From Didion, 12 essays of crystalline observation
‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean’ collects writer’s unseen works from ’60s to 2000
In any year, pandemic or not, a new book by Joan Didion is a cause for exclamations of joy. In “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” Didion, at 86 the author of five respected novels and a dozen even more highly regarded works of nonfiction — memoirs and essays and reportage — assembles 12 previously uncollected essays from the late 1960s to 2000.
The subject matter is eclectic, the themes diffuse — profiles of Nancy Reagan, Martha Stewart and Ernest Hemingway and pieces on the Hearst Castle in California, Vietnam veterans, and Gamblers Anonymous — but the prose style hits the same consistent effortless tempo and polished tone 12 times in a row. Ultimately, Didion’s essays are about language, about how a writer understands what her subject is by carving sentences out of the world of experience. As she says, “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”
No one but Tom Wolfe summed up the ethos of the 1960s as Didion did, with her litany of little ironies and dedicated absurdities. Her attention, as she says, was “always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus.” For more than half a century, she has been our poet laureate of the specific and tangible, using her writing as a light to find her way (and ours) through the strange shadows cast by
The Doors or Eldridge Cleaver or Charles Manson and, more recently, through breathtaking grief (“The Year of Magical Thinking,” “Blue Nights”).
Didion is a writer’s writer, like George Orwell or Alice Munro, producing prose so crystalline
artless. But it takes a lot of art to make sentences like these from the opening of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” describing the social breakdown presaged by the Summer of Love in 1967 San Francisco: “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 and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.” In a few carefully wrought sentences she shows the aimlessness of speech and the moral decay she discovered in Haight-Ashbury, her portrait of that time and place as memorable a picture of a social hemorrhaging as we might discover in a three-hour viewing of Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
According to Hilton Als in his foreword to the book, Didion’s genius is for grasping the menace in the everyday world – “Didion doesn’t insert her personality in the scene; she can’t editorialize, or won’t, because, to her, nightmares carry their own weight, and it’s the writer’s job to be awake when the nightmare or uncanny happens.” In an eerily prophetic line from the first essay in this new volume — “Alicia and the Underground Press” (first published in 1968) — she writes, “I am talking here about something deadening and peculiar, the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way, the failure of American newspapers to ‘get through.’ “She’s like Yeats’ poet in “Sailing to Byzantium,” singing to the lords and ladies of “what is past, or passing, or to come.”
Didion is, like Thoreau, one of our most epigrammatic writers, summing up a character or a cultural movement in a line or two. Has anyone ever seen Nancy Reagan (then the California governor’s wife) more clearly than this? “Nancy Reagan says almost everything with spirit, perhaps because she was an actress for a couple of years and has the beginning actress’s habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on Forty-fifth Street in Sacramento.”
And no one is better than Didion in thinking about the act of writing. In “Last Words,” a piece about Ernest Hemingway, originally published in The New Yorker in 1998, she shines a light on the first paragraph of “A Farewell to Arms” in a way that would put most scholars to shame. Here’s a taste: “That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences,
126 words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange 126 such words myself.” The rest of the paragraph consists of Didion’s eloquent analysis of those sentences, showing as clearly as one can how the magician performs his magic.
In the essay “Why I Write,” Didion explains that writing is
“an aggressive, even a hostile act.” Even her title, she admits, sounds out the “I” three times in what amounts to an “invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” She writes, she declares, “entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” The incalculable benefit for the reader is following the tracks of her sentences to discover along the way who we are and what these Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a classic collection of nonfiction: a definitive portrait of California in the 1960s and a revealing look at an America in dissolution that illustrates the roots of our own fragmented culture today.
meditations mean to us.
Michael Pearson, after a career of three decades teaching creative writing at ODU, is a freelance writer. He lives on the Eastern Shore.