My first reaction to receiving a review copy of South and West: From a Notebook (Knopf, $21) a slim volume consisting of two previously unpublished excerpts from notebooks Joan Didion kept during the 1970s, was a mingling of anxious horror and regret. I assumed Didion--who would be one of my heroes were I the sort of person who admitted to having them--had died. How could I have missed the news?
I wrongly thought that because South and West seems to belong to a certain species of book, something like Hemingway's posthumous The Garden of Eden or Harper Lee's semi-posthumous Go Set a Watchman. While there is sometimes value in these works, it's not difficult to see them as cynical profit-taking. Didion's notebooks might be interesting to biographers and those of us interested in her technique, but there are reasons these inchoate stories were abandoned. While writers are rarely reliable judges of their own work, most of us understand the miasmatic slog of the dead-end story. If you have the luxury of not publishing--and most working writers don't--then it's probably best to follow the instinct.
It was only after the Internet assured me my favorite icily elitist, dynamically intellectual writer was still alive and stonily glamorous in a way few writers achieve that I opened the book and began to read. It didn't take me long to finish it--less than two hours to speed through 126 pages.
More than 100 of those pages are devoted to a trip Didion made with her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in June 1970 on the theory "that if I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South." (The brief second section is devoted to an aborted attempt to write a piece about the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone in 1976.)
But the South didn't yield to Didion's gaze; she just saw it as close and dense, rather sparsely populated with people disconnected from the vital powers that move the cultural, economic and political levers of the wider world. She found something like the children's table at the American banquet, a place beset by petty squabbles and informed by superstition and wishfulness. People who live in places where the best place in town to eat is Howard Johnson's and who don't read, much less trust, the New York Times.
They are free to believe as they will that, say, the shootings at Mississippi's Jackson State University (less than two weeks after the infamous incident at Ohio's Kent State) where two black students were killed by police was a set-up by liberal agitators. Perhaps the Alex Joneses of the day (who did exist; see the New Orleans-set 1970 Paul Newman film WUSA for confirmation) would have called them "false flag" operations.
Anyone reading these notes in the context of recent American politics is bound to find them prescient, but her field notes on the South tell us far more about our correspondent's psychic territories than they do about the mythic land of Faulkner and Willie Morris--who nearly but not quite turns up at a dinner in New Orleans' Garden District where Didion's boorish host "Ben C." demands to know why Didion's husband "allowed" her to "spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash."
Maybe it accrues to Ben C.'s credit that he knows Didion's work--or perhaps he only knows her reputation.
It doesn't get much better for her as she progresses through small cities and smaller towns like Biloxi and Pass Christian, Meridian and McComb. She spends entirely too much time in the company of a carpetbagger named Stan Torgerson (he gets no shielding initial), who came down from the cold North (Minnesota, she thinks) to buy the "ethnic" (black) radio station in Meridian, Miss.
"I cannot think of any place where the black is denied entrance, with the possible exception of private clubs," Torgerson tells her. ".... We're still two generations from full equality, but so are they in Chicago, in Detroit, and have you ever been in Harlem?"
There's nothing surprising in the encounters Didion records, which is probably why nothing came of the project. On the other hand, she seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, or even a dull sentence fragment:
"At every social level, the whole quality of maleness, the concentration on hunting and fishing," she writes. "Leave the women to their canning, their 'prettifying.'"
And the book begins with a passage too well-wrought to be offhand:
"In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray: the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never rejects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence."
That's our girl. That's the reason we read Didion.
South and West is a quick read, but my thoughts about it developed slowly, like negatives in a chemical bath. And the cured analog thoughts were somewhat softer than the instant digital snapshots; we have been invited to inspect Didion's failure. It is just a notebook, a series of uncensored, heartless impressions jotted down to be sorted through and evaluated at some later date. You don't hold the immediate cruelty against the artist--details can be tweaked, names changed to protect the innocent. Maybe it is only upon reflection that we can manufacture empathy for people very different from ourselves.
And most people are very different from Joan Didion.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 03/12/2017