THE DREAM ENDURES: California Enters the 1940s.<i> By Kevin Starr</i> .<i> Oxford University Press: 480 pp., $35</i>

Up and down the state, in his various roles as a professor, lecturer, library official and occasional political aspirant, Kevin Starr is known for his passionate discourses on everything to do with California, from its history to its ecology, its turbulence, its continual promise and the dream of California as a far reach of American dreaming. Fluency of discourse causes impatience in some, but Starr’s great ease is matched by a rarer gift: He makes sense. The information is processed; it marches forward; he has engaged a passionate five-volume (and growing) labor of love. The current book, “The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s,” is an avid account of times we can almost remember.

I have been reading this series for its rich tracking of El Dorado since “Americans and the California Dream” was published in 1973. Starr has developed his ability to dramatize the story. In the third volume, “Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s,” he uses the struggle over water and irrigation in Los Angeles and the Imperial Valley as a novelist or filmmaker might, although he stops short of the knife in Jack Nicholson’s nose in “Chinatown.” He ranges from the fertile ethnic communities of Los Angeles to the ways architecture shapes temperament. He gives the arts their due and shows how Pasadena and Santa Barbara offered painters and writers alternatives to the megalopolis that Los Angeles was becoming. He depicts California’s development as a major world power though it isn’t a nation.

Like “Material Dreams,” Starr’s other books depict a unique culture in the hubristic act of creating itself out of the shards of diverse traditions, uprooted nationalities and intentions both good and bad but, above all, energetic. The word “dream” appears in the title of each volume. Perhaps the motto of the state, “Eureka, I Have Found It,” should be “I Will Dream It,” in the spirit of that well-named culprit, known as Dr. Lovejoy, about to be hanged by the vigilantes of San Francisco (“Do you have any last words?” he was asked, and answered: “Not at this time”). In the latest installment, the dream shows some of its nightmare elements but in a sepia portrait, tempered by fascination. Starr dreams he is writing more than a history, but also a philosophical study of the meaning of California. Some dreams come true.

The subtext of these dense volumes is the memoir of a native son in a condition of obsessed love for his birthplace. There is not much that’s modest in the manner, but there is responsibility in the effort to grasp the entire sense of a world. Starr reminds me of the obsessed and genial caffeine-swigging novelist Honore de Balzac, elaborating a vision of French society in the many volumes of “The Human Comedy.”

Starr makes clear in this volume that despite the Great Depression, that California creation known as “the good life” was developed along with other industries and agriculture during the 1930s, leading to our present panic about “lifestyle,” whether it’s feeling fit and eating right or looking chic in the right clothes. (The cult of the body was unequaled even by classical Greece, which seems to have busied itself with debating and therefore failed to invent “slacks” and “sportswear.” Togas were not generally the fashion except by the side of a few swimming pools in the film-biz Arcadia.)

Starr notes the “automobilization” of California life in the 1930s and ‘40s with the development of “the hotel via the motel . . . the home via the house-trailer and of the restaurant via the drive-in,” and he captures the rage for fulfillment through mobility. The Levi-ization of dress meant that a uniform of cowboys trickled up toward the leisure classes and then down to everybody else. Other elements of the lifestyle, like surf, sex and skiing, arrived before sushi in California, contrary to what English poet Philip Larkin, among others, believed when he wrote: “Sex began in 1963 / About the time of the Beatles’ first LP.” Starr’s gatherings of evidence, from the story of the last California American Indian, Ishi, to the story of William Randolph Hearst, illustrate how California history is continually being remade. Ishi dramatizes the myth of the vanishing American Indian; the building of Hearst’s San Simeon dramatizes an American compulsion to create an aristocracy. If, as Evelyn Waugh said, the characteristic sound of European aristocrats at play is that of breaking glass, the sound of what passes for aristocracy at work in California is the crashing of constraints.

Coming from a Catholic family, having a certain amount of Jesuit scholarship in his discipline and perhaps feeling an outsider’s empathy, Starr makes a close study of the increasing Jewish presence in California during this time in the arts, in finance, in the entertainment industry and in the fabric of experience. San Francisco, he writes, was a Jewish city unlike New York, its community dominated by conservative Sephardic and German Jews. And of course San Francisco was a Roman Catholic city. He notes the irony that young Dianne Goldman, later Feinstein, attended St. Ignatius and the Convent of the Sacred Heart for her early education in the 1930s and ‘40s. He is adept at tracing the ethnic diversity of San Francisco, including the African Americans, Latinos and Asians who clearly will claim greater importance as the work continues.

Musing on Starr’s portrait of San Francisco, I’ve decided that an imaginary “Great San Francisco Novel” would have the title “Nobody Came First” because the douceur de vie ascribed to its site, its climate, its Gold Rush and trading riches, its port-side insouciance, is built on a firm foundation of no firm foundation. Everybody arrived in San Francisco, originally known as Yerba Buena, at the same time, and everybody could be called “Slim” or “Tex” or some other frontier name if he (or even she) chose to. It was exhilarating, and still is.

Although Starr is attentive to Los Angeles and San Diego, he takes special delight in the overnight transformation of Yerba Buena, an outpost with a few American Indian trappers, Russian fur traders, Mexican ranchers and Spanish missionaries, into a quasi-European metropolis. Perhaps “Shazam!” should be the motto of San Francisco. The magic metal did this. The waters that embrace the town on three sides contributed the concentrating effect of walls and ramparts. Starr portrays a bohemian artistic life as sparkling and entertaining, like the operetta of Greenwich Village. In its time of dominance of West Coast industry, San Francisco made ships and locomotives, provided banks, beer and blue jeans--”it functioned as the most notable urban center west of Chicago and east of Hong Kong.” Like the San Francisco writer William Saroyan, who believed that if he wrote about himself, he was writing about the world, San Francisco believed it could be complete unto itself. And paradoxically while functioning as the chief port of the West and the capital of American raffishness, it almost was.

Yet “The Dream Endures,” a long, eloquent and passionate book, is subject to excesses. Do we need the digression about the family doctor of the bon vivant husband of the popular novelist Kathleen Norris? Probably not, although the rhapsodies about the dogs and the cute-named cottages of Carmel have a kind of poetry. Starr has an occasional tendency to write in a Latinate voice of booming bonhomie, saying “half a hundred” when “50” would do as well. This is not disagreeable but requires the surrender of stylistic predilection toward tight lips and maximum efficiency. Once the surrender is made, a reader will notice that God and irony are in the details, as in the description of Hearst’s San Simeon, which he started building in 1919 and continued to develop through the 1930s, where bottles of Heinz catsup, “suitable to a downtown lunch counter, topped a Refectory table from Renaissance Spain.”

Only occasionally does Starr tire into cliche: “Diego [Rivera] and Frida [Kahlo] arrived and took the city by storm.” Or jargon, as when he describes Los Angeles as an “innovative polynucleated metropolis”--say what, maestro?

Most often, Starr’s voice is graceful, such as when he describes the seduction of a sort-of-French, sort-of-young-thing by a San Francisco millionaire. The deed takes place over dinner in a private room at the Poodle Dog (the San Francisco roughneck pronunciation of Poule d’Or) Restaurant where “a door locked from the inside. Their knees touched and they dined no more.” End of paragraph. Starr’s elegant choice of detail here says plenty and not too much.

He deploys similar gallantry in describing William Faulkner’s Hollywood amours. The tone also works well in his accounts of Southern California cults of the period: Vedanta, the Great I AM, Theosophy, Krotona. (As a teenage runaway from Cleveland, I ate in a Krotona vegetarian cafeteria and departed with a stomachache: My body rejected Los Angeles fruitcakes.) The most prevalent cult was described by the painter, Gottardo Piazzoni, who, when asked what his religion might be, answered: “I think it is California.”

Starr’s history of Charis Wilson, gifted writer, great beauty, mistress, model and muse to Edward Weston, asks for its own book. I found myself searching for the what-comes-after to many of the stories Starr tells. This history incites further reading. He names Hollywood-bred Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run” (1941) as the best Hollywood novel and describes how Louis B. Mayer, outraged over the novel’s depiction of the film business, suggested to Budd’s father that he be deported. “Where to?” asked B.P. Schulberg. “Catalina Island?”

Starr also links the Bourbon American engineer Herbert Hoover with Ishi, movingly evoked as “the last Native American to receive his culture completely from Native American sources.” The conjunction of the aristocratic Hoover with Ishi is both bizarre and suggestive--Ishi, the intelligent primitive, and Hoover, the over-refined engineer. He is especially responsive to California art and literature, its alternating minimalism and excess and to that California hybrid of soul and money, the film factories in their personality driven early years.

“The Dream Endures” concludes with a detailed study of the artistic and intellectual communities of Northern and Southern California in exile from the Nazis, a world away from the madness they had fled. Heavy-handed Thomas Mann declared that where he was, was Germany (ergo, willkommen to Santa Monica).

Starr demonstrates the continuing nourishment of America, especially California, by immigration. The story is steeped in optimism; the last word is an odd one for Southern California, which is considered a place of rootlessness: “home.” Starr, still hopeful, is not ready yet for a volume entitled “The Dream Erodes.”

Stendahl described the novel as a mirror passing along the roadway, suggesting that the novelist’s gift is limited by how he aims his reflecting glass. A great historian combines this relentless appetite for the world as he finds it with a plausible evaluation of its meaning. In his monumental continuing study of California, Kevin Starr belongs in the company of the best.