Mike Davis lives in a trim one-story house on a tranquil street in middle-class residential Pasadena. The onetime truck driver and current MacArthur fellow, who says he couldn't even compose a letter until he was 30, shuffles amiably across the porch to extend his hand in greeting to PW. At 52, he's dressed in youth's eternal uniform of blue jeans, T-shirt and sandals, without the storm clouds over his head that a reading of his fierce work would lead one to expect. His gray hair flips forward, his middle reveals a slight paunch and his face has the air of a slightly bemused choirboy. His wife, Alessandra, a painter born in Mexico, is on her way out the door to do battle with the government over a green card.
"I talk a lot," Davis warns PW before leading us to a dining table generously set with breakfast treats. He has just returned from one of his frequent visits to Ireland, the permanent residence of his eight-year-old son (his daughter is away for the summer), and he rapidly pops off on topic after topic -- the summer heat, this year's abundant crop of rattlesnakes in the nearby San Gabriel mountains, the unique reproductive capacity of coyotes, the fruitless efforts by the citrus industry early in the century to change the area's vegetation in the misguided belief that it could alter weather patterns. In person, Davis is much less fearsome than on the page, but the same sharp edge, intense delivery and idiosyncratic mixture of erudition and street talk that characterize his prose is evident in his conversation. His concentration is unwavering.
Davis is a historian by training, but this description hardly does justice to the books he writes: intricate patchworks of urban theory, literary and social criticism that pierce Los Angeles's urban and social sprawl. He is known for bringing a radical perspective to the culture of palm trees, freeways and unchecked urbanization that, is so often seen as a garden of Eden, not an Eden run amok.
His writing style is an equally distinctive blend of heady ideas and incendiary, sometimes lyrical prose. Though he writes resolutely about L.A., he is always on the prowl for the keys to some larger theory, whether social, political, economic or scientific -- or all combined. In the service of these goals, he hobnobs with academics and scientists, schoolteachers, former trucker buddies and hardnosed kids from South Central. He is widely credited with pointing out the gross social inequities that led to the Rodney King riots of 1992, but he dismisses the notion. "Any 10-year-old could have done that. It was no feat to predict them."
Davis has a devout following in Southern California, a reputation based primarily on his 1990 book, City of Quartz, published in hardcover by Verso and now available as a Vintage paperback. Many readers greeted it as a messianic text; the book belongs on any short list of must-read titles about life in the City of Angels.
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Metropolitan Books) is his eagerly awaited follow-up. The book is an unsettling analysis of the relationship between natural and social catastrophe in an area where nature brings abrupt, violent changes, "with periods of boredom and inactivity followed by brief moments of terror." In Davis's view, the culprits are not earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides and coyotes that prey on household pets but rather shameful public policies that have transformed natural hazards into serious social ills. Going further and developing ideas first hinted at in City of Quartz, Davis analyzes how the "politics of disaster" have become "the moral equivalent of class warfare." It's a complex, fanatically researched and carefully presented thesis.
Child of the '60s
Davis was born in Southern California to Midwestern Irish-Welsh parents who hitchhiked west during the Depression. In the xenophobic suburbs where he grew up, he thought of himself as half-black, half-Jewish. As a boy, he conducted conversations in his head with an imaginary Russian pal, telling him what it was like to live in the Golden State. As he got older, his thoughts turned to social justice. "I came to consciousness when ordinary citizens were affecting the political process. I was an alienated, angry 16-year-old at a CORE demonstration in 1963. This changed my life in the best possible way."
After a short stay at Reed College in Oregon, he returned home to Southern California and became a community organizer, joined the Communist Party and worked as a long-distance hauler. He did a stint as a tour guide in Hollywood, which proved pivotal to his development as a dark guide to the city's secret history. "You'd buy a spiel from the other drivers and I thought, Why do that? I read all of Carey McWilliams [the Southern Californian historian who subsequently became editor of the Nation] as a way to develop a spiel, and got intimate with California history." (McWilliams's most notable book is the 1946 book Southern California: An Island on the Land.) At 30, Davis made a break with blue-collar life and resumed his undergraduate studies at UCLA, eventually specializing in labor history.
His early writing career took off during an association with the New Left Review, a Marxist journal published by Verso and based in London, where Davis was invited to edit and write. The six years he spent in the London office led to his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream, about Reaganism and the American Labor movement, published by Verso in 1986. During those years, Davis also established Verso's Haymarket series to specialize in radical studies of American politics and culture. A forthcoming title is about the threat chain stores pose not only to independent booksellers but also to independent cultural production. As an independent press, Davis says, Verso is as threatened by conglomerates as independent booksellers. "We're quaking in our boots."
Davis's time in London completed his transformation into a serious scholar with important things to say about urban history. When Anna Deveare Smith was at work on her play Twilight Los Angeles, following the 1992 riots, she came to Davis for his views. Originally, he planned to write a community-by-community history of the "uprising," his preferred term for the L.A. rioting, but he stumbled over his own qualms. "Ethically," he says, "I couldn't use journalism to exploit other people's pain and suffering."
Tackling a book from a socio-ecological angle instead provided a new view of L.A. and enabled Davis to bridge the worlds of the riots and the university culture through a powerful new lens, one that historians had not used. "I had become disenchanted with science in the '60s, after John Hersey's book on Hiroshima. This new book gave me a way as a historian to do science." Unlike City of Quartz, which was written without grants, sabbaticals or teaching assistants, or as he wrote at the time "other fancy ingredients," Ecology of Fear was supported by a MacArthur grant. Davis was able to attend a conference on paleoclimatology in Utah, coming away with his head filled with thoughts on El Nino's truly destructive aspects, how it leads to synchronized droughts. He sees the germ of a short book, perhaps The Secret History of the 19th century: El Niño, Famine, and Imperialism. His rallying cry for scholars, he says, is "Less Derrida and more Stephen Jay Gould!"
"Though huge and wonderful," the MacArthur fellowship didn't "address the huge capacity to spend money," he says. His wife doesn't have a job, his mortgage payments are relentless and he has to pay child support. Davis's holy grail is a regular full-time teaching job. "I've had utterly no luck finding this in Southern California." A prospect is blooming in the East, which he may reluctantly accept, if offered. He has cobbled together a teaching career at such places as the Cesar Chavez Center for Chicano Studies at UCLA, which he compares to CCNY in 1936 "with all those smart Jewish kids," and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, a small, specialized school in West L.A. where he creates one-of-a-kind courses in urban theory, leading his students to metropolitan areas around the Southwest.
"I have more fun than a lot of people. I love getting off campus and into the field. We look for realities not depicted elsewhere." He describes a Tongan bingo parlor in an outlying area of L.A. that he recently visited. "The city never disappoints. You can never be current with it. There's always some reality out there waiting for you."
Being acknowledged now as a writer brings Davis enormous satisfaction. "I like the idea of crafting something and sending it out into the world as part of the bigger picture." Being a popular author is another thing altogether, and he says he's terrible at it. "I can't stand going on the road. I don't like TV, being on the radio, revealing my personal life." (He has been married five times.) He prefers researching and writing and resents time away from it. "I'm tired of myself talking."
In Metropolitan's Sara Bershtel, he says, he has "without question the best editor in the world." He also works with editor Tom Engelhardt and is equally appreciative. Originally, he had a contract with Knopf for Ecology of Fear but ran afoul of the editor-in-chief. "I went to Los Angeles to cover the riots for the Nation," he says. "But I stood Sonny Mehta up for lunch; no mortal should do that. Knopf never forgave me.
"With Metropolitan," he adds, "I've had the experience of a writer's dream with an editor who reads every word and questions everything." In the end, he says, he didn't go along with a lot of the advice but came out with a better book because of it.
Apocalypse, Now!
Ecology of Fear was written during a six-month period at the Getty Research Institute after years of preparation. He spent 12 months immersed in urban disaster fiction for his chapter on "The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles," in which he explores why the city bears the brunt of the nation's primitive urges -- why people cheer while L.A. is buried under rubble or otherwise self-destructs. For the chapter on tornadoes in the L.A. basin ("Our Secret Kansas"), he spent months reading five L.A. dailies published before 1950 and pored over thousands of weather pictures looking for photos of tornadoes. "I like the archeological aspect of it immensely." He maintains an active file system of upward of 15,000 files, with thousands more stashed away in his garage. "Not knowing when to stop research is my personal demon," he comments. The photos in the book took three months to find, and $5000 of his own money. "I'd rather have good photos than anything," he says, showing off two favorites: a man on the beach hunting for rattlesnakes and a California prison guard holding two dead killer African bees.
His next book, which Davis views as the last in a trilogy about L.A. and which is still unnamed, will be more people-centered than either City of Quartz or Ecology of Fear. He is interested in the influence of immigrant cultures, especially East Asian family capitalism, on L.A.'s economy. The trilogy, he explains, derived from a fantasy. Three great thinkers, Walter Benjamin, Fernand Braudel, and Friedrich Engels, each with a different understanding of history and society, meet in a bar. They talk, trade ideas, agree to take a look at L.A. Benjamin writes City of Quartz. Braudel writes Ecology of Fear. Engels writes the third.
Given the litany of gloom in his work, what does he hope people will get from it? Why offer up a worldview so catastrophic that there seems to be no way out? "Any political activist wants people to act," he says. "My 16-year old daughter gave the best criticism of my work I've ever heard. 'You think you're organizing by telling how bad things are,' she said. 'You've got to tell how they can change things.' The next one will be less about how bad things are," Davis says. "Its focus will be on the actors trying to effect change.
"I may sound dire and hopeless," he adds, "but I have a lot of hope for the next generation."
