If I had started with The White Album instead of Slouching Toward Bethlehem I might have been spared two years of blithely embarrassing myself with statements like: “Joan Didion? She’s ok.” Actually she’s amazing. The rhythms of her self-dramatization in Slouching were too arch for my taste, or perhaps for my mood. The White Album must be different, or I must have changed, because I love the persona that emerges from its rhythms. She’s brooding, migrainous, in the first essay paranoid, yet essentially tough-minded and clear-seeing—a recipe, of sorts, for my favorite type of writer. Baudelaire and Cioran also brazed their delicate nerves to hard, cutting styles. I like her excitability, her habit of sudden absorption. Of late ‘60s biker grindhouse she writes, “I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook.” The book’s keynote, right there. Didion takes the stuff of recondite hobbies and autistic fixation—irrigation infrastructure, the Governors’ mansions of California—and finds the grandeur, the lyric, the idea.Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw the Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds and thousands of miles from where I am. I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard, about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace. Sometimes I am confronted by the intakes and sometimes by the shadow of the heavy cable that spans the canyon and sometimes by the ominous outlets to unused spillways, black in the lunar clarity of the desert night. Quite often I hear the turbines…I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map, he had said, was for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its complete isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.And leave it to the poet of Public Works to hang out with Malibu lifeguards and delight in “the laconic routines and paramilitary rankings” of those “civil servants in red trunks,” cherish their use of “a diction as flat and as finally poetic as that of Houston Control.” The White Album is rich in another effect, one I cannot name and so will clumsily indicate by invoking Holly’s stereopticon in Badlands, Joseph Cornell’s doll coffins among other uncanny capsules of ephemera; also, your mom’s tasseled dance card, and Flaubert’s assertion that “when everything is dead, the imagination will rebuild entire worlds from a few elderflower twigs and the shards of a chamber-pot”: The bedrooms are big and private and high-ceilinged and they do not open on the swimming pool and one can imagine reading in them, or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner. The bathrooms are big and airy and they do not have bidets but they do have room for hampers, and dressing tables, and chairs on which to sit and read a story to a child in the bathtub. (“Many Mansions”)She was a child on the Wisconsin prairie who played with china dolls and painted watercolors with cloudy skies because sunlight was too hard to paint and, with her brothers and sisters, listened every night to her mother read stories of the Wild West, of Texas, of Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. She told adults that she wanted to be an artist and was embarrassed when they asked what kind of artist she wanted to be: she had no idea “what kind.” She had no idea what artists did. She had never seen a picture that interested her: other than a pen-and-ink Maid of Athens in one of her mother’s books, some Mother Goose illustrations printed on cloth, a tablet cover that showed a little girl with pink roses, and the painting of Arabs on horseback that hung in her grandmother’s parlor.(“Georgia O’Keeffe”)
Dear Shevaun, You left a self-addressed envelope, the size of a note card, in the Duluth Public Library’s copy of “The White Album,” a collection of essays by Joan Didion. Your name as both the sender and receiver. Both address labels indicate an association with the University of Florida. One is decorated with a UF, the other a cartoonish profile of a cartoon gator, its snout hanging out of a decorative oval. Neither label is very artistic minded, not the finest work of a graphic designer. I doubt this is your fault, that you are the graphic designer in question, though you might have selected these two designs from eight other versions and you most certainly were the one to decide they were at least good enough to stick to this envelope. I assumed, Shevaun, that you were older. Perhaps of the same generation as Didion. That you had checked out “The White Album” for the same reason I might revisit the movie “Adventures in Babysitting” or Debbie Gibson’s “Shake Your Love.” A nostalgia for the late 1960s in California. The Manson era. Black Panthers, the Doors sans Morrison trying to record an album without the vocalist known for wearing black leather pants without underwear. I imagined you looked like Didion, whom Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times once described -- using Didion’s own words from “A Book of Common Prayer” -- as possessing “an extreme and volatile thinness … she was a woman … with a body that masqueraded as that of a young girl.” I imagined you as widowed and crafty. A woman keeping the same strict schedule for almost half a century. A woman who could write a recipe book filled with meals staring Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. A woman with things that went in certain places. I was wrong. I Googled you. You are maybe in your mid-30s or en route. And your education is of a certain level that damn-near paralyzes me when I consider the quagmire of student loan debt you must be seeped in. My wallet weeps for you, Shevaun, and it’s weeping louder than my admiration for your commitment to furthering your education. Did you finish “The White Album,” S? Or did the envelope mark the spot where you said: “I’m feeling you, Joan. But I just can’t, right now, give a shit about water treatment and highway systems. I was with you through the piece on the end of the 1960s. And if I’d gotten there, I might have enjoyed the one about your migraines and how you’ve learned that suffering through them is like a form of yoga. Then the book was due and you just didn’t renew it. Or maybe that envelope marks the point where you said: “Screw this rental. I’m buying!” I don’t remember where you parked your envelope, but if this is the case I bet it is where Didion says: “I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.” That’s the sentence I read over and over again while sitting at a tall top table at Subway, unsure of why it snagged my attention. It’s an easy sentence. A descriptive sentence. The sentences around it provide perspective: her marriage is on a precipice. There have been tidal wave warnings. Her daughter wanted to go for a swim. Maybe it’s just the idea of picturing Didion as a thirty-four-year-old when for all of my life she has been post-thirty-four. And maybe it’s because I have a fortune teller’s view of her future. Many decades later the tidal wave will come and that tidal wave is “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Writing, Shevaun, is a weird thing. I can give or take Joan Didion. Her curiosities aren’t necessarily mine. The essays on water treatment and the the highway system. But when she turns an eye on herself, buying a dress for Linda Kasabian, witness in the prosecution of Charles Manson or on her first book tour and ordering a Shirley Temple from room service for her daughter, I take her. I take her like the Lothario on the cover of a bodice ripper, chest like fine leather upholstery and hair like a windsock.Best Wishes, Christa
What do You think about The White Album (1990)?
Not every essay holds up 30+ years later, certainly the moving waves of feminism and changes in the way we think about privilege make some ideas and "insights" especially cringe-worthy and dated. But that's not unexpected for essays from the past. What does hold up incredibly well is the writing-Didion writes descriptions that awe with their intuitive-seeming accuracy and manages to reflect the sort of dreamy sense of unreality that seems to have been the hallmark of the part of culture she was in using clear and powerful language. She makes every topic compelling, from the obviously interesting (rock stars, Manson family members) to the less immediately interesting (traffic patterns, flowers). Also, reading this gives you a great excuse to listen to 70s rock & drink some CA white wine if you need one.
—katie
I didn’t love these essays until about the midpoint, “The Women’s Movement”, a devastatingly good piece about the watering-down of feminism in mid-century America, about the heartbreaking shift of a vitally important revolutionary movement as it lost touch with its ideological base and became ever more a vehicle appropriated by a leisure class, its goals moving away from seeking the possibility for an individual to create their own unique destiny unfettered by traditional obstacles and bias, and moving toward something like a seeking of the possibility for the mere prolongation of adolescence, a fear of growing up- more a form of escapism than a new form of liberation. This seems to me, even today, a very important and accurate assessment of not only what happened within various egalitarian movements in the last half of the 20th century, but a shift that occurred on whole societal, generational levels in America.After that midpoint in the book, pretty much every essay contains little revelations, little personal thunderstorms and continental illuminations. Didion does such a great job of balancing the internal and the external, the personal and the social, the personal and the political. Her cultural criticisms are downright measured but no less defanged (such intelligence and confidence need not be blustery), and what I find at the heart of many of the cultural and political essays is a distanced lamentation for an America that could have been but was lost or obliterated at some vague point in the latter days of the 60’s; could have been if we were less forgetful of history, less willing to take the path of least resistance, less entitled, less ready to meet our better selves, less easily resigned to things as they come packaged. She rarely seems angry; she often seems disappointed. Her prose is never shaken (this woman can write a hell of a balanced, beautiful sentence), but what we are given as her personality often seems on the verge of tearing in the winds of her times.Speaking of, wind is an important element in this collection. Wind blows from the Pacific through an open hotel room window as she anticipates a tidal wave and a possible divorce in Honolulu. Wind stirs up debris in the streets of Bogota. Wind blows and stokes fires across southern California that heat to such an extreme that birds explode in mid-air. Wind ripples the surface of the ocean as she observers a diver submerging into cold water thick with kelp. Wind has aided the coastal fires in coating the surface of the water with soot. The elements are ever present and interactive. Water nourishes Amado Vazquez’s thousands of orchids before fire destroys them. Light and water on the beaches of California and Hawaii coddle the idle survivors of old money. She is a great observer of rain, rain and its antithesis, dust. Water holds special sway over her recollections; the flow of water and the absence of water; water held back by dams, flow stations, the control and release of water- as it would anyone living in the arid southwest or California’s strange meteorological zones. Light, the viscosity of air in certain places, the various colors of vegetation and vegetation’s abundance or lack, even a person's voice or posture, their slightest motion- Didion is so conscious of the tone of a setting and the settings constituent pieces, be it a forest or an airport, a hotel room in New York or student demonstration, a stretch of coast or a shopping mall, the Hoover Dam or the Getty Museum. She is a master at uncovering the telling detail of a scene, and this includes the obscure detail ferreted out that in brief is revelatory of someone or something's broader historicity.Her voice is always re-centering in the human, the cultural, the societal- the orientation of the individual in respect to the massive undulations of the country and the epoch. A military graveyard attendant. Soldiers. Lifeguards. Botanists. Filmmakers. Painters. Writers. Politician’s wives. Radical activists. Murderers. Musicians. That she can project a totality of all of these things, and get at the heart of ideas that define a very specific time and place (California, USA, 1960’s and 70’s), and at the same time write it so that we feel that we have been allowed a purview of not only that era but of the intimate space where it touched a specific woman’s memory, is impressive indeed.
—Geoff
Roberto Bolaño has described writing as a kind of illness. Joan Didion is better proof of this statement than nearly any other writer I've encountered (save maybe Bolaño himself and a couple of others). Her essays feel like compulsive explosions, expressions of an obsession to describe what a time and place feel like and to explore and interrogate the strange phenomena of our world. Her voice is tart and erudite and generally unyielding to bullshit. On many subjects, but most especially on anything related to the state of California, she writes brilliant, fluid, lively prose that illuminates, provokes, inspires laughter and deeper thought. Her work reflects her discontent and discomfort with life. This gives its darkness and its edge.However, she has some real limitations as a writer. Too often she makes everything about her even when she seems to be trying to do the opposite. There is also a certain upper class or elitist tilt to her perspective. This can make her an able satirist at times, but sometimes when she addresses politics more sincerely she sounds hopefully adrift in her own limiting individualism. I have nothing against individualists or stubborn outsiders, but I don't think she wears it particularly well, precisely because she doesn't seem to be very clear about how her own idiosyncrasy separates her from the hoi polloi. Her essay on the women's movement is nearly unreadable. She writes about the women's movement as if caught up in some bitchy hall of mirrors of her own construction. Overall, this is an exceptionally strong collection of essays. I can think of few writers who can write such keen portraits of place and character, while also revealing oneself so intimately. She seems to have been a deeply troubled person, but I have to admit we are all richer that these troubles caused her to produce such terrific nonfiction literature.
—Robbie Bruens
