The Importance of Being Joan, Part 2
 by William D. Sheldon

A FAIR NUMBER OF JOAN DIDION'S ESSAYS HAVE BEEN COLLECTED IN SEVERAL VOLUMES OVER THE YEARS. The first, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1971), won Didion considerable acclaim. The essays are brief (all but the title essay), terse, full of political ironies, personal insights and the beginning of a social critique. Themes are sketched here (the "golden" life of California, the conversion of political analysis to simplistic jingoism, several forms of self delusion) that grow and flourish in each successive decade of writing.

There are pieces that are completely surprising. "John Wayne: A Love Song," for example. It is surprising because at the time of the essay, Wayne was considered by many to be the single most recognizable symbol of America's infatuation with the mindless macho mystique. To others, he was a symbol of masculine strength, nationalist pride and loyalty. Didion is infatuated, if not with the image, certainly with the man behind it. She observed him first when she was a child seeing his movies, then as an adult watching him on the set of his 165th movie, and later with her husband and John and Pilar Wayne at dinner.

Seen as the beginning of her adult examination of the roles of men and women, this piece has an astoundingly tender approach. The (intentional) irony is held at bay. Her recitations of completely genuine, simple "manly" banter among the cast of The Sons Of Katie Elder draw the reader into a world that is hard to imagine 40 years later. At least until the last page of the essay when, at the conclusion of the filming, the manly illusion created in the making of this Western ends with director Henry Hathaway jarringly announcing "I get through here all I'm gonna do is take Seconal to a point just this side of suicide." Maybe John Wayne's appeal at the end of an era of make-believe American wholesomeness is that he would not be saying such a thing -- either in the movie (no matter how bad his character was supposed to be) or in real life. Didion uses him to contrast so stunningly with the modern children playing at being adults in California in the 1960s.

In "Marrying Absurd," she captures the Las Vegas wedding scene in five pages. It is a fine example of her short essays. This passage I love:

"One hundred and seventy-one couples were pronounced man and wife in the name of Clark County and the State of Nevada that night, sixty-seven of them by a single justice of the peace, Mr. James A. Brennan. Mr. Brennan did one wedding at the Dunes and the other sixty-six in his office, and charged each couple eight dollars. One bride lent her veil to six others. 'I got it down from five to three minutes,' Mr. Brennan said later of his feat. 'I could've married them en masse, but they're people, not cattle. People expect more when they get married.'"

It is the title essay that makes this book a part of American history. Didion went to San Francisco in 1967 and, in her words, made a few friends. She spent her time getting to know a lot of runaway children, some of whom had children of their own. Children who were making vague future plans, taking a lot of drugs, describing the effects and availability of everything from peyote to acid to crystal meth in candid detail. She talked to the people who were trying to help out these children, and to the police. Ironically, the San Francisco police would not allow her to interview any officers or administrators or anyone who could shed light on what they saw as the problems. The San Francisco police understood very well that the problems were drugs and juveniles, rape and child abuse. But in those days (is it different now?) the "press" was not welcome in America's trouble spots.

The Dead ñ Grateful, that is -- are present in the essay. Didion goes to the park where they are rehearsing and talks to their teenaged groupies. She meets a lot of people, many in couples, who are laid back or jittery or angry or preoccupied with the effects of their current acid trip. In the end, she is taken to meet someone who her guide says "will blow your mind." It is meant to be positive. Who she meets is a five-year-old girl who tells her she is in "high kindergarten," whose mother gives her both acid and peyote, who has a crush on Marty in the Jefferson Airplane and Bob in the Grateful Dead, who just got over the measles and wants a bicycle for Christmas. Didion records all of this without saying a judgmental word. Rereading it 20 years after my first encounter, I continue to find this essay chilling.

There are 20 essays in the book, most of them short, many previously published in The New York Times Magazine or Holiday or The American Scholar or Vogue. An odder collection does not exist, at least not one of this caliber.

The second collection, The White Album (1979), is a more mature work. By the time of its publication, Didion was well established as both a novelist and an essayist. The themes that begin to emerge are powerful: the absence of ethical judgment in the nation's "moral leaders," the attempt to gain control over the seeming meaninglessness of life through various means, the significance of that control for the individual and for society.

In an age in which belief could be fatal, Didion's essays gave me a life-saving measure of doubt. The late '60s and early '70s raised the dark romanticism of drugs, alcohol and narcissism to the level of a religion. Every self-destroying celebrity had hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of fans (short for fanatics). Many of the fans emulated the worst of their idols' behaviors. While it may be true that some sane, sober young person listened to Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix in quiet reflection for the pure joy of the music, no one can deny that, for many, Joplin's was the music for getting drunk as Hendrix was for smoking pot or dropping acid.

There was a magnificent freedom for the teens of this age. Self-discovery and awakening were the hopeful messages, along with brotherhood, ecology and working together for peace. Drugs and alcohol frequently fueled our parties and brought out the weaknesses in our immature personalities. Teens are impressionable and rebellious at the same time -- an inescapable feature of the transition from child to adult. In Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones, we found pied pipers. Obviously, the majority of us survived, but drugs, booze and the dark self-centered thinking of the age took an enormous toll.

In The White Album's title essay, Didion pastes together snapshots of some of the stars of music and radical politics stripped of glamour and hype, exposed in the ordinary light of day. She keeps her judgements to a minimum, allowing her collection of scenes to speak for itself. Jim Morrison, banal, inconsiderate of his friends and bandmates; Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver in and out of jail, trying to make history and social revolution, incapable of grasping the magnitude of their failures; Linda Kasabian (one of the Manson "family") facing trial, preparing to provide testimony for the prosecution in the murders of Sharon Tate et al., worrying about what dress to wear.

"Many people I know in Los Angeles," Didion wrote, " believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when the word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like a brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."

Didion's own persona in these essays is observant, self-conscious, fearing that she is too confused or too many steps behind to see the meaning of the moment. Her most frequent device is juxtaposition of events that create a non-tension, a fascinating irony bordering on the surreal or at least the absurd. She captures the strangeness of the times and the almost-extraordinariness of the people -- that is, the ordinariness of the people at the heart of such extraordinary but senseless events.

I would not have read a book about or by Bishop Pike, either in the '70s or now. Yet Didion's essay portrait, "James Pike, American," is captivating. The following passage summarizes a crucial point in this very influential man's youth:

"After Hollywood High there was college with the Jesuits, at Santa Clara, at least until James repudiated the Catholic Church and convinced his mother that she should do the same. He was eighteen at the time, but it was characteristic of both mother and son to have taken this adolescent 'repudiation' quite gravely: they give the sense of having had no anchor but each other, and to have reinvented their moorings every day."

She compares Bishop Pike to Gatsby "coming up against the East. One also thinks of Tom Buchanan and his vast carelessness. (Some 25 years later, in Santa Barbara when the Bishop of California's mistress swallowed 55 sleeping pills, he appears to have moved her from his apartment into her own before calling an ambulance, and to have obscured certain evidence before she died.)" In comparing real life, real people to well-known fictional characters and allowing the reader to reach his or her own judgment, Didion appeals to the literate reader, momentarily ties the real world and the literary world together. She gives the reader an unexpected chill in setting out the utter callousness of this famous "spiritual" leader.

Didion was not Catholic, but had married a Catholic. She was curious about Pike's view and read his Pastoral tract titled "If You Marry Outside Your Faith." Her reaction:

"I was struck dumb by Bishop Pike's position, which appeared to be that I had not only erred, but had every moral right and obligation to erase this error by regarding my marriage as null and any promises I had made as invalid. In other words the way to go was to forget it and start over. Ö Here was a man who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over, to shed women when they became difficult and allegiances when they became tedious and simply move on, dismissing those who quibbled as petty and 'judgmental' and generally threatened by his superior and more dynamic view of human possibility."

Didion picks up this theme of shedding loyalties, friends, values and personal history in several of her novels. For example, Inez Victor in Democracy tells a reporter that "memory" is the "major cost" of being caught up in a political campaign. The campaign in question was her husband's unsuccessful run for the presidential nomination in 1972. "I mean you lose track. As if you'd had shock treatment. Ö I mean you drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. Ö Things that might or might not be true get repeated in the clips until you can't tell the difference." Truth is always the victim, Didion repeatedly shows us, when we recreate a version of the world around us (including the history we have with other people) to fit our current self-interest.

Another passage from James Pike, American is worth repeating here:

"The sense that the world can be reinvented smells of the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring, and in a way the Sixties were the years for which James Albert Pike was born. When the man who started out a winner was lying dead in the desert his brother in law joined the search party, and prayed for the assistance of God, Jim Jr., and Edgar Cayce. I think I have never heard a more poignant trinity."

In "Holy Water," Didion talks about the system of water transfer in California, the movement from reservoirs to the locals where water is needed, the immensity of the project, the fact that it is carried out daily with such competence and so taken for granted. "From this room in Sacramento," she reports, "the whole system takes on the aspect of a perfect three-billion-dollar hydraulic toy, and in certain ways it is."

She recognizes that the subject is one she has become obsessed with, and that her fascination with its multi-level significance of it may not be widely shared: "Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveriesÖ" In this essay, Didion moves from describing a system so large as to be abstract for most people to describing urgently concrete scenes of the needed water delivery, whether received or not. Her prose technique is entirely effective and, as in the Bishop Pike piece, holds on to the reader. Then she moves from concrete to personal for several paragraphs. A line I have remembered for years comes from this essay: "Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control."

Loss of control on a personal level is the opening theme of this book. In her first essay, she quotes a long passage from a medical record, a psychiatric evaluation -- her own. The diagnosis and outlook are grim. It is almost comical in retrospect. One can only be grateful that Didion was not, like so many, turned into a life-long psychiatric patient, a self-proclaimed victim like so many "sensitive" people have been in last four decades. Her summary: "By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968."

I am to this day impressed with the contrast between the description of James Pike and the description of the waterworks. An ego-driven man with no ethics fails to control his own destiny (although he imposes his will temporarily on many). Didion scorns the man, Pike, but venerates the man-made water control system, humanizing it in the process. Perhaps this is because one is feeding his ego at the expense of friends, family and church with no compunction about abandoning any belief or loyalty that becomes inconvenient, while the other serves millions, uses "control" in the grandest, most humanely useful way without calling attention to itself. This is what she admires, the usefulness, the selflessness (to anthropomorphize the water system), the soothing reliability of this vast, man-made thing.

In After Henry (1992), Didion's essays are notably longer, more complex, stronger, wider ranging in both subject matter and geography. The book is divided, in fact, into four segments, three of which are titled geographically: Washington, California (which actually includes an essay relating her experiences and observations in Hawaii), and New York. From the first of those categories, "In the Realm of The Fisher King" is, like the majority of the essays, a reprint from the New York Review of Books. It happens to be a favorite of mine, one I read in that journal a few years ago and found hysterically funny. Unfortunately, the humor is derived from following President and Nancy Reagan's foibles.

Didion has followed the careers of Ronald and Nancy Reagan for decades, met Nancy Reagan on several occasions, and addressed prior essays to the strange quality of their "roles" as politicians (see, e.g., "Many Mansions" in The White Album). Here Didion discusses the Reagans, Michael Deaver's book, Peggy Noonan's book, and her own recollections. To complete this line of reading, I recommend her review of Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan in the Nov. 4, 1999 issue of the New York Review Of Books. You have to have both a sense of humor and a sense of outrage to fully Didion's view of the Reagan rise to prominence and all the political folly that came with it.

Before the more conservative members of my audience write her off for her comments on Reagan, let me refer you to her comments on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s A Thousand Days ("an essentially anti-historical workÖ") in her book Miami. Didion's distaste is for two things: incompetence in office and revisionist (a fancy word for dishonest) history. It matters little whether the subject is a Democrat or a Republican and it matters less on what side of the aisle the revisionist sits. Her contempt for the co-opting of public policy discussions by Madison Avenue-style tactics is pervasive.

Also of significant merit in After Henry is her essay on the world (and world view) of the journalists who become part of the entourage of the presidential campaigns, "Insider Baseball," and her tremendously thoughtful and detailed piece on New York, "Sentimental Journeys." The latter is 65 pages, quite long for Didion's essay style and includes the blend of history (of the city, of Central Park), politics (the early politics shaping the city and recent crises), sociology (the class and racial undercurrents of the city's attempts to address crime) and personal material. As always, Didion peels away layers, turning big questions (and big statements of policy) into smaller, far more accessible pieces, pieces that are personal to her and to many of the subjects (and, presumably, readers) of this essay.

In "Pacific Distances" (one of the California essays), Didion wanders through her own history at Berkeley (first as a student, later as a guest lecturer) and provides what I thought was a wonderful glimpse into the world of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. She treats the giant lasers there with the same almost sensual love of detail as she had the Hoover Dam and the water delivery system of California in The White Album.

Miami

I am writing this piece in February, 2000. Last night I watched Dateline's 30 minutes of coverage of the Elian Gonzales dispute. That is, the custody battle over a Cuban child who survived a tragic boat crossing from Cuba that took his mother's life. His father is still in Cuba. His relatives in Miami are fighting to keep him in the United States, in spite of his father's rights and request for his return. The show discussed the criminal records of the Cuban relatives (two uncles with two DUI convictions each and two cousins with various violent felonies, one with an established gang affiliation). A sheepish Janet Reno was shown making one or another pronouncement about letting the appropriate officials decide. There's nothing to decide. The law is quite clear that the boy should be returned to his father in Cuba. That he hasn't been returned and that he has been left in the care of distant family members who would not be granted custody in any ordinary situation in America is simply the result of a social and political situation that is incomprehensible to most Americans, probably unknown to most Americans.

This week I read Didion's nonfiction Salvador (1983) for the second time (the first being nearly 15 years ago) and Miami (1987) for the first time. Together with her novel The Last Thing He Wanted they make a pretty good trilogy, though two are non-fiction. In fact, the more bizarre and seemingly fictional events occur in Miami and Salvador.

In Miami, Didion explores the prominence, wealth, political motivation and political activities (ranging from speeches to bombings in several American cities) of the various factions of the Cuban population of that city. I was expecting political friction, spicy food, clashing cultures that melded slowly, but I was not given that. Instead I read about an American city with more than 50 percent of its population from Cuba, a city in which hating Fidel Castro is a given, hating President John F. Kennedy (a short distance behind Castro) is a given, and in which a Cuban who is deemed to be "too closely allied with American interests" is in peril.

I'm too young to remember the Bay of Pigs clearly and too uninformed about Cuba to have recognized the names of the 2506 Brigade or President Kennedy's words to the Cuban exiles at the 1962 Orange Bowl ("I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana"), which were construed as a second false promise by Kennedy. The exercise in presidential authority in which Kennedy withheld American air support for the ill-fated invasion intended to overthrow Castro's government did not, until I read Miami, really figure in what I thought about the Iran-Contra affair two decades later, or the Kennedy assassination, or Elian Gonzales' unimpressive Miami relatives' mysterious power over the federal government.

The surprise, for those of us on the outside, is that Miami's Cuban population is moneyed, often militant, extremely right-wing, opposed to ANY negotiations over ANY issue with Castro (including the freedom to travel and visit relatives) and likely to be supportive of bombings and murders committed against ANYONE who disagrees with their position, as if such attacks somehow hurt Castro. Freedom of speech, political negotiations, exchange of goods, services and information, according to Didion's account, are simply a lower priority (by a huge degree of magnitude) than the hatred for Castro.

Murders and bombings committed against anyone suggesting negotiations, against airlines that facilitate exchanges, against a New York cigar shop owner allegedly photographed giving a cigar to Fidel, are designated by these Miami residents as the actions of "freedom fighters." Intolerance and hatred are the superceding values, all other values being dispensable. The "family values" espoused by Elian Gonzales' cousin rang hollow on television (largely because she dismissed the violent felonies of her siblings as irrelevant to the question of the care and custody of the child), all the more so because the underlying motive was simply not discussed on the newscast.

The Elian Gonzales matter is not just a question of where the child legally belongs or where the child is better off. It is a matter of honor to Miami Cubans that nothing lost by Castro is given back to him. As of this writing, I'm unaware of any bombings or murders committed to prevent the child's return to Cuba. I would not be surprised, however, to discover that there had been multiple threats. Had Miami been written by an author I did not know to be credible, I would have been extremely reluctant to accept this view. Didion's book certainly opened my eyes to a level and a type of conflict that I would never have surmised from watching the television or reading an occasional Washington Post piece. I gather I would also not have learned this much from regularly reading the Miami Herald.

A word about the book's style. It is solid prose, relying on interviews, observations, research and reasonable analysis. It is unmistakably Didion in the use of irony, unaccountably strange encounters, repetition of phrases that in context betray the obvious doublespeak of their authors, and a profound unwillingness let contradictions drop.

Salvador, likewise, examines political connections, reveals in some detail the incredible hypocrisy of the Reagan administration's position and public pronouncements, and, most of all, brings the reader face to face with a level of brutality that is purely shocking. In a nation smaller than San Diego County, the official estimates of the political murders committed in one year alone were just under 7,000. Didion spent some of June, 1982 (I either missed it or she does not say exactly how long she was there, but it was clearly more than a couple of days) in San Salvador. The Didion style, laden with incredulity, is entirely appropriate for a time and a place where "body dumps" are an accepted feature of daily life.

This tiny book (just over 100 pages) contains fragments of El Salvador's history and long passages of its violent present, juxtaposed with passages from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a host of government documents and news clips. In 1821, Guatemala declared its independence from Spain, Didion reports. But Guatemala's neighbor, El Salvador, had a "sense of itself in its moment of independence that it petitioned the United States for admission to the union as a state. The United States declined." The 1975 Miss Universe contest was held in San Salvador. It "ended in what might have been considered a predictable way, with student protests about the money the government was spending on the contest, and the government's predictable response, which was to shoot some of the students on the street and disappear others."

There are priceless moments in this little book, such as Didion's meeting with the grandson of the late General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, El Salvador's dictator from 1931 to 1944. The General's proclamations to the public include such gems as "It is good that children go barefoot. That way they can better receive the beneficial effluvia of the planet, and the vibrations of the earth. Plants and animals don't use shoes."

The General's grandson seemed to be equally well informed when, rather than denouncing the murder of Archbishop Romero in 1980, he told Didion that Romero was a "bigot," that listening to him was like listening to Hitler or Mussolini, and that it isn't known who shot him (though it is well known), it could have been the left or the right. Didion describes encounters with children with automatic weapons, soldiers, other journalists, the few remaining academics (the major university has been shut down numerous times and many intellectuals openly murdered by the "death squads," others "disappeared") and then-president Magana.

There are more interesting passages about America's policy at the time than I have space to record here. But I'll give you a couple, just for the flavor:

"[O]ne man's political disaster could be another's democratic turbulence, the birth pangs of what Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders persisted in calling 'nascent democratic institutions.' 'The new Salvadoran democracy,' Enders was saying five months after the election, not long after Justice of the Peace Gonzalo Alonso Garcis, the twentieth prominent Christian Democrat to be kidnapped or killed since the election, had been dragged from his house in San Cayentano Itepeque by fifteen armed men, 'is doing what it is supposed to do -- bringing a broad spectrum of forces and factions into a functioning democratic system.'"

Didion concluded that "the American effort had a distinctly circular aspect (the aid was the card with which we got the Salvadorans to do it our way, and the appearing to do it our way was the card with which the Salvadorans got the aid). Ö 'anti-communism' was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take." To be branded "left" or communist, it was sufficient to oppose "seeing one's family killed or disappeared."

Didion may convey moral ambiguity in many of her fictional characters, but no one can mistake her outrage at the Salvadoran government's unfettered brutality or the American government's hypocritical complicity. In the end, Didion cannot be said to have "made sense" of either the Miami Cuban scene or the American involvement in El Salvador. She can be said to have enabled a broad audience to encounter the conflicts that exist in those places, to consider their meaning, to see past the shallow "sound bites" of American politicians (Democratic and Republican alike) as well as the major networks' failure to probe the news.

I will continue to greet new pieces by Joan Didion with excitement. I'm certain I would often disagree with her in conversation. Perhaps she would even dissect my own neurotic life and spot examples of meaninglessness in moments I treasure. Or not. All I can say with certainty about her is that year after year, she has written well and posed powerful questions about things that needed questioning.

I'm grateful.

[ Copyright © 2000 William D. Sheldon. All rights reserved. ]

William D. Sheldon, TW3's Articles Editor, is a lawyer, an avid reader and a writer who makes his home in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Kill Your TV Archive

Kill Your TV 1: The Importance of Being Joan, Part 1

---

A Not Entirely Disinterested Service of
Bancroft & Associates: Digital Publishers