The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  She writes about James Pike, an old Okie, who became the bishop of California and served at Grace Episcopal Cathedral after being dean of Saint John the Divine in New York. She traces his restless movement through one holy passion after another until he dies in a Jordanian desert, hoping to experience the wilderness as Jesus had, carrying only a little extra equipment: a cheap map from Avis and a bottle of Coke. For Didion, Pike’s need for constant reinvention “smells of the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring.”

  This uncharacteristically broad statement, placed among the gridlock of official “moorings” (that is, government control of water and cars), suggests the sixties’ rot lay in a flawed liberal vision adamant about regulating individual rights. In Didion’s mind, the liberal paradox guarantees insanity. Thus, we get James Pike instead of John Wayne or even Howard Hughes.

  But Didion is not always easy to read, ideologically. She begins her essay “The Getty” by saying, “Something [about the new Getty Museum] embarrasses people.” The staid collection of antiquities smacks of “learning”; the place is “unremittingly reproachful … to generations trained in the conviction that a museum is meant to be fun, with Calder mobiles and Barcelona chairs.” What people want in a museum is a space that will “set the natural child in each of us free.”

  At first, then, the essay appears to mock the museumgoing public, too ignorant to know what’s good for it. But then Didion quotes the Getty’s founder: In his design dream, he refused to “pay for any ‘tinted-glass-and-stainless-steel monstrosity’”; in gathering his antiquities, with the aim of pleasing visitors, he knew he was “flouting the ‘doctrinaire and elitist’ views … endemic in [the] Art World.”

  Didion’s essay is a bait and switch. The people who don’t have any idea what’s good for them aren’t the slow-witted members of the museumgoing public. In fact, the museumgoing public visits the Getty in “large numbers”: they find the spot as awesome “as its founder knew they would.”

  No, the people who don’t have any idea what’s good for them are the cutting-edge art world insiders, supporters of the International Style of architecture (“tinted-glass-and-stainless-steel”), and abstract art (“Calder mobiles”). Take that, MoMA!

  In one sense, Didion’s social vision remains unchanged here from earlier essays: She disapproves of regulation in art as in any other sphere; her sympathies lie with a populist view of the “people,” who may not understand fine art but know what they like. However, class and wealth—and their impacts on our individual views of what it means to be human—are complex affairs, as Didion’s conclusion makes clear: “On the whole, ‘the critics’ distrust great wealth, but ‘the public’ does not,” she writes. “On the whole, ‘the critics’ subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but ‘the public’ does not. In the end the Getty stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them least.”

  Trickle-down aesthetics? A privileged view? Perhaps. But Didion’s vantage point here is neither at the top of the hill nor on the road’s rugged shoulder. She inhabits the interstices of language, drifting back and forth.

  The section on California is followed in The White Album by Didion’s attack on the women’s movement, a dour assessment of Doris Lessing, and a portrait of a feminist icon (before there was a movement) Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe, “equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was,” shuns social constructions of identity. It is the natural landscape of the West, embodied in the figure of a sister with a gun, that firmly roots the painter. Here, Didion reveals her sentimentality (normally, she distrusts the word immutable; it doesn’t fit her geologic perspective).

  The White Album ends with evocations of American spaces, followed by “On the Morning After the Sixties” and “Quiet Days in Malibu,” unconvincing paeans to survival. Once again, Didion rejects any march toward the future requiring a social commitment: “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”

  Of course, there are lots of barricades. A swimming pool can be a barricade.

  Didion had made her choices.

  * * *

  “Her nervous system is a San Andreas Fault. Language is her seismograph and style her sanity. Nobody writes better English prose than Joan Didion. Try to rearrange one of her sentences, and you’ve realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram,” John Leonard wrote in his review of The White Album in The New York Times. He said the book was full of the “stuff of the bad dreams of the 1960s” but its real genius was to leave unsaid the nightmares’ cause—like an odor pervading everything, so thick that we barely register it: “Vietnam [goes] unmentioned.”

  If The White Album was a sequel to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, it did not represent an advance to Martin Amis. In The London Review of Books, he said, “In her relatively self-effacing preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Miss Didion admitted, ‘Whatever I write reflects, somewhat gratuitously, how I feel.’ Ten years on, the emphasis has changed; you might even say … that whatever Miss Didion feels reflects how she writes. ‘Gratuitous’ hardly comes into it anymore.” Amis did not buy her frail persona: “Only someone fairly assured about certain of her bearings would presume to address her readers in this (in fact) markedly high-handed style. The style bespeaks celebrity, a concerned and captive following.”

  In her Georgia O’Keeffe essay, Didion had declared, “Style is character,” speaking of the time Quintana stood dazzled in front of the canvases and asked to speak to the painter. Amis objected: “The extent to which style isn’t character can be gauged by … reading a literary biography, or by trying to imagine a genuinely forthright discussion between Georgia O’Keeffe and Miss Didion’s seven-year-old daughter.”

  7

  Even more than The White Album, a piece she wrote for The New York Review of Books on the movies of Woody Allen prompted passionate letters of response, most of them angry. In recent years, Allen had made Annie Hall, Interiors, and Manhattan, films most critics considered proof of mature artistry. Didion called them “adolescent” fantasies whose “social reality” was “dim in the extreme,” deriving “more from show business than from anywhere else.” Notable in her critique was her strict defense of realism in art, her use of the phrase “the large coastal cities of the United States” to describe Allen’s fan base (in conservative circles, “the large coastal cities of the United States” was code for “liberal”—Didion used this trigger language with ease a full twenty years before the general public learned its subtext), and her disgust with Allen for displaying the same sort of elitism she was often accused of flouting. She dismissed his characters for having dinner at Elaine’s and talking showbiz—while, in any given week, she could be found having dinner at Ma Maison and talking showbiz. She complained of a teenage character in Manhattan whose parents were never on-screen: The character, she said, “put me in mind of an American International Pictures executive who once advised me, by way of pointing out the absence of adult characters in AIP beach movies, that nobody ever paid $3 to see a parent.” To slam Allen for being a pure creature of the entertainment business by invoking her insider status seemed a questionable strategy.

  Just two months after her piece on Allen appeared, Didion endured a harsh attack by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, a regular reviewer for The Nation and many other publications. “When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer—not entirely facetiously—that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone … who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo,” Harrison began.

  “I knew I wasn’t going to get a break if my daughter’s name was fair game in the first line,” Didion said later.

  The piece wa
s a catalog listing of the major faults Didion’s critics had charged her with over the years. Harrison called her a “neurasthenic Cher” whose prose style was a “bag of tricks.” Her style depended mainly on juxtapositions of “nihilism” with “ripeness and plenitude,” as in the line, “In the years after Luis was shot water hyacinths clogged the culverts at Progresso” (from A Book of Common Prayer).

  Harrison seemed to miss the fact that Didion’s “bag of tricks” was the essence of literary art: plot (the nihilistic movement of time toward inevitable death) balanced against lyricism (those blissful moments of clarity—“ripeness” of imagery—in which time seems to stop, and, just for an instant, the world reveals itself to us).

  Harrison bristled at Didion’s politics (“Ayn Rand’s … rugged individualists whose religion is laissez-faire capitalism … would find themselves at home” in her work), her removal from the world (her “observations about the self-serving ‘children’ of the 1960s are dead accurate; but that doesn’t give her the right to fiddle while Watts burns”), and, most of all, her class superiority (to Didion, “[Lucille] Maxwell Miller’s real sin … was to live in a subdivision house in the San Bernardino Valley and to hope to find ‘the good life’ there, instead of in Brentwood Park or Malibu”).

  Generally, in the past, Didion had accepted public criticism better than her husband—Dunne wanted to throttle this woman (and it was too bad Henry Robbins wasn’t around to go after her). “I was sorry [Harrison] felt so strongly about me,” Didion said. “But you couldn’t get too worked up about it since it was so over the top.”

  Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the piece was its timing—at least as far as Didion was concerned. Harrison had accused her of reporting only on her own sensibility and preferring to love her own pain. Yet, writing about Woody Allen, Didion had declared, “Most of us remember very well [the] secret signals and sighs of adolescence, remember the dramatic apprehension of our own mortality and other ‘more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,’ but eventually we realize we are not the first to notice that people die.” Her irritation with Allen signaled a shift in her thinking, which her work would reflect over the next ten years. Essentially, she was telling Woody to grow up, to get over himself. The reason her critique seemed so misplaced was precisely because she was talking to herself. Woody Allen’s failings—his self-absorption, his privileged perspective—were her own. She knew it. It was easier for her to see how these weaknesses softened Allen’s work than it was for her to locate the problems in her own writing. But then Harrison came along to remind her. Didion wanted a way out. She was tired of being Miss Lonelyhearts. And the world was demanding more of us all.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  1

  Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency of the United States galvanized Didion as a writer in ways she had not been motivated before. Her books of the 1980s were extremely political, icily angry, and all of a piece. They are best understood in concert.

  The easy rap against Reagan has always been that he was a movie actor, following the scripts of his advisers, more interested in performance than in the substance of governing. Didion saw him more as a studio head or producer, asking his cabinet, What if this happened, or that?—as if world events did not spring from history or facts on the ground, but could be fashioned from whole cloth. For example, in 1967, he’d told the Los Angeles Times he had a “feeling” about Vietnam (not that he’d been there, or read the intelligence reports). “I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war than the people have been told.”

  Just change the script.

  What if this happened?

  Trust me. “The people” will line up—around the block, around the country—to purchase tickets. They want to believe our magic. (“The gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world,” said Hannah Arendt, of propaganda.)

  For Didion, the bigger problem with the Reagan presidency was his kitchen cabinet, the California cronies who had bankrolled him, shaped his image, got him elected governor, and now pushed him onto the national stage. It was bad enough that these men—media CEOs, attorneys, oil-field brats, beer distributors—were calling the shots (what business did a restauranteur have being the president’s foreign intelligence adviser?), but it was their wives who were really in control, arranging the parties in Brentwood where incentives got launched (while the Secret Service boys bolted food in the laundry rooms).

  In charge of all this was “Pretty Nancy,” for whom Didion had had an immediate and persistent antipathy.

  “Get him off his feet!” she’d say, sweeping into a room, hovering around her husband.

  Didion could just picture it.

  Among Nancy’s friends was Lee Annenberg, niece of Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn, once married to Beldon Katleman, the Las Vegas casino owner who’d bailed Nick out of his pot scrape. Lee had also been married, for a while, to Lewis Rosenstiel, king of the Schenley liquor empire, for whom Anthony Kennedy had lobbied before setting off to the Supreme Court. Nancy and Lee were pals of Betsy Bloomingdale, who had worked with Lenny as a member of the Colleagues, raising money for unwed mothers. Betsy got Nancy into the Colleagues in 1962, and boy, could Pretty work a charity! She’d pop around from the Colleagues to the Foster Grandparents to the Vietnam Veterans’ groups in the hospitals, making friends with the women who ran the boards; then she’d call their rich husbands and say, “You know, we need more money for the campaign, or what are we going to do about this, or why is Ronnie getting bad press on that? How can you help?”

  Didion understood how it worked: the phone calls, the cocktails, schmoozing on the green-and-red linen sofas. All the Hollywood players were making their way to Washington—people, some would say, who, in smarts and taste, had fucked their way to the middle and who were bound to pull the country down to their level.

  “There was a lot of ideological fervor in Washington” at the time of the first Reagan administration. “And all those people there turned up in think tanks. Well, Dinesh D’Souza [who’d become a Reagan policy adviser] writes a book. It’s going to be bought by all those people in think tanks, right? At the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation [funded by the president’s beer-making buddy, Joseph Coors]. There’s a certain built-in sale on those books,” Didion said.

  Didion: A reporter in Washington “is not going to have sources unless [he] write[s] the kinds of stories [the sources] want to see written.” (Of Bob Woodward’s books, in which he merely repeated the stories insiders wanted public in order to advance their agendas, Didion said that “these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”)

  Didion: The “critical reading faculty” in this country “atrophied” around the time Reagan took office. She said this was not a coincidence.

  2

  In Salvador, and even more forcefully in Miami, published thirteen and seventeen years, respectively, after Play It As It Lays, Didion reconsidered the intelligibility of narrative.

  Salvador opens with an image of abandoned American-owned hotels—“ghost resorts”—on El Salvador’s Pacific beaches. To land at the airport built to service these shells, she says, “is to plunge directly into a state where no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse. The only logic is that of acquiescence.”

  So much for narrative, we think.

  As she has done so often, Didion foregrounds her nervous personality in the book, her ache for solidity and depth in a place where nothing fits. She has left her California valley, entered the chaos of civil war in a brutal foreign land. Why? As her grandfather taught her, California has long historical ties to Latin America; it emerged from, and much of its vitality still depends on, Latin cultures. A fifth-generation Californian still trying to write a definitive history of the West, Didion hopes to cast back beyond childhood stories and uncover the actual nature of her soil.

  Ultimately, then, the subject of her r
eporting in El Salvador is the United States—once upon a time and now under Reagan, as it settles more deeply into what she perceives to be unjustifiable belligerence around the globe.

  With the publication of Salvador in 1983, Didion insisted the surest way to understand this country was to leave it—to adopt, toward it, a different point of view. America’s affairs around the world caged the nation’s domestic politics. The confusions she experienced at home might be at least partially relieved by a broader perspective. In the end, her frustration with a national story that never seemed clear—a frustration painstakingly expressed in earlier books—did not force her to reject narrative; it led her to believe that how we live could not be described in the usual manner, or discovered in the usual places. But that didn’t mean the story didn’t exist.

  How could it be tracked? The princess needed to escape the trap of her castle, her ranch house, her nice new shopping mall. She had to visit the consulate, the foreign hotel (where other traps awaited, no doubt). The story would no longer be found, or at least it would not be completed, in a domestic setting. That vision was too narrow.

  The narrative shards of the tale—the madness of contemporary American life, both at home and abroad—lay strewn across public squares: archives, libraries, battle sites, forgotten museums. The princess had to camp in the Hall of Records, and study every paper trail she could find.

  * * *

  Before sinking fully into Salvador, let’s dolly back for a moment.

  Typically, we speak of “scenes” in a narrative. Increasingly, in the 1980s, Didion’s writing discovered the real American stories not in the scenes, but behind them, in obscure rooms in queer places with unpronounceable names, where our government’s military and economic interests coiled in dank corners. The scenes were all surface, illusion, advertising and propaganda, impenetrable jargon: an apparently arbitrary mix where nothing fit; a glut of information so loud and rapid-fire, we ceased to believe in any coherent story.