Women writing women: The Autumn of Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem may be the book that taught us all that “writers are always selling somebody out,” but it is also a very short book with four different sets of curtains in it: the frayed silk ones of the old Newport cottages, the pale appliquéd muslin ones of the Hotel Playa de Cortés in Guaymas, the paper flowered ones in the fortune-teller’s booths on Hotel Street in Honolulu, and the yellow-silk ones she hung in her New York apartment, forgetting to weight them properly, so “all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms.”
The collection is named for the piece about life in the Haight, but the book is anchored—in sentiment, concern, and tone—by the final essay, “Goodbye to All That.” It’s about the exquisite sadness of the end of a love affair, the growing disenchantment with living in New York, and most of all what it’s like for a woman to lose her youth:
There was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl that used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that … One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
She had stepped into the revolving door of the Seagram Building and stepped out “a good deal older, and on a different street.” She began to cry a lot, and the smell of certain perfumes overwhelmed her with emotion, and “it was very bad when I was twenty-eight.”
Critics of Joan Didion—and they are legion—fall into several camps, the largest and best-organized of which maintains that she’s a downer. “Can nothing be done to cheer this woman up?” asked Darcy O’Brien in the lede to his exasperated New York magazine review of The White Album. Or, as Sandra Hawk of Fort Worth, Texas, wrote to the editors of Life magazine in the January 23, 1970, issue: “Your new writer, Joan Didion, is not exactly ‘Little Mary Sunshine,’ is she?” Guilty as charged. What Didion wrote about were the exquisitely tender and often deeply melancholy feelings that are such a large part of the inner lives of women and especially of very young women—and girls—who are leaving behind the uncomplicated, romance-drenched state of youth and coming to terms with what comes next. Didion’s sensibility is like that of the young Joan Baez, whom she encountered in 1965: “Above all, she is the girl who ‘feels’ things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.” She herself had once been the girl with “skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation … full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again.”
Didion is the writer who expressed most eloquently the eternal-girl impulse, the one that follows us into adulthood: the desire to retreat to our room, to close the door, to spend some time alone with our thoughts and our feelings. She understood that the old governor’s mansion in Sacramento was superior to the Reagans’ giant tract house because it had big, airy bedrooms, “and one can imagine reading in one of them, or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner.” She loved Alcatraz Island not only for the flowers and the view, but because she is a person who likes a moat. Like Baez, when the world was too much with her she wanted to be able to retreat to someplace beautiful and “lock the gate.” When we learned that each time she finished a novel she had done so back in her old bedroom at her parents’ house—the one she had painted carnation pink during her first year at college, and that had green vines growing up over all the windows, so that the light was filtered—we all imagined writing novels and finishing them in just that way. That’s who we all wanted to be—someone’s star student and someone else’s star daughter, the ingenue who didn’t have to carry the picture but without whom it would be flat and lusterless. We were the ones who wanted to provide—or be—“colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.”
Even marriage—that girl-buster, that instant ager—was, in her description, a state of extended girlhood...
The book has a second subject: the death of her only child, Quintana, at age 39. That this event should coexist with—should be described in the same tone as—the bummer about the red suede sandals, that this event should not even get top billing in the title, hints at the fact that Joan Didion may have been quite right when she suggested to Lynn Nesbit that they send the advance back to Sonny Mehta and shelve the project. The thing isn’t quite cooked.
Quintana’s parents wrote her into existence in myriad places, and always managed to present themselves as the parents of the century, but off the page she was a deeply troubled person, whose demons ranged from a chronic overuse of alcohol to a variety of mental illnesses, including manic depression. In other words, she should have fit right in, but she didn’t fit right in, because the Didion-Dunnes had one of those insular, deeply interdependent, and mutually reinforcing marriages that children have an impossible time breaking into.
Didion reports that the central demon of Quintana’s life was a fear of abandonment. “How,” she writes plaintively, “could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?” A cursory reading of the Didion-Dunne canon provides a partial answer. In The White Album, Didion saw fit to quote liberally from her own psychiatric evaluation (as an outpatient she was treated over a lengthy period). The diagnosis included that she had emotionally “alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings.” In thrall to “an underlying psychotic process,” her contact with reality was “obviously and seriously impaired.” This period lasted from 1966 to 1971, a fact that takes on a different complexion when you realize that Quintana was born and adopted in 1966.
Both of Quintana’s parents worked constantly, left her alone with a variety of sitters—two teenage boys who happened to live next door, a woman who “saw death” in Joan Didion’s aura, whatever hotel sitter was on duty—and they left her alone in Los Angeles many, many times when they were working. The Christmas Quintana was 3, Didion planned to make crèches and pomegranate jelly with her, but then got a picture in New York and decided she’d rather do that, leaving her child home. (She was there because the movie was “precisely what I want to be doing,” Didion wrote defiantly, although she admitted that it was difficult for her to look into the windows of FAO Schwarz.) She balanced ill health and short deadlines by drinking gin and hot water to blunt the pain and taking Dexedrine to blunt the gin, which makes for some ravishing reading, but is hardly a prescription for attentive parenting. Where was Quintana when Didion was living at the Faculty Club, or finishing her novels at her parents’ house, or bunking down in the Haight? Not with her mother...
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/the-autumn-of-joan-didion/8851/?single_page=true
