Diesel slicked the air.
She remembered afternoons she’d spent as a girl on army posts, wearing a red poppy on her dress, following her father around the country. She remembered playing with dogs on the lawns of lieutenant colonels, sitting in clear sunshine and reading books that seemed to matter. These days, the national press was reporting that residents of Bikini Atoll, living in intolerable slums on a place called Kill Island, were still unable to return to their home, twenty-two years after the atomic tests.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
The ashy yellow light, slanting now through the canebrakes, appeared to burden the limbs of the palms.
5
Didion had a busy June. In addition to visiting Hawaii, while Slouching Towards Bethlehem made its way to reviewers’ desks, she was diagnosed in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica with severe alienation and “reality contact” impairment. The Rorschach, Thematic Apperception, and Sentence Completion tests, as well as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory suggested “a personality in process of deterioration”; “the content of patient’s responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations”; she has a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.”
That she submitted to these tests as her book materialized suggests the overwhelming levels of anxiety, anticipation, and pressure caused by publication, a common circumstance for authors. To some degree, her profile fits any “creative personality,” particularly in the letdown after an especially fertile span, when a project is done, one relinquishes control of it and can only await the reactions of strangers.
She wrote that her breakdown did not seem to her “an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968”—a thematic aperçu within “The White Album”’s tour of social disintegration, but a swift elision of her personal troubles. Certainly, in the wake of the spring’s political assassinations and campus upsets, no one felt sanguine. “Many saw the unleashing of a dark, latent psychosis in the national character, a stain that had its start with the first settlement of a hostile continent,” Time reported. Recently, in New Orleans, District Attorney Jim Garrison, in a high-profile trial, had raised the possibility of conspiracy in the killing of JFK, lifting the lid on Miami’s Cuban exile community and certain connections in that city with the mob, rekindling public doubts about the veracity of the Warren Report; Didion was not alone in believing she shared, in the words of her doctors, “a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations.” She lived in the very neighborhood of cultural meltdown, glamour gone groovy gone gritty, with weekly demonstrations and threats of violence just blocks away on the Strip; she lived in the Hollywood rumor mill, steeped in stories of bigger and bigger parties, harder and harder drugs. Tales of orgies fluttered like scented envelopes up and down the hills. It had become chic to keep a pair of handcuffs in the bedroom. “[L]ibidinal preoccupations … distorted and bizarre” (a concern for Didion’s analysts) would have appeared in the psychiatric profiles of anyone north of La Brea.
Could Didion really have been surprised by the results of her tests? As the young California poet Robert Hass had written, “It became clear to me that alienation was a state approaching sanity, a way of being human in a monstrously inhuman world, and that feeling human was a useful form of political subversion.”
In fact, Didion’s push to finish her essay collection, the pressure of the looming contract for an uncompleted novel, her husband’s unhappiness with the reception of his book, as well as the rigorous travel schedule they maintained as reporters for The Saturday Evening Post, was reason enough for “an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out.”
A psychosis in the national character was never the point. And Elavil would not be the answer.
In roughly the same period, personally and professionally, Didion responded to a Harper’s Bazaar questionnaire, “Singular Voices: 100 Women in Touch with Our Times.” Aside from asserting that the most significant change in our society was its “total breakdown,” her answers sketched a woman generally at peace with herself, insofar as peace was possible on a daily basis in a tumultuous time, in the midst of a hectic career. She seemed satisfied with her work—it was as “vital” to her as anything else in her life, and she would be “bereft” without it; she did not feel stifled in a male-dominated world—she could not imagine accomplishing anything without the encouragement of men; she cooked for relaxation and avoided all housework and laundry, leaving those chores to the maid, unless there was an emergency; she did not feel she had ever made a “significant choice”—“One day and one thing led to another and pretty soon a pattern was set, irreversible.”
How do you feel when you consider that you will probably live longer than most men?
“It never occurs to me,” she said.
6
In publishing circles, summer is generally considered a slow time for serious books: It’s beach-read season. But in the spring and summer of 1968, while the president was reading about the decline of the King of Beasts in Aesop’s Fables, Farrar, Straus and Giroux released three volumes the critics called essential to understanding the culture. The books were all associated with Henry Robbins.
They were Donald Barthelme’s groundbreaking short story collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Of Barthelme, William Gass wrote in The New York Review of Books, “[He offers] a dizzying series of swift, smooth modulations, a harmony of discords”—the new national speech. He chronicles our use of “love, wine, cigarettes, and hobbies, in our barricades, to shore against our ruin,” and he reports that it “is not going well.”
In The New York Times, C. D. B. Bryan said Wolfe’s “enthusiasm and literary fireworks … make it difficult for the reader to remain detached” while trying to determine if the counterculture is dangerous to, or prophetic about, America’s future.
And Didion’s old friend Dan Wakefield said flatly in The New York Times Book Review that Slouching Towards Bethlehem brought together “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years. Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of ‘art,’ perhaps it is possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call ‘mere journalism,’ but as a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.”
Wakefield’s review made an issue of disagreements in the press about a new form of journalism, debates increasing in frequency and vehemence since the 1965 appearance of Capote’s In Cold Blood and Jimmy Breslin’s columns in the New York Herald Tribune. In the weeks before Slouching Towards Bethlehem’s rollout, the publication of Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, about the march on the Pentagon in October 1967, intensified the arguments.
Alfred Kazin nicely framed the stakes Mailer had raised: “Mailer presents this book as [a] nonfiction novel,” he said. Like many contemporary American writers, he has been living the “‘crisis of the novel.’ He … [has been] so sensitive to politics, power and society in America, so engrossed in the search for solutions and revelations that the moralist … left little time to the novelist.” Now, it was the “coalescence of American disorder (always an obsession of Mailer’s) with all the self-confidence he feels as a novelist … that has produced ‘Armies of the Night’ … [I]t is a fact that only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive.”
Said Gay Talese, Mailer’s fellow traveler, “The new journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction.
It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form. The new journalism allows, demands in fact, a more imaginative approach to reporting, and it permits the writer to inject himself into the narrative if he wishes.”
This is a variation of Didion’s admiration of the reporting available in the underground press. Traditionalists were disturbed by what they perceived to be a reckless disregard for objectivity and a narcissistic insistence on placing the writer front and center. It’s also true that many of the attacks on the New Journalism were personal responses to Tom Wolfe’s abrasive personality (in print). He deliberately irritated literary purists. In 1972, writing with typical insouciance in New York magazine, he’d summarize his view of the skirmish: The New Journalists “never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world … causing panic, dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century…”
It was this sort of braggadocio in his attack on The New Yorker in the Herald Tribune (“Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”) that raised Dwight Macdonald’s hackles. He published a two-part piece in The New York Review of Books entitled “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine” (August 26, 1965, and February 3, 1966). “A new kind of journalism is being born,” he wrote. “It might be called ‘parajournalism’ from the Greek para, ‘beside’ … ‘against’: something similar in form but different in function … It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism, and the atmospheric license of fiction. Entertainment rather than information is the aim of its producers…”
This literary infighting held little interest for readers—or for most writers, who just went about their business—but a few points emerged from the battle that shed light on the changing nature of American literature, and suggested why, taken together, Barthelme, Wolfe, and Didion were essential to understanding the current state of the culture. It was precisely the “crisis of the novel” that birthed Donald Barthelme: Fearful that traditional literary forms could not adequately present the realities of our monstrously inhuman world, he had created a language for fiction embodying, like a trash compactor, our wasteful, contradictory speech, and, by extension, our mixed self-perceptions. From the opposite direction, traditional journalistic forms proved inadequate to contain the nation’s growing appetite for extravagant experiences, many of them made possible by new drugs and new technologies that no one, it seemed, could control.
Like Mailer, Didion revered the novel’s lyricism and interiority, but she, too, felt the genre’s crisis: Story premises no longer held for her. Plot and character had gone spongy, soaked through with predictability. Like Wolfe, she wanted to report the essentials of our national life, but who knew what they were now—certainly the Los Angeles Times hadn’t a clue, speaking, as it did, in a journalistic code chiseled decades earlier.
New language and new forms were necessary, but they would not be easily achieved. Even Wolfe stumbled along the way. In his first pass at Ken Kesey, he wrote, “So far nobody in or out of the medical profession knows exactly what LSD does to the body, chiefly because so little is known about the workings of the central nervous system as a whole.” This was as stuffy as anything in the Times. For Wolfe, it took plunging into the experience to get the essence of the story. One night, he dropped 125 micrograms of acid. Instead of reporting on the drug, he found language to convey it (channeling himself through Kesey’s trips—this was journalism, not autobiography): “The ceiling is moving—not in a crazed swirl but along its own planes its own planes of light and shadow and surface…”
Later, Wolfe would say, “Despite the skepticism I brought [to the story] I [was] suddenly experiencing their feeling.… If I could stop what I was doing, I would be one of the Pranksters.”
Didion never went that far in the Haight. Still, as Wakefield wrote, “though her own personality does not self-indulgently intrude itself upon her subjects, it informs and illuminates them.” This is what made her journalism so unique: “The reader comes to admire what can only be called the character of this observer at work.”
* * *
In preparing the collection for publication, Didion labored hard to shape her character, in the way the essays appeared together as a package. It was Robbins’s idea to lead with “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a brilliant choice, Didion thought, as she had come to accept his view that the book reflected a native daughter’s confrontation with California: her reevaluation of youthful romance, her wonder and dismay at the changes time had forced.
At the last minute, she inserted into her preface the paragraph explaining her paralysis over writing’s irrelevancy, and her need to confront disorder. This sewed a thematic thread through pieces written, initially, far apart and for different reasons.
The final essay she wrote for the book, her profile of the hopeless revolutionary Michael Laski, whom she’d thought was the “cat’s ass,” according to Dunne, anchored another theme central to the volume: “I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of the world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” In this seamless melding of her personality with that of her subject; the fluidity of style, combining confession with political cant, all in the same smooth rhythm; and in the sweeping, if ironic, statement about behaviors and beliefs (ending with an implicit assertion of principles), she demonstrated the advantages of the New Journalism.
It was a book of outsiders and extremists. It was a book of geographical and spiritual improbabilities. The essays, both empathetic and restrained, assumed the reader was a friend—a friend who listened to rock ’n’ roll and who’d voted for Barry Goldwater. “I had a strong feeling that it was necessary, that there was no reason to trust the reporter unless you knew where the reporter was. And if you didn’t know where the reporter was standing, then I really objected to the notion of objectivity … because it didn’t seem to me very real,” she said.
As for voice: Run River had taught her one kind of rhythm. “The fiction voice is like a liturgy, there’s a lot of repetition,” she said. In her nonfiction, she discovered that in addition to repetition, there were a “lot of clauses. It gets denser and denser. I’m not going to make it simple. It seems to me you can get a lot more thought in. You can make it come alive.”
Nonfiction, then, could be as challenging to compose as fiction. And she had become a different writer since publishing her novel. Run River was the work of someone longing to live outside the bonds of history, in a lazy, unchanging current of nostalgia smelling of rice and hops. Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a frightened, reckless embrace of what was and what could never be, of what would flourish only briefly and then die.
On the cover, Robbins wanted a Ted Streshinsky photo of her, capturing her “beauty,” her “hunted look.” She was dead set against a bright “hippie” jacket (FSG did splash a small rainbow over the title). She preferred a jacket based around a stark black-and-white photographic image, for two reasons: This was a book of fact, and a photo would suggest that; but also, in our time, everyone knows photos can be manipulated, blurring fact and fiction. This would give the cover a great feeling of now, of what’s happening. As for the author photo, maybe Ted’s pose of her eating an apple during a hippie demonstration, she said, or a shot of her in a cell at Alcatraz: something grainy, perhaps even washed-out, something “prett
y shocking,” to the point of “downright mystery.”
In the end, Robbins got the “hunted” look he wanted—Didion in Golden Gate Park, standing troubled, gazing into the distance, while the missing children huddle nearby. But her cover suggestions show how intensely involved she was in manufacturing her public image, off the page and on.
The attention to detail paid off. Generally, the reviews were laudatory. Time chided her for being “bleak and joyless”; her tone was “somewhere between Despond and Nostalgia.” But the book “approaches art,” the reviewer said. “What most captivates the reader is the fascination of discovering how her brittle sensibilities and flamboyant neuroses react to events … Didion suffers constantly, but compellingly and magically.”
Gender was a major issue for reviewers. “Journalism by women is the price the man’s world pays for having disappointed them. Here at their best are the unforgiving eye, the unforgiving ear, the concealed hat-pin style,” wrote Melvin Maddocks in The Christian Science Monitor.
And Time’s review concluded with Didion’s wish in “John Wayne: A Love Song” for a man who would take her “to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” “Many young men (and older ones, too), reading her sentimental, compassionate, and appealing passages would be willing to do just that,” said the magazine.
7
Tom Wolfe was a lightning rod and his exuberant style, stippled with typographical play, was rigged to pop like a can of snakes, but after the appearance of The Armies of the Night and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, no one could doubt the seriousness and power of the New Journalism, however broad the label may have been (and wildly inaccurate—as Jack Newfield said, “Defoe, Addison and Steele, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain were all new journalists according to most definitions”).
“In the Sixties you kept hearing that reporting was the new art form. While that was beguiling, I felt that not enough was said about how complex it had become,” said Nora Sayre, one of the best journalists of the period (she was the New York correspondent for The New Statesman). “First, you struggled with the facts you knew and couldn’t print—since you didn’t want to send certain people to jail or to be subpoenaed for your confidential sources. Second, many were afraid to talk to you, fearing that they would be quoted accurately—just as much as they feared misquotation. (Valid fears.) Third, although you deplored the traditional media’s distortions and felt you must correct the straight press, honesty often demanded that you report bad news from your own side.”
The Last Love Song Page 34