James Ellroy

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: James Ellroy begins with a reading from his no-holds-barred memoir. And a warning, there's some strong and very colourful language.

James Ellroy: [reading from So women will love me... to ...alone in the dark.]

Ramona Koval: This event that formed you in many ways, the murder of your mother when you were so young...for those who haven't read about it before, if it's not too painful can you just tell us what happened?

James Ellroy: On June 22nd, 1958, when I was ten years old, Jean Hilliker was murdered in El Monte California, a shit honky-tonk suburb 14 miles east of downtown LA. It was a sex deal gone bad, it was either rape or consensual sex, the determination was never made, the crime was never solved. I went back in 1994, 36 years after the fact, and attempted to solve the case. I failed.

Ramona Koval: That failure of the case being solved, where did it leave Jean Hilliker in your head?

James Ellroy: Writing My Dark Places, the book I wrote about the investigation, served to form an arc of reconciliation with my mother. I learned numerous facts about her life, saw the extent to which I was her, saw how gender bias favoured me and insured my own survival, and how gender bias destroyed her...

Ramona Koval: Because she was hungry for love too?

James Ellroy: She was a woman hungry for love living under the social codes of the American 1950s. Years later, after a nervous breakdown, the cessation of passion and ultimate dissolution of my second marriage, I realised that Jean Hilliker and I formed a love story rather than a murder story. I was ranging like a rabid pitbull around the world, determined to have a daughter. I was on a mission of 'wed, impregnate, contain'. I engaged in a great deal of romantic misconduct with wildly inappropriate women and decided I needed to write this book.

Ramona Koval: This Hilliker curse in fact is something that you thought you delivered to her as a child. She asked you whether you wanted to live with your father or her when they split up and you said you wanted to live with your father, and she got angry with you and there was an incident with a glass table.

James Ellroy: She hit me, I fell off the couch, gouged my head on a glass coffee table, called her two vile names, she hit me, she drew blood. She pulled back from the moment. I recalled the book that I read Christmas '57, the extract I just read, wished her dead, she was murdered three months later.

Ramona Koval: And the heartbreaking thing about this is that haven't we all wish to our parents dead at some stage (except for my children of course!), but you know, we all do that and we say, 'I wish you were dead, I wish I never had to see you again.' But you took this upon yourself when your mother's body was discovered and you were told that your mother had died, you said that people might have thought 'look at him, the poor boy', or 'isn't he a cute young man', or 'isn't he a poor young man' and felt sorry for you, but you had this sense that you were responsible, that she didn't deserve anybody's sympathy.

James Ellroy: I also looked upon my mother's death with relief and as an opportunity. I got to live with my permissive dad. My mother died at a time when I was sexually obsessed with her, hated her for her strict Calvinistic ways and her concurrent and paradoxical alcoholism. All of a sudden I was free, white, ten, with an ageing father who lets me run wild, and the world was my oyster.

Ramona Koval: Starting with the local streets, starting with the girls at school and their mothers who you had an interest in.

James Ellroy: There is an old joke indigenous to the American 1950s, and I think it says it all; I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he is working on now. And I think that says a lot of it.

Ramona Koval: You were a sexual little boy.

James Ellroy: I certainly was.

Ramona Koval: You depict yourself as this kind of little boy gone mad. In fact you use a language that you would use often for some of your books, this is a memoir of a nine-year-old, this is before your mother died, ladies' man, written in a noir tone, 'I tailed her to a crib on Arizona.' Is that how you thought as a kid or is that your imposition of the...your now imposition of what you thought was going on then?

James Ellroy: There are rules of memoir, and memoir coincides in The Hilliker Curse with autobiographical essay. You cannot lie or physically misrepresent events. You can omit, emphasise, deemphasise and attribute meaning to events that transpired decades before. So I deliberately wrote this book in a hard-boiled style. Why say 'apartment' when you can say 'pad' or 'crib'?

Ramona Koval: Because that was the lingo of the time?

James Ellroy: Because 'pad' and 'crib' sound cool, and 'house' and 'apartment' are square.

Ramona Koval: You describe your role as a peeping Tom as a young kid and in and out of the army and in and out of drugs, but actually you were a reader all through this time. Tell me what you were reading?

James Ellroy: I have read crime novels almost exclusively. I have listened to classical music almost exclusively. I have never been left-wing for a moment, even in my sleep. My cultural influences are odd for a man of my generation.

Ramona Koval: And they are?

James Ellroy: I have just described them, and they have all contributed to my religious, Tory, formalist, Beethoven-worshipping worldview.

Ramona Koval: Let's take that one at a time. Let's start with Beethoven because Beethoven comes in and out of this book all the way through. Tell me about your relationship with Beethoven.

James Ellroy: I have no family, I have very few friends, most of my friends are women. The primary male figure in my life has been the most inexplicable and unfathomable genius of all time, Ludwig von Beethoven. We have had many, many pithy dialogues which have been problematic because he is stone deaf, did not speak English and I don't speak German.

Ramona Koval: But you are a man of imagination. So why do you think he is the most misunderstood, brilliant genius?

James Ellroy: I think he's perfectly understood and exists in a constant state of reassessment. It is the music, it is a level of abstraction, a level of artistry for which there are no analogues in any other art. It is as if among artists there is only him, and since I am a megalomaniac and since I am a worshipful man, why not go right to the top.

Ramona Koval: Do you remember when you heard him first, his music?

James Ellroy: Yes, I had a junior high school music appreciation teacher named Alan Hyams. He had a record player on his desk at the front of the room, he had a bust of Beethoven, scowling. He put the needle down on the record, I heard [sings] and I have been fucked ever since.

Ramona Koval: What does it say to you when you hear that, how does it speak to you?

James Ellroy: I could give you a lengthy disquisition on romanticism. There is the British writer Coleridge, who I have never read, the German writer Goethe, who I've never read, there is Beethoven who I have listened to at astonishingly great length. It is big sex, big emotion, the holy conjunction of men and women, the virtuoso as corporeal god, the worship of nature, the seeking of God, and above all else the constant search for the transcendent human experience.

Ramona Koval: So is that what he was doing and that's what you want to do?

James Ellroy: That is what Beethoven was doing and that is what I try to do.

I had a Lutheran upbringing. There is nothing quite like Martin Luther to bring a carnally-minded young boy to God, because immediately after burning spiritual Europe to the ground, the first thing big Marty did was find himself a hot nun named Katie von Bora and had five kids. So if one wants to merge the sacred, the romantic, the profane, the religious, the carnal, Lutheranism is a good place to start.

Ramona Koval: I've never really had it put like that. So did you hear God speaking to you, did you know that there was somebody or some kind of beating heart waiting for you in a place to take you away from a life of misery on the streets and drugs and drinking?

James Ellroy: I have spoken to God in darkened rooms and gutters for 55 years, yes.

Ramona Koval: What does God say to you?

James Ellroy: God speaks to me in an abstraction. I hear the voice in my head, the filtering process comes out as the last line of the famous Rilke poem Archaic Torso of Apollo and it is: 'You must change your life'.

Ramona Koval: And you did, but your life went into a whole series, as you describe, of relationships with women, women that seemed like your mother. Anyone who's done any therapy or analysis would say, well, of course, and you kept repeating things, and you are a great romantic, and every latest woman was the woman perhaps. Why did God want you to spend 30 years in this rather tortured search, do you think?

James Ellroy: There is the constant spiritual question of the individual's will versus God's will. It is a daily battle. I have been prone to self-delusion, I have become more discerning over time, I only learned the hard way. My second marriage to a brilliant woman named Helen Knode, a writer who remains my best friend, went in the tank. I went out and had epic romantic misadventures with two women named Joan and Karen who were the two heroines of my most recent novel Blood's a Rover. They kicked the shit out of me.

I did what I always do when women divorce me or dump me, I moved back to LA, and I met the woman Erika Schickel and a little gear went click in the back of my brain and it was as if I could see the far side of the most distant galaxy and Miss Schickel was a intermittent companion of mine in the dark, a unilateral companion, I thought I was always talking to her. I did not know that Erika Schickel was conjuring me with much greater persistence and acuity than I was ever capable of conjuring her.

Ramona Koval: So in many ways you've met your match.

James Ellroy: In many ways my male will has been subsumed by a female will.

Ramona Koval: And are you happy?

James Ellroy: I am the happiest motherfucker on God's green earth.

Ramona Koval: And what do you think it took this little gear to move...or maybe you don't want to analyse it, because you are a romantic.

James Ellroy: Erika Schickel is Beethovian. Erika Schickel is the third movement, the adagio sostenuto, of Beethoven's Hammerklavier piano sonata, the Emil Gilels version. When you hear it, you will know.

Ramona Koval: That's what my mother always said about love, that when you hear it you will know, it's there, you will know it. It's always a bit mysterious when you don't know really what that means.

James Ellroy: Its mysterious when your will has been towards self-deluded sexuality, a romantic misalliance, and when you meet someone who out-manoeuvres, out-loves, out-flanks and out-wills you at every single opportunity.

Ramona Koval: And this book is a kind of confession, isn't it, too. It's a confession in the traditional sense of 'this is who I am', 'this is what I've done'.

James Ellroy: Yes, it is every bit of that, but as memoirs go, I do not find it solipsistic or unduly self absorbed. My Dark Places, my first memoir, addressed an enormous issue, much bigger than Jean Hilliker, much bigger than me; misogynistic violence. The Hilliker Curse addresses an issue much bigger than me, Erika Schickel or Jean Hilliker; the conjunction of men and women. Hence I have personal stories to tell within those larger spiritual constructions.

Ramona Koval: Your spiritual life...do you go to a church?

James Ellroy: I go to church, yes.

Ramona Koval: And do you have a pastor or a spiritual mentor?

James Ellroy: I have a pastor who looks askance at me, yes.

Ramona Koval: Does he read you?

James Ellroy: He read half of one of my books and put it down, shocked, and he has never quite figured out how someone can be as religious as I am and say 'shit' and 'fuck' as much as I do. I have one answer for him; Martin Luther!

Ramona Koval: So when you go to church, do you pray to God at church?

James Ellroy: Yes.

Ramona Koval: And do you follow the service, does the service mean something to you, do you think there's something spiritual and holy about getting together with other people? I suppose I can't imagine you in a congregation.

James Ellroy: Faith is the foundation of my life, and what I have difficulty explaining to people who possess the material world view is that I believe in the invisible above all else. What I believe in most is what I sense coming and can in no way actually see. As much as I enjoy worship with other people, I enjoy solitary worship more.

Ramona Koval: And that was what you were describing. It sounded not quite like solitary worship, the little boy who was alone in the dark, he is conjuring women, his fantasising, he's masturbating, so that's moved a little along to a more spiritual tone.

James Ellroy: It has. The little boy is an older man now. I am determined to eat that fucking broccoli because if I am 62 and haven't hit puberty yet, how long will I live?

Ramona Koval: If you're 62 and haven't hit puberty, you might be here for 300 years.

James Ellroy: I do rather look like a Micronesian tortoise, don't I.

Ramona Koval: I can't remember whether it was at the end of this book or somewhere else...no, I know, it was in the interview you did with the Paris Review, the last line of which says something like, 'I don't want to die and I'm not going to.'

James Ellroy: That's my intention, yes.

Ramona Koval: So who is this guy who gave the interview to the Paris Review? I mean, you're a much more thoughtful presence than the one you project often or you have projected, and you have examined...in the way Joyce Carol Oates said, you've examined America in a Dostoevsky fashion, but you have looked at America like she has, she has been devoting her time to looking at this country and where it is going, and quite a few of your American compatriots have done the same, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. So where do you think your country is at now?

James Ellroy: I think America will prevail as the world's superpower. I think a more prudent, more conservative man will be elected president in 2012...

Ramona Koval: More prudent than Obama?

James Ellroy: Obama will go out with his tail between his legs. I am entirely optimistic about the United States of America, and it is a very unpopular view to have today and people think I'm crazy, and I know I'm right.

Ramona Koval: What did you think about Obama being elected?

James Ellroy: I thought it was a Jim Dandy moment, it was a nice American moment. Look back retrospectively, you are not going to vote for Herbert Hoover over FDR in 1932, you're not going to vote for Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980, and you're not going to vote for John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008. All American leaders have two options; transcend or fuck up.

Ramona Koval: How do you think Obama should have transcended in the last four years?

James Ellroy: It hasn't been four years quite yet, I remain hopeful. I refrained from detailed critique because I think it's the best thing for America.

Ramona Koval: If you refrain from detailed critique as it is the best thing for America?

James Ellroy: Yes.

Ramona Koval: Because if you didn't...what would happen?

James Ellroy: I am not here to shit on America in a foreign country.

Ramona Koval: Fair enough. But I think I was thinking also about the public conversation about God, about religion in America, which I found to be very unusual in comparative democracies around the world, and I was just interested to see how you see it. I mean, there are people who don't believe that evolution exists, there are people who believe in angels, a lot of people, apparently, according to the surveys.

James Ellroy: God has been in the room with me on numerous occasions. God left a door open for me while I was walking down Pico Boulevard coughing up blood in a rainstorm when I was 26 years old. I believe in God. There are people who don't. It is their prerogative.

Ramona Koval: James Ellroy, open about his faith but coy on American politics. He holds nothing back though in his memoir The Hilliker Curse. As he explained to a packed Times Cheltenham Literary Festival audience, the memoir, his second, now that that's out of the way he's going back to the success of earlier books.

James Ellroy: I am working on the second LA Quartet. It is my most megalo, maniacal, extended work of fiction to date. The first LA Quartet, Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz circumscribed 1947 to 1959 LA. The Underworld USA trilogy American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover are the whole of America from '58 to '72. The second LA Quartet goes back further in time and takes existing characters and puts them in LA the month of Pearl Harbour as much younger people.

Ramona Koval: What do you think the importance was about that moment?

James Ellroy: I believe what Admiral Yamamoto said the day after Pearl Harbour, 'What I fear we have done is to waken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.' I love the sentiment. This is my love poem to my country and to the city I came from.

Ramona Koval: You say that you like to sit in a room and think and you don't like to read other people's work, so how would you approach doing a historical piece like that?

James Ellroy: I do what I always do, I hire researchers, they compile fact sheets and chronologies. The outline for the first novel of the new LA Quartet will be 450 pages long. Having a superstructure that enormous, that detailed, that dramatically inviolate allows me to live extemporaneously and improvisationally in each and every scene.

Ramona Koval: So what do they bring to you, these researchers? What do you ask for?

James Ellroy: I come up with questions that I need to have answered so that I can grant verisimilitude, the proper level of topicality to a time that I was not alive for. I have to have the information, then I trust myself to extrapolate and fill in all the blanks.

Ramona Koval: Do you have a story that you have in your head first about these characters when they were younger and what the guts of the narrative might be and then send out the researchers to say this guy lives here, I need to know what that was like at the time, I need to know what it was like in the marines or what was going on in Japan or what was going on in Washington, what the conversations were. Is that the sort of thing?

James Ellroy: I need all of that. The most pressing job for my researcher is to read my last seven novels and figure out how old these fuckers were on December 7th 1941 so that I am not putting underage kids in uniform.

Ramona Koval: So when it all comes back, you trust it, you trust that it's all what you want, you don't feel as if you have to go and smell the places and touch things and take it in like that?

James Ellroy: Ramona, it all comes down to this; how well can you make this shit up? As you well know.

Ramona Koval: I should have known that before I asked it. But it's so unusual, it is an unusual method of a writer going about things.

James Ellroy: I am diligent, I am methodical. I trust my imagination. If I am factually armed, if I am armed with the superstructure of the 80-megaton outline, then I know I can write the individual scenes and make it a coherent dramatic whole. I have learned more from listening to the symphonies of Beethoven and Anton Bruckner about constructing narrative than I have from reading any book.

Ramona Koval: Now that the Hilliker Curse is finished, as you say in this book, this book is going to relieve you of the way you had been before that. Does it work like that? Do you still have to fight those demons that you were talking about?

James Ellroy: I never loved another human being anywhere near as much as I love Erika Schickel. I've never learned as much from a human being as I've learned from Erika Schickel. I'm not always looking over my shoulder for the next image. I can't believe that God gave me this gift at this stage of my life.

Ramona Koval: It's been fantastic having James Ellroy in Cheltenham. Please thank him.

The self-confessed 62-year-old adolescent James Ellroy, now very much in love, in conversation with me at the Cheltenham Festival of literature. His memoir The Hilliker Cruse is published by Random House.

Publications

Title: The Hilliker curse: My pursuit of women

Author: James Ellroy. http://www.ellroy.com/

Publisher: Random House