Joan Didions Early Novels of American Womanhood – The New Yorker

As the lovely New York spring of 1977 turned into the worst kind of New York summer, I did two things over and over again: I watched Robert Altmans mid-career masterpiece 3 Women, at a theatre in midtown, and I read Joan Didions astounding third novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Released within weeks of each other that year, when I was sixteen, these two revelatory pieces of art shared a strong aesthetic atmosphere, an incisive view of uneasy friendships between women, a deadpan horror of consumerism, and an understanding of how the uncanny can manifest in the everyday. Reading and watchingit wasnt long before Altmans and Didions projects merged in my mind, where they constituted a kind of mini-Zeitgeist, one that troubled, undid, and then remade my ideas about how feminism might inform popular art.

After falling under the sway of A Book of Common Prayer, I turned to Didions first two novels, Run River (1963) and Play It as It Lays (1970). (All three novels were reissued in November, as part of a handsome volume from the Library of America, Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s.) Run River, published when Didion was not yet thirty, was conventional in a way that reflected not the fascinating slant of her intractably practical mind but, rather, her formidable ambition: writers wrote novels, so she wrote one. Still, the book, which is set in Didions home town of Sacramento, is not just a reflexive or academic exercise. Its protagonist, Lily Knight McClellan, is a kind of ruined Eve living in relative wealth in an Eden that the next generation will want no part of. Lily cries, drinks, cheats on her rancher husband, Everett, and aborts a child, because she cannot forgo the comfortable loving fictionsthe story of being a wife and thus socially acceptable, according to the rules of her tribe. What no Didion heroine can entirely reconcile herself to is the split between what she wants and what a woman is supposed to do: marry, have children, and keep her marriage together, despite the inevitable philandering, despite her other hopes and dreams. Didions women have an image in mind of what life should look liketheyve seen it in the fashion magazinesand they expect reality to follow suit. But it almost never does. In Didions fiction, the standard narratives of womens lives are mangled, altered, and rewritten all the time.

Play It as It Lays also centers on a woman failing to live up to social expectations, and it comes as close as any book has come to representing what repression does to the soul. In this slim novel, where sometimes a few words constitute a chapter, Didion gives shape to ghosts, the ghastly, and the ephemeral. Maria Wyeth, a sometime B actress, suffers a number of misfortunes, including the birth of a disabled child, but what makes her still the best known of Didions early heroines is how she queers the image of American womanhood even as she presumably lives it, in her nice house in Los Angeles, a city where failure, illness, fear... were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants. Maria feels an existential gnawing in her bones, a dread she can never quite shake, but instead of clinging tighter to the rules she has presumably been taughtpolish the furniture, make an apple pie, prepare her husbands Martini as he rolls up the drivewayshe makes a list of the things she will never do: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to,... carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.

Play It as It Lays was published not long after the Stonewall riots, in New York, at a time when there were few stories about gay male life out there, representing. The book, which features a significant gay male character, could be read both as a metaphor for queernessthe girl who doesnt fit inand as an early, un-camp depiction of the fag hag, a woman who questions convention by avoiding it and finds safety in the company of gay men. I admired Play It as It Laysthere isnt a closeted gay adolescent on the planet who wouldnt identify with its nihilism played out in the glare of glamorous privilegebut it didnt thrill me like A Book of Common Prayer, which has a full-bodied pathos and yearning that Didions other early fiction lacks or suppresses.

When A Book of Common Prayer came out, the country was still drunk on Bicentennial patriotism; 1976 had given us a big dose of pomp and ceremony. Over the receding jingoistic din, Didions voice told another story, about womens inner lives formed in a nation that was, as Elizabeth Hardwick put it, in a 1996 essay about Didion, blurred by a creeping inexactitude about many things, among them bureaucratic and official language, the jargon of the press, the incoherence of politics, the disastrous surprises in the mother, father, child tableau. The first three items listed have to do with language generally and rhetoric specificallyhow we fashion the truth, and why. In Didions noveland in most of her fiction, including her 1984 masterpiece, Democracybelieving that empirical truth exists is like believing that the water in a mirage will satisfy your thirst. What interests her is why people still want to drink it. Certainly Charlotte Douglas does. Charlotte is the person whom the books narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is referring to when she says, at the start of the novel, I will be her witness. When I first read those words, that long-ago summer, I was struck, as I am now, by the feminist ethos behind them: I will remember her, and therefore I, too, will exist.

I had grown up with the art and politics of such early heroes as Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Ntozake Shange, but Altmans potent film and A Book of Common Prayer were the first works I encountered that embodied the second-wave white feminism that mattered to me as well. Not that Didiona graduate of Berkeley and a staffer at Vogue during the age of Eisenhower, who was already writing pieces steeped in originalitywas part of the feminist movement. In her 1972 essay The Womens Movement, she objected to several of the movements tendencies, including its invention of women as a class and its wish to replace the ambiguities of fiction with ideology. It was clear from Didions writing that not only was she allergic to ideology, which she avoided like a virus in most of her work, but her ways of thinking and of expressing herself were unlike anyone elses. In a 2005 essay in The New York Review of Books, John Leonard recalled how startled he was, in the sixties, by Didions syntax and tone: Ive been trying for four decades to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours... something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than could be expected, as if to square a sandbox for the Sphinx. Still, in A Book of Common Prayer, Didion tried to close the gap between herself and others, to write about the responsibility inherent in connecting.

To me, A Book of Common Prayer was feminist in the way that Toni Morrisons Sula, published four years earlier, was feministwithout having to declare itself as such. But, whereas the two friends in Sula live inside their relationship, Didion wrote about a woman trying to enter into a friendship and a kind of love with another woman who is ultimately unknowable. A sixty-year-old American expatriate living in the fictional Central American city of Boca Grande, Grace inhabits an atmosphere of opaque equatorial light. Boca Grande, a sort of ersatz movie set, has no real history; its airport is a way station between more desirable destinations. A stomping ground for arms dealers and rich people with offshore accounts, Boca Grande is as good a place as any for Grace, who has cancer, to live and die. Not once during the course of the novel does she ask who will remember her when shes gone. Grace, who shares some of her creators moral rigidityIn order to maintain a semblance of purposeful behavior on this earth you have to believe that things are right or wrong, Didion told an intervieweris always looking out, rarely looking in. In a way, by moving to Boca Grande, Grace sought to escape life, or, at least, the life she was supposed to have as an American woman. And yet it followed her across the sea, in the real and ghostly presence of Charlotte, who died before Grace began telling this story.

Born in Denver, Grace was orphaned at a young age: My mother died of influenza one morning when I was eight. My father died of gunshot wounds, not self-inflicted, one afternoon when I was ten. Until she was sixteen, she lived alone in her parents former suite at the Brown Palace Hotel. Then she made her way to California, where she studied at Berkeley with the cultural anthropologist A.L.Kroeber, before being tapped to work with Claude Lvi-Strauss, in So Paulo. But make no mistake: her pursuit of anthropology was not the result of an intellectual passion, or any kind of passion. I did not know why I did or did not do anything at all, she says. After marrying a tree planter in Boca Grande, Grace retired (quotation marks hers) from anthropology. She gave birth to a son, and was eventually widowed and left, she says, with putative control of fifty-nine-point-eight percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process. Graces inheritance makes her the head of the household, but money isnt everythingit isnt even a start, when your real interest lies in something other than profit and waste. The flesh and the spirit are on Graces mind; her terminal illness no doubt contributes to our sense that, for her, the day is a long night filled with questions about being, questions she attaches to her memories of Charlotte.

Referred to by the locals as la norte-americana, Charlotte, during the brief time that Grace knows her, is a perfect denizen of Boca Grande. Pretty, ginger-haired, she seems to have no past, though she has an intense interest in the past, which spills over to the present and infects the future. She believes in institutions and conventionality, but they dont believe in her. She has a daughter, Marinmodelled on Patricia Hearstwho has disappeared after participating in a plane hijacking. Charlotte fills that absence with invention: she makes up a version of Marin who is forever a child. Charlottes husband, Leonard, isnt around much, either. When asked about him at one of many cocktail parties, Charlotte says carelessly, He runs guns. I wish they had caviar. That Charlotte is a mystery to Grace is part of the story: what sense can be made of a woman who spends half her time at the airport, watching planes take off for other places? Grace tries to shape these fragments and images of Charlotte into a coherent whole because she loves her, though she has no real language to express that love and Charlotte isnt around to receive it.

A Book of Common Prayer is an act of journalistic reconstruction disguised as fiction: a Graham Greene story within a V.S.Naipaul novel, but told from a womans perspective, or two womens perspectives, if you believe Charlotte, which you shouldnt. In a review of The Executioners Song, Norman Mailers 1979 book about the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, Didion writes, of life in the West, Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories. This is true of life in Boca Grande, too. Grace wants to pass down what she knows about Charlotte and, thereby, what she might know about herself. And yet some of the drama rests, of course, in what she cant know. After marrying, Grace says, she pursued biochemistry on an amateur level. The field appeals to her because demonstrable answers are commonplace and personality absent. She adds:

I am interested for example in learning that such a personality trait as fear of the dark exists irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the Mato Grosso or in Denver, Colorado.... Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids. Fear of the dark is a protein. I once diagrammed this protein for Charlotte. I dont quite see why calling it a protein makes it any different, Charlotte said, her eyes flickering covertly back to a battered Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue she had received in the mail that morning in May.... I mean I dont quite see your point.

I explained my point.

Ive never been afraid of the dark, Charlotte said after a while, and then, tearing out a photograph of a small child in a crocheted dress: This would be pretty on Marin.

Since Marin was the child Charlotte had lost to history and was at the time of her disappearance eighteen years old, I could only conclude that Charlotte did not care to pursue my point.

Also, for the record, Charlotte was afraid of the dark.

Facts dont necessarily reveal who we are, but our contradictions almost always do: its the warring selfthe self thats capable of both caring for others and intense self-interestthat makes a story. And if Grace is drawn to anything its a story; narrativeinvestigating it, creating itgives her something to live for. Part of what so captivates me about A Book of Common Prayer is that, on some level, its a book about writing, which captures Didions love of cerebral thriller-romances, such as Joseph Conrads 1915 tale Victory or Carol Reeds 1949 film version of Graham Greenes The Third Man, in which a man tries to piece together the story of his friends life. But the dominant ethos of the novel is one that Didion discovered as a teen-ager, while reading Ernest Hemingway. Writing about Hemingway in this magazine in 1998, Didion noted:

The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source.

Charlottes failure is that she attaches. She cant move through in the way that Grace can, or believes she can. Charlotte has her own stories to tell, but how can you give force or form to a piece of writing when youre immune to veracity? You can only write fantasy, tell the world not who you are but who you want to be. Charlottes fantasy includes the conviction that her strange and troubling family is a family. In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind, Didion noted in her wonderful 1976 essay Why I Write. Theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion. Charlotte composes several Letters from Central America, with a view to having The New Yorker publish her reportorially soft, inaccurate work, but the editors decline. Charlottes ineptitude doesnt keep us from rooting for her, though, because, despite it all, she doesnt complain and never loses heart, and how many of us could do the same, if, like Charlotte, we loved a child who couldnt love us, or married a man who was indifferent to our pain? Graces sometimes smug responses to Charlottes high-heeled strolls into political and emotional quicksand are more upsetting than Charlottes mistakes, because Grace believes she knows better, when, in fact, no one does. What Charlotte teaches Grace, directly and indirectly, is that, no matter how much you want to tell the truthor, at least, your truththe world will twist and distort your story. Didion closes her most lovelorn and visceral novel with Grace saying, with sad finality, I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

I dont think its necessary to read chronologically through the Library of America volumewhich, in addition to the novels, includes Didions seminal essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). Almost any page of this invaluable book will take you somewhere emotionally and offer a paramount lesson in the power of Didions voice. Some readers came to Didion later in her careerthrough her National Book Award-winning memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), about the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, for instance, or Blue Nights (2011), about the death of her daughterand its interesting to go back and explore the origins of the impulse that drives those memoirs. Indeed, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion confesses a Grace-like tendency to try to distance herself from the unfathomable through writing and research: writing, for her, can be a means of controlling the uncontrollable, including grief and loss.

A story thats as interesting as the ones Didion tells in important works like A Book of Common Prayer is how she found and developed that authoritative literary voice. In her review of The Executioners Song, this daughter of California wrote:

The authentic Western voice... is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of The Executioners Song is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls The immense blue of the strong sky of the American West... not too much makes a difference.

So whats out there in the blue? What words can we try to grab and shape as theyre fading away? How can we describe intimacy, or the failure of intimacy, without getting too close to it? Part of Didions genius was to make language out of the landscape she knewthe punishing terrain of Californias Central Valley, with its glaring hot summers and winter floods, its stark flatness, its river snakes, taciturn ranchers, and lurking danger. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world, she said in a 1977 interview. It so happens that if youre a writer the extremes show up. They dont if you sell insurance.

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Joan Didions Early Novels of American Womanhood - The New Yorker