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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
As Didion documents her reaction to Dunne's death and her efforts to manage her daughter's Kafkaesque odyssey from one intensive-care unit to the next -- although Quintana was still alive when she finished the book, Didion knew her long-term odds were not good -- she finds herself, at unwary moments, being dragged into the past. Sometimes the catalysts are large and obvious ones, such as driving the streets of Los Angeles, where Didion and Dunne raised their daughter, or seeing a television commercial that was filmed outside a house above the Pacific Ocean, on the Palos Verdes peninsula, where they lived when they brought Quintana home from the hospital and parked her in a bassinet under the wisteria. Sometimes they are completely random: a visit to the Parker House hotel in Boston, a city where she has never lived; an escalator at Madison Square Garden, a building she hasn't often visited.
In this most tender of Didion's books, these unsummoned memories are the most vivid elements, forging an endearing portrait of a family where bourgeois convention and bohemian eccentricity were mixed in odd quantities. She remembers Dunne standing in the pool at their Brentwood house, reading and rereading "Sophie's Choice" while she worked in the garden. She tells us they were very rarely apart; once, when she had to work an extra day in San Francisco, Dunne took the $17 commuter flight from LAX in an airplane with a smile painted on its nose and took her to dinner at Ernie's, where Jimmy Stewart sees Kim Novak in "Vertigo." She digs up the traces of Quintana's girlhood Dunne buried in his novel "Dutch Shea, Jr.," and recalls a late-summer funeral in 1978 after which Dunne told her that his cardiologist had warned him about the blocked ventricular artery leading to his heart.
Didion's form of grief-madness goes beyond the now-famous detail that she refused to give away Dunne's shoes after he died because, she reasoned, he would need them when he came back. Her memories were more than sad or bittersweet reminiscence; they were active attempts to force a new outcome. She believed, or suspected, that she could reach into the past and change whatever it was that had led her to this place. Would Dunne not be dead, and Quintana not dying, if they had bought a house in Hawaii (as she once wanted)? Or if she had not understood the ambulance lights outside their Brentwood house one night in 1988 as an omen, and agreed to move to New York (as Dunne wanted)? And if we can reach into the past and change it, how do we avoid what Didion calls the appointment-in-Samarra problem, meaning that whenever and however we alter the direction of our lives, the Grim Reaper will always be waiting at our new destination, smiling in toothy satisfaction?
As literary critic George Steiner once explained, it's symptomatic of modernity that the present is ruled by images of the past. I suspect we all lead lives dominated in large part by this variety of magical thinking, and while it undoubtedly gets worse as we get older, it can start when we're very young indeed. That old flame whose appearance in your dreams fills you with joy, that Arts and Crafts house your parents sold in 1983, that one afternoon when it rained but you all went in the lake anyway -- these moments can seem more vivid to us, seem more pregnant with lives unlived and directions untaken, the farther away they recede.
Certainly the unfulfillable quest to recover the past is the great theme of modern literature; it drives all of Faulkner's work, all of Joyce's, all of Nabokov's. The paradigmatic work of modernist fiction is called "In Search of Lost Time," for Christ's sake. The most famous sentence in American literature informs us that we are "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Knowingly or not, Joan Didion -- who has already brought nonfiction into psychological and emotional terrain previously reserved for the novel -- has enlisted herself in this tradition. This chronicle of genuine grief and madness, this loving tribute to her real family, is also Didion's crowning literary achievement.
If we have lost faith in a literal paradise, we can still find a literary or artistic one, precious fragments of the past preserved living on the page, undimmed by the passage of time. Gatsby will always stand hypnotized by the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock; the narrator of "Swann's Way" will always be in bed with his famous cookie, awaiting his mother's goodnight kiss. In that universe John Dunne and his wife will always enjoy an evening drink on their Malibu deck or their Honolulu hotel balcony, smelling the jacaranda or hearing the mynahs sing. They will always keep their daughter safe; they will never grow old. Joan Didion has given her dead husband and daughter the gift Humbert Humbert gives his lost love at the end of "Lolita": By placing the three of them and the life they made together in "the refuge of art," by making them "live in the minds of later generations," she has given them the only form of immortality they may share.
