The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Thomas Mallon would write that her “view of our cold war victory [is] so blinkered that its chief consequence appears to have been not the liberation of Eastern Europe but economic downturn in Los Angeles County,” making “Joan Didion much more typical of literary intellectuals than she used to be.”

  Joe Klein, hardly an impartial critic—Didion had zinged his reporting in a piece—called her political theories fantasies, and her “notion that non-voters are a seething, alienated mass who would turn every election into a Democratic Party landslide” a delusion. In fact, Didion had said no such thing.

  She could be criticized fairly not from the Right or the Left, but from the red-hot center. She had become one of the people she disparaged, a reporter inside the process. “Remember Mencken?” said her friend Earl McGrath when asked about the ironies of her makeover. “Don’t get too close to the bastards; you might get to like them? Well, I think Joan got to like them.”

  As for her personal politics: “My responses are pretty much the same as they were when I was voting for Goldwater. I don’t see a whole lot of shift,” she insisted. “[T]hey’re pretty straightforward, stay-out-of-our-hair politics.” It’s the parties that changed, she argued: “I don’t know who is represented by the current Democratic Party, or the current Republican Party.” The Democrats had moved to the right and the Republicans were no longer averse to swollen bureaucracies. So where to turn?

  Didion’s “political trajectory” was based on an “unorthodox conservatism” serving as “the foundation for idiosyncratic critiques of power,” Rachel Donadio observed accurately. In her maturity, Didion’s self-correcting quality, her ability to be ruthlessly self-evaluative and change her mind when she saw she’d been wrong, trumped her contrarian streak. If she had a strong capacity for denial, she had an even stronger will to shuck her illusions once she’d exposed them.

  “I think of political writing as in many ways a futile act,” Didion said. But “you are obligated to do things you think are futile. It’s like living. Life ends in death, but you live it, you know.”

  * * *

  In New York, she dreamed of being locked inside her apartment in Saint John the Divine, next to her mother’s ashes.

  The city had changed in the short time she’d been gone. “[P]eople, if they got it, had stopped talking about it,” she wrote. “I came in from Kennedy to find American flags flying all over the Upper East Side, at least as far north as 96th Street, flags that had not been there in the first week after the fact.” The attack on the World Trade Center “was being processed, obscured, systematically leached of history and so of meaning,” she observed. It was “finally rendered less readable than it had seemed on the morning it happened. As if overnight, the irreconcilable event had been made manageable, reduced to the sentimental … [to] repeated pieties that would come to seem in some ways as destructive as the event itself. We now had ‘the loved ones,’ we had ‘the families,’ we had ‘the heroes.’”

  President Bush, whose leadership the pundits sorely questioned before the attack, and who was conspicuously missing from view on the day itself, was trotted out by his handlers at flag-waving events, swearing to bring the world’s “evildoers” to justice. In The Washington Post, David Broder praised the president’s “moral clarity” and likened him to Lincoln. CNN said he was poised to lead us into “America’s New War” (though the enemy and the proper battlefront had yet to be identified). “[T]his reinvention of Bush as a leader … was entirely required by the narrative of the moment,” Didion said.

  As for the coming battle: “You know that famous Vietnam thing—how do we get out of Vietnam? There’s a sense in which we’re not going to be able to say that we won this one and leave,” Didion suggested. “I think there will probably be an unpredictable [political] shift of some kind. I don’t mean a shift to the left or a shift to the right. I mean a shift I can’t even imagine.”

  The beginnings of this shift, whatever it would be, were already apparent. “[W]e have been instructed at regular intervals since September 11, 2001, [that] ‘they’ attacked us because they hate everything we stand for, our freedom most of all,” wrote New York Times columnist Frank Rich. “If that is the case, history will have to explain why post-9/11 America was so quick to rein in the freedom of debate even as we paid constant self-congratulatory lip service to this moral distinction between them and us. September was not over before Ari Fleischer, the President’s press secretary, set the tone. ‘There are reminders to all Americans they need to watch what they say, watch what they do,’” he said.

  At first, Didion had noticed people thronging bookstores immediately after the attacks, buying volumes on Islam, on American foreign policy, on Iraq and Afghanistan. Like folks in Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, they wanted to “get it,” to study, to learn. But then—as political scientist Steven Weber observed—the national “discussion got short-circuited.” The “tone of the discussion switched, and it became: What’s wrong with the Islamic world that it failed to produce democracy, science, education, its own enlightenment, and created societies that breed terror?” In Weber’s estimation, it was a “long-term failure of the political leadership, the intelligentsia, and the media in this country that we didn’t take the discussion that was forming in late September and try to move it forward in a constructive way.”

  Instead, Didion said, it became a “discussion with nowhere to go.”

  Predictably, the narrative settled on fantasies (nonexistent weapons of mass destruction) and familiar tropes (national security) to bolster the administration’s previous priorities. “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go,” said President Bush, and so the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing directly to do with the 9/11 attacks, became a self-fulfilling prophecy—a Catch-22. “Given all we have said as a leading world power about the necessity for regime change in Iraq, our credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take place,” said James R. Schlesinger of the Defense Policy Board.

  In the early days of the war stirrings, Didion would travel to the World Trade Center site. She didn’t have a police pass, so she would stand at the nearest barricade, about a block away from the crater. “It draws you toward it,” she said. “It has almost the impact of a great cathedral.” The site’s power lay “not exactly [in] the amount of the destruction,” she thought. “Other things have been destroyed through our lifetime; a higher number of people have died in a lot of combat situations. This, you can’t quite come to terms with it, you can’t quite grapple with it. It’s a really direct challenge to our idea of … modernity, to our idea of progress, to our idea of secular democracy. Someone said, ‘You can’t have that, we can take that away.’ That is what everyone is trying to come to terms with.”

  The rush to war seemed to her an obvious warning that the harm we’d do ourselves in overreacting to the tragedy posed our gravest danger. “I think that democracy has shallow roots in America,” she said. “Unless people take care of it, it is not assured.”

  Instead, over and over, our leaders loved to gamble with it—this impulse, Didion recognized all too well, especially in the recovered alcoholic George W. Bush.

  In her own attempts to get it, she discovered enough to know that for decades, leading up to this moment, America’s policies in the Middle East had been one shell game after another: “Stall. Keep the options open. Make certain promises in public, and conflicting ones in private. This was always a high-risk business,” Didion said. Now our bluffs had been called.

  To cite one important instance, in the 1980s we had armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russians, but we had lost control of them, just as the FBI lost control of the Symbionese Liberation Army in California in the 1970s, and now our training and weapons were turned against us.

  In response, our leaders behaved like desperate addicts: double down, another try, come on—just this one last time. What business are they all in. It was like the portrait of the feeble old
gambler in The Last Thing He Wanted, the father, slipping away, sipping a glass of bourbon-laced Ensure: “Jesus Christ,” he says. “I needed this deal.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  1

  The deaths of her parents freed Didion—indeed, filled her with urgency, especially in the wake of 9/11—to reexamine extensively the California myths she’d inherited from them, and finally, after decades, to complete the book she’d once wanted to call Fairy Tales. Where I Was From, published early in 2003 (a year that would end by taking her, tragically, to where she would go), was, as one critic has pointed out, an aria made for the concert stage, a muscular combination of essay, reporting, and memoir, a now-dissonant, now-harmonized amalgamation of American prose styles loosed upon the impossible subject of whatever happened to this country, a story beginning, for Didion, with the nation’s westward expansion.

  The book was a grand performance dedicated to Frank and Eduene, who would never see it. Twice in her lifetime, Didion had become so nervous before giving a reading that she had wanted to throw up, and on both occasions her parents had been sitting in the audience. Now their seats were empty. The show was for them (had always been for them), but their absence was required for it to work, a further complication in the writing, a parenthetical catch of the breath, a sob in the syntax: This was not a book about disenchantment with her origins so much as loss of charm. She wrote, “There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”

  Technically, the challenge was to find a proper form for American social history (in so many ways, the story of California was the story of America, just as an individual’s life could illustrate the cultural life of an era). “All of the great English fiction was social history,” Didion said, “but I came to feel that it was impossible to write social history in America because it didn’t have a unified audience. There wasn’t a universally accepted social norm, so it was much harder to write.” She believed that fiction was no longer up to the task—or its readers weren’t. “I think specifically novels [have been devalued now] because people don’t understand unreliable narrators, for example; they believe that anything the narrator of a novel tells them is supposed to be the truth. They read a novel as if they were reading nonfiction. They literally do not seem to grasp the difference.”

  Some aspect of unreliability had always been essential to Didion’s literary voice, even in nonfiction: The act of witnessing suggested the need to observe precisely because one did not know what was happening. And it was in the shivering core of this vulnerability, mixed with the loss of her parents’ world, that the voice of Where I Was From began to emerge. Some of what she knew, she knew from history, she would say. Some of what she knew, she believed. Some of what she knew, she didn’t know, because she had believed it once and now no longer did. It was a voice she had first tried with full confidence in fiction, in A Book of Common Prayer, following Conrad’s example: “[T]he not quite omniscient author.”

  Take a deep breath. Read aloud the first sentence of Where I Was From. It announces the book’s intentions; it offers a tone of elegy and remembrance as well as of historical accuracy, of intimacy and objectivity; it has the sweep of the continent: “My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Scott was born in 1766, grew up on the Virginia and Carolina frontiers, at age sixteen married an eighteen-year-old veteran of the Revolution and the Cherokee expeditions named Benjamin Hardin IV, moved with him into Tennessee and Kentucky and died on still another frontier, the Oil Trough Bottom on the south bank of the White River in what is now Arkansas but was then Missouri Territory.”

  The voice’s expansiveness enabled Didion to move fluidly from the diaries of the pioneers in her family to pioneer history in general; from the dreams of those who’d made the crossing to the disappointments of their ancestors; from California’s intellectual traditions to her personal educational progress; from the state’s self-delusions to the lies of its developers, and the fairy tales she’d been sold like so much hardscrabble.

  “California likes to be fooled,” said a character in Frank Norris’s great American novel, The Octopus. This was Didion’s conclusion, too, and the central point she wanted to make.

  2

  Throughout Where I Was From, Didion guards against nostalgia—the romantic yearning for a lost domain, which she felt had curdled Run River—but it was hard for her not to suspect that some fatal tipping point had now been reached, that at last what was good about California had been irretrievably trashed.

  Her fear was most apparently realized in the state’s latest trade-off: public schools for private prisons, another example of California’s “willingness to abandon at a dizzying rate,” Didion thought. “I mean, the notion of taking care of other people who might or might not be troubled, which people all over the world do, seems not to have entered into [the state’s thinking].” And the legislature’s reckless dismantling of the once “amazing” U.C. system of higher education: “Well, it is hard to know how you get out from under that,” she said.

  Toward the end of the book, she revisits “towns I knew, towns I thought of as my own interior landscape, towns I had thought I understood, towns in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys”—towns now so “impoverished in spirit as well as in fact that the only way their citizens could think to reverse their fortune was by getting themselves a state prison,” building and staffing it in lieu of adequately funding their schools.

  On the one hand, “[w]e were seeing nothing ‘new’ here,” she said. “We were seeing one more version of making our deal with the Southern Pacific. We were seeing one more version of making our bed with the federal government.”

  On the other hand, we might well be witnessing an irreparable tragedy. In Delano, where once the community had tussled over the picking of grapes, the fight was now over whether to build a second detention facility near the ten-year-old North Kern State Prison, contracting the work out to the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, all for the sake of a few low-paying local hires. Cesar Chavez had died in his sleep in 1993, at the age of sixty-six, an embittered and increasingly marginalized icon of California’s flickering promise in the 1960s. That promise seemed to have devolved into America’s war on drugs, a desire to fill as many prison beds as possible, add more, and get communities like Delano to pass bond measures in the misguided hope that a new private jail would enrich the county.

  “[W]hen the families of inmates move into a prison town, they not only strain the limited resources of local schools and social service agencies but bring emotionally stressed children into the community and school system,” Didion wrote. “‘The students are all very high risk,’ a school official … told The Los Angeles Times. ‘They come from single-parent homes. They’re latchkey kids, often on AFDC. It’s very obvious they’re from a whole different area. It creates societal conflicts. The child does not fit in.’”

  And here was the real heart of Where I Was From. Once again, Didion was writing about displaced children.

  Motherless now, fatherless, she was the mother of an adopted girl with no attachments to her ancestors.

  The long, rolling cadences of history and heritage in the book’s overture vanish in the coda, in a single fierce line: “It was only Quintana who was real.”

  Quintana, living in a Golden State of Abandonment.

  When critics accused Didion of “saying goodbye to California” with this book, of giving up on the place, she was astonished. They had mistaken her sorrow for anger. She said, “It’s a love song, as I read it.”

  Now that she had written it, she might finally be at peace with laying her parents to rest; she might finally relinquish her California driver’s license (with her New York address on it). In one sense, the book is “about being older,” she said, and the knowledge accruing from that.

  Which was what? an interviewer asked.

  Didion’s answer made her sound like a child once more, heeding her mother’s warnings. “Be a better person,” she said.
And then, as if the weight of all her losses was borne in upon her—her father’s false-cheery calls for a drink, her mother’s sad indifference, the valleys’ rage to incarcerate the state’s kids: “[N]obody can ever be nice enough.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  1

  Didion tried to be cordial to Nick if they happened to attend the same party somewhere. Dunne wouldn’t talk to his brother at all, but Didion would pause to say hello before spending the rest of the evening clear across the room from him. She felt helplessly motherly toward these two misbehaving boys. Nick seemed to cultivate friends and enemies in distinct counterpoint to his brother and sister-in-law—snubbing Leslie Abramson and courting Nancy Reagan, whom he’d met when he was back in L.A. covering the O. J. Simpson trial. Certain occasions brought the family together, as when Dunne’s nephew Tony, son of his older brother Richard, began dating and then married Jimmy Breslin’s daughter Rosemary. At dinners and gatherings celebrating the young couple, the Dunne family put on its Irish, a clannish front in case these noisy outsiders, the Breslins, burst onto the scene with the slightest condescension. “My father likes nobody,” Rosemary wrote in a memoir entitled Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (1997). From a distance, Breslin was wary of the Dunnes; he feared his daughter “was dating some anemic offspring of a famous parent.” He disdained “children of successful parents who do nothing but live off their famous or rich names and associate with others of similar stature and discuss how difficult it is being who they are as a way of explaining why they can’t get real jobs,” Rosemary said. The fact that Tony designed movie sets and had spent time at Hazelden didn’t help matters. Also, as journalists, Jimmy Breslin and Dominick Dunne couldn’t have been more different. Nick, “the chronicler of the society set”—and Breslin, “who [said] in all his years as a newsman the people he need[ed] to talk to always live[d] on the sixth floor with a broken elevator.” But Nick could be a charmer when he wanted to, and he hit it off with Rosemary’s cantankerous dad. Both men loved a good story. Rosemary said her father admired Didion and Dunne, “an extremely rare occurrence.”