I have been thinking of Laura Kipnis’s applaudable and much applauded review of Lili Anolik’s book comparing the wondrous Eve Babitz -according to Anolik, her own personal discovery – and the evil Joan Didion. Kipnis makes short work of this nonsense, but she does knock Didion inthe process, implying that her influence is too great and it is time (accordingto the clock of literary reputation) to take Didion down.
My Rushmore of the women essayists of the
latter half of the 20th century is: Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Janet
Malcolm and Elizabeth Hardwick.
All Rushmores are a little ridiculous. My
Rushmore could have included, say, Audre Lord or Toni Morrison. It did not have
to be so white and upper class. But this is my paper mache Rushmore, my sense
of the looming presences presiding above my own little fingers dancing on these
keys.
Only Janet Malcolm avoided fiction
altogether, although her work on reporters exposed a good deal of fictivity in
the late twentieth century style of grand reportage. I would also say
that Adler, however much I appreciated her essayist style, was better in her
two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark. Didion’s novels, to my mind, got better
as she went along – got more sharded and lethal. Democracy is more like
Speedboat than it is like Play it as it lays. Hardwick, too, pared down to the
parataxis beneath the plot – a very late seventies notion, where plot became a
thing of dread, an instrument that was used against you. There is no better
marker of the cultural mood in the States in the Seventies than Sleepless Nights.
Didion, though, was always special. From the
very beginning she knew how to make style cast a spell. And in that beginning
she was definitely a Goldwater girl, John Wayne’s erring but adoring daughter.
The culture of the seventies, the reverb from Watergate and the, well, inelegance
of the coming monster mash with Reagan, drove her away from thinking that the
woman who bragged of hanging out at the gas station with the boys could accept
these boys, all too visibly frat boys, on the right were of the same issue. She
moved, as a novelist and essayist, to a thinker on the margins. With the
advantage that she knew Anglo society in her bones. So with the short books –
El Salvador and Miami – she adjusted her hearing.
Didion, like Janet Malcolm, could hear a
text. She understood the art of citation – damning the establishment with their
own words in their own media organs. For instance, in Miami, she does a marvelous
rap on Miami’s purblind Anglo establishment by spotting things in the Miami
Herald. For instance, a two page, dryly comic bit that begins with this
innocent intro:
On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary
of the founding of Dade County, in February of 1986, the Miami Herald asked
four prominent amateurs of local history to name “the ten people and the ten
events that had the most impact on the country’s history”. Each of the four
submitted his or her own list of “The most influential people in Dade’s history”…
She presents this newspaper turn to celebratory history for a page, just
quoting, And then:
“On none of these lists of “The Most
Influential People in Dade History” did the name Fidel Castro appear, nor for
that matter did any Cuban, although the presence of Cubans in Dade County did
not go entirely unnoted by the Herald panel. When it came to naming the Ten
Most Important “Events”, as opposed to “People”, all four panelists mentioned
the arrival of the Cubans, but at slightly off angles (“Mariel Boatlift of 1980”
was the way one panelist saw it, as if this arrival had been just another of
those isolated disasters or innovations which deflect the course of any growing
community, on an approximate par with other events mentioned, for example the
Freeze of 1895, the Hurricane of 1926, the opening of the Dixie Highway, the establishment
of Miami International Airport, and the adoption, in 1957, of the metropolitan
form of government, “enabling the Dade Country Commission to provide urban
services to the increasingly populous unincorporated area.”
The Miami book strikes the note that Didion
made her specialty – the differand between the white establishment’s view of
American history, up to the present, and the reality of what was actually
happening in America. The Miami Herald, in its notion that Miami was an Anglo
city in the New South even as it became 56 percent Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian,
etc., could be paralleled by the Washington Post’s quaint notion that the very
heavily black city of Washington, D.C. existed merely as a backdrop – one that
needed proper taming! - to super important connections being made in
Georgetown. Perhaps the most powerful piece Didion did was on the Central Park
Jogger case, the case of the woman who was raped while jogging in Central Park
on April 10, 1989, the case that was “resolved” by the roundup of six black or Hispanic teen
boys, who were given all the
accountrements of a trial as they were disappeared down the sewage line leading
to the penitentiary system. While Didion’s piece did not argue that the teens
were innocent, it did argue that their presumption of innocence was grossly
violated by the media frenzy, followed by the political frenzy, a freakout of
the white establishment that revealed their “innocence”, to use Didion’s curious
term – their lack of knowledge of the world that they presumed to own.
Sentimental Journeys, published in the New
York Review of Books, was received as an insult and provocation when it came
out. In 1992, Hedrick Herzberg, a 100 percent Clintonite liberal, gave her
points for digging up the black viewpoint, but ends with this grave judgment:
“Ms. Didion plainly finds the “black” vison
of systematic oppression morally superior to the “white” vision of systematic mayhem.
But both visions are contemptible exaggerations, and it is far from clear
which, in New York, is the most damaging.”
Oh, we are so close here to a Sister Soulja
moment! And the oddity is, “Ms. Didion” is the Sister whose “contemptible exaggerations”
we have to get rid of.
Louis Menard, in a review of a book about
Didion, provides a good abbreviation of the way Didion’s comparative method
works:
“The journalistic nut of the Jogger piece
is the case of Laurie Sue Rosenthal. She was the mistress of an assistant city
commissioner for elevator and boiler inspections, a man named Peter Franconeri,
who happened to own an apartment at 36 East Sixty-eighth Street, between
Madison and Park, and a house in Southampton. On the night of April 26,
1990, Rosenthal called her parents, in Queens, from the Sixty-eighth Street
apartment and said she was being beaten. Sometime after that call, she died. In
the morning, Franconeri rolled her body up in a carpet, put it out with the
building's trash, and went to work.
The story did get into the papers, but
officials downplayed the significance. "There were some minor
bruises," said a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
A police officer complained to a reporter about Franconeri, "Everybody got
upside down because of who he was. If it happened to anyone else, nothing would
have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the
end of it."
Essentially, it was. Laurie Sue Rosenthal
was determined to have suffered an accidental death from the combined effects
of alcohol and Darvocet. Franconeri pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got
seventy-five hours of community service. The suspects in the Jogger case
got sentences of five to fifteen years, for crimes including a rape that, it
turned out, they had not committed. But the Central Park suspects
did not belong to what Didion called "the conspiracy of those in
the know, those with a connection, those with a rabbi at the Department of
Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or
Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because
of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued and that's
the end of it."
I will miss, oh I will miss, Didion
reporting about the Luigi Mangione case.
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