Culture

Joan Didion’s Early Novels of American Womanhood


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 Altman’s mid-career masterpiece “3 Women,” at a theatre in midtown, and I read Joan Didion’s 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 watching—it wasn’t long before Altman’s and Didion’s 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 Didion’s 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 Didion’s 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 fictions”—the 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. Didion’s women have an image in mind of what life should look like—they’ve seen it in the fashion magazines—and they expect reality to follow suit. But it almost never does. In Didion’s fiction, the standard narratives of women’s 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 Didion’s 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 taught—polish the furniture, make an apple pie, prepare her husband’s Martini as he rolls up the driveway—she 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 queerness—the girl who doesn’t fit in—and 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 Lays”—there isn’t a closeted gay adolescent on the planet who wouldn’t identify with its nihilism played out in the glare of glamorous privilege—but it didn’t thrill me like “A Book of Common Prayer,” which has a full-bodied pathos and yearning that Didion’s 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, Didion’s voice told another story, about women’s 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 specifically—how we fashion the truth, and why. In Didion’s novel—and in most of her fiction, including her 1984 masterpiece, “Democracy”—believing 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 book’s 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 Altman’s 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 Didion—a graduate of Berkeley and a staffer at Vogue during the age of Eisenhower, who was already writing pieces steeped in originality—was part of the feminist movement. In her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement,” she objected to several of the movement’s tendencies, including its “invention of women as a ‘class’ ” and its wish to replace the ambiguities of fiction with ideology. It was clear from Didion’s 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 else’s. In a 2005 essay in The New York Review of Books, John Leonard recalled how startled he was, in the sixties, by Didion’s syntax and tone: “I’ve 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 Morrison’s “Sula,” published four years earlier, was feminist—without 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 she’s gone. Grace, who shares some of her creator’s moral rigidity—“In order to maintain a semblance of purposeful behavior on this earth you have to believe that things are right or wrong,” Didion told an interviewer—is 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 Lévi-Strauss, in São 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.” Grace’s inheritance makes her the head of the household, but money isn’t everything—it isn’t even a start, when your real interest lies in something other than profit and waste. The flesh and the spirit are on Grace’s 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 don’t believe in her. She has a daughter, Marin—modelled on Patricia Hearst—who 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. Charlotte’s husband, Leonard, isn’t 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 isn’t 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 woman’s perspective, or two women’s perspectives, if you believe Charlotte, which you shouldn’t. In a review of “The Executioner’s Song,” Norman Mailer’s 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 can’t 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 don’t 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 don’t quite see your point.”

I explained my point.

“I’ve 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 don’t necessarily reveal who we are, but our contradictions almost always do: it’s the warring self—the self that’s capable of both caring for others and intense self-interest—that makes a story. And if Grace is drawn to anything it’s a story; narrative—investigating it, creating it—gives her something to live for. Part of what so captivates me about “A Book of Common Prayer” is that, on some level, it’s a book about writing, which captures Didion’s love of cerebral thriller-romances, such as Joseph Conrad’s 1915 tale “Victory” or Carol Reed’s 1949 film version of Graham Greene’s “The Third Man,” in which a man tries to piece together the story of his friend’s 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.

Charlotte’s failure is that she attaches. She can’t 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 you’re immune to veracity? You can only write fantasy, tell the world not who you are but who you want to be. Charlotte’s 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.” “There’s 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. Charlotte’s ineptitude doesn’t keep us from rooting for her, though, because, despite it all, she doesn’t complain and never loses heart, and how many of us could do the same, if, like Charlotte, we loved a child who couldn’t love us, or married a man who was indifferent to our pain? Grace’s sometimes smug responses to Charlotte’s high-heeled strolls into political and emotional quicksand are more upsetting than Charlotte’s 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 truth—or, at least, your truth—the 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 don’t think it’s necessary to read chronologically through the Library of America volume—which, in addition to the novels, includes Didion’s 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 Didion’s voice. Some readers came to Didion later in her career—through 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 daughter—and it’s 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 that’s 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 Executioner’s 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 Executioner’s 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 what’s out there in the blue? What words can we try to grab and shape as they’re fading away? How can we describe intimacy, or the failure of intimacy, without getting too close to it? Part of Didion’s genius was to make language out of the landscape she knew—the punishing terrain of California’s 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 you’re a writer the extremes show up. They don’t if you sell insurance.” ♦



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.