THE WHITE ALBUM

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In 1973 the five pillboxes on Makapuu Head had seemed to James Jones exactly as he had left them in 1942. In 1973 the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had seemed to James Jones less formidably rich than he had left it in 1942 … I’ve known of this compilation of essays and journalistic pieces for a long time, but only now decided to read it when it happened to come my way. The first half of it flew by, but I found the second half not as engaging, likely because I found its topics not as interesting.

Didion categorised some of her essays, with their first-person viewpoint and fiction-like fine detail, as “Personals”, but in fact they were about the world as seen by a social and political conservative from the last American generation to identify with adults. A tiny, unnerved and unnerving figure behind vast dark glasses, she was derisive of lax language and dismissive of unformed thought on both the left and right. She did not care to negotiate interviews with stars via their press agents.Subsequent work shows a shift, a greater emphasis on reportage – as in her analysis of the trial of the Central Park Five and the dispatches from El Salvador on which she worked in concert with New York Review of Books editor Bob Silvers, whom she described as her “baffle”, the layer that shut out extraneous noise as she was attempting to hone her thoughts and perceptions. In “Why I Write”, a 1976 essay, its title borrowed from Orwell, which appears in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion has also begun to wrestle with the idea of the writer’s power, and with her belief that asking for a reader’s attention is “an aggressive, even a hostile act … there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space”. Through all of these essays Didion also presents herself up for the examination of the reader in a uniquely post-modern style of her times. She is at one and the same time a vulnerable figure and a cynic, who talks about her own afflictions, emotional troubles and reconciliation's as a microcosm of her own times. At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. "That evening star fascinated me," she wrote. "It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.” New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Amis’s review reflected a long line of disdain from “serious writers” for the personal essay, the practitioners of which are mainly women.It’s engrossing and sharply written, with the detachment and empathy she simultaneously uses to observe the world around her - how does she do that??? I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map, he had said, was for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its complete isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) That was a very pretty image, the idle ladies sitting in the gazebo and murmuring lasciate ogni speranza, but it depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for “fulfillment,” or “self-expression,” a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and capable of engendering only the most pro forma benevolent interest. In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women’s movement would have seemed to have any interest at all. Marxism in this country had ever been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of “brotherhood.” In writing about “serious” matters, Didion never sought to excise fashion or fabric from her prose. She started her writing career at Vogue and her descriptions of political or the personal often break to include descriptions of furnishings or curtains or clothes. Joan Didion was unquestionably an exceptional writer. I was captivated by her unique prose. In this non-fiction essay collection, we are transported through the sixties in America, particularly in California. She possessed a magical talent for transporting her reader to a time and a place, and into a sort of time capsule that she's kept for you. The White Album takes us through a maze of American culture and exposes some of the darker sides of the American experience, and of Joan Didion's own experiences with health problems and personal tribulations. In queste pagine non c’è inizio, e neppure finale: in mezzo ci sono tante storie, e c’è la storia di Joan.By then, she seemed to feel that reality was dispelling all enchantments from her life. The lives of Didion and Dunne had been mostly funded by their remunerative rewrites for the screen, although their joint “implied promise of quality” had been delivered in the adaption of Dunne’s novel True Confessions (1981), and rather less so in a prolonged project, Up Close and Personal, filmed in 1996 as a vehicle for Robert Redford.