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White Album Pb

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This book is definitely the "Part 2" of a series that begoins with Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and each time that i return to it I feel like I am sitting down with a dear friend that I haven't talked to in a while. Other reviewers seem to have covered the title piece quite well, but I am intrigued that nobody seems to have mentioned my favorite -"Holy Water"- a fascinating look behind the scenes at the California Water Authority. I assign this essay again and again to my environmentalist students, both for the immediate content and for the intriguing window into the seductive nature of technology -one feels that Didion comes to be horrified and walks away enthralled. You will be too.

The White Album was published in 1979, and most of the material here is from the 1970s. Even so, the book is at least as much about the 1960s as is Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Like that book, this is a collection of essays from various publications, plus some previously unpublished material. It's a mixed bag. The title piece is quite strong, as is "On The Morning After The Sixties," proving, perhaps, that the 1960s really were Didion's one true subject. There's other good stuff here, too, and the book is actually sort of underrated, since so many observers rate it a poor second to Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But the Didion style is actually quite strong in this volume, sharply observed, carefully written, personal without being confessional, and always flirting with detachment but not quite achieving it. Obviously some people just can't stand Didion's essays, and this book would hardly change their mind; but if you're open to her style, this is worth reading.

Didion is a master of prose and arresting journalism. Like Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, she places herself within the action, identifying her place in historical events. She recounts the 60s, and its epicenter, California (especially Los Angeles), with precise lucidity--Didion was there, and DOES remember the 60s. Some of the most intruiging essays are those that serve as memoirs for her time and place--waiting with the Doors for Jim Morrison to show up for a recording session, travelling through Bogota, exploring California's water systems. Required reading for Angelenos.

The praise gets heaped on Slouching Towards Bethlehem (as well it should), but after finishing The White Album, there is no doubt in my mind they are equals in every way - an eloquent, painstaking, timeless collection of one unexpected, evocative observation after another. The appeal of Didion's writing is often to glimpse the author underneath her thick and specific veils of details, to marvel at the way her specifics are often more telling about her than about what she's writing - her own sense of dislocation amidst the silly late-60's music industry, her heartbreak within a charred orchid greenhouse, her rather endless defensiveness of California in Hollywood board rooms and Beverly Hills restaurants. In that, my favorite piece in this flawless collection is the 3-page description of Georgia O'Keefe: "'The men' believed it impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O'Keefe painted New York. 'The men' didn't think much of her bright color, so she made it brighter. The men yearned toward Europe so she went to Texas." It's a proud and bold description of a proud and bold woman, but what it really is is a treatise on what it means to be inspired and emboldened by the work and life of someone who came before you. A similar piece could be written on the uncompromising career of Didion, and it could be written following any essay in The White Album.

The traditional essayist is a sense-maker and an imposer of order, and in order to make sense and impose order traditional essayists assume an authorial command over their material (which is often their own lives, and/or their own historical period). But the really good essayists do not present themselves as authority figures who have the power to make sense of themselves and/or of the historical period they are living through. The good ones know that ages do not have names and that people remain mysterious, even to themselves.

Though there have been other essayist that share Didion's disdain for simplistic narrative, she really does not belong to any tradition of American essayists. But she's not a champion of the avant-garde either (not in the way Sontag was). I would say that her temperament is conservative (she wants things to make sense, to cohere) but never governed by or determined by any ideological preconceptions of how things should be or how we would like them to be. Her narrative style acknowledges and accomodates complexity and combats simplicity as well as undermines our desire to fully comprehend. Her work presents a challenge to what we know as well as our ways of knowing. Therefore reading Didion is unsettling, discomfitting. The essays succeed precisely because she does not try to name the thing that she writes about with nice clarifying titles or topic sentences, rather she presents her own competing impressions and competing ideas about the unnamable something that has her interest. What has her interest in THE WHITE ALBUM are the 1960's and early 70's and here she is very good at conveying her own singular impressions of that particularly chaotic time, or, more accurately, her own motions of thought and cognitive insecurities during that moment in time when no event or person encountered seemed to be operating according to rational or knowable laws. She is in many ways our poet of the irrational. Instead of presenting her observations in neat linear patterns that follow a single structuring logos, she presents them as the myriad fragmented interventions that they are. She leaves the sense-making, the imposition of order, to others.

Joan Didion always seems to look out at you from her book jackets in a straightforward, level-headed way, yet her readers will know she has a somewhat cockeyed view of life. Very Californian, as she quotes Bernard De Voto,"'The West begins, where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches." But hardly sunny, she's dark,dark: she has made the literature of nervous breakdown her own. We saw it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics); Play It As It Lays: A Novel; and A Book of Common Prayer; as in "The White Album," the book at hand here; essays first collected and published in 1979. She eyes the 1960s, and California, quite closely; she sketches the 1960's so well, in fact, she might almost have imaginatively invented them. It's all here, the Manson family, the Black Panthers, the historic doings at the University of California, Berkeley.

She says"...there were odd things going on around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of 'sin'-- this sense that it was possible to go 'too far,' and that many people were doing it-- was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9,1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised."

She continues," Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."

What an eye she has, what an ear, and what luck, too, right place at right time. And lucky us; she's given us so many reports from the front, wherever it may be, and of whatever it may consist. She continues to, still. I recently saw her speak at the Los Angeles Times Book Fair, on the UCLA campus, shortly after the death of her beloved husband, which she conveyed in such burning prose in The Year of Magical Thinking, her highly-recommended book on the subject. She was all there: her emotions, but also, her eye, and ear.

Joan Didion's essays are sharply observed and very personal. She informs us of her fragile mental state in the very first essay, in which she describes a pervasive sense of detachment that she felt from the world. She then goes on to deliver a collection of well-written profiles on personalities, places, and the concerns of the time (late 60s-early 70s). Didion inserts herself and her personal issues into these pieces on ocassion, which no doubt contributes to the accusation by some that she is a whiner. On the contrary, I feel that it was courageous for Didion to reveal herself this way and that the awareness of the narrator as a fragile, flawed individual rather than an omnipotent, god-like commentator pronouncing judgement on its subjects gives a unity and a perspective to these disparate pieces that they would not have possessed otherwise.

Do you ever have a group of authors that you just can't differentiate in your mind? I get that sometimes with writers, particularly those who I haven't read as they were writing. Like I finally just read a book by Eric Hoffer, whose stuff I'd always seen around but who I continually confused with Eric Fromm, Eric Erickson and a couple other guys who were popular in the '60s. Similarly, I've never been able to keep Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Joyce Carol Oates straight, but I was sure I didn't like at least a couple of them and had no desire to sort through and figure out which. What a revelation then to pick up a book of Joan Didion's essays; they are terrific.

The first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, opens with an introduction by the author, in which she says that the title is a reference to Yeats's great poem The Second Coming, with which many of the essays share an apocalyptic vision :

'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart

It is this realization that animates both this collection and The White Album (which should really be read together), the sense that American society was splintering in the 60s and 70s and that traditional moral and cultural restraints could no longer hold it together. Whether she's writing about a sensational murder or profiling California celebrities, discussing student demonstrations, the Black Panthers or the Women's Movement, or portraying her own physical and emotional problems, the consistent theme is one of the breakdown of the social order, or of the American psyche. But there's also a strong subtext which shows that the center, though embattled, really is holding; it is the margins, both at the upper and the lower ends of the social spectrum which are falling apart. The real danger lies in the middle's loss of confidence in it's own beliefs, a crisis of faith.

The disintegration at the bottom of the social scale is most clear in her reporting on crime, drug culture and the inanity of youth, racial and gender politics. But she lays the blame squarely, and fairly, at the feet of Middle America, as here when she's discussing the failure to provide any guidance to America's youth :

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 . . . These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. ... They are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words--words are for 'typeheads,' Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips--their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Now, normally, those words would come from parents, clergy, schools, etc., but self doubt inhibited their willingness to impart them, and kept them from enunciating these ideals to the rest of society.

The reason for their timidity is made apparent in a batch of essays which celebrate middle class good sense and sensibilities while contrasting them to the snobbishness and self-righteousness of elites. In essays on John Wayne, Howard Hughes, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Reagan-built California Governor's Mansion, Didion shows how out of touch intellectual opinion is with these symbols that the rest of us find so appealing. Here she is on the mansion :

A guard sleeps at night in the old mansion, which has been condemned as a dwelling by the state fire marshal. It costs about $85,000 a year to keep guards at the new official residence. Meanwhile, the current governor of California, Edmund G. Brown, Jr., sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the famous apartment for which he pays $275 a month out of his own $49,1000 annual salary. This has considerable and potent symbolic value, as do the two empty houses themselves, most particularly the house the Reagans built on the river. It is a great point around the Capitol these days to have 'never seen' the house on the river. The governor himself has 'never seen' it. The governor's press secretary, Elisabeth Coleman, has 'never seen' it. The governor's chief of staff, Gray Davis, admits to having seen it, but only once, when 'Mary McGrory wanted to see it.' This unseen house on the river is, Jerry Brown has said, 'not my style.'

As a matter of fact this is precisely the point about the house on the river--the house is not Jerry Browne's style, not Mary McGrory's style, not our style--and it is a point which presents a certain problem, since the house so clearly is the style not only of Jerry Brown's predecessor but of millions of Jerry Brown's constituents. Words are chosen carefully. Reasonable objections are framed. One hears about how the house is too far from the Capitol, too far from the Legislature. One hears about the folly of running such a lavish establishment for an unmarried governor and one hears about the governor's temperamental austerity. One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts : it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.

In such a situation, where the proclivities of the opinion-making class had diverged so far from the preferences of the middle class, it would have taken an inordinate amount of courage for middle America to hold it's ground, even more so in the face of the concurrent rebellions by youth, feminists and people of color, all of them attacking traditional tastes, beliefs, and mores.

The piece though that most dramatically illustrates this dichotomy and demonstrates just how embattled was Middle America and how arrogant were the intellectuals is the quite devastating, Bureaucrats. In straightforward fashion, all the more effective because understated, she relates the efforts of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to, in the words of it's director : "pry John Q. Public out of his car," by creating Diamond or HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes on the thruways, beginning with the Santa Monica :

Of course this political decision was in the name of the greater good, was in the interests of 'environmental improvement' and 'conservation of resources,' but even there the figures had about them a certain Caltrans opacity. The Santa Monica normally carried 240,000 cars and trucks every day. These 240,000 cars and trucks normally carried 260,000 people. What Caltrans described as its ultimate goal on the Santa Monica was to carry the same 260,000 people, 'but in 7,800 fewer, or 232,200 vehicles.' The figure '232,200' had a visionary precision to it that not automatically create confidence, especially since the only effect so far had been to disrupt traffic throughout the Los Angeles basin, triple the number of daily accidents on the Santa Monica, prompt the instigation of two lawsuits against Caltrans, and cause large numbers of Los Angeles County residents to behave, most uncharacteristically, as an ignited and conscious proletariat.

She goes on to show that the bureaucrats at Caltrans are bent on reengineering the behavior of motorists regardless of their resistance and of the disastrous results. The coup de grace is delivered in the final sentence : "Yesterday plans were announced to extend the Diamond Lanes to other freeways at a cost of $42,500,000." It's one of the finest essays I've ever read, exposing the arrogance of little men with too much power.

Throughout, the two books are filled with terrific stuff like this and more memorable sentences than you can count. The only weak spots are the predominantly personal essays, which I could have done withou

Didion's genius, in the book and a half of hers that I've read, is to waste not a single word on her evisceration of the culture she saw around her. But "evisceration" isn't the right word, and her essays thus far haven't really been about the culture around her. She sees a United States that is unintentionally ironic at every turn, and that has fallen apart in ways that ultimately crawl under all of our skins and drive us insane. The idealism of the Sixties turned into the madness of the late Sixties, and Didion was right there to watch the results unfold. She stands back and documents it with a few quick flicks of the paintbrush: just enough of an outline to make you understand the horror of what she sees, and then she moves on. The essays are structured, I think intentionally, with the quick cuts of modern movies. The images together don't make sense -- didn't in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and certainly don't in The White Album. The title essay in the latter is about a period in her life (probably right around the time she was writing Bethlehem) when the stories that we use to explain our world stopped making sense, and her life crumbled as a result. Her prose perfectly captures what I take to be the tone of her mind.

She's too smart to accept easy answers. Every time someone makes an argument -- even implicitly -- Didion is there with the knife to hack away the dross. I bet conversations with her are spectacular: challenging, thought-provoking, and energizing.

....her fine prose unpeels the life in So. California and exposes it to us in all its marvelous and wannabe glamor. Her critique of "The Women's Movement"--that (in my terms) the victim-thinking, entitlement, and pie-in-the-sky idealism of some of its staunchest party-liners reveal more about the damage done by the patriarchy than the propaganda does--remains relevant, unfortunately.