The Last Love Song (74 page)

But after a while, once she gets used to the fact that terror “is the given of the place,” she discovers links among accumulated details. However unfathomable war may seem on the ground, in the nitrate fog of gunfire, threats, and disappearances, it does not erupt without reason. Its causes may be complex and hidden, but they are also specific. Step by step, Didion begins to understand the “mechanism[s] of terror.”

For example, she learns that “names are understood locally to have only a situational meaning, and the change of name is meant to be accepted as a change in the nature of the thing named.” If a government organization is reported to have committed human rights abuses, it simply changes its name as a means of escaping the charges. The Didion who wrote
Play It As It Lays
and the essay “The White Album,” suffering severe narrative doubt, would have been content to note her inability to keep a grip on the facts in the white noise of El Salvador's linguistic madness. But now she understands that
renaming
is a deliberate government “tactic,” an attempt to “solv[e] a problem” by obfuscation. She connects the dots between the ill-constructed surface and the narrative reasoning behind the scene. She starts to grasp that many, if not most, of the confusions of contemporary life are purposeful, serving particular political ends.

*   *   *

On June 28, 1982, after twelve days touring El Salvador, the Dunnes caught a TACA flight to Miami, transferred to Eastern Airlines, and spent the night in the Hotel Carlyle in New York. Sitting in the restaurant, staring at her blue pocket notebook, Didion felt as great a disorientation as she had ever known. It was accompanied by a sense of urgency. Almost immediately, she began to translate her notes into a narrative, working faster than she ever had. Maybe she was experiencing the magic realism of the astonishing Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez: a sense of existing simultaneously in two different worlds, the El Salvador of the U.S. press, holding free elections and observing human rights, and the El Salvador of the maggoty Puerto del Diablo.

Quintana flew from Los Angeles to join her parents at the Carlyle on June 29. On July 1, they all drove to Hartford in a rented car to visit Dunne's aunt Harriet. The following day, the Dunnes dropped Quintana at Bennington. She was sixteen now and had started to think about college. Bennington offered a monthlong summer program for high school students that provided the experience of living on a college campus along with opportunities for “refining … artistic expression, combining hands-on work with independent study and research.”

Quintana's parents had told her she had a “great ability to sense things that are going on, like observing other people the way a writer does.” She'd also developed an interest in photography. Recently, Kurt Vonnegut's wife, Jill Krementz, had interviewed and photographed her for a book called
How It Feels to Be Adopted,
featuring the stories of nineteen teenagers. Quintana was getting used to being a literary character, appearing in people's pages. Maybe it was time she
really
tried a book of her own—perhaps Bennington could help her decide.

In the meantime, her parents flew to Paris and London, Didion writing all the while. In New York, she'd received all sorts of material from Robert Silvers, news clippings and statistics, to help her with her story. She worked throughout the summer, having returned to Los Angeles in mid-July. Finally, she sent a draft manuscript to Christopher Dickey. He fact-checked it for her, corrected some of her spelling of Latin American place names and organizations, and declared it “terrific.”

Robert Silvers ran Didion's entire account of her trip in three installments in
The New York Review of Books
—on November 4, November 18, and December 2, 1982. Simon & Schuster offered her a $35,000 advance for the book, to be published the following March.

Michael Korda, Didion's editor at S&S, thought she had done for El Salvador what Graham Greene had done for Panama in his famous writings about Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera.

Didion was disappointed in the end. Though it had been “gratifying to write something so topical … and to produce it fast,” the book “had no impact,” she said. “Zero. None. It was discouraging.”

(In 1983 the State Department invited Didion to join a cultural exchange tour in Buenos Aires, apparently unaware of, or indifferent to, her take on its Latin American policies. She accepted the invitation.)

A number of reviewers and scholars—among them, Ken Smith and Georgia Johnston—scorned Didion's lack of objective reporting in
Salvador,
and the paucity of her historical and political knowledge. They complained that, as she had done in her writings about Bogotá and Hong Kong, she depended on local color and sensationalistic detail to jar the reader's emotions (though, in the book, Didion claimed she was not at all interested in achieving easy irony through “color”). She substituted particular anecdotes for more general ideological observations.

These criticisms stirred the debate, once more, between mainstream journalism and the New Journalism. In a useful overview, Sandra Braman, a teacher of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, compared Raymond Bonner's reporting for
The New York Times
from June 1982 to Didion's coverage of the events in El Salvador during the same narrow period. Bonner filed thirteen stories, on deadline, in June. “According to the text,” Braman writes, “Bonner collected facts by attending public ceremonies and press conferences, reading newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio (or reading CIA-supplied transcripts of broadcasts, per a description of the process provided by Didion), and then making phone calls or seeking personal interviews with officials to get their responses to statements made by other officials.” By contrast, Didion kept a running list of random notes and personal observations throughout the month. “She attended to information from her own senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch,” Braman says. “Her written and aural sources were extremely diverse.”

The “geographic source of news” for most of Bonner's dispatches was San Salvador and Washington, D.C., political capitals in the business of dispensing official information. By contrast, Didion “participated in informal and formal social gatherings, and absorbed facts during daily transactions such as at the drugstore or in a restaurant … quasi-official sites such as the morgue, and unofficial sites like a number of neighborhoods.”

Braman concludes, “Bonner and
The New York Times
rely almost exclusively upon facts that list numbers—of dead, of disappeared, of land titles, of votes—and names—the Land for the Tillers program, the election, the president. Didion, on the other hand, specifically notes the uselessness of this kind of fact in El Salvador: ‘All numbers in El Salvador tended to materialize and vanish and rematerialize in a different form, as if numbers denoted only the “use” of numbers, an intention, a wish, a recognition that someone, somewhere, for whatever reason, needed to hear the ineffable expressed as a number.'” Bonner's accounts were “disjointed.” “Two kinds of stories appeared: Ray Bonner reported on the violence, and the next day there was an anonymous story repeating a State Department statement that the killing had declined.” For Didion, “[c]ollecting facts was a 24-hour job and occurred whether a situation was explicitly reportorial or not.”

As Braman says, whatever one thinks of the virtues of traditional reporting versus the techniques of the New Journalism—or even if one acknowledges the benefits of both—it's impossible to ignore the fact that corporate news outlets exist primarily to disseminate “the passage of bureaucratically recognized events through administrative procedures.” For better or worse, subjective accounts remind us that human life is a “perpetual frontier.”

Either way, the problem remains: finding a “diction that won't be outflanked by events,” in the words of Terrence Des Pres.

*   *   *

During the war in El Salvador—perhaps as in any war—imagination may have been scarcer, and more necessary, than objectivity.

In a remarkable book entitled
The Body in Pain,
Elaine Scarry writes that “what is quite literally at stake in the body in pain is the making and unmaking of the world.” Torture, she says, “not only deconstructs the ‘products' of the imagination, but deconstructs the act of imagining itself.” This is true in the case of an individual body and it is true in the case of a country, especially when tortured, dismembered bodies are left as messages to survivors that they are not allowed to imagine an alternative to oppression: “If you bury this body, the same will happen to you,” the Salvadoran death squads warned intimidated citizens.

Scarry claims that imagination's “labor” is “centrally bound up with the elementary moral distinction between hurting and not hurting.” Imagination is “simply, centrally, and indefatigably at work on behalf of sentience.”

So when Joan Didion arrives in El Salvador wearing monster glasses and a floppy sun hat, it is easy to distrust her motives; easy, later, to find instances of political and cultural naïveté in her account of what she saw; but in her act of witnessing and imagining (with unrelenting intelligence), she counters the forces of hurting and the void. She reconstructs a dismembered world, a severed narrative, the way the priests and nuns at the Maryknoll mission would reassemble the hacked-apart victims of the death squads, tenderly placing the bloody stumps in proper order on the ground.

3

Didion was adamant that she not be confused with an investigative reporter. On the verge of publishing
Miami,
in August 1987, she wrote an angry letter to Michael Korda and Lois Wallace, saying she had just received three copies of the bound galleys from Simon & Schuster and found the back copy inaccurate and damaging to the book: a publicist had declared
Miami
a work of investigative journalism liable to make headline news. Didion objected: She had written a book of observation and reflection, and to mischaracterize her in this fashion, or to suggest
Miami
was filled with breaking stories (her whole point was that people failed to acknowledge what they already knew), was to toss her to hostile reviewers who would scream they had been duped. From now on, she said, Simon & Schuster should talk about the book it
had,
not the book it might have wanted. If the final jacket copy said anything about headline news, she was going to insist it be reprinted. (The final copy mentioned only “masterful reporting.”)

Didion granted James Atlas an interview at her house in Brentwood for a
Vanity Fair
profile timed to coincide with the book's appearance. With Atlas, too, she took great pains not to be misunderstood. “I'm crazy about Miami,” she told him. “I like the weather, the light, the warm soft rain on Biscayne Bay; I like the Cubans, the liveliness of the scene.”

None of this made it into the book. Still, hers was a
personal
take on the city: That's what she had to make clear.

What
was
in the book? Well, for one thing, Atlas said, “I came away from [it] with the distinct suspicion that [John] Kennedy's assassination was set in motion by members of the Cuban community operating out of Miami.”

“I think there
was
a conspiracy,” she admitted. As she spoke, she leafed through
The Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations
on her coffee table. “I don't have any idea who instigated it, but the way people were thinking encouraged whatever did happen. There's a kind of collective amnesia about the whole thing. The Warren Commission constructed its mission to be restoring equilibrium. No one really wanted to know.”

Now we have intimations of connections between Colombian cocaine cartels and the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, she said. All part of the same political culture.

Perhaps. Still, “I find the incongruity hard to ignore,” Atlas said to her. What does any of this have to do with
you
? Why leave your “orderly world,” with its “fresh-cut flowers on the piano,” to chase down these phantoms in their military fatigues?

She became quite exercised:

“I was irritated that so many people have found it easy to overlook what's going on, to live in the comfort zone,” she ventures, clasping her hands and gazing down at the floor. Clearly agitated, she gets up and goes over to sit in a chair by the fireplace. “I suppose I'm interested in … Washington … um … Casey … It's quite inchoate, as you can guess.” She subsides in her chair and cries, “John!”

Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, appears. “Help me,” she implores him. “What is the interest here?”

Large, genial, enthusiastic, Dunne settles down on a sofa and considers. “I think it began with an interest in tropical climates. That soft underbelly that runs from Brownsville, Texas, to Miami. Here.” He shows me on a map.

Inchoate or not, Didion's vision had already convinced Atlas. “Ever since she made her reputation in the late sixties … Didion has been on the hot trail of the
Zeitgeist,
” he wrote. “In a way, she's defined it … [I]n
Salvador
(1983), she foresaw where the U.S. government would next commit itself to a disastrous foreign policy in the name of anti-Communism … it's turned out to be prophetic. What was happening in El Salvador then is happening in Nicaragua now.”

In
Miami,
Didion asserts that an “underwater narrative” drives the shattered surface of life in South Florida, in a city neither here nor there (geographically, Miami belongs to the United States, but culturally, spiritually—even in the “hips and décolletage” of the women—it feels like Latin America). In its earliest passages, the book evokes the “liquidity” and “cognitive dissonance” of the place, establishing the difficulty of locating a coherent story.