The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  I mention these examples to demonstrate that even as Didion frets about narratives in tatters, she is weaving narrative. She is carefully plotting a story, manipulating details, with a clear direction and a sense of who’s in charge—Joan Didion, jittery, uncertain, but vivid and speaking with a distinctive Western voice. Her collages are not stitched of random scraps. Her roads do not dead-end. Her narrative breakdowns are mirages. Every piece fits, often in more or less conventional patterns.

  4

  In the foreword to Political Fictions, Didion tells us she spent her childhood and high school years among “conservative California Republicans” in Sacramento, “in a postwar boom economy.” In other words, she grew up in a well-connected family surrounded by Okies and others like them who had weathered the Grapes of Wrath, who had managed to escape the fruit fields and achieve a modest prosperity, buying a few fields of their own, working for shipbuilders or aerospace companies or on test-site ranges or some other outgrowth of California’s burgeoning defense industries. American Promise—in the shape of the war and its stimulus to the economy—had directly benefited these families and those, like the Didions, with serious ties to the land. They all had reason to believe in “the narrative” as the Cold War heated up and American consulates spread throughout regions we had liberated or conquered. As David Beers, the son of a fighter pilot, writes in his memoir, Blue Sky Dream, Sputnik was the “lucky star” for postwar kids in California, “its appearance in the darkness a glimmering, beeping announcement that we would not know want.” In the 1950s, the GI Bill, housing loans, and government spending on computer development, aerospace, and foreign investment created what Beers calls the “Blue Sky Tribe,” a new middle class that worshiped a “God [endorsing] progress, personal and national,” and that believed it would live happily ever after in spotless, crime-free suburbs. Those invited to join the tribe—the people among whom Didion was raised—flourished in the new economy and voted conservatively in order to maintain it until the dream faltered in the 1980s.

  In an early essay entitled “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Didion sketched another version of this particular Western narrative. “John Wayne rode through my childhood,” she wrote, determining “forever the shape of certain of [my] dreams.” He suggested “a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free … at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

  Later, when Didion claimed narrative lost its intelligibility for her, she was not speaking abstractly, as so many of her contemporaries were, about the craziness of the 1960s, the mass upheavals attending the Vietnam War protests, the sexual revolution, or the civil rights movement, though these events touched her. She was mourning the loss of a very specific story with its bright river and its cottonwoods, its silvery satellite stars beaming riches down on a tamed and temperate West.

  Nor were the causes of her losses abstract, nothing as soggy as the notice our nation has borne in every decade of its existence that America had “lost its innocence” (how many times can innocence be lost?). No. Didion is as precise in her reporting as she is in her rhetoric and phrasing. Things stopped fitting for her when John Wayne, who was always and forever “supposed to give the orders,” got cancer. An unexpected crack in the narrative. “I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western,” she laments, “and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne.”

  Still later, she was “shocked and to a curious extent personally offended by the enthusiasm with which California Republicans … jettisoned an authentic conservative [Goldwater]” and rushed to “embrace Ronald Reagan,” a less principled man, in her view. She registered as a Democrat, the first and perhaps the only member of her family ever to do so, she says. She does not list her problems with Reagan but makes it clear that, for all his Western posturing, he was simply no John Wayne.

  For a while, after a dream fails, nothing seems to make sense. But Didion has never presented herself as a wide-eyed naïf. She admits that even as she fell for the John Wayne mystique, she understood that the world was “characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities.”

  Her prose is filled with little dodges like this: a subtle certainty in the face of doubt, hinting that we do not know the woman behind the books as well as we think we do. In part, the impulse to hedge reflects her Western upbringing (she comes from a family of gamblers). “I think people who grew up in California have more tolerance for apocalyptic notions,” she once said, thinking of earthquakes, floods, and fires. “However, mixed up with this tolerance for notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is the belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much part of being in California.” More deeply, the paradoxes in her writing suggest her real interest is language, its inaccuracies and illusions, the way words imply their opposites, and the ways stories, particularly stories that tell us how to live, get told or don’t. For all her fascination with American politics, the ostensible subject of much of her writing, George Orwell’s politics of language grip her most. There is a trace of the literary critic in all of Didion’s fiction just as there are echoes of nineteenth-century novelists—the omniscient, moral voice—in her later essays. And if, in the 1960s, her love of narrative structure led to a sense of betrayal (after all, one cannot be betrayed without first loving intensely), then that same love has allowed her to rediscover a coherent and ongoing American story.

  5

  It’s a simple story she longs for. A moral story, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. A road trip with a final destination. A John Wayne movie plot. But she also knows that such a story could not possibly embrace something as vast, diverse, and shifting as American life. The “pastures of plenty” will always remain elusive. The emphasis, then, in both her nonfiction and fiction rests not on the longed-for story—which can never be told fully—but on the longing itself. Her sensibility. The ironies shaping her disorientation and desire, her dashed hopes.

  On the page, Didion’s sensibility is individual, “passive,” “strange, conflicted,” as well as communal. She attempts to speak for us all through the apparently self-defeating strategy of grounding her authority in weakness. In the confessional tradition of Montaigne, Didion admits her limitations and befuddlements up front, so readers feel they are in the presence of an unusually honest speaker. “I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind,” she says in The White Album. “I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people.” This self-deprecatory statement is also a brassy declaration. Rhetorically, its function is to establish the narrator as someone with a unique consciousness, someone whose disengagement places her in a better position than anyone else to plumb contemporary life. She is an outsider whose singular, untainted perspective allows her to assume a public voice. Our responses to her persona tell us less about the woman behind the books than about ourselves.

  Recall Robert Kennedy’s funeral watched on a verandah of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel: a glimpse of Joan Didion? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the detail serves a literary purpose. American hotels, like American consulates, are outposts of U.S. values, especially in old colonial settings. Hotels appear often in Didion’s work. They suit her persona. They establish contrasts (home and not home, freedom, restrictions, and loneliness) allowing her to mix public rituals with private insights and local politics—not to share her life, necessarily, but to expose communal currents, communal break points. Our response to her is more generally a test of our principles and
concerns.

  One more thought to bear in mind, and eventually we’ll return to it: After the World Trade Center towers collapsed, many commentators, including Michiko Kakutani, a book reviewer for The New York Times, and Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, wondered if irony might be dead. No one felt like laughing. Political cynicism seemed insensitive, maybe even unpatriotic. The attack and the ensuing debate over responses to it posed a challenge to the literary enterprise Didion had pursued since the 1960s.

  Political Fictions, disparaging the corruption of America’s governing class, hit the nation’s bookstores on the day the towers fell. Irony? An example of why irony should be buried in the rubble (we can’t afford dissenting voices in a time of crisis)? Certainly, the image of passenger planes deliberately smashing into office buildings did not fit into any previous American narrative.

  6

  “I belong on the edge of a story,” Didion once said. Temperamentally, she is a reader, not an on-the-spot reporter or a stringer chasing witnesses down the street. In 1976 she signed on to cover the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone. She wrote to the magazine’s editor, Jann Wenner, that being in the courtroom on a specific day was not important to what she was writing. Wenner seemed dismayed at this news, but Didion insisted she was thinking of Hearst as an idea of California rather than as a defendant in a trial. She said she would probably spend more time in the Bancroft Library than she would in the courtroom.

  Always, she has stressed the limits of traditional reporting: Rarely will a place reveal its past or a person tell you the truth. Most first-person accounts are predictable, self-serving, and bland (she has been especially scornful of the “insider” reporting practiced by Bob Woodward, who often gets chummy with his subjects and whose interviews, she argues, are leaks by officials spinning events). Rather, what’s required of a writer is a thorough investigation of the public record. She feels that the surfaces of things—the stated claims of legal contracts, the walls and floors of gas stations, high schools—reveal as much as, if not more than, their depths. She abhors abstractions. Wary of interpreting behavior as a clue to character (the addiction, the sexual insecurity, the psychic wound repeating itself in each new relationship), she seeks, instead, fruitful inconsistencies. Thus, her careful linguistic construction of Joan Didion, her emphasis on the brute world’s shaping of identities, on the importance of actions and facts—or, more accurately, the forms assumed by “facts” (documents, essays, architecture); her reluctance, especially in early work, to judge or qualify.

  Given these attitudes, she leaves obvious potholes for a biographer, obstacles deepened by the apparently autobiographical material in her work: How much of it can be corroborated, dismissed, or augmented? What else is there to say? As of this writing, Didion is still living. Does a biography of a living person make sense? (At best, it can only smooth the ground for later, more comprehensive studies and must necessarily emphasize the writer’s early development.) Is the proper distance for evaluation possible now? My hope has been that these questions would animate, not defeat, the project.

  I put this hope to Didion, through her editor, Shelley Wanger. Blue Nights was about to appear. Joan was in the middle of publishing her book, so she could not really think about speaking to a biographer right now, Wanger replied, more or less as I thought she would. I said I understood; I’d ask again at a more convenient moment, knowing I might remain precisely or imprecisely on the edge of this story. Didion was known for granting access selectively to reporters. In a letter from the archives of the Lois Wallace Literary Agency, dated January 18, 1979, Maryanne Vollers had asked Didion if she would consent to being profiled in Rolling Stone. At the bottom of Vollers’s letter, Didion had penciled, lightly, that this would not be possible. On another occasion, she had refused a scholar permission to quote from her work on the grounds that she didn’t want people writing about her, and even more, she didn’t want to know if people were writing about her. Since she was also, at this time, allowing her work to be reprinted and discussed in literary anthologies, her decisions seemed personal rather than categorical.

  In The Year of Magical Thinking, she described an incident in a reception area of New York–Presbyterian Hospital, the night her husband died, when a social worker called her a “pretty cool customer.” Her coolness was apparent in interviews she had given over nearly five decades in which she’d revealed little of herself, in which she’d crafted another persona, not entirely at odds with the Joan Didion in her formal writing but not completely consistent with it, either. In interviews, Joan Didion was generally looser, funnier—but just as deflective. “Clearly, I’d say anything!” she admitted merrily in 2011, on tour for Blue Nights, when pressed about nonanswers she’d offered in the past. Time and again, she’d repeat particular anecdotes, writerly wisdoms, and calculated confessions. Always, her interviewers noted her famously frail physique, her halting voice hovering just above a whisper. The details were accurate so far as they went, but their repetition tended to create what we think of today as a brand, and it was first promoted by Didion herself. In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she had written, “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate.” This is the Joan Didion we would come to know, to the exclusion of all others, no matter what she said in interviews. Obviously, no reporter was going to get much out of her that she didn’t want out. Fair enough. But it was important to bear in mind that she was always working her brand. In Blue Nights she declared, “[W]riting … no longer comes easily to me.” The “no longer” suited her current narrative of diminishment (a condition belied somewhat by the power and suppleness of the prose), but the deeper effect of the statement was to reinforce the iconic image. Forty-three years earlier, she had written, “[T]here is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke.” With a pretty cool customer, perhaps it was best to remain on the edge of the story, I thought. There is “bound to be friction between the inquisitive biographer and the subject who wants to control the narrative of his or her life,” Carl Rollyson, author of biographies of Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag, once said. And after all, why wouldn’t Didion oppose a biography? Much of her career had been devoted to exposing as illusions most of the conventional meanings we take from literature. I admired her fierceness on this point and recognized the contradictions knotting my project.

  Ultimately, she chose not to cooperate. In her own work, she ceded as much weight to the correctly “perceived” as to the “accurately reported”—the point was to “get it right,” she said. I have used her marker as my guide, as well as the advice of her old teacher Mark Schorer, who wrote in “The Burdens of Biography” that, in fact, living witnesses could rarely be trusted. The biographer must be a “drudge,” a “trained scholar,” and “an artist” in order to “bring shape out of the mass,” he said. I make no claims to artistry, but ask the reader to accept Schorer’s standard: “[B]elieve only the conduct of the narrative itself, and the resolution of its values.”

  In choosing Didion as a subject, I am offering a particular slant on literary biography. In the spirit of saying “exactly what you are getting,” let me lay it out. There is the biographer who promises explanations by threatening to reveal a subject’s secrets, who promises to dish. I am not that biographer. Nor will I live and die by psychological theories. When presented with the private correspondence, diaries, journals, or rough drafts of a writer, I remain skeptical of content, attentive instead to presentation. It is the construction of persona, even in private—the fears, curlicues, and desires in any recorded life—that offers insights. A writer forms her stories, but the opposite is also true. This is especially the case with Joan Didion, whose prime subject is the nature of narrative and who has often said she does not know what she thinks until she writes it down. The “women we invent have changed the course of o
ur lives as surely as the women we are,” she once wrote. Her work does not merely inform or misguide us about her; it enacts her on the page, reproducing her mental and emotional rhythms. Any serious work about her should seek to do the same.

  Further, I trust that her literary methods will apply to her just as she pressed them on others—Joan Baez, Nancy Reagan, Dick Cheney, the “Joan Didion” in her novels—revealing the bedrock beneath layers of myth, gossip, PR, self-promotion, cultural politics, competing notions of human nature and the purposes of biography.

  The central question is this: Does the life reveal the art, the art the life? In The Miraculous Years, a biography of Dostoyevsky, Joseph Frank said it is the “masterpieces” that make the “life worth recounting.” My intent is to foreground my subject’s masterpieces rather than treat them “as accessory to the life per se,” and to trace her intellectual development.

  Throughout my pursuit, I have kept in mind the limits of narrative, but, like Didion, I see no reason not to attempt what may very well end in failure. As Joseph Conrad, a writer essential to Joan Didion, taught us, even shipwrecks are instructive.

  We read novelists, essayists, and memoirists for their views of the world. We read biographies of writers for an understanding of how they did their work and how the work evolved. In choosing Didion as a subject, I am abjuring abstractions (“the madness of the artist”), avoiding pat explanations of personal antics (booze, gender, trauma, even when they do inform the story), weighing conflicting testimonies, and scouring the public record for the underreported fact, the contradictory details.