Joan Didion

Substance and Style

Kathleen M. Vandenberg

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438481401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Much acclaimed and often imitated, Joan Didion remains one of the leading American essayists and political journalists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The lone woman writer among the New Journalists in the 1960s and '70s, Didion became a powerful critic of public and political mythologies in the '80s and '90s, and was an inspiration for those, particularly women, dealing with aging and grief and loss in the early 2000s. An iconic figure, Didion is still much admired by readers, critics, and essayists, who speak of looking to her prose style as a model for their own. In Joan Didion: Substance and Style, Kathleen M. Vandenberg explores how Didion's nonfiction prose style, often lauded for its beauty and poetry, also works rhetorically. Through close readings of selected nonfiction from the last forty years—biographically, culturally, and politically situated—Vandenberg reveals how Didion deliberately and powerfully employs style to emphasize her point of view and enchant her readers. While Didion continues to publish and the "Cult of Joan, " as one author calls it, grows seemingly stronger by the day, this book is the only extended treatment of Didion's later nonfiction and the first sustained and close consideration of how her essays work at the level of the sentence.

CHAPTER 1

Language and the Mechanism of Terror

Salvador

Much has been written about Didion’s work in the 1960s and ’70s, the years during which she composed the pieces that would be later published in her most celebrated essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968 and The White Album in 1979. These are also the years in which she published her first three novels—Run River in 1963, Play It as It Lays in 1970, and A Book of Common Prayer in 1977—though critical reception of these was never as favorable as it was for her nonfiction. As her output increased and she began to receive widespread recognition, it remained the case that it was Didion herself who interested readers, possibly even more than her work. As Louis Menand writes, there was interest in both her nonfiction and fiction:

Mainly, though, everyone was fascinated by the authorial persona, the hypersensitive neurasthenic who drove a Corvette Sting Ray, the frail gamine with the migraine headaches and the dark glasses and the searchlight mind, the writer who seemed to know in her bones what readers were afraid to face, which is that the center no longer holds, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, the story line is broken.1

Part of this was driven by the fact that these decades saw Didion and Dunne at the center of Hollywood life—with Dunne’s brother Nick, a Hollywood producer, putting them in touch with some of the biggest names of the decades in music, film, and writing. What Didion has already written about her life during these years, in Slouching and The White Album, Daugherty does a fine job of fleshing out in his biography in thorough detail, with vivid descriptions of the dinners, parties, and deals that kept the Didion/Dunnes at the intersection of Los Angeles life. Her daughter Quintana was, as a teenager, best friends with Susan Traylor, who was dating, and would later marry, Bob Dylan’s son Jesse; Harrison Ford worked as a contractor on their Malibu home in the ’70s (and thirty years later would pilot Didion to California in his private plane when Quintana was unexpectedly hospitalized in the ICU). They frequently hosted dinner parties (such as one for Tom Wolfe upon the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Janis Joplin was in attendance). Didion—a fashionable, photogenic, enigmatic figure, her slim body adorned in Lily Pulitzer shifts—would throw herself into cooking elaborate meals; alcohol flowed freely. They lived for a time down the street from the Mamas and Papas; Dennis Hopper and Natalie Wood were friends, as was Warren Beatty.

These same decades, which saw the rise of the counterculture, the civil rights movement, and the women’s movement, marked a turning point for literature and journalists—these were the years when Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and Truman Capote, among others, were pushing back against more traditional “objective” journalism and publishing pieces in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s that took a more literary approach to the stories being covered. New Journalism, as it later came to be called, represented a new approach to reporting, one in which the techniques of fiction (e.g., use of a narrator, scene setting, the inclusion of dialogue) were employed in writing about nonfiction subject matter.2 Wolfe perhaps put it best, describing it as “really stylish reporting” with an “esthetic dimension.”3 It was an approach to writing that married the subjective with the objective, allowing, for the first time, the voice and personality of the writer to intrude significantly upon the telling of the story.

Such reporting was still dependent on conventional journalistic methods—research, interviews, data checking, fact finding—and it was still expected that everything in a piece would be based in fact, but New Journalists shifted the focus of such writing from mere reporting to storytelling. Thus, a writer such as Capote spent a considerable amount of time fleshing out his characters and setting the scene for the true-life murders of the Clutter family in his groundbreaking book In Cold Blood, and Hunter S. Thompson created “Gonzo” journalism, involving himself in the stories he wrote, living the experiences of his subjects (as he famously did by riding with the Hell’s Angels for more than a year) and becoming a character in the subsequent pieces he produced.

And Didion spent 1970, in part, by taking a road trip with Dunne through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and jotting down observations in her notebooks, which have only recently been published as South and West: From a Notebook. In these, her approach is clearly both “traditional” and literary. Her talent at constructing sharply evocative images that dissolve, as through a stereopticon, seamlessly into one another, produce vivid three-dimensional pictures.4 Some of the sentences contained within these notes are rich with prepositional phrases (uninterrupted by commas) that layer her imagery, giving it depth. In Biloxi, in June 1970, she sees, and thus the reader does as well, that “[i]n the sawdust under the awning a small girl sat, stringing the pop tops from beer cans into a necklace.”5 In the same month, she stops in Winfield, Alabama, where she sees that “[a]t the little concrete pool between the motel and the creek, two teenage girls in two-piece bathing suits were laying in the sun on the stained pavement” (75). In each sentence the reader is given the close-up, the medium shot, the long shot, flawlessly edited together.

Some imagery is also given dimension by her characteristic mix of sentence types, whose fluent rhythm owes more to poetic form than journalistic traditions. Short declarative sentences often establish a backdrop, a series of these sentences uninterrupted by coordinating conjunctions, emphatic but matter-of-fact. She writes, of the Deep South: “Everything seems to go to seed along the Gulf: walls stain, windows rust. Curtains mildew. Wood warps. Air conditioners cease to function” (30). Alternately she pens sentences that rise and fall rhythmically to convey scenery rich with tactile details: “There was occasional rain and an overcast sky and the raw piney woods” (40).

Long, lyrical, sentences—accumulating details through coordination and repeated modification, weighty with metaphors, made fluid through alliteration or anaphora—frequently travel across the pages of this work. Based in fact, but steeped in imagery, these have an aesthetic dimension unlike the traditional prose of reporters. Quite often, as with the scenes mentioned below, rather than reflect back to the reader, as if in a seventeenth-century Claude glass, settings and worlds harmonized and colors softened, her sentences capture the raw, dark, edges of places. In their concrete, sensory detail they are so tactile as to border on haptic communication. “In New Orleans in June,” she observes, “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” (5). The metaphoric heaviness of the atmosphere is echoed in the repetition of the harsh “d” sound: “death” (four times), “decay,” “drowning.” After visiting the Garden District, she reflects that “[w]hat I saw that night was a world so rich and complex and I was almost disoriented, a world complete unto itself, a world of smooth surfaces broken occasionally by a flash of eccentricity so deep that it numbed any attempt at interpretation” (15). The anaphoric use of “world” stiches together, seamlessly, the literal and the figurative, and carries the reader forward to the uncertainty that concludes the sentence.

These protracted sentences are frequently interrupted by brief, fragmentary sentences that demand attention. While fragments are commonly considered to be, as Constance Hale puts it, “adrift, without clear direction or function,”6 Didion’s fragments are sharp-eyed and rooted in the visible and tactile: “A black woman sitting on her front porch on the backseat from a car. Cannibalized rusting automobiles everywhere, in ditches, the kudzu taking over. White wild flowers, red dirt. The pines here are getting lower, bushier. Polled Herefords” (42). And on the road from Meridian to Tuscaloosa: “Dixie Gas stations, all over, with Confederate flags and grill work. Boys working on the road between Cuba and Demopolis. Making measurements with fishing poles” (62). And then she writes, a few sentences later, “I think I never saw water that appeared to be running in any part of the South. A sense of water moccasins” (62–63).

While, as Michael Arlen was quick to point out as early as 1972, there was not much new about New Journalism (he notes that there had been “a vein of personal journalism in English and American writing for a very long time”), it was the case, as he argues, that New Journalists “considerably expanded the possibilities of journalism.”7 In describing the parameters of this genre, one of its foremost practitioners, Gay Talese, explains:

The new journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form. The new journalism allows, demands in fact, a more imaginative approach to reporting, and it permits the writer to inject himself into the narrative if he wishes.8

Didion had been writing in this genre for years (though she herself did not claim to be a New Journalist and saw few similarities between the leading male writers in the genre and herself) while continuing to work on her novels as well as screenplays with Dunne. She only really began to turn her attention to politics in the early ’80s. She began writing for The New York Review of Books in 1973, under Silvers, who would be hugely influential in shifting the trajectory of her writing.9 Initially, her reviews for the publication centered on literature and celebrity, with her shift to coverage of political rhetoric occurring in 1982. With this shift in focus, there was a marked change in Didion’s style. Where before, in the pieces collected in Slouching and White Album, her complicated nostalgia for a mythic California and the cultural narratives that sustained early generations of her family and informed her childhood inevitably produced prose both reflective and introspective, her political essays—from Salvador through to Fixed Ideas—reflect a writer far more disenchanted and insistent. While there remains what Ellen Friedman calls “an obsessive nostalgia” for things lost,10 there is a growing interest in language—its uses, misuses, and abuses.

Several of her stylistic strategies—increasing use of anaphora, expletives, parentheticals, and hedges in particular—seem to arise from a determined effort to avoid the language through which “fixed ideas” and “political fictions” are communicated. While old stylistic patterns remain—an affection for long, cumulative, and complex sentences, a talent for striking metaphors, a tendency toward anastrophe, irony, and understatement—Didion recedes from the center of her narratives, emphasizing her “outsider” status in order to secure her position as an objective and unbiased critic. Personal details—such as the packing list in “The White Album,” with which longtime fans are intimately familiar, or the meals she and her then eleven-year-old daughter share in “On the Road,”—are much less frequently noted. If one could be said to have developed a sense of “Joan Didion” the writer from her first two essay collections, it is fair to say that in these political pieces, she would remain a quite shadowy and unformed presence to those unfamiliar with her writing or reputation.

Didion offered varying accounts for her trip to Salvador, but it is clear that she approached the country and the topic from a place of intellectual and professional curiosity rather than any deeply personal interest in the country’s affairs or passionate opinion about the direction in which the country seemed headed. The casual, almost offhand way in which she describes her decision to travel to a country seized by unthinkable violence is striking—in a 2003 interview with Guardian writer Jemima Hunt, she offers that “[t]he decision to go to El Salvador came one morning at the breakfast table. I was reading the newspaper and it just didn’t make sense.”11 In another interview, in 2006 with Hilton Als, she indicates that her motivation to write the book came from Silvers, who, upon hearing that Didion and Dunne were traveling to San Salvador, asked if one or the other would write something about it.12 In any case, in June 1982, she and Dunne, accompanied by Christopher Dickey, then Central American Bureau chief for The Washington Post,13 traveled to El Salvador, a country then marking its fourth year of an explosive and extremely violent civil war that would eventually end only in 1991, nine years after her visit.14

When Didion landed at the El Salvador International Airport the country was in the midst of chaos—it is almost impossible to overstate how unpredictable, unstable, and dangerous El Salvador was at the time. Visitors were not wholly protected from the terror infusing the place, and, indeed, some of the most widely publicized and horrific acts of violence against both visitors and citizens occurred shortly before her visit. She arrived “approximately a year and a half after four American church women were murdered there; approximately six months after all the residents of the village of El Mozote were massacred by the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl Battalion (trained by the United States military); and shortly after the ARENA party’s Roberto D’Aubuisson, who had been implicated in the assassination of Archbishop Romero, was elected president of El Salvador’s constituent assembly.”15 Neither at the time of Didion’s visit, nor for many years afterward, was there clarity on who orchestrated or perpetrated these acts, though there were certainly many rumors (and strong indications) that U.S.-backed death squads were responsible for great numbers of the killings.

Economic and military aid from the United States—whose presence and support is frequently signaled in Didion’s work via reference to American brands and cars—was predicated on the notion that El Salvador was an ally in its Cold War fight against communism, and included training the government-supported soldiers whose opponents “then-President Ronald Reagan identified as Cuban-backed guerrillas.”16 The involvement of the United States in the civil war complicated the efforts of many U.S. reporters to uncover and report on the violence taking place there. In the case of El Mozote, there was initially a complete denial that a massacre had even taken place, and even when the United States conceded that it had occurred, there were years of denial over the number of victims. In a sign of just how difficult it was to identify perpetrators of these and other acts of torture and terror and bring them to justice, consider that it was not until 2002 (twenty years after Didion’s visit) that two retired Salvadoran generals, now permanent U.S. residents, were found legally responsible for the torture that had occurred during the war.17

The book ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: To Shift the Structure of a Sentence
• Chapter 1 Language and the Mechanism of Terror: Salvador
• Chapter 2 Preferred Narratives: New York City after the Central Park Jogger
• Chapter 3 Lifting the Curtain: The Rhetoric of Politics
• Chapter 4 Terra Incognita: On Loss and Memory
• Conclusion: What Remains
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover