Calling James Ellroy “outspoken” and “no holds barred” is a cliché. But even clichés can be true. Excerpted from “James Ellroy,” September 21, 2010.

JAMES ELLROY, Author, The Hilliker Curse, L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia
In conversation with TOM BARBASH, Author, The Last Good Chance – Moderator

 

JAMES ELLROY: I’m thrilled that you came out to see me. I realize that you had options tonight. You could have stayed home and attended to your sex lives, your drug habits, your fatuous worship of President Barack Obama, and you didn’t. You came here to see me, and I’m nothing but grateful.

JAMES BARBASH: When other people might have been in graduate school, you were actually caddying, and you were caddying at golf clubs as you were writing your first five novels. What did that experience give you, versus a traditional path toward a writing career?

TOM ELLROY: No one told me that I could not write a novel. No one told me that I could not not write a novel. I had never read short stories. I don’t enjoy short fiction. I have read crime novels almost exclusively. I dislike magical realism. I have not read mainstream American literature, with a very few exceptions. I have read novels written by Americans almost exclusively.

I thought for many years that I wanted to be a writer so that I would have a girlfriend, a swanky pad on Rossmore Avenue in LA, some swinging Ivy League threads and a groovy sports car. I was gravely mistaken. It was finally when I got the idea to write a story that became my first novel, Brown’s Requiem, about a tall, think, dark-haired, bespectacled man who repossessed cars, who hung out with country club gold caddies, who got involved with a bunch of low-life golf caddies, who’s obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder case, and had an overweening love of classical music that I finally realized you can tell your own story and couch it in genre fiction full of shootouts, fistfights, intrigue, social observation across a wide level, and though you will probably not find a girlfriend while writing this story, the private-eye hero will definitely meet a woman who plays the cello. So I wrote the f--king book and I sold it.

BARBASH: In your second book, Clandestine, you are in some ways writing about your mother’s murder. But in that case, the crime gets solved.

ELLROY: Yes, and my father kills my mother. There is a nine-year-old boy who looks like me when I was 10 years of age, and the woman lawyer resembled a transient girlfriend that I had at the time. It doesn’t take a genius to put all of this together.

BARBASH: In terms of directly writing yourself, or your impetus to write My Dark Places, can you tell about the origins of that, moving from fiction into memoir, what the challenges were like, that first experience?

ELLROY: I had no idea that I’d write my memoir, My Dark Places, about my mother’s 1958 murder. A series of events interceded. My second ex-wife, Helen Knode, bought me a picture of myself from the LA Times archive. It’s been over-reproduced many times since. I have been told that my mother was just killed. I’m 10 years old. I’m lost in opportunism, calculation, ambiguous bereavement, and my reporter friend told me that he would be seeing my mother’s file as part of a piece he was doing on unsolved San Gabriel Valley homicides. I realized that I had to see the file and write about it for GQ magazine. I decided to turn it into a full-length book. I would attempt to solve my mother’s investigation, with a retired LA County sheriff homicide detective named Bill Stoner. We failed to find the killer. The book describes my arc of reconciliation with my mother. There is no conclusion.

BARBASH: You spoke just now, the bereavement is sort of ambiguous. I saw in another interview that you described “glibly” using your mother’s murder to promote The Black Dahlia. Did it feel glib at the time, or did it only feel glib in retrospect?

ELLROY: It felt glib at the time because I had six published novels, no hits. I knew this was a hit book. I knew that the doppelganger aspect of my mother’s death and Elizabeth Short’s death, becoming obsessed with Elizabeth Short’s death in the wake of my mother’s death, was an exploitable media story. A character in my novel Blood’s a Rover says, “Your options are do everything or do nothing.” I would rather exploit than do nothing and I don’t find exploit too harsh a verb. The book honors my mother, the book addresses her as a human being. I was handsomely compensated for writing the book. I tried to find the killer. I failed. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that my mother and I comprised not a murder story but a love story, and it was then [that] I conceived my current book, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, which has a staggering non-sequitur conclusion.

BARBASH: Can you explain what the title refers to?

ELLROY: On the occasion of my tenth birthday, in March of 1958, my mother, Jean Hilliker, a 43-year-old alcoholic registered nurse, divorced from my father for two and a half years, sat me down half-gassed and said, “Sonny, you’re now 10. You can live with your dad or with me. It’s your call.” I said, “My dad!” She gave me a big whack, I fell off the couch, gouged my head on a glass table, I called my mother a drunken whore, she hit me again, she pulled back from it. [In] Christmas ’57, I’d read a kid’s book about spells, curses and witchcraft. I recalled the book, issued the curse, wished my mother dead; she was murdered coincidentally three months later. Thus, The Hilliker Curse is a predator’s confession, a cri de coeur, an apologia, a redress of the women who have shared my life with me, and it has quite a surprising happy ending that many critics are skeptical of. But, if you’re skeptical of the ending of The Hilliker Curse, there are a couple of reasons for this. You do not believe in deep physical and romantic love. And since I’m a high-class guy and attempting to be higher class, the express “f--k you all” to critics who dislike the conclusion of this book might backfire in the end.

BARBASH: One critic who liked your book referred to it as your most humane and touching book. Are those difficult words for readers to associate with James Ellroy?

ELLROY: No. The books are tender, full of passion, full of bad men in love with strong women. I come out of romanticism. The single greatest male figure in my life has been Beethoven. I have conversations with him all the time. They’re difficult. He’s deaf, I don’t speak German and he doesn’t speak English. I make it work anyway. Beethoven is the greatest artist ever created by civilization. He is a man of almost indescribable courage, because the worse it got, the greater he got. As the cone of silence fell over him with greater and greater totality, he was forced to move inward, seek God, to recall what he could hear and what he could think, and in the course, wrote the greatest music of all time. So, if you’re megalomaniacal, and I tend to run that way, what does it cost you to identify with the greatest artist who ever lived? Why not?

BARBASH: I want to talk about obsessiveness. There’s a way in which you talked about yourself as being effectively obsessive. Are all good novelists necessarily obsessive, or people who perform in the arts at the highest level? Can you talk about the channeling of the variety of obsessions that come across in your memoir and your fiction?

ELLROY: I can’t honestly comment on authors or musicians today, because I don’t watch television or go to movies. I don’t have a cell phone or a computer. I live in a cultural vacuum. There’s a reason for this. The reason is the greater the solitude that I achieve, the better I can think, the better I can immerse myself in the historical periods that I write about. And aside from spending time with the woman who forms the conclusion of The Hilliker Curse, and driving from my pad to her pad, I am largely alone, laying in the dark, thinking, having conversations with either the woman herself – who does speak English and is perfectly capable of hearing everything that I say and who often talks back to me and, quite frankly, contradicts me a great deal – or conversations with Beethoven, who just tends to sit there and glower. I love to think. I love to plot. I love to plan. I believe that art is consciousness. I believe that if an artist of decent intelligence, native talent, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, plots diligently, meticulously, and with great exactitude, he or she can get better, better, better and better.

BARBASH: One thing you said in The Hilliker Curse: “I was tracing the arc of the Hilliker curse. I wanted all woman, or one woman, to be her.” I was wondering if you could talk about how the image of your mother manifested itself in other women you’ve either written about or loved.

ELLROY: Jean Hilliker was a powerful woman of her era. Promiscuous by the fatuous standards of 1958. A registered nurse, a single mother, a hard-charging, good-looking, red-haired alcoholic, stern, a religious woman. She gave me the gift of faith, for which I am forever thankful. I often, as a child, studied her face, and I have often studied the faces of women for signs of probity, moral character, humor and strength. There she is. We are separated by 52 years. I will not see her again on this earth. I will be reunited with her in the next earth. I look forward to that. I have not the slightest doubt that it will occur. I think we will have a lot to talk about. That the woman I ultimately ended up with is in many ways complementary to Jean Hilliker and entirely unfathomable and inexplicable as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and the late string quartets, especially when compared to Jean Hilliker, is nothing but a godsend, and of course it had to happen this way, because the male self-will is very often self-serving and quite often self-destructive.

BARBASH: You still live in Los Angeles. Could you talk a little bit about Los Angeles, what it was like to grow up there, what it’s like to live there now? It’s featured so heavily and intensely in so much of your work.

ELLROY: I’m from LA. I grew up there. I don’t know about LA history as you might think I do. I make most of this shit up. It’s historically valid as far as it’s historically valid. I think that each and every one of you who grew up somewhere might be similarly inchoately obsessed with your own hometown. I just got lucky that my parents hatched me in a cool locale. I live in LA because it’s where I always go when women divorce me, and I got very lucky that my romantic fate awaited me there. I have no sense of LA today. It’s overcrowded, it’s smoggy. There are far too many people with far too many automobiles. I can’t wait to get out. Sooner or later, we will.

BARBASH: Are you pleased with the way your work has been translated from the page to the movie screen?

ELLROY: Money is the gift that no one ever returns. The size large always fits, and the color green is always flattering. I have been handsomely compensated for the motion picture copyrights to numerous of my books. There are some movies you want to see, like L.A. Confidential, some movies you want to flee, like The Black Dahlia. They all sell books. It would be ungrateful of me to criticize these films if they were bad, for attribution, because nobody forced me to take the dough. I’m nothing but happy.

BARBASH: [Your style of writing] is praised for being very brief, short, staccato. What’s the reason for your prose style?

ELLROY: I like a story wherein every word furthers plot, characterization, milieu. It’s also a very male language and the language of police officers, who go from one task to the next, trying to solve crimes because their internal lives are disordered. The best police detectives that I know are men and increasingly women who have disordered personal lives, thus they need to impose moral order on external events to make them feel happy, feel involved, feel like they’ve accomplished something.

BARBASH: You’re a self-described right-winger, which makes you an anomaly in the world of writers. It’s hard to find very many Republicans at all amongst writers. Why do you think that is?

ELLROY: People are afraid of appearing inhumane. People are afraid to say, “I believe in God. I am theocratic. I believe that God’s law rules the world and that it is more important than secular freedom.” People are afraid to say, “I believe in capitalism.” People are afraid to say, “I firmly believe that America must rule the world.” I think many people share it; few, outside of right-wing pundits, voice it. But it comes down to this: I don’t care what people think of me. I have a wonderful readership. People either agree with me or they don’t. It’s ok. I like folks just fine, and as far as critics go, I like them to the extent that they like me, hate them to the extent that they hate me – though I tend not to indulge hatred; it’s a negative emotion – dismiss them to the extent that they dismiss me. I do not review books. I do not engage in literary feuds, because people work hard to write books. I’m a very exacting critic, and I don’t want to shit on anyone.