A Thomas McGrath Centennial Celebration

Los Angeles Review of Books features Andrew Lyndon Knighton's essay about the incredible poet Thomas McGrath. McGrath, born one hundred years ago, is the subject of a number of celebrations in Los Angeles, his reluctant habitat. A marathon reading of his celebrated Letter to an Imaginary Friend will take place at Beyond Baroque on November 12.

On an otherwise innocuous summer morning in July 2013, a gasoline tanker carrying 8,500 gallons of fuel careened out of control in a tunnel connecting two arterial freeways just a bit north of downtown Los Angeles. Crashing into the tunnel wall, it unleashed a spectacular fireball and a series of terrifying explosions. Improbably, the driver escaped and no one else was seriously injured, but the inferno captured the city’s jaded imagination for a day. The mouth of the tunnel breathed a wall of flame into the open air, gasoline runoff fed fires burning in the nearby Los Angeles River, and smoke belched forth from storm drains for blocks around. The LAFD advised people to avoid manhole covers, lest they erupt into the air from the subterranean force; eyewitnesses pondered the spectacle of rats scrambling to the surface streets in flight. The resulting traffic jam, of course, was all but unspeakable.

This Angeleno version of apocalypse would likely have earned a knowing nod and a wry smile from the radical poet Thomas McGrath, who lived some of the most trying years of his life in Los Angeles during the 1950s. Just over a decade after Nathanael West famously represented the city as a hellish inferno, McGrath expressed his own contempt for Los Angeles in much the same terms. He once derided it as the “largest sewer in the world,” and in his autobiographical masterpiece, the long poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend, depicted it via imagery of percolating demonic energies, mostly unrelenting human suffering, and spectacular, fiery depths:

Vertical city shaped like an inverse hell:
At three feet above tide mark, at hunger line, are the lachrymose
Cities of the plain weeping in the sulphurous smog...

The all-but-literal realization of McGrath’s poetic vision of Los Angeles on that day in 2013 is made more remarkable when one considers that the site of the inferno — at the point of intersection between the Golden State and the Glendale Freeways (“The Five” and “The Two” in local parlance) — is almost exactly where McGrath’s house stood before being displaced by the construction of those thoroughfares.

Continue at Los Angeles Review of Books.