And deploy them she does. What this collection does that is different from other collections of her essays is provide a compendium of how she became the writer she is. Didion reflects on formative experiences in her journey as a writer in order to illustrate how she did one of the hardest things a writer must do — develop a perspective.
Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers. Contribute Now. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short—about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine.
The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. Didion wrote one column about touring Alcatraz, another on the general secretary of a small Marxist-Leninist group.
The Post was struggling to stay afloat it went under two years later , and that chaos let the new columnists shimmy unorthodox ideas past their desperate editors. It has claims to being the most influential essay collection of the past sixty years. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more.
Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well. And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.
Because a sentence of Didion is unmistakable, people often presume that her advances were in prose style. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.
Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Most writers of nonfiction operate in the sphere of high craft: like a silversmith producing teapots, they work to create elevated and distinctive versions of known objects.
A master will produce a range of creative variations, yet the teapots always remain teapots, and the marks of individuation rise from a shared language of form and technique. Together, she knew, they had to tell a bigger story, because they came from the same place coastal California in the same time and from the same vantage hers.
But what was the story? To figure it out, Didion started adding stones from elsewhere in the quarry: circumstances surrounding the production of the newsstand columns, details from her home life.
This process of redigesting published craftwork into art is how Didion shaped her nonfiction books for fifty years. It made her farseeing, and a thorny voice about the way public stories were told. The foreword, very fruitful, is by Hilton Als.
The earliest columns, from the late sixties, remain crisp and engaging on the page not a given for late-sixties writing. Other essays, such as a piece on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from , are, if not exactly urgent, nice to have around.
Devoted readers will find the book unrecognizable as a Didion collection in any real sense. Struggling to describe this dissolution, she decided to express the problem structurally. And he seemed to have accepted his second-best status. He came on blustering and tough, but he was softhearted. And confusing. And those were boozy days. So does [John].
He was an alcoholic and he broke down doors. Scratch a bully find a victim. Vegas is about a writer who leaves his wife—also a writer—and child—a little girl, adopted—to live in Las Vegas, precisely what Dunne did for six months in the early 70s. In lieu of divorce coming perilously close to divorce divorce. The scene is a phone call between the protagonist and his wife:. There was a long silence at the other end of the telephone. And the wife defeats the husband. A no-contest contest.
How she does it: by not doing anything. She exhibits neither shock nor rage nor sadness at the prospect of his getting together with a teenager. In fact, she encourages him to, all but dares him. Which is the exact moment he turns meek and little-boy, backs down and off.
Well, why not? In her memoir Blue Nights, Didion tells a story of a five-year-old Quintana calling Camarillo, the state mental hospital, to ask what she should do if she was going crazy. Didion tells another story of Quintana, at the same age, calling Twentieth Century Fox to ask what she should do to become a movie star. Either way, the marriage settled down. In , the Didion-Dunnes would move out of the house on Franklin Avenue to a house in Trancas, just north of Malibu.
The moment they leave Hollywood to go Hollywood, though, is the moment I lose interest in them as Hollywood figures. As I already said, the book is both book and movie. The world Maria inhabits is a contrived one—an artifice.
If a character burped or cracked a joke, you feel the whole thing would collapse. Which is why Play It, taken on its own terms, is profound, high art; and, not taken on its own terms, profoundly silly, high camp. The movie exposed the book. Showed how weak the central concept was, how purest-corn and junk-Hollywood: the glamour of desolation, the romance of despair, how low-life are those living the high life, etc. Only, unlike the junk-Hollywood product, Play It took itself seriously.
The material was contemporary, urban, feminine. He was a director of Westerns, often set in the past, and extremely violent. Yet his violence was beautiful—sensuous and painterly—and he was a fatalist, and thus close to Didion in sensibility. It always struck me as false that Maria was so tranquil behind the wheel.
Is there a better way for one of the most alienated characters in modern literature to connect than inside her metal shell, her barest touch resulting in blood and guts and severed limbs? That version, of course, never happened. The studio balked at Peckinpah. Missed opportunities are always a shame. In , the summer of Manson, Easy Rider roared onto screens trailing clouds of motorcycle exhaust and marijuana smoke. A new era in movies had begun. This new era, New Hollywood, was really an end-of-an-era era.
Its decade was the 70s, and the 70s were less the 70s than the posts, the 60s once the light had been snuffed out. Its movies were, unsurprisingly, dark: innocence was lost or violated, promise unfulfilled, effort futile. In the 70s, movie culture would become central to American culture.
And yet movies were, at that moment, it, the hot art form. So Didion, who missed nothing, had missed a major cultural shift. That the movie she and Dunne are best known for is A Star Is Born , a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake, tells, I think, the story of their Hollywood career. Her moment ended in , when Warren Beatty, that skilled seducer, sweet-talked her into leaving The New Yorker for Paramount.
Didion would continue to be a great writer, but would cease to be a visionary one. While a number of her later books hit the best-seller list, they failed, with the exception of The White Album, published in though about the earlier period, to truly resonate.
Her days as a cultural phenomenon were over. Until the passing of Dunne and Quintana. In their deaths, Didion was resurrected professionally. The Year of Magical Thinking was a critical sensation—winner of the National Book Award—and a commercial one, selling a million-plus copies, far more than any other book in her career. And its sequel, Blue Nights , was another smash. Her method, which is also her genius, has been to attenuate nature, strip it of its force and vitality.
And then nature did that to her. Did it by aging her, taking away her youth and beauty. Did it again, and more violently, by taking away those she loved most. With just about anybody else, it would have ended there—heartbreak of that magnitude breaking the spirit and the will, as well. Not with Didion, though. She did it right back to nature. Art won out over life, another way of saying the artist won out over the human being. There seemed nothing more to say. I was the one who was supposed to be detached.
Joan in her Trancas kitchen in Weekly Sign up for our essential daily brief and never miss a story. It's on the house. Enter your e-mail address.
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