There are two worlds
Obligatory Joan Didion appreciation post
Before I was a writer, I was a nervous teenage girl. I had friends—plenty of friends, in retrospect—but I was also deeply alone. I was not moved by the things that moved other people. I saw a world that nobody else could see.
This was in part because I grew up in the Appalachian foothills, where everybody was white and Christian fundamentalist, suspicious of books and outsiders (aren’t books always kind of about outsiders?). There weren’t even any Catholics in my school except two families. I was not technically an outsider, having been born right there in Wind Ridge, delivered by the same country doctor as everyone else, but my parents were outsiders, and that was enough.
I also grew up in an enclave of back-to-the-land hippie types, who posited themselves as a superior culture to the Pepsi drinkers. Because the hippie types were, according to their own advertising, free: with their Dylan and their brown rice and their Indian cotton. Free of the narrow laws that make a person socially legible to others (AKA manners). But the pursuit of freedom can also be a fairly narcissistic endeavor, especially if you expect your children to bear the proof of how exceptionally you have raised them. For all their Jung and macrobiotics, they didn’t know what I meant by the hidden world, or they weren’t curious enough to look.
You might be wondering what I mean by saying that I have always seen a hidden world. I don’t know how else to say it. There is a vast emptiness with a fantastic sense of humor, and it is everywhere. It is a holy emptiness. It feels just as real to me as any person. It is my writing collaborator, and it is essentially ecstatic as much as it is ruthless.
My high school English teacher, Mrs. Hatfield, gave me a huge box of books when I was in 9th or 10th grade. She didn’t need them anymore, she said. She had doubles. There’s almost no way this could have been true; it was too big of a box, full of Faulkner and Hemingway and Baldwin and Fitzgerald, and I honestly forget what else. Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. I mean, there’s almost no way she had doubles of all of these books, but if that’s the kind of fib you have to tell to get a nervous teenage girl to accept a gift, so be it.
The most important thing in the box, of course, was that trio of FSG Noonday paperbacks: Slouching Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, and Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. I say most important because to me, at that time, there was something about that book, that rushed, blurry author photo. Joan Didion has always made a glamor out of being impossible to surprise. Being situated in Malibu doesn’t hurt, and neither do the sunglasses, but I think it’s quite obvious that the glamor has more to do with a certain warlike posture you can sense hovering just behind the sentences.
I started writing this a few weeks ago when the news about Joan Didion’s death first came out, and since then it’s lost some of its air because, well, the subject is just about talked out. (Ohhhh the sentences! Everybody has said this.) Revisiting a few of her B-sides, there is some definite yikes material w/r/t race and American imperialism.
I think what I liked most about Didion when I first read her was the unmistakable sense of power in her writing. When people moon about the sentences, the sentences, I think they’re actually, to some extent talking about power rather than prosody. Or, to be more exact, that certain kinds of prosody demonstrate a degree of willfulness in the writer because they reject the almost constant imperative to soften things. (Which is why I hate it when people call something “beautiful writing” without being specific. Point of view is what makes beautiful writing, and the sentences out of this context are just wallpaper.)
And, in some way, I think I related deeply because Didion was as critical as can be of a certain Sixties ethos which my parents and parent-adjacent adults were living out. There’s that horrible scene in “The White Album” of a child being both neglected and treated as an adult, given no rules and gestured to as a king of being and impulse. It’s grotesque, and while it doesn’t exactly sum up my experience of being raised by back-to-the-landers, it gets a lot closer than anything else. And maybe that is why reading her felt like finally finding someone reasonable to talk to in a society that was either Christian superstition or narcissistic freedom.
But I was setting up Didion as a writer who also saw what I’ve called the hidden world, the holy emptiness, and as I’ve reread her over the last few weeks, I’ve realized that I might have been projecting a little bit of my vision. Didion is great, cosmically great, at rendering the way that the firehose narrative proliferation of life on earth produces certain uncanny patterns and rhythms, but she also retreats to a cynical position. And that’s where I part ways with her. (And that’s where Larry Levis comes in. But more about that some other time.)
Still. That parting of ways feels friendly to me. Joan Didion’s books have kept me company while I developed enough of a self to say my own thing. In the same way that you need a friend in your twenties who knows all the bouncers and has all these horrible green lamé dresses to loan you, and you need a friend in your thirties who will walk endless miles in the woods and enumerate theories about parents’ moon signs, and you need friends who also like to walk around the block in the rain when you leave the movie theater, I needed Joan Didion’s books.