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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Where I Was From" is a book about your progressive disenchantment with the idea of California, the myth of California that you inherited. But you admit at one point that your confusions, your "misapprehensions and misunderstandings," are as much about America as about California.
Well, I didn't want to go too far with that. It's certainly a book about America in that the idea of moving west, the development of the West, is the key to my idea of America. So, yes, it is a book about America to that extent. I don't think it's about modern America.
But it's about a disenchantment with the whole story. It's not so much a disenchantment as a falling away of enchantment. The whole story being essentially Manifest Destiny, which carried over into a lot of stuff we did and stuff we thought about, even if we didn't articulate it. I mean, it's certainly a big issue right now.
I thought, like most people thought -- like most people of my generation thought -- that America had a special mission. It was unquestioned. I didn't ask myself where we got that mission, who gave it to us. And I certainly wouldn't have thought it was God, had I taken it that far. But we had a destiny, and the settlement of the West was part of that.
And people of your generation shared that belief irrespective of political ideology? Even if they were liberals or radicals or whatever?
Yeah, I think so. I've kind of been all over the map politically. Actually, I haven't changed my way of thinking a whole lot, but as the world has changed it has placed me at different points on the political spectrum. I was a slow study on Vietnam, for example, because I thought it was in some way our mission and our fate to intervene. It took me until quite late in the game, dramatically later than most people I knew. Then one morning I was reading the paper and I realized it didn't add up, you know? Part of it was that I had this idea that we had a special role.
The idea that things don't "add up" -- that's exactly the expression you use in talking about California. It seems like that's the characteristic gesture of your career as a writer: You look at things and calculate when they don't add up.
Well, what happened in Vietnam, when my eyes opened, was very simple. We had been taking a hill at great loss of life. We had been taking it for weeks, and now we had taken it, and now we were retreating from it because it was not strategic. Well, somebody was not telling the truth, right? That was a pretty simple thing.
This book started because I had done a piece for the New Yorker in Lakewood, Calif. [on the decline of the aerospace industry]. By the time I finished the piece, it was much too long, around 18,000 words.
Wow, even too long for the New Yorker!
Even for the New Yorker. And I still hadn't answered any questions as far as I was concerned. I hadn't dealt with a thing. Then I tried to address some of the questions that had arisen in a piece for the New York Review of Books, and I still hadn't addressed them. Then, some years later, I thought I might try to look at California in a more systematic way, so I did this. I don't think I would have been moved to write this book before my mother died [in May 2001]. I had thought of doing it, but it became an overwhelming sense of something to do after she died.
Well, your family history here is so compelling, and so enjoyable. Your story about the grandmother who gave you an ounce of really expensive perfume when you were 6 years old, and all your stories about these extraordinary pioneer women who were your ancestors. Yet you seem to be encouraging yourself, and maybe us too, to resist those kinds of stories -- to resist the idea that our ancestors made us who we are.
Yeah. In one sense, it's because I have an adopted child [her daughter, Quintana]. So it became very clear to me that heredity wasn't the last word.
But the stories are still powerful for you, or they wouldn't be in the book.
I have been astonished by the number of reviewers who say things like, "Didion says goodbye to California. Didion gives up on California." It's a love song, as I read it! So, yeah, the stories still have power for me.
But you don't look to them now for truth or meaning or explanation.
I don't think they have any truth for me. I think they're stories, and they led me into a kind of sentimentality which was destructive, I think, in retrospect.
Yet you also seem to acknowledge that the question of how to deal with the past, with the death of loved ones, that inevitable sense of loss, has no answers.
"There is no real way to deal with everything we lose." Yeah, there's no way to shake loose of these stories. On one level, that's the answer I finally came to. I could start over asking questions about California, but I'd arrive at the same answer, I think. And it's not California, of course. It's where you're from.
What made you decide to leave California?
Oh, I didn't decide to leave. I left when I got out of Berkeley because I had been offered a job in New York, so I came here for eight years. Then, after we got married, we moved to Los Angeles, which was another place to me. I had never lived there. We went for six months and sublet our apartment. Then we stayed another six months. Then we stayed another year. Then we stayed another 23 or 24 years.
When we moved, it was a whole series of things. We had a little apartment in New York, so we were spending more time here. Quintana had gone to college, so she wasn't home. We were spending more time in New York just to change our routine, to get out of town. Then it became uncomfortable in that little apartment, but we couldn't afford both a house in California and a bigger apartment. So we sold the house in California. We could have as easily sold the apartment in New York. It was not a very thought-out decision. We just decided to do it one night at Newark Airport when our plane was late. If in fact we had put our house in California on the market and hadn't sold it, it would have gone a different way.
It wasn't an idea of leaving California. In fact, I immediately started the "Letter From Los Angeles" for the New Yorker, which I had told them I wouldn't do when we were living in California. I just kept going out there. It was a great luxury. I could be there and drive around and ask people questions without any responsibility.
So you weren't drawing some line in the sand, or crossing some Rubicon, with respect to living in California.
No, I still have a California driver's license. I don't know that I'll renew it out there this time. I used to renew it when I was seeing my mother. It actually has my New York address on it. I was renewing it after the Loma Prieta earthquake [in 1989] and the lights had been off in Monterey for several days and everyone was confused. So I said I was living in New York, and asked could I put down that address instead of my California address. They said, "Put down any address where you want us to send it."
So you don't have to be a California resident to have a California driver's license?
Apparently not.
Does that make sense?
I have no idea.
This is pretty obvious, but the book is called "Where I Was From," not "Where I Am From." Did you call it that because that phrase actually occurs in the book?
No, it was the title before it was a phrase in the book. But I didn't think of it in those terms. It surprised me last week, when I was reading at Yale, to come across that phrase. It just seemed to me right. It's not so much about California as it is about a state of mind, an enchantment. That's where I was from.
I recently re-read George Steiner's long essay "In Bluebeard's Castle," in which he says that modern culture is permanently haunted by the ghost of the past. You argue that California is always haunted by this idea of a golden age, and that the Golden Age for a Californian is whenever he first got there.
We're always hearing about some new low that we've reached, like the recall. But in fact the recall is Proposition 13 [the anti-tax initiative of 1978] and a whole lot of stuff. Somebody in the Los Angeles Times pointed out that California undergoes one of these revolutions, these little earthquakes, about every 12 years.
Well, I'm gratified that I got you to mention the recall without actually bringing it up. You must be sick of talking about the recall.
Sick of the recall, yeah.
You quote the character Cedarquist, from "The Octopus," telling someone, "California likes to be fooled."
That line certainly came to mind. I think it's a reasonable way of summing it up. The recall was an expression of anger; it was an expression of huge, unbearable disappointment that the trend isn't up at the moment. California doesn't deal very well with anything but boom. And there's no way that the election of one governor or another is going to change the economy.
Not even an android superhero.
No! [Arnold voice.] "I will fix it." But if you look at it another way, it drains off a lot of anger. And it really probably won't make much difference. I remember reading what Jerry Brown once said, when he was being interviewed about Reagan. He had gone to see Reagan in the governor's office, and he said, "He's acting the part of governor very well. He really has the ceremonial aspect of it down." In the end, that was what it was, because the actual work is all staffed out.
One of your enduring themes is the increasing theatricality of American politics. In the book "After Henry," you write about the total emptiness of the modern political convention, and you compare it to the political spectacles that were held in the Soviet Union.
Before I ever went to a convention or had any exposure to a campaign, for some dumb reason I spent a week or two in the press room of the White House in the mid-'80s. I was going to do a piece I never did, because nobody would call me back. What struck me when I actually got into a campaign, which was in '88, was that it was exactly like the White House press room. In other words, the campaign was the model for the White House day. Consider this crazy thing we have now, where the administration is going around telling its story, right? As if that is going to substantively change either of two things: the economy or what's going on, on the ground in Iraq. It's a campaign idea. It's part of the endless campaign that we have now.
Well, the campaign we have now is driving me crazy. We're several months away from the point when anybody actually begins voting. And by the time anybody actually votes, the campaign is likely to be over.
Yeah. You don't have to win New Hampshire to be the candidate. It will have been decided. I read recently that Howard Dean is running 15 points ahead in New Hampshire, but it's hard to imagine him as the Democratic Party's candidate. The decision will go another way, I would guess.
Mild as he is, he's still too offensive to the power structure?
Yeah, as very mild as he is. This time it's so hard to figure. There's just no one on the horizon.
What do you make of Wesley Clark?
He looked great on CNN when he was doing commentary during the run-up to the war. As a candidate, he doesn't seem to carry that authority. Maybe he carried that general's authority onto CNN and he doesn't feel it now. Many people have mentioned to me how short he is.
Bush is shorter than Gore, and that was the first time the shorter man had won in many years. Of course, then again...
He didn't really win!
Here's a quote for you: "I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself."
That's from "The White Album."
Yeah, from the first page. It began to occur to me that is exactly the process of your writing life, the process of disillusionment and disenchantment.
The problem is that I have a highly developed capacity for denial. I can learn things, I can learn things, and I will immediately banish them from my mind and go on in the same error. I'm always having to start over.
The great Western writer Wallace Stegner used to say that the myth of the West was about masculine individualism, but the reality of the West, to the extent that anything good happened at all, was the more communitarian side of it: women and families and the towns and communities they created. And that's exactly what you focus on with such fondness: your female ancestors.
What was always striking to me was that they kept going in the face of no clear reason to. Not just that they kept going west, but that they kept going day by day. I think my reaction to them was probably more personal. But that's an interesting thing -- those were communities that worked, among the women. Community in general -- well, there was no community in general. Talk about denial.
