NOWADAYS, whether or not we like the idea, it looks as if it's going to be important to understand the culture of Southern California. After all, it has formed two Presidents and provided a congenial atmosphere for the retirement of a third. James McMichael's Four Good Things, a new long poem about--of all things--Pasadena, makes such an effort. It is also about worry, death, sex manuals, taxes, domestic architecture, the Industrial Revolution, real estate, and the American soul.

Perhaps "culture" is the wrong word to describe what goes on. Perhaps not even Bertolt Brecht, who knew the middle class hates to be reminded that its comfortable life is political, could make it interesting. It is a land characterized by the atmosphere of a San Clemente golf club locker room; golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. It is a land of Jack Daniels and Vietnamese maids, of luxurious home sprinkler systems, of helicopters which hover over the city to catch purse snatchers making their grabs on the main streets and then disappearing into arroyos of impenetrable chaparral in the canyons.

The poem begins tranquilly, with recollections of childhood. The narrator's father is a real estate developer; his mother, in an upstairs bedroom of their pleasant suburban home, is dying of cancer. Here are the themes, announced at once: In the child's mind, place is a masculine proposition, a dubious promise of the good life sketched out in survey maps, prospective buyers, and the cheerful desolation of lots. The female propositions--death, repose--flower from the middle of that promise. Place, which is everywhere present and palpable, is not quite real; and death, which is not present and everywhere palpable, is very real. the two are somehow married, though they seem not to talk to each other much.

This is an accurate and a scary definition of Southern California or at least one regularly suggsted by the other writers of that place--Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald. It thus qualifies as classically American, written with the speculative range, freedom of imagination, and fierce, clear eye that have invigorated this country's proudest works. the verse is clean, quiet, and lapidary; all the excitement is in watching McMichael take up one "unpoetic" subject after another and illuminate it; he turns all the world on the emotions of a child who is trying to find out what his father does all day and why his mother is dying.

The central technique is making connections. What, for example, is the connection between Pasadena and the Industrial Revolution? McMichael notes that the rich of California, whom a world market brought into being, made houses out of William Morris's criticism of shabby machine production standards. Very beautiful houses, actually, and McMichael describes the principle of their construction with a wonderfully quiet (and faintly nagging) accuracy:

...Their stairs were furniture. /A bench along a landing had the same insistent/finish as an inglenook, the same square/ebony caps for screwheads as the tables and the chairs. Everything showed you how it went together.

The poet notices something else: not just that seeing how things go together reassures, but that reassurance was needed in the first place. There was an anxiety in adolescent California, a nervous need for place and careful planning, a twitching spring from the England of the 1830s and 40s which had replaced old wealth and property with active capital as the shield against uncertainty:

Free trade was Jesus Christ. They formed their joint stock companies and combines, and could count on/triple rows of sheds, eight miles of granite docks,/calm and deep water in all tides at Liverpool.'

They could also count on the help

As long as there were/workers enough, 'and not all so insanc as to prefer/dying to living,' their master had it as he wanted...

Uncertainties in the market combatted by mastery and planning. Every American presidential candidate has tried to allay our anxiety by showing us how we are all going to get somewhere. McMichael insists that planning and anxiety are almost Siamese twins. Americans, with their city planning, economic planning, estate planning, family planning, with their game plans and saving plans and lay-away plans, would seem to be the most anxious people on earth.

So, then, here's the connection to Pasadena's California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the planner's paradigm, the probability theory, took root:

...If we overlooked nothing,/no single difference of temperament or will,/if it were all accounted for and stored and if we/watched it periodically and found it yielded/more and newer orders, it would teach us how to/master what was probably and make it pure,/assign it a completeness like the past's.

Here also is the connection to insomnia and the way that worry keeps us awake, examined below in a creepy revision of Rene Descartes' idea that the only real place is what passes through our minds.

...So I don't/care if I go back to sleep. Since it never works to/care about it, since my calmness when I care is/feigned and crazy, I don't care. I'll get up,/I'm too tired to get up...The certainty/sleep isn't there is me.