NOT FAMOUS ENOUGH: HOW POLITICAL CORRECTNESS SUNK ONE OF THE BEST Y-A NOVELS IN THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON
(This essay was written in 2018)
This year marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of Famous All Over Town, one of the best coming-of-age stories in the American literary canon, but don’t expect to see any retrospectives or appreciations of this masterpiece in the mainstream media. The book is funnier, more moving, and better written than Catcher in the Rye, but the fact that it was written by an old white guy rather than a young Hispanic guy keeps it from being better known. Originally, this wasn’t a problem. The book was published under a pseudonym – Danny Santiago (a sort of Latinized version of the author’s real name: Daniel Lewis James) – and the author’s bio suggested he was young (“grew up in Los Angeles,” “his first novel”). The book received raves upon publication. The reviewer for the New York Times wrote: “It is cheering to report that Danny Santiago is a natural…His Famous All Over Town is full of poverty, violence, emotional injury and other forms of major disaster, all vividly and realistically portrayed, yet, like a spring feast-day in a barrio, it is nevertheless relentlessly joyous. Best of all is its language…a rich street Chicano English that pleases the ear like sly and cheerful Mejicana music. Famous All Over Town is a classic of the Chicano urban experience. And Danny Santiago is good news.”
The book was published in 1983. In early 1984 it won a $5000 literary prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The publisher wanted to nominate the book for a Pulitzer Prize but the author refused to provide an author’s photo (a necessity for a Pulitzer nomination). But soon the forces of political correctness turned against it. On August 16, 1984, the New York Review of Books published an essay by novelist John Gregory Dunne in which he exposed that the book was written not by a young Chicano born in L.A. but by an old white guy with a patrician background: moneyed family, Andover Academy prep school, classics degree from Yale, etc. Dunne’s exposé was well intentioned. Daniel Lewis James was not only a friend of Dunne’s and his wife, Joan Didion, but also their former landlord. For a while, in the late 1960s, Dunne and Didion lived in a home owned by James and his wife, Lilith. Dunne thought it was a mistake to publish the novel under a pseudonym. He wanted to show the world that fiction writers don’t need to be born into a particular culture in order to write effectively about it. But Dunne’s essay ignited a bit of a firestorm. Soon the self-proclaimed arbiters of authenticity began pointing their fingers at James and crying “cultural appropriation.”
Scholar Arnd Bohm, writing in The International Fiction Review, summed up the response this way:
The reception turned negative and indeed hostile when John Gregory Dunne revealed "The Secret of Danny Santiago" in the New York Review of Books…The reaction ranged from consternation to anger. How could James have managed to dupe the publishers and the critics? How did an elderly affluent white author dare to appropriate the voice as well as the topics of minority writing? The Before Columbus Foundation sponsored a symposium at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco on the question "Danny Santiago: Art or Fraud," with the consensus opinion of those who participated leaning toward the accusation of fraud.
Fortunately, political correctness was not as powerful a cultural force in those days as it is now. Plenty of voices in the literary community, including some Hispanic ones, came to James’ defense. Interviewed by the New York Times, novelist Thomas Sanchez, an early champion of James’ novel, said, “A work must be judged by the work itself, not the political or ethnic orientation of the author. A lot of professional Chicanos, professional blacks, professional Jews, professional Anglo-Saxons say no one else can cut into their territory. I don't believe in terms of the human race there is any such thing as territory. What creativity and art are all about are the absolute freedom to cross all those lines and go into any point of view in terms of the context of the work.''
Had it been published in 2018 the book might have inspired the kind of pearl-clutching from the illiberal left that recently motivated The Nation to apologize for a poem it had published, called “How-To,” that was written by a white man (Anders Carlson-Wee) from a black man’s perspective. Or it might have created the kind of tempest that brewed up when author Laura Moriarty decided to include a Muslim character in her young-adult novel American Heart (2018). Accused of creating a “white savior narrative,” Moriarty was denounced in often obscene terms on numerous online forums devoted to young-adult fiction. Spooked by the outcry, Kirkus shamefully took the unprecedented step of withdrawing a positive review it had published of Moriarty’s novel.
The backlash against “Danny Santiago” wasn’t as harsh. His book remained in print and no positive reviews were pulled. But, given the magnitude of James’ achievement, the book’s relative obscurity these days is damn near a crime. At the website GoodReads.com, the book has only fifteen reader reviews. This comment, by “Melissa” demonstrates that the pseudonym controversy still hovers over the book’s reputation: “The fact that the author's name is fake so that an old white dude could pretend it was written by a Chicano author does, in fact, take away from the book.” At Amazon.com the book has a mere thirteen reader reviews, including such comments as: “The author has a controversial background and that disrupted the whole reading experience.” The book deserves the kind of prominence that To Kill a Mockingbird (10,175 Amazon.com reader reviews) and Catcher in the Rye (3,613 reader reviews) enjoy. But misguided notions about authenticity have denied the novel its due.
The book does an excellent job of illustrating that Chicano culture, which nowadays is more likely to be referred to as Latino or Hispanic-American culture, is not a monolithic entity. Among the Chicanos in Famous All Over Town, the American-born tend to look down upon the Mexican-born. Those who arrived from Mexico recently are looked down upon by those who arrived years ago. The book shows that even the Spanish language has many permutations, not all of them appreciated equally by all Spanish speakers:
“Ai-yi-yi,” Mr. Pilger said when he saw [the narrator’s grades]. “C-minus average with a D in Spanish? In Spanish, Rudy Medina?”
I didn’t mention it but Miss Helstrom’s Spanish was from Spain. If you talked Mexican, forget it. Only Anglos got A’s with her.
While visiting Mexico with his family, the narrator and his sister find the local Spanish hard to fathom. “Eeeho,” his sisters says, “but they sure talk real crazy Spanish down here. Mercado for marketa, camion for troque, and I had to act out lip-stique, if you can believe it.”
At another point, the narrator says: I went in and found my grandma jabbering that rattle-tattle language of hers…
Of an Italian-American bank manager in L.A., Rudy says: He spoke Spanish almost like a native but with spaghetti sauce on it.
Famous All Over Town engages with many issues that are even more inflammatory now than they were in 1983. At one point the police shoot dead a Chicano teenager who has stolen a car worth only about $50. The author makes clear that the youth was killed not because he stole a car, but because he was poor and Hispanic. The shooting and its aftermath are major episodes in the story:
“You mean to tell me,” Mr. Pilger shouted, “you mean to tell me two weeks’ suspension is all that killer gets?”
“Without pay,” I added.
“And then goes back in uniform to shoot some other kid. And nobody protests? Nobody brings charges? Where’s the ACLU?”
The best reason to read Famous All Over Town isn’t its topicality or its insights into Chicano street life in East L.A. circa 1970. The best reason to read the book is that it is beautifully written. The family’s trip to Mexico goes sour when Rudy and his sister Lena criticize their macho father in front of his in-laws. Almost instantly the father decides to end the vacation and drive his family back to L.A. Here’s how the author describes it:
We climbed into the Buick like strangers on a bus. Nobody came outside to see us off. Four days ago we rolled in there like the Three Magic Kings. Today we were scuttling off in the dawn like the cucarachas…When you’re a kid, your father is like the sun in the sky. Your whole family circles him like a bunch of planets. He gives you your winters and your summers, your good days and your bad, and it’s a black night when his back is turned to you. But we had disobeyed him. We had shamed him in public, and now our Gravity was all gone. The only thing that held us together was the Buick.
Throughout the novel, the Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation is trying to use eminent domain to get the city to condemn and destroy Shamrock Street, the neighborhood where Rudy Medina and his family live. The family and their neighbors fight this effort but, inevitably, the railroad wins. Here’s Rudy describing the destruction of his neighborhood:
It’s enough to make you cry to see Shamrock Street, the way they murdered it. Don’t tell me houses have no feelings. You should have heard them scream when the bulldozers ripped them down, boards splitting open, plaster crashing, nails hanging in there for dear life. I had to hold my ears…”Stop and look even if it hurts,” I told myself. “Look hard so later you could testify.”
When his proudly Mexican father is humiliated by his countrymen at a border inspection, and Rudy’s mother has to buy their passage through the barrier gates with a pair of beloved earrings, Rudy writes: And after that, on our long road south, my father never saluted the Mexican flag again, and he talked more English than I ever heard him speak in L.A., in gas stations and other public places.
In his short story “Red Wind,” Raymond Chandler produced the most famous literary description of the Southern California weather phenomenon known as the Santa Ana wind: There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
For my money, this description from Famous All Over Townis even better: A certain wind visits L.A. from time to time, and the Santana is its name. It comes roaring in hot off the desert like a raging bull, and so dry your mouth tastes full of sand. Women snatch washing off the line before it goes flying over the next-door roof. They scream their kids off the street, spank them for nothing, and then turn up the television to drown out the world while the beans burn black on the stove. Men do worse things. Everybody seems to hate that wind. Not me. It stirs my blood around till I’m ready for anything, and the harder it blows, the better I like it. It could blow L.A. into the ocean for all I care.
Here’s one of Rudy’s neighbors describing her precarious financial situation:
“All my life I’ve lived with second-hand,” Virgie preached, “first my father’s house, then my own. Salvation Army and Goodwill, they were my department stores, and sometimes the city dump. Day-olds from the bakery, dented tomato cans, sunburned shirts from store windows. Never two chairs alike and lucky if one shoe matched the other. To me the prettiest thing in the world is a price tag without a Fire Sale on it.”
And here’s Rudy describing the appearance of a cop car on his street:
A black-and-white had just turned into Shamrock and now it came prowling up the street. A black-and-white on Shamrock is like a cloud passing across the sun, it chills you. Loud guys get quiet, quiet guys get loud. Some walk casually into backyards, others start flaky conversations and everybody feels Wanted For Murder. The cops raked the sidewalk with those glassy eyes of theirs, and I stared right back at them. They don’t like that.
There is a beautiful little book lost inside the American literary canon that’s just perfect for readers both young and old but almost nobody is reading it because of a 35-year-old controversy involving a pseudonym used by the book’s long dead author. Curiously, Daniel Lewis James came by his pseudonym out of necessity. He and his wife, while successfully employed in the film industry in the 1940s (he was an assistant director on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator), were active members of the communist party. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee called them to testify. Both James and his wife refused to self-incriminate. They were blacklisted. To make ends meet, James needed to work under a pseudonym. He began writing screenplays under the name Daniel Hyatt. For 25 years Daniel and Lilith James served as volunteer social workers in the largely Latino East L.A. neighborhood depicted in the novel. When it came time to write a novel set in that neighborhood, the penname Daniel Hyatt didn’t seem to suit. It wasn’t until he came up with the name Danny Santiago that James finally felt free to write about the people and places he knew so well. If Senator McCarthy hadn’t come gunning for him, he might never have even considered the use of a pseudonym. If you don’t like the fact that the name Danny Santiago appears on the cover of Famous All Over Town, you have the U.S. Government to blame for it.
The ending of the novel strongly suggests that the author was planning a sequel. If so, the controversy surrounding the book may have dimmed his enthusiasm for continuing the project. In any case, the author died in 1988 at 77 years old without ever publishing another book. The one novel he left us is a masterpiece of cultural appropriation. You can no longer punish him for his “crime” by refusing to read his book. You can only punish yourself.