Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Years later, in the sobriety of post-9/11 America, here is Didion in her “maturity”:

  [Her] 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.”

  As a professor of English and creative writing at Oregon State, Tracy Daugherty is, like his subject, steeped in New Critical theories and stratagems. Both the biographer and his subject distrust direct statement and “abhor abstractions” and both are “wary of interpreting behavior as a clue to character.” Confronted with Didion’s decision not to cooperate with him (though she does not seem to have wished to hamper him) the biographer decides to approach his subject’s life as if its truths do not lie easily on the surface of that life but constitute a text (my term, not Daugherty’s) to be decoded:

  When presented with the private correspondence, diaries, journals, or rough drafts of a writer, I remain skeptical of content, attentive instead to presentation. It is the construction of persona, even in private—the fears, curlicues, and desires in any recorded life—that offer insights.

  In this approach Daugherty echoes Didion’s acknowledgment of her indebtedness to the English Department at UC-Berkeley, from which she received a B.A. in 1956: “They taught a form of literary criticism which was based on analyzing texts in a very close way.” And, “I still go to the text. Meaning for me is in the grammar. . . . I learned backwards and forwards close textual analysis.”

  For all her insight into political intrigue and the bitter ironies of American life in the late twentieth century, Didion’s essential interest, Daugherty suggests, has always been language: “Its inaccuracies and illusions, the way words imply their opposites”; Didion has many times stated her hostility to fashionable and politically correct dogma, as in her defense of the “irreducible ambiguities” of fiction vis-à-vis the “narrow and cracked determinism” of the women’s movement with its “aversion to adult sexual life” (“The Women’s Movement,” 1972):

  All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

  In this passage Didion anticipates the sentiment of the anthropologist-narrator who recounts, in a stylized Conradian narrative of detachment and analysis, the story of maternal loss at the core of A Book of Common Prayer:

  [Charlotte Douglas] had tried only to rid herself of her dreams, and those dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life. We all have the same dreams.

  But do we? Feminism challenges this romantic passivity, replacing Freud’s idea of women’s biological destiny with a “destiny” unburdened by gender, like that of men; in her passionately written screed against the very bedrock of feminism, Didion aligns herself with other notable women writers who have scorned the notion of sisterhood. If you have suffered in the “female obsessional life” and if that life has been, for you, in its most profound moments essentially an “underground” life, it will be anathema to be told that others wish to escape this gender-fate. (See Jean Stafford on Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, published in Esquire in November 1975, in which Stafford ridicules the feminist conviction that women’s bodies are not fair game for the sexual predation of men; in effect, Stafford seems virtually to be defending rapists against their accusers and to decry women for, not being raped, but for daring to publicly object to it.) An abused, humiliated, emotionally exploited woman does not want to believe that her fate might have been otherwise; she will identify with her oppressors, in the hope of courting their favor, aligning herself with their power, presumed to be greater than the power of the (sister)-oppressed. In their denunciations of feminism as a threat to their definitions of self both Didion and Stafford seem to miss the point: feminism is the politics of human equality, which means economic as well as sexual equality. To deflect the issue onto a matter of language, and the “ambiguities” of language, is perhaps misguided, however esoteric.

  In her fiction, which is usually more nuanced than her nonfiction, Didion presents clearly flawed female protagonists like Maria of Play It as It Lays, whose masochism allows her to be swinishly exploited by men, and Charlotte Douglas of A Book of Common Prayer, who is seduced and misused by her Berkeley English instructor, yet falls in love with him. Maddeningly, Charlotte is incapable of defining herself except by way of masculine appropriation or as a (failed) mother of a pseudo-revolutionary cliché-spouting daughter (in the mode of Patty Hearst) who sets into motion the actions ending in Charlotte’s death. We know that the spoiled Marin can only disappoint: “[Marin] would never bother changing a phrase to suit herself because she perceived the meanings of words only dimly, and without interest.” Of the doomed Charlotte the narrator says, with some exasperation: “I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life.”

  The most intensely examined female life in Joan Didion’s oeuvre appears to have been her own exhaustively and illuminatingly examined interior life; Didion’s most brilliantly created fictional character is the writer’s persona—“Joan Didion.”

  IN ITS MOST ENTERTAINING PASSAGES The Last Love Song is something of a joint biography of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Didion’s writer-husband of over forty years, with whom she collaborated on screenplays for The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Play It as It Lays (1972) and, their most successful film, a remake of A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand (1976). Author of the novels True Confessions, Dutch Shea, Jr., The Red White and Blue, Nothing Lost, and the memoirs Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season and Harp, Dunne was ebulliently outspoken, the acerbic and sometimes scandalous extravert to Didion’s “neurotically inarticulate” introvert.

  Here is Didion writing with disarming candor of a stay in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in the aftermath of an earthquake in the Aleutians: “In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” (“In the Islands,” from The White Album) Didion’s confiding tone suggests a private diary entry, but it is very publicly printed in Life to be consumed by hundreds of thousands of readers for whom the “confessional” mode was not a commonplace in 1969. Not surprisingly, Dunne confides in strangers with startlingly intimacy as well, in the quasi-autobiographical Vegas (1974) with its memorable, Didion-like opening: “In the midst of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.”

  Coolly Dunne observes: “Sometimes, living with [Didion] was like ‘living with [a] piranha.’”

  Sometimes, at his most depressed, [Dunne] would imagine writing suicide notes, but “whatever minimal impulse I had for suicide was negated by the craft of writing the suicide note. It became a technical problem.” He could not stop revising.

  “When are you coming home?” [Didion] asked when she called.

  A nuanced, nostalgic, and loving portrait of Dunne emerges decades later in The Year of Magical Thinking, but Dunne’s droll, often raucous voice pervades virtually all of Didion’s prose fiction and gives to certain of her male characters a distinctly comic-aggressive tone in welcome contrast to her repressed, temperamentally inarticulate female characters.

  In December 2003 John Gregory Dunne died, of a heart attack, in the couple’s Manhattan apartment as abruptly as Jack Lovett dies of a heart attack at the end of Democracy. As Inez Victor is a stunned witness to her lover’s death so Joan Didion was a witness to her husband’s death: in prose eerily forecasting the ope
ning lines of The Year of Magical Thinking, the narrator of Democracy recounts Lovett’s death in a swimming pool at a hotel in Jakara:

  It had been quite sudden.

  She had watched him swimming toward the shallow end of the pool.

  She had reached down to get him a towel.

  She had thought at that exact moment of reaching for the towel about the telephone number he had given her, and wondered who would answer if he called it.

  And then she had looked up.

  “You see the shards of the novel I am no longer writing, the island, the family, the situation. I lost patience with it. I lost nerve.”

  Of course, Didion’s narrator has not really lost nerve: she has in fact just begun “her” novel. The narrator so intimately addressing us is not Joan Didion and we should not confuse her with the author whose name is on the title page of the book, though we have been, in the teasing manner of Philip Roth, invited to confuse the two:

  Call me the author.

  Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing table in her own room in her own house on Welbeck Street.

  And, with an air of weary disdain in The Last Thing He Wanted:

  The persona of “the writer” does not attract me. As a way of being it has its flat sides. Nor am I comfortable around the literary life: its traditional dramatic line (the romance of solitude, of interior struggle, of the lone seeker after truth) came to seem early on a trying conceit. I lost patience somewhat later with the conventions of the craft, with exposition, with transitions, with the development and revelation of “character.”

  Didion uses such authorial intrusions to lend credence to her fictional subjects, as she has often used herself in her nonfiction pieces to lend credence to their authenticity; in this, she is unlike her contemporaries John Barth, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and others associated with postmodernist literary experimentation of the 1970s and 1980s, who call attention by such devices to the fabrication of “fictional subjects”—in fact, their inauthenticity. But Didion is a social realist and a passionate, one might say old-fashioned moralist: she is too much under the spell of the real to wish to debunk it, and she has, unlike the postmodernists, exciting and meaningful stories to tell. Her much-stated anxieties about storytelling—“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience” (“The White Album”)—seem to spring more from aesthetic considerations, than from considerations of truth-telling; the anxieties of Didion’s several fictitious narrators are characteristic of writers seeking something other than conventional forms with which to tell their stories. On the one hand, there is the material (“the island, the family, the situation”), on the other hand the way in which the material will be presented. Ezra Pound set a very high standard with his admonition “Make it new!”—a Modernist standard whose significance would not have been lost on any ambitious literary writer coming of age in the 1950s.

  Whatever her doubts about the limitations of narrative fiction Didion seems to have thrown herself into journalism with much enthusiasm, optimism, and unstinting energy— a perfect conjunction of reportorial and memoirist urges. The Last Love Song traces in detail the provenance of Didion’s nonfiction pieces, which secured a reputation for her with the publication of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968; originally published in such diverse journals as the Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, National Review, and Esquire the essays were urged into book form by Henry Robbins, an editor at the time at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who became a personal friend of the Dunnes. (After Henry, Didion’s essay collection of 1992, is named for the legendary Robbins, who died of a heart attack, at fifty-one, in 1979.)

  It has been Didion’s association with The New York Review of Books, however, that seems to have stimulated what is perhaps the most productive phase of her career. Daugherty notes how “as an editor, Robert Silvers intuitively grasped her literary gifts and untapped potential.” Of Didion, Silvers says:

  I just thought she was a marvelous observer of American life. . . . She is by no means predictable, by no means an easily classifiable liberal or conservative, she is interested in whether or not people are morally evasive, smug, manipulative, or cruel—those qualities of moral action are very central to all her political work.

  Out of Didion’s meticulously researched journalism for NYRB would come several of her most important books—Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry, Political Fictions (2001), and Where I Was From; in all, more than forty pieces by Didion would appear in NYRB over a period of forty years. Among these is the corrosively brilliant “Sentimental Journeys” (1990), an investigation into the “high concept”[We Tell Ourselves Stories]narrative surrounding the Central Park jogger rape case of April 1989, which resulted in the convictions, on virtually no forensic evidence, of five young black men who’d been coerced into confessing to white NYPD detectives; Didion’s focus is upon the sensational media coverage of the case, the play of “white” and “black” stereotypes “aimed to obscure the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also . . . the civic and commercial arrangements that made those tensions irreconcilable.” Running so counter to public opinion—that is, white public opinion—Didion’s essay aroused much controversy for its determination to expose, with the precision of a skilled anatomist performing an autopsy, how the mainstream media presents to a credulous public “crimes . . . understood to be news to the extent that they offer . . . a story, a lesson, a high concept.” (In 2002, Didion’s skepticism about the case would be vindicated when the New York State Supreme Court vacated the convictions of the “Central Park Five” after a reexamination of DNA evidence and the confession of a serial rapist named Matias Reyes.)

  Political Fictions, which had the misfortune to be published at the time of 9/11, is a collection of essays analyzing the ways in which the American political process has become “perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.” In this media-driven process even politicians of integrity are obliged to concoct “fables” about themselves. Didion’s tone suggests Swiftian indignation modulated by a wry resignation:

  There was to writing about politics a certain Sisyphean aspect. . . . Even that which seemed to be ineluctably clear would again vanish from collective memory, sink traceless into the stream of collapsing news and comment cycles that had become our national River Lethe.

  THE LAST LOVE SONG is not an “authorized” biography and yet it exhibits few of the negative signs of an “unauthorized” biography: it is brimming with quoted material from Didion, both her writing and her interviews, and with a plethora of conversations with, it seems, virtually everyone who knew Didion, even at second hand. It is warmly generous, laced with the ironic humor Didion and Dunne famously cultivated. The biographical subject acquires a hologram-like density, and her voice is everywhere present.

  In his consideration of Didion’s personal life, Daugherty can’t avoid touching upon the vicissitudes of living intimately with the sometimes volatile John Gregory Dunne and with their adopted daughter Quintana Roo, who as a young adolescent, living in California, had already begun exhibiting signs of depression and a penchant for self-medication. (“Just let me be in the ground. Just let me be in the ground and go to sleep”—Didion quotes Quintana, echoing lines from Democracy uttered by Inez Victor’s unhappy daughter Jesse: “Let me die and get it over with. . . . Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”) Passages dealing with Quintana’s difficult adolescence, her stints in rehab and her final, protracted illness within two years of John Gregory Dunne’s death are the most painful passages in The Last Love Song. Of her daughter’s collapse Didion comments in Blue Nights with a disconcerting frankness that manages yet to be oblique:

  She
was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has suggested—ask any doctor—that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.

  Didion’s early work is associated with a particular tone, what might be called a higher narcissism (“What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”), and a predilection for establishing herself as a center of consciousness.

  “It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.”

  But overall, the range of her writerly interests is considerable: from the chic anomie of Play It as It Lays to the sharp-eyed sociological reportage of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album; from small gems of self-appraisal (“On Keeping a Notebook,” “On Going Home,” “Goodbye to All That”) to the sustained postmodernist skittishness of A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy; from the restrained contempt of “In the Realm of the Fisher King” (Reagan’s White House) to the vivid sightings of “Fire Season” (Los Angeles County, 1978); from the powerful evocations of clandestine politics in Salvador and Miami to family autobiography with a title precisely chosen to emphasize the past tense, Where I Was From, and the more recent memoirs of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Who but Joan Didion could frame the stark pessimism of The Last Thing He Wanted—with its incantatory reiteration that deal-making, gun-running (in this case, illegally supplying arms to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in 1984) is the essential American dream—within a romantic tale of a daughter fulfilling a dying parent’s wish for a “million-dollar score.”