The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  The Society Editor at the Union decided to get married and asked Didion if she’d like to be her full-time replacement at the paper. After two years, she’d earn $125 a month. Great—and on top of that, marry Bob? The fellow wouldn’t relent. She could just see herself moving to Kern County, driving a new Ford each year, hanging out at the country club, bored to her bones, slipping into boozy, sad affairs with other women’s husbands.

  * * *

  In August, the Mademoiselle college issue graced Sacramento newsstands. Didion’s relatives snapped it up. An editor at Henry Holt, noting her desire to publish a book, wrote to offer her a “sympathetic reading.” If only she had a manuscript!

  Between Bob and Henry Holt, Berkeley and the Society Desk, she lived the mixed messages of the “Millies.” “Capture a man … and a career,” said one of the magazine’s ads: All you had to do was wear Dacron. “When you live out of a suitcase … take Tampax along.”

  All the Bobs in all of Kern County couldn’t hold a candle to what she had seen. And what she’d seen, readers would come to witness. Didion’s path through society pages and fashion magazines put a unique stamp on her writing, and her writing would become synonymous with the New Journalism. It was a literary style valuing style, coinciding with fashion and the reading practices of the New Criticism. No object was too trivial to be analyzed; everything was design. Clothing, jewelry, furniture: More than just accoutrements, they were signatures, cultural markers, indicators of the present and the future, means by which life could be read. Conrad—that most “female” of men—had understood this even better than Miss Blackwell had. A storehouse of “beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods” was called a “fetish,” he said, “because of the spirit of civilization it contained.”

  And so fleeting!

  Oscar Wilde said fashion is “a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Didion knew she was writing elegies (“Nothing matters”). The champagne, caviar, and accordion music could not last.

  In the late 1970s, Mademoiselle stopped the guest editor program. In 1980 it suspended its poetry and fiction contests. In 2001 the magazine ceased altogether. And what of the ambitious girls who had gathered in the summer of 1955 to burn like lightning? We all know what happened to the poetry winner. And: “I was shocked and thrown off balance when Jane Truslow died,” Burroway said. Now Truslow is just a footnote to stories of Sylvia Plath. “Such a fully lovely and alive person, so little impact,” Burroway said. “We are all wisps in the wind.”

  3

  Grief passes.

  “A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee,” wrote the poet Walter Landor. What did he mean by these lines in his elegy for a dead young girl? Clearly, said Didion’s teacher, he meant that however overwhelming and necessary mourning may be, it is, like all human experience, finite. The teacher had gone on to say, “A night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours.”

  Read it for yourself. Close textual analysis. I’ll expect your papers on Wednesday.

  She was back at Berkeley, trying to shake off her hangover from the inert second half of the summer. Fights with Bob. Mediocre productions at the Music Circus—South Pacific again! Carousel again (though it did make her weep)! Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones at the state fair. The highlight of August was when her father roused himself to trade in the family’s 1950 Ford for a ’54 Sun Valley, pale shrimp in color, with matching upholstery and a glass top.

  Mademoiselle should have been the season’s glory, but the issue came and went; already, Didion felt like a has-been.

  She had completed her finals from the term before. She had purchased five yards of mulberry gray wool, along with a Vogue pattern for a couturier coat, and sewn the coat and a matching skirt. She had hoped to make a cocktail dress of striped silk to show her sorority sisters she was just as fashionable as they were despite the fact that she’d abandoned the Tri-Delt house, but once classes started, she lost steam.

  She had wanted to take another short story–writing class and a course on Conrad’s novels, but the English Department determined she’d used up her electives. She was required to finish English 155 (Chaucer), Anthro 120 (the peculiarities of Incan grammar), and Psych 168 (“Abnormal”—the only class she liked). She feared she’d be at Berkeley for another hundred years.

  Over the summer, Mark Schorer’s students had read his new novel. In Dwinelle Hall they debated its themes: Was there freedom of choice in life—really? One member of the group said no and declared himself a Trotskyist. They kicked around Graham Greene’s latest novel, The Quiet American: subterfuge, international intrigue, U.S. empire building.

  Meanwhile, once a week, Didion fended off the rakish comments of Professor Caldwell, who asked her to his office to discuss Edmund Spenser.

  It was a long way from mirrored conference rooms. Berkeley sophistication consisted of small coffee shops on Walnut Street where World War II vets spent the afternoons telling eighteen-year-olds stories of combat and prostitution; Sather Gate, where pro- and anti-McCarthyites cleared their throats at one another; and the Cinema Guild Theatre, tucked into the corner of the Sequoia Apartments building on Telegraph Avenue. The Guild showed foreign features (Renoir’s Grand Illusion), smart Hollywood comedies (Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours); the theater’s program director at one time was Pauline Kael, before she made her name as her generation’s most important and infuriating movie critic. At the Guild, Didion saw Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel and wept at The Bicycle Thief.

  Didion figured the California Republican Party was dead for 1956, so she remained politically inactive. That year, the only campus event remotely subversive was a “particularly vigorous panty raid,” said Seymour Martin Lipset, a sociology professor. In just a few years, women’s underclothing would become a political symbol, but for now it was a source of harmless fun—unless you were a former Mademoiselle intern, in which case, it was a career path.

  * * *

  Up in the Berkeley Hills, boys and girls danced naked at night among trees exploding with lights. Such were the rumors: a perverse afterglow of the Bevatron’s throbbing through the blue gums and alders, as if society had to produce an antisociety, just as protons could not exist without their opposites. The Beats, the avant-gardists, the Berkeley Gothics with their stream-of-consciousness “poetry,” their orgies, yoga, and chemical enhancers—Didion couldn’t stand them. Not that she knew any of them, but the very thought of what she’d heard disgusted her.

  At the time, Allen Ginsberg shared a cottage with Jack Kerouac on Mount Tamalpais. All around them, in the woods, the sharp, fresh smell of mint. They sat on the rotting porch among wild rosebushes and tomato vines, drinking, smoking, chatting with pals—“Zen lunatic drunks,” Kerouac said. Ginsberg was writing his “Footnote to Howl!” and chanting “Holy! Holy! Holy!” Occasionally, he’d go grocery shopping in town, imagining Walt Whitman sizing up the stock boys. Near the cottage, Gary Snyder, planning a Buddhist pilgrimage to Japan, sat in his shack on a tatami mat, drinking tea, reading D. T. Suzuki, Han-shan, and Philip Whalen. He wrote poems titled “For a Far-Out Friend” and “Song and Dance for a Lecherous Muse.” The poems celebrated getting “high” on a woman’s body and being “hooked” on books. At a reading at the Poetry Center in March 1956, Kenneth Rexroth introduced Snyder by saying he’d met a woman who wanted to know if Snyder was a “real poet or is he just one of those people who object to everything?”

  “This is very important,” Snyder told me one afternoon. “We thought we had won. In Northern California, the intelligentsia, such as it was, had given up on Trotsky and Stalinism early, but it had not given up on radicalism. So we were embracing anarchy, Kropotkyn—it was a wonderful environment, but hardly anybody else in the United States thought that way, even in New York, for at least another ten years.” By writing anarchy, Snyder and his buddies believed they would bring it about.

  For Didion, writing was not
a matter of communing with the spirit of the forest, sparking revolution, or buzzing with Eros. It was deadlines, cut-and-paste jobs, pleasing Saks Fifth Avenue.

  Not only did she have nothing to do with the Beats, she had, during senior year, less and less contact with the sorority or anyone not connected to The Occident, Berkeley’s literary magazine. The writers formed a “clique,” said Gabriel Rummonds, a former editor. “A small group of students and their friends had hold on staff positions and authors who were published. It was hard for an outsider to join.” John Ridland agreed. He had won a Phelan Scholarship in Poetry and would pursue a distinguished literary career, but the staff ignored everything he sent them. In 1956, the year Didion took the reins, The Occident reflected austerity, fastidiousness, and morbid self-regard. Humor had never been its strong suit—satire was reserved for The Pelican, another campus publication (pelican was a derogatory student term for coeds). The high-minded Occident, established in 1881, and counting Jack London among its illustrious contributors, shunned silliness. In 1949, Jack Spicer described a campus reading by Occident writers: a “ghostly symposium, five poets holding forth on their peculiar problems. One will say Magic; one will say God; one will say Form. When my turn comes I can only ask an embarrassing question: ‘Why is nobody here? Who is listening to us?’”

  As editor, Didion brooked no sandals or beards, no “pseudo-avant garde” nonsense. The inexperience of her coworkers revolted her. “The trouble with you, Didion,” said one scornful young staffer, “is that you admire the professional.” He “considered my concern with punctuation and my enthusiasm for Henry James a sellout to the English Department,” she said.

  “I tried to be friendly with her but got no encouragement,” said Harriet Polt, another editor. “I recall her sitting on the floor at a staff meeting, my saying hello or something of the sort, and her just mumbling. She was a very shy, tiny thing, mouselike.”

  Nevertheless, she set up a card table in front of the library and tried to persuade students running to class to stop and purchase the issue. Joan Haug-West, her old high school classmate, now a Berkeley coed, remembers Didion sitting in the sun, quietly persistent. The magazine’s business manager, an army vet and former researcher at Time, fought with Didion over promotional tactics. Card tables were fine, he said, but he had plans to raise The Occident’s national profile. He believed it should compete with The Partisan Review. Didion thought him psychotic. One morning he phoned her at eight o’clock, insisted she rush to Eshleman Hall for a meeting. She hung up on him. She’d been suffering from a migraine for three days and had to go to Cowell Hospital for some codeine.

  * * *

  “It is not professional, of course … but several of the pieces in the magazine are very close to being professional and indicate substantial promise in their writers,” Thomas Parkinson wrote in a review of The Occident in the Daily Californian. He singled out Didion’s first published short story and praised its “first rate” prose.

  In “Sunset,” Didion test-ran themes and circumstances she’d return to eight years later in her debut novel. The story opens with an overture reminiscent of A Farewell to Arms (and also of lyrical passages in Steinbeck’s The Long Valley or The Grapes of Wrath) in which the California heat assumes a presence stronger than any of the characters. Laura, a Central Valley native, descendant of pioneers, is married to a Midwestern businessman named Charlie (“And that had made all the difference,” the narrator says; Charlie is a projection of the young golfer Didion dated just after high school). Laura has been away from California for a dozen years. She’s depressed. Her husband’s desire to see her father’s grave in her family’s cemetery irritates her, reminding her how much has changed since she left: “She even felt that she belonged to a different generation” now. Worse, she may as well not exist. She feels she could “fuse with the yellow fields, dissolve into the late summer twilight.” Her marriage has been “completely without motivation or continuity” and she can easily “imagine that Charlie was not beside her.” She cannot, or will not, talk to him about the source of her recent fragility—the belief that she has been spiritually “disinherited” by her father’s death and the loss of family property.

  As a teenager, Laura felt she was better than anyone else. Her father told her so: “But it was necessary to be polite to all the others, because that was really the final test of how much better you were, and that was how one got along in this world.” The family had “pushed across the mountains a century before, broken across the Sierras and made the dry fields grow. ‘You’re the heiress to that entire century,’ [Laura’s father] had said harshly, ‘and you’d better be damn proud of it.’ She had felt it a grave responsibility.”

  Here is the story’s autobiographical core. When teenaged Laura takes tennis lessons and insists she’s not playing to win, her mother says, “Laurie-baby, everybody plays to win.” Eduene to a tee. In the next line, Didion drops the narrative mask and reveals herself: “[H]er mother, of course, had been right.” The line’s confidence has nothing to do with Laura.

  Didion shared with her character a sense of slipped tradition. Charlie is an early version of Ryder Channing, the entrepreneur and sly suitor in Run River, who knows California’s future lies in betraying its past—a past in which he has no stake. Charlie is older than Laura, “already at the age when the idea of death was beginning to gnaw at the fabric of his daily life,” patient with her petulance and cruelty. He is probably “going to die” before she does: the first of Didion’s many tragic males. “[S]he could not face finding any fear, any weakness, in the man she had married for his strength,” the narrator says, showing Didion’s hand perhaps more than she realized at the time.

  As the couple strolls among the tombstones, contemplating how much of the land has been sold, Laura sounds for the first time in Didion’s printed prose the major theme of future writings, a precursor to Didion’s contention that the center cannot hold, a twenty-one-year-old’s prescient and permanent shock: It “was as if the rules under which she had lived her entire life had been arbitrarily declared invalid.”

  4

  Didion wanted to be literary, not academic. This was hard at Berkeley. She wanted access to San Francisco’s cultural events but had no car. Worst of all, because she was so quiet, the boys in her writing course thought they were smarter than she was.

  One night she borrowed a dress from her roommate, Corrine. She had a date with a boy from Schorer’s class. He was going to take her on the F train to dinner and a play in the city.

  Corrine’s dress smelled of Corrine’s perfume, a scent Didion associated with a tenor voice singing “The Bluebird of Happiness” on a scratchy radio. Corrine liked to lie awake in her room, listening to this song, a local station’s late-night sign-off.

  The boy took Didion to a French family restaurant, where they ordered coq au vin—standard fare for UC students out on the town, yearning to be European. After the play, on the train back to Berkeley, he told her he liked her dress and asked why she’d not worn it before. She didn’t admit she’d borrowed it to please him. He pulled a Dylan Thomas paperback out of his pocket and began to read aloud. “‘It was my thirtieth year to heaven,’” he recited, then paused to explain, “It was his thirtieth birthday.”

  Didion nodded.

  Playing dumb with poets: Surely this was not the way to be literary.

  5

  Fellow Occident editor Harriet Polt recalled, “Of course I was awfully jealous when she got the Vogue gig—and surprised, as she seemed so withdrawn.”

  First prize in Vogue’s Prix de Paris contest for young writers was one thousand dollars in cash or “two wonderful weeks in Paris,” winner’s choice. Finalists had to be college graduates. They were automatically screened for their potential as employees of Condé Nast Publications.

  “[H]ow crazy I was to get out of California,” Didion said. “The first time I came to New York it was so thrilling to me I just thought I had to get back … so I threw
myself into the Vogue contest.” She didn’t believe she had a chance: The writing assignments were much more fashion-minded than those for the Mademoiselle competition. “Expect the contest not to be a cinch—it isn’t,” the magazine warned applicants. “Expect to give it time and some of your best thought.”

  Writers were evaluated for their “grasp of subject matter; presentation” and “demonstration of special skills.” They were required to provide a six-hundred-word personal statement and short essays on a range of topics, such as “Why should fashion be important to a woman?” “Have you a clothes philosophy?” and “What clothes would you take” to exotic locations such as Europe or California?

  In 1951, two years before marrying John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier won the Prix de Paris with an essay entitled “People I Wish I Had Known.” She wished she had known Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Serge Diaghilev, “poets and idealists who could paint sinfulness with honesty and still believe in something higher.” Her fantasy was to be a “sort of ‘Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century,’ watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” This was the sort of thing the magazine wanted. Jackie was its girl.

  By November 1, 1955, Didion had mailed her application, parroting the magazine’s verbal style and current enthusiasms—for jersey jumpers and striped oversweaters, coral jewels, blond cotton poplin, and “red, red, red!”

  By January she was among the contestants invited to enter the second round of the competition. She was asked to “[g]ive ideas for a newspaper advertisement, window displays, fashion show” or to “[w]rite a profile on a personality … which would be of interest to readers of Vogue.” Recently, the magazine had published an article entitled “Four Architects Helping to Change the Look of America,” by Aline B. Saarinen, who profiled her husband, Eero, as well as Gordon Bunshaft, Philip Johnson, and Mies van der Rohe. She extolled the International Style. Van der Rohe’s “unshakable sense of moral righteousness is like a Puritan’s,” Saarinen wrote. Nonsense, Didion thought. More convincing to her was the men’s professional cattiness: “So-and-So is covering the country with a thick chocolate ooze,” said one fellow of another. This sounded like a Sacramento real-estate debate. She could do this!