Joan Didion dies at 87
RIP.
Didion specialized in the non-fiction essay, one of my favorite genres. I read her 1968 work Slouching Towards Bethlehem (title taken from Yeats’ wonderful poem “The Second Coming”) a couple of years after it came out and admired it greatly, re-reading it several times. That was so long ago, though, that I no longer remember the details. What I do remember is how well-written it was, and what a sense of anxious foreboding it conveyed.
That was my own feeling about the 1960s, too.
I later read her very sad memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne and the illness of her daughter (who also died not long after the book was written). That was over fifteen years ago. Her obituaries say that she died of “complications from “Parkinson’s disease,” so she also had that affliction. Difficult.
She was very talented, and the death of Quintana Roo very sad, but any New Yorker will remember her atrocious defense, from thirty years ago, of the young men in the infamous case of the Central Park jogger. Despite all the lies from the left (including a pseudo-documentary from PBS and a worthless mini-series from Ava DuVernay entitled “When They See Us”), there exists overwhelming evidence of the young men’s guilt (if not in the actual rape, then without question in violence and brutality). Their trial was fair, and the later “confession” from Reyes did nothing to absolve them of their part in the unspeakable brutalizing of the innocent young woman. Ann Coulter (as well as Linda Fairstein) has written extensively and very sensibly about this case and the manipulation of its public perception by “progressive” activists.
Ann Coulter (as well as Linda Fairstein)
Not delving into this particular dispute. Just remarking that Coulter’s judgment about matters like this has been in the past uneven.
I’ve found in the past everything I’ve picked up written by her left me wanting to read more. Which is interesting, because her perspective has an unpleasantly mordant quality to it.
There was a documentary on her by one of the streaming services which has a scene of her at an awards ceremony in 2012. She had Griffin Dunne with her to help her with stairs; her mobility has been impaired for some time.
At the Dam made an impression on me at an impressionable age.
A very fine prose stylist.
National Review Online posted a collection of her essays for that magazine.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/joan-didion-the-national-review-years/
How I love Joan Didion’s writing! So dry, so precise. She should have made James Bond’s martinis.
Here’s a bit of Joan more recent than the usual immortal quotes from “Slouching” and “White Album.” She skewers Bob Woodward’s bland book, “The Choice” (1996) — about the Clinton-Dole campaign — as representative of all Woodward’s books:
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Mr. Woodward’s rather eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him has been generally understood as an admirable quality, at best a mandarin modesty, at worst a kind of executive big-picture focus, the entirely justifiable oversight of someone with a more important game to play. Yet what we see in “The Choice” is something more than a matter of an occasional inconsistency left unexplored in the rush of the breaking story, a stray ball or two left unfielded in the heat of the opportunity, as Mr. Woodward describes his role, “to sit with many of the candidates and key players and ask about the questions of the day as the campaign unfolded.”
What seems most remarkable in this new Woodward book is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as the insiders’ inside story and each of which went on to become a number-one bestseller: these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.
–Joan Didion, “The Deferential Spirit”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/sep/19/the-deferential-spirit/
I can’t get Joan Didion’s monster movie out of my mind…
Back in 2012 I was rereading “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and I got stuck (again) wondering what monster movie Didion was referencing in her essay, “I Can’t Get That Monster out of My Mind.”
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Quite early in the action of an otherwise unmemorable monster movie (I do not even remember its name), having to do with a mechanical man who walks underwater down the East River as far as 49th Street and then surfaces to destroy the United Nations, the heroine is surveying the grounds of her country place when the mechanical monster bobs up from a lake and attempts to carry off her child. (Actually we are aware that the monster wants only to make friends with the little girl, but the young mother, who has presumably seen fewer monster movies than we have, is not. This provides pathos, and dramatic tension.) In any case. Later that evening, as the heroine sits on the veranda reflecting upon the day’s events, her brother strolls out, tamps his pipe, and asks: “Why the brown study, Deborah?” Deborah smiles, ruefully. “It’s nothing, Jim, really,” she says. “I just can’t get that monster out of my mind.”
–Joan Didion, “I Can’t Get That Monster out of My Mind” from ?”Slouching Towards Bethlehem”
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So begins Didion’s sixties critique of Hollywood. I know old sci-fi and I was bothered not to remember what Didion found unmemorable. At first I thought of “Kronos” about an alien machine attacking the earth, but it never befriends a child nor has a scene at the UN.
I googled for an answer, but found none. So I laboriously worked my way through old movies and found, I believe, the movie and the scene Didion failed to recall in full:
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Henry: I saw you from my window. You looked so small, so lonely.
Ann: I haven’t been able to get over it. That terrible… What was it, Henry? What was that monstrous thing?
–“”The Colossus of New York” @ 48:15 (1958)
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It’s interesting how Didion got the right feel of the scene, yet “rewrote” so many of the details. Henry is not Ann’s brother, but her brother-in-law who is in love with Ann. The child is Ann’s son, not daughter. Henry and Ann meet in the moonlit backyard at night. Henry is pipeless.
There is something of a Didion cult (clearly I am a member), which is particularly strong among women. Some, usually women, come out the other side as strong critics. I find it interesting that one can, nonetheless, spot Didion’s influence a mile away in their criticism:
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When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer — not entirely facetiously — that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator’s having pleated instead of gathered her new diningroom curtains.
–Barbara Grizzutti Harrison, “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect” (1980)
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html
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Harrison has her points, but in a way they sound like complaints that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. Well, yeah.
For those fascinated by Didion and the ripples she created, here’s a couple more critical links:
http://review.gawker.com/the-long-con-of-joan-didion-1726474476
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/the-autumn-of-joan-didion/308851/
Didion has been a revered writer for some time, but it seems there has been a backlash.
Matthew:
Thanks for the NR link on Didion!
(It contains PDFs scanned from the original dead tree magazines, complete with drawings and ads. I’m charmed.)
I believe it’s The White Album that includes a memorable and very sharp put down of feminist writing. I’m sure there was a lot of resentment about that.
My favorite Didion non-fiction book has always been The White Album. My favorite novel was Play It As it Lays. No matter what she wrote, you felt her powerful persona.
@ Mac > “very sharp put down of feminist writing”
I haven’t read that essay, but I suspect her complaints were along the lines of most feminist writing being of the type that allowed the Sokal Hoax Trilogy to sail through the leftist journals.
Accountability for Government Employees. Tyranny!
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3160976/chinese-city-xian-punishes-officials-allowing-virus-spread
Oops… Intended for Open Thread.
but I suspect her complaints were along the lines of most feminist writing being of the type that allowed the Sokal Hoax Trilogy to sail through the leftist journals.
Not at all. Antedated Sokal by about 25 years. The burden of the essay was that the feminist magazine journalism of the time amounted to a complaint against the demands of personal responsibility and adult life.
My mother (an older contemporary of Didion’s) tended at the time to be critical of feminist agitation, in large measure because their modus operandi was at war with the way a prudent individual – male or female – navigates adult life. She’d say “they’re vocal“, and in her life of 40+, the vocal people you know are generally the ones making your world worse. She also thought attempting to invade male spaces (e.g. private clubs) was a waste of effort and to no one’s benefit (“now that you’ve forced your way in, what are you going to do?”). She was discontented with many things, but also at a time in her life when you’re resigned to that. Feminist jabberwocky offered absolutely nothing which would address two-thirds of her discontents and offered nothing other than ‘sue the ba*tard’ for the other third.
National Review Online posted a collection of her essays for that magazine.
It’s interesting that she submitted work to NR, which was at the time a subcultural magazine with a much smaller circulation than the ones for which she usually wrote. Didion’s been compared to Garry Wills, which is inapposite inasmuch as the only thing they had in common was some association with Wm. F. Buckley ca. 1962. Didion was not aligned with any faction, political or cultural. She did not write polemics. She did not write polemics polluted with forensic and rhetorical tricks. (See the late Paul Mankowski SJ on the scams incorporated into Wills’ modus operandi). Wills on his best day might write something that would be of middling quality in DIdion’s corpus.
I believe Didion found the feminists to be neurotic. Mostly, because feminists tend to be neurotic. (That said I’ve known some anti-feminists males to be neurotic too.)
As usual, one must not take Art Deco’s pronouncements too seriously.
Didion came from a conservative California family, she voted for Goldwater and she even voted against Nixon in a primary because Nixon “was too liberal for her.” Her stint with NR was hardly out of character.
Her problem with the women’s movement went well beyond complaints about evasions of personal responsibility. Straight up in the first five paragraphs of her essay, “The Women’s Movement,” she analyzed the movement in terms of the latest attempt at Marxist revolution in America.
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In fact there was an idea [behind the women’s movement], and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women’s movement would have seemed to have any interest at all.
Marxism in this country had ever been an eccentric and quixotic passion. <One oppressed class after an other had seemed finally to miss the point. The have?nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game.They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self?interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of “brotherhood.”
And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women’s movement, and the invention of women as a “class.”
–Joan Didion, “The Women’s Movement” (1972)
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/30/archives/the-womens-movement-women.html
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Rather prescient for 1972, I’d say. At the time I don’t remember any mainstream commentary on feminism going directly to the M-word (Marxism) like that. We are seeing the same dynamic playing out today.
It’s true Didion drifted away from orthodox conservativism. WF Buckley called her an “apostate.” She claimed this was due more to her dissatisfaction with the Republican Party than the attractions of the left. See the following article for more:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/08/joan-didion-unorthodox-conservativism/
“This is supposed to be a happy occasion, …., about who killed who ….” Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Not happy, at the passing of Joan Didion. You both have good points to make IMO.
Merry Christmas.
I believe it’s The White Album that includes a memorable and very sharp put down of feminist writing. I’m sure there was a lot of resentment about that.
Mac:
To be sure. Though I would go further.
My impression is these women who criticize Didion are spiritual Daughters of the Strong Matriarch, the woman who formed them as writers. Now they are dissatisfied with Didion and wish to break free, but how can they exorcize such a monumental influence?
As usual, one must not take Art Deco’s pronouncements too seriously.
You didn’t bother to read what I said.
huxley: Bari Weiss is one contemporary female writer who celebrates Didion:
Joan Didion, who inspired a generation of young writers including this one, died Thursday. She was a lot of things, but one of them: she was a brilliant contrarian. My favorite of her pieces skewered the trendy movements around her. When hippies were cool, where was Joan Didion? She was writing the darkest portraits of the movement that were ever made. She was showing readers the preschool-aged child whose parents gave her LSD. She went to the beating heart of the utopian progressive movement of the era–in the heart of the city where I was born and raised–and she showed what the unmooring looks like up close.
In “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” Didion gives us a hilarious take-down of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, where well-meaning young hippies wander glassy-eyed across her pages. . . . The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/tgif-i-couldnt-handle-vacation-edition