The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Scarry claims that imagination’s “labor” is “centrally bound up with the elementary moral distinction between hurting and not hurting.” Imagination is “simply, centrally, and indefatigably at work on behalf of sentience.”

  So when Joan Didion arrives in El Salvador wearing monster glasses and a floppy sun hat, it is easy to distrust her motives; easy, later, to find instances of political and cultural naïveté in her account of what she saw; but in her act of witnessing and imagining (with unrelenting intelligence), she counters the forces of hurting and the void. She reconstructs a dismembered world, a severed narrative, the way the priests and nuns at the Maryknoll mission would reassemble the hacked-apart victims of the death squads, tenderly placing the bloody stumps in proper order on the ground.

  3

  Didion was adamant that she not be confused with an investigative reporter. On the verge of publishing Miami, in August 1987, she wrote an angry letter to Michael Korda and Lois Wallace, saying she had just received three copies of the bound galleys from Simon & Schuster and found the back copy inaccurate and damaging to the book: a publicist had declared Miami a work of investigative journalism liable to make headline news. Didion objected: She had written a book of observation and reflection, and to mischaracterize her in this fashion, or to suggest Miami was filled with breaking stories (her whole point was that people failed to acknowledge what they already knew), was to toss her to hostile reviewers who would scream they had been duped. From now on, she said, Simon & Schuster should talk about the book it had, not the book it might have wanted. If the final jacket copy said anything about headline news, she was going to insist it be reprinted. (The final copy mentioned only “masterful reporting.”)

  Didion granted James Atlas an interview at her house in Brentwood for a Vanity Fair profile timed to coincide with the book’s appearance. With Atlas, too, she took great pains not to be misunderstood. “I’m crazy about Miami,” she told him. “I like the weather, the light, the warm soft rain on Biscayne Bay; I like the Cubans, the liveliness of the scene.”

  None of this made it into the book. Still, hers was a personal take on the city: That’s what she had to make clear.

  What was in the book? Well, for one thing, Atlas said, “I came away from [it] with the distinct suspicion that [John] Kennedy’s assassination was set in motion by members of the Cuban community operating out of Miami.”

  “I think there was a conspiracy,” she admitted. As she spoke, she leafed through The Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations on her coffee table. “I don’t have any idea who instigated it, but the way people were thinking encouraged whatever did happen. There’s a kind of collective amnesia about the whole thing. The Warren Commission constructed its mission to be restoring equilibrium. No one really wanted to know.”

  Now we have intimations of connections between Colombian cocaine cartels and the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, she said. All part of the same political culture.

  Perhaps. Still, “I find the incongruity hard to ignore,” Atlas said to her. What does any of this have to do with you? Why leave your “orderly world,” with its “fresh-cut flowers on the piano,” to chase down these phantoms in their military fatigues?

  She became quite exercised:

  “I was irritated that so many people have found it easy to overlook what’s going on, to live in the comfort zone,” she ventures, clasping her hands and gazing down at the floor. Clearly agitated, she gets up and goes over to sit in a chair by the fireplace. “I suppose I’m interested in … Washington … um … Casey … It’s quite inchoate, as you can guess.” She subsides in her chair and cries, “John!”

  Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, appears. “Help me,” she implores him. “What is the interest here?”

  Large, genial, enthusiastic, Dunne settles down on a sofa and considers. “I think it began with an interest in tropical climates. That soft underbelly that runs from Brownsville, Texas, to Miami. Here.” He shows me on a map.

  Inchoate or not, Didion’s vision had already convinced Atlas. “Ever since she made her reputation in the late sixties … Didion has been on the hot trail of the Zeitgeist,” he wrote. “In a way, she’s defined it … [I]n Salvador (1983), she foresaw where the U.S. government would next commit itself to a disastrous foreign policy in the name of anti-Communism … it’s turned out to be prophetic. What was happening in El Salvador then is happening in Nicaragua now.”

  In Miami, Didion asserts that an “underwater narrative” drives the shattered surface of life in South Florida, in a city neither here nor there (geographically, Miami belongs to the United States, but culturally, spiritually—even in the “hips and décolletage” of the women—it feels like Latin America). In its earliest passages, the book evokes the “liquidity” and “cognitive dissonance” of the place, establishing the difficulty of locating a coherent story.

  She conveys Miami’s disjunctions through juxtapositions. “[I]n 1959 when Fulgencio Batista” and his friends flew out of Havana “on an Aerovias DC-4,” she says, “the women still wore the evening dresses in which they had gone to dinner.” She parses the clashing national rhetoric: What Washington calls the “disposal problem” (that is, how to manage so many furious Cuban exiles), “Miami calls la lucha,” or the struggle for a liberated Cuba.

  As the book proceeds, Didion dwells on causes more than perplexities. As it turns out, the place’s bafflements are willful, born of prejudice or arrogant disinterest: Though Cubans constitute 56 percent of Miami’s population, the Anglo press gives them scant coverage. A Miami Herald reporter calls the Hispanic population a “teeming, incomprehensible presence” without even trying to gauge its rhythms.

  The city’s bewilderments spring, as well, from public leaders’ desire to avoid discussion of certain subjects: the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John F. Kennedy’s assassination; according to officials, even to broach these topics is to blunt the crucial “healing process” necessary for communal health.

  And in part, puzzlement results from dirty little secrets (note how Didion ends the following sentence in the passive voice, nailing language’s complicity in the crimes):

  That la lucha had become, during the years since the Bay of Pigs, a matter of assassinations and bombings on the streets of American cities, of plots and counterplots and covert dealings involving American citizens and American institutions, of attitudes and actions which had shadowed the abrupt termination of two American presidencies and would eventually shadow the immobilization of a third, was a peculiarity left … officially unexplored.

  Didion’s longing for story leaves nothing unturned. Predictably, at this point in her career, images start to fit for her in the interiors of a hotel. In the Omni, downtown, she sees Miami’s “social dynamic” revealed “in a single tableau.”

  At night, unemployed black teenagers gaze up from the streets outside the Omni at the hotel’s out-of-reach windows, while Cuban men wearing black tie tango with “women in Chanel and Valentino evening dresses on the ballroom level.” These Cubans have gained entry into America’s elite spaces because their fathers, fleeing the island in the 1950s and early 1960s, were given Miami’s service jobs, leading eventually to more gainful employment. Otherwise, these jobs might have gone to local blacks—the fathers of the aimless boys on the streets. For Didion, the hotel is the “most theatrical possible illustration of how a native proletariat can be left behind in a city open to the convulsions of the Third World, something which had happened … first and most dramatically in Miami but had been happening since in other parts” of the United States.

  The more she delves beneath Miami’s “provisional” surface, discovering narrative strands, the more she recovers a belief in cause and effect, consequences, and narrative itself, asserting the capacity of “individuals” to “affect events directly.”

  She begins to hear similarities in the way elderly Cuban exiles talk about the Kennedy administration’s covert activities against Castro in the early 1960s
and the way young people speak of the Reagan administration’s illegal war in Nicaragua. An old and disastrous story in American politics appears to be playing out again.

  Even more startling, the more she sees and hears, the more it becomes apparent that the same players are driving events. The story is coherent, continuous, and understandable, after all, despite the U.S. government’s attempts to preserve deniability.

  She learns about a man named Theodore Shackley, chief of station at a Central Intelligence Agency facility on the University of Miami campus in 1962, then the “largest CIA installation, outside Langley, in the world.” There, nearly four hundred CIA case officers trained and coordinated thousands of Cuban agents. This is the same man, Shackley, “who left Miami in 1965, spent from 1966 until 1972 as political officer and chief of station in Vientiane and Saigon, and turned up in 1987 in the Tower Commission report”—on the Iran-Contra scandal—“meeting … in Hamburg with [arms dealer] Manucher Ghorbanifar and with the former head of SAVAK counterespionage.”

  Shackley is one of dozens of men Didion discovers, loses, and finds again, through obscure public records and newspaper archives, overheard rumors and conversations, men who are playing hide-and-seek, popping up at opportune moments in odd, out-of-the way places. By bringing their movements to light, she sketches possible connections between seemingly disparate events: the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, the coup in Chile, the Vietnam War, the worldwide heroin trade, the Watergate break-in, the Nixon resignation, the Iran-Contra affair, the cocaine blight in L.A., the rise of global terrorism.

  We are a long way from the princess in her castle, but perhaps, Didion hints, we are on our way to understanding why the castle came to be such a trap, why the princess had to leave it, drifting, confused, through an ever more cryptic nation. Perhaps we are on our way to understanding that narrative didn’t fail after all; it simply had to expand and refocus to encompass more complex realities. We are on our way to grasping why the princess might find comfort as a literary critic, a parser of language—and why she might find the real story in the Hall of Records.

  * * *

  The problem with conspiracy theories is threefold: They are impossible to prove; they attract extremists stoked by paranoia; and they have become so popularized in movies, TV dramas, and on the Internet, their claims are easily dismissed as entertainment. “The truth is out there” was just another advertising slogan.

  What distinguishes Joan Didion from an exploitative figure like, say, Oliver Stone, and the rabble of Web voices, is her disciplined thinking, her organization in the midst of fragmentation. In an early essay titled “On Morality” she wrote:

  As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119 degrees. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, because The American Scholar asked me to, in some abstract way about “morality,” a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.

  A devotion to the particular (it is not just hot; it is, in fact, 119 degrees), an admission of frailty, and a distrust of whatever she has been told to think about make Didion a more trustworthy witness than run-of-the-mill conspiracists.

  In her room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, she thinks about a car wreck she has read about in the paper, and a nurse who said, “You can’t just leave a body on the highway. It’s immoral.” “It was one instance when I did not distrust the word,” Didion says, “because [the nurse] meant something quite specific. She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.”

  In the final analysis, Didion’s attraction to conspiracy tales, particularly in the 1980s, has less to do with the intrigues themselves than with her persistent longing for a narrative, any narrative, to alleviate the pain of confusion.

  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”—and if the story is not readily apparent, we will weave one out of whatever scraps are at hand; we will use our puzzlement as a motivating factor; we will tell our way out of any trap, or goddamn seedy motel.

  4

  Between Salvador and Miami, Didion published her fourth novel, Democracy (1984), inspired, in part, by her travels to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia—but chiefly by her love of Hawaii. Democracy looked back to the fall of Saigon. It placed that moment—in Didion’s canon—in the midst of Reagan’s Central America shenanigans. Indirectly, she suggested a connection, and forced a reexamination of the recent past in light of the present.

  As the book opens, Didion’s oldest fears seem to have recurred. One by one, narrative verities fail.

  Setting? Don’t count on it.

  As the “granddaughter of a geologist, I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands,” declares the narrator, a woman named Joan Didion.

  History? Backstory? Sorry.

  In this humid, mutable world, no one can “write anything down, the point of the pen would go right through the paper.”

  Emotion, psychological motivation, depth of character? Try again.

  Didion can find no human feeling or satisfactory explanations for why people do what they do. She has only “[c]olors, moisture, heat … blue in the air.”

  Fables and romance won’t do, either. No “dawn’s early light.” Instead, we hear a government man reminisce: “The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.” It’s nuclear winter rather than Reagan’s “Morning in America.”

  “Call me the author,” Didion says, plunging us into mealy Melvillean fog. She says, “I began thinking about Inez Victor and Jack Lovett”—the novel’s protagonists—“at a point in my life when I lacked certainty, lacked even that minimum level of ego which all writers recognize as essential to the writing of novels, lacked conviction.”

  She continues: “When novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact.” But she won’t play even this narrative bait and switch, because she recognizes its foolishness, and she wants to find a deeper, truer story.

  She has come to these dire straits because she views American democracy now as a poisonous language game:

  In the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what [the government] called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley [she says, the Joan Didion of the novel blurring into the woman we think we know] … I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy … between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer.

  The passage implies some faith in narrative, as practiced by Orwell, Hemingway, and the rest. But official language—“assistance effort,” masking, among other things, the napalming of Vietnamese villagers—mocks any effort now to teach the value of sentences, style, or thought. Language no longer describes the problems of democracy. It is part of the problem. (Paraleipsis: the rhetorical strategy of emphasizing a point by appearing to gloss over it—this is the new American speech, and it becomes the speech of Didion’s novel.)

  For a committed writer, the only moral recourse, at this point in American history, is to strip away whatever might be contaminated by the bad politics of our time: setting, history, backstory, psychological motivation, romance, fable. We begin with whatever’s left—“colors, moisture, heat, blue in the air.” From there, we build our story (the very opposite of the “generalizing impulse”).

  In this way, grasping not at abstractions or received forms, but at strict particulars, Didion recovers some measure of trust in words. Ironically, she winds up telling an old-fashioned love story—about Inez, who comes from a “family in which the colonial impulse
had marked every member,” and Jack, a player like the men on the government’s “secret team,” a fellow whose name eventually leaks out of “various investigations into arms and currency and technology dealings on the part of certain former or perhaps even current overt and covert agents of the United States government.”

  Like Charlotte Douglas, Inez had learned the princess song, but the tune goes sour. This is, after all, 1975—one of the lowest points in American democracy. Its “assistance effort” has become a cesspool.

  Inez loses her husband, a U.S. senator, to praetorian ambitions; like Charlotte, she loses her daughter—and her son—to all-consuming capitalism, which is loosed like anarchy upon the world. The only possible hero for her is a man in the thick of the hidden narrative, a man who speaks nostalgically of the beauty of nuclear tests. Inez steps out of the fairy tale and into the secret story. Because “nothing in this situation encourages the basic narrative assumption, which is that the past is prologue to the present, the options remain open here,” Didion says. “Anything could happen.”

  In the end, Inez winds up teaching American literature in Kuala Lumpur. One day, Didion reads about her in the London Guardian, and the words bring back to her a “sudden sense of Inez.” So, as it turns out, language has not been ruined beyond all use, nor has it lost its power to plumb the truth. It simply must not be invoked to cover the “flotsam of some territorial imperative” left behind by the venalities of democracy.