In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. ... The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.
These opening lines of Joan Didion's new book, South and West -- perhaps "proto-book"1 is the better term -- are perhaps the most vividly descriptive lines in the entire volume. In a few sentences they conjure up images of New Orleans -- which I've never visited -- that are unforgettable, and that also reinforce my preconceptions of that city's appearance and atmosphere.
I found much of the remaining book -- with a number of excellent exceptions -- to be just what they purport to be: rough notes written down by the author in 1970 during a road trip from New Orleans through Mississippi and Alabama. They are, in general, notes and observations that she hoped eventually to work into a finished book. She never wrote the book, and it's not entirely clear why she has published them "prehumously," although novelist Nathanial Rich proposes an answer in his Foreword.
I had never heard of Joan Didion until 1970 when I read an essay published in Life Magazine.2 She recalled a Saturday afternoon in 1953, hanging around after lunch at a friend's fraternity house in Berkeley, while the friend went out to watch a football game. From this small kernel, her essay blossomed into an expression of her amazed realization of how much university life had changed -- the "silent" generation becoming the "hippie" generation -- during the intervening 17 years. As a guy who had myself been at college just before the cusp of that change in generations, I was dazzled by both her perceptiveness and her writing style.
Didion still remains a favorite author. Her writing style is unique, and she often evokes a sense of the uncanny from her observations of the most apparently mundane events and situations.
In South and West, much of what Didion finds unusual and bizarre about the South was not unique to the South. She seems to be simply unaware of the facts of everyday life in rural and small town America everywhere. For example, she talks to a past acquaintance at a New Orleans party who has read her essay describing time spent among the hippies in San Francisco. The man asks her
... why I had been allowed ... to "spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash."
"Who allowed you?" he repeated.
I said that I did not know quite what he meant.
Ben C. only stared at me.
"I mean, who wouldn't have allowed me?"
"You do have a husband?" he said finally. "This man I've thought was your husband for several years, he is your husband?"
This exchange sounds funny now, but in the small Northwest town in which I grew up it would have seemed totally normal in 1970.
But Joan Didion, who has lived many places, but primarily in fashionable areas on the two coasts, was appalled. At another point, she reminds herself
It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?
I suspect that she would have been overcome by the same anger had she lived in sleepy towns in virtually every state. An anger shared by many women, certainly by 1970.
During their travels, she and her husband stayed at a variety of motels, most frequently at local franchises of mid-price national chains. After a day of interviewing local figures, both town leaders and average folks, she felt relief checking into a motel.
Sitting by the pool at six o'clock I felt the euphoria of Interstate America. I could be in San Bernardino, or Phoenix, or outside Indianapolis.
No doubt she was surrounded by a more cosmopolitan group at a Howard Johnson, say, than she had been at the local courthouse. But I suspect that much of her relief came from being around people from a somewhat higher socio-economic level, from wherever they came, whose manners and opinions were therefore closer to her own.
I've never been to the Deep South, so my feelings about Didion's observations are entirely conjectural. I don't doubt that -- aside from the peculiarities found everywhere in small town America -- the South presents its own peculiar differences -- certainly racial differences -- from conditions found in the northern and western states. I feel this difference, as noted above, most deeply in Didion's observations of New Orleans, and the surrounding areas of Louisiana, an area that is perhaps not typical of the Deep South..
When I think now about New Orleans I remember mainly its dense obsessiveness, its vertiginous preoccupation with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style.
These are all preoccupations which, she claims, are antithetical to the preoccupations of the West, of Californians.
In New Orleans they also talk about parties, and about food, their voices rising and falling, never still, as if talking about anything at all could keep the wilderness at bay. In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent ....
Sounds creepy, just as I suspected. I'm tempted to visit!
In his Foreword, Rich suggests that Didion's rough notes from 1970 are worth considering today, because she even then realized that America's destiny might not always be to serve the world as the beacon of rationality and progress -- the virtues of California -- that it was assumed to be in 1970. She sensed that tribalism, small town virtues, ignorance and fear of the unknown -- even of the next county -- had deep roots, not just in the Deep South but in America in general. That these atavistic fears and impulses were gradually creeping -- like the kudzu she saw climbing over everything in the South -- over the coastal virtues of rationality and globalism and cosmopolitanism.
In other words, Rich claims that Didion foresaw the coming of Trump, or at least the forces that made Trump possible.
I think that interpretation is possible. At one point she describes her growing sense that
... the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be, the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. I did not much want to talk about this.
She interviewed the southern novelist Walker Percy, a gracious host who touched on this subject
"The South," he said, "owes a debt to the North ... tore the Union apart once ... and now only the South can save the North."
This theme was certainly present in Didion's notes and contemplations. I'm not sure it was a major theme.
In any event, it wasn't a theme on which Didion cared to dwell. She expressed her immense relief when she finally boarded a plane back to Los Angeles.
An interesting collection of notes from an earlier stage of Joan Didion's career. I would prefer to have read a finished book in which she had incorporated some of this material in a polished manner.
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1A very short book with an estimated Kindle reading time of two hours. Priced at $10.99 on Kindle.
2Republished as "On the Morning after the Sixties" in her collection of essays, The White Album.
