Break On Through to the Other Side

THE POET IN EXILE, By Ray Manzarek, Thunder’s Mouth Press: 210 pp., $22.95

HIRSCHFELD’S HOLLYWOOD: The Film Art of Al Hirschfeld, By David Leopold, Abrams: 96 pp., $15.95

DOWN BY THE LEMONADE SPRINGS: Essays on Wallace Stegner, By Jackson J. Benson

The body of Jim Morrison was buried in a sealed coffin in a Paris graveyard, a fact witnessed by the few who attended the interment in 1971. Thus did the richly storied life of the lead singer of the Doors, dead of heart failure at the age of 27, come to a sad and squalid end.

“Or was it, in fact, a hoax?” muses Ray Manzarek in “The Poet in Exile,” a novel that invents a new variation on the myth of Morrison. “Was it all an elaborate ruse to free the Poet from his worldly entanglements, including his now increasingly heroin-intoxicated mistress, and send him off to ports unknown where he could pursue his craft unencumbered?”

As imagined by Manzarek, co-founder and keyboardist of the Doors, the “rock God” is not dead and buried. Rather, he has contrived to escape from the sycophants who only encouraged his drinking and other excesses--”the La Brea Mafia,” as Manzarek puts it--by faking his own demise and going so deeply underground that the graveside charade in Paris seems believable precisely because the deity himself is nowhere to be seen.

“The Poet was gone,” writes Manzarek. “And we all wept for him. And our tears were applause for the efficacy of an illusion.”

“The Poet in Exile,” of course, is presented as a work of fiction--the Poet, whom we are supposed to recognize as Morrison, is dubbed Jordan, and Manzarek’s alter ego is called Roy. Morrison styled himself as the “Lizard King” and Manzarek calls Jordan the “Snake Man.” But the author writes with a wink and nod, and he clearly hopes to enlist his readers in yet another twist on the myth that Morrison cultivated during his own lifetime.

The yarn begins when a letter arrives at Roy’s home in Los Angeles--the missive was mailed in the far-off Seychelles, the message is deeply and characteristically enigmatic and the signature is a single scrawled letter: “J.” Agitated and intrigued, Roy goes in search of the West Coast wild man, whom he understands to be its author, and, in a real sense, his own history and destiny.

Roy casts his memory back to the dues-paying years of the rock band that J fronted, a band that goes coyly unnamed in the book: “We were touched by tongues of fire in the little El Segundo beach house that we used as our rehearsal space,” he recalls. “We were just trying to take it a little higher. You know, like Van Morrison says, ‘Into the Mystic.’” And when Roy finally finds himself face-to-face with the self-styled Snake Man, now older and grayer but no less charismatic, he is aquiver with curiosity.

“I’ve only just begun to unravel this mystery,” says Roy. “I’ve got a million questions. And...Jordan, you’re going to answer every one of them.”

The Poet proceeds to describe his journey from substance abuse to spiritual ecstasy, a narrative that ends with a moment of authentic surprise and heart-tugging poignancy. Ultimately, however, the answers provided by the resurrected “rock God” are no more mysterious than the customary on-camera confessions that can be seen on any episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” “I was a success, I was famous, I had money in the bank ... and I had nothing,” declares Jordan. “Except a bad hangover.” And when Roy finds him to be clean and sober after his long years of self-exile, it’s almost a disappointment: “You’re a good and decent human being now,” announces Roy. “You’re not the Snake Man anymore.”

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Al Hirschfeld’s pen-and-ink caricatures are as emblematic of the New York theater scene as Sardi’s or Times Square. Yet, as we discover in “Hirschfeld’s Hollywood,” he started out in the motion picture industry--and he never really left it behind.

“[H]is first theatrical drawing was published in December 1926,” explains David Leopold, an archivist and curator of Hirschfeld’s artwork. “By then, he was a veteran of studio publicity and advertising departments, having already worked for Goldwyn, Universal, Pathe, Selznick, Fox, First National, and Warner Bros.”

Co-published by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and based on an exhibit of Hirschfeld’s artwork at the academy, “Hirschfeld’s Hollywood” includes more than 100 posters, billboards, murals, paintings, drawings and other artwork, all of which celebrate Hollywood rather than Broadway.

And, remarkably, the artwork that is presented so elegantly and yet so playfully in “Hirschfeld’s Hollywood” spans nine decades of glitter and glamour, thus reminding us that Hirschfeld is still active as he approaches his 100th birthday: When the Oscar nominations were announced in 2001, the New York Times had Hirschfeld draw the nominees.

“From Astaire to Zorina,” as Larry Gelbart sums up in a foreword to the book, “from Dove to Hawks, from Pidgeon to Crowe.”

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Does Wallace Stegner belong in the pantheon of American authors that includes such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck?

Jackson J. Benson, professor emeritus at San Diego State University, has devoted his life’s work to the study of these three writers, and he makes the case for Stegner in “Down by the Lemonade Springs,” a collection of his biographical and critical essays that illuminates Stegner in ways that are intended not merely to heighten our regard for him but to deepen the experience of reading his writings.

Stegner was not only a man of letters--an accomplished novelist, historian and biographer--but also a beloved teacher of writing at Stanford and a fiery environmental activist. The crown jewel among his novels, “Angle of Repose,” was honored with a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, but Benson also wants us to know that Stegner was presented with a Freedom to Write Award by PEN Center USA West in 1992 when he refused to accept a national arts medal from then-President George Bush in protest against acts of censorship by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“A truth seeker” is how Benson describes Stegner, “who tried to see himself, his history, his land, and his people as clearly as possible and to pass on those discoveries to others.”

Benson is candid about his own high esteem for Stegner: “I spent several weeks a year, off and on, with him for nearly seven years,” writes Benson. “He was simply the brightest man I had ever known.” But he is also willing to confront some of the less endearing qualities that he discerns in Stegner and his writing: “Like the work of one of his mentors, Robert Frost, his writing had both a sunny and a dark side,” Benson explains. “What he said about Frost was just as true for him: ‘The real jolt and force of Frost’s love of life comes from the fact that it is cold at the root.’”

The highest and best use of “Down by the Lemonade Springs” is as a companion to Stegner’s work. “Angle of Repose,” for example, is surely one of the greatest of American novels, but the experience of reading (or rereading) Stegner’s masterpiece will be all the greater in the light of what Benson reveals about how it came to be written in the first place.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People.”