As a child, though, Didion learned from her mother to revere the pioneer past, to bear solemnly the memories of those who had come before. Eduene may have doubted anything was worth recording, but as a mother she had to stick to family rituals; if nothing else, the family’s social standing depended on an allegiance to the past. It was a descendant’s duty to preserve the elders in the form of inscriptions, jottings in journals, as well as in the weavings and quilts, the smoothed rocks and blue glass bottles they left behind, objects lining the dark rooms of Didion’s childhood homes. A quilt, a page of prose: Both were talismans, reminders of what is and is no more. Perhaps this is why Didion never kept diaries of her own: She was taught that writing was not self-expression or indulgence; it was history.
At the Kilgore, kneeling in the shadows of granite spires, Didion saw the costs of where she was from, the losses of so many parents and their need to mark the days of their children: “Our darlings,” one year and nine weeks, two years and ten months, stillborn, here and gone.
* * *
Writing did not get more precise than in tombstone inscriptions. Beloved Daughter, Wife, and Mother, Born, Died. Facts, as lightning-sharp as the strike of a snake.
When she was twelve, and had been scrawling in notebooks for six or seven years, Didion discovered similarly sharp writing in the work of Ernest Hemingway. She had been going to the local library with a note from her mother saying it was okay for her to check out “adult” books (she had free reign in the library but “wasn’t allowed to listen to the radio because there were scary things on it”—that is, fallout from World War II). Mostly, she read biographies. “I think biographies are very urgent to children,” she would say later. They “told how you got from the helpless place I was to being Katherine [sic] Cornell, say.” But then she read the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. She took the book home and typed the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms on a solid Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. Four sentences, four commas, one hundred and twenty-six words, only twenty-three of which contained more than a single syllable. For the first time, another writer’s rhythms filled her like a tide and she gave herself to the motion. It was a solemn cadence, like something you’d hear at a funeral. As in the crossing stories she’d first encountered, much of Hemingway’s power came from leaving out information. “In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?” she asked herself. Unlike the pioneer mythmakers, Hemingway avoided abstractions. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice…” he wrote. “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory…” He went on to say, “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” This was a new perspective on the past—what would the stories really say if you scratched out the words sacrifice and courage? If you stripped the stories to their place names? As she read more Hemingway—teaching herself typing skills by copying his “magnetic” words—she toughened her style. She began to hear a stronger music, to see a grander purpose, in writing, beyond just keeping records, though the impulse to note everything remained, along with the storm and the figure at its center. As Virginia Reed, a Donner Party survivor, wrote in a letter to one of her cousins, a passage Didion cherished and might have claimed as a credo, “I have not wrote you half the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is.”
Chapter Two
1
The California of Didion’s girlhood, during the Depression, offered enough open space to appear to be Eden still, especially to a child. The Sierra, where the Donners met their limits, still defied people’s efforts to tame them. The moody weather of the Sacramento Valley, which dictated the inhabitants’ physical and emotional rhythms, proclaimed daily its uncontrollability. In and around the Donner Pass, North America witnessed its heaviest snowfall, an average of thirty-seven feet a year. This formed an icy reservoir on the Sierra’s western exposure, which melted annually around the first of May, filling and sometimes flooding the Feather, Bear, Yuba, American, and Cosumnes Rivers, offsetting the baked summers, nurturing wheat fields, rice paddies, and orchards, sprouting berries, sugar beets, melons, plums, tomatoes, peaches, pears, walnuts, olives, cherries, and grapes.
But this Eden was industrial. Silver irrigation pipes sprawled among wheat stalks sliced by whirring steel blades—and anyway, the wheat was beginning to thin. Bad planting practices had exhausted the valley soil. When Didion was a girl, the crusading writer Carey McWilliams lamented California’s “factories in the fields”; his calls, in newspapers and books, for better care of the land and the people who worked it guided John Steinbeck’s hand as he drafted The Grapes of Wrath. In the pioneer myths Didion grew up on, no mention was ever made of the gold rush as a technological enterprise, a drive to develop the mechanics of moving water across hostile terrain to support the miners. In her teenage years, Didion would hear from her mother, her teachers, and Sacramento’s leaders that newcomers, the federal government, and corporate bosses from the East were ruining California’s once-perfect environment, but, in fact, the land was already an android, artificial tendrils fused with the natural, sustaining an unholy agricultural system.
That life in the valley was not pure or preordained was impressed most directly on Didion by Sacramento’s levees. From its founding, and through its early iterations, Sacramento City showed itself to be, in many ways, a poor idea. River floods devastated the place in 1849 and again in 1861 (perhaps one of the reasons Mark Twain decided not to stick around writing for The Sacramento Union). By early January 1862, twenty-three inches of rain had fallen in less than a month, melting some of the Sierra snowpack and driving most of the townspeople from their homes, among boxes, rotted goods, and debris, to a high spot known as Poverty Ridge, where squatting miners used to pitch their tents. A local paper, the Marysville Daily Appeal, reported that “stock of every kind could be seen passing downstream, some alive and struggling and bellowing or squealing for life.”
By 1934, the year of Didion’s birth, the levees had significantly reduced flooding. The Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River would be completed in 1945, emerging from within a grid of steelwork, cables, and scaffolding. The Wright Act, decades old by the time Didion was born, had chipped away at the natural flow of water by allowing farmers whose land did not abut rivers to organize irrigation districts to divert the moisture they needed from one area to another. Still, details such as those in the Daily Appeal of terrified cattle swept in torrents through the city seemed to belong to the present. Despite development, new technologies, and changing land uses, the politics and folklore of what some people still called Sacramento City ensured a living past, especially for a child with an imagination as vivid as Didion’s. As a former boomtown, hunkered between Sierra miners digging for gold and San Francisco merchants spinning gold into ephemeral, expensive trinkets, Sacramento had developed a tough, opportunistic, and insular society. It was an overwhelmingly male society in the beginning, a town of squatters, gamblers, and dreamers lured by gold. In Didion’s time, Sacramento still bore the traces and scars of this origin. Initially, the scarcity of women led men to idealize them, except for the ladies actually in their midst, often forced into prostitution, the ambivalence apparent in surviving saloon songs from the 1840s, such as “Sacramento Gals”:
They’re pretty gals, I must confess,
Nipping ’round, around, around;
And “Lordy-massy” how they dress,
As they go nipping ’round
On J Street …
The women’s celebrated style boasted Sacramento’s aspirations. It was a spot where rural treasure, extracted from the mountains, was forged by the magic of capital into luxuries destined for the drawing rooms of San Francisco. And each night that song could have been sung in a tavern called Didion’s on Front Street, frequented by eye-catching women, and run by Frank Didion’s great-grandfather.
As the initial crush o
f the gold rush receded, Sacramento’s residents longed for more women to “civilize” the place, to provide moral ballast to the men’s excesses. This longing, shaped into an unspoken civil policy, created a pinched and segregated social structure that lingered in the city well into Didion’s maturity. In the 1950s, when Sacramento tried to annex several outlying communities, these communities resisted, in part because their citizens viewed Sacramento as a “cold” place, repressive and tolerant of brutal police tactics. The influx of women as a moral army also set the city’s development patterns: The family unit was the pacifying force. Unlike farm life, which required many hands to do the work, city life, more centralized and diverse, operated as a series of interconnected hives. Subdivided lots and single-family dwellings checkerboarded the valley, making the buying and selling of real estate Sacramento’s real business, and eventually giving Didion’s family much of its income. Downtown, lavish hotels served as meeting spaces and stages for men just back from the mountains to strut their adventurousness. They struck the poses of literary figures from dime novels, newspaper stories, and railroad advertising circulars, which had seduced many of them into coming west in the first place. John Wayne prototypes: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett (whom Wayne would one day play in a movie), Kit Carson, John Charles Frémont, the self-made man. While women kept order at home, men burnished their reputations as good-hearted hell-raisers or courageous loners ready to ride off into the sunset. Impromptu gambling halls came and went; the spirit of speculation was as thick as contagion. From the first, a boisterous, transient population pushing against pleas for greater order made nostalgia the city’s dominant tone. As early as the 1850s, a newspaper editorial by E. C. Ewer mourned the loss of the good old days, “when the miners paid for everything in dust—when the red-shirted gentry were the nabobs of the land … Those days have passed, and with the change has come idleness, vagrancy, and coin as the circulating medium.” This is the tone Didion would adopt for her first novel, Run River, about valley life, in 1963.
As she admitted later, the tone was not quite suitable. From the start, Sacramento was an ornery place with plenty of dead zones. Its government plazas displayed a ruthless efficiency of design, outpacing the politicians’ capacities for matching it. That so many capital cities, where raw deals get made to enrich the whole, are ugly and lifeless at their cores reflects one of our oldest animal instincts: You don’t want to eat where you shit.
2
Right away, Didion dreamed of getting out—or so she remembered years later. In fact, she remained fond of many places in and around Sacramento. Nothing awful occurred in her early childhood, but it was often a gloomy time spent in still, dark rooms. The first house she knew was on Highland Avenue, in a neighborhood now called Curtis Park, northeast of downtown. Her parents shared the house with her mother’s folks. “The area was a streetcar suburb, built out between the 1880s and the 1920s,” William Burg, the city’s most ardent historian, told me. The no. 6 trolley cut through the neighborhood, past acres of hops and mint, ferrying a mix of laborers, bankers, and furniture salesmen; at night, just as mothers prepared children for bed, the outbound Twenty-first Street car clattered past tightly curtained windows. The houses, whether late Victorians, bungalows, or Tudors, had new sewer lines and were already being shaped by forces that would radically alter the look of Sacramento in just a few years. The most striking feature of the Didions’ 1923 house was its massive carport. In fact, the streetcars were all but done. In 1947, Pacific Gas & Electric would sell off the last of its trolleys, and suburban growth exploded with the auto. The Didions had a large lot, elevated in case of floods, and the house (boxy, with thin windows blocking more light than they let in) sat well away from the street. But traffic was increasing. The Sacramento Aviation Company was expanding its operations here, recruiting more workers and their families, another sign of things to come.
The 1940 and 1941 city directories list the Didions’ residence as 2211 U Street, a two-story 1908 Craftsman bungalow in Poverty Ridge, the former squatters’ camp and flood haven. In the late nineteenth century, it had turned into a posh neighborhood of Queen Anne, Stick, and Colonial Revival foursquares. The Poverty Ridge house is the one Didion considered her true childhood home. It was near the Ella K. McClatchy branch of the public library—a children’s library at the time—where Didion loved to read under towering, sunny windows.
In general, the neighborhood was still nice in the 1940s, but it was beginning to decline, as the suburbs drew many middle-class and wealthy families out of the city’s center. The migration made for good housing prices in town, and the Didions, now with a second child, Jim, born in December 1939, almost doubled their square footage with the move, and got a five-space garage in the bargain.
“My father, when I was first born, he was selling insurance, but nobody was buying anything, so he’d play poker,” Didion said. Gambling may have been lucrative for Frank Didion, but he continued to sell insurance through the Travelers Group well into the 1940s, even though his life in Sacramento was interrupted by the war and he had to leave town and return. City directories list a suburban address for his office. Frank Didion was a mediocre, or perhaps just a distracted, salesman; his real passion was risk. The place’s speculative fever filled him. He loved not just poker but anything on which a sum could be wagered, a claim staked. He seems to have really hit pay dirt after World War II, cleaning up at a government auction, acquiring dozens of Royal manual typewriters, which he later sold at a profit, along with property—a fire tower, a few old mess halls, sitting on valuable lots now—and a military jeep, in which he would teach his daughter to drive. After the auction, he settled into the boom-and-bust rhythm of real-estate speculation, moving money from one account to another. Dabble was a word Didion associated with his professional activities. He was “fuzzy” about finances, she said. The family seemed to have plenty—the house was spacious, the kids never wanted for ice-cream cones, trips to San Francisco or Stinson Beach—but a feeling lingered that their privileges were wispy: myths and illusions, like the family’s storied past. Frank was quiet and depressed—a good-looking man, though Eduene’s family thought he had a weak mouth. He was quick to fix a drink to quell the smallest anxieties. Didion remembers him as “full of dread.” She said that even at family parties, when he’d seem to enjoy himself playing ragtime piano, his bearing conveyed such tension, she’d run to her room and close the door. Frank’s mother had died when he was young, in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and his father had married a dynamic woman named Genevieve, who spent more time on local politics than on raising her stepchildren. Frank’s younger brother, Robert, lost an eye one summer in a fireworks accident in which Frank’s carelessness seems to have played a part. Didion thinks he suffered guilt about this for the rest of his life. As an adolescent, restless, hunting distractions, he always hoped to work at the California State Fair but never measured up to the job. His greatest discipline was reserved for sports. He lettered in basketball in 1928 at Sacramento City College. But then, as an adult, his discipline dissipated; he was always seeking something for nothing. He’d go from the high-flown Sutter Club (he was not a member) to the seediest gambling joints. Late at night, he’d drive to the Nevada border to shoot craps. Until 1940, the riverboat Delta King offered floating card games and strong drink on the Sacramento River. Prohibition had only recently ended, and odd cocktails prompted by the liquor ban were popular. Since the quality of outlawed alcohol was suspect, creative bartenders had added flavorings, sweeteners, and leafy sprinklings to their furtive whiskeys. Now, while laying down his bets, Frank Didion happily imbibed whatever buddies set in front of him: gin slings, old-fashioneds, manhattans, and aviations. Lady Luck rode the river swells up and down, up and down, and Frank never tired of chasing her, as someone of romantic temperament might have put it. And why not? Family lore suggested the name Didion was a derivative of the French Didier, a variation of desiderium: “unfulfilled longing.” In previous centuries, this longi
ng had usually been spiritual in nature, though it often referred to a woman’s yearning for a child.
* * *
Frank spent his childhood a few blocks from an eccentric white house at Sixteenth and H Streets, built in 1877 and featuring cupolas shaped like pastries, Victorian Gothic detail, gingerbread trim, and intricate door moldings. The house had once belonged to the Steffens family. As a boy, Frank befriended Jane Hollister, niece of the poet Lincoln Steffens, and was later a classmate of hers at Berkeley.
In 1903, the old Steffens house had become the Governor’s Mansion. From that point on, every governor of the state of California lived in the house until Ronald Reagan in the 1970s. Like her father, Didion fell in love with this icon of nineteenth-century bohemianism, and like her father, she was always haunted by the conviction that its elegance meant the past was a lovely lost domain and the present a fallen state, dominated by petty, classless folk.
* * *
Eduene Didion preserved the genteel rituals of the past, holding ladies’ teas for her friends and many relatives—endless Sunday aunts, Didion recalled. One of them, her great-aunt Nell, habitually twisted the splendid rings on her fingers, snuffed cigarettes in a thick quartz ashtray, and told Didion that her grandmother was “nervous,” “different.” When Didion asked what this meant, Aunt Nell said it meant she couldn’t be teased. Eduene, wearing an ankle-length red lace dress, passed around trays of butter cookies, slices of lemon on Wedgwood plates, and cream cheese and watercress sandwiches.
“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”: Didion had memorized this line from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem and she thought of it, at tea, whenever one of the tottery ladies lamented the death of an old friend. To her, the notion of being alone, unattended, everyone close to you gone, was liberating and exciting, especially on these slow Sundays when the aunts came shuffling near, bathed in cloying perfume.
The Last Love Song Page 4