Happy Thanksgiving for yesterday America, I hope you had a good one and are all sitting with your feet up and recovering and in the mood for a conversation.
And if anyone else wants to hide from Black Friday horrors (what madness is this?) please come in and hunker down here for the day. I have an endless supply of beverages and cake and maybe we could have a conversation about Joan Didion, because I would really welcome your thoughts.
I wonder, has anyone else watched the recently released documentary about her on Netflix, The Center Will Not Hold. I settled down to watch it one evening last week thanks to a recommendation on Twitter from great friend of dovegreyreader Adele Geras.
Literary icon Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.
I had read The Year of Magical Thinking back in 2006 when dovegreyreader scribbles was very new and Blue Nights some time later. In fact I remember so clearly coveting a copy of the latter when it was first published in the USA and before it was published here in the UK. That very same week I had walked into a charity shop in Tavistock and there it was on the shelf...the US edition, hardback, brand new, unread and I had a feeling an angel might have delivered it into my hands. I gradually stocked up on more by Joan Didion but had never quite found myself in the right mood to read more until now.
I thought the documentary was all things astonishing and I need to watch it again because there is a great deal to miss. The New Yorker reviews the programme here and highlights one of the moments that I didn't miss...and yes, it took my breath away too, unexpected and showing the depths of Joan Didion's skill as a journalist.
Diminutive and doleful, eyes so melancholy, hands so expressive and choosing each word so carefully... yet not in a way that frustrated this viewer. Through the lengthy pauses I waited patiently, because when the words came out they were spare yet razor-sharp in their accuracy. And a countenance equally capable of showing an almost childlike joy at special moments...I’m thinking of the day Joan sat down with Vanessa Redgrave (who played Joan in the stage version of Magical Thinking) and they shared Joan’s family photo album and their own experiences of grief. It was all profoundly moving film-making I suspect more readily facilitated by the fact that Joan’s nephew Griffin Dunne was the producer. There was an ease and an openness that I doubt anyone other than a family member could have elicited and it worked for me.
And how fascinating to realise that Joan Didion had covered so many important moments in US culture and history in my lifetime. The hippies of Haight Ashbury, the death of Kennedy... more in the programme than I can remember, but often telling it slant; from an angle less noticeable, less obvious to the average onlooker, but subject beware...
'...people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.’
The loss of those closest to her remained the enormous tragedy that both The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights had revealed and the sadness and sorrow were palpable, but with it I felt a strong sense of Joan Didion as the family member left behind for a reason...to tell it like it is.
It all led me to the Joan Didion shelf. I had bought a copy of Live and Learn all those years ago, a three volume anthology of essays and journalistic pieces comprising Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and After Henry and I am already deeply engrossed.
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...
...
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
W.B. Yeats
The W.B. Yeats poem, (written in 1919 but every word as prescient now as then) opens the first volume Slouching Towards Bethlehem and with it Joan Didion’s explanation that those few lines of the poem
‘...have reverberated in my inner ear as if surgically implanted there.’
By her own admission many of the pieces are small and personal and I suspect that this is what is attracting me now that I have that image of Joan Didion imprinted in my mind from the film.
’But since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’
And how Joan Didion feels is transmitted with an innocent sort of guile (can there be such a thing) that has me marvelling at her skill. The reader is placed, located and already forming impressions and even making assumptions to the point where I felt this was like reading a Martin Parr photograph in words. There is irony and honesty and sharp focus on the very thing that Joan Didion wants the reader to spot...in much the same way Martin Parr wants you to spot the stain on the dress and draw your own conclusions. It’s about what Joan Didion chooses to see and how she conveys it, perceptions and illusions all chipping away at the reader’s own sensibilities and sympathies.
Her words about Joan Baez ( and who can know what Joan Baez thought of them at the time or since) have resonated with me for days...
’Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.’
and suddenly I could think of dozens of comparables. Those celebs catapulted to fame and stardom and are writing their autobiographies (or having them written for them) before they are twenty.
I can feel myself descending into purple prose as I try to describe all this (something which Joan would never do) Lives are filleted carefully and with seemingly exquisite ease, the flesh set aside to reveal the bones beneath and often lives are found wanting or perhaps the opposite, replete and fulfilled, but all in the most unusual ways.
John Wayne on the set of his final movie once cancer had made inroads was beyond moving... he knew, everyone knew, no one could say as much, but that moment when the final scene was filmed...
’Everyone was very still. And at 2.30 that Friday afternoon Henry Hathaway turned away from the camera, and in the hush that followed he ground out his cigar in a sand bucket. ‘OK, ‘ he said. ‘That’s it.’
Joan Didion tells it slant.
I’m trying to think whether we have such a writerly treasure here in the UK.
A woman who has been there and told it through good times and tough times and still has something to say...
I’m sure we do and I’m sure you will all name a few, but America, can I ask you... is Joan Didion the treasure for you that she seems to me?
I’m interested to know because from afar I am worshipping.
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