I
“She cooked nonstop,” Eve Babitz, the Los Angeles–based artist and author of Eve’s Hollywood, remembers. “She made stuff like beef Wellington—for a sit-down dinner for thirty-five people—with a side dish, Cobb salad or something, for those who didn’t eat meat. . . . It’s the first time I ever saw Spode china. . . . She could make dinner for forty people with one hand tied around her back while everybody else was passed out on the floor.”
Babitz is describing the dinner parties Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne hosted, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, in the “sprawling, spooky house” they were renting at 7406 Franklin Avenue, “just south of the Hollywood Hills and north of Sunset Boulevard.” The “she” is Didion herself, of course, and as I was reading this description, savoring the image it conjured—Didion, her slender body lurking beneath a loose shift, martini in one hand, a wooden spoon in the other, cigarette poised on the rim of an ashtray to the right of the stove-top—I realized the true source of my affection for the writer: her aesthetic. That is why I tend to prefer Didion’s novels to her nonfiction (style, as a governing concern, is less troubling when the eventual content is, anyway, fictional); why her packing list inspired my Halloween costume last year; why I underlined the phrase “her weight dropped to seventy pounds” in Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Didion, The Last Love Song, from which the quotes above are also taken.
I say “realized,” but the revelation wasn’t exactly a surprise; it was, however, sudden, and the source of unexpected chagrin. The elegance of Didion’s persona has contributed to the characterization of her prose, too, as elegant. But what if Didion’s prose is not elegant, but merely cold? What if her famed detachment is a symptom not of a sensitive mind, but of a privileged one?
II
“I trust,” Daugherty writes in his preface, that Didion’s “literary methods will apply to her just as she pressed them on others . . . revealing the bedrock beneath layers of myth, gossip, PR, self-promotion, cultural politics, competing notions of human nature and the purposes of biography.” So, The Last Love Song is, at least in part, an attempt to separate the character of “Joan Didion,” as she appears in the essays by the writer of the same name, from the historical Joan Didion.
It is not, in this respect, especially successful. Daugherty wants to interrogate Didion’s persona; often, he succeeds only in reproducing it. By relying too much on her own words, and too little on primary sources, Daugherty ensures that Didion’s self-presentation will dominate. The most convincing passages are the ones that sound most like Didion’s own writing: “The passengers waited for an hour,” Daugherty writes of a pit stop in Panama, where the plane Didion and Dunne were on landed to refuel, “the smell of gas infusing the stench of tar and dust. In a newspaper she saw a photograph of a hijacked 707 burning at night in a Middle Eastern desert. . . . She thought of Henry Adams, the Dynamo, coal, Conrad’s tales of mining in the tropics, politics.”
When Daugherty does offer revelations, he seems surprisingly unwilling to probe their relationship to Didion’s work. “At dinner parties and Hollywood gatherings” in 1964, he notes, “Didion shocked some of her fellow guests when she said she would vote for Goldwater again and again if she could. He was a principled man in the mold of the pioneers, of John Wayne, and that was that.” That same year, presumably guided by his “principles,” Goldwater had, at the Republican Convention, engineered the defeat of “a platform plank affirming the constitutionality of the recently passed Civil Rights Act.” About the effect of Didion’s conservatism on her writing—on her political essays—Daugherty has little to say.
Here, ultimately, is the source of my chagrin. Didion’s impeccable aesthetics abruptly seem to be concealing a lack of generosity—a lack of generosity that, once one learns to look past the persona, to ignore the persona’s overwhelming force, becomes glaringly apparent. Perhaps this is why Daugherty shies away from analysis, and retreats into stylized descriptions written in a kind of Didion-lite. One imagines a biographer’s disappointment, realizing the appeal of his subject’s prose rests on a sympathetic—and deliberately superficial—understanding of the character crafting it.
“Quite possibly,” Daugherty writes, speculating about Didion’s suspicion of the student protests that swept her alma matter, the University of California, Berkeley, in the ’60s, “what was wrong with the world was the conviction that something was wrong with the world—specifically, people’s ‘refusal to believe that the irrational might prevail’ just as easily as the ‘rational.’” This is an easier stance to adopt if what’s “wrong with the world” isn’t wronging you. “If I could believe,” she wrote in “On the Morning After the Sixties,” collected in The White Album (1979), “that going to a barricade would affect a man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.” Not her own fate, but some other man’s. Daugherty characterizes her writing in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) as “icy with principled realism.” Susan Straight, a native of the San Bernardino Valley profiled in Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” later collected in Slouching, was assigned the essay as a seventeen-year-old college freshman, soon after it was published in the Saturday Evening Post. “She admired,” writes Daugherty, “Didion’s ‘elegance and precision and genius’ but found the essay ‘painful’ and unpitying in its class judgments.”
Didion adopts, in later works like Salvador (1983), a more liberal perspective—“the subject of her reporting,” Daugherty writes, “in El Salvador is the United States—once upon a time and now under Reagan, as it settles more deeply into what she perceives to be unjustifiable belligerence around the globe.” But her concern continues to be at once detached (from events on the ground) and personal. “In the final analysis,” Daugherty concludes, “Didion’s attraction to conspiracy tales,” in El Salvador, in Miami, “has less to do with the intrigues themselves than with her persistent longing for a narrative, any narrative, to alleviate the pain of confusion.” Didion spent, Daugherty tells us, just “twelve days touring El Salvador” before writing her book.
III
In January, the design house Céline debuted a new ad campaign; Didion—in black, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, shot by Juergen Teller—was one of its faces. There followed the requisite thinkpieces. “Joan Didion is a living stereotype,” wrote Haley Mlotek on The Awl, “and I only mean that in the most literal definition of the term: Joan Didion functions as a mental shortcut.” Mlotek goes on to describe the ad as “a kind of fashion synergy we see maybe once every five years; a time when one cultural arbiter meets another in unexpected and perfect harmony, when two complementary aesthetics meet in both brands and humans. The image was perfect.” And this perfection was cause not only for celebration, but also consternation, seen as the final step in Didion’s transformation from three-dimensional writer of complexity to two-dimensional icon.
Without denying the reality of the human, three-dimensional Didion, what Daugherty’s biography reveals—against, perhaps, his own intentions—is not merely (obviously) that Didion’s success always depended, to a certain extent, on style. It reveals a triumph of style over substance in, to echo Mlotek, the most literal sense: style painted over substance, working to conceal, working to deform.
Miranda Popkey is the assistant to the editor at Harper’s Magazine.