details about the new novel?
Los Angeles based. Earlier than any of my previous books.The last film project of yours that you talked about was White Jazz.
White Jazz is defunct.Oh. The thing I always thought would translate into a great film or television series is The Big Nowhere.
The Big Nowhere, among all my novels is the novel that would make the best motion picture. Three and a half hours in black and white, you're absolutely correct. And it's owned by an Italian film company, and it's defunct.
Advertisement
Is this to curb illegal immigration?Yes.
Well then it may be justified. It has to be judged on an ad-hoc basis, all that stuff. It's very easy to immediately jump to racial bias there. Racial profiling is really no more than the empirical knowledge that certain types of crimes are committed in subcategories of certain racial groups. It's street sense--if you were a police officer and you're out looking for crime, you'd react along those lines because that's what your instincts tell you. And if you were a police officer with that level of street smarts and a decent intelligence, you'd be right more often than not. Ideology often fails when confronted with issues like this and personally I feel no social obligation to take part in the world as it is today or to comment upon it. I'm grateful for the haven of history and I trust my instincts for historical period, time and place, characterization milieu. I will never add contemporaneously and entirely ignore the culture of today. I don't have a cell phone. I don't have a computer. I am computer illiterate. I have never been on the internet. A woman named Melissa Stafford who works for me has a computer that can order me a pair of shoes. There's an all right website now, James Ellroy dot net or whatever the fuck it is, I don't know, I never look at it. I'm glad it's there as a book-selling tool, but I don't care beyond that. All of these regimes of mine, these disciplines, enhance the solitude and the mental quiet I need to create the work that I write.
Advertisement
I was on Facebook for a while. Erika Schickel and I finally converged on Facebook. And it's only because I was enjoined to go on Facebook by Knopf. They thought it would be an effective book-selling tool. Erika was looking for me and I was looking for her. We were inevitable, she and I, and Facebook was the means, and now I've canned Facebook and now I've got a website.So what do you write on? A typewriter?
No, I write by hand. And I gain from it because I'm anxious by nature. I gain peace of mind by knowing all this shit can wait till I get home. I've got a fucking answering machine, and that's a kick. Say I spend the night in Erika's bed. I come back. Well, who called while I was gone? You hear the messages. I got a fax machine. It's sufficient.Do you still categorize yourself as a crime writer? This is not really a book motivated by crime or a search for justice.
The LA Quartet veers away from genre fiction and crime fiction to historical political fiction and it escalates. It becomes more and more and more about social history as we climb through the 1950s. Then it becomes something else entirely in the Underworld USA Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. So physically, they're historical novels, but I'll always be classified as a crime writer. It's dandy as long as it sells my books. And I've written three books of short stories in journalism and I've written two memoirs. So I have the most varied career, arguably the deepest, of anyone who originally put pen to paper to write mysteries and crime novels. I've upped the stakes, considerably.
Advertisement
Chandler pre-dates film noir. Noir is entirely a construction of postwar America. It is postwar American and European art. It is a direct rebuttal of Nazism and the Holocaust. It was a subversive art form concurrent with being a conformist art form. The LA Quartet books; The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, were never intended to be noir. They were historical novels set in the film noir era. The most common misconception about the film L.A. Confidential and, the director Curtis Hanson would confirm this as well, is that it's film noir, and it's not. It's a historical film. It's a historical romance set in the film noir era.You've pointed out Jim Thompson as another writer whose work is frequently filed under noir but is not really noir.
I read a few of Thompson's books and I didn't think much of them. I felt like they were written for 500 bucks in three weeks, because they were. And I have absolutely no patience for novels. None. The guy who got there first, who presaged noir more than Chandler, is James M. Cain with The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. And then there are suggestions of noir in Mildred Pierce and opera noir in Serenade. And Horace McCoy's book, They Shoot Horses, Don't They, they are 1930s short novels prescient to the post-war malaise, the Holocaust, World War II, millions of deaths, and noir. They got there first--McCoy secondarily and Cain primarily.
Advertisement
I took a music appreciation class at John Burroughs Junior High School. It was the winter of 1960. The teacher's name was Allen Hyams, dapper little guy with a pompadour. He was the music teacher at John Burroughs Junior High. I wrote an essay about John Burroughs called "Let's Twist Again" in Crime Wave, my collection of essays. Hyams had a bust of Beethoven, numerous busts of Beethoven, on a desk at the front of the room and he faced us kids. He put a record player there, a phonograph, and said something along the lines of "Hey kids, dig this," and he put down the needle and an orchestra went dun, dun, dun, duuuun, and I was hooked.You're strictly classical. You're not into rock and roll.
Rock and roll has always felt reductive to me. Like institutionalized rebelliousness. It feels inherently un-profound to me. The "I like you good baby, I'm gonna make you mine" song. The cultural influences that have shaped my generation, or people 10 or 15 years younger than me, never grabbed hold of me emotionally. Which is my way of saying I don't dig it. I'm not saying it's devoid of social content or it's meretricious. I'm saying I don't care. I'm saying it doesn't vibrate my kundalini.Do you feel like you've said everything you can say about Jean Hilliker with this book?
I don't know. She's there. I'm here. I don't foresee writing another memoir. I wrote a piece for West, which is the LA Times magazine, called "To Live and Die in LA" after moving back to LA after many years. I said it would be my last piece of autobiography but I was mistaken. So, never say never.Is Los Angeles inescapable?
It's entirely escapable. When Erika's daughters go to college we're getting the fuck out of there.But that essay from 2006 was so definitive. The thrust was very much "I am LA and LA is me."
Well I think the more honest answer is LA is where I go when women divorce me and I don't know where else to go.So what's the next place? Do locations still matter to you?
Oh yeah. I want a nice, peaceful, cold, nurturing, homogenous, affluent climate. I don't need culture. I don't need anything other than the minimal surroundings.INTERVIEW BY MATTHEW CARON
PHOTO BY MICHAEL DE LEON
