As with the sermons of Billy James Hargis, campus speech predicted coming violence, had the “Silent Generation” paid attention. Clark Kerr, Berkeley’s chancellor, was overseeing the transformation of California’s higher education from an agricultural base to a Cold War orientation. The university system flourished (and became, for a time, the finest in the world) with moneys devoted to weapons R&D. The year Didion entered Berkeley, California’s defense contracts totaled $2.1 billion, tops in the nation. Kerr liked to joke that his job was to “provide parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni,” but, in fact, he was tasked with militarizing academia. To this end, he envisioned a “multiversity” structured around separate research interests proceeding independently and often competing for federal grants. As he’d write in The Uses of the University, a profoundly influential text on U.S. education in the early 1960s, “There are several ‘nations’ of students, of faculty, of alumni, of trustees, of public groups. Each has its territory, its jurisdiction, its form of government. Each can declare war on others; some have the power of veto.” Such language, shaping his thinking since the early 1950s, led to a specific campus layout. Whereas previously the Campanile had served as the university’s center, with the library and classroom buildings forming a quadrangle, thereby encouraging students to mingle, the campus in Didion’s time was beginning to fragment. Departments enlarged and disciplines split off into huge new buildings, erasing the old pedestrian paths. Some of the new structures straddled deep ravines, offering no gathering spaces. Kerr claimed his vision formed a “happy home” for the “intellect,” a place where it could cozy up to the “ideological giants” (governments and businesses) who “rend the world with their struggles.” But soon he grasped the unintended consequences of his efforts. In 1963 he admitted, “[T]he undergraduate students are restless. Recent changes in the American university have done them little good … Lack of faculty concern for teaching”—given the faculty’s heavy research burden and dependence on private funding—“endless rules and requirements, and impersonality are the inciting causes.” It was no coincidence that Berkeley gave rise to the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and witnessed some of the decade’s most withering campus violence. If Didion’s class was silent, it formed the first invisible wave of unrest: in 1952, as part of campus replanning, humanities students (those most engaged in analyzing language and ideological agendas) were located closer to Sather Gate, traditionally the spot given to off-campus groups for soapbox speeches and pamphleteering. Over a period of just a few years, this area would become the gathering place for a small, fertile subculture waiting to explode, especially when, in the early 1960s, Kerr and other campus officials tried to restrict speech. (These days, the space just outside the gate has been paved over and has the feel of a pedestrian mall at a strip shopping center.)
Had Didion attended to various orators while strolling past Sather Gate, she might have worried about Stalin’s death and its effect on U.S.-Soviet relations; might have heard murmurings about a French military botch in Vietnam; might have noted the loss of bipartisanship in California politics. Richard Nixon had tarred and feathered Earl Warren with “New Dealism,” introducing fresh levels of cruelty into the state’s public speech. From California’s shores, these toxic inflections would soon sweep the nation. The old agricultural elite was giving way to political candidates handpicked by investors in Lockheed and Douglas.
From the window of her room, Didion could see the construction of the Bevatron among alder, pine, and blue gum trees in the Berkeley-Oakland Hills: corrugated metal sidings, poured-in-place cement, topped by an impervious dome. The Bevatron was a particle accelerator, 180 feet in diameter, designed to create antiprotons to test the hypothesis that every particle in the universe had a corresponding antiparticle. It utilized a ten-thousand-ton iron magnet, a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, and several large measuring devices called “Frankensteins.” Its windows glowed an eerie deep blue at night. From the Bevatron, weird messages tumbled downhill: radiation, PCBs, beryllium, cesium-137, uranium-238, cobalt-60. A beautiful, terrible syntax, hypnotic in its dullness, began to seed local speech. Bruce Cork, a radiation specialist in Berkeley’s Department of Physics, described the new facility this way: “The Bevatron requires an intense source of high-energy protons. The machine should accept monoenergetic protons for a duration of approximately five hundred microseconds once every six seconds. To satisfy the requirements of small loss due to scattering by gas in the accelerating chamber, a 9.9-mev linear accelerator has been built and operated.” The jargon storm, the passive voice, the evasive verb tenses would become the dominant mode of American speech in the late twentieth century. The effect would be to erase agency and accountability (Richard Nixon had already smuggled these stratagems into politics in his 1952 “Checkers” speech, a desperate and successful attempt to shield his misdeeds).
In one of her classes, Didion had read The Education of Henry Adams. She perceived the connection between Adams’s musings on the Dynamo and the Bevatron’s presence on the hill. In the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, Adams had witnessed massive electrical generators in Machinery Hall and become convinced that technology had replaced the “moral force” of the church (best expressed in Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, with its lovely blue windows devoted to Mary). For centuries, the Virgin’s moral force had consisted of righteous power, eroticism, and hope, now more efficiently combined in the “vertiginous speed” of the machines. “The planet itself seemed less impressive” in the face of the Dynamo, Adams wrote in 1918. Similarly, in the shadow of the Bevatron, the globe seemed more vulnerable than before. In a poem entitled “Prayer to the Virgin,” Adams wrote prophetically, “Seize, then, the Atom! rack his joints! / Tear out of him his secret spring! / Grind him to nothing!”
Night after blue night, the Bevatron ground away among the pines.
Didion was more fascinated by the facility’s flashing lights than by its cultural impact, but links and revelations stirred her as she read. For instance, Adams had written of the Dynamo that it was basically an “ingenious channel for conveying … the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal.” This dovetailed with Conrad’s sagas of the Eastern seas, and the extraction of coal from treacherous climes, using cheap labor and exploitative economics. She wasn’t sure how or why but she knew this information, knotted in some mad way, indicating the madness of human affairs, had a bearing on the Bevatron. Language and history were keys to understanding not only the past but also what was happening on the hill outside her window.
3
“The whole way I think about politics came out of the English Department,” Didion told a reporter for Berkeley’s Daily Californian in 2001. “They taught a form of literary criticism which was based on analyzing texts in a very close way. If you start analyzing the text of a newspaper or a political commentator on CNN using the same approach of close textual analysis, you come to understand it in a different way. It’s not any different from reading Henry James.”
In 1953 she was wary of the New Critical method. The New Criticism “depends on over-interpreting everything,” she would say. “I think most writers don’t analyze where [their work] comes from.” But tracking the work’s origins is a different kettle of fish from deconstructing a writer’s use of language, and she applied herself diligently to parsing others’ words, absorbing the nuances of verb tenses, syntax, point of view, selection, and omission. “I still go to the text,” she said in 2002. “Meaning for me is in the grammar.… I learned backwards and forwards close textual analysis.”
The development of her interpretive apparatus coincided with a love of existential philosophy. “I was very excited by Sartre in particular, by the whole idea of existentialism, which I ended up probably interpreting erroneously for my own purposes,” she said. “I took it to mean that we should accept the meaninglessness of the world and still live in it.” Her mother’s refrain, “What difference does it make?” inclined h
er to this view. Now she had academic backing for her fatalism.
If the world was pointless but we had to live in it, we did so by investing importance in objects, people, ideas, and social roles. How and why these things came to embody the meanings we gave them—this was the burden of analysis, a way of decoding life’s grammar. In novels, comedies of manners depended on seeing beneath the social niceties, separating what people said and did in public from who they were in private. Reading life was no different. Eduene’s teas, the pioneer talismans, the fashions in Vogue, the power hierarchy in Sacramento had forced Didion to view life as theater. The logical next step was to strip away the costumes.
“Mark Schorer … helped me. I don’t mean he helped me with my sentences or paragraphs—nobody has time for that with student papers; I mean that he gave me a sense of what writing was about, what it was for,” Didion said.
In his landmark essay, “Technique as Discovery” (1948), Schorer advanced the New Criticism. The content of novels was less important than the “form and rhythm imposed” on them by the writer’s techniques, he said. Technique not only “contains intellectual and moral implications … it discovers them,” transforming the “world of action” into “texture and tone,” creating a new and unique area of human experience. Didion now grasped Hemingway’s appeal for her: His “early subject, the exhaustion of value, was perfectly investigated and invested by his bare style,” Schorer wrote.
Furthermore, he said, writers expose their subjects through style: Didion built a career on this argument. Writing was not polemical. It was a kind of music, with major and minor keys.
For Schorer, point of view was the main technique propelling a writer “toward the positive definition of a theme.” No one manipulated point of view better than Joseph Conrad. In Heart of Darkness, the horror swallowing Marlow and Kurtz is made more terrible by its passing from one person to the next and finally to the reader. The book’s theme is not the madness it depicts, but our complicity in it, manifested by the point of view, making us the recipients of an old and tragic tale. We are charged with the awful responsibility of knowledge. In a similarly framed novel, Victory, written in the early twentieth century, Conrad insisted ours was an age “in which we are camped like bewildered travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel,” sharing each other’s stories. Didion would appropriate Conrad’s perception and imagery—specifically, the “unrestful hotel”—as often as she could.
Victory dazzled her and became “maybe my favorite book in the world,” she said. In the years ahead, she would reread it whenever she began to write new fiction. It “opened up possibilities” for novel structure. She said, “It’s not a story the narrator even heard from someone who experienced it … so there’s this fantastic distancing of the narrative, except when you’re in the middle of it, it remains very immediate. It’s incredibly skillful.” She would employ a distanced point of view in A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted. From Victory, she would also take a preoccupation with colonialism, remote island settings, hotels, underhanded business, shadowy world-traveling heroes attempting to rescue strong but doomed women.
Schorer demonstrated for her how one writer births another. In 1954 he published a novel, The Wars of Love, which borrowed its structure from the master. “I am not a central character,” the narrator announces. “I am less important in this story than any of the others.” In stating this (apparent) truth, Schorer’s narrator takes a page from Conrad’s tellers, but he’s less subtle—naturally, his denial is a forceful assertion. His sensibility dominates the tale, a raising of narrative heat. Didion took note.
“I begin in this unpromising way … reader, to give you fair warning which is your right,” says Schorer’s man.
Didion’s variation, fifteen years later: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am.”
Schorer’s narrator says of a particular public figure, “[Y]ou know the name.” “[Y]ou remember the names,” says the peripheral narrator of The Last Thing He Wanted. Didion read Schorer’s novel shortly after it appeared; she found it academic and stuffy, but she admired its shape. Clearly, his channeling of Conrad and its impact on her were immediate and lasting.
“Victory seems to me a profoundly female novel,” she has said. How can a novel related by a seaman about a boorish hotel keeper, male brigands, and the coal and shipping trades be “female”? Didion explained, “[I]f style is character—and I believe it is—then obviously your sexual identity is going to show up in your style.” In Victory, “you’re seeing [the story] from a distance which is very like the distance in real life,” she said. It’s “told to you by someone who heard it from somebody else.” For Didion, then, structure fashions style, a reflection of orientation and therefore of character. Here we have gossip based in hearsay, a disengaged relationship with the subject (the worldly affairs of men), an evaluative impulse, and a desire to pass lessons on to others. She located the “female” aspects of Conrad’s novel in grammar and syntax rather than in biology, culture, and politics. Small wonder that, in little over a decade, she would clash with ardent feminists over the nature of female experience.
* * *
Schorer’s creative writing course paralyzed Didion. “We were constantly being impressed with the fact that everybody else had done it already and better. It was very daunting to me,” she said. Phyllis Butler, one of her classmates, remembered her as quiet but intense, a good performer of her work, which stood out in a group of extraordinarily talented students (including Butler, who went on to a successful writing career). To get into the course, students had to submit a one-page essay to Schorer. “You hoped he would like it, and a lot of people got turned down,” Butler said.
“I was so scared in that class I couldn’t speak. I felt too shy and too inadequate,” Didion recalled. “[I had] a terror that any sentence I committed would expose me as not good enough.” She completed only three of the required five stories. Her classmates, many of them older than she was, wrote witty and entertaining anecdotes. Conrad had hardened her conviction that “there was more to be learned” about life “from the dark journey.” Her peers’ concerns—marriage, work, the struggle for day-to-day contentment—seemed prosaic. “[I]t had not yet struck me in any visceral way that being nineteen was not a long-term proposition,” she said years later. She failed to engage her compatriots in the glories of point of view, frame tales, the possibilities of intimacy and distance. “A lot of people don’t get as excited about these things as I do,” she told an interviewer. She dreaded showing up at noon each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Dwinelle Hall.
In class, Schorer stressed “sociological history,” Butler told me. “‘Understand your society,’ he’d say. ‘If you can capture your time in your writing—as Verdi did in his operas, for example—you’ve made a real contribution.’ He also warned us, ‘If you want to get published, it’s difficult to come from California.’ He felt there was a real East-West divide in the literary world.”
Eventually, Didion completed a short story she felt pretty good about. It wasn’t Joseph Conrad—she wasn’t prepared to scale Mount Parnassus, so she stayed in the valley and wrote close to home.
She tried reporting for the campus newspaper. W. H. Auden began a West Coast tour in the fall of 1953. His recent poetry, about a culture driven “mad” by excess and war, intrigued Didion. He had defined the present as the “Age of Anxiety.” His poem “September 1, 1939,” whose images of “blind skyscrapers” and flashings of light amid an “odor of death” would be widely disseminated on the Internet following the World Trade Center attack in 2001, was quoted frequently in Berkeley bars. In it, he described the decade of Didion’s birth as “low” and “dishonest,” a snuffing of America’s “clever hopes.”
Perhaps Didion feared what he had to say about her generation’s prospects. She was “absolutely terrified” of him, his smoker’s cough and baleful eyes. She sai
d, “I couldn’t think of any questions [for him]. I had written some down but they seemed too stupid.” She stammered and went white and mute during this meeting with Auden, her first official interview.
Chapter Five
1
By sophomore year, Didion had fled the chaotic Tri-Delt house and moved into a five-bedroom, twelve-bath place at 2520 Ridge Road, across from Etcheverry Hall, near old stucco apartment suites with scalloped balconies tucked among avocado and apple trees, Italian cypress, silver birch. She shared the house with three other girls, including Corrine Benson from Marin County and Didion’s sorority roommate, Shirley Stephenson. Stephenson’s decorative arts enthusiasms meant Mondrian murals were tacked to the closet doors and stylized animals crawled across kitchen walls. An abstract mobile hung from the living room ceiling, its sharp edges frightening Didion whenever she got up for any reason in the middle of the night. She felt her friends had staked out each corner of the house before she’d had a chance to move in.
If not quite at home on campus, she was settled in her rituals. She was part of a student coterie in the English Department invited to faculty digs. One night, one of her teachers got sloppy drunk and revealed his bitterness at academic drudgery and university regulations. Didion was stunned to learn her mentors shared some of the same adult disappointments she’d seen in her family’s house while growing up. The serious English majors were expected to go to graduate school. Didion did not share this ambition. Though she felt like an imposter among her peers, her teacher’s drunken screed strengthened her reluctance to remain in academia. For the time being, though, she hoped to secure an undergraduate teaching assistantship with Thomas Parkinson, a poet and Yeats scholar fascinated by the fledgling Beat movement. Parkinson was the son of a laborer who’d been blacklisted in the San Francisco general strikes in the 1930s. He was active in campus politics. He was particularly sympathetic to the struggles of his female students, whose fellowship opportunities were limited and poorly funded compared to their male counterparts’.
The Last Love Song Page 10