California Plush
The only thing I miss about Los Angeles
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
--pimps, surplus stores, footprints of the stars
--descending through the city
fast as the law would allow
through the lights, then rising to the stack
out of the city
to the stack where lanes are stacked six deep
and you on top; the air
now clean, for a moment weightless
without memories, or
need for a past.
The need for the past
is so much at the center of my life
I write this poem to record my discovery of it,
my reconciliation.
It was in Bishop, the room was done
in California plush: we had gone into the coffee shop, were told
you could only get a steak in the bar:
I hesitated,
not wanting to be an occasion of temptation for my father
but he wanted to, so we entered
a dark room, with amber water glasses, walnut
tables, captain's chairs,
plastic doilies, papier-mâché bas-relief wall ballerinas,
German memorial plates "bought on a trip to Europe,"
Puritan crosshatch green-yellow wallpaper,
frilly shades, cowhide
booths--
I thought of Cambridge:
the lovely congruent elegance
of Revolutionary architecture, even of
ersatz thirties Georgian
seemed alien, a threat, sign
of all I was not--
to bode order and lucidity
as an ideal, if not reality--
not this California plush, which
also
I was not.
And so I made myself an Easterner,
finding it, after all, more like me
than I had let myself hope.
And now, staring into the embittered face of
my father,
again, for two weeks, as twice a year,
I was back.
The waitress asked us if we wanted a drink.
Grimly, I waited until he said no...
Before the tribunal of the world I submit the following
document:
Nancy showed it to us,
in her apartment at the model,
as she waited month by month
for the property settlement, her children grown
and working for their father,
at fifty-three now alone,
a drink in her hand:
as my father said,
"They keep a drink in her hand":
Name Wallace du Bois
Box No 128 Chino, Calif.
Date July 25 ,19 54
Mr Howard Arturian
I am writing a letter to you this afternoon while I'm in the
mood of writing. How is everything getting along with you these
fine days, as for me everything is just fine and I feel great except for
the heat I think its lot warmer then it is up there but I don't mind
it so much. I work at the dairy half day and I go to trade school the
other half day Body & Fender, now I am learning how to spray
paint cars I've already painted one and now I got another car to
paint. So now I think I've learned all I want after I have learned all
this. I know how to straighten metals and all that. I forgot to say
"Hello" to you. The reason why I am writing to you is about a job,
my Parole Officer told me that he got letter from and that you want
me to go to work for you. So I wanted to know if its truth. When
I go to the Board in Feb. I'll tell them what I want to do and where
I would like to go, so if you want me to work for you I'd rather have
you sent me to your brother John in Tonapah and place to stay for
my family. The Old Lady says the same thing in her last letter that
she would be some place else then in Bishop, thats the way I feel
too.and another thing is my drinking problem. I made up my mind
to quit my drinking, after all what it did to me and what happen.
This is one thing I'll never forget as longs as I live I never want
to go through all this mess again. This sure did teach me lot of things
that I never knew before. So Howard you can let me know soon
as possible. I sure would appreciate it.
P.S From Your Friend
I hope you can read my Wally Du Bois
writing. I am a little nervous yet
--He and his wife had given a party, and
one of the guests was walking away
just as Wallace started backing up his car.
He hit him, so put the body in the back seat
and drove to a deserted road.
There he put it before the tires, and
ran back and forth over it several times.
When he got out of Chino, he did,
indeed, never do that again:
but one child was dead, his only son,
found with the rest of the family
immobile in their beds with typhoid,
next to the mother, the child having been
dead two days:
he continued to drink, and as if it were the Old West
shot up the town a couple of Saturday nights.
"So now I think I've learned all I want
after I have learned all this: this sure did teach me a lot of things
that I never knew before.
I am a little nervous yet."
It seems to me
an emblem of Bishop--
For watching the room, as the waitresses in their
back-combed, Parisian, peroxided, bouffant hairdos,
and plastic belts,
moved back and forth
I thought of Wallace, and
the room suddenly seemed to me
not uninteresting at all:
they were the same. Every plate and chair
had its congruence with
all the choices creating
these people, created
by them--by me,
for this is my father's chosen country, my origin.
Before, I had merely been anxious, bored; now,
I began to ask a thousand questions...
He was, of course, mistrustful, knowing I was bored,
knowing he had dragged me up here from Bakersfield
after five years
of almost managing to forget Bishop existed.
But he soon became loquacious, ordered a drink,
and settled down for
an afternoon of talk...
He liked Bishop: somehow, it was to his taste, this
hard-drinking, loud, visited-by-movie-stars town.
"Better to be a big fish in a little pond."
And he was: when they came to shoot a film,
he entertained them; Miss A--, who wore
nothing at all under her mink coat; Mr. M--,
good horseman, good shot.
"But when your mother
let me down" (for alcoholism and
infidelity, she divorced him)
"and Los Angeles wouldn't give us water any more,
I had to leave.
We were the first people to grow potatoes in this valley."
When he began to tell me
that he lost control of the business
because of the settlement he gave my mother,
because I had heard it
many times,
in revenge, I asked why people up here drank so much.
He hesitated. "Bored, I guess.
--Not much to do."
And why had Nancy's husband left her?
In bitterness, all he said was:
"People up here drink too damn much."
And that was how experience
had informed his life.
"So now I think I've learned all I want
after I have learned all this: this sure did teach me a lot of things
that I never knew before.
I am a little nervous yet."
Yet, as my mother said,
returning, as always, to the past,
"I wouldn't change any of it.
It taught me so much. Gladys
is such an innocent creature: you look into her face
and somehow it's empty, all she worries about
are sales and the baby.
her husband's too good!"
It's quite pointless to call this rationalization:
my mother, for uncertain reasons, has had her
bout with insanity, but she's right:
the past in maiming us,
makes us,
fruition
is also
destruction:
I think of Proust, dying
in a cork-linked room, because he refuses to eat
because he thinks that he cannot write if he eats
because he wills to write, to finish his novel
--his novel which recaptures the past, and
with a kind of joy, because
in the debris
of the past, he has found the sources of the necessities
which have led him to this room, writing
--in this strange harmony, does he will
for it to have been different?
And I can't not think of the remorse of Oedipus,
who tries to escape, to expiate the past
by blinding himself, and
then, when he is dying, sees that he has become a Daimon
--does he, discovering, at last, this cruel
coherence created by
"the order of the universe"
--does he will
anything reversed?
I look at my father:
as he drinks his way into garrulous, shaky
defensiveness, the debris of the past
is just debris--; whatever I reason, it is a desolation
to watch...
must I watch?
He will not change; he does not want to change;
every defeated gesture implies
the past is useless, irretrievable...
--I want to change: I want to stop fear's subtle
guidance of my life--; but, how can I do that
if I am still
afraid of its source?
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Frank Bidart's poem moves between memory, confession, and argument, beginning with a vivid drive through Los Angeles and then widening into a meditation on family history, social class, and inheritance. The opening rush through the freeway and city lights suggests freedom from memory, but that freedom quickly gives way to the poem's central insistence that the past cannot simply be escaped. The speaker looks back on Bishop, his father, his mother, and even on other lives documented in a letter and a violent anecdote, trying to understand how people become what they are.
The poem's progress is not linear so much as accumulative: one scene triggers another, and every image of décor, behavior, or speech becomes evidence in a larger inquiry. The speaker first resists California's surfaces and associates them with moral and emotional disorder, then slowly recognizes that these very surfaces are bound up with his own identity. The final movement is the most personal and unresolved. The speaker wants change, yet admits that fear is rooted in the same history he is trying to master. The poem's deepest tension lies in this conflict between the desire to revise the self and the knowledge that the self has been made by the very past it resents.
Theme
- Memory and inheritance - The poem treats the past as something active and shaping rather than finished. Family history, place, and repeated speech patterns all seem to live on inside the speaker, even when he wants distance.
- Identity and class - The contrast between California, Bishop, Cambridge, and the East reveals the speaker's unease about where he belongs. Style, taste, and social setting become markers through which he tries to define himself.
- Family conflict - The father, mother, and their stories dominate the poem's emotional center. Their marriages, addictions, and disappointments become part of the speaker's own struggle to understand himself.
- Change versus fatalism - The poem keeps testing whether a person can truly alter a life shaped by habit and damage. The speaker wants transformation, yet the poem suggests that experience leaves enduring marks that cannot be willed away.
- Self-knowledge through discomfort - The speaker reaches insight not through comfort but through irritation, shame, and embarrassment. What initially seems ugly or provincial becomes a mirror for his own complicity and origin.
- The past as both wound and source - The poem does not present memory as purely destructive. It is painful, but it also gives form, meaning, and even artistic material to the speaker's life.
Literary Devices
- Free verse - The poem's irregular lineation and flexible rhythm mirror the mind at work, moving by association, interruption, and reflection rather than by fixed stanza pattern.
- Juxtaposition - Bidart places glamorous Los Angeles imagery beside shabby interiors, family bitterness, and a criminal record, creating sharp contrasts that expose the instability beneath appearances.
- Allusion - References to Proust and Oedipus widen the poem into a meditation on memory, guilt, and fate, connecting the speaker's family history to larger literary and mythic traditions.
- Cataloging - Long lists of furnishings, behaviors, and visual details make the rooms and people feel concretely real while also suggesting accumulation, overload, and social diagnosis.
- Repetition - Recurring phrases about the past, learning, and fear give the poem a circular pressure, emphasizing how the speaker returns again and again to the same unresolved concerns.
- Shift in perspective - The poem moves from first-person recollection to quoted documents, family speech, and reported incident, allowing private feeling and public fact to collide.
- Enjambment - Many thoughts spill across line breaks, creating hesitation and momentum at once; the syntax often seems to keep revising itself as the speaker searches for a true relation to his past.
Symbolism
- Hollywood Freeway - The freeway stands for speed, movement, and the illusion of release from memory, even as it runs directly through the city the speaker cannot fully escape.
- California plush - The upholstered, overdecorated room suggests a regional style the speaker initially reads as artificial, but it also becomes a material sign of the world that formed him.
- Drink - Repeated references to drinking symbolize escape, denial, and inherited self-destruction, especially in the lives of the father and Nancy.
- The letter from Wally Du Bois - The letter is a concrete fragment of history that reveals endurance, shame, and the attempt to rebuild a life after damage.
- Oedipus's blindness - Blindness symbolizes the costly search for truth and the wish to escape the past through self-punishment.
Tone
Bidart's tone is intellectually searching, self-scrutinizing, and often unsparing, especially when he turns his attention to family history and his own mixed feelings about origin. He is not sentimental about memory; he treats it as morally complicated, sometimes humiliating, and sometimes revealing. The emotional atmosphere for the reader is tense and confessional, with sudden flashes of vividness that give way to unease. Even when the poem reaches moments of recognition, it never settles into calm, so the mood remains restless, bruised, and deeply reflective.
Historical Context
Frank Bidart is associated with late twentieth-century American poetry that often combines intellectual argument, dramatic monologue, and intense psychological self-examination. His work commonly draws on classical literature, modernist memory, and personal history, but it resists neat lyric closure in favor of inquiry and pressure. This poem fits that broader tradition by moving through family narrative, social observation, and philosophical reflection in a single extended free-verse form.
The poem also reflects a modern American interest in place as identity: California is not just scenery but a cultural field shaped by mobility, class anxiety, regional style, and the pressures of reinvention. Its references to East Coast standards, Western towns, and literary exemplars like Proust show a speaker negotiating between cultural worlds. The poem's method belongs to a period of poetry that often treats autobiography not as confession alone but as a way of thinking through history, inheritance, and the making of the self.
Similar Poems
- Meditations in an Emergency - Frank O'Hara
- The Family Reunion - J. V. Cunningham
- One Art - Elizabeth Bishop
- Daddy - Sylvia Plath
- My Papa's Waltz - Theodore Roethke