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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Joan Didion talks about Arnold and Reagan, the triumph of Wal-Mart ugliness, dot-com insanity, and the betrayal at the heart of the California dream.
Oct 18, 2003 | Interviewing Joan Didion, as I told a couple of friends recently, is sort of the ultimate no-win proposition for any journalist. Not because she is rude or difficult or cryptic or dismissive of foolishness or anything like that; on the contrary, she proved to be a kind and considerate host who got me an Evian water from her fridge, listened attentively to questions, and answered them thoughtfully. No, the problem is more that if you're a person with literary ambitions who got into journalism and aspires in some way to combine adventurous writing and sharp-eyed reportorial observation, you're inevitably going to compare yourself to Didion and the comparison is unlikely to be flattering.
Didion is not merely one of the greatest living practitioners of the literary journalism tradition, she more or less invented it, at least in its 20th century American incarnation (along with Tom Wolfe, and maybe Janet Malcolm). Her essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album" remain perhaps the pithiest, most tightly focused portrayals of the disordered cultural life of the United States in the 1960s and '70s to be found in any literary medium. "Salvador" and "Democracy" offer scathing portrayals of the Reagan era at home and abroad, and although I'm not as big a fan of her fiction as of her journalism, the novel "Play It as It Lays" is an important document of SoCal anomie.
Her writing has always been both personal and political. Her prose has the erudition and elegance, on the one hand, of a woman from upper-middle-class society with a good education (which Didion surely is) and also the informality, hunger and daring of someone who lived through an era of revolutionary change and learned to question all such things, as well as to question the notion of revolutionary change itself. And Didion most certainly is that too.
Then there's the problem, for me at least, that Joan Didion, both in her prose and in person, reminds me of my mother. I don't say that they look all that much alike, although there is a certain resemblance; they're both, at this point in their respective lives, the kind of skinny older women, WASP'y, artsy California women, to whom the epithet "birdlike" sticks and cannot be peeled away. They certainly don't sound alike; Didion is extremely soft-spoken and my mother, well, isn't. Didion's new book, "Where I Was From," is largely about her home state of California, and even more than that about the distinctive state of California delusion, or "enchantment," in which she was brought up. It became increasingly clear to me while I was reading the book that my mother -- and by extension I myself -- were brought up in almost exactly the same place.
Early in "Where I Was From" Didion writes that the life she was raised to admire was entirely the product of a certain California-specific isolation, "infinitely romantic, but in a kind of vacuum, its only antecedent aesthetic, and the aesthetic only the determined 'Bohemianism' of 19th century San Francisco. The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black." She goes on to say that her family preferred dark houses, copper and brass that had tarnished to green, and "darkened" silver over the well-polished kind. When I told Didion at the beginning of our interview that I had been raised in a cedar-shingled house in Berkeley, Calif., that was designed not by Bernard Maybeck himself but by one of his students, and that my mother mourned the loss of that house to this day, she laughed because she knew exactly what that meant and understood precisely the character of that mourning.
But this aestheticized middle-class self-perception is, Didion argues -- like almost everything else about California's sense of itself -- a kind of con job. As she puts it in what is virtually a topic sentence, "A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up." She sees a state whose history was poisoned at the root by a heritage of carelessness and hucksterism, whose residents have always been willing to mortgage the future for a short-term payout, and whose myth of freedom and independence has always been funded, at mind-blowing, almost unimaginable expense, by the same federal government many of its citizens profess to hate.
In this view of California history, the recent voter rebellion that led to the election of a movie star to statewide office (for not the first or even the second but at least the third time, let us note) is just another manifestation of a pattern that has existed for generations. Didion observes that all Californians think the state has been ruined and corrupted and that something drastic must be done to redeem it. To live in California is to live inside a sort of recurring elegy for what has been lost. We all know it used to be different, used to be better, used to be that paradisiacal garden at the end of the American dream. The precise date of this Garden-of-Eden Golden State varies, but it's generally whenever the person who is doing the complaining first got there.
Californians always believe that their state is being consumed by a cycle of economic boom and rapid change, but Didion makes the case that boom and change are in fact the fundamental qualities of the California experience, from the time of the Gold Rush to the explosion (and implosion) of Silicon Valley. She remembers her mother complaining that California had gotten too regulated, too heavily taxed and too expensive, and talking enthusiastically about moving to the Australian outback. That was in the 1940s, when the state's population was about one-sixth what it is today. That was in Sacramento, a sleepy agricultural burg where everyone who could afford to still built their houses on stilts because the city flooded out almost every winter, and where young Joan Didion learned to swim in the then-undammed Sacramento and American rivers and wrote for the society page of the Sacramento Union.
Near the end of the book, Didion begins to question whether something fundamental has changed in California. Can a state that houses some 36 million people, almost 15 percent of the U.S. population -- a state that has aggressively defunded public education to build a massive prison system, a state with one of the nation's highest rates of endemic poverty -- still sustain a cycle of semi-permanent boom, not to mention its mythic sense of self? Interestingly, however, in my conversation with her she came off more as a classic California libertarian than she may recognize. She clearly laments the destruction of so much of the state's open space beneath funguslike suburban sprawl, but she is so eager to avoid "pernicious nostalgia" that she seems unwilling to support the kinds of centralized planning measures that even political moderates -- and perhaps especially suburban voters -- now yearn for.
"Where I Was From" has all the tension and lyricism of Didion's writing at its finest. It's a haunting and sometimes hilarious tribute to her three generations of California ancestors and to the powerful narrative they wrapped her in, one she now believes to be false and destructive. It's a brave and necessary attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the all-but-forgotten Frank Norris, whose novel "The Octopus" remains the great literary document of 19th century California, in all its greedy contradictions. It's also an effort to reconcile Didion's passionate feelings for the state, and her sense of loss about seeing its magnificent landscape devoured, without surrendering to elitist sentimentality. In one of the book's cruelest moments for any past or present Californian, Didion recalls driving her elderly mother (who died in 2001) from Monterey to San Francisco. Her mother becomes confused about the route, and Didion assures her that they are where they should be, traveling northbound on U.S. 101. "Then where did it all go?" her mother asks, surveying the uniform suburbia around them. A few miles later she adds that California had become "all San Jose."
Despite all this, Didion insists that critics who read "Where I Was From" as a farewell to California, as some kind of symbolic renunciation, are missing the point. She says her own decision to leave California two decades ago (with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne) for a primary residence in New York was more haphazard than anything else. Indeed, she confesses to a kind of bicoastal schizophrenia; she began writing her "Letter From Los Angeles" column for the New Yorker after she had left L.A. for Manhattan, thus conveying to many people the idea that she still lived on the West Coast. She still holds a California driver's license, although, mysteriously, it is imprinted with her New York address.
Didion met with me in the living room of her spacious, book-overloaded apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She lives on the fifth floor but doesn't have much of a view. Above the chair where she sat was a landscape painting depicting the back streets of Las Vegas. It's a distinctive Western horizon, complete with low-rise apartment buildings, old tires, sagebrush and puddles of unidentifiable goo.
