Didion Looking Down

...Writers & Writing DIDION LOOKING DOWN BY DAPHNE MERKIN Try to imagine Franz Kafka speeding along a California freeway, or sitting around with some rock musicians, or lolling on a Honolulu beach You can't quite, can you/ Nevertheless, such images—in their very incongruity—pinpoint the what-is-wrong-with-this-picture...

...feeling I had while reading Joan Didion's new collection of essays, The White Album (Simon and Schuster, 223 pp , $9 95) I was tempted to dismiss the sensation altogether Maybe the problem resided with me, rather than Didion, who is, after all, a very good writer But it lingered and I had to pay attention The author, I finally realized, is the purveyor of a very streamlined model of angst Like tubular furniture, there are no cumbersome appendages or unnecessary details Everything is pared down for maximal depressive effect Perhaps this way of arranging reality is a bequest from Didion's stint at Vogue, it is not, at any rate, in itself objectionable as a style It worked, for instance, supremely to her advantage in her first collection of pieces, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and it has worked intermittently well in her three novels It has ceased to work, most of the time, in The White Album The angst is no longer believable, it has become too savvy and too clean The famed delicacy of nerves?My only advantage as a reporter," Didion wrote in the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests"—is now completely strategic Calculated from first to last, her frailty is mere intellectual teasing "I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town There were rumors There were stories Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable " ("The White Album") Like all great teasers, Didion nonetheless gets what she wants, her insistent vulnerability exercises—and this is the cunning of it—a tyranny of its own We are not to hold her to anything, for migraine-ridden as she is, it is a wonder she is able to jot down her thoughts at all She can still make the most astringent of judgments when she pleases—her essay on "The Women's Movement" is as hard-hitting as anything by Commentary's resident batter, Midge Dector When she doesn't feel up to drawing conclusions, however, she starts to act dazed-and-breathless, in the manner of Marilyn Monroe This is especially true of her reporting on the lost sheep who wander around her beloved California In "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik'' Didion touches upon several such woolly-minded beings, including Dallas Beardsley, who is 22 years old and very badly wants to be a movie star "It means being known all over the world," she tells Didion " And it means happiness, and living by the ocean in a huge house But being known It's important to me to be known " How does Didion react to this/ Instead of stepping on the brake, she coasts along with the girl, making her part of a dream-scenery, a nightmare of unrequitedness "As I drove home that day through the somnolent back streets of Hollywood I had the distinct sense that everyone I knew had some fever which had not yet infected the invisible city In the mvisible city girls were still disappointed at not being chosen cheerleader In the invisible city girls still got discovered at Schwab's and later met their true loves at the Mocambo or the Troc, still dreamed of big houses by the ocean and carloads of presents by the Christmas tree, still prayed to be known " That Didion invests the fictional world of "the invisible city" with greater drama and authority than the real world is hardly surprising For Dallas Beardsley is cast from the same mold as Maria Wyeth m Play It As It Lays, and Didion has always appeared—or liked to appear—to belong to this mold herself, indeed, she may truly want to be Maria or Dallas, to live out their fantasies Yet the fact is that Joan Didion is a successful writer, with her wits firmly about her Thus I cannot help finding her empathy with the nonftc-tional Maria ultimately simster in its inventiveness, if only because it so blithely overlooks the actual misbegotten instance for the sake of a dubious poetics "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Didion proclaims in her opening line, fine and well, but it is imperative that we differentiate between our stories and real lives What it comes down to in the end, I think, is a question of declaring one's ground Can you honestly claim to be peering over the abyss from first-class cabins and suites in the Royal Hawaiian/ And what is the point of going to an obviously swanky hotel and then dragging out the parphernalia of the enlightened elite in the middle of the sunshine and the papayas "To sit by the Royal pool and read The New York Review of Books is to feel oneself an asp, disguised in a voile beach robe, in the very bosom of the place I put The New York Review of Books aside and talk to a pretty young woman who has honeymooned at the Royal, because honeymoons at the Royal are a custom in her family, with each of her three husbands " ("In the Islands") Such bluntly honed juxtapositions clue the reader only into Didion's ambivalence about the world of moneyed pleasure, how she condescends to it, how she desires it and how she manages to play every angle every which way by inserting different parts of herself at different lulls in the action Sometimes things become too confusing, even for so provisional a sensibility as hers, but when that happens she simply turns around and shapes a manifesto out of the confusion She recounts, for instance, the history of a silk dress she bought the morning of John Kennedy's death and subsequently ruined at a party in Bel-Air where Roman Polanski was present She then recalls how later she picked out a dress at I Magnin in Beverly Hills tor Linda Kasabian to wear to the Manson hearings "1 believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences," she declares, "but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did " It may be an indication of our times that Didion is to be found observing the contemporary wreckage—the misfits, the failed public projects, the unmitigated boredom—from the toniest of surroundings Her imagination is exceedingly modern in being disaster-prone, yet also modern in ruthlessly appropriating the journalistic-voyeunstic elements of disaster and then retreating into irony, safely removed from the social and political implications To justify her stance, she writes "Barricades are never personal We were all very personal then [in the '50s], sometimes relentlessly so, and, at that point where we either act or don't act, most of us are still I suppose I am talking about just that, the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not m some error of social organization but in man's own blood If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be an error It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robs us early of a certain capacity for surpnrise " I am simply not convinced that Didion's radar-like at-tunement to fringe people and marginal situations is evidence of a profound response to anxiety Rather, it seems to be a kind of magical displacement, an inverted stroking of the rabbit's foot If you're busy keeping track of misery, maybe it won't happen to you Having said all this, I would like to note that Didion as a writer has little to fear from the competition She is an expert listener and her snatches of conversation or overheard dialogue are like no one else's "'Listen, I got this truly beautiful story,' the man who cuts my hair says to me 'Think about some new Dominque Sanda-type unknown Comprenez so far?'" Then there is Arnado Vazquez, who runs a commercial orchid-nursery '"You want to know how I feel about the plants,' he said as I was leaving 'I'll tell you I will die in orchids "' She is vastly intelligent about certain kinds of deception, too, as in the piece about Governor Brown's unoccupied official residence, wryly entitled "Many Mansions" "One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable '' And she has about her a genuine receptivity to the odd nuances in seemingly straightforward occurrences that makes for an undeniable originality of perspective When Didion is good, as she is about shopping-centers ("On the Mall") and aqueducts ("Holy Water") and Hollywood ("In Hollywood") she is very good, primarily because she has an uncanny ability to translate essential private fascinations into matters of compelling general interest When Didion is bad, when she is whistling her tune ot High Weariness and coining phrases ot disengagement that sound as it they were lifted not from Kafka but from the Top 40?'I lost track ot information I was blitzed by opinion" ("On the Road")—she is horrid...