a notebook for Joan Didion

a letter from (mostly California), c. 1960s

I've always been baffled by the notion that people would lie about having seen films or read books that they hadn't because they thought they “should” have, and I'm still not convinced it's a phenomenon that exists on any kind of scale outside the imagination of columnists for publications like the Guardian. All the same, I'm not unfamiliar with the sense that there are books and films one should have seen, that constitute glaring omissions in one's repertoire, not because you are trying to impress anyone but just because when you love literature and you love cinema, you are forever running to catch up and you never will and that’s part of the beauty of this particular type of love, knowing you can never get to it all and trying anyway.

I'm not sure why I never got around to Joan Didion, though, because there was a period in my late teens and early twenties when I was enamoured with the whole New Journalism thing—Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson. At any rate, a few years ago someone mentioned Didion to me, and I said I hadn't read her, and suddenly it became a kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where I kept bumping into mentions of her and people saying to me “oh, you would love her!” And suddenly not having read Didion felt like a thing I really needed to fix because I was pretty sure I was missing out.

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The titular essay in Slouching Toward Bethlehem about hippies in the Haight is indeed a remarkable piece of long-form slice of life reportage that resurrected memories of far more breathless and exploitative articles found as a child in old Reader's Digest and similar places that recounted the lives of the young and high, cults and runaways and “acid casualties” and public service announcements that intoned “It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are” in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, a world away from my own Gen X teenage years but always lurking as the backdrop for older siblings and cousins and movies I wasn't old enough to see. But it was other, smaller pieces in the book that had me reaching for a notebook of my own, not with fully-fleshed out responses but the kernels of unpolished, unfinished ideas.

For example, from her piece on Hollywood, “I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind”:

In the popular imagination, the American motion picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and creative in the human spirit [. . .] Mention Hollywood and we are keyed to remember Scott Fitzgerald, dying at Malibu, attended only by Sheilah Graham while he ground out college-weekend movies (he was also writing The Last Tycoon but that is not part of the story); we are conditioned to recall the brightest minds of a generation, deteriorating around the swimming pool at the Garden of Allah while they waited for calls from the Thalberg Building.

She wrote that in 1964. (And then she went on to say things about Dr. Strangelove and Fellini and Bergman and others that were wrong, wrong I tell you!) but what struck me about it was the timelessness of its lament, the idea that Hollywood churns out soulless films these days, that anything inventive that gets through is practically by accident, not like it used to be—a fallacy I am guilty of indulging in far too often.

Didion opens “On Morality” by describing morality as “a word I distrust more every day” but then goes on to this striking passage:

“You can't just leave a body on the highway,” she said. “It's immoral.”

It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific. She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh. Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a sentimental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes. If we have been taught to keep our promises, if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is good enough—we stay with the body, or we have bad dreams.

This is a remarkable essay that seems as least as relevant today as it was when it was it was written, examining the dangers of certainty in the morality of our own conscience. It is a direct rebuke to the simplistic moralizing of social media, forty years before anyone had heard of a Facebook, reminding us that “all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in the New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone ipso facto virtue.”

In “On Keeping a Notebook”:

I imagine...that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not [. . . ] Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Is that the point of all the writing that I do? The point of this substack? Is this why humans make art? Our mark on the cave wall? (I'm reminded of on-the-run reggae singer Ivan's (Jimmy Cliff) graffiti in the film The Harder They Come: I was here but I disapear [sic]. I was here. I am everywhere.)

In this always-on, always-available, no-way-to-hide age, I was absolutely charmed by this description, in “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” of what one had to do in 1966 if one wanted to get in touch with Joan Baez:

The New York company for which she records, Vanguard, will only give Manny Greenhill's number, in Boston. “Try Area Code 415, prefix DA 4, number 4321,” Manny Greenhill will rasp. Area Code 415, DA 4-4321 will connect the caller with Keppler's Bookstore in Palo Alto, which is where Ira Sandperl used to work. Someone at the bookstore will take a number, and, after checking with Carmel to see if anyone there cares to hear from the caller, will call back, disclosing a Carmel number. The Carmel number is not, as one might think by now, for Miss Baez, but for an answering service. The service will take a number, and, after some days or weeks, a call may or may not be received from Judy Flynn, Miss Baez's secretary. Miss Flynn says that she will “try to contact” Miss Baez.

I think the biggest surprise for me in the cumulative effect of these essays was the sense of longing, of loss, that suffused them. I expected more of them to be like the sophisticated irony of “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” that gimlet-eyed appraisal of a lost generation, but it was the evocations of lost places I fell in love with, a long-gone Sacramento in “Notes From a Native Daughter” and a New York City that can never look the same when you're no longer twenty-five in “Goodbye to All That.” And again and again throughout the collection, we keep returning to Los Angeles, a city I have always found loathsome and fascinating, a desert mirage, an impossibility, rendered in Didion’s prose as dangerous and magical as the fairy food you’ll be offered there.

Remember what it was to be me. I was here.