The Last Love Song (5 page)

3

Snakes slithered around the Didion family cemetery when Didion was a girl but rarely ventured near the tombstones until she was a teen and vandals began ruining the graves, an activity that reached alarming proportions in the early 1980s, when someone dug up and stole a skull. The Matthew Kilgore Cemetery, east of Sacramento in Rancho Cordova, which became a rocket-manufacturing community for Aerojet General following World War II, was named after Didion's great-great-great-grandfather. He left Ohio and settled in Sacramento in 1855. From him was descended Ethel Mira Reese, who gave birth to Didion's father, Frank, on January 1, 1908. Two hundred and forty-five graves pocked the land near the American River Grange, among pyracantha, oleander, and wild blackberries, on what had once been Matthew Kilgore's 154-acre farm.

At the Kilgore Cemetery, Eduene Didion, dropping her usual diffidence, impressed upon her daughter the meaning of being a fifth-generation Californian: It lay in the sacrifices etched into the stones with the bold strokes of chisels; in words such as
faith, fidelity, courage,
and
integrity.
Didion's ancestors had come for the bounties of the land, spilled their blood among its blooms, and their burial in its soil anointed it—or so the story went. As an adult, Didion would learn that the family cemetery had been sold amid ugly bankruptcy proceedings, the way so many ranches in the valley had been subdivided and auctioned off. So much for sacred ground. In November 2011, recounting for a Los Angeles audience the day her mother told her of the sale, Didion choked up. It was the “selling of what I had preferred to think of as heritage,” she said: the end of the fairy tale, “a total collapse of the narrative.” As part of that collapse, an auto-salvage yard, America Auto Wreckers, would set up shop next to Sacramento's Home of Peace Cemetery, antifreeze leaking and spreading into some of the oldest Jewish graves west of the Mississippi River; in the mid-1950s, the remains of more than five thousand pioneers would be exhumed from the Helvetia Cemetery and dumped in mass graves in order to accommodate urban growth. The old headstones would be scattered in people's backyards for children to play among. Perhaps at this point, Didion's mother began to relinquish what little faith she had had in the promise of California. Her depression grew, along with a grim recalcitrance. In succeeding years, she would threaten to leave the state “in a minute. Just
forget
it,” Didion recalled.

As a child, though, Didion learned from her mother to revere the pioneer past, to bear solemnly the memories of those who had come before. Eduene may have doubted anything was worth recording, but as a mother she had to stick to family rituals; if nothing else, the family's social standing depended on an allegiance to the past. It was a descendant's duty to preserve the elders in the form of inscriptions, jottings in journals, as well as in the weavings and quilts, the smoothed rocks and blue glass bottles they left behind, objects lining the dark rooms of Didion's childhood homes. A quilt, a page of prose: Both were talismans, reminders of what is and is no more. Perhaps this is why Didion never kept diaries of her own: She was taught that writing was not self-expression or indulgence; it was history.

At the Kilgore, kneeling in the shadows of granite spires, Didion saw the costs of where she was from, the losses of so many parents and their need to mark the days of their children: “Our darlings,” one year and nine weeks, two years and ten months, stillborn, here and gone.

*   *   *

Writing did not get more precise than in tombstone inscriptions. Beloved Daughter, Wife, and Mother, Born, Died. Facts, as lightning-sharp as the strike of a snake.

When she was twelve, and had been scrawling in notebooks for six or seven years, Didion discovered similarly sharp writing in the work of Ernest Hemingway. She had been going to the local library with a note from her mother saying it was okay for her to check out “adult” books (she had free reign in the library but “wasn't allowed to listen to the radio because there were scary things on it”—that is, fallout from World War II). Mostly, she read biographies. “I think biographies are very urgent to children,” she would say later. They “told how you got from the helpless place I was to being Katherine [
sic
] Cornell, say.” But then she read the first paragraph of
A Farewell to Arms.
She took the book home and
typed
the first paragraph of
A Farewell to Arms
on a solid Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. Four sentences, four commas, one hundred and twenty-six words, only twenty-three of which contained more than a single syllable. For the first time, another writer's rhythms filled her like a tide and she gave herself to the motion. It was a solemn cadence, like something you'd hear at a funeral. As in the crossing stories she'd first encountered, much of Hemingway's power came from leaving out information. “In the late summer of
what
year?
What
river,
what
mountains,
what
troops?” she asked herself. Unlike the pioneer mythmakers, Hemingway avoided abstractions. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice…” he wrote. “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory…” He went on to say, “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” This was a new perspective on the past—what would the stories really say if you scratched out the words
sacrifice
and
courage
? If you stripped the stories to their place names? As she read more Hemingway—teaching herself typing skills by copying his “magnetic” words—she toughened her style. She began to hear a stronger music, to see a grander purpose, in writing, beyond just keeping records, though the impulse to note everything remained, along with the storm and the figure at its center. As Virginia Reed, a Donner Party survivor, wrote in a letter to one of her cousins, a passage Didion cherished and might have claimed as a credo, “I have not wrote you half the trouble we've had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is.”

 

Chapter Two

1

The California of Didion's girlhood, during the Depression, offered enough open space to appear to be Eden still, especially to a child. The Sierra, where the Donners met their limits, still defied people's efforts to tame them. The moody weather of the Sacramento Valley, which dictated the inhabitants' physical and emotional rhythms, proclaimed daily its uncontrollability. In and around the Donner Pass, North America witnessed its heaviest snowfall, an average of thirty-seven feet a year. This formed an icy reservoir on the Sierra's western exposure, which melted annually around the first of May, filling and sometimes flooding the Feather, Bear, Yuba, American, and Cosumnes Rivers, offsetting the baked summers, nurturing wheat fields, rice paddies, and orchards, sprouting berries, sugar beets, melons, plums, tomatoes, peaches, pears, walnuts, olives, cherries, and grapes.

But this Eden was industrial. Silver irrigation pipes sprawled among wheat stalks sliced by whirring steel blades—and anyway, the wheat was beginning to thin. Bad planting practices had exhausted the valley soil. When Didion was a girl, the crusading writer Carey McWilliams lamented California's “factories in the fields”; his calls, in newspapers and books, for better care of the land and the people who worked it guided John Steinbeck's hand as he drafted
The Grapes of Wrath.
In the pioneer myths Didion grew up on, no mention was ever made of the gold rush as a technological enterprise, a drive to develop the mechanics of moving water across hostile terrain to support the miners. In her teenage years, Didion would hear from her mother, her teachers, and Sacramento's leaders that newcomers, the federal government, and corporate bosses from the East were ruining California's once-perfect environment, but, in fact, the land was already an android, artificial tendrils fused with the natural, sustaining an unholy agricultural system.

That life in the valley was not pure or preordained was impressed most directly on Didion by Sacramento's levees. From its founding, and through its early iterations, Sacramento City showed itself to be, in many ways, a poor idea. River floods devastated the place in 1849 and again in 1861 (perhaps one of the reasons Mark Twain decided not to stick around writing for
The Sacramento Union
). By early January 1862, twenty-three inches of rain had fallen in less than a month, melting some of the Sierra snowpack and driving most of the townspeople from their homes, among boxes, rotted goods, and debris, to a high spot known as Poverty Ridge, where squatting miners used to pitch their tents. A local paper, the
Marysville Daily Appeal,
reported that “stock of every kind could be seen passing downstream, some alive and struggling and bellowing or squealing for life.”

By 1934, the year of Didion's birth, the levees had significantly reduced flooding. The Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River would be completed in 1945, emerging from within a grid of steelwork, cables, and scaffolding. The Wright Act, decades old by the time Didion was born, had chipped away at the natural flow of water by allowing farmers whose land did not abut rivers to organize irrigation districts to divert the moisture they needed from one area to another. Still, details such as those in the
Daily Appeal
of terrified cattle swept in torrents through the city seemed to belong to the present. Despite development, new technologies, and changing land uses, the politics and folklore of what some people still called Sacramento City ensured a living past, especially for a child with an imagination as vivid as Didion's. As a former boomtown, hunkered between Sierra miners digging for gold and San Francisco merchants spinning gold into ephemeral, expensive trinkets, Sacramento had developed a tough, opportunistic, and insular society. It was an overwhelmingly male society in the beginning, a town of squatters, gamblers, and dreamers lured by gold. In Didion's time, Sacramento still bore the traces and scars of this origin. Initially, the scarcity of women led men to idealize them, except for the ladies actually in their midst, often forced into prostitution, the ambivalence apparent in surviving saloon songs from the 1840s, such as “Sacramento Gals”:

They're pretty gals, I must confess,

Nipping 'round, around, around;

And “Lordy-massy” how they dress,

As they go nipping 'round

On J Street …

The women's celebrated style boasted Sacramento's aspirations. It was a spot where rural treasure, extracted from the mountains, was forged by the magic of capital into luxuries destined for the drawing rooms of San Francisco. And each night that song could have been sung in a tavern called Didion's on Front Street, frequented by eye-catching women, and run by Frank Didion's great-grandfather.

As the initial crush of the gold rush receded, Sacramento's residents longed for more women to “civilize” the place, to provide moral ballast to the men's excesses. This longing, shaped into an unspoken civil policy, created a pinched and segregated social structure that lingered in the city well into Didion's maturity. In the 1950s, when Sacramento tried to annex several outlying communities, these communities resisted, in part because their citizens viewed Sacramento as a “cold” place, repressive and tolerant of brutal police tactics. The influx of women as a moral army also set the city's development patterns: The family unit was the pacifying force. Unlike farm life, which required many hands to do the work, city life, more centralized and diverse, operated as a series of interconnected hives. Subdivided lots and single-family dwellings checkerboarded the valley, making the buying and selling of real estate Sacramento's
real
business, and eventually giving Didion's family much of its income. Downtown, lavish hotels served as meeting spaces and stages for men just back from the mountains to strut their adventurousness. They struck the poses of literary figures from dime novels, newspaper stories, and railroad advertising circulars, which had seduced many of them into coming west in the first place. John Wayne prototypes: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett (whom Wayne would one day play in a movie), Kit Carson, John Charles Frémont, the self-made man. While women kept order at home, men burnished their reputations as good-hearted hell-raisers or courageous loners ready to ride off into the sunset. Impromptu gambling halls came and went; the spirit of speculation was as thick as contagion. From the first, a boisterous, transient population pushing against pleas for greater order made nostalgia the city's dominant tone. As early as the 1850s, a newspaper editorial by E. C. Ewer mourned the loss of the good old days, “when the miners paid for everything in dust—when the red-shirted gentry were the nabobs of the land … Those days have passed, and with the change has come idleness, vagrancy, and coin as the circulating medium.” This is the tone Didion would adopt for her first novel,
Run River,
about valley life, in 1963.

As she admitted later, the tone was not quite suitable. From the start, Sacramento was an ornery place with plenty of dead zones. Its government plazas displayed a ruthless efficiency of design, outpacing the politicians' capacities for matching it. That so many capital cities, where raw deals get made to enrich the whole, are ugly and lifeless at their cores reflects one of our oldest animal instincts: You don't want to eat where you shit.

2

Right away, Didion dreamed of getting out—or so she remembered years later. In fact, she remained fond of many places in and around Sacramento. Nothing awful occurred in her early childhood, but it was often a gloomy time spent in still, dark rooms. The first house she knew was on Highland Avenue, in a neighborhood now called Curtis Park, northeast of downtown. Her parents shared the house with her mother's folks. “The area was a streetcar suburb, built out between the 1880s and the 1920s,” William Burg, the city's most ardent historian, told me. The no. 6 trolley cut through the neighborhood, past acres of hops and mint, ferrying a mix of laborers, bankers, and furniture salesmen; at night, just as mothers prepared children for bed, the outbound Twenty-first Street car clattered past tightly curtained windows. The houses, whether late Victorians, bungalows, or Tudors, had new sewer lines and were already being shaped by forces that would radically alter the look of Sacramento in just a few years. The most striking feature of the Didions' 1923 house was its massive carport. In fact, the streetcars were all but done. In 1947, Pacific Gas & Electric would sell off the last of its trolleys, and suburban growth exploded with the auto. The Didions had a large lot, elevated in case of floods, and the house (boxy, with thin windows blocking more light than they let in) sat well away from the street. But traffic was increasing. The Sacramento Aviation Company was expanding its operations here, recruiting more workers and their families, another sign of things to come.