The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  In a series of articles for The San Francisco News, John Steinbeck also wrote of Central Valley drifters “hated” by the locals, living in shelters of “corrugated paper” and tents the “color of the ground.” These News pieces were run-ups to The Grapes of Wrath. Published in 1939, around the time Didion got her first notebook, Steinbeck’s novel dared to declare its origins in advocacy, its roots in reportage. Didion never claimed Steinbeck as an influence, but his ruminations on the valley matched hers, if from a different political angle, and must have reminded her of her grandfather’s writing (additionally, her paternal great-great-grandfather once organized grape growers in Florin County and owned twelve thousand acres of fruit trees). Stories like Steinbeck’s, and the consequences of life in California for the descendants of the first waves of Okies, hover behind Didion’s early essays. Steinbeck’s documentary approach, like that of Dorothea Lange with her photographs, or James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, remained a model of how to frame political subject matter. In the 1960s and 1970s, critics would call Didion, along with Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson, a pioneer of the New Journalism, in which the reporter inserted herself into the story as its centerpiece. In fact, the observational stance—the witnessing ethic—of Didion’s essays, and her tough tone, scrappy as the Christmas tinsel waving on Sacramento’s streetlights, shared as much DNA with the proletarian writing of the Great Depression as it did with the celebrity showstopping pieces of Mailer, Wolfe, and Thompson.

  Chapter Three

  1

  When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, Sacramento mobilized. By two P.M., McClellan Field was scrambling hundreds of Curtiss P-40s and B-26 Marauders for flights to Alaska, where they would be prepped for battle. Thomas Monk, the city’s mayor, ordered security details to guard the levees in case the mainland was attacked. On December 8, the mayor mandated citywide blackouts. Three days earlier, Didion turned seven. The festive atmosphere surrounding her birthday celebration soured quickly and then the world went dark. In the past, in San Francisco or on Stinson Beach, Didion, staring out over the waves, had mentally navigated Hawaii’s shores. The place loomed large in the minds of well-to-do Californians: a paradise within easy cruising distance. But now it was a smudged spot in the atlas. A territory called “War.”

  After the attack on Hawaii, Didion’s father was assigned by the U.S. Army Air Corps to travel from Fort Lewis in Washington State to Durham, North Carolina, and finally to Peterson Field in Colorado. He would take his family with him, fragmenting Didion’s formal schooling from the end of first grade until the fourth. Military records indicate that Frank Didion joined the National Guard in 1939. His family had a long history with the Guard; his uncle Edward Reese served with distinction in the Guard’s hospital corps in San Francisco following that city’s massive earthquake and fire in 1906. It did not escape the Didions that military enlistment was often a conduit to business opportunities. Frank would remain in the military much of his life, working for the Selective Service as a procurement officer in Sacramento, becoming a major in the Air Corps, and finally retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in August 1965.

  In his early thirties when the United States entered World War II, Frank stayed stateside, helping the army settle financial affairs. Specifically, he wrapped up outstanding World War I–era contracts, clearing the path for new business.

  What this meant for Didion was saying good-bye to her friends. From now on, she’d experience reading not as something you did in school, but something you did on your own wherever you were: a secret pleasure. “I tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it,” she said. “I [had] a literary idea of experience, and I still don’t know where all the lies are.”

  In Tacoma, Washington, housing on base and even in town was overcrowded because of the sudden arrival of so many soldiers. Eduene scrambled to find accommodations for her family, going every morning to the army housing office to try to claim a room somewhere. Didion remembered seeing her mother cry for the first time one day outside the housing office. “Meanwhile, we were living in a hotel with a shared bathroom,” Didion recalled. “It was in sort of a nice part of town. I don’t think it was a bad hotel, but it was a period in American life when hotel rooms didn’t necessarily come with bathrooms. So my mother, I remember her emptying an entire bottle of pine-scented disinfectant into the bathtub every time she gave us a bath.” Eventually, the Didions found a single room to rent in a nearby guesthouse. “It’s an adventure,” Eduene told her daughter, trying to be cheerful. “It’s wartime, it’s history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.”

  Soon, Frank was transferred to North Carolina to sort through army records at Duke University. He traveled ahead. Eduene followed sometime later with the children. They took a train to Union Station in Los Angeles and from there caught the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited, stopping once in New Orleans, spending a night at the St. Charles Hotel, a much finer establishment than they had known in Tacoma. The train was jammed with military personnel. Often Eduene and the kids were forced to stand in the couplings between cars, inhaling smoke and the smell of grease. One day, while the train was stopped on its way through the Southwest, a young sailor got off, bought a bottle of Coke for Eduene and a Navajo bracelet for Didion. Eduene thanked him graciously. Even in wearying circumstances, she was determined to keep up a respectable appearance, wearing a plaid seersucker suit, spectator pumps, and sometimes, when she could get them—as in New Orleans—white gardenias in her hair. She dressed her daughter in cardigans and pleated skirts. Her usual “non-depressed” performance slipped into sternness on the road, stiffened by the effort not to be humiliated. As for Didion, in the midst of confusion, her love of drama got plenty of nutrition. Her mother was right: This was an adventure. The sailor said he had survived the downing of the USS Wasp.

  In Durham, the Didions again lived in one room, this one in a house owned by a Baptist preacher and his family. In the evenings, Didion would sit on the house’s wide wooden porch, listening to cicadas, sipping a Grapette or eating peach ice cream straight out of quart cartons with the preacher’s hulking daughters, hoping to play with their Gone With the Wind paper dolls. They never let her.

  In sweltering midafternoons, other children on the block slithered under back stoops to eat dirt rich with clay, using a piece of raw potato as a spoon. Eduene told Didion the kids did this because of a physical condition called pica. “Poor children do it,” she said. The clay satisfied some craving untouched by their regular diet. “You never would have learned that in Sacramento,” Eduene said with a doubtful sense of accomplishment.

  Sometimes during this uprooted period, Didion attended local schools; other times she didn’t (she skipped second grade altogether). Later, she would say she missed absorbing certain fundamental skills, such as subtraction, which she never mastered. She did learn, by rote, the poem “In Flanders Fields” for Armistice Day commemorations, wearing a stiff red poppy to class, pinned to her dress, but making little connection between the heroics of World War I, viewed on scratchy film strips in visual-aids rooms, and the military regulations her father endured on each new base he visited.

  One day, near the end of the family’s stay in North Carolina, Eduene noticed her baby boy, Jim, reaching for something through the bars of his playpen: a copperhead, making its way through the room, eventually leaving, possibly to cool itself in the shade of a back stoop where the neighborhood children cradled their raw potatoes.

  At Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, Didion first saw war. Though the family found decent housing here—a four-room bungalow—and Didion’s routine was steadier, with regular classes at Columbia School and a Brownie troop, the base was spartan, its movements paced to the grim precision of emergency measures. The field was still being developed; many of its landing strips were temporary, lanes of dust kicked up by razor winds in eye-piercing gusts. Tar-paper barracks lined the perimeter, al
ong with a small Officers’ Club. Inside the club, in the late afternoons, Didion would sit, mesmerized by a display of fake blue rain behind the bar. About the time the Didions arrived, the field was named after 1st Lt. Edward J. Peterson, who had crashed here when the left engine of his twin-engine F-4 failed. He had been pulled alive from the flaming wreckage but later died of his burns. Didion heard stories about him, hushed and incomplete and in passing, and probably thought of him each time a noisy B-24 Liberator landed, rattling the house’s windows. She recalled writing a letter to her grandmother about the field’s new name, and she remembered how “pilots kept spiraling down through the high thin Colorado air. The way you knew was that you heard the crash wagons.” Hard work, sacrifice, and terror: the rhythm of conflict. Uncertainty ruled the days. Though the bungalow was nice enough, Eduene refused to unpack the family’s belongings. What difference did it make? she wondered. “Orders” could arrive at any moment, sending them packing. What were these “orders”? Did someone knock at the door with them? Whatever they were, they kept life tense, and they flattened Didion’s mother. In certain blue hours, Eduene roused herself. At base barbecues, she wore flowers in her hair. She made her daughter give a soldier apple-blossom soap as a going-away present the day he got transferred. She gave her daughter a copy of Emily Post’s book of etiquette and taught her how to accept and decline formal invitations. She told her daughter that after the war the family would move to Paris, where Frank would study architecture at the Sorbonne.

  At Peterson Field, Didion encountered John Wayne. It was in a Quonset hut, and it was midafternoon. Outside, the wind was hot, stirring the yellow columbine. The B-24s were rumbling. It was the summer of 1943. The movie was War of the Wildcats, and it was love at first sight. His gestures, his voice, his deference toward women, his slow stoicism … together, if all this didn’t add up to “orders,” it’s what “orders” should have been. In an unsettled time, Wayne’s firm presence was just what the world needed. He was more confident than the men she had known, but he had that familiar, easy pioneer spirit. When he told the girl in the movie he would buy her a house at the bend in the bright river, Didion knew right where she belonged.

  2

  In essays, memoirs, and interviews, Didion has always underplayed her family’s itinerant period as a factor in her development as a writer, but we should not dismiss it so casually. A number of experiences, working with and against her memories of Sacramento, coincided then to seed her future style.

  In Colorado Springs, the bungalow’s garden backed up to a psychiatric hospital. Didion used to take her notebook to the hospital grounds to record snippets of anguished dialogue. Discussing her memories of these episodes in Blue Nights, she ended with a flourish stylistically pleasing, but frustrating in its refusal to examine the emotional impact of sneaking around listening to people in pain: “I did not at the time think this an unreasonable alternative to staying in Sacramento and going to school.” This sentence, a neat rhetorical feint, was reminiscent of The White Album, written over thirty years earlier, when she elided her own psychiatric evaluation. In the title essay, she said her alienated condition did “not now seem … an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

  The Blue Nights account reinforces the image of the lonely writer obsessed with loss first seen in “On Keeping a Notebook.” Just as, in the essay, she distinguished her discontented self from the more reasonable, better-adjusted people around her—her mother, her daughter—she said in Blue Nights that her four-year-old brother “scouted the neighborhood, and made friends” in Colorado while she brooded alone over dark doings in a scary place and dreamed up stories. No doubt the frequent moves isolated her, made her an outsider, and deepened her natural reserve (a schoolmate told her she was “military trash”). But more profound changes were afoot.

  For one thing, her little brother wasn’t the only one meeting new people. On the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, Didion wasn’t always alone. Several afternoons, the daughter of a resident doctor accompanied her on her eavesdropping missions. This girl also carried a notebook and captured talk through open windows. At the end of the day, the two spies would convene to see who had gotten the best bits. Writing, then, was a social activity, and Didion was competitive about it.

  She never forgot she was the daughter of a woman who “gave teas,” yet here she was among tar-paper shacks, dirt runways, training aircraft, trucks, and jeeps. Her mother wasn’t wrong: She was seeing things she would never see in Sacramento, but much of the time she wasn’t sure what she saw. Just looking was no longer good enough. The act of watching required backstory and judgment. Her descriptive powers were tested by alien objects, incidents, and details, but more than this, she was glimpsing a world of men. She was not tempted to become a tomboy, but she saw how Sacramento had cosseted her. It’s no surprise that, in just a few years, she would be receptive to Ernest Hemingway. The appeal was not just his style but the subjects on which he turned it—many of them familiar to her now.

  Through solitary doggedness, Didion began to fashion a literary purpose. Like Invisible Scarlet O’Neil, she was a reporter. Her methods were surreptitious. She was not trying to write war stories, but stories of people suffering inner torment.

  Not “an unreasonable alternative,” not “an inappropriate response”: From the beginning, certainty was one of her strengths, no matter how often she denied it (looking back, she called it “false bravery”). A young woman who could write, early in her career, that “for some time now [she had] felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people” is a woman comfortable with her voice on the page, a writer already experienced and confident despite her protests of frailty, and a woman in no way interested in apologizing for her point of view.

  This point of view firmed up in wartime as she followed her father around the country. Only by leaving Sacramento could she begin—consciously or not—to glean she was a Westerner with firm Western attitudes: a stance she would develop more aggressively as she grew older, became more aware, and pursued writing as a vocation. “As far as my sense of place, I idealized Sacramento during those years,” she once said. “I was just yearning to get home.”

  This did not mean her literary fantasies rejected Manhattan; one of her favorite pastimes on the army bases was reading Mademoiselle and Vogue. One day, in Colorado Springs, “we were snowbound,” Didion recalled, and she and her mother were looking through a magazine. “Vogue used to have a contest for college seniors [offering a trip to New York], and my mother … pointed it out to me as something I could win when I got old enough.”

  Despite her early portraits of writer as isolated, maladjusted child, her memory of her mother’s encouragement shows how bookish the family really was; she had tacit permission to pursue the pleasures of her notebook. Several members of her mother’s family wrote verse. With Eduene’s editorial help, Didion’s maternal grandfather, Herman Daniel Jerrett, published in 1915 with a small Sacramento press a slender volume entitled California’s El Dorado Yesterday and Today, dedicated to “my dear mother who crossed the plains with her parents and relatives in their own train of fifteen wagons, leaving their old home.” In 1963, the year Didion published her first novel, he released Hills of Gold, again with a small press in Sacramento, tackling, he said, “historical questions of a controversial character.”

  In Where I Was From, Didion referred to her grandfather as an “innocent” from the mountains, but she adored him. He was much on her mind during her childhood exile from Sacramento. The importance of his literary activity lay not just in modeling for her the possibility of being a writer but also in teaching her to reject certain delusions. Inadvertently, he cast doubts on the family legacy. For example, in California’s El Dorado Yesterday and Today, he called California’s crops sources of “enthusiasm and pride” for the state, and irrigation a “necessity for the production of fruits.” He wrote this as a major California landowner whose fields depended on irr
igation, while managing the Loon Lake Water and Power Company, which set irrigation policies. Many years passed before Didion could see past the surface of her grandfather’s text to his self-interest. This process of rereading and rethinking what she thought she knew would eventually help her write Where I Was From. The habit of questioning, of comparing what she knew with fresh experiences and alternative viewpoints, began to take root on the road from Washington to North Carolina to Colorado.

  * * *

  If the world went dark for Didion during Sacramento’s blackouts just days after her seventh birthday, darkness seemed to assume a personal shape and intent while she was eight years old and living in Colorado. One day, during a fire drill at the Columbia School, her right temple began to ache and she experienced the sensation that something had been “taken out of the middle” of her vision. She had lost something “mentally” as well. It was not just a headache. It “brutalize[d] me,” she said. The school called her mother, who took her home. Didion lay listless in bed. Her conversation drifted. After a while, Eduene took her to the infirmary at Peterson Field, where an Air Corps doctor prescribed an enema, useless in relieving the pain.

  Maybe her mother was right after all. Maybe she did need the quiet of darkened rooms and the fussing of Sunday aunts.

  Didion learned that her grandmother, her mother, and her father had all suffered from migraines most of their lives—“those sick headaches my family brought west with the seeds.” She had inherited the malady. It worsened during her adolescence and young adulthood, and though she would eventually learn to live with the recurring pain, she would never be entirely free of it. As recently as 2011, she would tell a filmmaker, interviewing her for a documentary, “I have [a migraine] right now. I have to fight for certain words. I can see you, but if you were to hold up a sign … I couldn’t read the sign, probably.”