The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Behind this new emphasis was a firm conviction, though at the time of A Book of Common Prayer, it was inchoate in her mind. She would not articulate it directly until the essays in After Henry and Political Fictions, starting in the 1990s. But already she was feeling the rhythm, the structure, of her conviction, and here is what she knew: The people inside America’s governing process, including the journalists who report on officials’ behavior, have “congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which [is] its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.”

  These insiders use fables and romances (we favor the freedom fighters; that’s what this party is all about; strong bipartisan support; putting the American people first) to obscure the ruthless, exclusive nature of the process.

  This is how the world is, the powerful swear from on high. This is the way it has always been. Self-evidently, their claims are not true. What is true is harder to find these days. It was easy to see the squalor of a squatters’ camp in a California fruit field in the 1930s. It’s much harder to see the link between a civil war in Central America and a drug blight in Compton (a subject Didion would track in the 1980s).

  Instead of clear connections, we have—on the news, on the Internet, in videos—flash pictures in variable sequence.

  Or to put it another way: In the kind of domestic narrative Didion once followed (in Run River and even in Play It As It Lays) the house in which the couple will or will not live happily ever after is a given. The later Didion, intent upon cracking official fables, insists the real narratives are these: who owns the land on which the house was built; who built the house and when; who sold the house to whom; when, why, and for how much; who, ultimately, benefited from the sale; where did the proceeds actually go; for what purposes was the house actually used?

  This is no longer a world aspiring to happily ever after. It is a world of transactions ever more complex, leading to mass movements of money and consolidations of power. And it requires a new kind of storytelling.

  * * *

  In Berkeley, Didion had put a Xeroxed manuscript of the unfinished novel into Henry Robbins’s hands. She continued to tinker with the story and add to it, using her husband’s notes. He read as she worked and offered handwritten suggestions on yellow legal sheets, which she typed up and studied during revisions. Mostly, his comments had to do with clarifying details and keeping the point of view straight: Like a narrator in a Conrad novel, Grace tells stories about others, and it is not always clear how she knows what she knows.

  Dunne worried about the book’s bleak vision: In Didion’s view, politics was essentially a planet-wide arms deal.

  The novel offered a dark picture of North American power moves from a fresh angle. “In North America, social tensions that arise tend to be undercut and co-opted quite soon, but in Latin America there does not seem to be any political machinery for delaying the revolution. Everything is thrown into bold relief. There is a collapsing of time. Everything is both older than you could ever know, and it started this morning,” Didion said.

  She had hired a personal secretary and researcher, a young woman named Tina Moore, to help her with business correspondence as well as materials for the novel. She was a “fantastic researcher,” Didion said. “She would go to the UCLA library, and I would say, ‘Bring me back anything on plantation life in Central America.’ And she would come back and say, ‘This is really what you’re looking for—you’ll love this.’ And it would not be plantation life in Latin America. It would be Ceylon, but it would be fantastic. She had an instinct for what was the same story, and what I was looking for. What I was looking for were rules for living in the tropics. I didn’t know that, but that’s what I found.”

  Her screenplay work had given her confidence in “intercutting” dialogue among several characters at once, and she enjoyed trying her hand at “big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers—when you’ve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes.” She realized when she got within twenty pages of the end that she “still hadn’t delivered [the] revolution” she’d promised earlier in the book. The novel “had a lot of threads, and I’d overlooked this one. So then I had to go back and lay in the preparation for the revolution.” It was like sewing, “setting in a sleeve … I mean I had to work that revolution in on the bias, had to ease out the wrinkles with my fingers.”

  She freely embraced the fact that she was writing a “romance,” that her women were “romantic heroines rather than actual women in actual situations.” She had constructed a brooding allegory of the life of our times.

  On March 24, 1976, Henry Robbins wrote Didion to say A Book of Common Prayer was a novel of great “power and beauty.” He said, “I see what John means about … perhaps laying on the ambience of rot and death too heavily, but it didn’t and doesn’t bother me … The novel is about death (just as Play It As It Lays was in its different way), and I don’t find these thematic signals intrusive.” He concluded, “It’s a wonderful book, and I know it will be recognized as such—even by those who were frightened of Play It As It Lays. You’re not going to have to wait for the appreciation this time.”

  She retreated into her study, surrounded by the magic objects easing her into her dream world and getting her past the “low dread” she felt each morning before beginning to write: postcards from Cartagena, a volume entitled Inside South America, a book of useful phrases (Quiere ser mi testiga, “Do you want to be my witness?”), a newspaper photograph of a man washing blood off the floor of a bombed Caribbean hotel lobby, lists of arms (M2, AR-15, Kalashnikov), lists of names (Graciela, Grace) written on sheets of onionskin paper stapled together, books of botany and medicines (Tropical Nature, An Epilome of the Laboratory Diagnosis and Treatment of Tropical Diseases—“For persistent vomiting: A few drops of 1:1000 solution of adrenalin in a little water, taken by mouth with sips of iced champagne”).

  Scattered across her desk were several forty-nine-cent Wire-In-Dex pads of ruled index cards containing images or lines of dialogue: “The oil rainbow slick on the water.” “He runs guns. I wish they had caviar.” Of these last two sentences, Didion said later, “When I heard Charlotte say this [in my mind], I had a very clear fix on who she was.”

  She saved newspaper articles on matters that would not make it into the novel, but they indicate how political her thinking had become, and they anticipate future projects: profiles of Vietnamese orphans, of Nicaraguan rebel groups, of money deals in and out of Miami.

  There was a Pablo Neruda poem, “A Certain Weariness,” clipped from The New Yorker: “I don’t want to be tired alone. / I want you to grow tired along with me.”

  * * *

  “As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents … ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver,” says Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator of A Book of Common Prayer. She is speaking about a woman named Charlotte Douglas.

  Grace, in her sixties and dying of cancer, remains, like Conrad’s Marlow, largely in the story’s background, infusing every image in the book with her sensibility—but obliquely. Public, rather than private, incidents dominate the action. “I tell you … about myself only to legitimize my voice,” Grace says.

  Charlotte, a “child of the western United States,” had been provided with “faith in the values of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of clean and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of prayers and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history.” In other words, she was a member of the Blue Sky Tribe, and John Wayne rode through her dreams.

  But these details are merely introductory, the last remnants of a novel like Run River. “Some women … marry or do not marry with equanimity,” Grace says. “They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They �
� get up and scramble eggs.”

  “So you know the story,” she says dismissively at the start of the novel, preparing us for something else entirely. Though we do not know it yet, the domestic has been swamped by America’s “underwater narrative,” which is powered by nothing that cozy families, in their mortgaged homes, can possibly perceive. Behind the nice houses and the slick new shopping malls, the political class is busy making deals and counterdeals in anonymous rooms in remote terrains that the average citizen cannot find on any map.

  Charlotte’s daughter, Marin, a Patty Hearst–type radicalized by the 1960s, goes underground. Charlotte, unhinged by her daughter’s disappearance, and harassed by the FBI in its efforts to find the girl, retreats to a small Latin American country, a place resembling Costaguana in Conrad’s Nostromo. It seems to have “no history”—or maybe too many parallel pasts. It is called Boca Grande: Big Mouth, a vacant maw spewing disputatious language designed to preserve the “deniability” of anyone who passes through the region, since the only visitors here are the “occasional mineral geologist or CIA man traveling on one or another incorporeal AID mission.”

  Along the way, Charlotte gives birth to a hydrocephalic baby. It dies a few weeks later: the third dead infant we’ve met (so to speak) in as many Didion novels.

  Charlotte waits, in vain, at the Boca Grande airport—as Didion once waited in Panama—for a plane that might connect her, somehow, to her daughter, Marin.

  Grace, the widow of a wealthy man with financial stakes in Boca Grande, takes an interest in her fellow exile. Grace was raised in the American West, among transients in a hotel. She feels a kinship, a “common prayer,” with Charlotte (though the childlike Charlotte is far more naive): They’re shaped by the same Blue Sky values, disappointed by greedy, ambitious husbands, adrift now in an unchartable world, their hopes blasted by forces they cannot see, much less confront.

  Each night, as Grace rinses her hair, she is aware of Liberian tankers in the bay outside her window, shadows on “incorporeal” missions (Liberian registration is usually a false cover for clandestine ships—slipping the narrative as easily as they slip in and out of foreign harbors).

  In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion has cast off the social satire of Edith Wharton with its love of surface contours—a residue of which remained in Play It As It Lays; she has moved beyond the Gothic insularity of Poe, beyond the arbitrary postmodern collages of many of her contemporaries, and into a Melvillean world of confidence men and shifting sight (early on, Charlotte writes a paper on Melville for a college professor who later becomes her husband; he gives her an F).

  One night, at the Hotel del Caribe, where Charlotte lives on Boca Grande, the generator flickers out, and she sits “alone in the dark at the ballroom piano until three A.M. picking out with one hand, over and over again and in every possible tempo, the melodic line of a single song.” (The scene recalls Didion’s essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” where the melancholy father of a Berkeley frat boy tweaked a tune, hoping to find the happy chords of his past—the essay itself an echo of Didion’s dad trying, throughout her childhood, to cheer himself up by playing ragtime piano.) The dance floor, site of so many fairy-tale triumphs, has gone black; still, the abandoned princess keeps trying to find the right structural rhythm, the one continuous line getting her to the end of the only song she was ever taught to play.

  But the melody won’t carry on the island of Boca Grande.

  None of the usual rituals or forms, nothing on which Charlotte has depended in her temperate life, will suffice now. As Grace says, words—accepted definitions, explanations, points of contact—don’t work here.

  * * *

  At the end of the novel, once Charlotte has died brutally as a result of her refusal to acknowledge the realities of political violence, Grace locates Marin “in a dirty room in Buffalo” to bear final witness, to tell the girl her mother “always kept [her] in her mind.” Marin, hardened by her radicalism, doesn’t care—or pretends not to. In the end, she does break down.

  The scene is a mirror image of the final section of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when Marlow cannot tell Kurtz’s intended the truth of what happened to her beloved in the wilderness. In Conrad, women, cosseted by strict social expectations, unaware of the world’s primal darkness, must be lied to for their own protection. In Didion, women are exposed to the horror just as much as the men are; if they remain deluded, it’s not because they haven’t tried to see the truth. It’s because, since Conrad’s day, the truth has become a seven-headed cobra (Kalashnikovs, the TRIGA Mark III).

  Says Grace, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

  No one could.

  * * *

  On August 7, 1976, Didion wrote Lois Wallace, detailing her expectations for a sales strategy in marketing the novel. She trusted Henry Robbins, but perhaps she had already seen that he would hit a wall at Simon & Schuster in attemps to promote literary fiction. Another editor at the house remarked that a novel called A Book of Common Prayer might well end up on the religion shelf. The comment upset Didion, not because she feared she’d have to change her title (she was not about to), but because it suggested a less than wholehearted approach to selling the book. There was no point in pushing a literary novel as a rousing good adventure yarn—futzing with the title made no difference. No. The way to sell a literary novel, Didion said, was to make it An Event. She believed the book had commercial potential if the reading public could be persuaded hers was the novel to buy this year, whether or not they read it: Its appearance was a Major Literary Milestone. Therefore, the sales possibilities lay entirely in S&S promoting the book as A Novel by Joan Didion, with her name in larger letters on the cover than the title. Sell the author and the author’s importance more than the book itself.

  The novel’s rollout had to be handled with a kind of arrogant certainty, she said, and she expected Wallace to inject a shot of testosterone into the S&S sales staff.

  Whether the letter was prompted by pure anxiety over Simon & Schuster, or genuine confidence after her successful lecture at Berkeley, Didion was sincere in her plan for selling the book. (And she seems to have gotten her way: On the cover of the first-edition hardback, her name, printed in all caps at the top, is bolder than the title.)

  She closed her letter by announcing to Wallace that she’d just bought a red fox coat.

  * * *

  S&S’s Dick Snyder did have a blockbuster mentality and little patience for the placid backwater of literary fiction. In 1974, after a few weak years, he’d resuscitated the company financially with a deal he’d very nearly declined: All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the story of their reporting trail in the Watergate affair.

  All the President’s Men became the definition of “blockbuster.” Now, just weeks before the official publication date of A Book of Common Prayer, the movie of the Woodward-Bernstein story, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, was gobbling up review space, pumping new life into the paperback, and generating buzz for this year’s sequel, The Final Days, charting the end of the Nixon presidency. For the foreseeable future, Simon & Schuster would devote its best resources to selling this book. Tricky Dick had screwed Didion.

  She bore no animosity toward Carl Bernstein, who had married her friend Nora Ephron in April. A charming rogue, he entertained Didion; she recognized he was probably the sort of man “capable of having sex with a venetian blind” (the reputation preceding, and surviving, his union with Ephron), but he never troubled her with his randiness or his gossip, and they got along fine. He admired her writing. The only potential awkwardness in their friendship occurred around certain others: Ben Stein, another new Didion pal, a former Nixon speechwriter (once rumored to have been Deep Throat), now trying to break into the movie business. Didion and Dunne were enormously helpful to him, introducing him to their picture agents. They were amused by his continuing support for Nixon. “I just think he was a saint!” he’d say. “[So] he
was a politician who lied. How remarkable!” Probably not a good idea to herd him into the same room with Bernstein.

  The other difficulty was Bernstein’s partner. Woodward didn’t particularly care for Nora Ephron or her social circle. “I just didn’t have the natural connection with Nora,” he admitted. “I remember I heard Nora talk about some dinner and holding a discourse on the kind of lettuce that had been served. ‘Can you believe they served that kind of lettuce?’ There was just this sense that she had been offended … it just wasn’t the way I lived.” He’d never have made it in Old Sac. And—grateful as Didion was for his exposure of the used-car salesman muttering to himself in the White House at night—he didn’t endear himself to her.

  2

  “I remember going to a party at Joan’s house in Trancas. I did not like the party, but Joan was so incredibly nice. Couldn’t have been more hospitable,” Ben Stein told me. “The people at the party were just uninteresting. I remember sitting at a table with John’s brother Nick, and he was particularly uninteresting.”

  “I wasn’t invited [anywhere] much anymore,” Nick said. “In my journal of that period I recorded with names every snub, every slight. Already I had almost jumped in front of a train in Santa Barbara. At the last second I let it pass me. Already I’d had a major flirtation with a kitchen knife that I took to bed with me, as if I could make it happen in my sleep, thereby absolving me of any responsibility in the eyes of God, or so I thought. The love that I felt for Los Angeles turned to hate.” He knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to abandon the community altogether. He was no longer a deal maker. That distinction belonged to his brother now.

  Working the room, chatting people up, refilling their drinks, Dunne loved to pique his guests’ curiosity, remarking coyly about his efforts on A Star Is Born, “Put it this way, it’s our beads, but it’s not our necklace.”