The Last Love Song (99 page)

*   *   *

After
Blue Nights
was published, she said she wasn't sure she would write anymore. Writing about “morality and culture” was “like pushing the stone uphill again. You write about X political events and nothing happens. That doesn't push you to write again,” she said.

As much as we might yearn for the Didion who once commented so perceptively on California, as valuable as it would be to receive a report from her on the West's latest water wars or the transformation of San Francisco by the techno-riche or the new nexus of California money, commerce, entertainment, and politics—say, in the salons of Arianna Huffington or Lynda Resnick—she is a New Yorker now, increasingly out of touch with California. As she once wrote, “It is often said that New York is a city only for the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also … a city only for the very young.” She was once very young in New York. Now she is relatively rich there.

Now and then a rumor will surface in the press or on the Internet that Didion is writing a screenplay, a thriller, with Todd Field, or that Campbell Scott plans to direct a movie of
A Book of Common Prayer
starring Christina Hendricks, or that Didion has abandoned her part in an HBO biopic of Katharine Graham; now and then, Didion will be sighted walking with a cane along Park Avenue, crossing Fifty-seventh Street in thirteen-degree weather wearing only a thin coat and white slippers, her bare ankles exposed to the wind, or she'll be seen in the Yossi Yossi salon on the Upper East Side dishing with her hairdresser about Nancy Reagan's remoteness; now and then, she'll buy snacks at the William Poll deli on Lex or she'll be spotted at an Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Whitney, looking like a teenager in Uggs; now and then, someone will recall having seen her once, in the old days, at Elaine's, watching Mick Jagger greet Yoko Ono (“Dahling!”), or patrons of Swifty's restaurant will whisper about the small party dining quietly in the back room—Didion, Earl McGrath, and Barry Humphries (Broadway's “Dame Edna”). “Earl's job these days is taking care of Joan,” Eve Babitz told me.

Since
Blue Nights,
there have been more occasions to mourn: Connie Wald, who died in her Beverly Hills home, site of so many splendid dinners, at the age of ninety-six; Nora Ephron, dead at seventy-one of pneumonia brought on by myeloid leukemia; Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer at the age of sixty-two.

There have been illnesses, minor injuries, neurological scares, brief hospitalizations, a broken collarbone, resulting in canceled appearances—in Boise, Idaho, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and at the twenty-third annual PEN Center USA Literary Awards Festival in Los Angeles in October 2013. Governor Jerry Brown and Harrison Ford presented Didion a Lifetime Achievement Award in her absence.

She
did
travel to Yale University in 2011 to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters for her “unflinching” exploration of “love and loss, politics and place, social disorder and the search for meaning.”

And on July 10, 2013, at the White House, President Barack Obama placed a heavy National Humanities Medal around her neck—many at the affair thought it would pull her to the floor. “I'm surprised she hasn't already gotten this award,” Obama said. “[D]ecades into her career, she remains one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture.” For the ceremony, she wore a blue shawl and a plain flowered-print dress. Her bare arms were bone-thin, and the president had to help her onto the stage. She frowned with the effort of movement, looking a little lost, and she received the loudest ovation of the day (other Arts and Humanities Medal recipients that afternoon included Robert Silvers, Marilynne Robinson, Ernest Gaines, Kay Ryan, Tony Kushner, Ellsworth Kelly, Jill Ker Conway, Elaine May, Renée Fleming, Allen Toussaint, Herb Alpert, Frank Deford, and George Lucas). Didion steadied herself against the president, spreading her long, pale fingers against his dark suit. It was a striking image: this frail figure, the descendant of Western pioneers, reaching for the nation's first African-American president, an image confounding attempts by the Twitter-verse and Beltway pundits to decipher the moment's meaning. Was Didion politically conservative or liberal? Why had the White House chosen
her
? Was Obama sending a message? Appeasing Hollywood donors? The old
National Review
crowd? What did Didion think of
him
? Did this award bridge a generation gap? In the end, there was only one person's hand grasping the shoulder of another.

2

To “really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote.

Katie Roiphe agreed: “There are … male writers who imitate Didion, though more of them borrow from Tom Wolfe. Think of all those articles you've read in
GQ
and
Esquire
with such Wolfian sound effects as ‘Splat!' and internal free associations and liberal spatterings of exclamation points.”

Roiphe's example probably tells us more about the editors of
GQ
and
Esquire
than it does about male writers, just as her (and Flanagan's) broad strokes reveal more about her than the boys. Calls to gender wars over Didion blur the fact that her range has been vast and her style has become the music of our time. In spite of her sharp particularities, she is, finally, one of the most inclusive writers of the era: politics, history, war, the arts, popular culture, science and medicine, international relations, the passing of the years.

Certainly, any writer concerned with California or grappling with the heritage of the West (which Didion proved was a confrontation with America at its core) must come to terms with her work. Matthew Specktor, whose novel,
American Dream Machine,
memorializes Hollywood's recent history, calls her “absolutely essential.”

Finally, in considering Didion's literary legacy, one can't ignore her silence on certain matters of class and ethnicity. It is made all the more obvious by the richness of these subjects in the work of such writers as Susan Straight, Al Young, Amy Tan, and Richard Rodriguez. Yet this gap indicates less that California is no longer
where she was from
than that her California was specific and personal, despite its broader applications. She told us this all along.

Richard Rodriguez grew up in a far different Sacramento than Didion did, culturally and economically, but he admired her immensely and found her work galvanizing. In labeling writers, slotting them into cultural categories or dismissing them for what they
fail
to explore, we run the risk of politicizing literature, reading it as sociology, Rodriguez says: “Sociology is not literature. Sociology is the attempt to render an experience of averages and to search for the typical case from the average. The experience of literature is exactly the opposite. It looks for the particular, and then it seeks the universal through the particular rather than the other way around. So if you are a sociologist looking for the Mexican American experience, what you do is interview two hundred students and find out what they think.… What you do as a writer is, you write about one particular Mexican American kid.… If the writer is true, then people who are not Mexican American can say, ‘I don't know who this kid is, but this reminds me of something I felt growing up.'”

On those blue, blue nights, slouching toward a center that would not hold or the diminishing days of autumn, this writer was always true. If we pause and bother to listen, we remain dreamers of Didion's dream.

3

Within a few days of the one-year anniversary of her husband's death, Didion went to Saint John the Divine. A security guard let her into the small chapel off the main altar, underneath construction scaffolding, so she could hang a lei, sent by Susanna Moore from Honolulu, on a brass rod holding the marble plate to the vault containing her mother's and husband's ashes. As she left the nave and wandered up the main aisle, she stared at the magnificent rose window over the front entrance until, from a certain position, the sunlight through the stained-glass inserts flooded her vision with blue.

Back in her neighborhood, so many changes were occurring, as they always did in New York. She wished she could tell her husband about them. Ralph Lauren seemed to be taking over the entire block between Seventy-first and Seventy-second streets. More bookstores had closed, here and across the length and breadth of Manhattan. “Sometimes I feel as if I'm working in a field that's disappearing right under my feet,” said the great biographer Robert Caro.

Empty windows. Lost histories. Distant memories.

“Memories are what you no longer want to remember,” Didion had discovered, padding through her silent apartment. Memories were no solace at all. Now Didion wished she hadn't saved the silver from her mother's house, her daughter's old school uniforms, her husband's shoes, the CD featuring the Israeli jazz pianist playing “Someone to Watch Over Me,” possibly the last song Dunne had listened to the night he died, old wedding invitations (some of the couples long divorced), funeral notices for people she could no longer picture.

Writing
The Year of Magical Thinking
had not been an act of remembrance so much as a continuing engagement with her husband so that she wouldn't yet have to consign him to her dusty old drawer of the past.

Composing that book had been “like sitting down at the typewriter and bleeding,” she told her friend Sara Davidson. “Some days I'd sit with tears streaming down my face.” But she'd done it, and for a long time afterward, she'd kept herself busy. “I don't call it strength. I call it pragmatism,” she'd said. What choice did she have? “I can handle it. I can cross the plains. Bury the baby.”

Asked by a young interviewer, shortly after the appearance of
The Year Magical Thinking,
whether she could imagine falling in love again, she said, “I wouldn't get married again, I don't think. But fall in love? Absolutely.”

*   *   *

It took the stumble in her bedroom, the constant IV infusions of bone-loss medication, the skin cancer treatments (she'd been
warned
all her life about sunning on tropical beaches!), the broken collarbone, the fevers, the PET scans, the physical therapy sessions, and, most of all, the writing of
Blue Nights
to change her tune.

“I just jumped ship,” she told Sara Davidson one day about finishing the book. “I couldn't live with it anymore.” So she brought it to a close. She went to dinner at Elio's to celebrate her relief.

After years of pushing hard, harder, she felt weary, listless. Perhaps she'd overdone it. She no longer wanted to go out for breakfast at Three Guys or to dinner at Tamarind, because what if she fell in the restaurant? She no longer cared about events at the Council on Foreign Relations, or window-shopping at Armani. She noticed people considering her “frail in an entirely more serious way—taxi drivers jump out of the cab to help me get out. In New York, that's pretty scary,” she said.

Alone in the apartment one day, she found a journal Quintana had kept. Middle school? High school? Didion turned the soft white pages. Quintana said she hated Jane Austen—
and
her parents. Why did they always have to treat her like a child? She was quite capable of taking care of herself.

Perhaps it was then, that quiet instant while thumbing through the journal, staring out over the roof of St. James's, that Didion admitted she could no longer bury the baby: “It's not my code anymore … I'm not self-reliant.”

But no. This scene was too much like the forced epiphany of an awkward short story.

Still, in essence, it was true. Pioneer stoicism no longer enabled her “to get through the day.”

One afternoon, Sara Davidson asked her if she wanted live-in help. No, Didion said. The “idea of someone living in my apartment is repellent.” Besides, she could call on over twenty staff members in the building in an emergency. She rarely kept her door locked anymore.

What, then? What did she want? What could she say she needed?

“Acceptance,” Didion said. “Surrender.”

Recalling this moment later, Davidson said Didion seemed to have surprised herself.

“Surrender was never close to my code before. But I don't mean giving up. I mean … giving yourself to what is.”

She said that lately she'd been rereading
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind,
recalling Trudy Dixon and the woman's serenity in her dying days. The book was a reminder to “let things go … letting go. Of what doesn't matter … Not much [is] important, not in the way I once thought it was.”

Abandonment. It lay at the heart of the crossing story, the story of the sweeping American continent.

Not much is important.
“But,” Didion said, “the feeling of connection is.” And there it was—the worm in the story, the snake in the garden; the problem, all along, with where she was from, with where she found herself now, with where we all seemed to be going. “[I]t's an enterprise the whole point of which is survival,” she said of the old myth. Survival of the fittest. Capitalist logic. She paused to consider. If you've left what you loved behind—your reason for
moving
in the first place, for dreaming, for working—can you really be called a survivor? Softly, Didion said, “There's something missing in survival as a reason for being, you know?”