Democracy
Didion, Joan
what's the difference? It's a matter the authors don't address. To offer pragmatism to the American people as an intellectual antidote to the seductions of socialist "idealism," is to concede...
...that the bombing of the embassy commissary was an isolated incident and did not reflect the mood of the country...
...I have not been so disappointed by a novel in years--partly because as Democracy clanks along Didion keeps giving brief reminders of her exquisite gifts...
...No "exposd" is possible if the audience you wish to inform shares (or at least tolerates) your target's values...
...A native of Hawaii, she "believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon...
...It is all very poignant, and it happens all the time, and the stars do not move one millimeter out of their orbits...
...Thank God, I'm alone...
...but it does provide an abundance of startling facts for those willing and able to defend themselves philosophically...
...But I know what I know, and that is how dearly I love you and how I am yours within myself...
...He protests from time to time, almost with wonder, that she is the better writer of the two...
...From the operations room at the Honolulu airport...
...He was jealous, it is true, but jealous over a buxom and bonair woman of the world, and when that object crumbled, grew deaf, and became shrill, he turned into a stonecutter like his father before him, relentlessly lost in patient, heavy labor...
...The liters add up, he figures, to about a quart...
...Inez Victor has in the past gone by the names of Lily Knight McClellan, Maria Wyeth, and Charlotte Douglas...
...The warm rain down on the runways...
...Be thou ever--and ye will...
...She was a saftig matron of 44, and a successful theatrical designer when his own play Welcome to Our City was rejected by the then reigning lords of the theater...
...There are plenty of places in the world to get your head cracked and nose broken if that is what you are after...
...But despite the philosophical chasm in its thesis, the Isaacs' book is an invaluable study of how today's Left is undermining the free society...
...The word love did not come easily to his lips or his pen, and Aline Berstein, who undoubtedly loved him, suffered many a sophomoric yawp at his hands...
...1 may meet the Demon Drink Saturday in Richmond--he, afraid desperately of being alone, but understanding it in me...
...She is not amused by the piratical catalogue, and sternly instructs him in the wisdom of this world...
...he is interested in the world, and his own still negligible place in it...
...A letter designed to warm a woman's heart...
...The lout is suggesting that she will always be unfaithful (the " i n " of infidelis was lightly crossed out), and what is a poor woman to do...
...1 am nearly mad with worry about you...
...I love you...
...The Coercive Utopians may not provide a philosophical defense against today's collectivist activists...
...It was kind of the place to be" for Jack, who years before played regaling Othello to Inez's allears Desdemona, and whose right if shady stuff never lost its appeal for her during her long marriage to Harry, who can't even win something as worthless as the 1972 Democratic nomination...
...I'm not surprised that the blurb to Democracy gives no hint of its format...
...This book is principally about Inez Victor, Harry's wife, who has never gotten over Jack Lovett, an adventurer who spent much of the two decades before the fall of Saigon dealing in arms, currency, technology, and maybe drugs...
...Cant is cant, on whatever political wing it flies, and Didion's ear has in the past performed synesthetic miracles that let the reader hear the stench...
...No, this is not something Didion said in an interview...
...I remember with dull horror that it has been three weeks since 1 wrote you...
...MY OTHER LONELINESS: LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE AND ALINE BERNSTEIN Edited by Suzanne Stutman/University of North Carolina Press/S14.95 Paul Boytinck Thomas Wolfe died at the age of 37...
...He can never master that same effortless tone and convey that same affection because, I suspect, he did not have it in himself to do so...
...In actual fact, the liters add up to a merry quantity of beer: perhaps two gallons...
...If I do not hear soon will try to come over to f'md you...
...Under different auspices and to different ends lnez Victor and I were both working for Vogue that year, 1960 . . . . " Didion was in fact working for Vogue then, but if she thinks it's somehow imaginatively interesting to claim that the demonstrably unreal Inez was as well, she's wrong...
...Surely nothing that you gain can be worth what you are inflicting on me...
...He is all angles and porcupine quills...
...But some of the techniques that have served her so well in the past are worked too hard for the sake of lighting up these by-now-too-familiar faces: the litanies ("By which I mean to suggest" opening three paragraphs in a row...
...If this silence of yours is only an idea, what is the idea...
...It made me happy all but the Latin Tag, with the prefix crossed out...
...It was a relief to know you are no longer with your wild companion.You are my wild companion, and 1 hope you will always be so...
...Oh but I speak to you presently and immanently as I write...
...Of the daughters I was at first more interested in Janet, who was the younger, than in Inez...
...Her dialogue is wonderful...
...Call that a travel advisory...
...There's a sort of desperation to the device, and as this unholy marriage of author's biography and characters' non-lives proceeds, the reader winces and, finally, wearies...
...l lost patience with it...
...It's on page 25 of Democracy, which, in addition to its other problems, is a novel about novel-writing...
...More than anything else Democracy suggests that it is time for Joan Didion to break camp, to realize that this particular vein is exhausted, to have the courage to pack up her enormous talents and once more, for the sake of imagination, head west...
...She protests, in a correspondence that nearly always breathes her devotion, that "With all your imagination, you do not seem to know how it is to be constantly vilified and beaten by a loved being," but Thomas does not take the sentiment to heart...
...Matters were not helped by mutual vows of fidelity and chastity, harshly exacted by either party to the affair...
...To offer pragmatism to the American people as an intellectual antidote to the seductions of socialist "idealism," is to concede that socialism is idealistic, and that capitalism has no moral rationale...
...So tanked up, he naturally found all 6'6" of Thomas Wolfe engaged in a shoving match...
...She is interested in him...
...I lost nerve...
...Didion even decorates the failure with her own supposed presence in her characters' lives: "The first time I ever saw Jack Lovett was in a Vogue photographer's studio on West 40th Street, where he had come to see Inez...
...You know she's finally going to bolt...
...It is, however, less agreeable to realize that, having borrowed her title from Henry Adams, she has lifted almost everything else from her earlier novels...
...Obsessive love has made her imperious, demanding, frightful...
...Conservatives may have been annoyed by her recent book on El Salvador, but irrespective of administration policy toward Central America, they would be hard put to read her twenty years' worth of books and not conclude that she is among the most fundamentally conservative writers in America...
...He continues with the same inimitable charm: Why I would go to China and ther'd be a day between our thoughts, but what's a day...
...Do you take this as an indication of my growing laxity...
...Two-thirds of the way through the book, Didion writes: I plan to address Jessie [lnez's daughter] presently, but I wanted to issue this warning first: like Jack Lovett and (as it turned out) Inez Victor, I no longer have time for the playing out...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 43 the sentence fragments that used to be so arresting but now sometimes seem just a nervous refusal to finish a sentence: See it this way...
...See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it...
...Four f---ing reasons...
...Three times, in fact...
...My dear, I have been gone a day, and I still love thee...
...Harry was interviewed and expressed his conviction that this isolated incident reflected only the normal turbulence of a nascent democracy...
...That conclusion, in this exchange of letters, is undeniable...
...Wolfe's response, in his notebooks, testifies to fury: On Monday--July 28 I sent Aline Bernstein, my former mistress, a cablegram, in response to repeated letters and cablegrams of hers, in the last cablegram of which she said "Are you all right: Answer at once, otherwise I am sailing to find you at once"--I had not written this woman since 2 or 3 days after my arrival in France but in answer to these threatening letters & cables I sent the following message: "Aline Bernstein, Armonk, New York--Am Well living Montreux--Tom Wolfe"--I had no answer during interim but today Mr...
...These remarks are addressed, not to a chippie of sweet sixteen, but to a matron of 44 whose pores breathe devotion, everlasting love and fidelity in a style of faultless simplicity...
...In this it succeeds brilliantly, and cons~tqtes a reference no informed reader can afford to be without...
...The correspondence therefore gives a strange and lopsided impression...
...The surgeons who palliated his final moments bored into his skull, and the intercranial fluid danced, it is said, for the final time: arced 18 inches into the air, confirmed the worst fears of the surgeons (they found millions of tuberculi), and three days later he was dead of miliary tuberculosis of the brain...
...It just multiplies in every direction...
...After listening to Inez's sister Janet make conspicuously-consuming chat about childhood servants on a "CBS Reports" during the '72 campaign, Harry's adviser says: "Ask Mort how he thinks the governess from Neuilly tests o u t . . . Possibly Janet could make Mademoiselle available to do some coffees in West Virginia...
...The way I care for you is like a cube root...
...Democracy is, by the author's admission, a failure...
...He was a villainous stripling of 24 when he first met Mrs...
...And i think as I go to bed here in ominous midnight that darkness drops, the revelry begins, the flashing lights blaze on the sky, and women, fatal, false, silken, softbreasted cushion-bellied women awake to lust...
...She is soft and devoted, emollient, not an irascible bone in her body...
...She moves along with a limpid, practiced ease which makes his own style appear like a laborious imposture...
...The friendship he offered her after the affair had run its course was an amiable man's death sentence on an old love affair, and she failed to understand, much less accept, the older Wolfe's inexorable rejection...
...You see the shards of the novel I am no longer writing," the author tells us...
...She is a woman...
...Here he is, almost 25, writing to his charmer from Baltimore: I'm going down the bay to Norfolk on tonight's boat...
...God bless you...
...And where dies faith...
...with sow grunts and belly burlesque...
...Slowly and reluctantly but wondering44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984...
...What she remembers from the aforementioned Indonesian grenade-throwing is "the green lawn around the ambassador's bungalow at Puncak, the gardenia hedges...
...It is a pleasure to find her still able to do this in Democracy...
...She is all sweet reasonableness, and pneumatic patient flesh, all swansdown...
...Pardon me, miss, but haven't we met before...
...Where does the heart go rotten...
...By Bacchus, how the Paul Boytinck ~ a librarian at Bucknell University, and compiler of C.P...
...Their affair was begun on a boat, and it continued to have a storm-tossed element about it for years...
...He drank, he says, seven or eight liters of beer...
...Like Maria Wyeth of Play It As It Lays, she learns to ask why not instead of why...
...Aline...
...I was in the real flower of my physical self, I was beautiful," she said later...
...He will say "nothing tawdry, nothing mean, nothing common," but sexual jealousy is eating at his vitals, and he boasts that his "powers of resistance" were never tried by a Belgian floozie, and he is free with casual fragments of pure kindness: Goodbye, Jew...
...Like all the rest of the heroines she can be tough, both practically and morally, during certain emergencies, but she spends most of her life drifting in the wake of second-rate men and almost remembering something ineffable that somehow got lost...
...Listen: The letter made me so happy, I have been walking on air all day...
...rubble gleams when touched by the lights of the carnival...
...Snow: A Reference Guide and the forthcoming Anthony Burgess: An Annoted Bibliography and Reference Guide...
...Semper [inlfidelis...
...She is Molly Bloom...
...and is pressed by Harry's adviser for a reason why, she writes back: "'Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air...
...The letters do, however, convince me that Wolfe learned a literary lesson or two from his charming inamorata...
...In the resulting brawl his head was gashed, bloodied, shaved, stitched and eventually mended...
...Friend wanted reason--I had none, which he couldn't understand...
...Aline...
...When, when a woman lifts her skirt, behind the door...
...the caressing of scientific diction as an appalling antidote to the abstract ("Technical death would n o t occur until they had n o t one but three flat electroencephalograms, consecutive, spaced eight hours apart...
...Bernstein...
...No, this volume doesn't meet that challenge by explaining why the Left is evil or impractical...
...Some years later, when he was 30 and she 49, we find the following exchange: I am cabling you today, for God's sake what is the matter with you...
...He is wailing and gnashing his teeth, groaning about his quota of words per day, willing to wound and not afraid to strike, blunt and stupid (in his intelligent way) as a cracker...
...The letters do not convince me that Wolfe loved his lady love...
...It got written when Didion detoured from the novel she originally intended to write about Inez's family in Hawaii...
...To work, an assault on activist "idealists" must start with a repudiation of their "ideal"--and it must offer a counter ideal...
...A putupon ambassador is playing host to Harry Victor, a liberal Democratic congressman, during riots in Jakarta in 1969: "The ambassador was interviewed and expressed his conviction Thomas Mallon teaches English at Vassar College...
...Young Thomas, it must be confessed on the strength of these letters, was somewhat of a bitch...
...He's even stuck her with a kid named Adlai...
...They were the heroines of Didion's first three novels, and they're still the heroine of this one...
...Have you been consulting new acquaintances on how to treat old friends...
...I never say a cruel thing to you in a letter," he asserts...
...We are loading up with more and more to do...
...Capitalism is finished if, in the face of a moral challenge, all we can offer in reply is Murphy's Law...
...It's no wonder Inez (not to mention Didion) prefers Jack to Harry, who has all the depth of a press release...
...And it is that "idealism" which has increasingly immunized the Left from public criticism...
...By God, I say that this is good, for poetry must l i v e . . . And more piffle of that kind...
...She doesn't do it until one of her kids has run away from a methadone program to Saigon (in the spring of 1975) and her father has killed her sister, but she gets around to it, and when she does Jack is there to go with her...
...In Democracy, her latest novel, she can still rise to the occasional smell...
...One can sit down with the same syntax too many times, just as one can bump into the same heroine once too often...
...What surprises me is that Didion expects us to care about a story she apparently ceased to...
...The smell of jet fuel...
...the sea is too wide, too deep, too dark for me ever to reach you with my words...
...I hope the whore dies immediately and horribly, I would rejoice at news of this vile woman's death...
...The famous Oktoberfest brawl is laid at her feet like a prize bone...
...This is fair enough, but why an author who has in the past written with ethical brilliance about cutting one's losses and burying one's dead chooses to advertise her failure in this awful oldhat nouveau way is mysterious and sad...
...That line says a lot about pioneering, an endeavor and state of mind that for a long time preoccupied Didion, who has registered suspicion of any code of conduct other than "wagon-train morality": " I f we have been taught to keep our promises--if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is good enough --we stay with the body, or have bad dreams...
...Back to the same of that summer's misery and enchantment when I was seventeen...
...The thing to do is to do it [write], and no one can do it but yourself...
...The event graduated to general mayhem...
...Inez has a "capacity for passive detachment" that proves to be "the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory...
...I wrote to you yesterday, to Asheville, and will telegraph tomorrow...
...When she finally washes up in Kuala Lumpur tending to refugees (remembering Charlotte Douglas inoculating the population of Boca Grande...
...Please do not take it ill that l say this, it is not a boast, only a corroborative detail...
...DEMOCRACY Joan Didion/Simon and Schuster/S13.95 Thomas Mallon As an epigraph to her first novel, Run River, Joan Didion, sixthgeneration Californian, chose an observation from Peck's 1837 New Guide to the West: "The real Eldorado is still further on...
...A narrative alert...
...Aline was fond of food and a good cook and a big-breasted, lavishly hipped, delicately boned temptress and Thomas, initiated into her world, often asked other women, out of the blue, with a knowing air, if they were fond of cooking...
...Such a concession, by capitalism's supposed defenders, is the chief reason for the success of the Left--particularly in attracting young people...
...He thought I was the most beautiful woman in the world...
...A firm believer in the you-are-what-youown theory of characterization, Didion stocks the Victors' Central Park West apartment with the ideological and careerist clutter of a lifetime: _9 . . the Canton jars packed with marking pencils, the stacks of Le Monde and Foreign Affairs and The Harvard Business Review, the legal pads, the several telephones, the framed snapshots of Harry Victor eating barbecue with Eleanor Roosevelt and of Harry Victor crossing a police line with Coretta King and of Harry Victor playing on the beach at Amagansett with Jessie and with Adlai and with Frances Landau's Russian wolfhound...
...Horace Coon (O quite by accident of course, showed up)--This woman, of course, is behind it: she wrecked me, maddened me, and betrayed my love constantly, but she will not leave me alone now...
...All four women have the same frayed psychic wiring...
...He has gained, he reports to his cool mistress, "a criminal stubble, white scar and a grand unyielding love...
Vol. 17 • August 1984 • No. 8
