Joan Didion – South and West – Review

In 1970, Joan and her husband, John Dunne, set on a trip to America's deep south. This text is a collection of her ”notes” on that trip, with the intent of writing a piece for some publication, that in the end, never eventuated. The last section of the book, are a collection of observations and reflections about her native state of California. Again, intending to write a piece for Rolling Stone magazine about the Patty Hearst kidnapping and trial, this article too, was never written. What we do have are deep insights into America's past, its iconoclasts, arcane attitudes, and people seemingly lost in a 19^th century anomaly of time, a place where the Civil War is in the not-so distant past, where the rest of us know it as some “war” about “emancipation”, some 200 odd years ago.

Since the presidential abnormalcy of Trump 2016, these arcane attitudes, these blatant racist, and feudal mind-sets of many people in the South, once frozen in amber, have now come to life, revealing white supremacy and blatant racism straight into the main stream discourse, like the Raptors of Jurassic Park. It's not as if this antiquated mind-set was not prevalent before Trump, the ice simply melted, and the beast awoke, revealing their Confederate flags and Tiki torches, straight into our living rooms on the 6:00 News.

What struck me in Didion's elegant prose, is the feeling of desolation, poverty and oppressive heat, imprisoning the people throughout the “off the main road South”, where community is based on strict religious values and the second religion, the opiate of the south, Sports. To be fair, there is nothing wrong with a strict religious faith, and the worship of sports, as a way for a community to find common ground. However, what remains there, at least in 1970, (which, I believe, continues in 2019) are the same medieval construct of the 19^th century. White-God-fearing-people are at the top, while the black, brown and poor exist somewhere below. For certain, there was a subtext in a few conversations that Didion had with generational land owners, and that was a reminiscent longing for the 18 and 19^th century slave owner days – the system worked better then, and everyone knew their place.

Despite the inescapable heat and back-looking values in certain areas of the Deep South, Didion manages to capture its other-worldly beauty: Kudzu, a vine the covers everything, and various colourful flowers that grow naturally throughout the land. Apart from the land, in Didion's notes, I found the basic people in these small communities: innocently American, a people that strive for the better aspects of life, though never really wanting to know anything outside their particular province.

In the last 13 pages of the book, we read Didion's notes about her native State of California. On assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, to cover the Patty Hearst story - her notes arise as a reflection of her own childhood, a connection to Hearst, and a connection she really did not want to explore at that time in her life. Although Joan Didion is a genius literary mind, the woman also writes from her heart. I believe during that period in her life, she refused to”go there”, moving on to other projects.

I read this work in one afternoon. There is no doubt that I'll read it again. Didion does a service to her readers, and that is representing the voice of pure observation of a journalist, and the pounding heart of reality, with a subtext of the romantic.