WATER TO WINE: : THE METAMORPHOSIS OF L. A. : MATERIAL DREAMS Southern California Through the 1920s <i> by Kevin Starr (Oxford University Press: $21.95; 424 pp.) </i>

Kevin Starr has written an engaging, eccentric history of Southern California in the ‘20s. It shifts focus like a zoom lens, from physical growth to cultural ferment, water to oil, cops to football, oligarchs to Babbits, Bible-thumpers to architects, transportation to bibliophilia, William Mulholland to Jake Zeitlin, Frank Lloyd Wright to Simon Rodia, ethnic mix to real estate. It has a sort of urban sprawl of its own, yet it manages to hang together the way a three-ring circus does--a lot going on, clowns and trapeze artists and tigers, all under one awning. It is richly researched, informative, fun to read, and flawed.

It seems a case of metaphor overkill--not in the writing of metaphors, but in using the term as label. Thus we have what Starr calls a health-seeking metaphor, an originating metaphor, a privacy and retrenchment metaphor, a patio metaphor, resort metaphor, design metaphor, Biblical metaphor, Chicago metaphor, Santa Barbara metaphor, Newport metaphor, controlling metaphor, prophetic metaphor, technology metaphor, Christian metaphor, development metaphor, Spanish metaphor, tide-pool metaphor, genteel metaphor, a “flat landscape that suggested no easy metaphors,” and advice that “the Salton Sea offered the deepest possible metaphor of the region.”

The writing is bright; it has substance, pace and vigor; it makes sense even when it stretches for metaphoric significance, but Starr is like a very good pitcher who every now and then throws a ball three feet over the catcher’s head, as when after a good stretch of first-class writing, there are clusters of inverted sentences, or three sentences in a row that begin with participles. He uses “sub/urban” repeatedly, where just plain suburban would do for most of us. But these are small cavils, against the broad scale and integrity of his canvas.

The book opens with the whopping success story of irrigation in Southern California (“Foundations in Water . . . Hydraulic Visions and Historical Metaphors”). Los Angeles “made itself happen through will and water”; the city was a “hydraulic have-not” which had to “invent itself through water.”

William Mulholland, hydraulic engineer, was “the one universally acknowledged founder of Los Angeles”; the Department of Water and Power was “a second government”; without the resources of the Colorado River, and the longest aqueduct in the Western Hemisphere, there would be no modern Southern California. Starr acknowledges that the saga of struggle, power plays and annexation ploys entailed in the watering of the region, has been told before, even once in a movie, but his account is a model of succinctness, wired for metaphor: “. . . engineering as a mode of humanistic intent . . . the opportunity to co-create with divinity itself.” (Outraged residents of Owens Valley dynamited the aqueduct 10 different times to protest the sequestering of water that had been given to them by the same divinity.)

Then come pages on planning and development, ballyhoo, oil, the automobile, the emergence of institutional Los Angeles, the establishment for the first time in history of a city built around the automobile. As the ‘20s began, about 6,000 electric cars radiated daily from downtown Los Angeles to link four contiguous counties. “Only wealthy and politically independent suburbs such as Palos Verdes and Beverly Hills were capable of planning with the landscape, not the automobile, as the primary consideration.” The how and why of what happened to the streetcars is not spelled out, since they vanished in a later decade, and that story probably will be told in another increment of Starr’s “America and the California Dream” series, of which the present volume is No. 3.

Several characters who flourished in the ‘20s have resonances today, as we discover on meeting Harry Culver and I. N. Van Nuys, now memorialized by Culver City and the community of Van Nuys; and Alphonso Bell, whose name is absorbed in Bel-Air; and Col. Griffith J. Griffith, who shot his wife, served two years in prison for attempted murder, and, in a more genial mode, deeded to the city 3,000 acres which became Griffith Park; and E. W. Hilgard, agronomist, after whom the avenue and hotel in Westwood are named; and, of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes,” who lives on in Tarzana.

In a chapter on institutions in the ‘20s, Starr brackets an unlikely pair, the Department of Water and Power and the University of Southern California, for having “fully expressed and served the ambitions of Anglo-American Los Angeles in its expansionist exuberance.” Following them, he cites the Philharmonic Orchestra and the L.A. Police Department for attaining “a high level of autonomous power and authority as they emerged as arbiters and brokers of the Los Angeles identity.”

Recollections of this period include one relating to football. In 1924, USC was asked to leave the Pacific Conference because of “lax scholastic standards,” whereupon USC’s then President Rufus von KleinSmid retaliated by seeking games with Notre Dame, the biggest-drawing team in the country. Two years later at Soldier’s Field in Chicago, the match-up attracted 120,000 spectators, up to then the largest crowd ever to watch a game of any kind.

Regional architecture has an engrossing chapter to itself, with emphasis on two stars: the Bradbury Building, which “came out of nowhere” in 1893 and which “challenged Los Angeles to begin thinking of itself as a big city, a Chicago on the Pacific”; and the Watts Towers, “sustained by the logic of constructivism . . . an architectural symbol equal in mystery and power to the Bradbury Building.”

Starr devotes two chapters to Santa Barbara as a contrasting alternative to Los Angeles, claiming that the city “turned its back on glitter and razzmatazz in favor of romantic historicizing and other preoccupations of the genteel tradition.” Indeed Santa Barbara might have developed a harbor to parallel, on a smaller scale, Long Beach and Los Angeles, and might well have worked itself up into a major industrial center and aviation capital (Lockheed and Northrop got started there). Instead, it made a transition “from sanitarium to a resort . . . (to) an American Nice, sunny gold and blue, languid and irrelevant . . . listless, charming, with a disarming beauty . . . a pastoral place that preferred to stay that way,” a city that in 1910 was equal if not superior to Hollywood in movie production (13 small companies made one-reelers there) but which chose to “pursue its dreams through architecture, not films.”

On life and letters in Southern California, the author, a former librarian, is in green pastures. All through the book his capsule biographies have the sharpness and cogency of “Aubrey’s Brief Lives,” and in the final chapters he is in top form. Sometimes the effect is gossipy: “MacIntyre was rumored to bring Occidental coeds there for purposes of seduction” . . . Robinson Jeffers while at USC pursued “a clandestine love affair with a married philosophy student” . . . “when Alfred’s father died, their relationships became a marriage in name only” . . . “seduced by a Catholic prelate when she was fifteen. . . .” But the pages on Books and Bohemia in Greater Los Angeles; on the comings, goings and doings of Pasadena’s literati; on the “Zeitlin Circle”; on Merle Armitage’s “monstrous egomania” and “crypto-falangist sense of art as an elite defiance of the commonplace”; on Aldous Huxley, who once made a dedicatory speech at a Zeitlin bookshop; on M. F. K. Fisher, “the Virginia Woolf of cuisine”; on Ward Ritchie, still publishing; on Lawrence Clark Powell, still teaching; on the emergence of the Huntington Library as an important research institution in history and the humanities; all make sound reading.

The late Jake (Jacob Israel) Zeitlin emerges as the warmest and most robust figure of Starr’s literary phalanx. “Creative Los Angeles found in Zeitlin an emblem, a principle of aspiration and continuity, a listener, a patron, a friend . . . who functioned almost rabbinically as counselor, and confidante . . . who helped innumerable artists and writers and other creative aspirants toward fulfillment . . . who helped Los Angeles emerge as a national book and library center.” The gods smiled on Zeitlin, for he went from itinerant book peddler, so poor his first child was born in a charity ward, to become an international figure in the rare-book trade. Among other grand slams, he sold 144 illuminated manuscripts to the Getty Museum for $30 million.

There are enough good quotes in this book to fuel a mini-compendium. Two examples: Frank Hogan, attorney who defended millionaire Edward Doheny in the big oil scandal of the ‘20s: “A lawyer’s ideal client is a rich man who is scared”; and preacher Aimee Semple McPherson’s instruction to her congregation at collection time: “Sister has a headache tonight. Just quiet money please.”

A bounteous and valuable bibliographical essay rounds out this third volume in Starr’s series of California dream sequences. Next scheduled is “The Dream Endures: California Through the Great Depression.”