The Last Love Song (12 page)

Were we not invited to wonder what had happened to the narrative?

The degree to which the counterculture was just the culture, manipulated by people at the highest levels of what Dwight Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial complex,” to test the limits of human behavior and its susceptibility to control; the degree to which the eventual waning of the love-and-peace movement occurred not because rebellion lost steam, but because the power structure moved on to other forms of weapons R&D and assaults on human will; the degree to which drugs, technology, and infrastructures first developed for military application and then flooded into a society unable to absorb them while grappling with the consequences of continuous wars—this is a history yet to be accurately rendered.

Meanwhile, in the 1960s, Joan Didion, native of a state whose “climate, habits, and modes of life,” according to its Board of Health, were “well-calculated to break some link in reason's chain, and throw into confusion even the best balanced properties of mind,” would begin to document cracks in the country's official narratives, cracks she had first noted upon leaving her sheltered world in Sacramento in 1953 and going off to college, a departure that seems to have precipitated her father's breakdown and his stay at Letterman General Hospital. In time, Didion would distinguish herself as one of the most incisive chroniclers of the sixties, a period whose legacy now appears to rest in its questioning of what does or does not constitute mental illness.

2

Between June 1952 and February 1953, after her rejection from Stanford and before her provisional acceptance to Berkeley, Didion, depressed, picked up a few classes at Sacramento Junior College and listlessly dated a boy whose only passion appeared to be golf. “[M]y aversion to outdoor games normally approaches the pathological,” she once wrote, but she was drawn to this boy precisely because their differences allowed “dramatic possibilities” good for a spiky diversion.

She spent her evenings at drive-in movies. In the afternoons, she'd visit the family cemetery, sit in the car staring at chipped-wing angels, listening to country tunes and radio evangelists broadcasting from Tulsa. At the time, the most powerful Tulsa preacher, syndicated on five hundred AM stations nationwide, was Billy James Hargis. “All I want to do is preach Jesus and save America,” he'd say. He saw his “Christian Crusade” as a weapon against “Communism and its godless ways.” “Is the school house the proper place to teach raw sex?” he'd shout, and rant against public institutions poisoned by Reds whose plans to wreck America lay in eroding the country's morals. Among his supporters were the patriot-preacher Carl McIntire and Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker of the John Birch Society (Eduene Didion greatly admired the Birchers, she told her daughter). Allegedly, Lee Harvey Oswald would attempt to assassinate Walker in 1963, seven months before he was arrested for killing President Kennedy. When gaps appear in the narrative, conspiracy tales rush in to fill them.

In the summer of 1952, Billy James Hargis's sermons, rattling through the tinny speakers of Didion's car, presaged left- and right-wing violence, had she known. What she knew was that the shouting sounded like annexation debates in downtown Sacramento, one side arguing the city's responsibility for the poor, the other screaming, “Commies!” The dullness of the chatter paralyzed Didion so intensely, she simply watched one day as a rattlesnake slid among tombstones past her feet while she sat half in, half out of the car. Later she failed to warn anyone about the awful creature, violating her grandfather's code of the West.

*   *   *

Mark Schorer, Harvard educated, sophisticated in manner and dress, was the closest thing to an Easterner Didion had ever met, though in fact he was born in Wisconsin. A Midwesterner through and through—his finest achievement would be his biography of the Midwest American writer Sinclair Lewis—he seemed
credentialed
as an Easterner by virtue of his cultural knowledge and aesthetic refinement. By the time Didion took his classes at Berkeley in literature and creative writing, he was a literary star, having published a handful of short stories, many of them in
The New Yorker,
a study of William Blake, and a highly influential critical essay, “Technique as Discovery.” Graduate students clamored to get into his writing seminars and undergraduates packed his classes on European and American literature.

Another Harvard alum, James D. Hart, best known now for his
Oxford Companion to American Literature,
taught Didion the American classics she hadn't already read on her own. In Henry Nash Smith's classes, she deepened her familiarity with Henry James. She recoiled from D. H. Lawrence, irritated by him “on almost every level,” she said. “The writing was so clotted and sentimental” (she may have disliked him also because she failed to complete an assigned paper on him; each time she contemplated her Incomplete, she wanted to “heave,” she confessed to a friend). Her classmates in English 106A were reading Céline, Beckett's
Waiting for Godot,
Bellow's
Augie March
. J. D. Salinger was all the rage. The boys in the class dismissed female writers on the grounds that they had no experience of war. Male novelists were granted a “social tradition” in which to operate, Didion discovered: “Hard drinkers, bad livers, wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts.” “A woman who wrote novels had no particular role,” she said. “Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, Flannery O'Connor, of course. I didn't much like it.” On the other hand, she, too, was drawn to big fish and Paris; with the exception of George Eliot, the women she read did not impress her stylistically. The invalid role, invisible as Scarlet O'Neil, had always suited Didion. The Berkeley campus was a “big, anonymous place” into which she could melt. This pleased her. She soon recovered from the sting of failing to make Stanford. A friend of hers in Palo Alto asked her to write a paper for him on Joseph Conrad's
Nostromo
. She did and he got an A on it. For the same paper at Berkeley, Didion received a B−. Who was getting the stricter education? Going to Berkeley was like “waking up,” she said, though she would never claim to be a “legitimate resident in any world of ideas.”

“The Muse … / In distant lands now waits a better time,” Bishop George Berkeley had written in 1752, envisioning the unspoiled Western world as an excellent place to cultivate “Arts and Learning.” The California campus, named for him, nestled beneath sere, oak-dotted hills, its green lawns and white stone walls shaded by eucalyptus, alder, and flowering plum trees whose ripe fruit burned red as fevered skin. The petals of pink geraniums blew across cobbled walks mixed with flecks of deep blue lily of the Nile. The carillion in Sather Tower, known as the Campanile, tolled the stations of the day. At the end of each term, Didion stood among the smooth plane trees lining the Campanile Esplanade and listened to the bells play Rudyard Kipling's “They're Hanging Danny Deever in the Morning,” a melancholy tune about a British soldier executed for murder. His punishment enforced discipline among the troops: Presumably, the song edified students sweating their final exams.

In the evenings, Didion wandered across the bridge over Strawberry Creek, past Doe Library, out Sather Gate, and into “the city of unfinished attics and stairs leading to strange towers,” as Ishmael Reed would later say of the small community. A low throb of traffic animated the foggy streets and the air was sweetened with star jasmine. Behind the Claremont Hotel, dirt roads led into the hills; through Strawberry Canyon and Orindo Park, she hiked cool ravines padded with moss overlooking the flat part of town, with its factories and auto-repair yards, and, beyond that, the wide expanse of San Francisco Bay.

Despite the pleasant anonymity and the beauty of the campus setting, Didion felt nostalgic about her parents' house and she worried about her father. She had been in such a hurry to grow up, but on holiday visits home she painted her old bedroom bright pink, as if to seal it in the lead-based color of childhood. Standing in the kitchen, she'd eat waffles and apples, reflect on the sadness of the valley, with its dwindling hops fields (decimated since Pearl Harbor, when Japanese ranch hands had been interned), rummage through kitchen drawers, finding now-worthless food ration stamps. She'd note the yellow haze in the sky over Sacramento, an overcast indolence she termed “earthquake weather,” and she'd remember, almost fondly, quarrels with her mother—what about?; nothing, nothing at all—and the long silences between them afterward. She found old keepsake boxes stuffed with broken seashells and pressed nasturtiums. She remembered going into San Francisco to see Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne at the Geary Theatre in
O Mistress Mine
and wishing the whole world was a glib and overheated comedy for kids. She remembered broken levees, kilns burning in the night; shabby Chamber of Commerce parades—“fifteen dentists on fifteen palominos,” she'd write; sitting with her father as he drank quietly in the Senator Bar downtown, ordering her lemonade with grenadine; the sound of silver dollars in her father's fingers; the smells of sherry and vermouth in the kitchens of her mother's friends, who nipped in secret just a little each day.

What else did she remember? Hiroshima. Hearing about it, she'd thought of a line from Episcopal liturgy: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.” She remembered her mother on the phone with one of her aunts, planning a tea, advising her it was
never
a mistake to buy a hat. She remembered dawns, getting up as the last stars faded, expecting flames to streak across the sky from a Nevada test shot.

On these visits home from Berkeley, her wistfulness soon dissolved into valley lassitude, the immense flatness of the place offering endless directions, all alike. “The landscape has a fantastic, strong, and depressing effect,” she'd remark years later. “There is no way you can live up to the landscape. The works of man mean nothing … against [it].” A Conradian notion. “It's so awesome and clearly it can be wrenched apart in a millisecond by an earthquake.”

In the meantime it was being subdivided by her father and his cronies.
NO SEWER BONDS
, said the signs.
VETS NO DOWN. LOW F. H. A.

On the Southern Pacific's City of San Francisco, she'd return to campus, eager to resume her studies. But then homesickness hammered her again. Her classmates' easy teasing was wildly different from the pointed stillness in her parents' house. Gossip and small talk were simply beyond her. So were golden tans. She'd sit in her room, knitting a sweater for her father, or she'd lie awake, hearing the Campanile strike. She'd pity herself, a “humorless nineteen-year-old.”

As she wrote in
Run River,
“It was as if she had stumbled alone across the plains and found that everyone else had already arrived, by TWA.”

Out-of-staters appalled her; without thinking, they'd toss burning cigarettes from the windows of speeding cars. Didn't they know California was a tinderbox? Hadn't they heard of the Santa Ana winds torching the air? What was wrong with Eastern boys and Jewish kids with their fast talk and vulgar jokes, their sermons about trade unionism and democratic socialists? What was wrong with the Sigma Chis, convinced a whispered double entendre would get a girl so hot that she'd slip into the hills with them (after first stopping at a Shattuck Avenue drugstore for a discounted box of condoms)?

Didion's reserve and her faint pallor intrigued certain boys, lured by the challenge of cracking her silences and discovering her withheld mysteries. Soon, though, they'd be bored with her or terribly confused. She was simply
quiet.
In the mornings, she'd schlump to class in a dirty old raincoat, fingering bags of peanuts in her pockets.

Her rejection from Phi Beta Kappa nearly put her on the bus back to Sactown for good. She couldn't compete with the Pasadena social queens or quote Camus off-the-cuff at late-night mixers, so she had counted on her intelligence to distinguish her at Berkeley. But she had performed unimpressively in Psychology 1B, History 17A—even in the geology class she should have aced, thanks to her grandfather. When her grades arrived at her parents' house inside the self-addressed envelopes she had turned in to the registrar, she felt a marked loss of innocence. Quiet diligence and good manners would not exempt her from comparison to others and the need to prove her worth.

She pledged Delta Delta Delta (“Let us steadfastly love one another”) and moved into the three-story sorority house on Warring Street. This gave her an identity and new friends: Barbara Brown, daughter of Pat Brown, California's attorney general and soon-to-be-governor, and Didion's roommate, Shirley Stephenson, a decorative arts major from Hayward. Didion was uncomfortable living among sixty girls gossiping about 7Up-and-bourbon kisses in the backs of waxed jalopies. These were the girls Simone de Beauvoir had in mind when she characterized Didion's generation following a campus visit one spring: “I looked at the athletic-looking young people, the smiling young girls … and I thought that certainly … there were no more than one or two who were concerned about the news of the day. They sometimes say that America is the land of youth. I am not so sure. Real youth is that which exerts itself in forging ahead to an adult future, not that which lives confined with accommodating resignation in the limits assigned to it.”

*   *   *

Didion was
in
the world of Freddies and Sallies (as the Greeks were called on campus) but not
of
it; neither was she intimate with the Beats living up in the hills. “I came out of what was called the ‘Silent Generation,'” she'd say later. “The whole bottom line was that we didn't really think there were any social answers to the problems of humanity.” In a retrospective essay, she'd write, “The mood of Berkeley in those years was one of mild but chronic ‘depression,'” a projection, perhaps, of her personal disengagement.