If Joan Didion were writing this essay, she’d be clacking away on a typewriter with one hand, cigarette held aloft in the other. I’m doing neither because I’m not Didion, but then again nobody else is either. The iconic writer and journalist, who passed away from Parkinson’s yesterday at age 87, was one of the great literary artists of our age. It’s hard not to think that we lost her right when we needed her most.
Like her exact contemporary Philip Roth (they were born less than a year apart), she was one of the indispensable chroniclers of “the indigenous American berserk,” our penchant for hypocrisy and heartbreak. Where Roth was the irreverent Rabbi of Newark, Didion was the O.G. California Gurl, the great storyteller of what she called “the golden land.” She was seductive but in her writing unseducible, sexy and skeptical, a writer’s writer who became a glamour icon.
In books like The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and The Year of Magical Thinking she pioneered a style that was precise, memorable, and entirely unemotional. Her eye was as sharp as a shard of glass, and her prose had the chilly charisma of a dry white wine just out of the fridge, direct from the same soil that yielded Hemingway. She wrote about murderers and being young, hippies and hairdressers, national politics and personal loss. She had no patience for pieties, and could be brutal about the things about which people are sentimental. Didion’s intellectual instincts were conservative, but no writer who refuses to suffer fools can be neatly categorized. She was the first reporter to make the case for the innocence of the Central Park Five.
And of course, she was shockingly beautiful, as if the elegance of her writing found an avatar in physical form.
Didion is often grouped together with a group of writers who came of age in the 1960’s and 1970’s called “the New Journalists.” Rather than objective reportage and a ‘just the facts, ma’am’ style, figures like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese raided the fiction writer’s toolkit and brought literary language to bear on their subjects. They shed the reporter’s invisibility cloak and inserted themselves into the stories they covered.
Didion managed this, but in her own imitable way. The White Album begins “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but then casts doubt on that very practice: “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I have ever told myself.” She inserts her own psychiatric report into a rundown of the insanity of the 60’s, and famously shared her packing list for reporting trips. As she put it, “I had the keys, but not the key.” Maybe not, but by eschewing pity and showing the seams, she picked the lock. This is vulnerability without weakness, rigor without preachiness.
One of her essays in particular has left its imprint on my brain. Didion wrote Goodbye to All That in 1967, when she was thirty three. It is an account of her time in New York as an explanation of why she chose to decamp for Los Angeles. It was my hello to literature, or at least it feels that way. It was years before I read it at the age it was meant to be read, and by then it already felt too late. I’d already grown up in its complicated light. Goodbye to All That is an essay about where we live and how we age. What it feels like to arrive, and how we know it’s time to go. Things that matter.
One strand of the essay’s brilliance is that it holds beginnings and endings together in intimate proximity, as if they were long distance lovers. The first sentence brushes the last moment; “it is easy to see the beginning of things, and hard to see the end.” The essay’s glory is its tone, intimate and wry, the musing of an ingenue enlivened with the glint of a sophisticate’s knife. Didion’s sentences are steady and unplaceable. “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three,” she recalls, “is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” This is the voice of someone who is no longer young writing from youth, and it captures both the incredulous wonder and slyly knowing irony that only the very best prose can hold.
The essay’s tensile energy comes from its spirited effort to place its finger on the unreachable and luminous previous versions of ourselves. “I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever loves you and never love anyone quite that way again.” Being young in New York becomes a foreign country, a place to “stay up all night and makes mistakes.” Didion brings this all so close and makes it all seem so far away. Which is exactly how it feels. Beginnings are not a good time to write because there is too much running and flirting and living to do. But they are good to remember, and writing starts when remembering seems just as vital as doing.
The poet T.S. Eliot famously noted “in my beginning is my end,” but Didion sees things more radically. We are different people when we arrive at a place and when we leave it, and it is “distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” This seems right. We believe in new faces until we don’t, and we think we have “all the afternoons” in the world until just getting through one seems intolerable. The first gin and tonic of the night makes a whole set of promises. The last one half-apologizes for all the debts still outstanding.
“Goodbye to All That” remains a defining piece of writing and at the core of any New York canon because Didion brings both a microscope and telescope to her literary lab. The essay is shot through with the people and places of the city, and the moment Didion lived it and loved it, but its geography retains a wandering quality that belies this specificity. I read it in Cambridge, a place where I had gone to school and stayed for more school. It was a place I loved deeply and stayed an outrageously long time, relative to how long I had been alive. It was my world, until it wasn’t anymore. I wanted to take all of it wherever I went and leave it all far behind.
Didion hits precisely the counterintuitive note that to really see a place is to be totally blinded by its charms and its gashes. What she calls “the shining and perishable dream itself” is never more real than when it promises to never close even as it dims the lights. Dreams are flecked with fantasy; “one does not “live” at Xanadu,” she rightly says. But even if you don’t live there, you might linger for a while and see yourself more truly in its luminous halls.
Like Didion, I left New York to move West, and am now back East. For her, it was “the moon on the Pacific” and the fragrance of jasmine that announced a new chapter, the sensual remanding her into a new sensibility. On the other side of “the golden rhythm” is preposterous, flagrant, youth. On this side, the whole rest of the story, to be lived in the golden places to grow old in, where the dream became real and worn and lovely at the edges.
That’s Didion country.
A
P.S. If you missed Better Thinking’s Christmas essay yesterday, take a look here.