Joan Didion’s death last week was followed by an outpouring of praise stretching over a week in The New York Times. This raises a critical question. Was Didion really a great writer, or merely the vector of attitudes held by the commenting class? The answer lies not just in her most famous books and essays, but in a piece she wrote that has been overlooked by those who present her as a seer into the enduring meaning of the past.
Didion has been cast as a prophet of the present who “told the truth about America,” as one Times writer gushed. Well, she did tell a kind of truth, one that many sophisticated readers wanted to hear after the traumas of the 60s. Apparently, they still want to hear it. Her images of crazed violence resonate, for her admirers, with the current threat posed by the violent right. But this selective view of Didion’s work ignores the evidence that her dystopian gaze was usually a reactionary one.
Consider an essay that lies dormant in The White Album, one of her most famous collections of pieces about the `60s and its aftermath. Adoring critics rarely mention “The Women’s Movement,” probably because it punctures the myth of Didion. It’s hard to believe that a writer lauded as an oracle could stray so far from what we now believe. Of course, in 1972, when Didion wrote that piece, benighted responses to feminism were common enough. But her reputation as a truth-teller hinges on her refusal to honor conventional wisdom. In this case, she affirmed a whole set of orthodoxies, placing women’s liberation in the company of ‘60s foolishness. That’s why this essay needs to be exhumed. Take a look.
To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism. Nonetheless it was serious, and for these high-strung idealists to find themselves out of the mimeo room and onto the Cavett show must have been in certain ways more unsettling to them then it ever was to the viewers….
Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. (This grievance was not atypic in that discussion of it seemed always to take on unexplored Ms. Scarlett overtones, suggestions of fragile cultivated flowers being ‘spoken to’ and therefore ‘violated’ by uppity proles)…. The derogation of assertiveness as ‘machismo’ has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal at any level with an overtly heterosexual man.
To Didion, these damsels of distress are “wounded birds” at best. “One had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion… of creatures too tender for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets…too ‘sensitive’ for the difficulties of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at a movement as a rationale for denying that reality…. The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real generative possibilities, of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words… In certain ways they tell us sadder things about what the culture has done to them…and they also tell us, I suspect, that the movement is no longer a cause but a symptom.”
Here is Didion’s greatest virtue as a writer, her acerbic and rigorously elegant style, applied to an emergent movement that she completely misunderstood, mainly because she relied on her resentment rather than seeking to decipher a new idea by talking to those who lived it. This is a major flaw in any journalist, since bearing witness lies at the heart of reportage.
Didion bore witness in her work about El Salvador, but not when it came to the changes brewing in her own country. She saw them from on high, or, at any rate, from Malibu. I haven’t included in this excerpt Didion’s snide comments about lesbians, because such views were frequently expressed in those days even by some feminists. (Betty Friedan called lesbians “the lavender menace”). But Didion’s homophobia is part of a larger problem. Her grasp of the women’s movement is of a piece with her reaction to the counterculture. She noticed the chaos, but not the creativity.
It isn’t necessary to defend the audacious activist-authors of second wave feminism. Read the essays of Ellen Willis to see how candor and a critical edge can be the means to very different ends—and that’s my point. Didion tells a truth that is only true to people who want to see the radical politics of the `60s and `70s as mockable and ultimately dangerous to “those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities.” From this perspective, the Women’s Movement was another threat to the enlightened.
But enlightenment is never fixed, and one writer’s truth may soon seem like hermetic falsity. That possibility is missing from Didion’s first two collections because she didn’t engage change on the ground. This aesthetically armed distance suited bohemians who emerged from the `60s clinging to hip irony, and liberals who had only embraced the counterculture when they made a profit from it. They never felt rewarded by the scrum of sex and drugs and rock n roll. They never took to crash pads that had no value as real estate, and clothing that didn’t distinguish them by its price. Nor did they detect the snares of neoliberalism that would soon engulf and enrich them. Didion was—and still is—the herald of those whose temperament directs them to see the excess in each experiment, and not its actual reach. She was always lying in wait for Charles Manson, and when he finally appeared she had her story. The appeal of that narrative speaks to the way many bobos have come to regard their radical past.
Didion’s frequent use of the pronoun we is not quite royal, but it conveys a sense that she and her readers are a civilized few staring in horror at a nation lost in ignorant unreason. This perspective allows those readers to ignore the material reasons why hysteria now grips the enragés of the right. To the extent that such obliviousness guides liberal thinking about the crisis of American politics, it is as unforgivable as any excess of the ‘60s. It has the same smug assurance without the ambition to expand that “we” beyond the ranks of the well-educated oppressed. To read Didion without examining the biases that inform her early work is to disregard the foundation of her sensibility, which was not reason, but the need for safety through order. If you yearn for that, fine. But don’t confuse it with truth-telling.
In the course of a long career, Didion tackled racism, social violence, and mourning in ways that were far from predictable. Her early work is much more reductive, yet it has received the most attention, because it seems to hold the key to understanding the current crisis. Didion’s take on the ‘60s has always affirmed her readers’ misgivings. Today, it invites them to blur the distinction between the radical actions of that era and the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021. Both can now be seen as outbursts of the American berserk. But that is not the truth. It is an attitude.
“If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade,” Didion writes, “…but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.” What she argues, essentially, is that protest will not produce a better world; that utopian thinking can only lead to murder and mayhem. Didion affirms the belief that it is riskier to undertake radical experiments than to live with the anodyne sentiments that seep from the compromises of the present. To me, that fatalism, no matter how eloquently expressed, is as ominous as disorder.
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Check out The Essential Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota Press)