In Praise of Messy Lives (12 page)

There is, admittedly, no rule that writers have to write about new situations: we still want to read about love, adultery, and death. It wouldn’t matter that the subject of incest is no longer fresh except that it so insistently announces its own freshness. When the writers of current incest novels darkly foreshadow what is to come, when they carefully build to the terrible scene, they rely on the shimmer and flash of novelty. They deliver the scene itself with the breathless tone of revelation: as each father
slides under the covers with his young teenage daughter, the words themselves virtually quiver with the feeling,
I am the first person ever to have written about this
.

It’s possible that the incest scene could be made new, but at this late date we can’t help suspecting that the scene is the product of cultural opportunism, a sign that the author has lost sight of what separates literature from television drama. Beneath the swelling prose, the panties and the nightgowns, one feels the selling principle at work. Sex sells and perverse sex sells more—a sentiment confirmed during the fierce bidding war for Sapphire’s
Push
. That the unfinished manuscript finally sold to Knopf for a reported $500,000 is testimony to the commercial potential of this particular form of suffering. Sapphire’s novel itself is aptly named. The idea behind the larger literary trend toward sensationalism seems to be to push one step further, to push for the purest rage, the most lurid crime, the most innocent victim. The idea, finally, is to shock the virtually unshockable modern reader.

The irony is that while incest in life will never cease to appall us, incest in its written form is no longer shocking. After a while we read these scenes with the same numbness we feel watching people being blown up in the movies. Incest is no longer the dirtiest secret or the most unimaginable act, since we seem to talk about and imagine it all the time.

Young writers like Heather Lewis clearly have been reading their Dorothy Allison; Sapphire clearly has been reading her Alice Walker. And there is a whole new generation of writers, still in writing programs and dorm rooms, crumpling pages, drinking coffee, eyes fixed to their computers, who will read Lewis and Sapphire, as a new batch of novels with “dark secrets”
and “harrowing pasts” finds its way onto editors’ desks. Until one fine morning when some publisher gets out of bed and thinks,
I’ve heard enough about incest
. And some writer sits in her studio apartment typing away at her novel, thinking,
This is like nothing anyone has seen before
. And slowly at first, and then more quickly, other publishers and writers will turn, with good intentions, with dollar signs in their eyes, to the next hot subject, the next modish plot twist. Let it be soon.
^*

Joan Didion devotees may be disappointed that
Where I Was From
is not, in spite of its title, a memoir. Or rather, it may be her version of a memoir—dazzling, theatrical, dense—but when it comes down to it, it is a book with very little of her life in it. The publishing materials refer to
Where I Was From
as “deeply and intensely personal,” and yet what is striking is how impersonal the book actually is.
^*

Since the publication of
The White Album
and
Slouching
Towards Bethlehem
, Didion has been celebrated as one of America’s leading practitioners of a new kind of highly wrought personal journalism. In the
New York Observer
, Susan Faludi claimed that Didion taught a generation of writers how to make journalism “a personal expression.” And Martin Amis characterized her style as “self-revealing” in an essay in which he went on to call her “a human being who managed to gouge another book out of herself rather than a writer who gets her living done on the side.” But has her writing ever been that immediate, that personal, that raw? Has her confessional style ever been much more than just that—a style?

Didion seems at first glance to be revealing so much about herself because she makes great use of her mental fragility. Certain temperamental qualities of hers—her paranoia, her morbid sense of impending disaster, and her distrust of all stated realities—were particularly suited to the 1960s and ’70s. Take the moment in
The White Album
when she writes about the “attack of nausea and vertigo” that led her to a psychiatric clinic. On the surface, this might seem like an intimate revelation about her inner life. And yet she ends the passage with “such an attack does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.” This is typical Didion. It’s as if her body were a finely tuned instrument for channeling the jittery mood of the country in flux. Her sense of doom, of highly calibrated alarm, is always in the service of some larger point; her stunned disbelief is always a commentary, on the times, on a murder, on the water supply, on Hawaii, on the bewildering state of California. It is never simply emotion for the sake of emotion. There is no pleasure in frankly exhibitionistic exposure; there is none of the blinkered narcissism of some of our more recent personal writing.

If there is a great deal of personality in her essays, there is very little that is personal. Even in her most superficially revealing essays, like her much-beloved “Goodbye to All That,” autobiographical facts give way to typologies. Her crying in Chinese laundries becomes “what it’s like to be young in New York.” New York becomes “an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.” In the end, for all the spare, vivid details about her walking down the street peering into the windows of brownstones, about drinking gazpacho when she is hungover, the essay is about moving to New York and about being young—not about Joan Didion moving to New York and being young. This is, in many ways, her gift: she leaves space for thousands of similarly disaffected readers to enter her prose and passionately identify with it.

Her stylistic tics add to the illusion of personal revelation. Didion frequently addresses the reader directly, as if we have entered an intimate form of conversation. She writes, “When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” And her idiosyncratic cadences, her use of a kind of lulling, incantatory, biblical repetition, reinforces our sense of connection to her. Take this passage from
The White Album:
“It was Morrison who had described the Doors as ‘erotic politicians.’ It was Morrison who got arrested in Miami in December of 1967…. It was Morrison who got up there in his black vinyl pants with no underwear and projected the idea, and it was Morrison they were waiting for now.”

And yet even after reading every single word Didion has ever published, how much does one know about her? One knows what
she packs on a trip to interview a subject, one knows about the jasmine she smells on the way home from the airport in Los Angeles, but one knows almost nothing about her family, say, or her marriage, or her daughter. The personal information she imparts is so stylized, so mannered, so controlled, that it is no longer personal information.
^*
The “I” in her essays is an elegant silhouette of a woman. There is something shadowy about her, something peculiarly obscure, like the famous photograph of her hiding behind huge sunglasses. She is, in the end, a writer of enormous reserve.

Where I Was From
covers some of the ordinary terrain of the memoir; namely, it begins with her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s crossing the country in pioneer wagons and ends with her mother’s death. And in some way, she is writing about her own reverse pioneering—her trip east, abandoning everything she grew up with. But there is an evasion at the center—a masterly, brilliant evasion but an evasion nonetheless. In her riff on California, Didion examines, variously, Frank Norris, Jack London, the Spur Posse, the waterways, the Southern Pacific Railroad, the paintings of Thomas Kinkade, the Bohemian Club, and the economy of the early nineties, and yet her own relation to the place and to her family go largely unexamined. She teases out every contradiction, picks apart every myth, and explodes every subtlety in mini critical essays, but when it comes to her own background, she falls back on ordinary—if
perfectly crafted—description. Joan Didion, for all of her stylistic brio, becomes straightforward. She never gets beyond the cool surface. She is vague on certain crucial details. She writes, for instance, about her father going into a mental hospital for “some weeks or months.” But she does not say why exactly or what she makes of it. Instead she goes on for several pages on the history of committing people to mental institutions in the state of California, suggesting that there is a shocking tradition of abandonment in that history, until one is finally dying to ask, What about her own father?

There is in her delicate, urban, neurotic sensibility something of the hardy pioneer ancestors she describes, jettisoning rosewood chests in the crossing, burying the dead on the wagon trail, never looking back. At one point she quotes another child of California, Patty Hearst, saying, “Never examine your feelings—they’re no help at all.”

So, why would she write a book that at least borders on being a memoir?
Where I Was From
is obsessed with unsatisfying graveyards: a family cemetery that was sold, children buried in trunks, women left in watery pools, or the dead buried on the trail, their graves run over with wagons. And in a way, this book represents another incomplete burial. Didion tells us the question “Where will I be from?” occurred to her when her mother died, and it seems that the impetus for this book came out of that death. One senses that Didion is attempting to bury her parents, and yet she doesn’t quite. So much remains unsaid beneath the surface. Instead she writes what she always writes: about the lies we tell ourselves, about the absurdity of our desire for order, about the shamelessness and cowardice of human character. The usual elisions occur: she is writing about herself, she is writing about
California, she is writing about the founding myths. This is, like much in Didion, both frustrating and amazing. She is on some cool, understated, self-contained level channeling Walt Whitman, singing of America by singing of herself.

I don’t think that I have ever walked into the home of a female writer, aspiring writer, newspaper reporter, or women’s magazine editor and not found, somewhere on the shelves, a row of Joan Didion books. Very few women in the business have not, early in their careers, stayed up late into the night reading her, the sky streaked violet: “I could indulge here in a little idle generalization … could talk fast about convulsions in the society and alienation and anomie and maybe even assassination, but that would be just one more stylish shell game. I am not the society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.” There it is. The brilliant paranoia. The sentences in love with their own drama.

On the cover of one of the books is a famous photograph of Didion, stick thin, hair blowing, brow furrowed, eyes hidden behind enormous black sunglasses, looking as if she needs a cigarette. She was the embodiment of everything cool in sixties journalism. Her writing was stylish, ironic, neurotic, and felt. Her sharp tone cut through the pretensions and weirdness of the times, but she also cried as she walked down the street and had migraine headaches and could barely get out of bed. That was
her persona—bruised, fragile, harboring a mysterious sorrow that had something, but not everything, to do with the world around her. Didion wrote about murderers and fanatics and five-year-olds doing acid. She wrote, “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” She did clipped irony and she did sentences swelling with portent. Hers was the quivering, sensitive sensibility of a generation, and still her words reverberate through our magazines and newspapers, her quirky, distinctive, oddly formal writing style borrowed and imitated, echoed and incorporated until it becomes simply the way we write. And it isn’t a fleeting fashion. Nearly forty years after her first essays appeared in places like
The Saturday Evening Post
, we still imitate Joan Didion, and if we don’t imitate Joan Didion, we imitate the people who imitate Joan Didion. Her rhythms are so mesmerizing, her insights so impressive, her personality so perversely appealing, that they lodge in the mind. It’s no different from the boom of British authors writing like Martin Amis, or novelists drawing on Hemingway and Mailer, or painters drawing on Corot, but it is testimony to the power of Didion’s style and the strength of her voice that it echoes into the casual pieces of this, the next century.