by Joan Didion
During the five days I spent in Kuala Lumpur Inez mentioned such “correspondences,” her word, a number of times, as if they were messages intended specifically for her, evidence of a narrative she had not suspected. She seemed to find these tenuous connections extraordinary. Given a life in which the major cost was memory I suppose they were.
By the time I got back to Los Angeles a congressional subpoena had been issued for Jack Lovett and the clip of Inez dancing on the St. Regis Roof had made its first network appearance. I have no idea why this particular clip was the single most repeated image of a life as exhaustively documented as Inez Victor’s, but it was, and over those few days in January of 1976 this tape took on a life quite independent of the rather unexceptional moment it recorded, sometimes running for only a second or two, cut so short that it might have been only a still photograph; other times presenting itself as an extended playlet, reaching a dramatic curtain as the aide said “Hold two elevators” and Harry Victor said “I’m just a private citizen” and Inez said “Marvelous” and the band played “Isn’t It Romantic.”
I suppose one reason the tape was played again and again was simply that it remained the most recent film available on Inez Victor.
I suspect another reason was that the hat with the red cherries and “Just a private citizen” and “Marvelous” and “Isn’t It Romantic” offered an irony accessible to even the most literal viewer.
Three weeks later a Washington Post reporter happened to discover in the Pentagon bureau of records that the reason Jack Lovett had not answered his congressional subpoena was that he had been dead since August, buried in fact on government property, and that the signature on the government forms authorizing his burial on government property was Inez Victor’s.
That night the tape ran twice more, and then not again.
At any rate not again that I knew about, not even when NBC located Inez Victor at the refugee administration office in Kuala Lumpur and Inez Victor declined to be interviewed.
In March of 1976 Billy Dillon showed me the thirteen-word reply he got to a letter he had written Inez. He had resorted to writing the letter because calling Inez had been, he said, unsatisfactory.
“Raise anything substantive on the telephone,” Billy Dillon said when he showed me Inez’s reply, “Mother Teresa out there says she’s wanted in the clinic. So I write. I give her the news, a little gossip, a long thought or two, I slip in one question. One. I ask if she can give me one fucking reason she’s in goddamn K.L., and this is what I get. Thirteen words.”
He handed me the sheet of lined paper on which, in Inez’s characteristic scrawl, the thirteen words appeared: “Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air. Four fucking reasons. Love, Inez.”
Colors, moisture, heat.
Enough blue in the air.
I told you the essence of that early on but not the context, which has been, you will note, the way I tried to stay on the wire in this novel of fitful glimpses. It has not been the novel I set out to write, nor am I exactly the person who set out to write it. Nor have I experienced the rush of narrative inevitability that usually propels a novel toward its end, the momentum that sets in as events overtake their shadows and the cards all fall in on one another and the options decrease to zero.
Perhaps 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.
Anything could happen.
As you may or may not know Billy Dillon has a new candidate, a congressman out of NASA who believes that his age and training put him on the right side of what he calls “the idea lag,” and occasionally when Billy Dillon is in California to raise money I have dinner with him. In some ways I have replaced Inez as the woman Billy Dillon imagines he wishes he had married. Again as you may or may not know Harry Victor is in Brussels, special envoy to the Common Market. Adlai and Jessie are both well, Adlai in San Francisco, where he clerks for a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit; Jessie in Mexico City, where she is, curiously enough, writing a novel, and living with a Newsweek stringer who is trying to log in enough time in various troubled capitals to come back to New York and go on staff. When and if he does I suspect that Jessie will not come up with him, since her weakness is for troubled capitals. Imagine my mother dancing, I had hoped that Jessie’s novel would begin, but according to a recent letter I had from her this particular novel is an historical romance about Maximilian and Carlota.
Inez of course is still in Kuala Lumpur.
She writes once a week to Jessie, somewhat less often to Adlai, and scarcely at all now to Harry. She sends an occasional postcard to Billy Dillon, and the odd clipping to me. One evening a week she teaches a course in American literature at the University of Malaysia and has dinner afterwards at the Lake Club, but most of her evenings as well as her days are spent on the administration of what are by now the dozen refugee camps around Kuala Lumpur.
A year ago when I was in London the Guardian ran a piece about Southeast Asian refugees, and Inez was quoted.
She said that although she still considered herself an American national (an odd locution, but there it was) she would be in Kuala Lumpur until the last refugee was dispatched.
Since Kuala Lumpur is not likely to dispatch its last refugee in Inez’s or my lifetime I would guess she means to stay on, but I have been surprised before. When I read this piece in London I had a sudden sense of Inez and of the office in the camp and of how it feels to fly into that part of the world, of the dense greens and translucent blues and the shallows where islands once were, but so far I have not been back.
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.
BOOKS BY JOAN DIDION
WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
WHERE I WAS FROM
POLITICAL FICTIONS
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
AFTER HENRY
MIAMI
DEMOCRACY
SALVADOR
THE WHITE ALBUM
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
RUN RIVER
ALSO BY JOAN DIDION
AFTER HENRY
In After Henry, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates, and gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.
Current Affairs/Essays/978-0-679-74539-6
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness that has made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. Charlotte Douglas has come to the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75486-2
DEMOCRACY
Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of the losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget Inez’s father is a murderer. Moving deftly between romance, farce and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force fr
om a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75485-5
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena’s father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal—a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75285-1
MIAMI
No one has observed Miami’s pastel surfaces and murky intrigues more astutely than Joan Didion. As this unerring social commentator follows Miami’s drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion and hypocrisy—and of political violence turned as personal as a family feud.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-78180-6
POLITICAL FICTIONS
In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
Essays/Political/978-0-375-71890-8
RUN RIVER
Joan Didion’s electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75250-9
SALVADOR
“Terror is the given of the place.” The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country’s particular brand of terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As she travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-75183-0
WHERE I WAS FROM
In this moving and insightful book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.
History/Memoir/978-0-679-75286-8
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Memoir/978-1-4000-7843-1
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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