Didion at 75

The first time I read an essay by Joan Didion, one published in a weekly magazine, I was dazzled. In a few paragraphs, she said everything I had been feeling about generational differences (in her case, between "silent" and "hippie" generations) in how people dealt with life and with politics. She threw in thoughts about growing older, and about whether it was possible, or even worthwhile, for groups of citizens to effect societal change through angry demonstrations.

I later read more of her writing, and was especially impressed by her two early books of essays, books about which it has been written:

Her books of essays -- Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album -- represent, to me at least, some of the best and most evocative writing of its kind of the past half century.

--Me, actually, in my 2009 posting "Slouching towards darkness".

(In that 2009 post, I reviewed a dramatization of Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Imagine my discomfort today, therefore, when I read Caitlin Flanagan's essay, "The Autumn of Joan Didion," in the February issue of The Atlantic. Flanagan's essay, which purports to review Didion's latest book, Blue Nights, proclaims that Didion is a writer for girls, especially young girls "on the cusp of womanhood." Flanagan herself recalls -- and much of the review is devoted to Flanagan's memories of her own childhood at Berkeley, where her father, as an English professor, gave Flanagan the chance to meet the young Didion -- how her father exclaimed one night, "There's something weird going on with Joan Didion and women."

So ... what? So, I've been in love with chick lit all these years? But I don't watch vampire movies. While Jane Austen's ok, I don't moon over it. I don't grow faint reading of tender virgins finding themselves clasped in the strong arms of a manly embrace. Why Didion?

Flanagan points out that no real gal can resist Didion's allusions to "the smell of jasmine," or the "packing list" Didion allegedly kept by her suitcase. Huh? Didion, Flanagan contends, knows how to describe her own wardrobe and that of others in detail. She knows the differences in styles of flatware. She knows about good and bad floor plans for houses. She [gasp!] writes about hanging "yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better."

Us guys, on the other hand, we don't care about all that stuff. We want to read about getting high with Hunter Thompson, while speeding on a highway somewhere out of Barstow. Says Flanagan.

Flanagan -- and maybe millions of women, as she suggests -- apparently read Didion differently from the way I do. I'm sure the yellow silk, the flatware, the crepe-de-chine wraps, and [sigh] the jasmine are all there in Didion's writing. I'm willing to admit that her attention to such feminine details may be an attractive feature to many. But to me, the essence of Didion's appeal -- in her essays, which are the concern of both Flanagan and myself -- has been her ability to see the world from a different angle: to see the normal, routine world with which we are all familiar through a broken or distorting mirror, revealing a scary image of things flying out of control.

The title to her first book of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, calls to mind words from Yeats's poem that seem to inform all of her essays.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, ...

Didion's essays repeatedly show worlds spinning apart -- her personal grip on her own life, and our civilization's grip on civilization.

As an example of Didion's acute sensitivity to female concerns(according to Flanagan) -- Didion understood that the traditional governor's mansion in Sacramento was superior to Ronald Reagan's new mansion "because it had big, airy bedrooms" in which one could spend time reading, or writing, or "closing the door and crying until dinner." No wonder girls loved Didion! But that 1977 essay was only superficially about the livability of the Reagan mansion. She saw the Reagans and their nouveau mansion as representing an unfortunate, and already passé, 1950s-ish interlude between two eras -- the old rural Californa of orange groves and quiet good taste and a coming post-70's California of austerity and simplicity, represented by the then governor, Jerry Brown. Brown was famous for his monastic lifestyle, for sleeping on a futon on the floor of his apartment, for refusing to live in the Reagans' overbuilt governor's mansion.

One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.

--Didion, The White Album.

Ultimately, after talking about her own childhood and Didion's appeal to the female gender, Flanagan's review gets around to its nominal subject, Blue Nights. She regrets that it is not a good book. The language is clichéd, Didion's thoughts are no longer original, her insight is lacking. In summary, Didion's problem is that, at 75, "she got old."

Blue Nights deals with Didion's parallel concerns: the death of her daughter, and her own aging and eventual death. As would any grieving mother, she lingers repeatedly over memories of her daughter throughout the young woman's short life: happy times, sad times, puzzling times, disheartening times. To Flanagan, it's clear that Didion just can't read between the lines. Didion can't see that many of her daughter's problems resulted from the way her parents reared her, from their overriding concerns with their own careers, from their selfish narcissism.

My freshman English teacher wrote a warning on one of my early essays: Be cautious in believing that you understand an author's writing better than he does himself. To me, reading Blue Nights before I read Flanagan's review, it was clear that Didion was all too aware of how her own "weaknesses" as a parent affected her daughter. These weaknesses, many of which were unavoidable considering the careers pursued by Didion and her husband, are set forth clearly in the book, and her "where did I go wrong" questions are rhetorical. Didion did not do a clinical self-analysis, it's true; she left it to the reader to connect the dots. But Joan Didion, whatever her age, is never clueless.

Rearing a child, watching the child grow into independence, growing older oneself, losing one's loved ones, and facing one's own eventual death are all part of the human predicament. They are neither male nor female concerns alone. Joan Didion has been thinking and writing of these problems, among many others, throughout her writing career. Her writing may have had a special appeal for young girls, but she's never been a "women's writer." She may now be aging, but she has not lost her sharpness of thought, her turn of phrase, or her ability to see the "strange" in what others find commonplace.

Blue Nights is worth reading.