Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy

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To understand the art that is created, one must look at the past to find what created the person. What motivates, what irritates, what scares and what makes the creator laugh. A biographer might have to go deep, past where the creator wants others, including themselves to look, to even find facts about people close to the creator, that they didn't even know about. Actions, reactions, events all make a mark, all leave a scar. To understand the Demon Dog, one must know the hell that forged him. To read James Ellroy is to see past effecting the present, screaming into the future and burning all in its path. To read a biography on the man is seeing the portrait of man, whose childhood left a mark, took his time to find himself, good to friends, bad to the women in his life, and a writer of skill and great ability. Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy by Steven Powell is a biography of a man, a study of a canon, and a life that has few parallels.

Love me Fierce in Danger is first a portrait of the artist as an energetic and trauma-tempered young dog, and then later—an elder hound both content with the considerable dent he’s made in the universe, and yet still today as a septuagenarian, not content to simply roll over… I'm not someone who's pored over all of Ellroy's work, but I was more than intrigued to find out more about his life from the little I knew and Steven Powell delivers a comprehensive account of a life well lived.In between is a life of nearly nonstop chaos. Ellroy nearly died multiple times of alcohol and drug abuse before publishing a single book, let alone become the massively influential and successful giant of the genre he is now. Most of his fans already know this, as well as the story of his mother's murder, as it's all in MY DARK PLACES. Powell's work digs deeper into that material, but it doesn't feel like rehashing. James Ellroy learned his craft somehow and his biography ought to give at least some hint on this actually important aspect of his art. He certainly didn't learn it in bed. One comes away from this new biography of Ellroy, however, with the sense that his public persona – rebarbative, showy, manic – is far from inauthentic. If there is a mild-mannered Wizard of Oz inside Ellroy’s booming façade, he is buried unreachably deep. For Ellroy fans and scholars both old and new, Love Me Fierce in Danger has plenty to spark and—more importantly—maintain your intrigue, even if you were certain you already knew all about James Ellroy’s exhaustively documented life…

When Ellroy was just ten years old, his mother brutally murdered. The crime went unsolved, and her death marked the start of a long and turbulent road for Ellroy that included struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and jail time. As Powell reveals, Ellroy’s mother’s murder and his upbringing in 1950s Los Angeles, always on the periphery of Hollywood, had a substantial influence on his writing. Powell plumbs the history of Ellroy’s life and family, including his mother’s mysterious first marriage eighteen years before her murder. In the 1970’s, homelessness, arrests/petty crimes and inhalant and alcohol abuse had taken a toll on Ellroy’s mental and physical health. As he turned his life around, he began writing. Ellroy sharpened his public speaking skills and dazzled AA members with his gifted storytelling abilities. Powell certainly gives us an impressively detailed account of the artist as a young drug abuser, burglar and sex-obsessed voyeur, a period that also includes the teenaged Ellroy acting tough with “his classroom Nazi act”. The early chapters, in fact, are the book’s strongest, and particularly when Powell investigates the young Ellroy’s relationship with his mother, Jean: “Years later, he candidly described his emotionally cold reaction to his mother’s murder: ‘I hated her. […] Some unknown killer just bought me a brand-new beautiful life.’” Without question, the tragedy of Jean Ellroy’s unsolved murder in El Monte, California, (1948) has greatly influenced her son’s life and literary career beyond comprehension. There was bias and stigma in that era against divorced single mothers who didn’t meet the powerful idealized societal version of wife, mother, homemaker. There was no evidence that Jean, a nurse, was an alcoholic, promiscuous, or a bad unfit parent. She closely supervised her son’s education, took him to church services and on vacations. We learned that following their acrimonious divorce, his father deliberately poisoned his son's mind against his mother-- parental alienation was unheard of at the time.I’m a perfect example of that: Despite being a rabid Ellroy fan and devotee since I was 14 years old (27 years ago…), and even after reading literally hundreds of Ellroy interviews and related media throughout that time, there were elements of Love Me Fierce in Danger that surprised even me… No spoilers here, but there’s even a highly symbolic scene involving the Demon Dog as a then-infantile Demon Puppy that serves as a foreshadowing of Ellroy’s evisceration—and thus, humanizing—of Hollywood’s numerous dirty secrets in the decades to come… I know you are going to think I am strange, but I have never read anything Ellroy has written. I have been meaning to, but there are just so many books out there. My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Bloomsbury Academic for an advanced copy of this biography on one of the outstanding and outlandish crime writers of the 20th Century. I read this book in galley form and was disappointed to come across several mistakes in usage and sentence structure. Some examples: absence of “whom” throughout the book, “The ruthless nature of magazine publishing entailed editors rarely stayed in post for long at GQ”, “…the nature by which he acquired it often underscored his fundamental emotional problems,” “…one of the melancholiest aspects of aging,” “the Marine Corp”, etc. My hope is that errors will corrected before publication.

Powell does not set out to expose Ellroy, who has always been perfectly happy to expose himself. If anything, you sense Powell feels safer discussing his subject’s sexual conduct than his right-wing (sometimes far-right) views, which are mostly attributed to an understandable hunger for attention in his youth. ‘With any feelings of anti-Semitism long behind him, Ellroy enjoyed taking in the culture at the Hillcrest’ (his local golf club in Los Angeles) is one of a number of sentences that sow doubt rather than eliminate it. Love Me Fierce in Danger by Steven Powell is just the type of biography that is needed for a figure like James Ellroy, one that goes beyond just recounting a life and gets into understanding it. The early part of the book is completely wild as we are introduced to Ellroy's parents, who led similarly barnstorming lives before the murder of Ellroy's mother when he was 10 years old. The effect of this on the young Ellroy cannot be understated as even while he believes himself to be the next great crime writer he spends his years scraping by enough to fuel his addiction to alcohol. Certainly there is a demonic edge to Ellroy’s best work that makes most other crime novels, even the darkest, seem like comfort reading. He reportedly lives a more harmonious life nowadays, reunited with his second ex-wife, Helen, but Weirdly, there is one whom Powell very carefully avoids naming, even while providing more than enough information to identify her, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

Reviews

Steven Powell also gives us candid and insightful analysis into the origins and progression of both Ellroy’s well-hashed outrageous public persona, and the Demon Dog’s monastically Beethovian private life, with all the idiosyncrasies, private insecurities, coping mechanisms, and solitary circumspection that bind these two extreme polarities for James Ellroy just like everyone else. Love Me Fierce In Danger is a substantial work of literary scholarship. Powell, who has written two previous critical works on Ellroy, interrogates in detail what has effectively been the three writing careers of Ellroy: his published fiction and non-fiction books, his script writing work for Hollywood – which is far more substantial than I had realised – and his work as a columnist for GQ magazine in the 1990s, which in itself was quite significant. When Ellroy was eleven years old, his mother was brutally murdered and the perpetrator was never caught. For any child this would be a cataclysm but for Ellroy it only widened the existing schism in his life and personality. His father, Armand, hated Ellroy’s mother for divorcing him and slandered her mercilessly to their son before and after her death. Jean had had expectations of James, and during her weekday custody of the boy their life had rules and structure. Armand was an alcoholic who couldn’t keep a job and couldn’t be bothered giving structure to his son’s life. Having only one surviving parent, however unfit, James internalized much about his father including vengeful feelings toward his late mother. To deal with growing up virtually uneducated, unsocialized, enraged, and starved for attention, Ellroy created antisocial personae that would appear at times throughout his life. In junior high school, he “became” a Nazi and did his best to alienate Jewish students. He became a burglar, a shoplifter, and a peeping tom. In middle age and later, Ellroy would put on his “Dog” personality, talking “jive”, insulting various individuals and groups in foul-mouthed diatribes, especially while speaking in public or in other high stress situations. The “Dog” also contributed to his difficulties with women. This was a very interesting, although also somewhat off-putting, biography. It is incredibly detailed, not only about Ellroy's life, but also about each of his major books, with quite lengthy descriptions of the plots of each. It was a difficult read in the sense that Ellroy is a difficult personality (both to capture in words and to like or warm to), as opposed to difficult because of the writing style, which is quite engaging, particularly given some of the subject matter.

Dr. Powell reminds us on several occasions that Mr. Ellroy never finished high school. Mr. Ellroy did not apparently, based on Dr. Powell's information, attend any college classes. How then does an effectively uneducated person become the predominant male genius of American letters of his era? I don't know and neither will you when you finish reading Dr. Powell's extensive work. The truly revelatory stuff is found in the examination of Ellroy's years of fame. Though often staying sober after his hellish youth, his addictive personality manifests throughout his life in virtually every other aspect of it: spending, womanizing, chasing the trappings of fame in the media and at public appearances, and constantly aiming to portray himself as more.vulgar, caustic, right-wing and hypermasculine than he actually is (and he is in fact all of those things, but more nuanced underneath the bluster). Powell vows in the intro not to psychoanalyze Ellroy, but he doesn't have to: the behavior, whether it be acts of immense generosity and human kindness or cutthroat cruelty and verbal abuse, tells you all you need to know. Ellroy is an absolute mess in many ways, and it is inextricable from the power of his writing. (Ellroy is fairly honest to his biographer about most of his worst qualities; Powell presents the rest by amassing evidence from other parties.) You can also see the painful reverberations—far into adulthood—of Ellroy’s childhood traumas, which certainly include, but also go far beyond the well-tread territory of his mother’s brutal 1958 murder. While you might expect some degree of this from any biography, with James Ellroy, it’s even more prescient, because the generational ramifications of past misdeeds is a deliberately haunting, discomforting, and necessary motif in all the Demon Dog’s novels. Powell introduced his favorite Ellroy novels and book series offering detailed accounts related to his writing styles of combining fictional characterization with real life events, and his technique of limiting dialogue to reduce the manuscript content. If a name was dropped, a credible story followed—also included were easy to follow timelines, cultural events, trips abroad, literary agents, famous editors, celebrities and other insiders in the publishing and film industries. Ellroy generously donated his papers to the University of South Carolina (1999) he visits on occasion to lecture and update the archive.I knew Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was a young boy. I never knew though how troubled and, let's face it, terrible his life has been. He has been labeled a womanizer, drug addict, alcoholic, and tempered person. After reading this, I can say that's all true. Plus he is one of the best crime writers out there. I never knew he wrote historical fiction crime books, which I love to read. I learned a ton from reading this book. This is a biography that should appeal to those who simply love biographies as well as those interested in Ellroy's work. Those interested in literary history will find a lot here to think about as well. Steven Powell, a British academic, has spoken to dozens of whiplashed witnesses to the Ellroy story, as well as securing many hours’ worth of interviews with the demon dog himself. Powell convinced Ellroy he was the man to take on his biography after unearthing the hitherto unknown identity of the first husband of Ellroy’s mother Jean – a possible suspect James Ellroy had a different name at birth, one that sounded like a political assassin, or a hayseed. Ellroy's parents divorced early, with a lot of enmity, and Ellroy spent time between both parents, a mom that tried to raise him, and a father who spent more time railing on the shrew that he married. Ellroy's mother was murdered, suspect unknown, and Ellroy went to live with his father, a minor Hollywood flunkie, who had seen better days, and spent more time on his couch then providing or caring for his son. Young James loved to read, stealing books when he had to to keep up with his voracious habit. Crime and crime stories were his favorite, books that later helped him when he started breaking into houses for thrills. After the death of his father, drinking nearly killed Ellroy, but golf, AA, books and a need to write gave him something to live for. Starting slow he wrote what he knew, crime, men failing and Los Angeles. Slowly he found his groove, removing words, mining history and people, real and not-so-real, to tell his tales, and success, and madness soon followed.