USA TODAY International Edition
A revealing peek into Didion’s psyche
She opens her ’ 70s notebooks in ‘ South and West’
In the 1970s, “New Journalism” was still new, and Joan Didion had announced herself as an acclaimed practitioner of the form in her now- classic 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In 2017, it’s perhaps a bit disorienting to get Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook ( Knopf, 125 pp., eeeE out of four), drafts of two never- before- seen pieces from the ’ 70s.
And yet, in many ways, these sketches are vintage Didion, idiosyncratic and tantalizingly self- revealing. As a journalist, she coolly lets readers draw their own conclusions from her stark observations. These pages seem haunted; their bleakness and torpor reminded me of the lonely photographs in Ed Rushca’s 1968 book Nine Swimming Pools ( and a Broken Glass).
South and West is a slim, slight book: unfinished, equivocal, yet filled with piercing, star- tling sentences.
The first essay, and by far the longest, is “Notes On the South,” from a road trip Didion made in summer 1970 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, through cities and small towns in sweltering Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. ( Dunne died in 2003; Didion’s memoir of grief, 2005’ s The Year of Magical Thinking, won the National Book Award.)
At the end of the pair’s Southern sojourn, Didion declares fail- ure: “All the reporting tricks I had ever known atrophied in the South. There were things I should do, I knew it; but I never did them.”
Should we believe her? Didion’s method is a detached melancholy that encourages her subjects to say things they shouldn’t. Her interview with Stan Torgerson, a white man who bought a black radio station in Mississippi, provides a snapshot, it seems at first, of a new South.
“We are in a transitional phase. There’s a tremendous push to education on the part of young blacks. The schools here are completely integrated … the key is racial harmony,” he says.
And then: “I’m not saying I’m going to have a colored minister come to dinner tonight, ’ cause I’m not. But things are changing.”
If Didion’s attempt as a Californian to “understand” the South here is ( at best) sketchy, her glimpses into her own psyche are fascinating. She recalls, as a child, missing her father with “an egocentricity which then approached autism, and which afflicts me still in dreams and fevers and marriage.”
The brief second section, “California Notes,” began as an assignment for Rolling Stone in 1976 to cover the trial of kidnapped heiress- turned- bank robber Patty Hearst.
Didion never wrote the piece, and these notes are far less cohesive than those in “Notes On the South.” But back in California, she is more relaxed, or so she says: “I am at home in the West. … I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.”
Joan Didion never seems easy. She keeps us off balance, in a way that’s cryptic and seductive and has lured in readers for more than 50 years.