Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  This was actually the second prize Didion won in her early twenties. She’d already spent the summer of 1955 in the guest editor program at Mademoiselle in Manhattan. (The same program had most famously hosted the poet Sylvia Plath a couple of years before, and was described and lampooned in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.) For that issue of the magazine, she’d written a tidy profile of the novelist Jean Stafford, then not so long out of a marriage with the poet Robert Lowell. She wrote up Stafford’s musings on the marketability of novels versus short stories quite dutifully, with the control and poise of a very good student. There was no hint of the voice people would come to hear.

  Didion never went to Paris. Instead, still a senior at Berkeley, she asked Vogue to give her a job in Manhattan. The magazine found her a place in the copy department and she moved out in the fall of 1956. These two entrances into New York are elided, somewhat, in the opening of Didion’s famous essay about eventually leaving the city again, “Goodbye to All That.” She first saw New York she says, when she was twenty—the Mademoiselle trip. But much of what she discusses in the essay is the experience that followed her second arrival—from the employers who told her to go outfit herself at Hattie Carnegie to being so poor she had to charge things at the Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop, indulging even when broke as the young do.

  To be clear, this is no real deception. The elision of the two arrivals is subtle, and in any event most people who have ever come to New York to work can testify that the feeling she describes—”nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach”—is a renewable resource, something one can dip back into again and again. But there is something of Didion’s method to be learned here: the fact that she was, often consciously, fashioning something from her experiences that was more than bald self-revelation.

  At Vogue, Didion was at first shuffled into the advertising department, then later took up the role once occupied by Dorothy Parker: she drafted captions. By then the prim regime of Parker’s editor Edna Woolman Chase was over. Vogue was somewhat more ambitious, especially when it came to the clothing showcased in its pages. Still, the intellectual tone in the Vogue offices hadn’t changed much. The magazine was still populated by people who were unquestionably richer than Didion, but they were neither particularly literary nor intellectual. But they chased trends, and sometimes those trends led them to very good writers.

  As Didion always told it, the first of her signed pieces for Vogue came about as an accident. Other copy required for the issue did not arrive, and she wrote to a word count. The item she came up with, a short meditation on the nature of jealousy, does not have the force of its convictions. The rote thesis is that jealousy has some force in life:

  Talk to anyone whose work involves an investment of self: to a writer, to an architect. You hear how good a writer X was before the New Yorker ruined him, how Y’s second novel, no matter what Diana Trilling said, could have been only a disappointment to those of us who realized Y’s real potential.

  If this sounds like a writer fortifying herself for a brilliant future career, it is important to remember that at the time Didion was not writing for a magazine that garnered much literary and intellectual respect. The subjects of her essays, which Vogue permitted her to do more of in 1961 and 1962, sometimes seemed to reflect Didion’s inner frustrations. They were about self-respect, the ability to take no for an answer, emotional blackmail.

  Vogue was not the only magazine Didion was writing for at the time. She also had arrangements with Holiday and Mademoiselle. “I was writing pieces that I just sent out,” she told interviewers. “I really didn’t have any control over them.” And the pieces do read somewhat as tryouts for a writer developing a craft. She didn’t include them in later collections of essays, evidently not feeling them her best work.

  Didion also contributed occasionally to the conservative National Review, writing mostly books or culture columns. There she was given the space to elaborate more fully on subjects less susceptible to accusations that they were mere magazine fluff, self-help written in literary diction. Instead she got to do things like review J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, which she panned high-handedly. At a party, she recalled in her review:

  There was, as well, a stunningly predictable Sarah Lawrence girl who tried to engage me in a discussion of J. D. Salinger’s relationship to Zen. When I seemed unresponsive, she lapsed into language she thought I might comprehend: Salinger was, she declared, the single person in the world capable of understanding her.

  This statement now evokes considerable dramatic irony, given what Didion would become to the next few generations of young women, who likewise insisted she had articulated their innermost thoughts in her essays. But when Didion set out originally to write, she wasn’t aiming to be popular in that way. In fact, in Salinger she saw an opportunity to take down a large man: Franny and Zooey she said was “finally spurious.” She saw a man who flattered his readers by giving them the sense they were part of some elite who knew how to live better than other people, when in fact he did nothing but focus on the trivial. He confirmed others in their obsession with minor, superficial things, and in that way, could offer them only something like self-help.

  One person who agreed with her on this was Mary McCarthy, writing in Harper’s. Still a year out from the all-consuming reception of The Group, she laid her finest set of knives to work on the book. She also complained that Salinger lingered too long on trivialities: drinking from a glass, lighting cigarettes. The Salingerian worldview, though, was what McCarthy especially hated: the idea that only the people inside his circle of trust were real, that everyone else was lying. She could not abide the ambiguity of the suicide of Seymour Glass that haunts the pages of Franny and Zooey. She wanted to know why he’d killed himself, whether it was because he had married badly or because he was too happy. She ended with an unforgettable line:

  Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?

  Salinger was then at the height of his popularity and just about to go into hiding. But something is revealed in McCarthy’s and Didion’s shared irritation with him: there was something about Salinger that suggested only surfaces. Funnily enough, both of these women would in time be tarred with the same brush, praised as impeccable stylists whose ideas and observations never quite lived up to the beauty of their prose.

  When Kael went after Didion’s “swank” image, for example, she was arguing in that vein. But Kael also knew that Didion had skill, admitting even as she trashed her that there were flashes of genius: “The smoke of creation rises from those dry-ice sentences.” Kael just wanted Didion to be less injured, less melancholy, less—overall—of a victim. And yet, that really seems only a disagreement as to personal style: Kael spent her life running away from any admission of fault or weakness, particularly in her prose.

  And though it’s now rarely remembered this way, the pair once had grounds for professional rivalry, too. Didion was Vogue’s film critic for a short time in the 1960s, and she had taken up those duties around the same time Kael arrived at the New Yorker. Didion had much less space than Kael, and was clearly not as interested in the internal battles of film criticism, per se. But she had, like Kael, a skeptical attitude toward popular taboos, and a distrust of certain sentimental licenses taken by movie directors. At least once, on a specific film, Kael echoed Didion, too. In 1979, the New York Review of Books asked Didion to take a look at Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and something not unlike Kael’s breakthrough, biting Limelight review had come back. “Self-absorption is general,” Didion began, “as is self-doubt”:

  “When it comes to relationships with women I’m the winner of the August Strindberg Award,” the Woody Allen character tells us in Manhattan; later, in a frequently quoted and admired line, he says, to Diane Keaton, “I’ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted longer than the one between Hitler and Eva Braun.” These lines are meaningless, and not funny: they are sim
ply “references,” the way Harvey and Jack and Anjelica and Sentimental Education are references, smart talk meant to convey the message that the speaker knows his way around Lit and History, not to mention Show Biz.

  Ironically, for all her complaints, and although she had often been a booster of Woody Allen’s, Kael shared Didion’s exasperation with Manhattan, and had the same concern that all its deep talk was masking a fundamental superficiality. “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” she asked a year later, as she sideswiped Manhattan in her review of Stardust Memories.

  Obviously Didion never had any problem using the “I” when she was writing nonfiction. But by 1964, just three years after she started writing those searching essays for Vogue, she was plainly itching to write about something other than herself. Her life was also changing. She had published a slim novel, Run River, whose journey to the bookstore had been a grand disappointment. The title had been chosen by the publisher, and the editor had altered the form of the novel entirely, changing its experimental structure into something quite conventional. She had also married John Gregory Dunne, a sometime friend, after he’d supported her through the end of a long love affair. The pair decided to quit their magazine jobs and move to California, where they had a vague plan to make careers in television.

  Vogue, apparently unwilling to cut apron strings altogether, asked Didion to begin reviewing films for it. In her opening column for 1964, written just a month before she married, Didion declared her critical approach would be somewhat democratic:

  Let me lay it on the line: I like movies, and approach them with a tolerance so fond that it will possibly strike you as simple-minded. To engage my glazed attention a movie need be no classic of its kind, need be neither L’Avventura or Red River, neither Casablanca nor Citizen Kane; I ask only that it have its moments.

  She went on to cast positive votes for The Philadelphia Story, The Spirit of St. Louis, and Charade. Kael had not yet quite broken through to mainstream movie reviewing and I Lost It at the Movies hadn’t yet been published, but we can see in Didion’s words a relatively similar approach. She too would spend her career insisting there were moments of brilliance even in what was unquestionably trash.

  Didion alternated her assignment on the movies with another writer, which seems to have prevented her from reviewing memorable films. She was trying to write with flair, though, in short spaces, and most of the reviews are sprightly, wisecracking things that seem more like Parker than Didion. She hated The Pink Panther: “possibly the only seduction ever screened (David Niven vs. The Princess) with all the banality of the real thing.” She liked The Unsinkable Molly Brown, but commented that Debbie Reynolds “tends to play these things as if the West was won by jumping up and down and shouting at it.” She confessed a weakness for teenage surfing movies, “an enthusiasm I should try to pass off as sociological.” Like Kael, she too hated The Sound of Music, calling it:

  More embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people like Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.

  Gradually, though, Didion got bored with film reviews. Her review of The Sound of Music was so caustic that Vogue fired her, as she tells it. (This was another connection to Kael, who had been fired for panning the same movie at McCall’s.) In any event, she was moving on to other subjects in a column that she and Dunne soon set up at the Saturday Evening Post.

  At the Post, Didion’s writing would undergo a major shift in tone, too. There are hints of the elegiac, distinctive earlier Didion voice in “On Self-Respect,” and in another essay she wrote for Vogue on American summers. But, given the Post’s willingness to send her into the field, she found a groove. It helped that California of the 1960s was fertile ground for twisting stories that provided Didion with the opportunity to follow a disturbing note longer than a column or two. She started off writing for the Post about Helen Gurley Brown (whom she found silly) and John Wayne (whom she did not), but it was the first of the crime pieces that hit a chord with the magazine’s readers—and also reads as the first true Didion piece.

  It was titled “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left?” But the title Didion would give it in her own collection, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” was the one that would stick. Nominally chronicling a local murder, in which a wife was accused of burning her husband to death in the family car, Didion immediately pulled back to a wide-angle view of everything that was plaguing California, not to mention most of the rest of America:

  This is the California where it is easy to Dial-a-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdresser’s school.

  The woman was eventually convicted of murdering her husband, but naturally the residents of the San Bernardino valley—the part of California Didion was describing in that long, unwinding opening paragraph—did not take kindly to being characterized this way. “I am worried about Joan Didion,” wrote one Howard B. Weeks, who also listed his profession: vice president for public relations and development at Loma Linda University. “We recognize these feelings as symptoms commonly observed in young New York writers who venture into the Great Unknown beyond the Hudson.” This letter illustrates that Didion hadn’t quite yet broken through to the mainstream; Howard B. Weeks did not know he was lecturing the woman who would become the signature American writer from California on the subject of her own home.

  Didion did not slide into her groove immediately. The next piece she wrote seemed almost a step away from anything that could possibly annoy anyone. It was entitled “The Big Rock Candy Figgy Pudding Pitfall.” Despite her having savaged Helen Gurley Brown and J. D. Salinger for being essentially trivial persons, one guesses this was the kind of piece Didion wrote for money. It details an effort to cook twenty figgy puddings and make twenty hard-candy trees. But it seemed to reflect a state of distress about how her domestic arrangements were working out:

  I am frail, lazy and unsuited to doing anything except what I am paid to do, which is sit by myself and type with one finger. I like to imagine myself a “can-do” kind of woman, capable of patching the corral fence, pickling enough peaches to feed the hands all winter, and then winning a trip to Minneapolis in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. In fact, the day I stop believing that if put to it I could win the Pillsbury Bake-Off will signal the death of something.

  Dunne appears in this article as a benevolent, comic figure, who upon confrontation with the supplies asks, “Exactly what kind of therapy are we up to this week?” But nowhere in this article does Didion mention that earlier that year, she and Dunne had adopted a child they named Quintana Roo Dunne. The anxiety, though, about being some kind of domestic goddess—”the kind of woman who made hard-candy topiary trees and figgy puddings”—smells of what the women’s magazines all call nesting.

  For one of the first issues of the new year, she wrote an essay the magazine entitled “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” (Later generations of readers would come to know it better by the title “Goodbye to All That.”) This was when the first hint of her career-long obsession with the stories we tell ourselves would begin to explicitly emerge. Didion suggests that the New York of her imagination had dominated the real one the whole time she actually lived there:

  Some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was
late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

  This essay is so famous it is said to have spawned its own mini genre of essays about leaving New York. Like the song on the jukebox, it expresses the feelings everyone has about a common experience. The brilliance of the essay is that even in the act of writing it Didion reenacts an emotional cliché, the narrator telling a past self how silly and stupid she was to fall for a story that everyone falls for. This self-conscious style, a personal matter conveyed at a distance, would become Didion’s signature. Even when she wrote about something as personal as her divorce, she did it at a remove, turning it over in her hand, polishing it to a shine that concealed certain roughnesses in the center.

  Dunne and Didion soon had a regular column in the Saturday Evening Post, sharing a byline. It looks odd to contemporary eyes, especially because of the illustration the magazine used at the top of each column, drawings of them both. If Dunne had written the column, the illustration would show his face in front of Didion’s; if she had written it, her face would move in front of his.

  Her columns were generally the more interesting explorations of the pair, her knack for inspiring a reaction was top-notch. Her essay on migraines would appear in that space, as would her reporting of a decommissioned Alcatraz and a devastating sketch of Nancy Reagan, then the first lady of California:

  She has told me that the governor never wore makeup even in motion pictures and that politics is rougher than the picture business because you do not have the studio to protect you … “Having a pretty place to work is important to a man,” she has advised me. She has shown me the apothecary jar of hard candies she keeps filled on the governor’s desk.