Didion's Slouch

There is an inherent risk of embarrassment if attempting to write about something without a complete education on the subject, hoping to strike on a thought like sparks from a flint. You’ve been warned.

When women writers complain their work isn’t taken seriously enough, Joan Didion stands implacably to refute that silliness. And no, that’s not what the blog’s about, just a passing rant. The blog is about writing.

As a second aside, Nathan Heller in his New Yorker article, What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion says Didion was first to use a writing technique he calls ‘flash cuts’–jumps between disassociated subjects that cohere nonetheless. Huh.

Of Didion’s decades writing, the first of hers for me was The Year of Magical Thinking about the aftermath of her husband John Dunne’s sudden death by heart attack. I finally read it a year ago, although I had read its reviews back in 2005 when the book was published. The reviews insisted it was brilliant, and I was in bad need of brilliance at the time, but I avoided it like the plague, thinking ‘someday, when I’m better.’

"I had entered at the moment it happened a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself was that there must be certain things I needed to do. There had been certain things I had needed to do while the ambulance crew was in the living room. I had needed for example to get the copy of John's medical summary, so I could take it with me to the hospital. I had needed for example to bank the fire, because I would be leaving it. There had been certain things I had needed to do at the hospital. I had needed for example to stand in the line. I had needed for example to focus on the bed with telemetry he would need for the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian."

From The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

In 2005, I myself had not been living a single year of ‘magical thinking’ but was closing in on a decade of the same. Didion’s year of tragedy came like an erupting volcano one might suspect is coming on, might think is the flow approaching, so you dodge around a corner to find the main flow roaring straight at you. Then, as her book went to press, her only daughter died.

Life sucks and then you die as the hippie saying goes.

Mine was more like the single near-lethal blow from a sledge hammer waking years later with a damaged brain. I knew the risk, but with my cavalier faith in a skill at dodging pain, had refused to accept losing my son until the day of his suicide.

I lived through my fifties as a half person, drinking and writing as the means to cope, writing despairing poem after poem–a handful of humorous biographical stories but the majority dark–truths as I saw them. Until the day D threw a surprise birthday party on my 60th, and I was taken aback–where the hell had my 50s gone?

People might expect a year’s worth of mourning is a sufficient amount of time. I read that somewhere and laughed–time hardly mattered. So the years from 2002 until 2009 stumbled by and I had hit sixty. Referring back to the publication dates of the poems, I still had a few more years to go at that point. Mourning is a play at insanity–or magical thinking.

In an ongoing, if frantic effort to educate myself–frantic because I’d started too late if I expected to absorb what Harold Bloom knew about literature–I felt I should read Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, her first collection of essays. Great title borrowing from the best. If you can get a great title you’re halfway there–I’d read that somewhere else.

The first essay in the book, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, is about a sensational murder in Southern California she’d originally written in 1964. It was written in a style made popular in that time: dry, detached, pith-like observations, gimlet-eyed even. New Journalism was a thing in the 60s.

So here’s where I’ll confess I know only a little about nonfiction from the middle 60s. I read a couple of Saul Bellow’s novels–and hated the obsessive way he kept grinding on–like nothing existing outside his personal life. Polished writing, but it was just gratingly self absorbed. Early Philip Roth came in a close second. I’m OK with dark, but I need a bit of humor to leaven it; I was more a fan of John Barth’s hilarity among the unbalanced, Giles Goat Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor. I was deep into sci-fi and fantasy. Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

It wasn’t until sometime in the 70s that I read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Compared to Didion’s work, Wolfe’s was closer to the gonzo king, Hunter Thompson, if without his cheerfully admitted substance abuse. And to complete the circle, I’d first read Hunter Thompson’s series, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas published in Rolling Stone magazine. Complimenting Thompson’s diatribes, with reason enough to renew my subscription, were Ralph Steadman’s accompanying illustrations–if you could call them that–more like a lunatic’s sketch book complete with ink splatters, or Aubrey Beardsley on acid. Beardsley was skating close to his own edge, if with somewhat more style. Steadman was just freaky, man.

Ralph Steadman’s film poster for Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) released by Universal Pictures

The Peacock Skirt, illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for Oscar Wilde's play Salomé (1892)

Compare the two and discuss.

A friend from Sumter and a classmate at Clemson, Harry Bryant, had inherited an entire collection of Beardsley’s published work–from his grandmother no less. Harry descended from a woman of eccentric tastes, it would seem. Beardsley’s line drawings took Art Nouveau into darker places than Tiffany lamps ever did—and his prose I shall not quote from. It made Samuel Clemens blush.

Did Joan Didion ever meet Ross Macdonald?

Reading Didion’s first essay in Slouching, I was recalling Ross Macdonald’s work, The Zebra Striped Hearse, also set in the 60s of Southern California. The novel’s plot revolves around the early days of the counter-culture and drugs as seen through the skeptical eyes of Lew Archer, his alter ego, a middle-aged detective. First person viewpoint allowed him to insert himself as a character in the novel, with whatever predilections he the author might hold.

Macdonald’s viewpoint seems strikingly similar to Didion’s–that of observing at a distance, a pose that continues supporting hungry writers to this day. In both cases, the subject was California in the 60s. His detective stories read like offhand notices on life in the 60s coupled to a crime story.

“It was raining hard when we put down in Guadalajara, as if our descent had ruptured a membrane in the lower sky… I exchanged some damp dollars for some dry pesos and asked the cashier to get me an English-speaking taxi driver…

“He led me across the many-puddled parking lot to a fairly new Simca sedan…

“I was a wetback,” he said with some pride. “Three times I walked across the border. Two times they picked me up on the other side and hauled me back on a bus. The third time, I made it, all the way to Merced.”

from The Zebra Striped Hearse by Ross Macdonald

The Guadalajara scenes portray American expats drinking until dawn while their country of origin was burning. An entire genre of disillusioned expat stories exists, and it’s possible Macdonald got there first for the American version—forgetting Jack Kerouac’s seminal instructions for at least one generation, On the Road with Jack Cassidy’s father driving like a crazy man into Mexico.

I get the impression Macdonald enjoyed the hell out of visualizing the expat characters he wrote about–dwelling on them more than what seemed essential to the storyline.

Digressing big time, Macdonald’s, The Drowning Pool made it to the silver screen with Paul Newman.

Macdonald was the pseudonym for Kenneth Miller, a transplanted Canadian living in LA. Does living in LA make skeptics of all writers?

The hearse of the novel’s title is authentic to the times; such vehicles indeed existed. Hippies liked hearses; Harry, Carlyn and I trugded right past several in the traffic jam at a Watkins Glenn concert for 600,000. And of course there were the Grateful Dead—plural to both concert and hearse.

A high school friend of mine named Richard–another transplant from Britain–in those years drove a VW Microbus, which we painted front to back with rainbows and glorious day-glo Blue Meanies styled after Peter Max. You couldn’t miss that bus in a town of 25,000 innocent southerners.

In the book’s early chapters, the zebra-striped hearse, accompanying beach bums and surf boards, is introduced in passing.  Only toward the story’s final build does the hearse return in a scene that begins to bring the clues together:

“The striped hearse was standing empty among other cars off the highway above Zuma. I parked behind it and went down to the beach to search for its owner. Bonfires were scattered along the shore, like bivouacs of nomad tribes or nuclear war survivors. The tide was high and the breakers loomed up marbled black and fell white out of oceanic darkness.

“Six young people were huddled under blankets around one of the fires. I recognized them: one of the girls was wearing the brown tweed coat. They paid no attention when I approached. I was an apparition from the adult world. If they pretended I wasn’t there, I would probably go away like all the other adults.”

from The Zebra Striped Hearse by Ross Macdonald

His crisp phrases tell you place and time–Zuma Beach, ‘bivouacs of nomad tribes,’ ‘nuclear war survivors’ and ‘an apparition from the adult world.’

Macdonald caught the era’s zeitgeist in such an offhand way it passed effortlessly into the heart of his story. That he chose the hearse as the book’s title is the giveaway the story is Macdonald’s take on the disintegrating 60s, the post-war American family, and the nascent hippie movement. By an author only famous for his pulp fiction.

Macdonald was Canadian, so was his skill at observation came from being at a slight distance to the culture he was witnessing?  That he was also a self taught writer from a family broken from poverty allowed him the sympathy he held for his characters–and his unease being with people of wealth.

Didion’s title essay Slouching Toward Bethlehem is as dark a take on the days of free love as Macdonald’s, minus the whodunit. Like whiskey without an ice cube to lessen the bite.

The 60s were a coming of age after the dozing 50s when the American world was painted in pastels and formica was an interior decorator’s go-to material in the kitchen.

If I’d been a more active participant in the 50s–other than playing cowboys and indians in the pine woods behind our house–I might have felt just as liberated after the war as the adults who were still standing.

Were the 60s a wakening with a hangover after too much champagne?

Whatever it was, writers working the era were staring glumly at their feet more than joyfully taking to the fields with kites and kitties. Waiting for the big one. And if the children of those times were a bit off balanced, whose fault was that?

“Otto is feeling better because he discovered it wasn’t the cocaine-and-wheat that made him sick. It was the chicken pox, which he caught baby-sitting for Big Brother and the Holding Company one night when they were playing. I go over to see him and meet Vicki, who sings now and then with a group called the Jook Savages and lives at Otto’s place. Vicki dropped out of Laguna High ‘because I had mono,’ followed the Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time and has been here ‘for a while.’ Her mother and father are divorced, and she does not see her father, who works for a network in New York. A few months ago he came out to do a documentary on the [Haight-Ashbury] District and tried to find her, but couldn’t. Later he wrote her a letter in care of her mother urging her to go back to school. Vicki guesses maybe she will sometime but she doesn’t see much point in it right now.”

from Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

The closest to humor the essay gets is irony, as if to say, see?

Didion strove to be the silent observer. But she missed half the party. If everyone was as screwed up as she claims in the essay, an entire generation would have been swallowed by pot, hash and acid.

A number were, yes, indeed. One guy I knew at Clemson–who served jail time for selling LSD–ended up warped for life, becoming a born-again religious Republican for god’s sake. If that’s what LSD does, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Philip K Dick’s schizophrenia was closer to the center of his talent than the drugs he imbibed–the drugs only confused him. His prose had me convinced his take on reality wasn’t too far out.

I watched a friend of my girlfriend on a bad trip crying alone in a house trailer’s living room. No one else in the room, and she was crying like her life was coming apart. I felt sad for her–and felt rotten myself because I was ready to go to sleep and wouldn’t go comfort her or it would misery for both of us.

She was a talented writer who later became a private secretary to James Dickey, the hard-drinking poet in residence at the University of South Carolina. She worked on his papers; evidently the acid didn’t wound her nearly as bad as her depression did.  

Yet I knew other brilliant people who navigated those waters fine–and had good times while they were there. Didion’s take on the scene was a ‘downer, man.’

Yeah, OK, a lot of kids were screwed up, but amazingly got on–humans can be fairly indestructible when it comes to it. Or we’re just not the sensitive, soul searching creatures we pretend we are. Groovy.

If you swallowed all the media hype in those days about peace and love, discovering a darker side might have come as a shock. Like learning life wasn’t all hugs and easter bunnies. Didion’s popularity among the literati doesn’t take away from her skepticism–she was skeptical about everything, including herself. Perhaps living in the moment was better for the psyche than observing it–but also didn’t add much to the larger picture.

Didion sold a good many stories to the Saturday Evening Post, so it’s hard to claim she sat high on a throne. More power to her.

So is it fair, or even useful, to weigh books in separate genres against each other? Crime novels vs. cultural essays? Macdonald and Didion were writing as close observers, and both meant to be taken seriously. While reading his books, I wished he’d written in the third person so to get at Lew Archer the person. I wish she’d peered deeper into why the counter-culture happened, why it was genuinely important. Her argument against it made a splash and sold books: that’s the cynical argument. His lack of a protagonist evolving from book to the next didn’t hurt his sales either, given he was ‘only’ a pulp fiction writer.

Possibly a better question: what else might they have in common? You can read Macdonald for plot alone; you can read Didion similarly, landing only on the sensational. But in both cases you’d miss each their qualities of voice. Read aloud, the words sing, his of the misfits and the earnest souls, hers of a research scientist’s keenest observation.  

Didion had a great description of what living during a Santa Ana wind storm was like. Macdonald had a running theme of the raging California fires growing ever closer in one of his.  And both leave vivid impressions.  

What We Get

So back to the article in The New Yorker, What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion, by Nathan Heller. He gets closer to what I find attractive in her writing: her toughness. She’s no sentimentalist.

“Didion’s ‘I’ ended up nearly as known as Hemingway’s ‘and,’ and carries the same mixed blessing of being caricatured more than characterized. The caricature has Didion as a histrionic oversharer—a kind of literary Tori Spelling. Yet her reasons for embracing the ‘I’ were mostly technical. You had to let readers know who you were and where your camera stood, she thought. It meant that Didion was always in her own crosshairs, and eventually turned the contrarian impulse on herself.”

from What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion, by Nathan Heller

Her view of the New York City mythology is worth reading–for one as myself who can’t get past the rotting pilings run out into the river and empty warehouse hulks to ever get carried away by the glitter and the rouge–the world’s most famous Potemkin village.  

Flash Cuts

“When Didion was gathering essays for her first collection, she did something notable with a piece she called “Los Angeles Notebook.” She took one of her “Points West” columns, about the Santa Ana wind, and put a flash cut after it. She lopped off the opening to a critics piece she’d written on books by Helen Gurley Brown and dropped that in, followed by another cut. In this way, she built a new essay from the wholes and bits of old material, tracing out flares of life around Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. They were part of one story, but, crucially, they did not connect.”

from What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion, by Nathan Heller

After the title essay, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I was ready to give up on Didion’s early essays. Then I read On Keeping a Notebook, and she won me over, directing that laser back on herself.

“So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about ‘shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed’? Shopping for what? Typing what? Who is E? was this ‘E’ depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?”

from Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

“from the grossly negligent to the merely absent,” now there’s a woman who isn’t begging forgiveness.

Along with her first book of essays, I ordered Joan Didion’s The White Album, which damn well better be in praise of the music, regardless of how many flash cuts and side trips she takes.

Get it–trips? Groovy, man.