California marks a transitional stage in Robert Cohn's life: after his divorce, he goes to the Coast, enters literary circles, and uses what remains of his inheritance to support an arts review. The state is therefore less a permanent home than a launching ground, connecting the failed domestic life he has left behind with the expatriate literary and personal entanglements that carry him to Europe.

Arrival After Divorce

Robert Cohn reaches California after his divorce has been arranged. The divorce follows a marriage that began when he married the first girl who treated him kindly, lasted five years, and produced three children. His domestic unhappiness had hardened him, while most of the fifty thousand dollars left by his father had been lost and the remainder of the estate had gone to his mother. His wife's departure with a miniature-painter gives him the shock that ends the marriage more decisively than his own prolonged intention to leave it.

California consequently receives Cohn at a moment of release rather than triumph. He has escaped a marriage he had hesitated to end because he believed leaving would be cruel, but he arrives with diminished finances and a personality shaped by disappointment. The state's importance lies in what it permits next: a new social and professional identity built through literary association.

Literary Enterprise in California

In California, Cohn falls in with literary people and, because he still has a little of his inheritance, begins backing a review of the Arts. The review starts publication in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and later finishes its run in Provincetown, Massachusetts. California thus becomes the place where private money is converted into cultural enterprise and where Cohn's connection with the literary world becomes materially visible.

At first Cohn is regarded simply as an angel, and his name appears on the editorial page only as a member of the advisory board. That arrangement changes. He becomes the sole editor, discovers that he enjoys the authority of editing, and finds himself exercising control rather than merely financing other people's work. When the magazine becomes too expensive and he has to give it up, the failure removes both an enterprise and a newly acquired source of authority.

From California to Europe

The end of the magazine does not end Cohn's literary and emotional reorientation. By then, a forceful woman who had been taken in by the prospect of rising with the magazine has also taken control of his life. Cohn believes he loves her, while she becomes increasingly dissatisfied when the review fails to advance. She urges him to go to Europe, where he might write, and the two leave California for a life abroad.

The movement from California to Europe is therefore driven by intertwined pressures: the collapse of the review, the woman's attempt to secure what remains available from Cohn, and Cohn's desire to write. They spend three years in Europe, the first in travel and the final two in Paris. California stands at the hinge of this movement, a place where financial resources, literary aspiration, and romantic dependence are briefly assembled before being carried across the Atlantic.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

California belongs to the novel's larger pattern of unsettled American and European lives. Cohn's path runs from the wealthy Jewish families of New York through education, marriage, divorce, California publishing, and European expatriation. The state is not described through landscape or local culture; its narrative identity comes from the institutions and networks Cohn enters there. It functions as a cultural intermediary, linking inherited American wealth to literary production and then to the expatriate world.

Cohn's California experience also exposes the unstable relation between money and independence. His remaining inheritance makes the review possible, and editing gives him pleasure because it grants authority, but the magazine's expense eventually defeats him. The same resources that open a new life also make him vulnerable to people who organize their futures around his money and influence. California therefore represents opportunity without security: it allows Cohn to become an editor, yet cannot provide a durable foundation for the identity he is trying to construct.