A friend asked me after seeing what I was reading, Slouching
Towards Bethlehem, “Is this a
“Christian book?” Not with any malice, “No”, I said. “It's
the title of an essay by Joan Didion, taken from a poem by W.B.
Yeats.” She smiled and commented that she loved Yeats' poetry. I
nodded in agreement. Yeats' poem certainly expresses the tone of
Didion's essay, describing her time in San- Francisco while living
with the newly branded “hippies”, during the Haight Ashbury days
of 1967.
Didion
was in her early 30's, living with an array of flamboyant characters,
all searching for meaning, all anti-establishment, and all
experimenting with drugs from pot, peyote, speed, heroin and the
common one of the day, the infamous LSD. Didion never judges with her
observations and realistic dialogue, but the narrative reeks of
irresponsibility. This particular crowd averaged between 14-20 years
of age, along with a few old dubious men, intent on maintaining the
“high”. As her readers, we get the feeling that she is telling us
the unvarnished truth, without any hints or references to the 18th
and 19th
century Romantics, (something that many writers has described this
period as being in the late 60's) but a realistic account of lost
youth and over idealistic individuals, desiring radical change. All
of Didion's essays are painfully honest, and beautifully written.
It
is really difficult to review a collection of essays, because each
one stands alone as a single piece of work. I must say, though, that
the entire collection, separated under three titles: Life
Styles in the Golden Land;
Personals, and Seven
Places of the Mind, (great
editing from the publisher) reflects the essence of the times and her
art, her political views, (though somewhat hidden), and her keen eye
of people and the public domain in general.
Didion's essays under
the title Personals, gives
the reader an insight into the author, and her writing sensibilities.
Since the age of 5, when her mother gave her a small notebook, she
describes always writing life down on paper. This is not the similar
diary entries of a child or teenager, describing the day to day
activities and the occasional love interest. This is a soul recording
something entirely different. She writes:
In
fact I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry:
instead I tell what some would call lies. That's
simply not true,”“
the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against
my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, and the
spider was not a black widow, it wasn't that way at all.” Very
likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble
distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have
happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my
purposes, matter.” (P.
134)
For
me, this statement tells us that this writer cares not for time,
place, form and event, but the feelings that
these events or any experience felt by the experiencer, for her the
writer - that this is the most important aspect of the story telling,
and the impressions (and events) of her life overall.
As
I had lived in California for a decade, and as Didion is a native
Californian, her essays under, Seven Places of the Mind,
are relative and quite moving. Anyone who has lived in Southern
California are all too aware of the Santa Ana winds. Close to a curse
from the gods' of weather, people change
during this time: sickness, migraines, a dramatic upsurge in crime,
domestic violence and murder. Didion writes:
I
have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it,
and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it
because we feel it. The baby frets: The maid sulks: I rekindle a
waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and
lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the
Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply
mechanistic view of human behaviour.” (P.
217)
The
understanding and first hand experience I have had with Santa Ana,
really, is beside the point. It is Didion's prose and gut-honesty
that connects me, as the reader, to this strange manifestation. The
woman writes her personal feelings about a known event, and through
her particular experience, we all can relate on a visceral level...in
our hearts. This is the mark of an incredible writer – a writer
in-tune to her own personal feelings, and as such, can write down
these feelings, and we all can relate on a much deeper level than
ever before.
A
life time of reading, it is a shame that I had never run across Joan
Didion over all these years. After second thought, it could well be a
great thing, because now I have some little knowledge and a lifetime
of experience to appreciate her genius.
A
wonderful collection of essays.
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