Joan Didion is a writer, a very well known and accomplished writer, from California. Her first book of essays “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, written in the sixties, is centered mostly around, or jumps off from, her home state. I mentioned her and this book in my Arts Roundup a few weeks ago. Now that I am most of the way through this book I wanted to share my thoughts about it with you. Much has been written about Didion throughout her long career and much more eloquently than I can do. But nevertheless this book has had a strong impact on me and I wanted to write about it.
The book is made up of three sections. The first is about people (e.g., John Wayne) and events (“Woman on trial for killing her husband”) in California, the second are more introspective pieces and the third are stories about various places. Though her writing is powerful throughout I want to focus on a few of the essays in the second and third sections.
On Keeping A Notebook – In this essay Didion traces her need to write things down back to her days as a young girl. She wonders about the origin of certain entries and why she chose to document them in her notebook. Later on in the essay she writes:
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them.”
On Self-Respect – An essay on knowing yourself and coming to terms with that knowledge, the good and the not so good things that we all are. It is in a way her version of “On Self-Reliance”[1] in that it is what we think of ourselves, not what others think of us, that matters in the end. She cites as one example the character from the “Great Gatsby” the tennis player Jordan Baker:
“Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace… Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.”
Los Angeles Notebook – This is kind of a spooky essay about what it’s like to live in California. Parts of it sound like something ripped from today’s headlines and not a story written 50 plus years ago. After the catastrophic fires this past year, Didion writes this about the fires that ravaged California during the Santa Ana season:
“The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn the way it did in 1956… In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.”
Throughout the book there are numerous references to the Santa Ana winds that Didion portrays more as a cosmic force of nature with powers over people and not just some seasonal climatic event.
“To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior… Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana … ‘Anything can happen’.”
Goodbye To All That – This is a wonderful essay about Didion’s time living in New York City where she went for six months and stayed eight years. Living at times on the edge of poverty she hung on to experience the magic that is New York City when you are young:
“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”
In the end this is not a critique or even a review. This is more a fan letter, a recommendation. And though I have shared some quotes from the essays they are not spoilers. The book is filled with prose like the examples I have shared. I find it all quite powerful indeed. It is a gift to discover even one writer or book like this a year. 2018 will have to struggle to keep up. As for what’s next for me, I’ll be running down Didion’s second book of essays “The White Album”. I’ll report back.
ARTS ROUNDUP
Watching- I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately in my viewing choices. But that ended with the new Netflix limited series “Collateral”. The four part series stars Carey Mulligan as the lead detective investigating the murder of an immigrant pizza deliveryman. It is a very complex story written by David Hare with great performances by a very deep cast. Highly recommended.
Listening – The latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine had one of their occasional overviews they do of all of a band’s albums and their latest one profiled Steely Dan. So I pulled up the greatest hits “Decade of Steely Dan” from my iTunes archive. They had an impressive run in the 70’s from the early albums’ radio friendly hits like “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and “Reelin’ In The Years” to the frictionless surfaces of “Aja” and “Gaucho”.
Reading – There was an interesting profile about Keith Richards in last week’s Wall Street Journal Magazine. Part Connecticut country gentlemen, part rock and roll pirate; it’s always fun to check in on Keith. To paraphrase the title of the article, one of the legends of rock is still rolling at 74.
[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson.