The Last Love Song (75 page)

She conveys Miami's disjunctions through juxtapositions. “[I]n 1959 when Fulgencio Batista” and his friends flew out of Havana “on an Aerovias DC-4,” she says, “the women still wore the evening dresses in which they had gone to dinner.” She parses the clashing national rhetoric: What Washington calls the “disposal problem” (that is, how to manage so many furious Cuban exiles), “Miami calls
la lucha,
” or the struggle for a liberated Cuba.

As the book proceeds, Didion dwells on causes more than perplexities. As it turns out, the place's bafflements are willful, born of prejudice or arrogant disinterest: Though Cubans constitute 56 percent of Miami's population, the Anglo press gives them scant coverage. A
Miami Herald
reporter calls the Hispanic population a “teeming, incomprehensible presence” without even trying to gauge its rhythms.

The city's bewilderments spring, as well, from public leaders' desire to avoid discussion of certain subjects: the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John F. Kennedy's assassination; according to officials, even to broach these topics is to blunt the crucial “healing process” necessary for communal health.

And in part, puzzlement results from dirty little secrets (note how Didion ends the following sentence in the passive voice, nailing language's complicity in the crimes):

That
la lucha
had become, during the years since the Bay of Pigs, a matter of assassinations and bombings on the streets of American cities, of plots and counterplots and covert dealings involving American citizens and American institutions, of attitudes and actions which had shadowed the abrupt termination of two American presidencies and would eventually shadow the immobilization of a third, was a peculiarity left … officially unexplored.

Didion's longing for story leaves nothing unturned. Predictably, at this point in her career, images start to fit for her in the interiors of a hotel. In the Omni, downtown, she sees Miami's “social dynamic” revealed “in a single tableau.”

At night, unemployed black teenagers gaze up from the streets outside the Omni at the hotel's out-of-reach windows, while Cuban men wearing black tie tango with “women in Chanel and Valentino evening dresses on the ballroom level.” These Cubans have gained entry into America's elite spaces because their fathers, fleeing the island in the 1950s and early 1960s, were given Miami's service jobs, leading eventually to more gainful employment. Otherwise, these jobs might have gone to local blacks—the fathers of the aimless boys on the streets. For Didion, the hotel is the “most theatrical possible illustration of how a native proletariat can be left behind in a city open to the convulsions of the Third World, something which had happened … first and most dramatically in Miami but had been happening since in other parts” of the United States.

The more she delves beneath Miami's “provisional” surface, discovering narrative strands, the more she recovers a belief in cause and effect, consequences, and narrative itself, asserting the capacity of “individuals” to “affect events directly.”

She begins to hear similarities in the way elderly Cuban exiles talk about the Kennedy administration's covert activities against Castro in the early 1960s and the way young people speak of the Reagan administration's illegal war in Nicaragua. An old and disastrous story in American politics appears to be playing out again.

Even more startling, the more she sees and hears, the more it becomes apparent that the same
players
are driving events. The story is coherent, continuous, and understandable, after all, despite the U.S. government's attempts to preserve deniability.

She learns about a man named Theodore Shackley, chief of station at a Central Intelligence Agency facility on the University of Miami campus in 1962, then the “largest CIA installation, outside Langley, in the world.” There, nearly four hundred CIA case officers trained and coordinated thousands of Cuban agents. This is the same man, Shackley, “who left Miami in 1965, spent from 1966 until 1972 as political officer and chief of station in Vientiane and Saigon, and turned up in 1987 in the Tower Commission report”—on the Iran-Contra scandal—“meeting … in Hamburg with [arms dealer] Manucher Ghorbanifar and with the former head of SAVAK counterespionage.”

Shackley is one of dozens of men Didion discovers, loses, and finds again, through obscure public records and newspaper archives, overheard rumors and conversations, men who are playing hide-and-seek, popping up at opportune moments in odd, out-of-the way places. By bringing their movements to light, she sketches possible connections between seemingly disparate events: the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, the coup in Chile, the Vietnam War, the worldwide heroin trade, the Watergate break-in, the Nixon resignation, the Iran-Contra affair, the cocaine blight in L.A., the rise of global terrorism.

We are a long way from the princess in her castle, but perhaps, Didion hints, we are on our way to understanding why the castle came to be such a trap, why the princess had to leave it, drifting, confused, through an ever more cryptic nation. Perhaps we are on our way to understanding that narrative didn't fail after all; it simply had to expand and refocus to encompass more complex realities. We are on our way to grasping why the princess might find comfort as a literary critic, a parser of language—and why she might find the
real
story in the Hall of Records.

*   *   *

The problem with conspiracy theories is threefold: They are impossible to prove; they attract extremists stoked by paranoia; and they have become so popularized in movies, TV dramas, and on the Internet, their claims are easily dismissed as entertainment. “The truth is out there” was just another advertising slogan.

What distinguishes Joan Didion from an exploitative figure like, say, Oliver Stone, and the rabble of Web voices, is her disciplined thinking, her organization in the midst of fragmentation. In an early essay titled “On Morality” she wrote:

As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119 degrees. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, because
The American Scholar
asked me to, in some abstract way about “morality,” a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.

A devotion to the particular (it is not just hot; it is, in fact, 119 degrees), an admission of frailty, and a distrust of whatever she has been told to think about make Didion a more trustworthy witness than run-of-the-mill conspiracists.

In her room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, she thinks about a car wreck she has read about in the paper, and a nurse who said, “You can't just leave a body on the highway. It's immoral.” “It was one instance when I did not distrust the word,” Didion says, “because [the nurse] meant something quite specific. She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.”

In the final analysis, Didion's attraction to conspiracy tales, particularly in the 1980s, has less to do with the intrigues themselves than with her persistent longing for a narrative,
any
narrative, to alleviate the pain of confusion.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”—and if the story is not readily apparent, we will weave one out of whatever scraps are at hand; we will use our puzzlement as a motivating factor; we will tell our way out of any trap, or goddamn seedy motel.

4

Between
Salvador
and
Miami,
Didion published her fourth novel,
Democracy
(1984), inspired, in part, by her travels to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia—but chiefly by her love of Hawaii.
Democracy
looked back to the fall of Saigon. It placed that moment—in Didion's canon—in the midst of Reagan's Central America shenanigans. Indirectly, she suggested a connection, and forced a reexamination of the recent past in light of the present.

As the book opens, Didion's oldest fears seem to have recurred. One by one, narrative verities fail.

Setting? Don't count on it.

As the “granddaughter of a geologist, I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands,” declares the narrator, a woman named Joan Didion.

History? Backstory? Sorry.

In this humid, mutable world, no one can “write anything down, the point of the pen would go right through the paper.”

Emotion, psychological motivation, depth of character? Try again.

Didion can find no human feeling or satisfactory explanations for why people do what they do. She has only “[c]olors, moisture, heat … blue in the air.”

Fables and romance won't do, either. No “dawn's early light.” Instead, we hear a government man reminisce: “The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.” It's nuclear winter rather than Reagan's “Morning in America.”

“Call me the author,” Didion says, plunging us into mealy Melvillean fog. She says, “I began thinking about Inez Victor and Jack Lovett”—the novel's protagonists—“at a point in my life when I lacked certainty, lacked even that minimum level of ego which all writers recognize as essential to the writing of novels, lacked conviction.”

She continues: “When novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact.” But she won't play even
this
narrative bait and switch, because she recognizes its foolishness, and she wants to find a deeper, truer story.

She has come to these dire straits because she views American democracy now as a poisonous language game:

In the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what [the government] called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley [she says, the Joan Didion of the novel blurring into the woman we think we know] … I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy … between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer.

The passage implies
some
faith in narrative, as practiced by Orwell, Hemingway, and the rest. But official language—“assistance effort,” masking, among other things, the napalming of Vietnamese villagers—mocks any effort now to teach the value of sentences, style, or thought. Language no longer describes the problems of democracy. It is
part
of the problem. (
Paraleipsis
: the rhetorical strategy of emphasizing a point by appearing to gloss over it—this is the new American speech, and it becomes the speech of Didion's novel.)

For a committed writer, the only moral recourse, at this point in American history, is to strip away whatever might be contaminated by the bad politics of our time: setting, history, backstory, psychological motivation, romance, fable. We begin with whatever's left—“colors, moisture, heat, blue in the air.” From there, we build our story (the very opposite of the “generalizing impulse”).

In this way, grasping not at abstractions or received forms, but at strict particulars, Didion recovers some measure of trust in words. Ironically, she winds up telling an old-fashioned love story—about Inez, who comes from a “family in which the colonial impulse had marked every member,” and Jack, a player like the men on the government's “secret team,” a fellow whose name eventually leaks out of “various investigations into arms and currency and technology dealings on the part of certain former or perhaps even current overt and covert agents of the United States government.”

Like Charlotte Douglas, Inez had learned the princess song, but the tune goes sour. This is, after all, 1975—one of the lowest points in American democracy. Its “assistance effort” has become a cesspool.

Inez loses her husband, a U.S. senator, to praetorian ambitions; like Charlotte, she loses her daughter—and her son—to all-consuming capitalism, which is loosed like anarchy upon the world. The only possible hero for her is a man in the thick of the hidden narrative, a man who speaks nostalgically of the beauty of nuclear tests. Inez steps out of the fairy tale and into the secret story. Because “nothing in this situation encourages the basic narrative assumption, which is that the past is prologue to the present, the options remain open here,” Didion says. “Anything could happen.”

In the end, Inez winds up teaching American literature in Kuala Lumpur. One day, Didion reads about her in the London
Guardian,
and the words bring back to her a “sudden sense of Inez.” So, as it turns out, language has not been ruined beyond all use, nor has it lost its power to plumb the truth. It simply must not be invoked to cover the “flotsam of some territorial imperative” left behind by the venalities of democracy.

*   *   *

“When I started thinking about the novel … I called it
Angel Visits,
” Didion said. “All the early notes were marked
AV.
An ‘angel visit,' I had read somewhere, was a nineteenth-century usage for a ‘pleasant interlude of a short duration,' and this was to be a novel that took place entirely in the rather somnolent life of American Hawaii. It was to be, as the narrator of
Democracy
eventually notes, ‘a study in provincial manners, in the acute tyrannies of class and privilege by which people assert themselves against the tropics' [a thematic link between
Democracy
and
Salvador
and
Miami
] … This was actually the novel I set out to write.”