SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR - Published 1948 from "AMERICA DAY BY DAY"
(I would've never guessed Simone spent time in Pasadena or Hollywood. Reading through, Beauvoir saw the dark side of Los Angeles life. She finds what we take in stride as not ordinary. In this excerpt, she is amazed by the way Angelenos buy things on credit and gives her opinion on American cities and neighborhoods that reveal class structure.)
Pages 337 - 338)
"A year ago N. married a GI (Ivan Moffatt), who is now a scriptwriter in Hollywood. When she came to join him, they hadn't a penny between them, and I. was earning very little money. N. was expecting a baby. Thanks to the credit system they practice here, they could rent a kind of barn and transform it into a livable house, and also buy a car, something absolutely necessary in this city of vast distances. Now I.s' situation has improved, but his salary is almost entirely consigned to paying off his debts. Besides, a law requires parents to take their children to the doctor once a week during their first year; this is very costly. It's hard to balance the budget every month. I know all that and also that I.'s car is red. So I am utterly astonished to see a little yellow car standing in front of the station. N. tells me, "It's ours. I. bought it last week just so we could drive around." "Nothing simpler," adds N.M., "since you buy without paying!" Obviously. But I'm stunned by such ease. Los Angeles also stuns me. This city is unlike any other. Below me, the downtown looks just like the downtowns of Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland, which themselves evoke New York's downtown and Chicago's Loop. It's the tall buildings housing banks, stores, and movie theaters, the monotonous checkerboard of streets and avenues. But then, all the neighborhoods we drive through are either disorganized outlying districts or huge developments where identical wooden houses multiply as far as the eye can see, each one surrounded by a little garden. The traffic is terrifying; the broad roadways are divided into six lanes, three in each direction, marked off by white lines, and you are allowed to pass to either the right or the left. You can turn to the right only from the right lane, to the left only from the left; this last maneuver is often prohibited, which complicates one's itinerary. At intersections the car that has arrived first has priority, a rule that provokes thousands of disputes..."
Page 339)
"Hollywood, as everyone knows, is where the studious are. The stars live in Beverly Hills,. To see their houses, you have to enter an artificial park humming with neither the muffled life of the countryside nor the feverish life of the city; the luxurious villas are surrounded by a false solitude. Avenues lined with garages and with flat-roofed boutiques, barely one-story high; a blue coastal road above the sea; vast camps of parked trailers, those caravans in which many homeless Americans live on the outskirts of towns; working -class sections filled with monotonous shacks..."
from
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002
