"Writing is character," said Harold Hayes, the late, fabled editor of Esquire, back when it was a serious magazine, innovating—along with Clay Felker's New York—what problematically came to be known as "the New Journalism." Everything you wrote, he meant, betrayed your inner motives: Mailer, for example, three times as smart as most of his critics, nevertheless suffered from his physical shortness and so became silly on macho subjects, "our eternal boy," Saul Bellow once told Dick Cavett on TV. Likewise, James Jones, whose From Here to Eternity eclipsed Mailer's The Naked and the Dead as a genuine WWII document of common foot-soldiering, never dealt with his inner gayness, and so destroyed his talent and liver ...
Upshift to the '60s and Joan Didion's early zeitgeist bulletins from the California coast, the thin neurosis of well-off housewives trying to outrun their nerves driving Sting Rays on Route 1 near Malibu. From Slouching Towards Bethlehem to Play It as It Lays to The White Album, the diminutive, caffeined, chain-smoking cool she emoted set a tone of laser chic for the tweaked sisterhood of the times (though all her sisters weren't fans); it was much like, say, James Dean killing Rock Hudson as an iconic image for men looking to postmodernize. Who wanted Katharine Anne Porter or Carson McCullers after they'd seen Joan in Vogue, a foretaste of the hyper-literate femmes fatale of William Gibson's Burning Chrome?
In her recent book, The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the eventual fatal illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo, Didion admits she wore shades to her wedding, and cried all the way to the altar, agreeing with Dunne within a half-hour of the ceremony to edit the "till death do us part" clause out of their mutual storyline ...
"A cool customer," as a hospital social worker assigned as Didion's grief counselor advised a doctor who'd failed to save Dunne on December 30, 2003; the writer had just succumbed to cardiac arrest, his chronic atrial fibrillation slipping into lethal "ventricular mode," the lower blood way closing like a sluice-gate, one moment discussing how WWI affected all subsequent culture, and the wisdom of not mixing single and double-malt scotch, the next slumping forward at the dinner table with an absurdly-raised left hand—his wife glancing and saying "Don't do that!" before she realized he wasn't kidding. Then she tried the Heimlich maneuver, failed to control his heavy weight and watched him crash to the floor, splintering a front tooth ...
The "cool" remark bothered her. She comes back to it repeatedly, as she does to the death scene and who was doing what before and after, rerunning the tape, trying for a clearer mix, cutting the hissing and popping, willing more resolution than there was, a better ending to the take ... and finally reflecting that they'd lasted 39 years(!)—double the lifetimes for some of her generation, the pure ones, Tim Hardin, Richard Farina, Mario Savio, Janis Joplin ...
She was always aware of the baby rattler in the rose garden; the coyote pack in the Hollywood Hills chewing the feet off the infant left alone in its English pram a fraction too long; the cold sea slime at Point Dume (near Bob Dylan's house!), suddenly blinding your windshield like a cataract:
"Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."
What separates The Year of Magical Thinking from all of Didion's previous work is her submission to the pain she's always held at arm's-length (at the price of three-day migraines). Until now, her finite intelligence operated surgically to parse, say, U.S. foreign policy in Central America (Salvador), or minority dynamics in the urban jungle (her brilliant piece on the '80s "wilding" phenomenon in Central Park for The New York Review of Books); those were subjects seen abstrusely through neural insulation. Her idea of herself was still her husband's, the snakily sensual young chronicler of "Waiting for Morrison," the beautiful pessimist novelist of Play It As It Lays, somehow still intact and interpreting the millennium. Her apocalyptic sense of America was deferred a little as the Loved One; all the horror she insisted on suggesting in her writing was seen through scrims of comfort, style, status and even trendiness—"John's blue suit was from Chipp," she noted, recalling their marriage day, "and my short white dress from Ransohoff's in San Francisco," bought the morning Kennedy was killed in Dallas ... furthermore, the Catholic mission where the ceremony took place was in San Juan Bautista, one of Alfred Hitchcock's California locations for Vertigo, the site of Kim Novak's fall from the bell tower, while Jimmy Stewart watched helplessly.
She believes in form and civilized grace. In El Salvador, before driving out to see la montana de los cuerpos, where the psychotic Roberto D'Aubuisson's ARENA party death squads dumped their bloody kills, she'd spend evenings with the U.S. ambassador, in the air-conditioned Hilton, or with the oligarchs who quietly backed the genocide, gleaning fine points for her great book ... when Tweedle Dum, a precious young reporter from New York magazine showed up to question her discreetly as a kick-off to Knopf's sales and awards push on TYOMT, she put out bowls of cut orchids and fetched bottles of Evian as a prelude to the interview, no longer "grim and hollow-eyed as she looked in Eugene Richards' photographs in The New York Times Magazine, "the reporter let us know.
But Dunne's death has changed her. Her premise for the book was that real grief, like love, drives you partly mad, and the evidence she presents—her reluctance to give away Dunne's shoes, or consent to embalming, or donate his eyes—was because she expected his return, and he'd need those things. The long-held scrims were finally gone. Dunne had kept her young. Now she looked her age.
Didion's self-absorption is what made her a star. Millions of people related to the fracture between her emotions and intellect. It worked well in a sales culture where you couldn't afford to feel much, where, as Andy Warhol once said, "I had to cut my feelings off, like having my appendix out ... they were getting in the way."
At first I thought it weird that Didion failed to deal with her daughter Quintana's death in The Year of Magical Thinking (she died last October, before publication, of a flu that morphed into pneumonia and septic shock), and that the book's pub sked was the determining factor in leaving it out. But on rereading, this book is the record of a cool customer's tough growth: "It's a whole different level of loss," she's said. "This is the part I don't want to talk about."
*For Bomie and Alan Halpern.