Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  Life with these people had the distorted logic of dreams, and Patricia Hearst seems to have accepted it with the wary acquiescence of the dreamer. Any face could turn against her. Any move could prove lethal. “My sisters and I had been brought up to believe that we were responsible for what we did and could not blame our transgressions on something being wrong inside our heads. I had joined the SLA because if I didn’t they would have killed me. And I remained with them because I truly believed that the FBI would kill me if they could, and if not, the SLA would.” She had, as she put it, crossed over. She would, as she put it, make the best of it, and not “reach back to family or friends”.

  This was the point on which most people foundered, doubted her, found her least explicable, and it was also the point at which she was most spe­cifically the child of a certain culture. Here is the single personal note in an emigrant diary kept by a relative of mine, William Kilgore, the journal of an overland crossing to Sacramento in 1850: “This is one of the trying mornings for me, as I now have to leave my family, or back out. Suffice it to say, we started.” Suffice it to say. Don’t examine your feelings, they’re no help at all. Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. We need a goddamn South Ameri­can revolutionary mixed up in this thing like a hole in the head. This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why.

  She was never an idealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by survival. She came back from the other side with a story no one wanted to hear, a dispiriting account of a situation in which delusion and incompetence were pitted against delusion and incompetence of another kind, and in the febrile rhythms of San Francisco in the midseventies it seemed a story devoid of high notes. The week her trial ended in 1976, the San Francisco Bay Guardian published an interview in which members of a collective called New Dawn expressed regret at her defec­tion. “It’s a question of your self-respect or your ass,” one of them said. “If you choose your ass, you live with nothing.” This idea that the SLA represented an idea worth defending (if only on the grounds that any idea must be better than none) was common enough at the time, although most people granted that the idea had gone awry. By March of 1977 another writer in the Bay Guardian was making a distinction between the “unbridled adventurism” of the SLA and the “discipline and skill” of the New World Liberation Front, whose “fifty-odd bombings without a casualty” made them a “definitely preferable alternative” to the SLA.

  As it happened I had kept this issue of the Bay Guardian, dated March 31, 1977 (the Bay Guardian was not at the time a notably radical paper, by the way, but one that provided a fair guide to local tofu cookery and the mood of the community), and when I got it out to look at the piece on the SLA I noticed for the first time another piece: a long and favorable report on a San Francisco minister whose practice it was to “confront people and challenge their basic assump­tions ... as if he can’t let the evil of the world pass him by, a characteristic he shares with other moral leaders.” The minister, who was compared at one point to Cesar Chavez, was responsible, according to the writer, for a “mind-boggling” range of social ser­vice programs—food distribution, legal aid, drug re­habilitation, nursing homes, free Pap smears—as well as for a “twenty-seven-thousand-acre agricultural sta­tion”. The agricultural station was in Guyana, and the minister of course was the Reverend Jim Jones, who eventually chose self-respect over his own and nine hundred other asses. This was another local opera, and one never spoiled by a protagonist who insisted on telling it her way.

  — 1982

  Pacific Distances

  * * *

  1

  A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of mean­ing to the driver, which is one reason the place ex­hilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. There is about these hours spent in transit a seductive unconnectedness. Conventional information is missing. Context clues are missing. In Culver City as in Echo Park as in East Los Angeles, there are the same pastel bungalows. There are the same leggy poinsettia and the same trees of pink and yellow hibiscus. There are the same laundromats, body shops, strip shopping malls, the same travel agencies offering bargain fares on LACSA and TACA. San Salvador, the signs promise, on Beverly Boulevard as on Pico as on Alvarado and Soto. ¡No mis barata! There is the same sound, that of the car radio, tuned in my case to KRLA, an AM station that identifies itself as “the heart and soul of rock and roll” and is given to dislocating programming concepts, for example doing the top hits (“Baby, It’s You”, “Break It to Me Gently”, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) of 1962. Another day, another KRLA concept: “The Day the Music Died”, an exact radio recreation of the day in 1959, including news breaks (Detroit may mar­ket compacts), when the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa. A few days later, KRLA reports a solid response on “The Day the Music Died”, includ­ing “a call from Ritchie Valens’s aunt”.

  Such tranced hours are, for many people who live in Los Angeles, the dead center of being there, but there is nothing in them to encourage the normal im­pulse toward “recognition”, or narrative connection. Those glosses on the human comedy (the widow’s heartbreak, the bad cop, the mother-and-child re­union) that lend dramatic structure to more traditional forms of urban life are hard to come by here. There are, in the pages of the Los Angeles newspapers, no Crack Queens, no Coma Moms or Terror Tots. Events may be lurid, but are rarely personalized. “Mother Apologizes to Her Child, Drives Both Off Cliff,” a headline read in the Los Angeles Times one morning in December 1988. (Stories like this are rele­gated in the Times either to the Metro Section or to page three, which used to be referred to as “the freak-death page”, not its least freaky aspect being that quite arresting accounts of death by Clorox or by rattle­snake or by Dumpster tended to appear and then van­ish, with no follow-up.) Here was the story, which had to do with a young woman who had lived with her daughter, Brooke, in a Redondo Beach condominiums and was said by a neighbor to have “looked like she was a little down”:

  A Redondo Beach woman apologized to her 7-year-old daughter, then apparently tried to take both their lives by driving over a cliff in the Malibu area Tuesday morning, authori­ties said. The mother, identified by the county coroner’s office as Susan Sinclair, 29, was killed, but the child survived without serious injury. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” the woman was quoted as telling the child just before she suddenly swerved off Malibu Canyon Road about 2½ miles north of Pacific Coast Highway.

  “I’m sorry I have to do this.” This was the last we heard of Susan and Brooke Sinclair. When I first moved to Los Angeles from New York, in 1964, I found this absence of narrative a deprivation. At the end of two years I realized (quite suddenly, alone one morning in the car) that I had come to find narrative sentimental. This remains a radical difference be­tween the two cities, and also between the ways in which the residents of those cities view each other.

  2

  Our children remind us of how random our lives have been. I had occasion in 1979 to speak at my daughter’s school in Los Angeles, and I stood there, apparently a grown woman, certainly a woman who had stood up any number of times and spoken to stu­dents around the country, and tried to confront a question that suddenly seemed to me almost impene­trable: How had I become a writer, how and why had I made the particular choices I had made in my life? I could see my daughter’s friends in the back of the room, Claudia, Julie, Anna. I could see my daughter herself, flushed with embarrassment, afraid, she told me later, that her presence would make me forget what I meant to say.

  I could tell them only that I had no more idea of how I had become a writer than I had had, at their age, of how I would become a writer. I could tell them only about the fall of 1954, when I was nineteen and a junior at Berkeley and one of perhaps a dozen stu­dents admitted to the late Mark Schorer’s Engli
sh 106A, a kind of “fiction workshop” that met for dis­cussion three hours a week and required that each student produce, over the course of the semester, at least five short stories. No auditors were allowed. Voices were kept low. English 106A was widely re­garded in the fall of 1954 as a kind of sacramental experience, an initiation into the grave world of real writers, and I remember each meeting of this class as an occasion of acute excitement and dread. I remem­ber each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being (it had not yet struck me in any visceral way that being nineteen was not a long-term proposition, just as it had not yet struck Claudia and Julie and Anna and my daughter that they would recover from being thirteen), not only older and wiser but more experienced, more indepen­dent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn: not only the stuff of grown-up life itself but, more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff that might be transubstantiated into five short stories. I recall a Trotskyist, then in his forties. I recall a young woman who lived, with a barefoot man and a large white dog, in an attic lit only by candles. I recall classroom discussions that ranged over meetings with Paul and Jane Bowles, incidents involving Djuna Barnes, years spent in Paris, in Bev­erly Hills, in the Yucatan, on the Lower East Side of New York and on Repulse Bay and even on mor­phine. I had spent seventeen of my nineteen years more or less in Sacramento, and the other two in the Tri Delt house on Warring Street in Berkeley. I had never read Paul or Jane Bowles, let alone met them, and when, some fifteen years later at a friend’s house in Santa Monica Canyon, I did meet Paul Bowles, I was immediately rendered as dumb and awestruck as I had been at nineteen in English 106A.

  I suppose that what I really wanted to say that day at my daughter’s school is that we never reach a point at which our lives lie before us as a clearly marked open road, never have and never should expect a map to the years ahead, never do close those circles that seem, at thirteen and fourteen and nineteen, so urgently in need of closing. I wanted to tell my daughter and her friends, but did not, about going back to the English department at Berkeley in the spring of 1975 as a Regents’ Lecturer, a reversal of positions that should have been satisfying but proved unsettling, moved me profoundly, answered no questions but raised the same old ones. In Los Angeles in 1975 I had given every appearance of being well settled, grown­up, a woman in definite charge of her own work and of a certain kind of bourgeois household that made working possible. In Berkeley in 1975 I had unpacked my clothes and papers in a single room at the Faculty Club, walked once across campus, and regressed, im­mediately and helplessly, into the ghetto life of the student I had been twenty years before. I hoarded nuts and bits of chocolate in my desk drawer. I ate tacos for dinner (combination plates, con arroz y frijoles), wrapped myself in my bedspread and read until two a.m., smoked too many cigarettes and regretted, like a student, only their cost. I found myself making daily notes, as carefully as I had when I was an undergraduate, of expenses, and my room at the Faculty Club was littered with little scraps of envelopes:

  $1.15, papers, etc.

  $2.85, tacoplate

  $ .50, tips

  $ .15, coffee

  I fell not only into the habits but into the moods of the student day. Every morning I was hopeful, determined, energized by the campanile bells and by the smell of eucalyptus and by the day’s projected accom­plishments. On the way to breakfast I would walk briskly, breathe deeply, review my “plans” for the day: I would write five pages, return all calls, lunch on raisins and answer ten letters. I would at last read E. H. Gombrich. I would once and for all get the meaning of the word “structuralist”. And yet every afternoon by four o’clock, the hour when I met my single class, I was once again dulled, glazed, sunk in an excess of carbohydrates and in my own mediocrity, in my failure—still, after twenty years!—to “live up to” the day’s possibilities.

  In certain ways nothing at all had changed in those twenty years. The clean light and fogs were exactly as I had remembered. The creek still ran clear among the shadows, the rhododendron still bloomed in the spring. On the bulletin boards in the English depart­ment there were still notices inviting the reader to apply to Mrs. Diggory Venn for information on the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. The less se­curely tenured members of the department still yearned for dramatic moves to Johns Hopkins. Any­thing specific was rendered immediately into a general principle. Anything concrete was rendered abstract. That the spring of 1975 was, outside Berkeley, a sea­son of remarkably specific and operatically concrete events seemed, on the campus, another abstract, an­other illustration of a general tendency, an instance tending only to confirm or not confirm one or another idea of the world. The wire photos from Phnom Penh and Saigon seemed as deliberately composed as sym­bolist paintings. The question of whether one spoke of Saigon “falling” or of Saigon’s “liberation” reduced the fact to a political attitude, a semantic question, another idea.

  Days passed. I adopted a shapeless blazer and no makeup. I remember spending considerable time, that spring of 1975, trying to break the code that Tele­graph Avenue seemed to present. There, just a block or two off the campus, the campus with its five thou­sand courses, its four million books, its five million manuscripts, the campus with its cool glades and clear creeks and lucid views, lay this mean wasteland of small venture capital, this unweeded garden in which everything cost more than it was worth. Coffee on Telegraph Avenue was served neither hot nor cold. Food was slopped lukewarm onto chipped plates. Pita bread was stale, curries were rank. Tatty “Indian” stores offered faded posters and shoddy silks. Book­stores featured sections on the occult. Drug buys were in progress up and down the street. The place was an illustration of some tropism toward disorder, and I seemed to understand it no better in 1975 than I had as an undergraduate.

  I remember trying to discuss Telegraph Avenue with some people from the English department, but they were discussing a paper we had heard on the plotting of Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, and Bleak House. I remember trying to discuss Telegraph Avenue with an old friend who had asked me to dinner, at a place far enough off campus to get a drink, but he was discussing Jane Alpert, Eldridge Cleaver, Daniel Ellsberg, Shana Alexander, a Modesto rancher of his ac­quaintance, Jules Feiffer, Herbert Gold, Herb Caen, Ed Janss, and the movement for independence in Mi­cronesia. I remember thinking that I was still, after twenty years, out of step at Berkeley, the victim of a different drummer. I remember sitting in my office in Wheeler Hall one afternoon when someone, not a stu­dent, walked in off the street. He said that he was a writer, and I asked what he had written. “Nothing you’ll ever dare to read,” he said. He admired only Celine and Djuna Barnes. With the exception of Djuna Barnes, women could not write. It was possible that I could write but he did not know, he had not read me. “In any case,” he added, sitting on the edge of my desk, “your time’s gone, your fever’s over.” It had probably been a couple of decades, English 106 A, since I last heard about Celine and Djuna Barnes and how women could not write, since I last encountered this particular brand of extraliterary machismo, and after my caller had left the office I locked the door and sat there a long time in the afternoon light. At nine­teen I had wanted to write. At forty I still wanted to write, and nothing that had happened in the years between made me any more certain that I could.

  3

  Etcheverry Hall, half a block uphill from the north gate of the University of California at Berkeley, is one of those postwar classroom and office build­ings that resemble parking structures and seem designed to suggest that nothing extraordinary has been or will be going on inside. On Etcheverry’s east terrace, which is paved with pebbled concrete and bricks, a few students usually sit studying or sunbath­ing. There are benches, there is grass. There are shrubs and a small tree. There is a net for volleyball, and, on the day in late 1979 when I visited Etcheverr
y, someone had taken a piece of chalk and printed the word radiation on the concrete beneath the net, breaking the letters in a way that looked stenciled and official and scary. In fact it was here, directly below the volleyball court on Etcheverry’s east terrace, that the Department of Nuclear Engineering’s TRIGA Mark III nuclear reactor, light-water cooled and re­flected, went critical, or achieved a sustained nuclear reaction, on August 10, 1966, and had been in contin­uous operation since. People who wanted to see the reactor dismantled said that it was dangerous, that it could emit deadly radiation and that it was perilously situated just forty yards west of the Hayward Fault. People who ran the reactor said that it was not dan­gerous, that any emission of measurable radioactivity was extremely unlikely and that “forty yards west of” the Hayward Fault was a descriptive phrase without intrinsic seismological significance. (This was an as­sessment with which seismologists agreed.) These dif­ferences of opinion represented a difference not only in the meaning of words but in cultures, a difference in images and probably in expectations.

  Above the steel door to the reactor room in the basement of Etcheverry Hall was a sign that glowed either green or Roman violet, depending on whether what it said was safe entry, which meant that the air lock between the reactor room and the corridor was closed and the radiation levels were normal and the level of pool water was normal, or unsafe entry, which meant that at least one of these conditions, usu­ally the first, had not been met. The sign on the steel door itself read only room 1140 / exclusion area / entry list a, b, or c / check with receptionist. On the day I visited Etcheverry I was issued a dosimeter to keep in my pocket, then shown the reactor by Tek Lim, at that time the reactor manager, and Lawrence Grossman, a professor of nuclear engineering. They explained that the Etcheverry TRIGA was a modification of the original TRIGA, which is an acronym for Training/Research/Isotopes/General Atomic, and was designed in 1956 by a team, includ­ing Edward Teller and Theodore Taylor and Freeman Dyson, that had set for itself the task of making a reactor so safe, in Freeman Dyson’s words, “that it could be given to a bunch of high school children to play with, without any fear that they would get hurt”.