The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  “we were snowbound”: ibid.

  “my dear mother”: Herman Daniel Jerrett, California’s El Dorado Yesterday and Today (Sacramento: Press of Jo Anderson, 1915), v.

  “historical questions”: Herman Daniel Jerrett, Hills of Gold (Sacramento: Cal-Central Press, 1963), ix.

  “innocent”: Didion, Where I Was From, 10.

  “enthusiasm and pride”: Jerrett, California’s El Dorado Yesterday and Today, 127.

  “taken out of the middle” and all other discussion of migraines, except where otherwise noted: Suzanne Styron and Jacki Ochs, “The Migraine Project,” Eleventh Hour Films; available at www.migraineproject.com/#section0. See also Didion, The White Album, 169.

  “those sick headaches”: Joan Didion, “Thinking About Western Thinking,” Esquire, February 1976, 14.

  “My sense was that we lived in the only possible place”: Adair Lara, “You Can’t Keep the California Out of Joan Didion,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 6, 2004, D1.

  “There was a certain way that possibilities”: Didion quoted in Kel Munger, “Where She Was From,” Sacramento News and Review, October 16, 2003; available at www.newsreviews.com/sacramento/where-she-was-from/content?oid=1640.

  “I think Mother just couldn’t face”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

  “When the school was first built”: Kel Munger to the author, December 6, 2011.

  “idea that I was smarter”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

  “didn’t get socialised,” Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

  “If you never learn how”: Joan Didion, “American Summer,” Vogue, May 1963, 117.

  “It was mystifying to my mother”: “The Female Angst,” Anaïs Nin, Joan Didion, and Dory Previn, interview by Sally Davis, Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, KPFK, February 1, 1972; available at www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recordings/bc0611.

  “We did not fight”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 149.

  Frank brought Didion: Didion recounts this episode in “Making Up Stories,” her 1979 Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan. The lecture appears in Robert A. Martin, ed., The Writing Craft: Hopwood Lectures, 1965–1981 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 235–48. Didion says she is not entirely certain she and her father ate cracked crab at lunch.

  “Tax Collector”: Resolution Number GF, City of Sacramento Records Library, June 26, 1942; available at www.records.cityofsacramento.org/ViewDocaspx?ID=s6tFBnt4w.

  “We had an irrigation problem”: Didion, Where I Was From, 17.

  “a color that existed”: ibid.

  “There’s a lot of mystery to me about writing and performing”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction, No. 71.”

  “The trouble with these new people”: Didion, Where I Was From, 95.

  “downright rural region”: William Burg to the author, December 9, 2011.

  “well-fed Lincoln-Mercury dealers”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 171–72.

  “wanted to know”: Didion quoted in Jemima Hunt, “The Didion Bible,” The Guardian, January 12, 2003; available at www.theguardian.com/books2003/jan/12/fiction.society.

  “have so much trouble getting through the afternoon”: Joan Didion, Telling Stories (Berkeley:, Calif.: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1978), 35.

  “I would have to say the rivers”: Didion quoted in Rob Turner, “Where She Was From,” Sactown, December 2011, 83.

  “caught, in a military-surplus life raft”: Didion, The White Album, 60.

  “The generation she was close to”: Kel Munger to the author, December 6, 2011.

  “She was in a higher social class” and all other quotes in this chapter from Joan Haug-West: Joan Haug-West to the author, January 16, 2012.

  “We had a very vibrant, active household”: “A Love for the Law,” Academy of Achievement interview with Anthony Kennedy, June 3, 2005; available at www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ken0int-1.

  “process of selection” and all other quotes in this chapter regarding the Mañana Club: Judy Robinson v. Sacramento City etc. School District 245, California Appellate 2d 278, September 29, 1966; available at www.law.justia.com/cases/california/calapp2d/245/278.html.

  “one [could] imagine reading”: Didion, The White Album, 71.

  “a very tedious time in my life”: Connie Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.

  “I tell myself that we are a long time underground”: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 150.

  “indiscriminately”: Joan Didion, “I’ll Take Romance,” National Review, September 24, 1963, 246.

  “pain seemed a shameful secret”: Didion, The White Album, 169–70.

  “I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,” The Paris Review 48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/560/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion.

  “missed that wild control of language”: ibid.

  “[He] made me afraid to put words down”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

  “a great house”: Didion quoted in Turner, “Where She Was From.”

  “They had knocked up girls and married them”: Joan Didion, Political Fictions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 19–20.

  “In a gentle sleep Sacramento dreamed”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 157.

  “That’s a false portrayal of the city”: Rob Turner to the author, December 7, 2011.

  “I don’t see any loss of character”: Mel Lawson quoted in Lloyd Bruno, “Looking Backward with Lloyd Bruno” in Suttertown News (May 24–31, 1984), 12.

  “I wouldn’t call [it] reporting”: Didion quoted in Turner, “Where She Was From.”

  “We were talking about some people that we knew”: Didion quoted in Munger, “Where She Was From.”

  “Dear Joan” and subsequent quotes regarding this incident: Joan Didion, “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice” in the “Points West” column, The Saturday Evening Post, April 6, 1968, 18–19.

  CHAPTER 4

  “manifestations of … tension”: Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 213.

  “some weeks or months”: ibid., 214.

  “responsibility for hospitalization”: Lt. Col. Myra L. McDaniel, “Professional Services and Activities of Occupational Therapists, April 1947 to January 1961,” in Army Specialist Medical Corps, gen. ed. Col. Colonel Robert S. Anderson, (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1968), 570.

  “modern concept of personality development”: Col. Albert J. Glass, “Army Psychiatry Before World War II,” in Neuropsychiatry in World War II, vol. 1, gen. ed. Col. Robert S. Anderson, (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1966), 8.

  “species of melancholy”: ibid., 3.

  “mind guys”: Didion, Where I Was From, 214.

  “scientific manner” and “most satisfactory results”: Glass, “Army Psychiatry Before World War II,” 11.

  ADL, “Reality Testing Situations,” and “Total Push Program”: McDaniel, “Professional Services and Activities of Occupational Therapists, April 1947 to January 1961,” 573, 577, 582.

  “woman doctor”: Didion, Where I Was From, 214.

  “given pretty much a free hand”: R. U. Sirius, “Hallucinogenic Weapons: The Other Chemical Warfare,” interview with Dr. James S. Ketchum, January 10, 2007; available at www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/01/10/hallucinogenic-weapons-the-other-chemical-warfare/.

  “permission” and “test doses”: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995): Chapter 1, “The Department of Defense: Consent Is Formalized”; available at www.hss.doe.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap.achre.chap1_3.html.

  “Army and the CIA had conducted LSD experiments”: ibid.

  �
��In Bed”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 170.

  “frisson of one another”: Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 97–98.

  “MK-ULTRA Subproject 140”: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, “Memorandum for Discussion Purposes Only,” February 8, 1995 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995); available at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchive/radiation/dir/mstrat/intret.txt.

  “climate, habits, and modes of life”: quoted in Didion, Where I Was From, 196.

  “[M]y aversion to outdoor games” and other details regarding Didion’s golfer: Joan Didion, “Take No for an Answer,” Vogue, October 1961, 133.

  “All I want to do is preach” and all other quotes concerning Billy James Hargis: Adam Bernstein, “Evangelist Billy James Hargis Dies: Spread Anti-Communist Message,” Washington Post, November 30, 2004.

  “on almost every level”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,” The Paris Review 48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/560/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion.

  wanted to “heave”: Joan Didion letter to Peggy La Violette, August 9, 1955, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  “social tradition,” “Hard drinkers,” and “A woman who wrote novels”: Didion quoted in Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71,” The Paris Review 20, no. 74 (Fall-Winter 1978); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion.

  “big, anonymous place”: Didion quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,” The Guardian, May 20, 2005; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/May21/usnationalbookawards.society.

  “waking up”: Didion quoted in Rebecca Meyer, “Berkeley Alumna Discusses Politics After ‘Fiction,’” Daily Californian, October 19, 2001; available at randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/didion/desktopnew.html.

  “legitimate resident in any world of ideas”: Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” originally published in New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1976; reprinted in Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 6.

  “The Muse … / In distant lands”: Bishop George Berkeley, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” in Berkeley! A Literary Tribute, ed. Danielle La France (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1997), 3.

  “the city of unfinished attics”: Ishmael Reed, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, cited in ibid., 174.

  “earthquake weather”: Joan Didion, Run River (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 119.

  “fifteen dentists on fifteen palominos”: ibid., 217.

  “The landscape has a fantastic, strong, and depressing effect”: Joan Didion in conversation with Michael Bernstein, the Revelle Forum at the Neurosciences Institute, University of California at San Diego, October 15, 2002.

  “humorless nineteen-year-old”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 127.

  “It was as if she’d stumbled alone”: Didion, Run River, 94.

  “Let us steadfastly love one another”: Tri-Delt motto cited at www.trideltaorg/aboutus/tr:_delta_fact_sheet.

  “I looked at the athletic-looking young people”: Simone de Beauvoir, America Day-by-Day, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 142–43.

  “I came out of what was called the ‘Silent Generation’”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

  “The mood of Berkeley in those years”: Didion, The White Album, 207.

  “provide parking for the faculty”: Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 233.

  “There are several ‘nations’ of students”: Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 33.

  led to a specific campus layout: For a discussion of the physical changes to the Berkeley campus in the 1950s, see Max Heirich, The Spiral of Conflict: Berkeley 1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 58–64.

  “happy home”: Kerr, The Uses of the University, 124–26.

  “[T]he undergraduate students are restless”: Clark Kerr, “Godkin Lectures at Harvard,” April 1963, cited in The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset and Sheldon S. Wolin (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1965), 37. Kerr’s remarks also appear in his The Uses of the University, 91.

  “New Dealism”: Starr, Golden Dreams, 206.

  “The Bevatron requires”: Bruce Cork, “Proton Linear Accelerator for the Bevatron,” Review of Scientific Instruments 26, no. 2 (1955): 210.

  “moral force” and “The planet itself seemed less impressive”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), 380.

  “Seize, then, the Atom!”: Henry Adams, Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 130.

  “ingenious channel”: Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 380.

  “The whole way I think about politics”: Meyer, “Berkeley Alumna Discusses Politics After ‘Fiction.’”

  “depends on over-interpreting everything”: Connie Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.

  “I still go to the text”: Didion in conversation with Bernstein, Revelle Forum.

  “I was very excited by Sartre in particular”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

  “Mark Schorer … helped me”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

  “form and rhythm imposed” and all other quotes from “Technique as Discovery”: Mark Schorer, “Technique as Discovery,” first published in The Hudson Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 1948); reprinted in Schorer, The World We Imagine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 5.

  “in which we are encamped like bewildered travelers”: Joseph Conrad, Victory (Garden City, N.Y.: International Collector’s Library, 1921), 3.

  “maybe my favorite book in the world”: Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1.”

  “I am not a central character” and all other quotes from The Wars of Love: Mark Schorer, The Wars of Love (Sag Harbor, N.Y.: Second Chance Press, 1982), 3, 4.

  “I tell you this not as aimless revelation”: Didion, The White Album, 133.

  “[Y]ou remember the names”: Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 9.

  “Victory seems to me a profoundly female novel”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

  “you’re seeing [the story] from a distance”: Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion.

  “We were constantly being impressed”: Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1.”

  “You hoped he would like it” and subsequent Butler quotes: Phyllis Butler in conversation with the author, July 17, 2012.

  “I was so scared in that class I couldn’t speak”: Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion.

  “there was more to be learned”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

  “[I]t had not yet struck me”: Joan Didion, Telling Stories (Berkeley, Calif.: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1978), 3.

  “A lot of people don’t get as excited”: Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion.

  “mad” and subsequent quotes from Auden: W. H. Auden. “September 1, 1939,” The New Republic, October 18, 1939, 297.

  “absolutely terrified”: Didion quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”

  CHAPTER 5

  a boy she referred to in letters: Joan Didion letter to Peggy La Violette, 1955, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  Four years after World War II: statistics cited in Larry May, Recasting America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 148.

  “rigid,” “frozen,” and “closed”: Simone de Beauvoir cited in Elizabeth Spies, “‘Dreaming Houses’ and ‘Stilled Suburbs’: Syl
via Plath Encounters the American Ranch Home”; available at www.iun.edu/~nwadmin/plath/vol4/spies.pdf.

  “I have, in the space of six days”: Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1962, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 117–18.

  “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 207.

  “the city’s elite dollhouse” and subsequent quotes about the Barbizon: Michael Callahan, “Sorority on E. 63rd S,” Vanity Fair, April 2010; available at www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2010/04/barbizon-hotel-201004?printable=true.

  “I remember Joan”: Gael Greene quoted in Linda Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,” New York, September 2, 1996, 31.

  “I would say, consulting a faulty memory” and other Burroway reminiscences: Janet Burroway to the author, March 21, 2012. Excerpts from Burroway’s letters throughout this chapter were provided to the author on March 21, 2012.

  “creative energy crackled like summer heat lightning”: Jane Truslow, “Memo from the Guest Editor,” Mademoiselle, August 1955, 241.

  “It was the first time I’d ever worked in an office”: “Conversation Between Joan Didion and Meghan Daum,” Black Book, December 12, 2004; available (2011) at www.meghandaum.com/about-meghan-daum/36-conversation-between-joan-didion-and-meghan-daum.

  “Joan spends vacations”: Ellen Adams, profile of Joan Didion, Mademoiselle, August 1955, 249.

  “seems better suited to the age”: Jean Stafford quoted in Joan Didion, profile of Jean Stafford in “We Hitch Our Wagons,” Mademoiselle, August 1955, 305.

  “discover[ed] to our delight”: Truslow, “Memo from the Guest Editor.”

  “champagne and caviar”: Joan Gage, “Bring Back the Mlle. Guest Editor Contest”; available at www.arollingcrone.blogspot.com/2010/05/bring-back-mlle-guest-editor-contest.html.

  “where fashion scored a touchdown”: Truslow, “Memo from the Guest Editor.”

  En route, Didion wrote a series of letters: Joan Didion letter to Peggy La Violette, 1955, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  “[she] was strong enough to make people take care of [her]”: Joan Didion, Run River (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 104.