EXPAT  By Ian Whitcomb
 

Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and Songbooks by clicking here,
or by going to ianwhitcomb.com

 

       

Los Angeles County

 

       We’ve abandoned our Pasadena house of many years, driven out by a beastly Iranian woman neighbour who, vowing haria, tried to kill our dog and cat while hurling expletives and baring her bottom. We now live in a safe but small apartment and, understandably, my wife wants me away most of the day.

       Thus I hunker down in the world-famous Huntington Library where they let me have a metal desk under the stairs in the basement near Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. So dire is my location that the Director displays it to would-be donors as an example of scholar-squalor. My cubbyhole is partly responsible for the erecting of a vast and featureless building on the lines of a Saddam Hussein palace that now houses scholars. Grim creatures in dark clothes with no time for gossip they peer and poke, tick-tocking facts that will end up as, say,”Synchonicity & The Frontier”, or “Female Negritude in The Middle Ages”.

       I’m merely a Reader, allowed here because of a daily journal I’ve kept for thirty years. This is a rarity and the Library stores the volumes somewhere in the enormous institution. They also collect my manuscripts which means anything on paper, including laundry bills and parking tickets. Some of my author friends squirm with fury when I tell them. The authorities were very good to me during our evacuation, accepting my library of Film Fun, Radio Fun and Classics Illustrated. They now sit near the Kingsley Amis library, which includes old Smarties and tattered trad jazz Lps. Nearby is the Christopher Isherwood library which we won’t go into.

       Nobody knows how much stuff there is in the Huntington. One day somebody turned up The Dead Sea Scrolls; another time they found the Nazi’s Nuremburg proclamation concerning the extermination of the Jews. Appropriate homes were quickly found for these manuscripts. On a more pacific level we also have

Illuminated Chaucer and some Shakespeare quartos. Sometimes I wander around and, getting deeper and deeper, discover hidden treasures: a trove of “Titanic” artifacts that I later used for my Grammy Award winning CD; a self-suppressed Kingsley Amis novel starring a homosexual with premature ejaculation problems.

       So together with the galleries of 18th century English landscape painters, I can’t feel homesick. Especially when current British literary celebrities descend on us. Not so long ago we were blessed with a bouquet of them: Ian McEwan, John Sutherland, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis himself. All there for a conference on “The Novel In Britain since 1950”. I sat in the front row of Friends’ Hall, joining a row of gentler local souls, mostly women who attend British costume movies and make trips to the West End theatre in professor-led package groups. We waited and waited. The Head Of Research announced that the literary lions last been seen smoking in the parking lot.  When at last they trooped in, somewhat the worse for drink, to a half empty room, I could see we were in for trouble. Hitchens gave us a curl of the upper lip to show he recognized the land of the crass but that there might be potential customers present. Amis, once a beauty but now a gnome, slid into a seat and issued a nod. We listened to talk of “characters whose inner lives hang out on their tongues” and “the importance of metaphor”. Then he proclaimed his big news: he’d move to New York and write The Great American Novel because we need one.

At question time I pointed out that no mention had been made of Julian McLaren Ross, finest of British novelists. “Never read a word of him”, said Hitchens. John Sutherland spoke of the future of the British novel having to come from below, from immigrants. I put up my hand. But what about Harry Potter, let alone Ginger Winer? What about them, said Sutherland. And so it went on until teatime. This is how I spend my days in Southern California before returning home for cocktails.

      

 

 

Ian Whitcomb is a highly respected performer, composer, and music historian. You can find all of his CD's, DVD's, Books, and Songbooks by clicking here,
or by going to ianwhitcomb.com