The Last Love Song (2 page)

2

In
Political Fictions
, Didion opened several essays with what Susan Sontag called the “generalizing impulse.” For example:

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.

And:

No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.

Rhetorically, these openings echo two of the world's best-known literary beginnings, in Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
and Leo Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina.
Listen:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

And:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Didion's writing is more specific and personal, but like Austen and Tolstoy, she presents a confident speaker with a solid worldview offering verities about human nature and culture. That these verities are not true (or not
necessarily
true) is beside the point. The effort is to create a social context in which the characters we are about to encounter must be considered, and reveals the narrator's values. Since views of human nature and culture are notoriously subjective, such pronouncements are meant to be quibbled with, poked, and prodded.

Let me amend my earlier statement, then. That such verities are not true
is
the point.

In
Political Fictions,
what was most striking to longtime readers of Joan Didion was the presence of
confidence
and
verities
in her prose. After all, this was a woman who wrote in 1968, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but at some point, amid rising crime rates, a televised war, and a culture experimenting with sex and drugs, Didion began to “doubt the premises of all the stories” she had ever told herself. As an adult American, she said, she thought she “was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning.'” With cult murders in the newspapers and rock songs on the radio insisting “love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation,” she found she could no longer “believe in the narrative and in the narrative's intelligibility.” At various times, between 1966 and 1971, she said,

I watched Robert Kennedy's funeral on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai. I reread all of George Orwell on the Royal Hawaiian Beach, and I also read, in the papers that came one day late from the mainland, the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. The child, whose fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for “a long time.” Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.

Didion's
The White Album
explored American violence, American apathy, and American sexual mores in the 1960s and was filled with anecdotes—about the Black Panthers, Charles Manson, the Doors—that did not fit into the overarching story, familiar to us from old-school history books and popular culture, of American Promise and the American Dream. By using a collage structure and halting, repetitive sentences, Didion disoriented readers until we began to experience the senselessness she claimed to have felt during those years.

An awareness of narrative's limits characterized her immediate post-1960s fiction—the novels
Play It As It Lays
(1970) and
A Book of Common Prayer
(1977), which, like
The White Album,
were fragmented, hallucinatory, and obsessively repetitive. But with her nonfiction of the 1980s—
Salvador
(1983) and
Miami
(1987)—the attentive reader could detect a tentative, born-again belief that narratives, particularly overarching narratives that tell us how to live,
do
exist still,
do
make sense still, though more and more we have to look for them in unlikely places.

Salvador, Miami,
and two later novels,
Democracy
(1984), about the fall of Saigon, and
The Last Thing He Wanted
(1996), covering the Iran-Contra years, prepared Didion's readers for the newly secure voice, reminiscent of her first novel, we encountered in
Political Fictions.
From 1963's
Run River
to a series of narrative breakdowns to the reinvigorated certitude of
Political Fictions,
Didion tracked American history as a reporter, novelist, and ardent reader, finding, losing, then finding again the stories imposed on our nation by time, history, and culture. Her late-in-life memoirs,
The Year of Magical Thinking
(2005) and
Blue Nights
(2011), investigations of aging, grief, and death, showed us more intimately
how we live,
and traced the inevitable life path of most Americans.

3

We think we know the woman behind the books. In her reportage, as in her essays and memoirs, Didion used her experiences to establish contexts and combine our national and individual stories. From the first, her work insisted that a single life contained the life of our times.

To discover what we
do
know about the woman, let's note a few things about the writer. First, recall her example of “the narrative,” a well-known fable that tells us how to live. In Didion's version of the story, the princess is not caged in a castle or an evil stepmother's house, but in a “consulate.” By slipping this unexpected word into a familiar trope, Didion highlights her literary sensibility. She doesn't care about magic kingdoms. She'd rather tour the embassies, the public squares surrounded by barricades and armored tanks. If
this
voice were to say, “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” you'd know to pull on your army boots instead of your glass slippers. The truth you'd be chasing would be located more readily on a military test site than in a ballroom. And it would hardly be universal. Every writer's verities—Austen's, Tolstoy's, or Didion's—have their boundaries and particular terrains.

Second, Didion's “images” are barely images at all. She tells us she watched Robert Kennedy's funeral “on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.” “Funeral” and “verandah” are rarely sentence partners; Didion provides no visual detail and, more crucially, no context to lessen the strangeness of the link. What was she doing at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel during Robert Kennedy's funeral? Was she alone? Did a crowd gather before a television set to watch the ceremony in sorrow? Was the TV propped on a wrought-iron table in the sun? What is the point of teasing us with the hotel if not to deliberately disorient the reader?

Third, the story Didion offers of the mother leaving her daughter near the last Bakersfield exit on I-5 is a variation of a particular American narrative. When the Joads left the road in John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath,
they exited near Bakersfield, hoping to discover the “pastures of plenty.” The famous final scene in Steinbeck's novel depicts a new mother suckling a starving man like an infant, an image of maternal generosity undercut by Didion's freeway anecdote. The shocking story of the I-5 mom is made even more powerful, almost mythic, by the ghost narrative of
The Grapes of Wrath
haunting it. Paradise has rotted rapidly since the Joads. More broadly, Didion plays against the whole genre of American road stories, all of which, from Kerouac's
On the Road
to television's
Route 66,
hearken back one way or another to Steinbeck's novel, which played against the notion of the West as the final frontier.

I mention these examples to demonstrate that even as Didion frets about narratives in tatters, she is weaving narrative. She is carefully plotting a story, manipulating details, with a clear direction and a sense of who's in charge—Joan Didion, jittery, uncertain, but vivid and speaking with a distinctive Western voice. Her collages are not stitched of random scraps. Her roads do not dead-end. Her narrative breakdowns are mirages. Every piece fits, often in more or less conventional patterns.

4

In the foreword to
Political Fictions,
Didion tells us she spent her childhood and high school years among “conservative California Republicans” in Sacramento, “in a postwar boom economy.” In other words, she grew up in a well-connected family surrounded by Okies and others like them who had weathered the Grapes of Wrath, who had managed to escape the fruit fields and achieve a modest prosperity, buying a few fields of their own, working for shipbuilders or aerospace companies or on test-site ranges or some other outgrowth of California's burgeoning defense industries. American Promise—in the shape of the war and its stimulus to the economy—had directly benefited these families and those, like the Didions, with serious ties to the land. They all had reason to believe in “the narrative” as the Cold War heated up and American consulates spread throughout regions we had liberated or conquered. As David Beers, the son of a fighter pilot, writes in his memoir,
Blue Sky Dream, Sputnik
was the “lucky star” for postwar kids in California, “its appearance in the darkness a glimmering, beeping announcement that we would not know want.” In the 1950s, the GI Bill, housing loans, and government spending on computer development, aerospace, and foreign investment created what Beers calls the “Blue Sky Tribe,” a new middle class that worshiped a “God [endorsing] progress, personal and national,” and that believed it would live happily ever after in spotless, crime-free suburbs. Those invited to join the tribe—the people among whom Didion was raised—flourished in the new economy and voted conservatively in order to maintain it until the dream faltered in the 1980s.

In an early essay entitled “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Didion sketched another version of this particular Western narrative. “John Wayne rode through my childhood,” she wrote, determining “forever the shape of certain of [my] dreams.” He suggested “a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free … at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

Later, when Didion claimed narrative lost its intelligibility for her, she was not speaking abstractly, as so many of her contemporaries were, about the craziness of the 1960s, the mass upheavals attending the Vietnam War protests, the sexual revolution, or the civil rights movement, though these events touched her. She was mourning the loss of a very specific story with its bright river and its cottonwoods, its silvery satellite stars beaming riches down on a tamed and temperate West.

Nor were the causes of her losses abstract, nothing as soggy as the notice our nation has borne in every decade of its existence that America had “lost its innocence” (how many times can innocence be lost?). No. Didion is as precise in her reporting as she is in her rhetoric and phrasing. Things stopped fitting for her when John Wayne, who was always and forever “supposed to give the orders,” got cancer. An unexpected crack in the narrative. “I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western,” she laments, “and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne.”

Still later, she was “shocked and to a curious extent personally offended by the enthusiasm with which California Republicans … jettisoned an authentic conservative [Goldwater]” and rushed to “embrace Ronald Reagan,” a less principled man, in her view. She registered as a Democrat, the first and perhaps the only member of her family ever to do so, she says. She does not list her problems with Reagan but makes it clear that, for all his Western posturing, he was simply no John Wayne.

For a while, after a dream fails, nothing seems to make sense. But Didion has never presented herself as a wide-eyed naïf. She admits that even as she fell for the John Wayne mystique, she understood that the world was “characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities.”

Her prose is filled with little dodges like this: a subtle certainty in the face of doubt, hinting that we do not know the woman behind the books as well as we think we do. In part, the impulse to hedge reflects her Western upbringing (she comes from a family of gamblers). “I think people who grew up in California have more tolerance for apocalyptic notions,” she once said, thinking of earthquakes, floods, and fires. “However, mixed up with this tolerance for notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is the belief that the world can't help but get better and better. It's really hard for me to believe that everything doesn't improve, because thinking like that was just so much part of being in California.” More deeply, the paradoxes in her writing suggest her
real
interest is language, its inaccuracies and illusions, the way words imply their opposites, and the ways stories, particularly stories that tell us how to live, get told or don't. For all her fascination with American politics, the ostensible subject of much of her writing, George Orwell's politics of language grip her most. There is a trace of the literary critic in all of Didion's fiction just as there are echoes of nineteenth-century novelists—the omniscient, moral voice—in her later essays. And if, in the 1960s, her love of narrative structure led to a sense of betrayal (after all, one cannot be betrayed without first loving intensely), then that same love has allowed her to rediscover a coherent and ongoing American story.