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Making a book is the lighting of a candle.
This candle burns in memory of
Jo Anne Daugherty
Robert Homler
Christina Ward
Acknowledgments
Kit Ward, Colleen Mohyde, and Michael Homler made this book possible. My admiration for them extends well beyond their professional skills. Until the very end, Kit sacrificed her time for others, and Colleen and Michael stepped up with grace and fortitude during moments of great difficulty.
Ted Leeson and Marjorie Sandor taught me to write better sentences. They are not responsible for the embarrassments that remain on the page. Elizabeth Wyckoff was an indispensable researcher. Keith Scribner enthusiastically shared his ideas on the American dream with me. Jon Lewis was a fine companion through the filmic and historical back alleys of Los Angeles. Kerry Ahearn keeps alerting me to the whereabouts of the Dead Father—a way of finding true north. I am grateful to the staffs of the Bancroft Library, the New York Public Library, the UCLA Library, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the libraries at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Texas State University for their help. Laura Wyss and Elizabeth Seramur conducted the photo research and editing. Dinah Lenney and Lyle Wilen made marvelous tour guides. The St. Martin’s team, particularly Lauren Jablonski (tireless!), Carol Edwards, Meg Drislane, Amelie Littell, Steve Snider, Steven Seighman, Yolanda Pluguez, Dori Weintraub, Ivan Lett, Jessica Lawrence, Emily Walters, as well as William McNaull and Eric Rayman on the legal team, handled the book with extraordinary care during the copyediting and production process.
I am grateful to the creative writing students at Oregon State University. For nearly three decades, they have energized me with their vitality and curiosity.
For his help with this book and for care and feeding, I am beholden to Tim Steele. I dearly miss him.
Below are some of the people who were kind enough to share their memories and thoughts, or point me in helpful directions. Any misunderstandings or errors of interpretation are mine, not theirs. For their extra generosity, I’d like to acknowledge Noel Parmentel, Rosa Rasiel, Dan Wakefield, Eve Babitz, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Josh and Foumi Greenfeld, Shirley Streshinsky, and Sean Day Michael. Their insights and stories were crucial to my understanding of the narrative. For permission to print previously unpublished material, my thanks to Philip and Amy Robbins, Margi Fox, and Roger W. Straus III.
Also, my gratitude to Don Bachardy, Weston Blalock, Christopher Buckley, William Burg, Janet Burroway, Phyllis Butler, Norman Carby, Jon Carroll, Larry Colton, Anna Connolly, Amy Cooper, Meghan Daum, Jim Desmond, Julie Didion, Willard Dixon, James Fallows, Carol Felsenthal, Jodie Ferrara-Adler, Gael Greene, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Linda Hall, Joan Haug-Smith, Carol Herman, Alex Ives, Boris Kachka, Sue Kaufman, Brian Kellow, Jonathan Lethem, Kel Munger, John Newhagen, Madeleine Noble, Joyce Carol Oates, Ivan Obolensky, Jay Parini, Harriet Polt, Claire Potter, John Ridland, Jill Schary Robinson, Gabriel Rummonds, Anna Schneider, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Nora Sheehan, Gary Snyder, Matthew Specktor, Ben Stein, Susan Straight, Rob Turner, David Ulin, Paul VanDevelder, George Vazques, Lois Wallace, and Sam Waterston.
Finally, my love and thanks to Don and Debra Daugherty, Charlie and Joey Vetter, Jeanne Sandor and the rest of her lovely extended family, Willie and Alice, and most especially to Marjorie Sandor and Hannah Crum.
The consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.
—Joan Didion,
A Book of Common Prayer
I think it is fair to say that the West has lost its place in the national imagination because, by some sad evolution, the idea of human nature has become the opposite of what it was when the myth of the West began, and now people who are less shaped and constrained by society are assumed to be disabled and dangerous. This is bad news for the American psyche, a fearful and antidemocratic idea, which threatens to close down change. I think it would be a positively good thing for the West to assert itself in the most interesting terms, so that the whole country must hear and be reanimated by dreams and passions it has too casually put aside and too readily forgotten.
—Marilynne Robinson,
When I Was a Child I Read Books
Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered.
—Sidney Howard,
Gone With the Wind screenplay
The whole cosmology of America tends toward the West … the quenching of the sun in the sea.
—Christopher Hitchens,
“It Happened on Sunset”
Preface: Narrative Limits
One afternoon in late September 2011, I was riding in a cab from Central Park West to JFK, reading Christopher Hitchens’s profile of Joan Didion in Vanity Fair magazine, when the cabbie, who had been muttering about the punishing price of gas, said wretchedly, “I don’t know what happened to this country.”
The cabbie was a transplanted Iranian. He complained about America’s “wallowing” in ten-year remembrances of 9/11. Christopher Hitchens was dying. Didion would soon publish a book, Blue Nights, about the near impossibility of surviving everyone she loved. In prepublication interviews, she had hinted that this might be her swan song. “I used to say I was a writer, but it’s less up front now. Maybe because it didn’t help me,” she told Publishers Weekly.
Ten years earlier, by coincidence, she had published Political Fictions on the day hijacked commercial airliners destroyed New York’s World Trade Center towers and a portion of the Pentagon. Political Fictions excoriated America’s ruling class: the politicians, the moneyed, and the media courting them while claiming to expose their corruption. Predictably, the book drew fire from political and media enclaves exploiting the events of 9/11 to censor speech or solidify their influence.
Coincidence is not something Didion much credited. And now, ten years later, within weeks of the 9/11 anniversary ceremonies, she was about to offer her account of the death of her daughter. An account of what it was like to leave no one behind. A totting up of the end.
Coincidence?
I don’t know what happened to this country.
Already, from the Hitchens piece and other well-placed profiles, it was apparent that Blue Nights would not be read solely as a meditation on private loss. Given the timing, and Didion’s reputation as a public pulse taker, her readers would receive the book as an elegy for everything those of us now living had experienced, including, perhaps, books themselves.
We are not adept at facing the ends of things in this country. But in the photograph accompanying the article on her daughter’s demise, Didion did not try to evade the camera or conceal from it her physical and psychological losses. She confronted the viewer directly, the face of grief and desiccation. In shadow, against a creamy white couch, her right hand, veined and curle
d, resembled charred bone. And yet the viewer knew the shot was precisely posed in the manner of Irving Penn’s old fashion layouts, for which Didion used to write captions—a sort of glamorous horror still. Who was she, really?
In the cab to JFK that day, I was not just idly considering Didion. In recent years, I had become—by coincidence, I sometimes thought, though I also distrust the concept—a literary biographer, and I had turned my ear to her. She was a powerful voice for my generation. Early in my career I had decided there was no point to literary biography if it did not seek to grasp what was said, and why, in a certain time. Unavoidably, this approach made the biographer an elegist, writing lamentations.
1
In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first nonfiction collection, published in 1968, Didion had written, “This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem … have reverberated in my inner ear.” Reportedly, in the preface to Blue Nights, she had written, “This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise.” The lines’ echoes forged the link between her early career, when the culture’s center seemed not to be holding and she was perhaps our keenest observer of the chaos, and her late writings, when she, like the readers who had matured with her, noticed her physical decline along with cataclysmic cultural shifts. Didion’s readers knew Blue Nights would feature an idiosyncratic appraisal of grief. Additionally, her genius for and uncanny luck with timing inclined the book to be not just a harrowing lullaby but our generation’s last love song.
A large claim. Yet a woman who had entitled one of her books Slouching Towards Bethlehem and another Democracy had never shied away from making or accepting large claims, including the quiet insistence in her work that she had always spoken for us.
By nailing the naughtiness of American politics on the day two of its physical symbols were attacked, and by keening ten years later, exploring, as a blind person touches strange new skin, the mechanisms of mourning and irretrievable loss, she had told us who we are, who we were. She helped us admit things we intuited but rarely aired: the fragility of our national myths and the constant nearness of death. At its best, her prose surfaced suppressed emotions, causing in the reader vertigo, déjà vu, and yes, even the sensation of coincidence: the now and to come, the hidden and known, overlapping like warm and cold Pacific waves. So conceived, coincidence is an evocative word for what we have always been and what we are already losing. It is, like an evening tide, a thick and somber blue: for Didion, the color of our current moment.
2
In Political Fictions, Didion opened several essays with what Susan Sontag called the “generalizing impulse.” For example:
It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.
And:
No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.
Rhetorically, these openings echo two of the world’s best-known literary beginnings, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Listen:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
And:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Didion’s writing is more specific and personal, but like Austen and Tolstoy, she presents a confident speaker with a solid worldview offering verities about human nature and culture. That these verities are not true (or not necessarily true) is beside the point. The effort is to create a social context in which the characters we are about to encounter must be considered, and reveals the narrator’s values. Since views of human nature and culture are notoriously subjective, such pronouncements are meant to be quibbled with, poked, and prodded.
Let me amend my earlier statement, then. That such verities are not true is the point.
In Political Fictions, what was most striking to longtime readers of Joan Didion was the presence of confidence and verities in her prose. After all, this was a woman who wrote in 1968, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but at some point, amid rising crime rates, a televised war, and a culture experimenting with sex and drugs, Didion began to “doubt the premises of all the stories” she had ever told herself. As an adult American, she said, she thought she “was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning.’” With cult murders in the newspapers and rock songs on the radio insisting “love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation,” she found she could no longer “believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility.” At various times, between 1966 and 1971, she said,
I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai. I reread all of George Orwell on the Royal Hawaiian Beach, and I also read, in the papers that came one day late from the mainland, the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. The child, whose fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for “a long time.” Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.
Didion’s The White Album explored American violence, American apathy, and American sexual mores in the 1960s and was filled with anecdotes—about the Black Panthers, Charles Manson, the Doors—that did not fit into the overarching story, familiar to us from old-school history books and popular culture, of American Promise and the American Dream. By using a collage structure and halting, repetitive sentences, Didion disoriented readers until we began to experience the senselessness she claimed to have felt during those years.
An awareness of narrative’s limits characterized her immediate post-1960s fiction—the novels Play It As It Lays (1970) and A Book of Common Prayer (1977), which, like The White Album, were fragmented, hallucinatory, and obsessively repetitive. But with her nonfiction of the 1980s—Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987)—the attentive reader could detect a tentative, born-again belief that narratives, particularly overarching narratives that tell us how to live, do exist still, do make sense still, though more and more we have to look for them in unlikely places.
Salvador, Miami, and two later novels, Democracy (1984), about the fall of Saigon, and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), covering the Iran-Contra years, prepared Didion’s readers for the newly secure voice, reminiscent of her first novel, we encountered in Political Fictions. From 1963’s Run River to a series of narrative breakdowns to the reinvigorated certitude of Political Fictions, Didion tracked American history as a reporter, novelist, and ardent reader, finding, losing, then finding again the stories imposed on our nation by time, history, and culture. Her late-in-life memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011), investigations of aging, grief, and death, showed us more intimately how we live, and traced the inevitable life path of most Americans.
3
We think we know the woman behind the books. In her reportage, as in her essays and memoirs, Didion used her experiences to establish contexts and combine our national and individual stories. From the first, her work insisted that a single life contained the life of our times.
To discover what we do know about the woman, let’s note a few things about the writer. Fir
st, recall her example of “the narrative,” a well-known fable that tells us how to live. In Didion’s version of the story, the princess is not caged in a castle or an evil stepmother’s house, but in a “consulate.” By slipping this unexpected word into a familiar trope, Didion highlights her literary sensibility. She doesn’t care about magic kingdoms. She’d rather tour the embassies, the public squares surrounded by barricades and armored tanks. If this voice were to say, “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” you’d know to pull on your army boots instead of your glass slippers. The truth you’d be chasing would be located more readily on a military test site than in a ballroom. And it would hardly be universal. Every writer’s verities—Austen’s, Tolstoy’s, or Didion’s—have their boundaries and particular terrains.
Second, Didion’s “images” are barely images at all. She tells us she watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral “on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.” “Funeral” and “verandah” are rarely sentence partners; Didion provides no visual detail and, more crucially, no context to lessen the strangeness of the link. What was she doing at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel during Robert Kennedy’s funeral? Was she alone? Did a crowd gather before a television set to watch the ceremony in sorrow? Was the TV propped on a wrought-iron table in the sun? What is the point of teasing us with the hotel if not to deliberately disorient the reader?
Third, the story Didion offers of the mother leaving her daughter near the last Bakersfield exit on I-5 is a variation of a particular American narrative. When the Joads left the road in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, they exited near Bakersfield, hoping to discover the “pastures of plenty.” The famous final scene in Steinbeck’s novel depicts a new mother suckling a starving man like an infant, an image of maternal generosity undercut by Didion’s freeway anecdote. The shocking story of the I-5 mom is made even more powerful, almost mythic, by the ghost narrative of The Grapes of Wrath haunting it. Paradise has rotted rapidly since the Joads. More broadly, Didion plays against the whole genre of American road stories, all of which, from Kerouac’s On the Road to television’s Route 66, hearken back one way or another to Steinbeck’s novel, which played against the notion of the West as the final frontier.
The Last Love Song Page 1