The Last Love Song (65 page)

Her lecture was entitled “Why I Write.” She told her adoring audience, “[T]here'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.”

She said—in front of the English Department faculty, many of whom had stopped taking her seriously until this stunning crowd showed up—she could no longer remember most of what she'd learned as a Berkeley undergraduate. Really, what she'd learned was that she was not an intellectual but a writer: “By which I mean not a ‘good' writer or a ‘bad' writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer.” So much for Schorer's dream of getting her back.

How does one write? Not by revisiting the dusty tomes of Henry James criticism. Not by swaggering into a teacher's office, arrogantly announcing oneself as a writer and declaring the teacher's time was done.

No.

One becomes a writer by being the inappropriate and dismissible creature the faculty had laughed about after the formal dinner. “You just lie low … You stay quiet,” Didion said. “You don't talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out…”

The standing-room-only crowd pressed forward.

This was one mouse who damn well knew how to roar.

 

Chapter Twenty-three

1

If Didion became a girl again on the Berkeley campus, nibbling nuts from her raincoat pocket, she aged rapidly while writing
A Book of Common Prayer.
“I don't mean physically. I mean that in adopting [the main character's] point of view, I felt much sharper, harsher,” she said. “I adopted a lot of the mannerisms and attitudes of an impatient, sixty-year-old dying woman. I would cut people off in the middle of conversations. I fell into Grace because I was trying to maintain her tone.”

It was the tone, of course, of Dunne's dying mother, just as the girl in the book, on the lam from the FBI, is, in some measure, Patty Hearst. These recent events made their way into the novel the way radiation from the TRIGA Mark III bathed anything straying unprotected into its radius; Didion began to see the novelist's job as wandering, vulnerable, into the culture's red zones, setting off the alarms.

But in speaking, in the novel, as an older woman
about
a younger one with a misguided daughter she's never understood, Didion was—more crucially—speaking to herself, observing her life from the wide end of the telescope, returning with warnings from the future, a form of magical thinking available only in fiction. “
A Book of Common Prayer
to some extent has to do with my own daughter's growing up,” she admitted to Susan Stamberg on National Public Radio. “My child is nowhere near the age of Marin, the girl in the novel, but she's no longer a baby. I think that part of this book came out of the apprehension that we are going to both be adults pretty soon … And [the daughter] has been misperceived by her mother most of her life.”

Didion was quick to distinguish her biography from her artistry. “What I work out in a book isn't what the book is about. I mean, this book isn't about mothers and daughters. That's part of what it was for me, but I don't think it's what it is for a reader.”

For the reader, it was a rare artifact: an American political novel. Since her trips to the Gulf Coast states and to Colombia, since her research on the Southern hemisphere and its economic ties to the Northern one, her notion of what a contemporary American novel needed to be had changed.

The fractured style of
all
her late novels (
A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, The Last Thing He Wanted
) is qualitatively different from the fragmentations in her earlier work. It conveys not a broken sensibility so much as the shattered texture of American public life. More pointedly than before, she assumes, in these books, a communal rather than an individual voice.

Behind this new emphasis was a firm conviction, though at the time of
A Book of Common Prayer,
it was inchoate in her mind. She would not articulate it directly until the essays in
After Henry
and
Political Fictions,
starting in the 1990s. But already she was feeling the
rhythm,
the
structure,
of her conviction, and here is what she knew: The people inside America's governing process, including the journalists who report on officials' behavior, have “congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which [is] its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.”

These insiders use fables and romances (
we favor the freedom fighters; that's what this party is all about; strong bipartisan support; putting the American people first
) to obscure the ruthless, exclusive nature of the process.

This is how the world is, the powerful swear from on high. This is the way it has always been. Self-evidently, their claims are not true. What
is
true is harder to find these days. It was easy to see the squalor of a squatters' camp in a California fruit field in the 1930s. It's much harder to see the link between a civil war in Central America and a drug blight in Compton (a subject Didion would track in the 1980s).

Instead of clear connections, we have—on the news, on the Internet, in videos—flash pictures in variable sequence.

Or to put it another way: In the kind of domestic narrative Didion once followed (in
Run River
and even in
Play It As It Lays
) the house in which the couple will or will not live happily ever after is a given. The later Didion, intent upon cracking official fables, insists the
real
narratives are these: who owns the land on which the house was built; who built the house and when; who sold the house to whom; when, why, and for how much; who, ultimately, benefited from the sale; where did the proceeds actually go; for what purposes was the house actually used?

This is no longer a world aspiring to happily ever after. It is a world of transactions ever more complex, leading to mass movements of money and consolidations of power. And it requires a new kind of storytelling.

*   *   *

In Berkeley, Didion had put a Xeroxed manuscript of the unfinished novel into Henry Robbins's hands. She continued to tinker with the story and add to it, using her husband's notes. He read as she worked and offered handwritten suggestions on yellow legal sheets, which she typed up and studied during revisions. Mostly, his comments had to do with clarifying details and keeping the point of view straight: Like a narrator in a Conrad novel, Grace tells stories about others, and it is not always clear how she knows what she knows.

Dunne worried about the book's bleak vision: In Didion's view, politics was essentially a planet-wide arms deal.

The novel offered a dark picture of North American power moves from a fresh angle. “In North America, social tensions that arise tend to be undercut and co-opted quite soon, but in Latin America there does not seem to be any political machinery for delaying the revolution. Everything is thrown into bold relief. There is a collapsing of time. Everything is both older than you could ever know, and it started this morning,” Didion said.

She had hired a personal secretary and researcher, a young woman named Tina Moore, to help her with business correspondence as well as materials for the novel. She was a “fantastic researcher,” Didion said. “She would go to the UCLA library, and I would say, ‘Bring me back anything on plantation life in Central America.' And she would come back and say, ‘This is really what you're looking for—you'll love this.' And it would not be plantation life in Latin America. It would be Ceylon, but it would be fantastic. She had an instinct for what was the same story, and what I was looking for. What I was looking for were rules for living in the tropics. I didn't know that, but that's what I found.”

Her screenplay work had given her confidence in “intercutting” dialogue among several characters at once, and she enjoyed trying her hand at “big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers—when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes.” She realized when she got within twenty pages of the end that she “still hadn't delivered [the] revolution” she'd promised earlier in the book. The novel “had a lot of threads, and I'd overlooked this one. So then I had to go back and lay in the preparation for the revolution.” It was like sewing, “setting in a sleeve … I mean I had to work that revolution in on the bias, had to ease out the wrinkles with my fingers.”

She freely embraced the fact that she was writing a “romance,” that her women were “romantic heroines rather than actual women in actual situations.” She had constructed a brooding allegory of the life of our times.

On March 24, 1976, Henry Robbins wrote Didion to say
A Book of Common Prayer
was a novel of great “power and beauty.” He said, “I see what John means about … perhaps laying on the ambience of rot and death too heavily, but it didn't and doesn't bother me … The novel
is
about death (just as
Play It As It Lays
was in its different way), and I don't find these thematic signals intrusive.” He concluded, “It's a wonderful book, and I know it will be recognized as such—even by those who were frightened of
Play It As It Lays
. You're not going to have to wait for the appreciation this time.”

She retreated into her study, surrounded by the magic objects easing her into her dream world and getting her past the “low dread” she felt each morning before beginning to write: postcards from Cartagena, a volume entitled
Inside South America,
a book of useful phrases (
Quiere ser mi testiga,
“Do you want to be my witness?”), a newspaper photograph of a man washing blood off the floor of a bombed Caribbean hotel lobby, lists of arms (M2, AR-15, Kalashnikov), lists of names (Graciela, Grace) written on sheets of onionskin paper stapled together, books of botany and medicines (
Tropical Nature, An Epilome of the Laboratory Diagnosis and Treatment of Tropical Diseases
—“For persistent vomiting: A few drops of 1:1000 solution of adrenalin in a little water, taken by mouth with sips of iced champagne”).

Scattered across her desk were several forty-nine-cent Wire-In-Dex pads of ruled index cards containing images or lines of dialogue: “The oil rainbow slick on the water.” “He runs guns. I wish they had caviar.” Of these last two sentences, Didion said later, “When I heard Charlotte say this [in my mind], I had a very clear fix on who she was.”

She saved newspaper articles on matters that would not make it into the novel, but they indicate how political her thinking had become, and they anticipate future projects: profiles of Vietnamese orphans, of Nicaraguan rebel groups, of money deals in and out of Miami.

There was a Pablo Neruda poem, “A Certain Weariness,” clipped from
The New Yorker
: “I don't want to be tired alone. / I want you to grow tired along with me.”

*   *   *

“As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents … ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver,” says Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator of
A Book of Common Prayer.
She is speaking about a woman named Charlotte Douglas.

Grace, in her sixties and dying of cancer, remains, like Conrad's Marlow, largely in the story's background, infusing every image in the book with her sensibility—but obliquely. Public, rather than private, incidents dominate the action. “I tell you … about myself only to legitimize my voice,” Grace says.

Charlotte, a “child of the western United States,” had been provided with “faith in the values of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of clean and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of prayers and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history.” In other words, she was a member of the Blue Sky Tribe, and John Wayne rode through her dreams.

But these details are merely introductory, the last remnants of a novel like
Run River.
“Some women … marry or do not marry with equanimity,” Grace says. “They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They … get up and scramble eggs.”

“So you know the story,” she says dismissively at the start of the novel, preparing us for something else entirely. Though we do not know it yet, the domestic has been swamped by America's “underwater narrative,” which is powered by nothing that cozy families, in their mortgaged homes, can possibly perceive. Behind the nice houses and the slick new shopping malls, the political class is busy making deals and counterdeals in anonymous rooms in remote terrains that the average citizen cannot find on any map.

Charlotte's daughter, Marin, a Patty Hearst–type radicalized by the 1960s, goes underground. Charlotte, unhinged by her daughter's disappearance, and harassed by the FBI in its efforts to find the girl, retreats to a small Latin American country, a place resembling Costaguana in Conrad's
Nostromo.
It seems to have “no history”—or maybe
too many
parallel pasts. It is called Boca Grande: Big Mouth, a vacant maw spewing disputatious language designed to preserve the “deniability” of anyone who passes through the region, since the only visitors here are the “occasional mineral geologist or CIA man traveling on one or another incorporeal AID mission.”

Along the way, Charlotte gives birth to a hydrocephalic baby. It dies a few weeks later: the third dead infant we've met (so to speak) in as many Didion novels.