by Alice Bolin
He was fond of referring to Paris as the “city of refuge”—which it certainly was, God knows, for the likes of us. But it was not a city of refuge for the French, still less for anyone belonging to France; and it would not have been a city of refuge for us if we did not have American passports.
Baldwin writes about the crisis of conscience when a person flees American oppression only to find out that they are more American than they previously thought.
Holder began regularly visiting the American embassy and begging to be allowed back into the United States, despite knowing that jail time awaited him there. He was eventually extradited back to the United States in 1986. Kerkow, on the other hand, adjusted eerily well to her glamourous life in Paris, wearing stylish, expensive clothes and speaking perfect French. She flirted with Sartre and was close friends with the actress Maria Schneider. Eventually her transformation was complete: in 1978, she said goodbye to Holder and slipped into Switzerland, most likely to buy a counterfeit passport, and she has never been heard from again. It is possible that she is still alive and incognito somewhere in Europe. The privilege afforded pretty white women allowed Kerkow freedom of movement, but what is more impressive about her disappearance is her determination and ruthlessness: she displayed a total lack of sentimentality about her past. Holder and Kerkow are almost too clean a case study in the differing relationships of black and white Americans toward their collective history.
The apotheosis of the white girl turned terrorist is Patty Hearst. The millionaire heiress of the Hearst publishing fortune was abducted from her apartment in Berkeley in 1974, just as Eileen and Reno were making their journeys to New York, and two years after Cathy Kerkow made her fateful plane trip. Her captors, left-wing terrorists called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), held her blindfolded for fifty-seven days until she agreed to join their cause. After that, she participated in several bank robberies and, in the words of Joan Didion, “sprayed Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles with a submachine gun.”
Didion wrote about Hearst in 1982, on the publication of Hearst’s memoir, Every Secret Thing. The book turned out to be misleadingly named, because even though Hearst includes tantalizing details about her sojourn with the SLA, like how to lace a bullet with cyanide, it was still unclear why she joined them, the extent that she believed in their ideology or was brainwashed, and how she could return so seamlessly to a relatively normal life when her captivity was over. In all, the question remained whether she was a perpetrator or a victim. Didion writes that public fascination cast Hearst’s story as “a special kind of sentimental education, a public coming-of-age.” But despite the public’s desire for her to be like the ill-used heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, Hearst insisted on muddying the waters, writing in Every Secret Thing both fawning reminiscences of the Hearst family mansions and a description of how to make a pipe bomb. Her story illustrates that a sentimental education does less to destroy the innocence of its protagonist than reveal its falsehood.
“I know how power works,” James Baldwin once said, “it has worked on me, and if I didn’t know how power worked, I would be dead.” Women know how power works, too, so often acting only out of a desire to protect our bodies from violence. “My thoughts at this time were focused on the single issue of survival,” Hearst writes about the early days of her abduction. But the knot of victim and perpetrator doesn’t always unravel so easily. White women wield power, too, particularly the power to enlist other people’s protection and then leave them holding the bag, like every noir anti-heroine hiding secrets behind innocent eyes. After Reno abets Roberto’s murder, she goes back to her job and friends in New York. Patty Hearst wrote Every Secret Thing “behind locked doors in a Spanish-style house equipped with the best electronic security system available.” Cathy Kerkow was able to start a glamourous new life after committing the longest-range plane hijacking in history. These are representatives of a group of people who have gotten a little too good at survival.
Didion writes of Hearst as a daughter of the California pioneer ethic, for whom a connection to the past was a sentimental indulgence. “Patricia Campbell Hearst had cut her losses and headed west,” she writes, “as her great-grandfather had before her.” It seems more likely that she is the product of the United States’s disordered relationship with its own history, which has allowed its people to live with massive moral contradictions from the moment of its founding. Hearst is America’s sweetheart, reminding us that, as Baldwin put it, “this depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people is, in sum, the American experience.”
4.
Los Angeles for me was C. We talked about L.A. constantly, those conversations that so define the city’s discourse that it’s become a cliché:
“How did you get here?”
“We took Centinela.”
“Should we Uber?”
“Can you pay the Uber there, and I’ll pay the Uber back?”
“If you wake up early enough, you could take the 210.”
“Oh, I love the 210.”
He read Didion while we were together, and we tried to determine if the first essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem took place in a part of San Bernardino County either of us were familiar with. Didion was all I wanted to be as a writer. I was obsessed with how her essays were literary but not academic, full of evidence but more about juxtaposition than justification. I see now that my mission inaugurated with The Flamethrowers was an attempt to discover who I could be as a writer without Didion as my guiding star. Her California was one I recognized, despite its being fifty years gone. I didn’t realize then that it was partly because so many things had bent to her nostalgia: there were pictures of her leaning against that sports car everywhere, like there are pictures of Charles Bukowski in dive bars. C and I read The Flamethrowers together, too, part of an effort to have something to talk about other than driving and his dog.
It’s easy for me to blame everything on Joan Didion. But if I weren’t her acolyte, I probably wouldn’t have been so contentedly miserable in Southern California. I was depressed and anxious most of the time C and I were together, a predictable recurrence of the mental illness I’d dealt with since I was thirteen. I had anxiety attacks at work, while driving, and when C and I were having sex. Often I would start crying and be unable to stop. It took me a long time to interpret these symptoms correctly. I thought I was “disorganized,” had “writer’s block,” had migraines and allergies. I thought it was a symptom of the Los Angeles Didion described in her essays, a giant city sprawling with housing developments from the desert to the ocean, disconnected neighborhoods laced together by serpentine freeways, the alienation of which induces sensitive white ladies to nervous breakdowns. I was probably partaking in some of her glamourous desperation, too, the kind of privilege that allows one to suffer “migraines that can be triggered by her decorator’s having pleated instead of gathered her new dining room curtains,” as Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in her epic anti-Didion rant in 1979, likening her to “a neurasthenic Cher.” The fact that I was able to participate in everything that made Los Angeles exciting while still being unhappy felt very Didion indeed.
It seems simple now: I was starting a new job, splitting my time between the boarding school and L.A., a difficult two-hour drive I made several times a week, and I was uncertain about my relationship. None of these sources of stress had anything to do with abstractions about California’s essential soul. I wish I had seen then that when Didion wrote about “Places of the Mind” she wasn’t kidding: what she defined as California was a map of her own dread, but it didn’t have to be mine.
Our cultural obsession with Didion and her generation of writers has only intensified in the two years since my L.A. era. As I write this in 2017, people seem to be constantly pointing to how thinkers of the twentieth century predicted the reactionary disaster of the Trump administration, from the Frankfurt School to John F. Kennedy. It’s no coincidence that both a hugely popular documentary about James
Baldwin, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, and Didion’s first book in six years, South and West, were released in spring 2017, and both were hailed as prophetic of our current political dilemma.
There is a feeling that the unfulfilled promise of the 1960s, when the hopeful uprising of the civil rights movement gave way to disillusionment with a series of traumatic assassinations and the quagmire of the Vietnam War, holds the key to our present moment. History cycled back as our beloved first black president and new protest movements could not stop a white nationalist billionaire from becoming the most powerful person in the world. In I Am Not Your Negro, Peck shows shot after shot of sneering white men and boys in the fifties and sixties, holding Confederate flags and signs that say we won’t go to school with negroes. These images are eerily echoed in pictures of Trump rallies or of the college-aged white boys who have followed the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on his speaking tour like he was a jam band, reveling in overt misogyny and racism rebranded as irreverence or “free speech.” These far-right gatherings, organized and emboldened, grew to the open unity of the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacist groups, and racist Internet trolls in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, which resulted in a white supremacist murdering a protester with a car.
The problem of white femininity became more complicated after the Great White Woman Hope, Hillary Clinton, failed to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” and hundreds of thousands of liberal white women took to the streets the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration in solidarity with their more marginalized neighbors, many of them for the first time. But another similarity in these pictures of angry mobs of white boys from 1957 and 2017 are the white girls lurking at their fringes. The famous photos of Charlottesville are of white men with crew cuts and polo shirts marching with tiki torches, but there were white women there, too, supporting and in many ways protecting them.
We believe that staring hard at these ugly images of bigotry is necessary to inoculate ourselves against it, which is also why we seek the “prophets” of the previous generation, hoping not to repeat the mistakes of the past, as if there are ever any new mistakes. But I am not the first person to point out that it is easy for white people to enjoy delicious disgust at our misguided and hateful fellow citizens—it is both self-righteous and entertaining, knowing that you would never protest an abortion clinic or an integrated school, and if you did, you would at least spell abomination right. The long tradition of molding everyday bigots into clowns and monsters with the help of a pull quote and a telephoto lens continues unabated, despite our fear of repeating history. Simplifying these people is an act of charity, a way to sentimentalize them. This is why so many chroniclers of late sixties and early seventies America failed so completely, despite a manic obsession with the zeitgeist. Didion and other New Journalists depicted the politicians, protesters, criminals, and cultural icons of their era not as good guys and bad guys, but as the diverse avatars of historical absurdity. As Grizzuti Harrison wrote, Didion “is obliged to call attention—in a series of verbal snapshots, like a Diane Arbus of prose—only to the freaks of the 1960s.”
The most telling example is the Black Panthers, whom both Didion and Tom Wolfe (especially in his satirical essay “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”) were drawn to because of the verbal novelty of revolutionary boilerplate language applied to the situation of the American ghetto. One of the pivots of “The White Album” is a visit to Huey Newton in prison, where he is playing the press like a fiddle, meanwhile saying very little about himself or his specific aims. “Tell us something about yourself, Huey, I mean about your life before the Panthers,” one reporter asks. “Before the Black Panther Party,” Newton replies, “my life was very similar to that of most black people in this country.” Didion is obsessed with a story in which Newton was denied treatment at an emergency room because he did not have the proper insurance, thinking that it illustrated “a classic instance of an historical outsider confronting the established order at its most petty and impenetrable level.” Her theory is destroyed when she learns that despite Newton’s belligerence in the emergency room, he did in fact have the proper insurance. For Didion, Newton’s status as “an historical outsider” collapses, confirming that the Black Panthers were just another group of actors in the political commedia dell’arte, all of whom are ridiculous and dishonest, and therefore easily and thankfully dismissed. Taken another way, this anecdote illustrates Didion’s inability to parse the complexities of a black working class: that Newton could be initiated in some bourgeois institutions and still be oppressed by them.
As Baldwin points out in No Name in the Street, though Didion and Wolfe treat the Black Panthers as a novelty, the U.S. government took them seriously enough to act systematically “to wipe the Black Panthers from the face of the earth.” It is difficult to properly stress the contrast between Baldwin’s description of the Panthers’ mission and New Journalists’ condescension. Baldwin points out that the initial stated mission of the group was self-defense, teaching black neighborhoods to protect themselves, especially against a racist police force. Their visionary power was in precisely the details that Didion and Wolfe saw as spectacle. As Baldwin explains it,
The Black Panthers made themselves visible—made themselves targets, if you like—in order to hip the black community to the presence of a new force in its midst, a force working toward the health and liberation of the community. It was a force which set itself in opposition to that force which uses people as things and which grinds down men and women and children, not only in the ghetto, into an unrecognizable powder.
It is not hard to understand if for one moment you imagine that black people were telling the truth—that their revolutionary rhetoric was not an attempt to co-opt leftist machismo but was, in fact, a pointed call for a specific kind of justice. Baldwin discusses Huey Newton, too, but, unsurprisingly, lends him more thought and sympathy than Didion does. His descriptions of Newton are long and thoughtful, considering the contradiction of the clean-cut guerrilla who looks like “everyone’s favorite baby-sitter.”
The difference in perspective between Baldwin and these zeitgeist chasers is encapsulated in Baldwin’s estimation of the difference between himself and another of their generation, Norman Mailer: “He still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose . . . The thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence.” There is something nostalgic in these bemused journalistic dispatches from the brave new world of the sixties, something of a desire to tame unruly social movements, to Make America Great Again: “Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo,” Didion writes in “The White Album,” “it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorable about bombing power stations.”
I remember realizing the danger in this weary stance toward history, shortly after seeing one of Woody Allen’s crappy late-career movies with a friend back in Montana. It occurred to me that Didion (born 1934) and Allen (born 1935) took a similar self-centered view of the sixties and seventies counterculture: having been helpless children during the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, they tended to view despair not as political but existential. If you take this long view, it is easy to see all problems as equally pointless, allowing ethics to slip soothingly from your thoughts. Police brutality is a phenomenon similar to the popularity of the Doors in “The White Album”; Allen’s heroes are equally preoccupied with memories of the Holocaust and losing their teenage girlfriends. But while Allen is easy to disavow, Didion’s blind spots hurt in a childish way, like finding out my mom told a lie.
I should have guessed there was a problem with Didion’s ethos when she questioned the use of narrative itself, asserting that life was more accurately portrayed as a series of disjointed vignettes, the clippings of discarded film edited from our stories. It’s not that I think this is inherently wrong, and it would
n’t mean much if I did; fragmentation as an artistic technique is not going away. But when I read Didion’s work from the 1960s and ’70s, I wonder if “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” is maybe not stated in good faith, if this belief in the falsehood of narrative and the truth of fragmentation is another story we tell ourselves. The disconnectedness of her work is an ironic gesture, a way of illustrating her longing for the continuous and comforting narratives of the past. And it reflects romantic myths about California, about a place like a stage set, with no memory, no consistency, no true reality.
Nowhere is Didion’s status as architect and propagator of false narratives of California clearer than when she is cunningly deflating sentimental myths about other places, foremost New York City. She of course wrote the most famous essay about getting tired of New York and leaving, “Goodbye to All That,” but she is better and more brutal in her 1990 essay “Sentimental Journeys,” about the Central Park jogger case, in which five black and Latino teenagers were convicted and imprisoned for a brutal rape they did not commit. There Didion explores how corruption and inequality are built into the structure of New York, and these essential qualities are written off or written over by platitudes about the city’s “energy” and “contrasts.” “The preferred narrative worked to veil actual conflict,” she writes, “to cloud the extent to which the condition of being rich was predicated upon the continued neediness of a working class.” This sounds pretty socialist coming from an erstwhile Goldwater Republican.
Her main critique is of the New York public mobilizing against the abstracted phantom of “crime,” meanwhile ignoring “the essential criminality of the city.” Crime stories are ubiquitous in our culture not only for their transgressive lure but for their power to reinforce a social order, providing “a sentimental reading of class differences and human suffering, a reading that promises both resolution and retribution . . . working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems.” Particularly disturbing are the ways that white female victims become the mascots of campaigns against “crime,” which can almost always be read as campaigns against a city’s poor and nonwhite residents. In the Central Park jogger case, the crime’s anonymous victim, a Wall Street executive who was gang-raped and beaten while jogging at night, was perversely idealized in the New York press, “wrenched, even as she hung between life and death . . . into New York’s ideal sister, daughter, Bacharach bride.” The traditional withholding of rape victims’ names helped her fulfill every fantasy of “contrasts” between the city’s best and brightest and its dark underbelly. It reinforced comforting notions of who was a girl—a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker, whose name was not spoken—and who was a man—a fifteen-year-old suspect who had not even been arraigned, whose name was spoken by the police and the press.