Joan Didion – The White Album – Review

 

Essay and articles written between the 1960s and late 1970s, Didion gives her readers a unique and insightful viewpoint, both personal and societal, a time period of great transition including politics, and the American psyche in general. Some of the passages within the essays read like notes that the author has in mind for the future. But there is cohesiveness between all the entries like she wrote a few pages one day, only to return to it years later as a finished whole.

The period so named the “American Dream” a great economic surge in the middle classes, yet a generation (50's) that chose to remain silent, a politically quiet generation, not necessarily blind to the injustices of a growing surveillance state, and a warmongering government; a silence begging and ready to explode, upon the assassination of J.FK., Martin Luther King and R.F.K.; the killing of thousands of American men and women in a stupid war in Vietnam based on propaganda, the 1960's generation hit the streets, as if a new Zeitgeist had begun. The White Album, Didion's collection of essays seems to capture this new spirit of the age, though from a distant clinical perspective, a cool eye for detail, and a gift for describing the mundane as unusual and occasionally, fantastic.

In the first essay, we find her covering a story about the Black Panthers. The trial of Huey P. Newton, who was stopped by a white policeman by the name of John Frey. Newton was shot by Frey in the stomach and later is indicted for the murder of Frey, wounding another police officer, and kidnapping a bystander. Arrested in Kaiser Hospital from his wounds, the incident soon became national news. Demonstrators filled the streets with placards displaying, LET'S SPRING HUEY, including large buttons saying the same, selling outside the courthouse for 50cents a piece. What made this story a national “issue” is that Newton and his friend, Bobby Seale, were the first organizers of The Black Panthers.

What is most important and pertinent about this story, is these same “issues,” the African American vs. the establishment, (police) continues to be relevant, in light of the recent George Floyd case, though Didion is writing essentially about the same thing, over fifty years ago. Back then, Newton became what some called a martyr for the African American cause, repeating a quote that continues to be used today:

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage. James Baldwin.  The more interesting sections of this essay are Didion's descriptions of her rented house on Franklin Avenue. This house became legendary in the city, a meeting place, a bohemian weigh station for writers, actors, filmmakers, musicians, and their respective entourages. She relates a few memorial experiences in this house, including huge parties with the likes of Janis Joplin. Didion claimed that these rockers never had normal alcoholic beverages but requested drinks like saki and other exotic elixirs.

During this time she was researching a piece on The Doors. Didion describes sitting in on a recording session where, not out of the ordinary, Jim Morrison is conspicuously absent. Morrison did finally show up, and she records a mundane conversation between Morrison Ray Manzarek. They were discussing something about rehearsing in another city and returning later. Certainly not worth mentioning here, but what must be said is Joan Didion's love for The Doors. A bit lengthy, the section is worth repeating, revealing Didion's admiration for the band and her general feelings about the time period:

 On the whole, my attention was only minimally engaged by the pre-occupations of rock-and-roll bands (I had already heard about acid as a transitional stage and also about the Maharishi and even about Universal Love, and after a while, it all sounded like marmalade skies to me), but The Doors were different, The Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors' music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation. The Doors were the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty, missionaries of apocalyptic sex. Break on through, their lyrics urged, and Light my Fire...” (P.21)

In the section “Woman,” there is an unusual critique of the author, Doris Lessing and comments about her views on Feminism that are quite surprising.

Joan Didion is hailed one of America's true Women of Letters. Reading these selections of essays, for this reader, has only reinforced this. Great writer, fantastic reading.