Joan Didion
Sloan Chase
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;"
W.B Yeats
Joan Didion was born on December 5th, 1934, in Sacramento, California. A descendant of a member of the Donner Party, Didion felt deeply connected to California, taking "pride in the fact that the land on which she lived had belonged to her family for five generations," (Henderson). She came from a very conservative background, writing in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (the title of which was taken from the W.B. Yeats poem), "This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book," (Didion). She was interested in writing from a young age, writing stories about dark themes for a young girl, her first story being about a woman who dreamt she was freezing to death, only to wake up to find she was dying of heat on the Sahara Desert - this was written when she was five. Later, she would name her greatest writing influences to be authors such as Geroge Eliot and Henry James, but it would be Ernest Hemingway to make the greatest impact. Didion took a lot from his writing, stating “I learned a lot about how a short sentence worked in a paragraph, how a long sentence worked… how every word had to matter.” Throughout her childhood, Didion grew up in a gloomy environment. Her father served in WWII, so the family was moving around the country constantly. In her collection of essays titled Where I Was From¸ Didion writes “We lived in dark houses… and favored, a preference so definite that it passed as a test of character, copper and brass that had darkened and greened. We also let our silver darken, which was said to ‘bring out the pattern.’” While majoring in English at UC Berkley, Didion entered an essay contest sponsored by Vogue in 1956. She won the contest, winning the prize of getting a job writing for the magazine, leading her to move to New York City. She lived there for eight years, moving back to California in 1964 after getting married to writer John Dunne. By this time, Didion had already established herself as a journalist, gaining notoriety as she became one of the pioneers of New Journalism.
New Journalism was introduced in the 60s as a style of journalism that uses “non-traditional” literary techniques, making pieces seem more like short stories rather than news articles. New Journalism was meant to be “an alternative to more standard media renderings of social reality, promising to deliver a ‘more real’ reality, the truer story of the main social crises splitting American society in the sixties. For it was not only a loss of interest in fiction that engendered the search for a new style. It was, probably even more significantly, precisely the atmosphere of social crisis that had begun to make the traditional media seem so suspect and that had called attention to the way the media’s claim to be ‘objective’ was frequently a smokescreen for bias,” (Staub). In short, writers were looking for a way to tell news in a way that was by the people, for the people. Instead of writing about events from the outside looking in, New Journalists inserted themselves into the narrative and reported on the story from the inside. Hunter S. Thompson for example, wanted to write about Hells Angels- so he joined them. Literary techniques were used as a method of keeping the reader engaged through “including vivid descriptions of scenes and full conversations in dialogue, rather than short questions from one witness at a time,” (Worthington). Writers would also write from a “character’s” point of view, looking through the lens of the subject rather than that of the journalist. However, New Journalism didn’t come without its objections. Critics believed that shifting perspective between the journalist and the subject was “irresponsible and misleading… for it is highly debatable whether one could label as ‘nonfiction’ the depiction of the inner workings of another person’s mind,” (Worthington). Another criticism was the fact that the journalist or narrator was put in the center of the story. This never happened in traditional journalism, where reporters made sure to remove themselves from the story entirely to write objectively.
The criticism was received, but New Journalists stood their ground: Many people during this time engaged in the social and political changes going on in America, and out of it all came fiction writers finding themselves “turning to the ‘rising authority of nonfiction’ to help make sense of the ‘fast-paced…apocalyptic’ times they were living in,” (Staub). Notable New Journalists include Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Truman Capote, all writing about topics such as the Black Panthers, the war in Vietnam, and other political issues. Wolfe believed that “only literary journalism could convey the intense social impact of contemporary American life,” (Worthington). For Didion, New Journalism provided a different route. She wrote about a wide range of topics from Jim Morrison and the rise of shopping malls to the women’s liberation movement and Nancy Reagan, each time adding her own opinion or perspective on the subject. She was also “uncannily attuned to the dark undercurrents of the day- the social fractures and divides that fueled carelessness and alienation,” (Kakautani), for what separated her from others was the fact that she “was able to see the long-term stakes of this rupture at a moment when most observers were fretting over whether to don love beads or to follow draft cards,” (Heller). One example of this would be her 1972 essay, “The Women’s Movement.”
The women’s liberation movement was the second wave of feminism that emerged in the 1960s. Their goal was towards equality for women, challenging the oppressive systems put in place. Nowadays, Joan Didion can be aligned with many feminist ideals, although she never considered herself a feminist. She especially disagreed with the women’s liberation movement, voicing her concerns in the 9th essay of The White Album. She brings up many different points in her essay, but one of the main ones is a lack of intersectionality:
One oppressed class after another 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 have 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.” (Didion, The White Album)
Almost twenty years before the term “intersectionality” was even coined, Didion was already pointing it out, able to look at the bigger picture. Her problem was with the superficialness of the movement. She thought it lacked depth, was becoming trivialized. She was “generally skeptical of progressive movements headed by white people… White activists are able to pick and choose their outrage, able to try on causes and identities with little investment, like picking something from a catalogue,” (Williams). Didion knew that the movement couldn’t focus on just white women, they had to take into consideration the differences that women of different races go through.
Other than commentary on political issues and figures, Didion’s writing included many pieces on American life and culture. Didion viewed the 60s as a very chaotic time, feelings which can be seen in many of her essays from that time. The opening lines to her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a striking example:
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes… People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves. It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in cold late spring of 1967. (Didion, Slouching…)
For a decade that saw the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, protests, and political assassinations, it’s no surprise Didion would have these feelings about the America. Her essay goes on to report on the lives of a couple of hippies living in California. Hippies in the 60s were mainly young people from middle class white families. The stories she tells following this are not necessarily happy ones. She spends a couple days with the people she’s writing about, documenting their days, most of which are spent on drugs:
At three-thirty that afternoon Max, Tom, and Sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara’s room, and about five-thirty some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon’s lap. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until seven thirty, when Max said ‘Wow.’ (Didion, Slouching…)
Didion, like other New Journalists, is inserting herself into the story. She is there, she is experiencing it, she is writing a firsthand account. There were a wide range of thoughts and opinions on hippies in the 60s. Among the more critical ones were people who opposed the sex, drugs, and music they engaged in. Common stereotypes included laziness, dirtiness, and irresponsibility, and Didion’s characters aren’t exactly disproving the point. Among the hippie’s Didion is observing is a woman named Barbara, who “will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week,” (Didion, Slouching…). Farther along the essay, Didion starts to make a discovery, one which Katherine Henderson is able to explain perfectly:
The climax of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is the reader’s realization that all of the hippies are emotionally stunted; they are essentially children playing at being grown-ups. They fulfill their most elemental needs- for food, companionship, and sexual release- but they avoid all the complexities of adult life: the need to find work that is rewarding and productive, the enduring commitment to another person, the search for words to communicate profound and intricate feeling… More surprising, the many reporters and photographers whom Didion meets in the district understand no better than the policemen. They were determined to assign the “hippie movement” some meaning in history, whether “artistic avant-garde” or “thoughtful protest”; they failed to see that these children were living without memory of plans, outside of time. “(Henderson).
And many of them were really children. Another one of the girls featured in the essay is only 17, a teenager, just like many other hippies at the time. But why so young? Many hippies would probably blame society for being too materialistic, too repressive. As for Didion, she puts blame entirely on her generation:
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum… This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game… They feed back exactly what is given them,” (Didion, Slouching…).
Documents such as this are so important for history. Through these accounts, we get a new understanding of the past, and new perspectives on people and cultures. Didion was able to do this perfectly by focusing on “smaller” topics such as hippies or Joan Baez, rather than larger more general ideas about America.
Despite all her talent and praise, Didion did receive some criticism. Despite the basic critiques New Journalism had received in general, her essay “The Women’s Movement” can be seen as anti-feminist or anti-woman for the way it criticized the movement. However, Didion isn’t attacking the core idea and values of the movement, but rather how the movement had manifested itself, as mentioned before. She never once denies what it’s like to be a woman, in fact, she describes it as the “sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death,” (Didion, The White Album). For most of her life, Didion was a conservative, which already is a put off for many people. She had a conservative upbringing being from old California and held conservative ideals until her later life when she started to become more liberal. However, her conservatism isn’t necessarily what one might picture as a typical conservative. To Didion, conservatism is “an intelligently expressed distaste for willful ignorance, or as she put it, ‘agonized complacency,’” (Zhang), a sentiment we can see in “Slouching towards Bethlehem,” with her criticism against the hippies she was writing about. As for general nitpicking on her writing, some say that “the peppering of her prose with proper nouns… is somehow unserious. (For whatever reason, these complains usually come from men,” (Heller). Others say that “of the later Didion that she has become in some ways a caricature of her earlier self, that her style has degenerated into parody. The sentences have gotten longer, they say, and more arch, and the stylistic mannerisms that so defined the early work have by now become cliches,” (Lacy). But whatever the criticism, there’s no doubt that Didion’s writing, and Didion herself, leave behind an important legacy.
Part of what makes Didion’s work last is the fact that it’s timeless. She saw the social “disorder” in society that still exists today. We see this once again in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” when she writes that the “center was not holding.” One could’ve applied this phrase to 3 years ago, when everyone was under lockdown due to Covid-19. The phrase can be applied to today, with news of global warming and wars and so much more bringing about feelings of uncertainty, or “the jitters,” as Didion called it. A certain college student could even use this phrase in her own life, as she rushes to finish papers and study for finals- it feels like the center could fall apart at any second. It’s easy to see our own world in her work, which “tragically, if unwittingly, anticipates our bewildered, agitated and insolubly divided culture, where the void she stared into so unflinchingly has become the climate in which we live,” (Merkin). Didion believed in thinking for yourself, for being educated and honest and willing to grow. She believed that “no one has the answers, and we must come to our own conclusions as intelligent beings with agency but also humility,” (Zhang). Through her writing, Didion has become a huge inspiration to many. Just as Hemingway taught her, Didion’s been an example and a teacher to many writers on how to write sentences, how to write paragraphs, how to write as if the center is not holding. And the inspiration doesn’t just stop at her writing. Despite not being a self-proclaimed feminist, many people look to her as one. For one, she was a woman breaking through a male dominated field throughout the 50s and 60s. Looking back on the past, “it must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do- but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them… [Didion] became Exhibit A… she gave you confidence. She shored you up. And did so not by rejecting the supposed realm of women, but by drilling down into it,” (Smith). The reason why we can’t imagine how different things were is because of women like Didion, who paved the way for other women writers and journalists to make their own mark. Even through all the praise, through all the writings and profound analyses of society, at the core of it all Didion is just a person. She had her struggles just like everyone else. She wrote about her migraines. She wrote about her grief after she lost her husband and daughter. She wrote about where she came from and where she lived, and she did it so well that people listened. Didion can be a writer for everyone, she’s become “a symbol of pioneering feminism despite her clash with the women’s movement, a liberal darling despite her conservative roots, a symbol of fidelity despite her tempestuous relationship with her husband and a sort of grief counselor,” (Nagourney). She was a mother and a wife and a woman, a writer whose work has stood the test of time and continues to inspire many. She lived through the chaos of the 60s and made it through to the 70s, when she gave an interview which only made her seem even more profound, that she even spoke diligently, not just in writing. She said “the finest hour had passed, I mean that, if the final test of your character was whether or not you could push on, get through the mountains, go on, if there was nowhere else to go then you were never gonna be put to that character test.,” (Didion, 1971). Didion knew that pain and struggle was a part of growing, a part of changing and becoming better. Seems like she knew it all, from the fragmentations of society to the fragmentation of oneself; if the center is not holding, push on.
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