In Praise of Messy Lives (13 page)

At the beginning of her classic collection of essays
The White Album
(1979), Didion quotes from her own psychiatric report and then says, “By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.” That was one of the revelations of her style: the writer’s own psyche became a delicate radio station channeling the outside world. The news was all about how the news makes you feel. And that is one of her most dubious
legacies: she gave writers a way to write about their favorite topic (themselves) while seeming to pursue a more noble subject (the culture). It was a particular kind of cultural criticism she was pioneering, with childhood sleepovers and marital problems and tears folded delicately into the mix: navel-gazing with a social purpose. Didion did it elegantly, but many of those who followed did it not so elegantly.

Take Anna Quindlen and her endless chronicles of the world shrunk down into the television set in her living room, with her sons making Lego houses in the corner. If Didion developed a personal rapport with the reader, whom she speaks to directly in her essays as “you,” Quindlen developed the kind of friendship with the reader where she sits at the kitchen table swapping recipes. Quindlen, who gained prominence on the op-ed page of
The New York Times
and then became a writer for
Newsweek
, was making her ideas palatable to the quintessential nineties audience, their bookshelves filled with memoirs and
Oprah
blaring from their television sets. In other words, an audience that wanted more intimacy and fewer ideas.

On one of the rare occasions when the outside world impinged on her interesting family life, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, Quindlen wrote: “Euphoria has been one of the war’s buzzwords. We have been repeatedly cautioned not to feel it. The president said the other night this was not the time for it. It has never crossed my mind.” The last sentence, the brisk personal reaction punctuating the public event, is pure Didion. The Gulf War also left Quindlen disoriented, she told us. “I am reasonably sure of only three things today,” she wrote, “that George Bush will be re-elected president in 1992; that … he might win by the largest landslide in the history of the nation; and that we are incredibly
skilled at war.” This sense of being so stunned by the news that you can only be “reasonably sure” of a few things was one of Didion’s most common states of mind. Didion herself put it this way: “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all of the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

Of course, Quindlen is warmer, fuzzier, dopier, and more domestic than Didion, a tabby to Didion’s panther. But there is a slightly hysterical strand running through Quindlen’s extremely public breakfasts with her children that brings the older journalist to mind. You can hear a hint of Didion’s emotional fragility, of that nausea and vertigo, for instance, in Quindlen’s assertion that “I have never sat down to write about abortion without feeling, at least for a moment, the complexities sweep over me like a fit of faintness.”

Quindlen was not the only
Times
writer to draw on Didion’s sensibility. Remember when Maureen Dowd began to distinguish herself as a political reporter with her colorful ruminations on George Bush on the usually staid front page of
The New York Times
? Instead of simply reporting. Dowd took apart the news and analyzed it, breaking down the language of politics with quick sarcastic swipes. Like Didion, she proved herself a connoisseur of the small ironies and eccentric details of political hypocrisy. She observed. “But pork rinds, promoted by Mr. Atwater as a down-home staple of Mr. Bush’s diet, have not been seen in the White House in nearly three years; Mr. Bush’s favorite snack, it turns out, is popcorn.” In her essays on people like John Wayne, or Huey Newton, or the Doors, or the Reagans, Didion wrote about what took place behind the image, about the intricate construction and manipulation of public perception. Take this memorable
scene from an essay in which Didion writes about the then California governor’s wife and a couple of photographers:

Dowd also imported into conventional newspaper articles Didion’s habit of deeply scrutinizing people’s choices of words. Dowd wrote, for instance. “At the Cabletron Systems computer parts plant in Rochester, he began a sentence concerning the Persian Gulf War with his usual manner of speaking, starting to say, ‘about to begin,’ and then thought better of it and switched to a Southern synonym mid-phrase. ‘It was one year ago, one year ago that Desert Storm was about—fixin’ to begin, as they say in another of my home states, Texas.’ ”

You can also hear Didion’s cadences—as well as several of Didion’s signature phrases—running beneath the political writing of Elizabeth Kolbert in
The New Yorker
. In a piece about the New York senatorial race, Kolbert writes: “In the months following, the fuss over ‘Captain Jack’ proved to be central to the emotional
logic of Giuliani’s election effort.” Not only does the rhythm of the sentence echo Didion, but the “emotional logic” of an election effort is exactly the sort of thing Didion was constantly discussing. “Logic” also happens to be one of Didion’s favorite words (Didion wrote: “As it happened I had always appreciated the logic of the Panther position” and “So many encounters in those years were devoid of any logic save that of dreamwork”).

Things “appear” and “seem” in Joan Didion’s writing. They are symbolic of and emblematic of; they characterize: they have morals and messages: they do not simply lie flat on the page. Which is also true of Kolbert: “The killing of Diallo, by contrast, seems to be emblematic of something new: a form of racial bias that is statistically driven and officially sanctioned and that, depending on your perspective, may or may not be racism at all.” This sentence is also very Didion. She loves long, oddly constructed sentences, with ridiculously complicated syntax, often in the passive tense, that are weirdly beautiful, like tall and awkward teenagers. The artful and prolific use of the indirect phrase and the passive tense are aspects of Didion’s signature style. Kolbert’s phrase “may or may not be racism” is also pure Didion: a typographic illustration of ambiguity, as when Didion wrote, “The Getty’s founder may or may not have had some such statement in mind.”

And Kolbert also evokes Didion in her strategic use of quotation marks. Take the following Didionesque observations about stockbrokers: “Brokers routinely have days in which they are ‘butchered’ or ‘killed’ or ‘annihilated’ but dying on the floor is not regarded as an entirely metaphorical prospect.” And “Last month, the First Couple completed their long-awaited move—‘move’
here being understood in the loosest possible sense.” This particular use of quotation marks is one of Didion’s stylistic tics that have made their way so completely and thoroughly into our journalistic patois that they are almost hard to identify. Didion was so suspicious of received ideas that she filled pages with such observations as “The clothes were, as Mrs. Reagan seemed to construe it, ‘wardrobe’—a production expense, like the housing and the catering and the first-class travel,” or “To encourage Joan Baez to be ‘political’ is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue ‘feeling’ things.” Didion uses ironic, or what could be more accurately called skeptical, quotation marks fanatically and constantly. They highlight the fact that the journalist is not just telling a story, she is taking it apart; that the words we use are suspect, revelatory.

Travel writing also lends itself to Didion’s dreamlike idiom. In the middle of her January 2000 piece in
The New Yorker
about Khao San Road in Bangkok, Susan Orlean interrupted her story to say: “I have a persistent fantasy that involves Khao San.” Later, she writes, “From here you can embark on Welcome Travel’s escorted tour of Chiang Mai … or an overland journey by open-bed pickup truck to Phnom Penh or Saigon, or a trip via some rough conveyance to India or Indonesia … or anywhere you can think of—or couldn’t think of, probably, until you saw it named.” Which brings to mind Didion’s frequent trains of “or”s, such as “Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat.… We would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later.… First we wanted a table for twelve … although there might be six more, or eight more.”

So enduring and powerful is Didion’s voice that her influence
extends to writers who weren’t even born when her first essays began to appear. Meghan Daum’s 1999 essay in
The New Yorker
on leaving New York strongly evokes Joan Didion’s famous reflection on the same subject, “Goodbye to All That,” written thirty years earlier. Daum writes, “Once you’re in this kind of debt—and by ‘kind’ I’m talking less about numbers than about my particular brand of debt—all those bills start not to matter anymore.” Didion writes, “I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.”

Daum continues: “As it turned out, I did go to Vassar, and although it would be five years until I entered my debting era, my time there did more than expand my intellect.” Didion uses the phrase “as it turned out” almost relentlessly in her writing, and she also loves to put complex temporal relations into a sentence in just that way. Here is Daum: “I’m kind of glad I didn’t know, because I’ve had a very, very good time here. I’m just leaving the party before the cops break it up.” Here is Didion: “It was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.”

Another young writer whose prose suggests late nights curled up with vintage Didion paperbacks is Sarah Kerr, writing here in
The New York Review of Books:
“But the arrangement did hold out a dream, a particularly Mexican parable of opportunity, for everyone in every sector, as a kind of glue.” (Didion used the word “parable” over and over, as in “this is a California parable, but a true one” or “this may be a parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself,” as well as
phrases like “particularly American” or “particularly Californian.”)

“But that is to get ahead of the story,” Kerr writes at one point in her political analysis. Didion also assumed the role of the storyteller with lines like “I want to tell you a Sacramento story.” In fact, the idea of teasing out the “narratives” and “stories” and “plots” of real life is one of Didion’s trademarks. After the famous first line of her collection
The White Album
, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she might use the words “story” or “narrative” up to fifteen or twenty times in a single essay. This too has entered our journalistic conventions as a cliché. Here is Lynn Darling in
Esquire:
“Marriage is for most of us the narrative spine of our lives, the epic on which we hang our sense of who we are.” Here is Meghan Daum: “If there is in this story a single moment when I crossed the boundary between debtlessness and total financial mayhem, it’s the first dollar that I put toward my life as a writer in New York.” And Elizabeth Kolbert: “The important story of his tenure is obviously the one about the city’s recovery.” And it has become as commonplace for writers to reflect on their story, and the storylike nature of their story, and the construction of The Story itself.

Didion’s writing was so original, so distinctive, that paradoxically she has lost her originality. She has become mundane, traces of her sharp personal lyricism scattered through newspapers and magazines. One thinks here of Auden’s elegy for Yeats: “he became his admirers.” (There are also male writers who imitate Didion, though more of them borrow from Tom Wolfe. Think of all of those articles you’ve read in
GQ
and
Esquire
with such Wolfian sound effects as “Splat!” and internal free associations and liberal spatterings of exclamation points.)

But all of this influence could be the highest achievement a writer can hope for. It is Didion’s incomparable style that seduces so many writers, but it is also the romantic persona she created: ambitious and vulnerable, narcissistic and paranoid and disoriented and maddeningly perceptive. The great revelation of her writing is that it was emotionally charged
and
coolly intellectual, after a journalistic tradition that was dry and distanced and straightforward.

One peculiar effect of Didion’s absorption into the mainstream is that it has become hard to read her work without hearing the echoes. In her most recent novel,
The Last Thing He Wanted
, her fifth book since
The White Album
, she begins to sound like a parody of herself: “That she did not was the beginning of the story as some people in Miami came to see it.”

Of course, one could argue that Didion herself may have been influenced by the women writers who came before her, by Mary McCarthy’s essay “My Confession,” about communism in the thirties, for example, or by Rebecca West’s
The Meaning of Treason
, which took apart and channeled the experience of postwar England in the way Didion would later take apart and channel the experience of sixties America. But that, as Didion would say, is a whole other story.