After Henry

...A quarter-century ago, in an essay on the movie industry, Didion complained that Stanley Kramer's Judgement at Nuremberg, made in 1961, was an intrepid indictment not of authoritarianism in the abstract, not of the trials themselves, not of the various moral and legal issues involved, but of Nazi war atrocities, about which there would have seemed already to be some consensus...

...Didion's problem, too...

...They are even:Willing, in exchange for certain colorful details around which a key "reconstruction" can be built . to present these images not as a story the campaign wants told but as fact...

...t 64 The American Spectator September 1992...

...But when she's attached herself to a large enough theme, like the fall of New York, Didion writes grandly...

...The complaint of Jonathan Yardley and others that Didion doesn't understand how Washington works may be correct, but misses the point that—as with H. Ross Perot—such ignorance may be feigned, even contrived...

...Don't let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can," one of the surviving children of the Donner Party concluded her account of that crossing...

...Newport isn't merely a symbol, it's a "morality play...

...lifestyle that was the Chandler brainchild...

...n After Henry, a dozen essays she has written over the last decade, Didion seems to have taken stock of her weakness for bathos and remedied it by choosing big, dramatic subjects to match the pretensions of her prose—starting with the eponymous Henry Robbins, Didion's editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and, later, Simon & Schuster, who died of a heart attack in his early fifties in 1979...

...What she is after is tabloid material in Gothic prose...

...AFTER HENRY Joan Didion Simon & Schuster/319 pages/$22 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALD WELL 62 The American Spectator September 1992 It's this Wagnerianization of the quotidian that makes Didion's novels so unreadable—how do you keep the pitch so high when a character is opening her purse or driving to the store...

...After the opening valediction, the book is divided into three parts: "Washington" (political writings), "California" (obiter dicta), and "New York" (last year's New York Review of Books article on the Central Park Jogger...

...All of her very best instincts have been towards herself, in keeping with the twelve-stepper's curiously capsized morality, whereby self-gratification is seen as generous, intolerance as caring, feeling good about yourself as glorifying God...

...The account not only provides a rare window on the culture of Los Angeles outside of Hollywood, but also makes clear that Hollywood itself is an outsider culture in the city...

...IncaChristopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...The mugging of Felix Rohatyn's wife is described not as strange—nor as poetic justice, for that matter—but as a "clarion irony...

...The three essays in the Washington section show a keenness for politics and a fathomless distrust of it, along with a rare patience for the whole story that a fan would call even-handed and a detractor conflicted...

...Didion is a dealer in types, and Harrison Gray Otis, founder of the Chandler willing, in exchange for access, to transmit the images their sources wish transmitted...

...Didion has the neurasthenic's gift for sensing impending disaster: These more privileged New Yorkers now felt unnerved not only on the street, where the necessity for evasive strategies had become an exhausting constant, but in even the most insulated and protected apartment buildings...

...The American Spectator September 1992 63 dynasty, is "in many ways the prototypical Los Angeles citizen...

...Unfortunately, she has for most of her career resembled a follower of that most late-twentiethcentury mass movement: self-help...

...Salvador (1982) is about the last outpost of European-style feudalism on earth, and if any of the locals differ significantly from the late Mr...

...The history is easy to chart here: Otis and his descendents brilliantly and ruthlessly conquered Los Angeles, founding, developing, procuring water for, attracting industry to, and eventually owning practically the whole of the Los Angeles basin...

...Once, in a dry season . . ." begins her Vogue essay on not making Phi Beta Kappa in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968...

...Didion often falls into this kind of bogus folkloricization—archaicizing the California of the television age, creating drama of duplicity...

...pable of turning down the volume, she ultimately makes even the most occasional essay sound like a chapter out of Hesiod or Samuel or Burnt Njal...

...One wonders what Didion wants here: slapping each other on the back, speaking in sports metaphors, trying to plow through Modern Times, and quoting Richard John Neuhaus on the collapse of the dogmas of the secular enlightenment may be inelegant and hokey, but it's what politicos do when they're not trading "access" for coverage...

...But monomania, not velleity, is Did-ion's strong suit, which explains why, in the passion for Latin American societies she has carried through the past decade, she has chosen as subjects the two most Manichean societies in the New World: Miami (1987) is about the last outpost of the Cold War (tropical front), and Didion leaves one with the impression that all her subjects belong to the Omega-7 school of conflict resolution...

...But of course it is not a habit of the rich, and in any case the Reagans were not rich...

...In her California pieces, Didion deals in big forces: the Santa Ana, earthquakes, floods...

...Surely there's no such thing as "the California ear," among the Californians Didion means...

...Now, the Chandlers were rich, and Didion is obviously very much at home with that turn-of-the-century family of carpetbagging autocrats...

...But although Didion cannot resist telling us that she knows Paul Mazursky and that her brother belongs to the California Club, there are fewer of the poor-little-famous-old-me passages that blew her cover of dispassion in earlier books, and made The White Album such a slog, passages like Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on "Midnight Confessions," and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means —which begged the response that, if writing didn't help Didion, she should perhaps stop doing it...

...Didion has long been fascinated by the Donner party, if her earlier essays on Sacramento are any indication, and again her writing becomes unwittingly self-referential: only where history is "abruptly sloughed"—completely sloughed—could one use a party of cannibals to symbolize a modern society of 30 million people...

...Didion evokes the extent to which the city's cultural map remains patterned on the whims of the family: Pasadena for the old-moneyed WASPS...

...If the 1980s have actually made her what her dust jackets have touted her as since the 1960s and what, ten years ago, she was most decidedly not—"one of America's finest journalists"—it is because she has taught herself a feeling for joy, pathos, and tragedy that do not bear directly on herself...

...With no faith in the ability of the "process" to address real issues, Didion nonetheless blames the press for not doing so in the process's stead, for being "In the Realm of the Fisher King," on the Reagan White House, shows Didion excited by the intellectual ferment of Washington in the 1980s, but rather taken aback by its occasionally nutty camaraderie...

...As the residents of such buildings, the owners of twelve-and sixteen- and twenty-four-room apartments, watched the potted ficus trees disappear from outside their doors and the graffiti appear on their limestone walls and the smashed safety glass from car windows get swept off their sidewalks, it had become increasingly easy to imagine the outcome of a confrontation between, say, the relief night doorman and six dropouts from Julia Richman High School on East 67th Street...

...Times Mirror Square," her essay on how they created the Los Angeles Times, and how the newspaper in turn created a Los Angeles culture that reflected the Chandlers' parvenu interests, is the best of the essays in After Henry...

...Surely Patty Hearst was not standing there in the closet muttering Considerate la vostra semenza...

...If After Henry is better than Did-ion's last collection of essays, it's because Didion's moral sensibilities may be righting themselves...

...In "Sentimental Journeys," she recounts how the Central Park Jogger came to be perceived not as a victim but as a symbol in a battle over whose image of "what makes this city so vibrant and so great" would triumph in New York...

...Didion is no fonder of Nancy Reagan than she was when she met her in the mid-1960s, dismissing her as a superficial product of the Hollywood studio system, but along the way it becomes clear that Didion has even less regard for the caricatures that Nancy Reagan's critics drew of the Reagan years: This expectation on the part of the Reagans that other people would care for their needs struck many people, right away, as remarkable, and was usually characterized as a habit of the rich...

...Don't worry about it," [Hearst] reported having told herself in the closet after her first sexual encounter with a member of the SLA...

...Don't examine your feelings—they're no help at all...

...Roberto d'Aubuisson, Didion didn't spend much time with them...

...Of course the Reagans weren't rich, and the fact that they've been so persistently portrayed as such is enough to make one realize that the eighties can be summed up just as easily by the disingenuousness of that era's opinion leaders as by the "greed" of its business leaders...

...This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why...

...That would seem to be the case in "Insider Baseball," Didion's astute essay on the 1988 campaign, which uses Michael Dukakis's absurd staged games of catch on airport runways as a leitmotif...

...It's a measure of that disingenuousness that it's left to a woman who has gained a reputation as a compulsive Hollywood social-climber to point out that, in an age when one in forty Americans is a millionaire, Ron and Nancy could scarcely be considered more than "comfortable...

...It's a nice connection, but, in a society as unmoored from its history as California is, who's to prove it true or false...

...Didion's ignorance of Washington—again, if ignorance it is—puts her paradoxically above the Willie Horton–invoking partisanship of Sidney Blumenthal, Duncan Dayton, and other journalists who calumniated as "issueless" a campaign that was guilty of little more than ignoring the issues the press wanted aired...

...In "Girl of the Golden West," she seeks an explanation for Patty Hearst's conversion to the Symbionese Liberation Army by comparing her not only to Jim Jones but also the cannibals of the Donner Trail: This abrupt sloughing of the past has, to the California ear, a distant echo, and the echo is of emigrant diaries...

...S ome of the old perpetual hand-wringing is present throughout After Henry: American elections aren't just important, they make us ask "why, finally, an American presidential campaign raises questions that go so vertiginously to the heart of the structure...

...That's Joan...

...Hollywood for those—like the Jews—who didn't fit the L.A...

...In her last essay collection, The White Album (1979), Joan Didion went gardening with the wife of the governor of California and found her melodramatic: Nancy Reagan says almost everything with spirit, perhaps because she was once an actress and has the beginning actress's habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on 45th Street in Sacramento...

...As Louis MacNeice put it in "The Drunkard": The barmaid was a Madonna, the adoration Of the coalman's breath was myrrh, the world was We, And pissing under the stars an act of creation...

...They float on the landscape like pyramids . . ." begins a piece on shopping malls...

...The same could be said of Didion: the historical events she deals in must be crude, epochal, and unambiguous to give any lift to the mammoth, novelistic type of journalism she seeks to practice...

...Didion has always wanted to be such a late-twentieth century writer, to rise to such apocalyptic heights...

...She will certainly write the Great Los Angeles Riot Story eventually...