The Last Love Song (76 page)

The rough drafts of the book in the Bancroft Library confirm this: They start and restart with various narrators describing the social life of a colonial family living in Honolulu during World War II. Eventually, it became “clear that this was not the direction the novel was taking,” Didion said. The book proved recalcitrant. Just three days before finishing it, she was “weeping” over its pages.

Why did the novel go awry?

Henry Adams: “[I]f man should continue to set free the infinite forces of nature, and attain the control of cosmic forces on a cosmic scale”—as “man” had done in the Pacific, with nuclear testing—then “the consequences may be as surprising as the change of water to vapor, of the worm to butterfly, or radium to electrons.” “What Adams really meant was that in the physics-driven machine age, traditional historical narrative was losing its force—except perhaps in its conventional role to describe ‘the decline and fall' of any age,” says critic Timothy Parrish.

Didion felt this historical decline in her bones. Any novel she wrote would need to reflect it, or the novel would be false. Her original subject, “provincial manners,” was merely the fairy tale designed to disguise cracks in the national story. As a form, history, Adams said, “must submit to the final and fundamental necessity of Degradation.”

So in degradation—of political culture, morality, social ties, language, and provincial manners—Didion found the proper subject and style of her novel.

Not that it ceased to be a novel of manners, entirely. Michael Szalay, another perceptive critic, said Didion was writing about the social tensions “within the Democratic Party between the party's liberal wing and … ‘the American business elite.'” These tensions offered numerous “opportunities for high romance … on the periphery of a crumbling empire.”

Szalay saw a “thinly veiled Jackie Kennedy” in the portrait of Inez Christian (though Inez's drinking brings her closer to Teddy's wife, Joan) and claimed that her husband, Harry Victor, was “a left-leaning liberal transparently modeled after the Kennedys”—“less a character than an
ad hominem
attack on sixties liberalism.”

Whether or not Didion had the Kennedys in mind, the novel proved prophetic in tracing the decline of New Deal liberalism, embodied in the sixties by the youthful, grinning face of JFK, and the rise of the Democratic Party's more pragmatic clan, reflected in the Democratic Leadership Council, formed just one year after the publication of
Democracy.
The council set out to weaken the party's traditional ties to minority groups and to court the private sector more assiduously—all in an effort to counter the conservative ideologies spawned by Ronald Reagan's popularity. The council's vision would pave the way for a more centrist Democratic leader, Bill Clinton, in the 1990s—prefigured in the novel by Harry Victor's son, Adlai(!), who claims it is time for
his
generation to enter the dialgoue, and who is referred to by his sister Jessie, a budding novelist, as an “asshole.”

Didion claimed that her husband came up with the title
Democracy,
but it seems likely she had Henry Adams's 1879 novel of the same name in mind. As we've seen, Adams had always been a touchstone for Didion;
his
heroine, like Inez, becomes disillusioned with the experience of American democracy, and flees to an “older” world.

It seems not only likely but undeniable that Jessie, the troubled young girl in the Victor family, struggling with drug addiction, is another projection—like Marin in
A Book of Common Prayer
—of Didion's fears for Quintana. At one point, Jessie says to her mother, “Let me die and get it over with. Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.” In
Blue Nights,
Didion quotes Quintana as saying, “
Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.
”

Quintana was roughly thirteen to seventeen years old when Didion wrote
Democracy.
The book is dedicated to her and her cousin Dominique. By the time the novel appeared, one of them was dead and the other had predicted her early burnout and demise in a fragment of a novel written “just to show you.”

Democracy
's leading man, the shadowy Jack Lovett, moving in and out of Saigon, is clearly another projection of the rugged individual, the man of action, to whom Didion had always been drawn. The “Joan Didion” narrating the novel says, “After I finished my first novel and left
Vogue
and started reporting I actually ran into [Jack] quite a bit … he seemed to exempt me from his instinctive distrust of reporters.” Later, quite indirectly, the novel suggests that Jack has had an ongoing affair with an American reporter, a woman who “kept a copy of
Modern English Usage
on the kitchen table, and a paperback copy of
Homage to Catalonia
in the drawer of the bed table” (Orwell, we recall, being one of the writers “Joan Didion” taught while Saigon fell).

John Wayne was still the love of her life.

*   *   *

Mary McCarthy did not know what to make of
Democracy.
In an extensive discussion of it in
The New York Times Book Review,
she wrote, “[D]espite an appearance of factuality achieved by the author's total recall of names, middle names, [and] dates … ‘Democracy' is deeply mysterious, cryptic, enigmatic, like a tarot pack or most of Joan Didion's work. One way of looking at that work is to decide that it has been influenced by movies … Like the camera, [Didion's] mental apparatus does not think but projects images, very haunting and troubling ones for the most part, precisely because they are mute.”

Like a freshman English major, McCarthy went symbol hunting, hoping to find the key to unlock the book. She was deeply irritated by Didion's throwaway mention of the Tropical Belt Coal Company. McCarthy was convinced this was a literary reference, but she could not track it down. Conrad, Kipling, Graham Greene, Waugh? In a rather schoolmarmish letter, published in the
Times
two weeks later, John Gregory Dunne informed “Miss McCarthy” that the Tropical Belt Coal Company appeared on the first page of Conrad's
Victory.
Left unsaid was the fact that knowing this reference did not unlock the novel. Didion's whole point was that the modern American novelist can no longer depend on traditional references or methods to be keys of any sort: Our national politics have compromised language too thoroughly.

In stressing this point—a point McCarthy apparently missed—Didion unveiled a major contemporary influence on her work: V. S. Naipaul. “[J]argon ends by competing with jargon,” he had written. This insight is a better key to understanding
Democracy
than anything McCarthy scrabbled for in her review.

In a discussion of Naipaul's work in
The New York Review of Books,
Didion argued that Conrad's
Nostromo
predicted Naipaul's wish for himself as a writer: “The wisdom of the heart [has] no concern with the erection or demolition of theories,” Conrad wrote. “[It] has no random words at its command. The words it pronounces”—the words a writer should write—“have the value of acts of integrity, tolerance and compassion.”

This is precisely what Didion wished for herself.

Democracy
frets about words, their ubiquitous misuse in our public discourse. The novel is an intense, fractured, and groping attempt to rescue words and restore to them their “integrity.”

It is an ambitious project, probably doomed to failure—but in the land of paraleipsis, its intent is essential.
Democracy
is one of the finest achievements of twentieth-century American fiction.

5

At two o'clock in the morning, John Gregory Dunne circled a chilly room, glancing furtively at cold, dead bodies. With him was the Belgian-born film director Ulu Grosbard, who would bring Dunne's novel
True Confessions
to the screen. The novel included a morgue scene, so the men had asked a homicide detective to sneak them into the L.A. morgue—“absolutely against regulations,” Dunne said—to witness an autopsy and to see the “decomp room,” where the medical examiner stored rotting corpses. To counter the smell, Dunne smoked a cigar.

The homicide detective wanted to be a technical adviser on the film, in return for touring the men through the underworld.

It wasn't crime or L.A. noir that attracted Grosbard to Dunne's novel; it was the story of the brothers, the conflict between the cop and the priest, the ambitious ascetic and the softhearted cynic.

Jealous of his brother's social standing, enraged by his self-righteousness, the cop commits an act of betrayal. It results in his brother's banishment and exile to a lonely desert church, ending his hopes of becoming a bishop. Toward the close of his life—“the arteries to the pump are shot,” he says—the priest forgives his brother: “In a way you were my salvation … You made me remember something I forgot.” He has become a simple man, embracing everyday rituals—like Nick in his Oregon cabin.

The movie was released in 1981, a year before Dunne found himself on the edge of a body dump in El Salvador. It received mixed reviews—and a public slap from William F. Buckley Jr., who complained about Hollywood's pleasure in presenting corrupt priests on the screen—but its ambitious story line restored some credibility to the Didion-Dunne screenwriting team after the lucrative embarrassment of
A Star Is Born.
(Though it was Grosbard who persuaded the couple to draft a less plot-driven script. “Oddly enough, they had thrown out a lot of stuff from the book that I thought was important to the story,” he said—primarily the complexity of the sibling rivalry.)

At a studio-sponsored preview in Boston, the Dunnes received a dispiriting evaluation of the movie from the marketing team: The film would appeal best to people with sixteen or more years of education. In any case, they were guaranteed $150,000 up front, in addition to the purchase price, and a production bonus of $100,000.

In 1982, Dunne published his second novel,
Dutch Shea, Jr.,
to generally good reviews. Michiko Kakutani ran a lengthy profile of him in
The New York Times,
pulling him further out of Didion's shadow. “[He] has established a distinctive voice, at once colloquial and knowing, street-smart and darkly comic,” she wrote.

Dutch Shea, Jr.,
was about a sad-sack defense attorney haunted by the death of his daughter. In the end, while declaring a steady belief in God, he commits suicide. The story's details were drawn from Dunne's reporting on trials at the Santa Monica courthouse. Fears for Quintana and grief over his younger brother's final act gave the book its emotional depth.

“I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself,” Dunne said. His protagonists were his “mouthpieces”: “What I mean is, I have one character or sensibility which I project into situations”—situations gleaned on the beat while talking to other people about their professions.

At first blush, little seemed to link his genre novels to his wife's edgy, self-reflexive fictions, but the couple's friend Paul Schrader once argued that detective noir concerns the disillusionment and moral uncertainty of postwar American culture, “the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity and finally, psychic stability.” Here, husband and wife found grim common ground.

The commercial successes of
Dutch Shea, Jr.,
and the movie of
True Confessions
(defying the marketing research) boosted Dunne's already considerable confidence. He seemed to occupy more
space
than before: To a colleague, Lois Wallace complained she couldn't conduct any business for his wife without having him poke his nose into every detail.

Around this time, Didion took a high-handed tone in several letters to her agent, regarding her displeasure over
Democracy
's foreign rights: She wanted a deal different from the one the agency had negotiated. She didn't like being condescended to (as she perceived it) by young publisher's representatives who showed no regard for the many years she'd spent in the writing business. Wallace and the publisher's reps were stunned by her vehemence. Didion announced that she would not be available for an interview with
Time
magazine; she felt
Time
had quoted her out of context on a previous occasion, so she didn't feel like talking to them. She continued to believe Simon & Schuster was cheating her on royalties. Dunne's love of a good verbal fight seemed to be hardening his wife's already firm attitudes toward business.

In a letter one day, Dunne chastised Christopher Lehmann-Haupt for mentioning, in print, that “Miss Didion's dust-jacket image” on
Democracy
“was thought to be in questionable taste by a number of fastidious observers” (who these observers were, he never made clear). The picture, “credited to Miss Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, presents the author wading in a skirt and sweater that cling sufficiently to reveal somewhat more of the anatomy than one is accustomed to seeing in a dust-jacket portrait,” Lehmann-Haupt wrote. Didion's response to the controversy? “It just shows somebody standing in the water,” she told Lehmann-Haupt. “It has terrific water and it has terrific clouds, and it makes me look relaxed and pleasant, as opposed to the intense or worried way I usually look in photographs. It's hard for me to say what message it gives because I'm just not in the habit of analyzing myself a lot.” She said she had hung an enlargement of the photograph on the wall of her living room, next to other pictures taken by Quintana.

In his letter, Dunne wondered when the Nipple Comintern had become so almighty powerful—and when had Lehmann-Haupt joined the Legion of Decency? He explained that, as it happened, his wife had not worn underwear since college for reasons gynecological (and certainly not since her recent hysterectomy). For that matter, neither did his daughter wear underwear. He said he did not mention this to titillate, but to suggest that questions of taste should not be asked if the standards were those of “fastidious observers” twitching at the sight of a nipple through a sweater while ignoring (or buying the official propaganda about) mass murders and suicides.