James Ellroy shoots Marilyn Monroe | EUROtoday
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PTo get in contact with James Ellroy, one of the best factor to do may be to have a time machine. We want to speak by video, however he doesn't have a pc. He offers interviews over the telephone, however doesn't like cell telephones and doesn't have one. He asks to name us on a landline. We can't discover one. He lastly agrees to speak to us on our mobile phone, the appointment is made a number of weeks upfront. At the precise time (7 p.m. at our place, 11 a.m. at his place in Denver), an unknown quantity seems on the mobile phone display. On the opposite finish of the road, James Ellroy. What historical system is he calling from? The sound crackles slightly round his deep voice. His press officer has warned us: we should not speak to him in regards to the current time, he would possibly get very offended. Knowing James Ellroy's legendary anger, we adjust to the rule of going again to the previous.
Going again in time is, in any case, the tacit contract between this man and his readers, whom he has been main for forty-four years and in 23 books, stubbornly, in direction of an “elsewhere”, fairly often Los Angeles, and a “before”: his novels, amongst that are the immense successes which might be The Black Dahlia, My Dark Side, and even the trilogy Underworld USA, all happen between the Nineteen Forties and Nineties.
“Marilyn, I don't like her”
His newest work, The Enchanters, to be launched on September 18, is the third quantity of a brand new “Los Angeles Quintet,” the primary two of which, Perfidia And The Coming Storm are set in World War II and depict relations between America and Japan.
This e-book encompasses a determine already well-known to Ellroy's readers: Freddy Otash, an actual character within the legal historical past of the United States, a former corrupt cop, a lawless personal detective, a fixer for the scandal journal Confidential, that James Ellroy knew effectively. The story, of which he’s the narrator, takes place in 1962 (The Coming Storm ran till the Sixties) and revolves across the demise of Marilyn Monroe. Overdose or assassination? The drama has shocked America, however leaves Ellroy chilly: he hates the actress, who seems frivolous, superficial and manipulative underneath his pen. But why the hell is he so harsh?
“I judge everyone, says the writer, who can be heard smiling. Especially Marilyn Monroe. I don't like her as a human being: she's erratic, hollow, perverse. She used people and let herself be used by them as an object. She was just an alcoholic and a drug addict who was lucky enough to live much longer than she should have. I don't like her as an actress. I've only seen her first three films: the others, I couldn't. If he devotes an entire book to his anti-heroine, weaving an eminently complex, dense and rhythmic plot, in which crooked cops and hidden microphones, starlets obsessed with their image and perverse psychoanalysts, power-hungry politicians and ultra-violent henchmen cross paths against a backdrop of haunting and sometimes grotesque pornographic imagery, it is to better denounce America in general and the sixties especially.
“Unrepentant voyeur”
It's strange that he feels so comfortable in the past, as he seems to abhor that era. “It was a crazy time. People were wallowing in sin, drifting further and further away from God, closer to the false gods of drugs and psychoanalysis. They were orchestrating chaos, and it was this chaos that I wanted to capture in my book,” he said. Sometimes Ellroy doesn't talk anymore: he preaches. “My e-book reeks of disapproval,” hammers this convinced Christian, who pillories Marx, Freud and secular humanism, whose essence he detests “falsehood”. He vomits psychoanalysis, this “a focus of completely anti-Christian egocentrism.” He thinks, then professes: “I think the answer is Jesus Christ. I think everything comes from Jesus Christ and must return to Him.” The austere crackling of his antediluvian telephone line haunts the deep silence that punctuates his words.
To investigate the death of Marilyn Monroe, Freddy Otash applies the method of the “human digital camera”. Endowed with a photographic memory, he captures crime scenes and “undresses” them in his mind until he unravels their mystery. Does James Ellroy do the same when he writes, his pen tracing the setting of his novels with ultra-sensory precision? “When I was a kid, I loved walking my dog late at night and peering through windows, like Freddy. But I’m not Freddy. My books reflect my perspective on the world, my love of crime fiction, my desire to live in it, and my turbulent emotional and mental life. I’m not a human camera. I’ve just been given a gift from God for writing.”
So didn't he need to learn to write? “God bless those who take creative writing classes, he answers. I didn't go to college. I looked at the world, I was obsessed with girls, women, actresses. I was 14 in 1962, I bought semi-pornographic novels at the liquor store. I read all of Harold Robbins' books, whose titles are more than evocative, like The Gynecologist. I read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler. That's how I learned to write. By the time I was in my twenties, I had nothing to do but pick up my pen.”
“My pen, my paper, my plan”
James Ellroy despises modern literature. He doesn't learn something that comes out in bookstores. “Trends don't interest me. The life of publishing leaves me indifferent. I am simply grateful to France for loving my literature more than all other countries, because you have known, unlike the Americans, how to preserve your critical spirit.” We enterprise to ask this unrepentant past-minded individual his opinion on post-apocalyptic fiction. Didn't Cormac McCarthy, a large of American literature, have considered one of his best successes with The Road ? Ellroy has story on this topic. “One day I was alone in the office of Sonny Mehta, the greatest American publisher. I picked up a manuscript, a boy and his father walking in a post-nuclear wasteland, and I laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought it was a parody of an end-of-the-world novel. Sonny came back and said, ‘James, why are you laughing?’ I held up the manuscript and said, ‘This is the stupidest shit I’ve ever read!’ He said, ‘This is the next Cormac McCarthy book.’” James Ellroy hates McCarthy's lack of dialogue markers, a legacy of Faulkner, whom he additionally dislikes. “It's contemptuous of the reader, snobbish and elitist. I believe in the American popular novel. I want a plot, a love story, violence. Give me that. And may McCarthy rest in peace.”
Ellroy finds peace in music. He loves jazz and classical music, Beethoven greater than anybody else. “When I was a kid, my music teacher put on a record. I heard ‘ta-ta-ta-taaaa’ – he sings, in a resounding voice, the first bars of the 5thSymphony –, and I was cooked. Bitten for life.” Music inspires him more than anything: “Symphonies are novels with a power that literature does not possess. They tell us stories.” Every day, for two hours, he listens to records, sitting on a chair, doing nothing else. “By assimilation, the symphonies inspire me with the form of a crime novel. There is in my subconscious, as in music, a thematic unity in which my sense of intrigue is included.” He writes with a sense of the sacred and Calvinist ethics: “I like to be alone. I like to create from nothing. I don’t like to leave my house. My pen, my paper, my plan.” Is he completely happy like this? “I’m a Christian, an optimistic and basically completely happy man,” James Ellroy replies. What can I say, besides… so be it.
James Ellroy in just a few dates
March 4, 1948 Born in Los Angeles.
June 22, 1958 His mom is murdered.
1977 After a number of years of delinquency, Ellroy turns into a golf caddy.
1981 First novel, Brown's Requiem.
1984 First success, Bloody Moon.
1987 Ellroy enters the legend with The Black Dahliafirst quantity of the “Los Angeles Quartet”.
1995 American Tabloidfirst quantity of the trilogy Underworld USA.
1997 My darkish aspectautobiography.
2015 Perfidiafirst quantity of the “Los Angeles Quintet”.
Our Review
BOnly a intelligent individual may kind out the reality from the lies on this sprawling novel: James Ellroy refuses to say how a lot of the story is actual.
August 1962: The iconic Marilyn Monroe is discovered lifeless at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Los Angeles. At the identical time, an actress is kidnapped, and a pervert haunts the homes of the Californian metropolis.
Freddy Otash, a former cop who’s rotten to the core, an unsavory detective and an inveterate voyeur, but additionally a fervent believer and tragic lover of sophisticated heroines (together with actress Lois Nettleton and Pat Kennedy, sister of Bob and John), is shipped by the top of the LAPD to rewrite Marilyn's story and stifle the proof of her relationship with the President of the United States. Otash had been spying on Monroe for a number of months: the e-book unfolds over a number of time intervals, earlier than and after her demise, and interweaves the threads of the assorted scandals which might be making headlines in a Los Angeles that resembles Sodom and Gomorrah, till its macabre and mind-blowing decision.
Faithful to the dense and feverish universe of James Ellroy, carried by a stunning fashion, The Enchanters overflowing with violence, love and debauchery §
“The Enchanters”by James Ellroy. Translated from American by Sophie Aslanides (Payot & Rivages, coll. “Rivages/Noir”, 400 p., €26). To be revealed on September 18.
https://www.lepoint.fr/livres/les-enchanteurs-james-ellroy-flingue-marilyn-monroe-07-09-2024-2569646_37.php