Of Joan Didion
Joan Didion was an answer to the recession of poise—of intellect—from our lives. We had had few others. Polish, exactitude, remove: of these she made an uneasy atelier, and with them erected a new expression. Novelty and anomaly, too, were at her disposal, never far off, right there in her kit. From early she would perfect them, tune the pitch, the keen and cant, of her voice. She would invent an American tone, contained inside of which—in the grain and in the groan—would be all the history of the stolen frontier. There she was, Didion, reluctant First Lady of the American West Coast, armed with charm and bizarre acuity. Then the political unconscious swept in. And some malaise, too. For cognitive activity in Didion disguised cognitive agitation, and there was much in the long twentieth century to find disquieting.
She was suited to her work, Didion was. Lay anthropology, amateur sociology, and the crusade for anagnorisis which sat at the heart of either enterprise were the final traits of her prose. The national character was motile, mercurial, of uncertain origin and destination. Yet Didion took it upon herself anyway to detect true natures and motives; she furnished etymologies of a thought, unveiled suppressed hypocrisies, appetites, logics. But the epiphanies with which she plied her trade—the baleful revelations and grim Eurekas of exposé—were glimpsed as through a glass, darkly. Some superfluity of perception would be needed here. And were there not some precedents? Dante had found himself “within a forest dark / for the straightforward pathway had been lost”; Didion discovered that way but preserved for us its darkness, isolating its tenebrous conditions as an essential to our American Experiment.
Essayed—assayed—in that endeavor was the glory of nationalism itself. It was unseemly, ineradicable, our patriotism. As were its effects: the anomie and geopolitical depredation, the unchecked creep of power and its mainstream celebration at home. Yet Didion’s writings are often only an encounter with these disagreeable rudiments of recent life, not a repudiation of them. Her basic sentiment was indeed journalistic; thus could nothing be counted banal to her, nor no banality unremarkable. Invested with her point of view, calamity morphed to curiosity, and curiosity was worth noting.
So the work is devoid, mostly, of judgments but not of evaluations. Civilization and its discontents were there to be considered; nothing was self-evident. A raging incoherence of forms had been waged as in a battle royale at the center of the culture industry; what would survive the melee? New and more styles of radical (or liberal, or conservative) will, evidently—there to be tried on, tried out: peddled to whomever.
Or taken seriously. The realization accounts for the late multiplicity of her subjects and the reorientation of her concern—toward politics, the lives and living of others, her own life. But what there to be said, ventured, proposed? Biography is only ever tautology for the subject who is already her own documentarian. Didion is the rare writer who’s said it all, everything, nothing left. The work is exhaustive, even in its withholding. Her focus attends to all but this, or all but that, and we come to recognize what she’s doing with the maneuver. We get more of her, more from her, in precisely the places our attention’s steered elsewhere. Distraction was by design, and itself revealing. So: Just as her tic threatened to become defect it instead elevated to become style, hallmark, not accident or furtive feature but wry artifice: intended, built-in, conspicuous in its reticence. The work says, The concordance of facts about her life is established, set; she wants it that way. You’ll get no more from her, save that refusal—and what it suggests.
Joan Didion: She's the woman motorist without a spare in the rear when she needs one. (What had happened? Were the tires compromised, was a nail in the road?) Well, she kept on, savoring hazard. Weren't there places to be? A mishap was what it meant to travel. En route she might observe something worth the mention, who knows….
Joan had had a private life, only that and no substitute. Yet its expression was public, as it must be for the writer whose every line is by accident or intention one of autobiography. The effect was of a diffident publicity: On the evidence of her photos, we know that she wore her sunglasses even indoors.