The White Album
Didion, Joan
THE WHITE ALBUM Joan Didion / Simon & Schuster / $9.95 Rachel Mark Many of the essays that make up Joan Didion's new book, The White Album, have already seen daylight. They appeared as individual...
...Therein lies its failure: An emblem is not a chronicle...
...Baldwin summed up: "If Bill's book does no more than what it's done tonight, it's a very important event...
...we wanted a table for twelve, or fourteen at the most, although there might be six more, or eight more, or eleven more: there would never be one or two more, because music people did not travel in groups of 'one' or 'two.' " This piece is not actually a single essay but a series of episodic sketches of California life in the late 60s and early 70s...
...we want the end to justify the beginning...
...Miss Didion casts her scalpel eye on "that .peculiar vacant fervor that is Hollywood political action...
...it is her utter indifference to cohesion that damages, and ultimately undermines, the whole...
...Later on, in "In Hollywood," Miss Didion reveals a world where the rules of the "significant evening" do not apply...
...Here-as in "On the Morning After the Sixties," a reverie on the complexion of life in her youth, or as in "In Bed," a meticulous discussion of her lifelong bouts with migraine-here, where she joins the "music people" as her own subject, where she examines and exposes herself, her principal weakness emerges...
...She gives their unstable lives a withering glance: "...time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later...
...Compazine one Easter Sunday and making a large and elaborate lunch for a number of people, many of whom were still around on Monday...
...I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did": In [my] house on Franklin Avenue many people seemed to come and go without relation to what I did I remember taking a 25-mg...
...It fails her-as the book Rachel Mark is a researcher at Newsweek...
...I won't go into my reasons why, but...
...more important always than the acquisition of money...
...This has nothing to do with social problems and their "upbeat fades/' and it has nothing to do with the ineradicable belief of outsiders in a Hollywood rife with glamor and corruption and mystery...
...And, finally, more critical even than the picture itself, which is "in many ways only the action's by-product...
...Take my chaotic book simply for an emblem of chaotic times...
...discuss...
...where the only real ideology is making pictures...
...In this Hollywood, evenings end before midnight, couples leave together, marital problems and illness go unmentioned...
...the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade...
...Miss Didion is ill-equipped to make it interesting...
...The White Album offers neither alternative: It jumps from place to place, from mood to mood, from the 60s to the 70s, randomly and without warning...
...In the heyday of hard, drugged rock music, Miss Didion was acquainted with some of its brightest lights...
...Any collection of essays, no matter how apparently unrelated they may be, needs a single intention to make sense of itself...
...It is a woman's form, and if Miss Didion did not actually invent it herself, she is, at her best, its sharpest, most compelling, and most interesting practitioner...
...and James Baldwin sat between them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in understandable but rather theatrical agony...
...They appeared as individual pieces in national magazines and newspapers during the period between 1968 and 1978...
...Here, the deal is what makes life worth living, "the action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics...
...Davis said more and more ("So you might ask, why didn't /spend five years and write Nat Turner...
...She renders an evening in 1968, spent at Eugene's in Beverly Hills (a nightclub opened by the supporters of Senator Eugene McCarthy), watching William Styron and the black actor Ossie Davis debating whether or not The Confessions of Nat Turner might encourage racism: As the evening wore on, Mr...
...We want progression...
...This is the variety of "good" journalism that relies heavily upon the first person- it gives all of life experienced in the narrator, it is full of moody, literary reportage, and it does its moralizing almost entirely by implication...
...She uses it skillfully to tell tales of Hollywood, of the Black Panthers, of rock musicians, of the Hoover Dam...
...Never mind all that, she says...
...It doesn't work...
...and though it is filled with choice sequences, the thread that runs through it, that ostensibly keeps it cohesive, is a depiction of Miss Didion's own spotty psychic condition throughout that period...
...1 remember a babysitter telling me that she saw death in my aura...
...Very few people have ever approached their own failure of nerve in print successfully: For strangers, the experience is almost inevitably boring...
...This is a community whose notable excesses include virtually none of the flesh or spirit": Dinner guests pick with vermeil forks at broiled fish and limestone lettuce vinaigrette, decline dessert, adjourn to the screening room, and settle down to The Heartbreak Kid with a little seltzer in a Baccarat glass After the picture the women...
...the peace of spirit to be derived from exercise class, ballet class, the use of paper napkins at the beach The men talk pictures, grosses, the deal, the morning line on the talent...
...And with some few exceptions (an essay about the women's movement that analyzes methodically, and brilliantly, the effort, and ultimate failure, of Marxist ideology to turn women into America's new "revolutionary class...
...I remember walking barefoot all day on the worn hardwood floors of that house and I remember "Do You Wanna Dance" on the record player...
...finally fails-when her gaze is turned exclusively inward, for a re-creation of her own migraine headaches, or of her own, extended, nervous breakdown...
...She rambles, often uninterestingly, sometimes incoherently: "I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself I was supposed to have a script, and I had mislaid it...
...Styron said less and less, and Mr...
...That is, it must have the underpinning of a theme to carry it along...
...In self-examination, she loses her authority...
...If such a theme is oot always accessible in the meat of a book, it will at least announce itself in the introduction...
...Hear, hear," cried someone sitting on the floor, and there was general agreement that it had been a stimulating and significant evening...
...and a piece about the novels of Doris Lessing that belongs in the collections of the masters of literary criticism), the articles exemplify what is called these days impressionistic journalism...
...But her loss of authority diminishes only individual parts of this book...
...Her descriptions of "music people" in "The White Album," the book's title piece, are no less delicious...
...In "Good Citizens," a wicked piece about California types, the impressionism is perfectly successful...
...we want history to unfold...
...the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth " For Hollywood's political thinkers, a social problem inevitably takes on the aspect of an old-fashioned movie scenario, in which, "once certain key scenes are licked...
...I remember chatting with her about reasons why this might be so, paying her, opening all the French windows and going to sleep in the living room...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
