Joan Didion, <The White Album>

I never associated Didion with California before coming to Davis. Both her first and given names sounded French, but I was already well acquainted with that she represented a new literary generation of America in the Sixties, the so-called 'new journalism.' Is it literature, or is it more of journalism? Can those two spheres of writing coexist? I would rather borrow a Wikipedia definition of new journalism: "a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time." The open encyclopedia circumscribes the genre as a part of journalism, but I could not and still cannot draw a definite line between a prose and a piece of report if the sole case allowed to me to learn 'new journalism' was a Didion. Although the writer bases her essays on real people, places, and events, she wields her magical power to transform the combination of factual accounts and her most private impressions on them into a neat piece of literature.

 

The essay collection consists of five parts: The White Album, California Republic, Women, Sojourn, and On the Morning After the Sixties. The first and the last parts are named after the eponymous essays, and indeed, "The White Album" epitomises and also abridges Didion's style and thematic focus. It was ambiguous to me why she titled the piece with fifteen chapters "The White Album" for a while. I do not remember if she explicitly mentioned the Beatles's ninth studio alubm The Beatles, or as it is referred to as colloquially the white album due to its cover, in the writing. If she did, then the author made her intention crystal-clear. She recounts the time in which she and her husband resided in and threw multiple balls at Hollywood. Thus, so naturally, it becomes much inevitable to avoid 'the' incident that marked the end to the Sixties: "murders on the Cielo Drive." In fact the essay concludes with her reminiscing how her life got intertwined with one of the surviving Manson Family members, Linda Kasabian. I have never heard of the Manson Family before, so I was a little perplexed when reading for the first time, then I searched all the names that appear more than once on the internet, and finally got a full picture of the landscape of California in the Sixties. Didion does not explain or elaborate on the subject of interest. She employs an indifferent tone when 'laying' out the events that independently defined the much affected era. Her memory about LA musicians and socialites, Hollywood figures, social activists, and above all, herself as a journalist who ventured throughout the most dynamic and eccentric times of her home state contains a penetrating, objective insight as "a reporter" but is mingled with her personal convictions. The intimate components are also presented nonchalantly, often without any highlighted exclamations or melodramatic exaggerations. Therefore, despite the author never proclaiming that her written accounts transcribed the reality, the readers are prone to accept and believe every sentence as a remarkably accurate statement of facts. For example, when Didion recalls the music scenes in the 1960s LA, she "embroiders in [her] mind" "John and Michelle Phillips, on their way to the hospital for the birth of their daughter Chynna, [having] the limo detour into Hollywood in order to pick up a friend, Anne Marshall" to "include an imaginary second detour, to the Luau for gardenias." The author creates an amalgam of non-fiction and fiction, of flat facts and mind-boggling commentaries that are derived from her own shrewdness everywhere. That is exactly why I shall not recommend Didion to anyone suffering from depression or mental deteriorations. Her words capture us instantly and relentlessly drives to her migraine-influenced crystal ball that disillusions the blind or the ignorant, or the innocent. When I was reading <The White Album>, I immersed myself into her feelings too deep, eventually began to scrutinise my own life: who am I, why am I here in America, with whom I let myself to be surrounded, where do I belong. And I almost cut out one of my closest friends.

 

"The White Album", I believe, is Didion's tribute to California in the Sixties. It encompasses a wide range of 'issues' that shook the contemporary people: music - especially rock, LaBianca and Tate murders by the cult Mason Family, Black Panther Party led by Huey P. Newton, San Francisco State University strike, Hollywood fames, and about herself. Since her every sentence holds a certain degree of veracity and insights, it is hard to pick a particular moment in which the readers' epiphany is maximised. However, to discuss shortly about one of the most palpitant revelations of mine, Didion discerns the empirically proven truth that at the core of every revolution, rebellion, or strike, which first seemed just, lies the perverted human desire for chaos from her interviews with the figures associated with Black Panther Party. Perhaps the second law of thermodynamics applies to human emotions as well: as the entropy of this world never decreases, so does our own affairs. As I knew nothing about the cultural landscape of the Sixties, I also had to rely on my own little investigation about Black Panther Party. Founded in Oakland, which is not far from where I am right now and in the proximity to the celebrated San Francisco, it was a Marxist organisation advocating black nationalism. Later this party's movement also got involved with the SF State strike in 1968. Didion, as a reporter, interviews Huey P. Newton, the founder who was arrested for killing a police officer. She "kept wishing that he would talk about himself, hoping to break through the wall of rhetoric, but he seemed to be one of those autodidacts for whom all thigns specific and personal present themselves as mine fileds to be avoided even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies in generalization." I was reminded of social activists of these days immediately. Those who exhort others to believe in their causes, to join in their acts towards a better society, often refuses to talk about themselves. The motivation, which indeed is the most private aspect of their activities, is always concealed. When they are asked, then they elude with a politician's tongue. However, the quote does not indicate that Didion was skeptical about the Black right issues. She also presents her moment of realisation through the typical blend of what she has seen and heard with her voice: "[f]or a long time I kept a copy of this testimony pinned to my office wall, on the theory that it illustrated a collision of cultures, a classic instance of an historical outsider confronting the established order at its most petty and impenetrable level. This theory was shattered when I learned that Huey Newton was in fact an enrolled member of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, i.e., in Nurse Leonard's words, 'a Kaiser'." So, there was enough reason for Newton to volunteer for a social rebel. But that was unspoken and unnoticed until Didion disclosed that Nurse Leonard's overprotective attitude had originated from her either unconscious or conscious distrust of Black people.

 

Nonetheless, it is a recollection about the writer herself that intrigued me the most in the eponymous essay. She confesses that "in the middle of [her] life [she] wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative's intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical." She reveals that "[d]uring the years when [she] found it necessary to revise the circuitry of [her] mind [she] discovered that [she] was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump or in why" but instead "in the picture of her in [her] mind: her hair incandescent in the flood lights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge." When her neurologist advised her to "lead a simple life" for her mental health, she dismisses it because that kind of life would be "another story without a narrative." However, in the end, and I am doubtless of its honesty, she compares herself with the sinned novelist Paul Ferguson who won a PEN fiction contest while serving in jail and said "writing had helped him ... to reflect on experience and see what it means." She "often reflect[s] on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions' and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped [her] to see what it means." And that is such a powerful way to close an essay dedicated to the Sixties. It seemed to me that she did share certain similarities as an author with Wanseo Park, the Korean novelist and essayist. Sentences that exhale chill that freezes the readers, cynical perspectives that deciphers the essence of various human lives, and the characteristic blurriness of fictional accounts. But, Park wrote to digest the worst time of Korean history, whereas Didion wrote to only underscore the futility of the Californian Sixties. I speculate that Didion actually wanted to become a novelist instead of an essayist. Of course, she published some novels, and also co-wrote screenplays, such as A Star Is Born that stars Barbra Streisand, with her husband. Yet, perhaps she wished the 'primary' source of her fame to come from fictions. I had this impression when Didion laments about the later writing style of the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing. She comments on the South Africa born British novelist as "a writer of considerable native power, a 'natural' writer in the Dreiserian mold, someone who can close her eyes and 'give' a situation by the sheer force of her emotional energy' who ironically "does not want to 'write well' ... but to write only to 'create a new way of looking at life.'" I read a book titled "London Sketch" by Lessing when I was in middle school, but did not really comprehend the central messgae of the omnibus. Nonetheless, I can still recall that I was confused at that time whether what I read was a novel. Didion cites Anna, the protagonist of The Golden Notebook by Lessing, and compresses the doubt I intuitively felt: "Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself ... I shall keep a diary." I think Didion was bitter about Lessing that, even with the talent which she did not possess, Lessing tries to become a theorist via fiction, when all Didion could do successfully is to write half-fictions.

 

Among the five parts of the collection, I found greatest pleasure from 'California Republic'. It does not necessarily mean that to live in California or anywhere else guarantees one to fully understand the region. Sometimes it is from a stranger's eyes a place stands with full vitality. However, Didion, as a native Californian, is not hesitant at all to disclose the true 'golden' state. Is it as golden as media often portray? Didion would definitely answer "no". She writes "the apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way." It is well known that the state annually (or even monthly) experiences a severe drought season. Because the weather is so dry, wildfire also became an annual event in the northern part. Yet, most people think of a nice rectangular swimming pool with detergent-blue water of untouched, smooth surface and a sunbed next to a palm tree. I am afraid to 'declare' that is not California at all. Particularly about a swimming pool, Didion sharply points out that it is not a symbol of "affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body" often misapprehended by outsiders, but a symbol of "order, of control over the controllable" to "many of us in the West." Water is so scarce here that it is both unpredictable and unimaginable to see "a river running wild and undammed." Once you arrive in the state of golden poppies, you realise that media have been deceiving us. It is not always sunny, windless, but, in fact, its weather is uncontrollable. On a sunny day, then it's too dry that water runs out. On a partly cloudy day, it's too windy and since there are no buildings tall enough to block the passage of the whirling air, you need strenuous efforts to stand still on road. On a cloudy day, then it is too cold to go out in t-shirt and shorts. California is also bleak. It is not a 'dream land' as many readily assume. It is people's sweat and blood that cultivated American Dream in the West. Without the artificial factor, the wild land would have gone out of control with the unfathomable power of the nature. Didion captures those human endeavours too in <The White Album>. For example, she talks about Hoover Dam, highway system in LA, and the prestigious orchid plantation in Malibu. The years she spent as a reporter can never go unacknowledged as her ability to incorporate factual information she learned by visiting the real places smoothly into her impression is incomparable to anyone.

 

Yet, my favourite piece in <The White Album> is "The Getty." It is a shame that I did not visit the Getty villa when travelling around LA in this March. However, from what I experienced at The Getty Center and heard from my AirBnB host about the late Getty, I could reconstrcut the images of the villa that sits atop the hills between Santa Monica and Malibu. I will simply cite the entire passage at which I was so stunned:

A musem is now supposed to kindle the untrained imagination, but this museum does not. A museum is now supposed to set the natural child in each of us free, but this museum does not. This was art acquired to teach a lesson, and there is also a lesson in the building which houses it: the Getty tells us that the past was perhaps different from the way we like to percieve it.
...
but the idea of the place seems to have been enough, and the idea was this: here was a museum built not for those elitist but for "the public." Here was a museum that would be forever supported by its founder alone, a museum that need never depend on any city or state or federal funding, a place forever "open to the public and free of all charges."
As a matter of fact large numbers of people who do not ordinarily visit museums like the Getty a great deal, just as its founder knew they would. There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole "the critics" distrust great wealth, but "the public" does not. On the whole "the critics" subscribe to the romantic view of man's possibilities, but "the public" does not. In the end the Getty stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them the least.

 

See, although Didion envies the literary genius for their inherent talent for fiction writing, there exists no one to outcompete here in the fields of social commentary. What she does the best essentially shares the same root with novelists: a thorough observation of the world as it is. It is nearly unbelievable that the Getty villa was free in the Sixties as well, but considering the haughty nature of the petty but also great J. Paul Getty, Didion was right. Even though those art experts disparage and almost abhor the old money or great wealth, it is exactly that sumptuous lifestyle that interests the public the most. It is almost like a human instinct. J. Paul Getty, knowing that modern theories tend to deviate from and even deny the most basic feelings as a living creature, installed a direct road between "the very rich" in Malibu and "the people who distrust them the least" in LA. With no one to manipulate the view and maneuver a taste, "the public" may someday reach the epiphany in which J. Paul Getty's foresight that men never have changed and will remain instinctive forever, that men are spontaneously attracted to golds, that men are not as creative, innovative, kind-hearted, and above all, innocent.

 

I wonder if I will ever get a second chance to be fully concentrated on Didion's writing as rigorous as this time. But, henceforth I learned that, if "certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them" and "[a] place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image," then it is Joan Didion to which California owes and belongs.

 

Didion, Joan. <The White Album>. Simon and Schuster, 1979.