by Alice Bolin
In the Central Park jogger case, black men and white women were cast not only as opposites but as natural enemies. In an op-ed for the Daily News after three defendants in the case were convicted by a female district attorney, Bob Herbert wrote, “They never could have thought of it as they raged through Central Park, tormenting and ruining people . . . And yet it happened. In the end, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were nailed by a woman.” This is the vicious nature of envisioning a victim of a brutal crime as Lady Courage, as “New York rising above the dirt”: the unwillingly canonized white girl becomes a new cudgel to punish those whom the city has always punished most. Didion writes passionately and convincingly against this weaponized white femininity in “Sentimental Journeys.” But it was her, after all, for whom the murder of Sharon Tate, and not of Martin Luther King Jr., signaled the end of the sixties.
It is difficult for white women to take responsibility for our faces—looming from magazines, televisions, posters, blown up absurdly on buses and billboards—and the aims we’ve allowed them to be deployed for. In The Flamethrowers, the narrator works as a China girl, the white (not Chinese) women whose faces were cut into the beginnings of film leaders, “there for the lab technicians, who needed a human face to make color corrections among various shots, stocks, and lighting conditions.” The narrator describes the obsessed crushes the lab technicians had on their favorite China girls, smiling, ordinary women whose regularity “was part of their appeal: real but unreachable women who left no sense of who they were.” A split-second snippet at the beginning of a movie, most viewers would never see a China girl, and if they did, their gaze would not linger on her; the China girls were like subliminal messages, illustrating minutely codified standards of what was beautiful and what was normal. The China girl was the cheerful mascot of wholesomeness, and as such, she was the very face of white female complicity, gazing into the camera as defiant as Patty Hearst in her mug shot.
Didion wrote “Sentimental Journeys” twelve years before the five defendants in the Central Park jogger case were exonerated, when DNA evidence proved another man had committed the crime. In it, she is skeptical of the state’s case against the five young men, noting inconsistencies in their confessions, and that the state “had none of the incontrovertible forensic evidence—no matching semen, no matching fingernail scrapings, no matching blood—commonly produced in this kind of case.” Not knowing the extent of the travesty of justice the case represented, Didion sees it as a febrile shared narrative that produced hysteria in sympathizers on both sides, with the white leaders of the city indulging in their Mother Courage/anti-crime rhetoric, and black leaders inciting their community to paranoia.
But the case validated many of the theories that Didion quotes skeptically from the famous black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News of “a white conspiracy at the heart of [black] victimization.” The defendants were, in fact, in the hands of “a criminal justice system which was . . . ‘inherently and unabashedly racist,’” victims of “a ‘legal lyching,’ of a case ‘rigged from the very beginning’ by the decision of ‘the white press’ that ‘whoever was arrested and charged in this case . . . was guilty, pure and simple.’” Baldwin often describes the white ideal of innocence as a desire for an imagined past uncomplicated by the problem of race—for a simpler, whiter time. It may be that in “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion, in her weary pragmatism, is unable to imagine the true face of innocence: not the China girl, but the scared black teenager giving a coerced confession. I Am Not Your Negro tacitly asks who we are more likely to call a child: photos of white faces smirking below a sign that says go back to africa negroes are juxtaposed with the faces of black lynching victims suspended above their broken necks.
Grizzuti Harrison’s most searing criticisms of Didion are of her conservative politics, with her caricatures of sixties leftist movements illustrating her belief in “the futility of all human endeavor.” When Grizzuti Harrison identifies Didion as residing “somewhere in Ayn Rand country,” my notes say only “ouch.” But the irony of Grizzuti Harrison claiming that Didion finds “any attempt at political analysis . . . perversely romantic” is that Didion spent most of the two decades after Grizzuti Harrison wrote this essay doing political analysis, writing about the politics of Central America and its diaspora, in Salvador and Miami, and covering American presidential politics for The New York Review of Books. Didion described her own foray into political reporting as Sisyphean and depressing, and it became an opportunity for her to once again rail against narrative, “the ways in which the political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience.” Grizzuti Harrison writes that Didion is notable in her unwillingness to connect the personal and the political, but it seems to me that politics is for Didion irremediably personal—it is so exhaustingly freighted with personalities that she can put no faith in it.
Didion exemplifies “the personal is political” as not only a rallying cry but a warning. Considering the crowded tradition of white female memoirists since Didion, I keep this warning in mind, given that telling a personal narrative, especially one anyone is interested in hearing, is a privilege in itself. In the half century since “the personal is political” was coined, many white women have interpreted it as “the personal is important” and taken it as a cue to appropriate public struggles to work out their individual grievances. Didion saw her private anxiety reflected in the chaotic state of California at the end of the sixties. The narrator of The Flamethrowers is stirred watching the women’s groups in a demonstration in Italy, chanting, “You’ll pay for everything!” “I took their rage and negotiated myself into its fabric,” she says. “I fused my sadness over something private to the chorus of their public lament.” And isn’t this just an essay about my ex-boyfriend?
It is very difficult to avoid sentimental narratives in personal essays, given that we romanticize nothing so much as ourselves. This was what exhausted Didion about narrative, and I think many white women are trying to situate themselves in stories that they didn’t invent and wouldn’t have chosen. That does not erase responsibility for reproducing distorted myths about power, for obscuring the fact that our most common stories are our most political. The sentimental education is hardly an innocuous trope, particularly when white American women, from the heroines of Henry James to the narrator of The Flamethrowers, stand in for the innocence of their young country. Hellos to All That are not about genuine transformation, more often using a callow protagonist as a foil to illustrate the world’s many cruelties. Such works do not properly illustrate a coming-of-age at all. This was a startling revelation about the literature of the sentimental education, but it still left me with a problem: How could I hope to grow up?
5.
Since Didion wrote her essay about leaving New York, the Goodbye to All That has become a cornerstone of the personal essay genre. Like the Hello to All That, the Goodbye to All That is built on myopic misconceptions about what makes a city unique—on sentimental, or false, narratives. Often their writers could not imagine living anywhere other than New York City or Los Angeles, setting the two cities up, ridiculously, as polar opposites. They are written by writers who are friends with all the other authors of the Goodbyes, thus creating a shared language that incorrectly defines a city as an elite living within it.
I like Didion’s Goodbye, but my favorite is Mary H. K. Choi’s mini-memoir Oh, Never Mind, even though it’s roughly as traditional a Goodbye to All That as you could find. Choi describes how in her mid-thirties, after a decade in New York working as a journalist and editor, she moved to Los Angeles to work in TV. Oh, Never Mind is full of generalizations about New York and L.A. that are funny but relatively meaningless: “In New York, everyone thinks they’re special; in Los Angeles, everyone feels entirely regular unless they’re famous, which, as a percentage, is basically no one.” She is self-conscious about the clichéd nature of her project. “Letting go of New York
was like breaking up with every boyfriend I’d ever had all at once,” she writes. “And I know it’s not new to want to leave.” She even warns her reader against doing the very thing she’s doing, advising that “the key to moving from New York to L.A. is to do it and not tell anyone,” because the Goodbye to All That is so dramatic and such a bluff—so many Goodbye-ers eventually move back to New York, including Didion herself.
What is remarkable in Oh, Never Mind is how Choi veers from her meditation about New York City to plumb her distant past, evoking “the stankiest, fermentiest, bottom-of-the-barrel kimchi, and pickles that sizzle like pop rocks. A la recherché du temps perdu, or whatever.” She writes about the confusion of growing up Korean in a multiethnic school in Hong Kong, where she didn’t long to be white but to be English, and thought Asian kids who hung out with other Asian kids were pathetic because “they settled for what I’d perceived to be the Friend Starter Kit (Oriental flavor).” She writes about her adolescent eating disorder, with Karen Carpenter and Lifetime Movies making her bulimia a way of partaking in pop culture. She writes about her family’s eventually moving to Texas and her roommate at UT, “a gorgeous socialite from Taiwan who spoke little English and dated guys who bought her clothes.” It’s almost as if leaving New York unleashed old versions of herself, alternative possibilities for who she could be given a change in geography.
This move, to pull the present away from the past in strips, speaks of the originating urge of autobiographical writing: to capture the way we experience time, which is not as a straight line but as layer after layer of experience that pile up inside the body. James Baldwin’s writing is full of compulsive bursts of biography, and he often takes us all the way back. No Name in the Street begins with his mother holding a piece of black velvet cloth and saying, “That is a good idea.” “We can guess how old I must have been,” Baldwin writes, “from the fact that for years afterward I thought that an ‘idea’ was a piece of black velvet.” The discursive essays that make up most of his nonfiction function almost as diaries, meditations on race, politics, and literature held together by reminiscences from his own life, often ones that don’t completely resolve. No Name in the Street is peppered with the story of his former bodyguard’s trial for a murder he didn’t commit. In the book’s epilogue, he says that he is still waiting to hear the outcome of the trial.
The book is also a story of reluctant Hellos to both New York and Los Angeles. In 1952, Baldwin returned to his hometown of New York from Paris, wanting to confront the America that had made him and to support the growing civil rights movement. His ambivalence toward New York draws a contrast with the soft-focus wistfulness of a typical Hello or Goodbye to All That: “No, I didn’t love it,” he writes, “. . . but I would have to survive it.”
Throughout No Name in the Street, Baldwin documents his doomed project of writing a screenplay based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Though he doesn’t write the end of that story either, he seems to see it coming. “What one can’t survive is allowing others to make your errors for you, discarding your own vision, in which, at least, you believe,” he writes. Like so many literary geniuses before him—F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, and Nathanael West—who moved to Hollywood to sell out to the movie industry, he experienced a special kind of alienation in L.A., that exile of the swimming pool. “People have their environments: the Beverly Hills Hotel was not mine,” he writes. “For no reason that I could easily name, its space, its opulence, its shapelessness depressed and frightened me.” I have come to see the elements of biography in Baldwin’s writing as Augustinian confessions: for you to understand where he is coming from, he will tell you where he came from.
This was an unsatisfying truth I acquired on my sentimental journey: that a life is about nothing except the reams of time that it is made of. This is one of those profundities that skirts the obvious, and the boring, too. Every book would be called Being and Time, but that title is taken. The writer is not only accounting for time but actually counting it: there’s a reason poets talk about meter. In Inferno, Myles writes about her poems not as describing her life, but as the very atmosphere she’s living in, an ever-present music enhancing her daily movements. “The room was the poem, the day I was in . . .” she writes. “These little things, whether I write them or not. That’s the score.” I love this sense that just as a poem winds its way down the page, you can use it as a meandering path through the world.
This way of thinking is common to conceptual art, which was an attempt to expand the definition of art to include all the objects and ideas the world could produce. Despite its association with minimalism, conceptualism is a hungry movement, bleeding across all forms and playing with eternity, with artworks as monumental as the Great Salt Lake. There is a swaggering rejection of those constraints that are concessions to the possible: in The Flamethrowers, one character has an ongoing project to photograph every living person. But some of this mania for comprehensiveness feels tinged with wistfulness, too. I think of the hours-long sentimental “diary films” of avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, intentionally amateurish, quiet clips from his everyday life among downtown New York hipsters during the sixties and seventies, including his famous friends like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Mekas and his brother were imprisoned in a German labor camp during World War II after escaping their native Lithuania, and much of the sweetness of his films seems informed by this trauma. He has captured so many hours of idyllic footage, you might begin to think it is a complete record of his life—it’s an alternative life, a dramatic score, and this one is for keeps.
The narrator of The Flamethrowers makes downtown New York diary films, too, recording a row of limousines out her window on Mulberry Street, waiting to take mafia men home from their social club. Other than the performance aspect of her run at the Bonneville Salt Flats, the only art pieces we see her make are films, using the medium to capture stasis and speed. The obvious question when it comes to conceptual art is how to record it and how much, and whether that record is art unto itself. The narrator’s hero, Smithson, is famous for his audacious land art, but just as compelling is his writing about his own work, his theories of “sites” and “non-sites” composed so clinically and then undone just as deliberately. “This little theory is tentative and could be abandoned at any time,” he writes about non-sites. “Theories like things are also abandoned. That theories are eternal is doubtful. Vanished theories compose the strata of many forgotten books.” It is amusing that the art critics Malcolm interviewed in “The Girl of the Zeitgeist” resented poet critics like Myles and Ricard, when those poets’ work more closely approximates conceptual artists’ own writing, which was gnomic and often crazy. As much as conceptualists wanted to reimagine art as “gestures and bodies,” they encoded those gestures and bodies into a new landscape of words—theories, pronouncements, descriptions, suppositions, and yes, even feelings—which poets have been doing essentially forever.
I’ve always read and written to mark time, working my way through The Flamethrowers slowly, over many months in L.A. I stopped in the middle of the thirty-page-long party scene, so the night Kushner describes seemed to last not hours but weeks. Reading it over so long, I felt the narrator and her circumstances shift in what seemed like real time: the book is true to the bewildering way relationships and alliances and fortunes change, like the young artist who is begging for curators to look at his pieces with embarrassing desperation, and then, a few months later, is the hot newcomer in the art world, his pathetic earlier self completely forgotten. I read it during a hot, drought-ridden fall, when it was so dry outside that ants infested odd corners of C’s house, getting into his freezer and attacking his ice cream sandwiches. Then in December, a monsoon that blew in from Hawaii flooded the freeways.
During that time I wrote a poem cycle based on James Schuyler’s lovely poem “Song,” his ode to the delicate moment of twilight, when “A cloud boy brings the evening paper: / The Evening Sun. It sets.” I
wrote a poem for every line in Schuyler’s poem, taking it as my cue and, like the title poem of Schuyler’s first book of poetry, “freely espousing.” My poems are filled with dress-up games: “If I were a cartoon I would wear this every day,” I write about “a halter dress that shines like root beer.” In the same poem, I write that “in my ’70s life / I am demure as a chicken strip.” I was going for a Day-Glo, SoCal version of Schuyler’s bucolics, describing how “Places in LA it is / true astroturf, / the Brady Bunch’s / post-drought dream,” but what resulted was more apocalyptic. I read all of my poems for my students and colleagues at my faculty reading that winter, and the next day felt so depressed and helpless that I cried myself hoarse when I couldn’t find my keys. I abandoned my poetry project. The weather changing like a mood swing makes a nice backdrop, but I swear this isn’t a sentimental narrative: my relationship was doomed.