FROM ITS BEGINNINGS California has had as varied an imaginative life as it has had a crazy social life. California is the only region not self-conscious about the East, the only region which dares to be independent without being defiant. And it can even make the East feel self-conscious about itself. The state is enigmatic; it harbors Shirley Temple Black and Huey Newton, Berkeley and Orange Country. It spawned the free-speech movement and has the largest enrollment in the John Birch Society of any state. It has at once San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The Spanish named California after a mythical medieval paradise, an island in the far West to which the noblest knights would go when they died. For generations since, California has been a glittering piece of ephemera on the western slopes of the farthest mountains. It has been a symbol for all that American society has hoped for and sought after. Californians themselves have been intrigued by the imaginative position of the place in American life. In Americans and the California Dream Kevin Starr tries to study the imaginative life of California in America. Starr, a Californian himself, spent the last five years researching and writing the book. During that time he sifted through a mountain of material in order to "deal with the imaginative aspects of California's journey to identity." Because he deals with California as a symbol, and because he sees the writing of history primarily as a creative art rather than a social science, Starr has invested a great deal of passion and his own sensibilities into the work. The book seems as much the personal task of a California intellectual, a piece of retrospective idealization, as it does a history. Starr writes that his narrative is the work of memory rather than analysis and that he wished to repossess the past, make it live again through his thoughts.

Always using individuals to dramatize his points and employing a series of heightened dramatic moments which are themselves symbols, Starr catalogues the bewildering variety of contradictory meanings which California held for Americans. Agrarian paradise, gold mine, intellectual and spiritual salvation, contemplative peace, the American Mediterranean -- California meant all these things and more to those who settled the land.

MIDWAY IN THE BOOK, in perhaps the inest chapter, Starr uses the life and thoughts of Jack London as an allegory of the potential tragedy hidden in the dream. As a writer, London rises out of the working class to national fame and wealth. As he becomes rich and famous London indulges a variety of self-destructive dreams; he thinks himself a Nietzschean superman; he builds himself a great mansion which burns to the ground; he kids himself that his habitual drinking is not alcoholism; he refuses to believe that his aging body is no longer strong and healthy. Finally, alone and despairing, he kills himself. In London's suicide Starr perceives the possible collapse of the California dream. London's doubts are California's doubts; he is in concert with California; he dies when his fantasies break down but California lives, secure in its own myths.

At the same time as Starr, with his 20th century values, is sympathetic to the dreams of Californians, he is quick to point out the false and narrow ideals Californians often had. London's delusions are only one example in the long history of the California mind going astray. The first visitors viewed with disgust the polyglot racial mix of Hispanic California, while later Protestant settlers hated the Catholics. Starr dutifully chants the litany of violent gold rush crimes and horrible racist acts against Indians and Chinese, but he makes it clear that these social realities are secondary matters. "...California concealed its sins and all but banished the tragic sense. Crimes remained unacknowledged or were sentimentalized, and, as if by common consent, responsibility was forgotten in the sunshine." Because its sins were not obsessive, California could shove them under the carpet and skip along its way.

Starr is not a historian in the contemporary social scientist mold. The direct and discernible influences on his style are 19th century romantic American historians like Prescott and Bancroft. They developed a style of history which demands literary excellence and imagination and Starr has both. It is a style which is narrative rather than analytical; the author's analysis is implied in and intuited from his selection and presentation of materials. It reads like an epic poem, like a saga of heroes, and it means to evoke a feeling of continuity: movement forward along not always logical but inevitable lines. In that way it imparts a life and meaning to the past that no bare analysis is capable of. The book itself becomes part of our cultural heritage.

Starr has succeeded with the technique so far, but if he hopes for a total success he should pursue the history of California to its present resolution. He is leaving Harvard for California this summer to work for Mayor Alioto in San Francisco and teach as a visiting professor at Berkeley. He writes that he plans two more installments on the California experience. Perhaps he will finally explain to me the Beach Boys and Ronald Reagan.