Mother Night EMILY GORDON
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Mother Night EMILY GORDON posed, to hide. Ellroy’s father, he Writes, MY DRRR PLRCES: An L.R. Crime Memoir. “never told me that sitting in the dark was By James Ellroy. a strange thing to do.” Ellroy spent his life Knopf. 351 pp. $25. doing exactly that. Well known for genre-mixing and efore dhwn on June 22, 1958, James -bending, Ellroy here makes his biggest Ellroy’s mother, Jean, a IC a Geneva leap yet: atrue-crime detective story, an OdeIia Hilliker, was raped, strangled to L.A.’ social history and a kind of romance. death and dumped on an empty road The result is a twisted literary memoir, the in El Monte, California. Ellroy was 10. white-hot spinning of a loner and autodi- what does it mean for a best-selling crime dact. “My father was a liar. My mother was novelist when his mother is a case-a num- a fabricator”; being a Writer, Ellroy’s a liar ber filed in a dusty archive labeled “un- too. For years he set fictional characters in solved”? My Dark Places, a memoir as the historical past, then re-wrote history. much about Ellroy’ s evolution as a writer Confined to the forms of real life, cold facts as it is about his mother and the search for and un-outlinable characters, in My Dark her murderer, takes the sustained anguish Places Ellroy is more powerful than ever. of that experience and builds a monument. Nearly all narratives of our parents It’s as The Redhead that Ellroy imagined his are patchy; we spend our lives assembling connections and explanations. Until he was motherfor much of his la$ie: an icon, a beacon, 46, Ellroy had little to go on but this one a red light that arrested gentleness. event, framed innewspaper clippings, and his traumatized memory (her bourbon, ap- He was a history junkie fiom way back. propriately, was Early Times). There was Hooked on crime news as a kid, he was . no trial, and the murder festered in his “developing a tabloid sensibility.. .. My imagination. “Every mystery solved was brain was a police blotter.” In his novels he my love for her in ellipses,” he Writes. He exhumes the past along with the secrets it has signed all 50,000 copies of this book, would have preferred to keep. But to get a sculpture cast from a mold of missing at his own history-not forties L.A. or pieces and silence. J.F.K.’s Camelot-he had to go beyondhis James Ellroy’s dark places are in those fields of expertise: “I had to attack the cen- ellipses and that signature. They are every- tral story of my life.” thing he has censored or pushed under: the Many fans of Ellroy’s oeuvre (twelve street they found his mother on; the bar books, the kind whose spine you break where she was seen dancing with her date, without shame-among them Clandestine, a c‘swarthy man”; the drive-in where they white Jazz and LA. Confidential) are al- had eaten earlier, whose carhop observed ready familiar with that story, an exploita- that Jean’s clothes were disheveled and the tion Ellroy fieely admits. Being “a thief man seemed distracted. One place is Ell- and a voyeur” may have served his Writing , roy’s own body, the pitch darkness of his well, but he felt cheap presenting Geneva’s sexuality; another is the “cavelikey’L.A. history as his own: “I plundered her in a hotel room he rents to consider her; and the fever dream and denied my own message first jail cell whose darkness “jump-started of yearning.’? This time, “I had to submit to [his] imagination.” Darkness is history that her spirit. If I hurt her, I’d feel her censure.” wants to stay, like a weak-shelled creature, My Dark Places is composed of four under its rock. The darkest places of all are sections,replete WithEllroy’s heart-surgeon Jean’s, her involuntary legacy: Divorced humor and cool irony: “The Redhead,” from James’s father, her past life a blank, “The Kid in the Picture,” “Stoner” and she came to El Monte, her neighbors sup- “Geneva Hilliker.” Just the facts: “The Red- 26 The Nation. December 2,1996 head‘, is a chronicle of Jean’s murder, as “I read a beat-up copy of Atlas Shrugged represented by her L.A.P.D. homicide file. and came to the unsound conclusion that It offers the bare bones of a mystery, irre- I was a superman.” sistibly inviting us to play detective. It’s not It can be hard to be in the same book in Ellroy’s voice but the detached narration with this Ellroy, who lives the life of adoles- of cops on the stand-“The coroner’s cent fantasy: expelled from school, sleep- deputy took a scalpel and made a deep 6- ing in flophouses, locked up forty-odd times inch-long incision in the victim’s abdo- for drunkenness, theft and trespassing (jail men.. .jabbed a meat thermometer into the was his “health retreat,’) before he kicked liver and got a reading-of 90 degrees”- what was fueling him. The prevailing voice or a nonchalant private eye: “Dead white in “The Kid in the Picture” is raw and women always stirred things ~p.’~It’sas crass-less the hepcat lingo of his thrillers The Redhead-a noir moniker, a clichk that than a hyper-angry, juvenile slang (“The renders her nameless-that Ellroy imag- high was gooooood... [it] left me dingy ined Jean for much of his life: an icon, a and schizzy”). Listening to this kid can be beacon, a red light that arrested gentleness. wearying. But then, as Ellroy himself likes to say, not every book should have a true- llroy’s protagonists tend to lose their blue hero; “I have empathy for monsters,” innocence, through betrayal, carnage or he’s said, and so do we. both. But Ellroy was never innocent. His His lust for stories of the dead turns out intimacy was with the politics of divorce, to be even more potent than his chemical [its ugly scenes and shameful loyalties- addictions. Young Ellroy is perpetually “a bifurcated life diwied up between two tanked on a cocktail of ego and media, fol- people locked in an intractable mutual ha- lowing female-murder-victim cases ob.- tred.” Screaming his father’s vicious slurs sessively, fantasizing himself, by turns, at Jean and getting slapped for it is one of as killer and rescuer, punisher and lover. James’s last clear memories of his mother The BlackDahlia murder (which he would You should be subscribing to alive. In a child‘s view of cause and effect, “solve” @his 1987 novel of the same name) our magazine too. it’s a simple equation. “I hated her and lust- was the 13-year-oldJames’s favorite, “ex- Because week in and week ed for her. Then she was dead.” plicitly pomog~aphic’~subject and his deep- out The Nation brings you the “The Kid in the Picture” is Ellroy, at est bad dream: “She was the heart of my likes of Patricia Williams, Bar- 10, posed by newspaper photographers at crime world. I didn’t know that she was the bara Ehrenreich and Alexander his neighbor’s workbench the day of his redhead transmogrified.” Cockburn in every issue. mother’s death. He’s sent back to L.A. to It’s not long before the suppressed live with his father-what he’d wanted‘all longing leaps up and his fantasies collide: They’re not only some of the along-whom Jean had kicked out four “I jerry-rigged a story straight off.. My best writers around-they do years before. He and his father (a “Holly- mother didn’t die in El Monte. She wasn’t their best work for us. wood bottom-feeder” and Rita Hayworth’s a drunk. She loved me woman to man.. .. It onetime agent-thenvise a profligate was the most impassioned and loving story with his own invented past) live in a filthy I’d ever perpetrated. It left me ashamed house. His father has his own crude theo- and horrified of what I had inside me.” ries of how Jean, “a drunk and a whore,” He stops short of acting out all the horrors ended up dead. After years of brainwash- he imagines, though; and after a complete TlheNation. ing and neglect, he dies of a heart attack, mind-and-body breakdown, he somehow I=mIm==”m 7 leaving James at 17 a furious, maladjusted manages to pull himself together. He cad- YES! I WANT TO SUBSCRIBE TO orphan-his brain tuned to death as though dies at posh golf courses and starts to write. 1 YOUR MAGAZINE, TOO. Send me 24 I it were a radio frequency. And there we leave him for a while. issues of The Nation for $21.95- I Even before his mother’s murder, Ell- l-.$38 off the newsstand price. roy says, he was “the poster boy for the If- n the scat sentences and wise-ass repartee 1 (Offer good for new subscribers only.) I You-Can’t-Love-Me-Notice-Me chapter in of “Stoner”-a portrait of Bill Stoner, I NAME (Please print) I all child psychology textbooks.” He gradu- the retired L.A. County detective Ellroy ates fiom “stilking” girls fiom school on his hired in 1994 to reopen Geneva’s file- I ADDRESS bike to breaking into their houses for money lie the other romance, besides Ellroy 1 CITY STATE ZIP and panties; from snitching pulp novels to and Jean’s, ofthis book.