in the midst of Yuletide
some tidings, though not unexpected, when they do come still jolt one to the very core; so it is with the death of one of the United States’ finest writers.
Joan Didion: December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021
There could be very few who have not been bedazzled by the beauty and coolness – in structure and syntax – of Joan Didion’s prose, the integrity and incisiveness of her investigations into the American culture and society of the last half century – uncompromising, often going there where it is at its very darkest. Who could not have appreciated her intellectual brilliance and the finest sense of irony that she brought to her stories – be they fact or fiction? As I have done, how many others have cried with her and for her – because of injustices done or out of grief crying to be heard; knowing well that all those tears are really for oneself – perhaps as the writer, Didion, would have wished? As a chronicler of, not only her time and her country, but her inner self with all its contradictions and human frailties and failures, Didion has no peer. She will remain present, until she is not.
The New York Times is full of accolades – here is their obituary, and tributes from two generations -a younger represented by Parul Sehgal and, old habits die hard, Kakutani (luck or subscription whichever comes first!). Available, for the moment at least, (edit. Jan 7 2022) Available to subscribers, this very famous 1991 essay written for The New York Review of Books about the trial of the Central Park Five in which Didion deconstructs the prosecution’s arguments, exposing the racial profiling and the political pressures about which they erected their case. Be warned, thirty years ago long form was really that – long! And every word, every page worth it. As prescient as the issues she raises in here essay were then, regrettably they remain the reality to this day.
This afternoon I watched again Griffin Dunne’s 2017 Netflix documentary about his aunt (I had a need to return to her – Christmas or no Christmas!). Not everybody was satisfied if I remember, and it cannot help but be a labour of love, but the warts are there to be found, and I liked it. Here is the trailer on YouTube:
Now the following I haven’t seen; but also available on YouTube is the 1972 film “Play It As It Lays”, for which Didion wrote the screenplay with her husband John Gregory Dunne based on her 1970 novel.
Didion speaks of this film not very favorably – something like “not what I wrote!”- in the abovementioned documentary, but it’s there asking to be watched! (As a side note, I find myself wondering: whatever happened to Tuesday Weld?)
There will be more to be said on Joan Didion after the holidays and beyond – by me and others – but I would like to add: that, with her death, I sadly recall that in the last couple of years we have now ‘lost’ (ouch! says she who has often said how loathe she finds euphemisms for death!) some of the truly great women of American “letters” from that generation which came of age in the 1950s and began their brilliant careers amidst the sociopolitical turmoil of the sixties – I am especially thinking of Toni Morrison last year and Janet Malcolm earlier this year. But gladly do I remind myself, that their “letters”, their legacies, their contributions to public discourse, will surely endure; complementing, for future generations, the record of a particular epoch that is still too near for us here still at its center.
Finally, Joan Didion’s essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem in the 1968 collection of the same name is a devastating portrait of the extreme disconnectedness of one generation, but could very well find resonance in our unhappy present. So, I end with the William Butler Yeat’s poem from whence Didion took her title (and also inspired that of Dunne’s documentary). Written in the wake of the First World War and in the midst of the Spanish flu pandemic, Yeat’s poem has the power to connect the disconnected over an entire century – in 1919, in sixties California and in the now. Another way of thinking about the Nativity story this year, and dedicated today to Joan Didion.
The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? - by William Butler Yeats (1919)