For Didion, mother loss, followed by a return to a college campus, was disorienting, almost as if there had been a glitch in time and she was young and old all at once.
So it was that in Berkeley she barely felt adult enough to fulfill one of her official duties as Regents’ Lecturer: being guest of honor at a formal dinner in the home of the English Department’s chair. According to Caitlin Flanagan, the evening was a disaster. “The immediate impression she gave, patently obvious even to a 14-year-old, was one of a person in misery,” Flanagan wrote. “I can tell you this for certain: anything you have ever read by Didion about the shyness that plagued her in her youth, and about her inarticulateness in those days, in the face of even the most banal questions, was not a writer’s exaggeration of a minor character trait for literary effect. The contemporary diagnosis for the young woman at our dinner table would be profound—crippling—social-anxiety disorder.”
“She never took her purse off her lap!” Flanagan’s mother exclaimed afterward. “She took it to the dinner table!”
The entire time, Didion had an “anxious expression” on her face. After dinner, clutching her purse, she couldn’t wait to leave as the faculty men drank gallons of Irish coffee. Once she’d gone, the “consensus was that the little lady had her work cut out for her,” Flanagan said. Maybe she wasn’t classroom material after all.
One student said the class was terribly awkward and tense. Didion would read to them in a barely audible voice or stare at them in silence, drumming her fingers on the desk.
We get a clear view of what she tried to teach from her novel Democracy (1984). In a wholly autobiographical passage, she says she met “a dozen or so students in the English Department to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers. I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style and presumably in ideas of democracy (the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought), between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer.” She asked her students to “[c]onsider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society” (recently, she had decided that the nation’s inability to come to terms with the loss of its manufacturing-based economy accounted, in large measure, for the social unrest of the 1960s). “Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words.”
Twenty years earlier, she said, “I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole.”
This image may have occurred to her because she remembered her student days, when she would glance up the hill at the blue lights of the Bevatron, and absorb, like radiation, the early Cold War expectation that her adult life would be lived “in the face of definite annihilation.” She remembered reading Henry Adams on the Dynamo and the Virgin. She imagined the “blue in the glass at Chartres” as the same blue surrounding the fuel rods inside the TRIGA Mark III, the nuclear reactor pool in Etcheverry Hall, “the blue that is actually a shock wave in the water”—the same blue as the medicine bottles tossed from covered wagons by her pioneer ancestors. She recalled Adams saying that, in developing massive machinery and fresh forms of energy, Western civilization had moved from thirteenth-century unity to nineteenth-century multiplicity, from belief in the moral force of the Holy Virgin to the anxiety of fragmentation. And now, in 1975, as she stood staring at the bland brick facade of Etcheverry Hall, the fragments of the Industrial Age were themselves fading under still more powerful bundles of energy and their increasingly abstract economies—all an indeterminate blue, the color of very late evening.
2
That spring, in Berkeley, the “question of whether one spoke of Saigon ‘falling’ or of Saigon’s ‘liberation’” was the major preoccupation of the students, if not the English Department faculty (the faculty was busy discussing the “plotting of Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, and Bleak House”). In her old raincoat—her regressive lassitude—she could do little between classes other than walk down to Telegraph Avenue and buy the latest San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Oakland Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Berkeley Gazette, and New York Times. “Tank battalions vanished between editions,” she wrote. “Three hundred fixed-wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the president playing golf at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, California.” Code names for the American evacuations of Phnom Penh and Saigon puffed up the headlines: EAGLE PULL, FREQUENT WIND. She learned that the “colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon were red, white and blue.” She learned that the “amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres.” Each new detail added to the “black hole effect.”
She would sit on a bench on Telegraph Avenue, considering the chaotic and incomplete dispatches out of Vietnam, considering the clamoring local disorder—the drug buys up and down the street, the cheap, bad food and the tepid coffee for sale, the stand where Nancy Ling Perry had sold fruit juice to Patty Hearst; she considered the shadow cast by Etcheverry Hall, and she concluded, intuitively, that the Berkeley-aided nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific, in the 1940s and 1950s, with their raze-it-and-leave-it results, “formed a straight line to pushing the helicopters off the aircraft carriers when we were abandoning Saigon. It was a very clear progression in my mind.”
It was hard, then, for her to trundle back to campus and concentrate on teaching “ideas of democracy” in American literature. The images broadcast from Southeast Asia clashed with words issued from Washington (“peace with honor,” an “orderly end to the assistance effort”) and seemed absolutely to deride the language of democracy—perhaps the concept itself.
Here again “the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought.”
“I’m a writer,” a stranger told her one day, standing in the doorway of her temporary office.
“What have you written?” she asked him.
“Nothing you’ll ever dare to read,” he snapped. He smirked at her. He said he admired only Céline and Djuna Barnes. Barnes was the only woman who’d ever written anything worth a damn. He sat threateningly on the edge of Didion’s desk and said, “Your time’s gone, your fever’s over.”
“It had probably been a couple of decades, English 106A, since I had last heard about Céline and Djuna Barnes and how women could not write, since I had last encountered this particular brand of extraliterary machismo,” Didion commented later. She said she locked her office door after the man left and sat silently for a long while in the afternoon light. “At nineteen I had wanted to write,” she said. “At forty I still wanted to write, and nothing that had happened in the years between made me any more certain that I could.”
* * *
At the beginning of March 1975, fixed-wing aircraft began evacuating American civilians and “at risk” South Vietnamese (those who had worked for, or with, the Americans) from Tan Son Nhat Airport. On April 3, President Ford announced Operation Babylift, an initiative to evacuate two thousand Vietnamese orphans, many of them fathered by U.S. servicemen. One of the operation’s Lockheed C-5A Galaxy planes crashed in a muddy rice paddy, killing 138 passengers, including 78 children. Within days of this tragedy, North Vietnamese forces began a final push toward Saigon, attacking Tan Son Nhat and killing the last two American soldiers to “officially” die in the Vietnam conflict. The fixed-wing evacuations were suspended, and Operation Frequent Wind began, a planned series of helicopter convoys leaving from the Defense Attaché Office at the airport, the American embassy in Saigon, and other rendezvous spots in the city. The American radio network was scheduled to play Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a signal to U.S. per
sonnel that the final evacuation had begun. CH-53 and CH-46 choppers as well as UH-1 Hueys would ferry civilians to the carrier ships of the Seventh Fleet waiting in the South China Sea.
On April 30, according to a New York Times article Didion read in her room at the Berkeley Faculty Club, “large numbers of … Vietnamese clawed their way up the 10-foot wall of the [American] embassy compound in desperate attempts” to be taken aboard the choppers landing on the small, flat roof and “escape approaching Communist troops. United States marines and civilians used pistol and rifle butts to dislodge them.” Several men and women got snagged on the wall’s barbed wire and hung helplessly, bleeding over the courtyard stones as ashes from destroyed top-secret intelligence reports spat from incinerator pipes, coating the compound. “People held up their children, asking Americans to take them over the fence.”
So many helicopters—eighty-one that final day—crowded the TF-76 carrier ships, some of the choppers were shoved off the decks to make room for others. Pilots were ordered to ditch into the sea, and wait to be rescued, since the USS Okinawa and others had no landing room. One Huey pilot, told there was no space for him aboard the USS Blue Ridge, leaped from his helicopter as it circled forty feet over the sea. The chopper crashed into the side of the ship; its rotor blade sheared off, grinding into an American Bell 205 that was refueling on deck. Moments later, another helicopter tried to land and crashed into the disabled Bell.
In the days ahead, while President Ford insisted that “Americans can [now] regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam,” and as Didion prepared for her final lecture at Berkeley, she learned from newspaper accounts that the “number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one.” In a speech at Tulane University, President Ford reiterated that America was a “good neighbor to all people and the enemy of none.”
Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words.
3
“There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” Caitlin Flanagan said her father remarked one night.
“Apparently, vast numbers of women—students, staff members, faculty, Berkeley people—were thronging to her office hours, hanging around the door of her classroom, arranging their schedules so that they could bump into her, or at least catch a glimpse of her, as she walked from the Faculty Club to Wheeler Hall,” Flanagan said. “It was becoming clear that she didn’t have just readers; she had fans—not the way writers have fans, but the way musicians and actors have fans—and that almost all of them were female.” The English Department faculty had pretty much written her off. She could never be embraced by the Establishment; she just wasn’t cut out for it. Said Flanagan: They “hadn’t simply underestimated” her “huge, mesmerizing power” over certain readers. They had been “almost entirely unaware of it.”
A reporter named Susan Braudy arrived to interview Didion for Ms. Apparently, the magazine had forgiven Didion for her attack on the women’s movement, and decided a successful female writer was a feminist icon, regardless of her politics.
Braudy’s approach to writing her article was to tell Didion she had spoken to a friend of hers—usually someone Didion didn’t know very well—and that the person in question had said this or that. Then she’d ask Didion what she thought. What Didion thought was that this reporter was terribly annoying. The process reenforced her belief that interviewing people for biographical profiles was generally a waste of time. When Greg Dunne heard that Braudy had asked his wife why she wrote about such emotionally crippled women, instead of strong women like herself, he exploded, saying this reporter knew nothing about literature.
Dunne had gone to Berkeley at his wife’s insistence. She had gotten nervous, anticipating the public talk capping her stay here. Further, she had dragooned Henry Robbins into flying from New York for moral support. She wanted to hand him personally the manuscript of A Book of Common Prayer. She needed his immediate encouragement and enthusiasm—plus, she distrusted Susan Braudy. Didion planned to read from the novel as part of her talk, and she didn’t want to see it quoted in Ms. Somehow, the pages would be safe in Henry’s hands. If Ms. tried any funny business, he would know what to do. “[E]ditors do not, in the real world, get on the night TWA to California to soothe a jumpy midlist writer,” she wrote later. But that’s precisely what Robbins did.
* * *
The English Department secretary had booked a room for Didion’s lecture. One afternoon, she and Flanagan’s father took the Dunnes to check it out. Heidi, the secretary, asked Didion if the room suited her.
Later, in a letter to Lois Wallace, Didion said she had worked up the nerve to say the room was too tiny for the audience she’d attract. The chair, impatient and disbelieving, gave her a thin smile but agreed to indulge her and book another space.
Flanagan told a different story. “Didion said nothing” to Heidi, she wrote. “[She] just looked up at her husband. He remarked coldly, ‘It’s too small,’ and Joan nodded fiercely, as though this were obvious.
“Never antagonize a secretary. Heidi marched back to her desk and scheduled Didion’s talk in the biggest hall she could book. Let her see how she liked lecturing to a half-filled room!”
When Didion saw the new lecture hall, she panicked. The first one had been too small, but this was a monster—she didn’t believe she could fill it. Heidi had set her up.
In fact, on the night of the lecture, “tearful women … were turned away at the door, others [were] grateful to stand in the back or to sit on the floor … [It was] a huge, rapt crowd of the type that doesn’t feature in even the wildest dreams of most writers,” Flanagan wrote. “It was a madhouse.”
Before she was introduced onstage, Didion hid in a bathroom, convinced she was going to vomit.
Trembling in front of the microphone, she cleared her throat and said, “I’ve been sitting here trying to get used to the idea that I’m here and you’re there, but it may take me a little while. So if I look at my feet and don’t talk very loud, I hope you’ll bear with me until I get used to the idea.”
Her lecture was entitled “Why I Write.” She told her adoring audience, “[T]here’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
She said—in front of the English Department faculty, many of whom had stopped taking her seriously until this stunning crowd showed up—she could no longer remember most of what she’d learned as a Berkeley undergraduate. Really, what she’d learned was that she was not an intellectual but a writer: “By which I mean not a ‘good’ writer or a ‘bad’ writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer.” So much for Schorer’s dream of getting her back.
How does one write? Not by revisiting the dusty tomes of Henry James criticism. Not by swaggering into a teacher’s office, arrogantly announcing oneself as a writer and declaring the teacher’s time was done.
No.
One becomes a writer by being the inappropriate and dismissible creature the faculty had laughed about after the formal dinner. “You just lie low … You stay quiet,” Didion said. “You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out…”
The standing-room-only crowd pressed forward.
This was one mouse who damn well knew how to roar.
Chapter Twenty-three
1
If Didion became a girl again on the Berkeley campus, nibbling nuts from her raincoat pocket, she aged rapidly while writing A Book of Common Prayer. “I don’t mean physically. I mean that in adopting [the main character’s] point of view, I felt much sharper, harsher,” she said. “I adopted a lot of the
mannerisms and attitudes of an impatient, sixty-year-old dying woman. I would cut people off in the middle of conversations. I fell into Grace because I was trying to maintain her tone.”
It was the tone, of course, of Dunne’s dying mother, just as the girl in the book, on the lam from the FBI, is, in some measure, Patty Hearst. These recent events made their way into the novel the way radiation from the TRIGA Mark III bathed anything straying unprotected into its radius; Didion began to see the novelist’s job as wandering, vulnerable, into the culture’s red zones, setting off the alarms.
But in speaking, in the novel, as an older woman about a younger one with a misguided daughter she’s never understood, Didion was—more crucially—speaking to herself, observing her life from the wide end of the telescope, returning with warnings from the future, a form of magical thinking available only in fiction. “A Book of Common Prayer to some extent has to do with my own daughter’s growing up,” she admitted to Susan Stamberg on National Public Radio. “My child is nowhere near the age of Marin, the girl in the novel, but she’s no longer a baby. I think that part of this book came out of the apprehension that we are going to both be adults pretty soon … And [the daughter] has been misperceived by her mother most of her life.”
Didion was quick to distinguish her biography from her artistry. “What I work out in a book isn’t what the book is about. I mean, this book isn’t about mothers and daughters. That’s part of what it was for me, but I don’t think it’s what it is for a reader.”
For the reader, it was a rare artifact: an American political novel. Since her trips to the Gulf Coast states and to Colombia, since her research on the Southern hemisphere and its economic ties to the Northern one, her notion of what a contemporary American novel needed to be had changed.
The fractured style of all her late novels (A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, The Last Thing He Wanted) is qualitatively different from the fragmentations in her earlier work. It conveys not a broken sensibility so much as the shattered texture of American public life. More pointedly than before, she assumes, in these books, a communal rather than an individual voice.
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