An Implacable I

By Elroy Rosenberg.

Photo courtesy of Getty via Harper’s Bazaar.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”

It’s no mystery why Joan Didion has long been subject to labels. The attempt to categorise her work into neat abstractions—“journalism,” “socially conservative,” “biography”—smacks of a desperate lunge towards ordering a writer who refuses to assume order in anything. Critics who fall into this trap seem, quite frivolously, to be rebuking a certain unease they have with Didion’s gaze, a gaze which itself rebukes commonly held ideals like Factuality or Social Cohesion. Even the “New Journalism” tag, to anyone at all acquainted with the New Journalists, doesn’t quite seem to fit.

Perhaps the descriptor which has most persistently been foisted upon Didion is that of “neutrality.” Passivity, detachment, objectivity—these, of course, being ideals to which countless writers aspire but almost none achieve. Writes Susan Sontag in her seminal essay ‘On Style’: “A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot—whatever the artist’s personal intentions—advocate anything at all. The greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality.” Need we look no further for two more perfect words to describe the conception readers hold of Didion’s perspective?

Why, indeed, is neutrality usually found such an impossible standard? Didion herself has an answer to this, in the kind of brief passage you never forget reading for the first time. It comes from her essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, from her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.'”

Naturally, there is something contradictory to be found in the emphasis on the “I” in Didion’s work and the supposed “sublime neutrality” which she represents. Considering the omnipresence of the former, the latter seems more or less unattainable. For many Didion readers, who simply cannot shake free of the need to label no matter how hard they wriggle, this paradox might seem unimportant. For me, it is the crux of her work, highlighted in her new collection of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Encapsulating many pieces from Didion’s emergence with her “Points West” column which she shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, as well as later work for establishments like the New York Times Magazine and New Yorker, the collection is a continuation of Didion’s lifelong search for that meagre, almost incommunicable slice of the world where subjectivity and transparency live together hand in hand.

‘Getting Serenity,’ which ought to have opened the collection, is an exquisite indicator of this search. Attending a series of meetings of Gamblers Anonymous, Didion’s ire is here drawn firmly on some of the most vulnerable and desolate among us: gambling addicts. As they tell their stories, offload their mea culpa night after night, Didion describes her lachrymose subjects with such unmistakable pity that even the most battle-tested Didion fan is a little breathless. Suddenly one of the participants is celebrating his first full year without placing a bet; and when he mentions the “serenity” he’s finding in his new life, a word often used in G.A. meetings as a catch-all term indicating a kind of aspirational self-amelioration, Didion shudders. “Well, there it was. I got out fast then, before anyone could say ‘serenity’ again,” and with haughty self-assurance, Didion is gone, back to “places where the lights were bright and no one counted days.”

I mention ‘Getting Serenity’ not only because it is Didion at her finest, but because it is Didion at her truest. Amidst the sordidness of human destitution, she’s there, slipping past the surface to hit the level-beneath-the-level. Set the scene, she does; record the dialogue, she does; make herself the protagonist, she must. Where, I ask, is the neutrality?

The chief limitation of Let Me Tell You is its extraordinary likeness to Didion’s other works. Most pieces pre-date Didion’s 1979 collection The White Album; beyond chronology, subject matter and form will probably strike the student of the Didion oeuvre as more or less recognisable. Consequently, the collection serves not so much to diversify our understanding of Didion’s work as it does to entrench and reinforce our impression of her. But none of this should imply deficiency: though perhaps familiar, the use of the first-person, for example, is still involving. Nor is the “I” any less implacable here than in some of her other, better-known works, suggesting her so-called passivity was just as much a misnomer in ’68 or ’89 or ’01 as it is now.

A key feature underpinning Didion’s collections is her interest in morsels of Californian cultural ephemera – she writes about cultural artefacts of the West in The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Sentimental Journeys, South and West and Where I Was From. Wherever we find her riffing on these provincial mysteries, Didion seems to suggest an incommunicability, a moral dubiousness, a certain idiosyncrasy inherent in the California experience. ‘A Trip to Xanadu’ describes her visit, along with her niece, to the mansion of William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon, a small locality equidistant from San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Hearst Castle long retained folkloric status among children in California (“I know,” Didion says, “because I was one of them”); here, it assumes almost totemic proportions, speaks to something spiritual, a kind of bedrock of localised meaning. Thus, in fitting fashion, the piece ends with Didion playing her own expectations of the castle against those of her niece, who hailed from Connecticut, who had never heard of San Simeon before, and who, Didion supposes, probably misunderstood what truly makes the place “affecting.” She ends up wishing they’d simply caught it driving along Highway 1, “the gates barred, the castle floating in the distance.”

Again, the operative instinct is less about an impartial perspective as it is about what Didion feels can’t quite be expressed. This is hinted at by the collection’s very title, where Didion seems to be adopting a position of authority, of soothsaying, as regards somewhat recondite and cloudy material. The essays become therefore a kind of permission we give her to explain, to “tell,” in her own obstinate way.

This obstinacy of style is what people sometimes confuse for her “neutrality.” And it is worth noting that the earlier Sontag quote is, of course, not in direct reference to Didion—it actually encloses mention of Homer, Leni Riefenstahl, Jean Genet, and Shakespeare. But it seems to presage the era which Didion’s pellucid prose would take by storm. Her aesthetic is indeed cool, unshakable, at turns demure and acrid of tongue. Because the writing is so precise and overtly deliberate, we assume a resistance to the natural—think of the way Joyce or Woolf writes so languidly, so freely, mimicking the ever-rolling stream of thoughts and ideas we experience every day. But it would be a mistake to call Didion analytical and academic. Sontag is analytical and much closer to neutrality of style than her counterpart. Didion is simply clear-eyed, under no illusions, nor is her prose constructed upon any illusions—such as being able to replicate consciousness. The glory of the Didion sentence, which would make her famous as both a thinker and prose stylist, is its relentless assurance, filtered through a subtly stylised cadence. Unsurprising, then, that Didion famously learned to write by typing out page after page of A Farewell to Arms.

There is a hunting ground where Didion, armed with her unmatchable clear-sightedness, is at her most lethal. I am thinking of certain fields, subjects, polemics, where the trappings and nuances seem impossible to disentangle. Feminism is one such subject. More recently, her reputation has turned back on itself, and some see the once-radical Didion as an anti-feminist and operative of the gender status quo. The view stems from a shoddy amalgam of interpretations, readings of her great polemics, including her excoriation of The Women’s Movement and Doris Lessing, her dislike for The Feminine Mystique, and her taste for Woody Allen films. Nevertheless, Didion consistently displays a preternatural interest in women who are, in one way or another, self-actualising. (Another example of the “implacable I.”) Prior to Let Me Tell You this had taken the form of N.O.W., Linda Kasabian, Patty Hearst, Lessing, Georgia O’Keeffe, and underlay some of her fictional characters in both Run, River and Play It As It Lays, all of whom, in their self-realisation, symbolised something about the beguiling spirit of duality which for Didion finds home within the female complex.

This time around, it is Martha Stewart, in a piece titled ‘Everywoman.com’ and published in 2000, when Stewart remained an unshakable doyen of homely female aspiration for millions upon millions of women. And again, it is the fact of Stewart’s self-actualisation which occupies Didion and which, evidently, is the backbone of her feminism. She also notes the reaction Stewart’s success engenders from critics and acolytes both. In her 1967 essay on Howard Hughes, ‘7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38′, Didion opined that “our favourite people and our favourite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.” Didion’s claim about Stewart is similarly percipient. What matters isn’t so much Stewart herself, even while she heads a billion-dollar corporation whose “only product [is] Martha Stewart.” No; what drives the essay is, in Didion’s words, what Stewart “offers,” what she “transmits,” what she “projects”: namely, “that know-how in the house will translate to can-do outside it.” This isn’t a hands-off exploration of Martha Stewart as woman or as tycoon, but an active, involved, almost seditious analysis of Martha Stewart as symbol, as icon.

With ‘Why I Write,’ the dialogue between self and style reaches an unmistakable apotheosis, and Let Me Tell You soars. It’s not quite Didion at her most candid, but it’s at turns tender and absolute, diffident and hard-hearted, and it expresses a certain worldview which, when reflected upon, so pervades the Didion oeuvre that the essay takes the form of a manifesto of sorts. “In many ways,” she writes—or speaks, in fact, for the essay is actually the transcript of a lecture she gave in 1975—“writing is the act of saying I.” We then become privy to almost every mode Didion can engage—quoting her own stories verbatim, transcribing rejection letters she received, constructing and deconstructing her own veneer—in order to say I. And we quickly understand that the story of her writing life is, in Didion’s mind, the story of her life, period.

Separation there never was, nor will there ever be; not until we can stop worshipping the gaudy myth of “neutrality.” As a journalist, a cool-eyed gaze is a prerequisite; but that ought not to lead to enshrining a lack of affect. Transparency is the greater quality, and this is precisely what Didion embodies. Her work is a dialectic of assured reason and an embellished lyricism, which synthesises into a powerful, compelling lucidity. What we now know is that this, for her, is the only way.