I picked this up because of Joan Didion’s recent passing, and the many obituaries and tributes to her that I read. Everyone was gushing about her and unfailingly cited the sheer pleasure of reading her writing. What can I say---the hype definitely met its expectations. I get the feeling that her voice is eerily familiar, something that I have to chalk up to her outsized influence. It feels like I have read so much of her writing before because people have tried to copy her, consciously or not. Who would not want to sound like her in these pages?
Montaigne, the originator of the form, comes off as someone who writes to understand himself, so that his essays are full of the ephemera that’s stuck in his head, passages of untranslated Latin and Greek and all, a tour of a mind unsure of what to think. Reading an essay by Didion gives the impression of someone completely sure of herself, of someone with an exquisite eye for detail, someone who wants to be part of the stories she is telling but reveals what she wants to reveal about herself and nothing more. In Montaigne the agony of thinking is on the page: with Didion all of it is scrubbed away, and her famously cool and collected voice is all that is left in the writing.
My favorite of these essays has to be, perhaps not surprisingly, the title essay. Even after all this time it has the capacity to shock. What I know of the hippies are mostly about the great psychedelic bands that came from that era. However much they were romanticized, what she shows is that the hippies were mainly teenage runaways, spending most of their time doing drugs and idling about. There was not much love or peace in what she depicts, and in fact she sees it as emblematic of a wider social decay:
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.
An interesting revelation from this collection is Joan Didion’s conservatives streak. It’s clear that she was preoccupied with familiar mainstays of the right: law and order and their dissolution, a reverence towards American mythology (most exemplified by the John Wayne essay), a skepticism of counterculture (as seen in the title essay and the one about Joan Baez), the prizing of individual toughness (particularly in the essay “Self-Respect”). This Know Your Enemy podcast episode goes into much more detail about this, where they argue that this conservatism comes from her roots in “old California” and her family ancestry as frontierspeople---famously she was related to some of the members to the doomed Donner Party. Of course she doesn’t dwell explicitly much on politics here, if at all, but it adds an interesting layer to an already idiosyncratic set of essays: there must be something to the fact that her admirers are overwhelmingly liberal (as most writers and aspiring writers today are) while here it is not clear at all that she was.