Under a Didion Spell

Last fall, as I prepared to start writing a regular column about California, I called a friend, Richard Saltus, in search of reassurance. I explained my new assignment and Richard, without a prompt, moved to the heart of my unease.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Joan.”

No elaboration was needed. By Joan, he meant Joan Didion, a writer who floats above anyone who would write about California like a taunting angel. Freeways, canyon fires, the Sunset Strip, Berkeley. Realtors, radicals, water wars and movie producers. Didion has given us her take on all these golden tales, and in a style that ought to discourage anyone else from trying.

Richard and I had fallen under Didion’s spell in the late 1970s. We were working at the San Francisco Examiner and she had just published “The White Album,” her second collection of journalistic essays. We were mesmerized by her arid, unerring prose, by her ability to spin literature out of common California detail, the ticky-tacky signage of suburban developments, the syntax of talk shows. We’d sit at night in the newsroom and run Didion sentences through our typewriters, as if the machines might be programmed to duplicate her magic.

It was one thing to type such passages as . . .

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in thirty-eight lives in a trailer.

. . . but it was quite another to cook them up from scratch. Soon enough, we abandoned Didion-esque aspirations and limped off to look for our own ways of putting things.

I’ve never met Joan Didion, but people who know her say she is the person her prose would suggest--intelligent but reserved, a spider on the wall. In a sense, most of us who read Joan Didion feel we know her. Much of her best work has been deeply personal. Her migraines and phobias--snakes amid the eucalyptus leaves, and all that--are part of California literature, as important in their way as her descriptions of Hollywood deal-making and growing up in Sacramento.

Quite often during the past several years (she wrote in the White Album) I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels “real bad” about picking off the family of five. . . . Acquaintances read the New York Times and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.

As much as Didion’s success reflects her persona, it also reflects a place--California. Although it’s common for writers to become linked with a city (Nelson Algren’s Chicago) or a region (Flannery O’Connor’s South), it is not common to build a literary reputation as the voice of a single state. For that matter, few states are suitable territory for statewide columns like this one. I would not be eager, say, to attempt “On Rhode Island” twice a week.

California’s literary richness is not a function of its vastness or diversity. Rather, it flows from the standing of this state as an idea, a place that matters beyond its borders and gives rise, to quote Didion, to “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

A few years ago, Didion moved to New York City--a treason she softened by writing still about her native state. A collection of her latest journalism is just out, entitled “After Henry,” and it contains a section on California.

A good part of any day in Los Angeles (one piece begins) is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.

Many East Coast reviewers cite the preceding passage to make the point that Didion remains in top form on California topics. This is a minor condescension, as the same critics often go on to argue she’s beyond her depth elsewhere in “After Henry,” writing about New York City or national politics.

My reaction is the opposite. I love the New York stuff, but the California stories seem a bit forced, even familiar. I wonder if Didion is now taunted by the same angel who sits over my shoulder--herself. In fact, should I ever meet her, I intend to recommend, humbly, that she write only about places other than California. And if I must, I will beg.