joan didion essay on the doors

The Rock Counterculture Had a Dark Side. Joan Didion Saw It Coming

By David Browne

David Browne

In the early days of her career, Joan Didion had a taste of what some music and arts journalists have had to endure over the years: the monotony of record-making. It was 1968, and Didion, working on a story, visited an L.A. recording studio to watch the Doors tinker with Waiting for the Sun . According to Tracy Daugherty’s Didion bio The Last Love Song , she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also wanted to scope out Jim Morrison as the lead in The   Panic in Needle Park , the junkie love-story movie they’d written. (The part eventually went to Al Pacino.)

What Didion found instead was tedium. The band waited, and waited, for Morrison to show up, leading to Didion having to focus on band small talk, bags of uneaten food and a Siberian Husky with different-colored eyes. A sense of torpor lingered over the proceedings until, finally, Morrison, in black leather pants, arrived. Even then, nothing much was accomplished. Morrison lit matches and placed them near his crotch. “There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever,” Didion wrote; she bailed long before the record wrapped.

Over the course of her career, Didion, who died on Dec. 23 of Parkinson’s disease at 87, wrote on a myriad of subjects — murder, grief, Central America, Miami, movie stars, California. Her coverage of the music scene of the Sixties and Seventies was just a small part of her oeuvre, and she pretty much left it behind after she and Dunne co-wrote a remake of A Star Is Born starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. But that world clearly fascinated her. “Rock and roll musicians are the ideal subject for me,” she said, with obvious delight, in the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. “They would just lead their lives in front of you.”

Her interests weren’t simply prurient. Didion’s observations on the Doors were tucked into her iconic essay “ The White Album ,” in which she grappled with beginning “to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.” In the late Sixties, she couldn’t have found a better example of the center not holding than the rock counterculture. Along with other stories in “The White Album” — the title itself a rock reference — the sight of one of her favorite bands mired in show-biz ennui embodied one of her narratives:  that “the world as I understood it no longer existed,” and that even the things that were supposed to save us, like rock & roll, were dissolving before our eyes.

The first hint of that viewpoint arrived two years earlier. In 1966, Didion profiled Joan Baez f or the New York Times (the piece, “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” was reprinted in Slouching Toward Bethlehem ). At the time, Baez was a deity of the folk and protest world and was launching an Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Northern California. In Didion’s reporting, Baez came across as earnest — with an “absence of guile” — but the depiction of the unconventional classes at the school, complete with ballet classes (to Beatles records) and reading discussion groups, was fairly withering. As Didion wrote of Baez, “She does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own and anyone’s adolescence.” At the time, many believed that musicians were the key to helping solve society’s ills; Didion clearly had her doubts.

Editor’s picks

Every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history.

The subtly scalding title essay of “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” found Didion in San Francisco during 1967’s Summer of Love. Everyone else in the media was covering that season in that city as if there were a new dawn rising. But in her story, originally for the Saturday Evening Post , Didion instead found runaways, drug abusers, spacey groupies watching the Grateful Dead rehearse, white Mime Troupers in blackface taunting Black kids, and a five-year-old on acid who admitted to liking Bob Weir. The piece unfurled one hippie-world nightmare after another, and Didion foretold the way Haight Ashbury would soon be overrun by dealers, tourists and harder drugs. (Even the Dead moved out soon after.)

“Rock and roll musicians are the ideal subject for me,” she once said. “They would just lead their lives in front of you.”

Back at her and Dunne’s house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, the couple threw a wild party attended by a hard-drinking Janis Joplin. Didion mentioned it in “The White Album,” where she also wrote that “music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat,” and ate dinner at ever-changing hours and lived on unpredictable schedules. What she didn’t cover in the story (but spoke of in the doc) was when she went to check on her and Dunne’s young daughter Quintana in her bedroom during the party. There, Didion found drugs on the floor, left over by party guests. She couldn’t believe anyone would have done that — another indication that, in her mind, the rock world was starting to plug into dangerous self-indulgence.

In the context of Didion viewing the decline of Sixties idealism through the prism of its leading soundtrack, there probably wasn’t a better example than A Star Is Born.  Didion and Dunne came up with the idea of updating that movie (two versions already existed), but with nouveau hip couple James Taylor and Carly Simon in the roles of the dissipated rocker and rising starlet. Taylor and Simon passed, as did Cher, and eventually the project wound up with Streisand and her producer and boyfriend, Jon Peters.

By the time the movie was completed, Didion and Dunne had been fired (leaving with a sizable payday, including 10 percent of the movie’s grosses). While it’s hard to say which parts of A Star Is Born came from their typewriters, the idea that the downward-spiral male lead was now a fading, debauched rocker (not an actor, as in the previous versions) was of a piece with Didion’s journalism. Played convincingly by Kristofferson, John Norman Howard guzzles alcohol and stumbles around onstage and off, hell-bent on ruining his career and singing excruciatingly bad fake-rock songs like “Watch Closely Now.” He’s the embodiment of Didion’s fears about what would become of the rock counterculture — it’s as if the increasingly bloated Jim Morrison had lived a few more years and resumed touring with the Doors instead of heading for Paris.

Related Stories

See bradley cooper join pearl jam to sing 'maybe it's time' at bottlerock, robby krieger, estate of ray manzarek sell their share of doors rights to primary wave music.

Sadly, Didion wasn’t wrong about the music she was drawn to; the years after “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” “The White Album,” and A Star Is Born were riddled with corpses and music-biz flame-outs. Just as fellow New Journalism legend Tom Wolfe regretted not following up on an early tip to write about an emerging style called hip-hop, it’s unfortunate Didion never dove into pop music’s rebirth by way of other genres. She never tackled punk, gangsta rap or rave culture. Then again, one can only imagine what she would have made of G.G. Allin or Burning Man or the recent horrors of Astroworld. She wouldn’t have been slouching toward Bethlehem — she likely would have collapsed altogether, grappling with the moment when the party truly got out of hand.

Vince McMahon Sexual Abuse Suit Paused for DOJ Investigation

• Courts and Crime
• By Ethan Millman

‘Doomsday’ Killings: Chad Daybell Found Guilty of Murdering First Wife, Second Wife's Two Children

• COURTS AND CRIME
• By Charisma Madarang

Ozempic Defined a TikTok Era. Now the App Wants It Gone

• Shot In The Dark
• By CT Jones

Harvey Weinstein Could Face New Charges in New York Rape Case Retrial

• Weinstein Retrial
• By Jon Blistein

How a 4-Hour Video About Disney’s Failed ‘Star Wars’ Hotel Took Over the Internet

• Insert Greedo Reference Here
• By Ej Dickson

Most Popular

Morgan spurlock, 'super size me' director, dies at 53, shannen doherty says 'little house on the prairie' co-star michael landon "spurred" her passion for acting, prince william & kate middleton are 'deeply upset' about the timing of the sussexes' brand relaunch, footage of bishop, 63, justifying marriage to 19-year-old congregant stirs debate, you might also like, ‘taking venice’ review: a tasty doc about robert rauschenberg winning the 1964 venice biennale. but was it a u.s. ‘conspiracy’ uh, no, pride month celebrates its 25th anniversary: the 2024 fashion collections from companies that give back to support lgbtqia+ community, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, how ‘the sympathizer’ crafted a world that is both fascinating and repulsive, manchester city’s sofive soccer centers expand footprint in u.s..

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

The Doors’ John Densmore remembers Joan Didion, Eve Babitz and Jim Morrison

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote to open “The White Album,” her kaleidoscopic essay on Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early ’70s that effortlessly flows through topics including Jim Morrison, Sharon Tate, Huey Newton, Didion’s stint in a psych ward, the Manson murders, living in a Franklin Avenue home in “a senseless-murder district” and that time “Roman Polanski accidentally spilled a glass of red wine” on her in Bel-Air.

Named for the Beatles’ self-titled album, Didion’s essay, which she worked on for a decade and published in her 1979 book of the same name, rings with an imaginary soundtrack.

Of her time living in Hollywood in her Franklin Avenue home, she writes: “I remember walking barefoot all day on the worn hardwood floors of that house and I remember ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ on the record player, ‘Do You Wanna Dance,’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’ and a song called ‘Midnight Confessions.’”

Most famously, Didion devoted a major scene to her experience watching the Doors in the studio working on “Waiting for the Sun,” their 1968 album featuring classics including “Hello, I Love You” and “The Unknown Soldier.” She describes “sitting on a cold vinyl floor” at Sunset Sound on Sunset Boulevard with Doors members Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore. They’re waiting for Morrison to arrive, and when he does, he’s his predictably provocative self, seemingly performing for Didion.

Didion: “He lights a match. He studies the flame awhile and then very slowly, very deliberately, lowers it to the fly of his black vinyl pants. Manzarek watches him. The girl who is rubbing Manzarek’s shoulders does not look at anyone. There is a sense that no one is going to leave this room, ever.”

Drummer Densmore was in that room and watched that interaction, he says during a phone call to discuss being included in Didion’s writing. But he’s also got something else on his mind.

“It’s pretty synchronistic that you’re calling because I was just writing a little letter to the editor about Eve Babitz,” he says.

Babitz, who died on Dec. 17, was celebrated for writing about Los Angeles culture during roughly the same period. But unlike Didion, who was an outsider to the rock and club scene, Babitz was an art and music insider — she had a fling with Morrison — and her writing reflected it.

Wrote Babitz of the Doors singer: “He was so cute that no woman was safe. He was 22, a few months younger than I. He had the freshness and humility of someone who’d been fat all his life, and was now suddenly a morning glory. I met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes …”

To extend Didion’s thought on stories and life, we multiply our lives when our stories collide. Below, Densmore discusses his intersections with both Didion and Babitz. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A guide to Joan Didion: Reading recommendations, tributes and more

Joan Didion, who died Thursday, left a seismic impact on the literary world and her home state of California.

Dec. 24, 2021

Why were you writing a letter to the editor? I was reading the story about Eve and the art world, and with all the tributes to Eve, no one has mentioned Eve doing the collage for Buffalo Springfield’s album cover — which I remember her spreading out on the desk of the Doors’ manager — started a movement, in my opinion.

Where did this happen? It was in the Doors’ office [in West Hollywood]. She was in and out. At the time, I was not into writing as much as Jim, obviously. I was in the music, which could match Jim’s lyrics, but it was years later when I realized how brilliant Eve and Joan were. In “The White Album,” Joan describes coming to the studio and hearing us record. At the time, I had no idea that “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was a reference from a Yeats poem.

What do you remember about Joan’s presence in the studio? In my autobiography, I described her as “a mousy little writer [who] was standing in the corner of the control room being very quiet.” I didn’t pay much attention to her. She was just sort of lurking. There’s the famous thing of Jim lighting a match for his cigarette or joint and he realizes Joan is looking at him, and he lowers the match down to his crotch.

Maybe you can settle an argument that’s occurring online. Throughout “The White Album,” Didion describes Morrison as wearing vinyl pants. Many people, most notably Rachel Kushner , believe she’s wrong — that he was wearing leather pants. Those weren’t vinyl pants, were they? [Laughs.] No, the pants were leather. I used to make jokes about them because he wore them for weeks. I said, “Jim, do you just stand them up on the corner when you take them off?” Later, he got a lizard-skin suit. That’s when I thought, “He’s buying into his own myth.”

Full coverage: Eve Babitz, vivid chronicler of Los Angeles

Eve Babitz, the author known for chronicles of L.A. drawn largely from her life, died last week at 78. See our full coverage past and present

Dec. 23, 2021

What do you recall about Babitz? Well, she evolved into writing these sentences that were jam-packed with local ambiance and more universal questions all in one sentence. Like, wow, maybe even beyond Joan — not that they’re in competition. They’re two great L.A. writers. What did Eve say? “I’m not Joan Didion,” and she isn’t. She is different — and was maybe a little jealous of Joan’s success.

Had you kept in touch with Eve? Not in many, many years. How should I say this? I was a stepping-stone. She was after Jim. Look who she went through: Ed Ruscha , Steve Martin , et cetera.

Wait, did you have an affair with Eve? Yes, but it was clear that she was interested in Jim. I mean, you’ve gotta love her for her artistic pursuits. I remember years ago, one producer, I think Lou Adler, said of the Doors movie, “Eve Babitz should write that script.”

[Note: Not long after this interview occurred, Densmore followed up with an email regarding his time with Babitz: “Randall, ‘affair’ is too strong of a word. I was a ‘one-night stand’ on the way to the Lizard King ... is more like it.”]

How Jim Morrison’s final sessions with the Doors produced an L.A. classic out of chaos

A reissue of the Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” and a memoir from guitarist Robby Krieger, find the band navigating Jim Morrison’s addictions during its final sessions.

Dec. 6, 2021

More to Read

What Joan Didion’s broken Hollywood can teach us about our own

April 8, 2024

Arthur Jafa shifts into another realm

March 19, 2024

L.A. confidential: The untold stories behind some of the greatest songs of the 1970s and beyond

Dec. 11, 2023

From Madonna to Barbra Streisand, it was the year music took over books

Dec. 5, 2023

Love affairs, the diva thing and that nose: Takeaways from Barbra Streisand’s huge memoir

Nov. 7, 2023

From East L.A., the Stains’ Robert Becerra was a punk-rock legend, to those in the know

Sept. 19, 2023

The choir that saved my life

July 13, 2023

Piecing together the story of my father, the Black cowboy-musician Jimmy Holiday

April 26, 2023

Why Joan Didion’s fiction matters more than you (or I) ever knew

April 12, 2023

The biggest entertainment stories

Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Former staff writer Randall Roberts covered Los Angeles music culture for the Los Angeles Times. He had served various roles since arriving at The Times in 2010, including music editor and pop music critic. As a staff writer, he explored the layered history of L.A. music, from Rosecrans and Sunset to Ventura Boulevard and beyond. His 2020 project on the early Southern California phonograph industry helped identify the first-ever commercial recording made in Los Angeles.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Punk Rock Bowling turns Las Vegas into a more inclusive (and still crazy) mosh pit destination

May 30, 2024

Nicki Minaj alleges racism and a conspiracy against her after drug arrest in Amsterdam

30 years later, Sarah McLachlan looks back at the album that ‘felt to me like freedom’

Asha Puthli was nearly India’s first disco star. She’s now 79, and her tour’s selling out

• Skip to main content
• Skip to quick search
• Skip to global navigation
• Submissions
• Search Archive

Five to One: Rethinking the Doors and the Sixties Counterculture [1]

Permissions : This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact [email protected] to use this work in a way not covered by the license.

For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy .

While historians have examined the complexity and nuance of the 1960s counterculture, their analyses of the popular culture that was intimately connected to it continue to focus on “hippie” culture from San Francisco. The Doors represent a different side of the experience. They were influenced by ideas that were influential across the movements that coalesced into the popular resistance front of the late sixties, but the band articulated an unorthodox brand of countercultural resistance that affirmed or rejected different aspects of the culture as it was discussed at the time and as it would later be constructed in popular memory. They advocated “sex as a weapon,” while subtly eschewing “psychedelia” and rejecting the more overt elements of hippie culture, especially Woodstock, in favor of “darkness” and “constant revolution.” The band’s extreme popularity in the late sixties points to the wide appeal of their particular countercultural brand.

“Five to One” is an evocative phrase. For listeners aware of the Doors song by the same title, it can bring to mind images of sex, fear, death, freedom, revolution, or simply drugs and alcohol. It can be a good-time anthem or a sobering indictment of the sixties. For listeners in the sixties, this double meaning was likely intentional. The song’s lyrics are loaded with double- or triple-meanings. In the 1968 recording from the LP Waiting for the Sun, lead singer Jim Morrison’s vocals are at times audibly slurred; but the song starts off strong. “Love my girl, she lookin’ good,” Morrison almost whispers into the microphone, establishing a sexual tone from the beginning before letting his listeners know that “no one here gets out alive.” Joan Didion remarked on this sex/death duality in an essay in The White Album (1979) . The Doors, she claimed, were “missionaries of apocalyptic sex.” They “seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra” and “insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation.” [2] Other double meanings in the song are equally illustrative. In the next stanza Morrison sings, “they got the guns, but we got the numbers.” At face value, the lyric can be interpreted as an overt political message. The police may have “the guns,” but the people “got the numbers.” Organist Ray Manzarek, however, revealed another meaning of the song in a 1968 interview in Life magazine. “In California, a number is another name for a joint, a marijuana cigarette,” he pointed out, adding drily, “[I] just thought you might want to know that.” [3] Sex, death, politics, drugs. Many of the Doors’ songs are as cryptic and suggestive as “Five to One.”

“Five to One” is meaningful on another level, though. Discussions about music feature prominently in many historical accounts of the sixties counterculture. While they have acknowledged that the counterculture was complex and nuanced, historians continue to focus on San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe & The Fish to describe the popular culture that issued from and reinforced it from 1967 to 1969. In his acclaimed 1996 book And the Crooked Places Made Straight historian David Chalmers provides an excellent example of this dominant interpretation. “Somewhere about the year 1967... the hippie culture turned into the counterculture,” he explains. “San Francisco gave birth to it,” and “life was psychedelia.” San Francisco bands became the “model,” in his view, of a “tribal-love rock musical” that became popular in that year. The Los Angeles-based Doors released their first and most successful album in 1967, though, and by the end of the “summer of love” it was number one on the national charts. By the end of the year, the Doors had two albums— The Doors and Strange Days— on the Billboard Top 10. For every Grateful Dead album a listener bought, at least five others bought an album by the Doors. For the rare listener who called in to a radio station to request a song by Country Joe & The Fish, at least five called in to request “Light My Fire” or “Break on Through.” These listeners were aware of the Doors’ message, even if they often misinterpreted it. Many fans and critics identified the band with a particular set of “psychedelic,” even “revolutionary,” countercultural credentials. “Five to One,” then, illustrates both the webs of meaning in the individual songs of the Doors and the role that the band played in the popular counterculture.

Because popular music albums are, in most cases, mass-produced and marketed for profit by large corporations, they present a superficial paradox for historians who wish to interpret “authentic” cultural documents. Do record corporations produce and sell what the public really wants to hear, or do they shape the public’s tastes to match their own economic needs? Cultural studies and media scholars have addressed this issue by defining two different “values” of cultural products. Record companies depend on the exchange, or economic, value of an album or single to stay in business, while consumers respond to the use, or “cultural,” value of the album when they listen to it. “The music industry can control the first,” cultural studies scholar John Storey explains, “but it is consumers who make the second.” [4]

The Doors crossed over the divide between corporation and consumer. While it was fashionable to scorn commercial success in San Francisco and other “underground” markets, the Doors and other bands in the Los Angeles scene kept a close eye on their appeal in the market. [5] Elektra vice president Steve Harris recalls Morrison’s concern with the band’s success. “I would always say to the boys, ‘Oh, the record jumped from this to this, and it’s got a bullet,’” he remembers, “[and] they gave the facade, or at least Jim did, of I don’t care.” After going “a couple of days” without bringing up record sales, however, Morrison “cornered” Harris and asked, “Well, where did the record go? How much is it selling?” Robby Krieger shares a similar memory of Morrison: “Jim never thought we were big enough. He thought we should be at least as big as the Stones. It never happened fast enough for him.” [6] The band was happy to discuss sales with interviewers as well. In a 1967 promotional spot on SUNY Oswego college radio, for example, the band chatted about royalties, chart positions, touring, and fame with student interviewers. [7] There was no apparent contradiction between fame, success, and social commentary for the Doors and many of their Los Angeles counterparts.

For historians, the use value of popular music has special significance. Popular songs and albums are freighted with “hidden histories,” according to cultural scholar George Lipsitz. Because consumption is such an important part of daily life for so many people, Lipsitz argues that popular music products become “focal points” that allow consumers to express ideas and emotions that are not possible in other types of cultural products. [8] This “uses and gratifications” approach to pop culture emphasizes the active role of consumers in the market. [9] Because listeners used the music of the Doors and other late sixties bands to meet their own needs—and often to shape their identities—the commercial albums these bands produced are definitely “authentic” cultural documents.

The “uses and gratifications” of sixties music consumers necessitates a reassessment of the relationship between the music of the Doors and the counterculture. First, the individual Doors, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore, brought social and political philosophies to the band that fit into different niches of the broader cultural trends of the early- and mid-sixties. This paper will necessarily, perhaps unfortunately, focus more on the philosophy of Jim Morrison than the other members of the band. He defined the Doors for the majority of their audience, and the unique artistic perspective he brought to the band corresponded with many of the antecedents of the resistance movement that emerged in full bloom on radio and television in the summer of 1967. Listeners were aware of these ideas in the Doors’ music and used them to categorize the band in ways that historians have not. The Doors and their promoters, meanwhile, continued to express their ideas through recordings, performances, interviews, and concert posters. Audiences and critics responded to these messages in diverse ways; while listeners and writers often did not draw a line between the Doors and hippie culture, the band attempted to separate themselves from the San Francisco scene and psychedelic “catch phrases.” They wanted to express a more intellectual appeal. [10]

This fault between San Francisco and Los Angeles, perceived and articulated by the Doors, points toward the ongoing historical reinterpretation of the counterculture. Historians recognize that it was not a monolithic movement that attracted adherents with a universal set of messages and symbols, like peace and love, drugs and sex. The musical landscape of “ the counterculture” was instead a multifaceted complex of different, overlapping subcultures, bound only by philosophies that challenged normative attitudes. Hippies were just one dominant subculture within the countercultural artistic milieu. The philosophies of these subcultures often coincided, but the people who participated in them demarcated the borders between their respective scenes when they felt it was necessary. The Doors represent another side of the resistance experience, a side fascinated with self-expression, darkness and release, sex and death. It was only after they were transformed by use into something new that these separate but overlapping subcultures were later compressed in popular memory into a single “hippie” experience. Historians can use the music and message of the Doors to illustrate the complexity of subcultures that made up the popular counterculture.

Resistance Provenance

In 1968, Rimbaud scholar Wallace Fowlie received a letter from Jim Morrison praising his latest book of translations of the brilliant, irreverent French poet’s work. “Just wanted to say thanks for doing the Rimbaud translation,” Morrison wrote. “I needed it because I don’t read French that easily.... I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me.” [11] Fowlie had no idea who Jim Morrison or the Doors were when he received the letter, but he later discovered that Morrison was especially fond of Rimbaud’s “Oraison du Soir,” or “Evening Prayer.” The poem, in which Rimbaud describes sitting in a barber’s chair, drinking “thirty or forty mugs” and smoking a pipe, while “A Thousand Dreams gently burn inside me,” foreshadowed many of the characteristics that were already defining Morrison by 1968. [12] Fans recognized that Morrison was wild and unpredictable; he was a rebel, just like Rimbaud. Many fans also recognized, however, that Morrison’s lyrics conveyed a sort of intellectualism that was missing from the pop charts prior to the Doors’ debut album in 1967.

Rimbaud was just one of many hip intellectual influences that Morrison and the rest of the Doors brought to songwriting and performing. Antonin Artaud, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Chicago blues performers like Howlin’ Wolf, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi all inspired and informed the music, lyrics, and performances of the Doors. Many of these artistic and intellectual influences were influential within non-normative intellectual and artistic communities of the early- and mid-sixties. They possessed “revolutionary” credentials that contributed to the perceived countercultural relevance of the Doors.

Norman O. Brown’s writing best conveys the foundations of countercultural thought as it was expressed by the Doors. In two works, Life Against Death in 1959 and an influential Harper’s piece in 1961, Brown articulated a split between repressed, “Apollonian” society and a liberated, “Dionysian” self. “The Western consciousness has always asked for freedom,” he wrote in Harper’s , “but everywhere it is in chains; and now at the end of its tether.” Liberation, in Brown’s view, could come from “the blessed madness of the Maenad and the Bacchant.” He advocated a search for “mysteries ... secret and occult .” [13] Brown’s work magnified upon and modified the analyses of modern society advanced by Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. One of these, Herbert Marcuse, wrote of a potentially non-repressive society that was possible only by the liberation of happiness, which he identified with Eros—libido. “The sacrifice” of Eros “has paid off well,” he insisted in the opening pages of his 1955 work Eros and Civilization. “In the technically advanced areas of civilization, the conquest of nature is practically complete, and more needs of a greater number of people are fulfilled than ever before.” Unfortunately, though, “intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom.” [14] Mirroring Freud, Marcuse argued that “unfreedom” was caused by the repression of libido. But how, he asked, could society liberate itself and continue to enjoy the benefits of progress? Only through a unification of Apollonian discipline and Dionysian freedom, he argued, were happiness and progress simultaneously possible. Brown, on the other hand, argued that progress was only possible through the revelation of “some mystery, some secret” and that there came a time when society “has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries.” It was time, he argued, to discover these new secrets. [15] He affirmed an element of the Apollonian in Life Against Death, though, when he maintained that Eros—“the life instinct”—could only “magnify life” by assisting the “death instinct.” [16]

Jim Morrison was well-versed in these philosophies but took a middle ground between Brown and Marcuse. He was excited by Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy , in which the philosopher argues that the Greek drama is successful because it embeds the Dionysian, in the form of the chorus, within the Apollonian, expressed through the narrative itself and its catastrophic conclusion. A 1968 interviewer reported that Morrison “suggests you read Nietzsche on the nature of tragedy to understand where he is really at” but missed the larger point somewhat when he asserted that “there was no need to guess which side” of the “Apollonian–Dionysian struggle for control of the life force” Morrison identified with. His performances with the Doors expressed both aspects of the struggle: sex and pleasure, Dionysus; and death and logic, Apollo. As a performer, nonetheless, he was eager to apply the philosophies of Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Brown to the theater. When he was a student at Florida State University in the early sixties, Morrison was deeply engaged with a class on the philosophies of protest. A student recalled for a 1981 biography that Morrison “could draw the professor into amazing discussions ... and the rest of us would sit there dumbfounded.” [17] He was intrigued by Freudian sexual neuroses and developed a theory of the psychology of crowds that he tested at the university. “I can just look at [a crowd],” he told some other students, “and I can diagnose the crowd psychologically.” Four students performing together, he said, could “cure” the crowd’s neuroses. “We can make love to it. We can make it riot.” [18] For Morrison, art offered the best chance to put his ideas to work. He transferred to UCLA in 1964 to pursue a degree in cinema before forming the Doors and enacting the Dionysian–Apollonian struggle on stage.

The Dionysian spirit of abandon and freedom found resonance in the emerging counterculture. One scholar observes that, by the end of the 1960s, using the term “Dionysian” to describe some new cultural development “was to risk cliché.” Saul Bellow’s main character in the novel Herzog observed an “erotic renaissance,” or “Dionysian Revival” as early as 1964. [19] According to Norman Brown, this “revival” was open to all comers. In Life Against Death, he insisted that the Dionysian consciousness “does not observe the limit, but overflows; [It is] consciousness which does not negate any more .” [20] These ideas held a mass appeal that became evident in the “revolutions” of 1967. One contemporary, historian Theodore Roszak, observed in 1969 an “unprecedented penchant for the occult, for magic, and for ritual,” which played an important part in the protest movements of the late sixties. As an example, he cites an October, 1967 demonstration in which fifty thousand protesters marched on the Pentagon. One group of these marchers “‘cast mighty words of white light against the demon-controlled structure,’ in hopes of levitating that grim ziggurat right off the ground.” [21] A bright orange button promoting the event depicted a pentagon floating over a field of grass. It read: “The Pentagon is Rising October 21.” [22] Even if antiwar activists did not believe that the power of the occult could actually levitate the Pentagon, they believed that the mysterious language and imagery associated with it could inspire their movement.

The occult influenced other aspects of the band’s public image. A November 1967 article in the New York Times reported that guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore were “disciples of the Indian mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.” [23] In 1966, organist Ray Manzarek met Krieger and Densmore in a meditation class at “one of the first meditation centers of the Maharishi,” according to 1968 interview in Eye magazine. [24] The Maharishi’s impact on sixties pop culture was almost the brunt of satire by the end of the decade. A 1971 New York Times article on the popularity of meditation opened, “The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, remember?” [25] Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore were involved with Transcendental Meditation at least a year before the Beatles or Rolling Stones made the guru into a national figure in 1967, at a time when his spiritual philosophy was still underground.

These elements came together in performance. Under the influence of Antonin Artaud, Jim Morrison envisioned theatrical musical performances that went beyond Freud’s sexual neuroses of the crowd or Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian analysis of tragedy. The French dramatist and poet Artaud advocated a “theater of cruelty” that would cut through a viewer’s “false reality” by depicting unflinching scenes of emotional and physical violence. In his 1938 manifesto he wrote, “we need above all a theater that wakes us up: nerves and heart.” [26] The idea that theater could “find itself ... by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams” [27] excited stage performers, directors, and writers throughout the sixties. A January 1964 arts report in the Christian Science Monitor , for example, reported on a “curious and interesting innovation” being attempted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, who were “giving a sort of surrealist program based on the theatrical theories of the Frenchman, Antoine Artaud [ sic ].” [28] These ideas were linked to politics. The dean of the School of Drama at Yale wondered in a 1968 editorial whether the “New Theater,” drawing from “a great number of avant-garde influences,” Artaud included, was linked with the “New Politics.” [29] With its unique mixture of both Dionysian stagecraft and the Theater of Cruelty, the play Dionysus in ’69 troubled the Time magazine reviewer sent to report on it. “Sweaty, tangled heaps of men and women” engaged in an “orgy” on stage, the reviewer wrote, clucking that “playgoers may wonder whether Dionysus was the Greek god of wine or voyeurism.” Artaud’s ideas were “behind all this,” according to Time , but it was “shamelessly alive from the waist down and shamefully dead from the neck up.” [30]

The “sex and death” dialectic at the center of the Doors’ music, then, was situated in a dramatic milieu that was already experimenting with Artaud and Dionysus on the same stage. In a 2003 interview, Manzarek explained the theatrical philosophy championed by the band. “Each song,” he told interviewer Harvey Kubernik, “had to have a dramatic structure.... You had to have dramatic peaks and valleys.” [31] Morrison drew a direct connection between Greek tragedy and Doors performances in a 1967 interview with The Harvard Crimson. “We’re right at that middle ground where it’s not quite drama and it’s not quite primitive either,” he explained. Like the Greek theater, which started with just one actor on the stage, music was developing more advanced dramatic forms. “Maybe two actors will come next, then three, and then it’ll be a drama instead of just a song.” [32]

The Doors engaged with a number of ideas that were popularly associated with the sixties counterculture. They brought together in their music and performances the liberating philosophy of Dionysian freedom, the intriguing and hip spirituality of Transcendental Meditation, and avant-garde theories from the radical fringes of theater. Listeners familiar with these ideas would have understood the “scene” credibility they bestowed upon the band. Sociologists and cultural studies scholars have identified the intimate connections between music and identity. [33] The Doors would have affirmed the “countercultural” credentials of fans that identified with the same ideas. Through performances, interviews, and promotional materials between 1967 and 1971, they clarified and refined their own cultural credentials.

Publicity, 1967–1971

In their music and lyrics, the Doors called upon their underground ideological provenance to explore a variety of “countercultural” themes. At the same time, promoters and journalists created an image of the band that was at times “psychedelic,” outrageous, revolutionary, or ridiculous, depending on their stance. Over the course of their career, the band’s viewpoints on some of the key issues of the sixties evolved. An examination of their stance on these issues reveals some of the differences between the Doors (along with other Los Angeles bands) and their counterparts from San Francisco, who were also identified as part of the “movement.” Some of these differences were intentionally emphasized by Morrison, Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore to distance themselves from what they believed to be psychedelic “catch phrases” that simplified the music. Others were more apparent in the descriptions of their music and performances in the media. Drugs, sex, politics, and the rest of sixties culture came under their gaze in six studio albums and numerous live performances between 1966 and 1971.

The Doors were intimately associated with sexuality in the minds of their audience. A November 1967 article in the New York Times explained that “Jim Morrison considers the Doors as something more than a hit rock ‘n’ roll group,” but his image was “directed at the same constituency as the Monkees: Those 14-year-old girls of America’s suburbs.... [His] vision is packaged in sex.” [34] There was some truth in this analysis. Rock journalist Harvey Kubernik recalls the early months of the Doors’ popularity while he was in high school: “At first it didn’t seem to matter that we boys listened to the Doors,” he remembers, “[because] the girls in ... homeroom couldn’t care less.” After the band’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1967, though, “it got to the point where we guys couldn’t compete with Jim Morrison.... He was the ultimate beautiful bad boy.” [35] This pattern continued to be a significant part of the band’s appeal for the rest of their public career. Another New York Times article, from 1970, reported on a concert at Madison Square Garden. “Onstage assaults, where teen-age girls must be pried off the bodies of the performers,” writer Mike Jahn opined, “are tributes usually reserved for the best-known rock idols.” During the concert, “at least two dozen ... girls and quite a few boys” were removed from the stage. [36] Fans expected a highly sexual performance and could be disappointed when a concert didn’t meet their expectations. One fan expressed his or her frustration in a letter to the Chicago Tribune after a November, 1968 performance. “All I had heard about the Doors (Morrison in particular) was the fantastic stage show they provide,” the writer fumed, but Morrison “stood listlessly thru the whole show and mumbled to himself and hardly moved at all.” He jumped in the air during one song, but the anonymous correspondent was unimpressed: “his shirt flew up, and we saw his tummy. Wow.” [37] According to most reports, this fan’s experience was rare.

This type of sexual appeal was not too different from other popular music acts. Morrison appeared in teenage magazines like Tiger Beat and was a locker pinup for girls at Harvey Kubernik’s high school. Morrison articulated a particular brand of political sexuality, however, that countercultural audiences would have recognized as something more than Tiger Beat fodder. “Maybe you could call us erotic politicians.... [There is] politics, but our power is sexual,” he told a Times reporter in 1969. He believed that, at a Doors performance, sexuality “starts with just me” before including the “charmed circle of musicians on stage.” After that, it “goes out to the audience” through the music and “interacts with them.” After they took it home and “[interacted] with the rest of reality,” Morrison would “get it back by interacting with that reality.” [38] As with “New Theater” and “New Politics,” commentators were interested in the “New Morality.” In a 1970 CBC radio interview, Morrison elaborated on it. “When I was in high school, and even college, which wasn’t that long ago,” he told interviewer Tony Thomas, “sex was still in the Victorian age. It was very hush-hush.” By 1970, though, “this new group of kids that’s coming along ... [is] much more free.” Linking their sexuality with politics, Morrison claimed that the new developments were “completely beneficial,” as “the repression of sexual energy has always been the grandest tool of a totalitarian system.” [39] Many young people across the country were engaged in the same types of conversations about sex. Historian Beth Bailey discusses the New Morality at the University of Kansas in Sex in the Heartland. “For some, sex itself became a moral claim,” she writes, “a way of distancing oneself from mainstream or ‘straight’ society.” [40] Morrison labored to inject himself, his poetry, and his band into this discussion.

Authority figures certainly linked the Doors with the potentially dangerous New Morality. At a New Haven concert, the show was stopped and Morrison was arrested after announcing to the audience during a song that a police officer had interrupted him and a girl backstage and sprayed mace in his eyes. Morrison viewed the incident as an example of police brutality and attempted to bring the audience to his side. “I want to tell you about something that happened just two minutes ago right here in New Haven,” he told the audience from the stage, “this is New Haven, isn’t it, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America?” He told the audience about meeting a woman backstage and finding a shower room for some privacy. “We weren’t doing anything, you know,” he continued, keeping time with Densmore’s drum rhythm, “just standing there and talking,” until a “little man, in a little blue suit, and a little blue cap” came in and maced him. [41] The audience took Morrison’s side, and the arena erupted in violence after Morrison was arrested. [42] The police press release, meanwhile, claimed that the show was “an indecent and immoral exhibition.” [43]

Two years later, Morrison faced charges for exposing himself to an audience in Miami, Florida. While band members claimed that Morrison only simulated exposing himself to the audience, newspapers reported the official version of events. [44] The incident brought out the “Legion of Decency” according to a Washington Post journalist, who attempted to “wipe Morrison off the musical map.” [45] FBI records released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the outrage that Morrison and other rock acts inspired in one citizen. He authored a letter to Senator Sam Ervin and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in March 1969, enclosing an album by the Fugs and a press clipping on the Miami incident. “I don’t know what, if anything, can be done to stop the distribution of such trash,” he wrote. “I think the time is long past due when the great mass of decent Americans can be assured that such as this will not be allowed to be peddled to their kids” in record stores. Hoover sent him a letter back, assuring him of his personal concern. “It is repulsive to right-thinking people,” he told him, “and can have serious effects on our young people.” [46] Viewing it alongside the forms of sexual protest sweeping the nation’s youth, authorities were troubled by the sexuality of the Doors but powerless to do anything about it. Morrison was only convicted of two misdemeanors in the wake of the Miami incident.

Drugs and politics rounded out the Doors’ radical message, but also illustrated the ways that the band tried to distance itself from the rest of the popular counterculture. Drugs were an important part of the band’s mystique from the beginning. Manzarek recalled their 1966 vision of the band in a 2003 interview: “[we were] going to be strange and eerie and LSD-infused.” [47] Rumors of their early excesses at the Whisky a Go Go in 1966 were legendary. “Ray sniffed an amyl nitrate cap” before a show, a 1968 article in Eye reported, “and played so long he had to be dragged away from the organ.” Morrison, during the same period, “was so consistently high on acid ... that he could eat sugar cubes like candy without visible effect.” [48] Concert promoters were anxious to pitch the Doors as a psychedelic act. One concert poster from an April 1967 show at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco featured the Doors and their opening acts in almost unreadable type underneath a swirling, red and blue vortex superimposed over the image of a naked woman. [49] East Coast promoters used the same appeal. A poster from an October 1967 show at The Surf in Nantasket, Massachusetts, looked like an oil projector depicting a woman with long, flowing hair. The details of the concert were, again, almost unreadable. [50] These posters followed a recognizable form than fans could use to categorize the band. [51]

On the national stage, the Doors attempted to distance themselves from the overt psychedelic culture. They made their views clear in an October 1967 interview in the Harvard Crimson. When the interviewer claimed that the band “started” psychedelic music, they were dismayed. “They really throw that word around,” Densmore replied, and Manzarek clarified: “That’s become the catch phrase for the last half of the 1960’s.” Morrison wondered, “what could that possibly mean, you know? Psychedelic. What could that mean anyway?” Attempting to pin them down, the interviewer asked whether drugs were an important part of their creative process. They all rejected the idea, advocating a more general form of personal freedom instead.

Morrison: About drugs or anything else, I think everybody should do what they want, that’s all.

Manzarek: Whatever the individual needs to do to get those inner feelings out is great. Drink, smoke, meditate, any one of a million things.

Morrison: Even celibacy.

Krieger: But we certainly don’t need drugs to dull our senses. [52]

While this may have been a public relations response for a college newspaper, they assiduously avoided the “psychedelic” label in many other interviews. Morrison, especially, wanted to convey an intellectual image. In August, before the Crimson interview, they sat down with Mojo Navigator in San Francisco, which had a resident “experimenter” on the staff. Morrison quickly changed the subject during a lengthy monologue about a new drug, NDDN—“one of Hoffman’s drugs, the third step up from LSD 26.” After the experimenter, “Cougar,” explained his latest trip, Morrison replied, “Interviews are good, but ... critical essays are really where it’s at.” [53] A year later he told Richard Goldstein of New York Magazine , “I wonder why people like to believe I’m high all the time. I guess ... maybe they think someone else can take their trip for them.” [54] Even so, Morrison was frequently under the influence of something , drugs or alcohol. Morrison’s friend Digby Diehl recalled the singer’s pre-show routine. He told an interviewer in 1998 that he would sit backstage with Morrison while he drank or smoked his way into character. “Often he’d arrive as the shy poet, and he would become that wild, theatrical sexual figure.” [55] Audience members threw joints onto the stage during performances, interviewers continued to ask Morrison and the Doors about drugs, and promoters continued pitching them as psychedelic acts. It is widely believed that Jim Morrison’s death in 1971 was drug- or alcohol-related.

The most significant difference the Doors wanted their audience to be aware of was their disconnection from the San Francisco scene. They told as many people as possible that, musically and politically, they were not from Northern California and not part of the “love generation.” While they used some of the same musical ideas to write their songs, the Doors were not influenced by folk-rock, and Jim Morrison’s lyrics did not often encourage listeners to “feel good.” Listeners were more likely to call them “evil” than look to them for peace and love. An album review in the Washington Post summarized the “recurring themes” in Morrison’s lyrics: “[He has a] fascination with evil, the love-hate-sex equation, anarchy within a rigid social structure, a love of the surreal and macabre.” [56] Reporters and reviewers have used a rich vocabulary of dark adjectives to describe their sound. It was, at times, “satanic,” “unsettling,” “grotesque,” “scary,” or “dangerous.” These descriptions affected the band’s reception in particular segments of the counterculture. They were not invited to play any of the major festivals of the era. “They were afraid of us,” Densmore recalled of the organizers of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in his 1990 autobiography. “We didn’t represent the attitude of the festival: peace and love and flower power. We represented the shadow side.” While his “flower-child half” really wanted to go to the festival, Densmore recalled, he was not able to attend because he was in “the demon Doors.” [57]

Woodstock was a particularly thorny issue with Morrison. He drew a dark line between his artistic and political philosophy and the festival’s philosophy in two 1970 interviews. “The hippie lifestyle is really a middle-class phenomenon,” he told interviewer Tony Thomas in May, “and it could not exist in any other society except ours, where there’s this incredible surfeit of goods, products, and leisure time.” While preceding generations had struggled with depression and war, the sixties offered “money enough to live a kind of a flagrant, outrageous lifestyle.” [58] He was even less equivocal in an October interview with ZigZag magazine interviewer John Tobler. “It seemed like a bunch of young parasites, being kind of spoon-fed this three or four days of ... well, you know what I mean.” While he conceded that his statements were probably “sour grapes,” he said that the audience at Woodstock was “not what they pretend to be, some free celebration of a young culture.” Morrison further attacked their call for a “sudden, miraculous revolution,” saying that it “would be unreal to me.... You have to be in a constant state of revolution, or you’re dead.” [59] The Doors’ message was completely incompatible with Woodstock, according to Morrison, and hippies were bourgeois twits, at best.

The antipathy between the Doors and elements of the San Francisco scene went both ways. Manzarek remembers in his autobiography that “San Francisco didn’t like L.A. Too plastic, not a real city.” At their first show in the city, the audience was unenthusiastic: “Here was a band being featured as coming from L.A. And calling themselves The Doors? Well, how pretentious and how very plasticene. ‘Boo, hiss!’” [60] In a 1968 interview with British weekly Record Mirror, he said that “San Francisco likes to think of itself as a European culture apart from the rest of the U.S.” Los Angeles was focused on business and industry while San Francisco was “trying to be creative.” [61] The divide between these two sites of the counterculture was, for some, deep and wide.

The Doors articulated a unique political vision that supported personal politics and mass resistance while remaining critical of the main currents of countercultural thought. The band’s name signaled the foundation of Morrison’s political ideas. Drawn from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), Morrison explained that “The Doors are what’s between the known and the unknown.” [62] The “unknown” played a significant role for the band. In a 1970 interview, for example, Creem magazine correspondent Lizze James claimed that fans of the band saw Morrison as “a savior, the leader who’ll set them all free.” Morrison found the idea “absurd.” “I think it’s a lie,” he told James, “everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most.... But that’s bullshit!” Instead, he argued, “people resist freedom because they’re afraid of the unknown.” The only way they could really be free, he argued, was to face “the greatest fear imaginable”—the unknown, in other words—in order to “be what you really are.” Political revolution is impossible “until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level,” Morrison maintained: “It’s got to happen inside first.” [63] While Morrison rejected the type of radical political freedom associated with mass politics and the New Left, his focus on personal politics mirrored the consciousness-raising methods pioneered by second-wave feminism.

The band took an unequivocal stance against the Vietnam War. The 1968 song “The Unknown Soldier” uses the war to address the core themes of fear and personal liberation. The song begins with a subdued tone; Morrison takes the role of a narrator oppressed by the conflict. “Wait until the war is over,” he advises the listener, “and we’re both a little older.” This subdued tone gives way to a darkly surreal groove after an abrupt time change and Morrison narrates images of war broadcast on the news: “breakfast where the news is read,” he sings, “television children fed / Bullet strikes the helmet’s head.” After the eponymous Unknown Soldier is “executed” in a dramatic martial interlude, the song repeats the subdued tone. “Make a grave for the unknown soldier / Nestled in your hollow shoulder,” Morrison nearly whispers over the ethereal organ before repeating the chorus and taking the song out in a triumphant cacophony with cheering crowds and shouts of joy. The dramatic confrontation with fear and pain—indeed, the death of the “unknown”—in the song leads the listener to a climax of ecstatic release.

The band resisted war on several fronts. Youth formed the ideological center of their opposition from an early date. They took a stand against the militarization of children in a benefit show for the “No War Toys” organization in 1966, months before the release of their debut album. [64] Morrison—the son of a Navy admiral—made his position clear in a 1970 interview on CBC radio. Young people were “the ones that always fight the wars,” he told the interviewer: “they’re the human fodder for the war machine. There just seems to be no way around it; there’s just no cause.” Touching on some of the themes in “The Unknown Soldier,” Morrison explained that war on television was “a great drama, life and death right there, a struggle.” The “glamour” of war “infected” Americans from youth, he explained: “with little kids running around playing war, playing cowboys and Indians or whatever ... somehow it’s just ingrained in you from the beginning that there’s something heroic, proving yourself in the battle.” Ultimately, Morrison believed, “you have to entertain these utopian concepts that life could work without all that struggle.” [65]

While the Doors took a stance against the Vietnam War and in favor of personal liberation, Morrison was critical of some of the more “revolutionary” modes of sixties political activism. “Tell All the People,” for example, was the first Doors song published under an individual songwriting credit. Krieger’s lyrics contained the lines “get your guns / the time has come / to follow me down.” Morrison demurred. “I don’t want people getting their guns and following me,” he told Krieger. “I’m not leading a violent revolution or anything.” He refused to put his name on the song. [66] Morrison was often deeply ambivalent about politics, focused more on personal expression. In the 1967 Harvard Crimson interview, for example, he argued, “if you’re into politics, then it’s real for you. If you’re not, then it doesn’t really exist, you know?” Despite the band’s clear antiwar message, Morrison applied the same philosophy to Vietnam: “The war doesn’t exist except for the soldiers and people involved directly with the war. Like I don’t believe there is a war.” [67] Producer Paul Rothchild explained his take on Morrison’s stance in Life magazine. “A few years ago you had social protest,” he argued, but “to the modern ear, that’s become corny.” Protest, he continued, was “self-defeating, because it just gets people mad. What is significant is social comment.” Morrison’s social commentary—when he asks “what have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister?” in When the Music’s Over , for example—“doesn’t draw conclusions, doesn’t say what the solution is.” [68] Unlike the self-assured activists leading the counterculture from San Francisco and the nation’s college campuses, Jim Morrison and the Doors charted a more equivocal political course.

In 2001 Barry “The Fish” Melton, one of the founding members of Country Joe & The Fish, contributed an essay about the counterculture to Long Time Gone , an academic historical retrospective of the sixties. “The 1960s I want to remember,” he reminisced, “will always be that relatively small group of people in the San Francisco Bay Area” music scene. “I want to remember my mixed feelings of fear and pride, and the incredible sense of community I felt when singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ locked arm-in-arm with others at a civil rights sit-in.” [69] The popular narrative of countercultural resistance is also focused on Melton’s San Francisco ideal. “Ask anyone born after 1964” about the sixties, the writers of a 1994 article claim, “and you will likely hear about how everybody was a hippie, protested social injustice and the Vietnam War, practiced free love, and smoked Marijuana.” [70] A more recent article in the OAH Magazine of History about secondary history education reveals how this stereotype is being perpetuated. “Lessons where students make tie-dyes, paint protest signs, or listen to the enduringly popular music of Jimi Hendrix testify to [a] widespread belief that familiarity breeds knowledge.” [71] While historians recognize that the counterculture was far more complex than the popular narrative would have it, their analyses are incomplete. Popular culture cannot be removed from any discussion of the era, but many historians continue to write about music that reinforce a “peace and love,” hippie-dominated narrative.

For several reasons, the Doors offer a more nuanced view of the counterculture that, in turn, can help historians write more nuanced accounts of sixties resistance. First, they were influenced by ideas that were influential across the movements that coalesced into the popular resistance front of the late sixties. Many listeners knew what these ideas were and identified the Doors with them. By association, these listeners would have associated the band with the wider counterculture. Second, the band articulated an unorthodox brand of countercultural resistance that affirmed or rejected different aspects of the culture as it was discussed at the time and as it would later be constructed in popular memory. They advocated “sex as a weapon,” while eschewing “psychedelia” and rejecting the more overt elements of hippie culture, especially Woodstock, in favor of “darkness” and “constant revolution.” Finally, the wild popularity of the band (one TV interviewer told the audience that “their first album sold more copies than ‘My Weekly Reader’”) [72] points to the wide appeal of their countercultural brand. These millions of listeners deposited personal meaning in the songs in their own ways; their individual meanings make up the “hidden histories” of popular music and the counterculture. [73] These hidden histories are the fabric of the historian’s craft.

Bibliography

• Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
• Bailey, Beth. Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Bindas, Kenneth J., and Kenneth J. Heineman. “Image is Everything?: Television and the Counterculture Message in the 1960s.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 22, no. 1 (1994): 22–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01956051.1994.9943663
• Brown, Norman O. “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind.” Harper’s, May 1961, 47–49. http://harpers.org/archive/1961/05/apocalypse/
• ———. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History , 2nd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.
• Carlevale, John. “Dionysus Now: Dionysian Myth-History in the Sixties.” Arion, Third Series 13, no. 2 (2005): 77–116. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29737263
• ———. “The Dionysian Revival in American Fiction of the Sixties.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12, no. 3 (2006): 364–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12138-006-0003-1
• Chalmers, David Mark. And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
• Crisafulli, Chuck. The Doors: When the Music’s Over: The Stories Behind Every Song. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000.
• Densmore, John. Riders on the Storm: My Life With Jim Morrison and the Doors. New York: Delacorte Press, 1990.
• Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Pocket Books, 1979.
• Diehl, Digby. “Love and the Demonic Psyche.” Eye, April, 1968. Reprinted at “Eye: The Doors Story,” accessed November 18, 2012, http://www.angelfire.com/id/doorslover/eye.html
• Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The Doors.” FBI Records: The Vault. Accessed November 3, 2012. http://vault.fbi.gov/The%20Doors
• Fowlie, Wallace. Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
• Goddard, Lon. “Open he Doors.” Record Mirror, September 14, 1968. http://mildequator.com/interviews/html/longoddard.html
• Goldstein, Richard. “San Francisco Bray.” In “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, edited by Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, 294–96. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Goldstein, Richard. “The Shaman as Superstar.” New York Magazine, August, 5, 1968, 42–45. http://books.google.com/
• Freeman, Jo. “Levitate the Pentagon (1967).” Jo Freeman.com. Accessed November 29, 2012. http://www.jofreeman.com/photos/Pentagon67.html
• Harris, Richard Jackson. A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication, 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2009.
• Hobson, Harold. “The Arts and Other Things: A Glimpse Into Actors’ Workshop.” The Christian Science Monitor, January 29, 1964.
• Hodgson, Godfrey. “Rock Music and Revolution.” In The 1960s, edited by William Dudley, 207–17. San Diego, Cal: Greenhaven Press, 2000.
• Hopkins, Jerry and Danny Sugerman. No One Here Gets Out Alive: The Biography of Jim Morrison. New York: Grand Central, 2006.
• Holzman, Jac, and Gavan Daws. Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop. Santa Monica, CA: FirstMedia Books, 1998.
• Lipsitz, George. Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
• Marcus, Greil. The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.
• Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization . Boston: Beacon Press, 1974.
• Manzarek, Ray. “Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A.” In This is Rebel Music: The Harvey Kubernik InnerViews, edited by Harvey Kubernik, 1–26. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.
• ———. Light My Fire: My Life With the Doors. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1998.
• Melton, Barry. “Everything Seemed Beautiful: A Life in the Counterculture.” In Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, edited by Alexander Bloom, 145–58. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Moist, Kevin M. “Visualizing Postmodernity: 1960s Rock Concert Posters and Contemporary American Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 6 (2010): 1242–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2010.00798.x
• Mucher, Stephen S., and Carrie E. Chobanian. “The Challenges of Overcoming Pop Culture Images of the Sixties.” OAH Magazine of History 20, no. 5 (2006): 40–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25162084
• “New Plays: Dionysus in ’69.” Time , June 28, 1968, 83.
• Perone, James E. Music of the Counterculture Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
• Powledge, Fred. “Wicked Go The Doors.” Life, April 12, 1968, 86–93.
• Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Translated by Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Rocco, John, ed. The Doors Companion: Four Decades of Commentary. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997.
• Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
• Shaw, Gregory. “Interview: With the Doors.” Mojo Navigator 2, no. 2 (1967): 11–15. http://www.rockmine.com/Archive/Library/MojoNav/Mojo13.pdf
• Storey, John. Cultural Studies & the Study of Popular Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
• Sugerman, Danny, ed. The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics. New York: Hyperion, 1991.
• Sundling, Doug. The Doors: A Guide, 2nd ed. London: Sanctuary, 2003.
• The Doors. The Lost Interview Tapes Featuring Jim Morrison. Vol. 1 . The Doors, Rhino/Bright Midnight Records RHM2 7904, 2004, compact disc.
• Tobler, John. “The Doors.” ZigZag no. 16 (1970): 5–8, 35. http://mildequator.com/documents/magazines/ZigZag1970/zigzagpopup1.html

The best free cultural &

educational media on the web

• Online Courses
• Certificates
• Degrees & Mini-Degrees
• Audio Books

Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: “…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was.” The wry lit­tle moment is per­fect­ly indica­tive of Didion’s unspar­ing­ly iron­ic crit­i­cal voice. Did­ion is a con­sum­mate crit­ic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always fore­most a judge of her­self. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first nov­el while work­ing for Vogue , “Good­bye to All That” fre­quent­ly shifts point of view as Did­ion exam­ines the truth of each state­ment, her prose mov­ing seam­less­ly from delib­er­a­tion to com­men­tary, anno­ta­tion, aside, and apho­rism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process per­haps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from some­where else, a city only for the very young.

Any­one who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-alter­ing city—will know the pangs of res­ig­na­tion Did­ion cap­tures. These eco­nom­ic times and every oth­er pro­duce many such sto­ries. But Did­ion made some­thing entire­ly new of famil­iar sen­ti­ments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a col­lec­tion of breakup let­ters to New York with the same title, the unsen­ti­men­tal pre­ci­sion and com­pact­ness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , a rep­re­sen­ta­tive text of the lit­er­ary non­fic­tion of the six­ties along­side the work of John McPhee, Ter­ry South­ern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. In Didion’s case, the empha­sis must be decid­ed­ly on the lit­er­ary —her essays are as skill­ful­ly and imag­i­na­tive­ly writ­ten as her fic­tion and in close con­ver­sa­tion with their autho­r­i­al fore­bears. “Good­bye to All That” takes its title from an ear­li­er mem­oir, poet and crit­ic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leav­ing his home­town in Eng­land to fight in World War I. Didion’s appro­pri­a­tion of the title shows in part an iron­ic under­cut­ting of the mem­oir as a seri­ous piece of writ­ing.

And yet she is per­haps best known for her work in the genre. Pub­lished almost fifty years after Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , her 2005 mem­oir The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faith­ful account” of the stun­ning­ly sud­den and crush­ing per­son­al calami­ties that claimed the lives of her hus­band and daugh­ter sep­a­rate­ly. “Though the mate­r­i­al is lit­er­al­ly ter­ri­ble,” Pin­sky writes, “the writ­ing is exhil­a­rat­ing and what unfolds resem­bles an adven­ture nar­ra­tive: a forced expe­di­tion into those ‘cliffs of fall’ iden­ti­fied by Hop­kins.” He refers to lines by the gift­ed Jesuit poet Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins that Did­ion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall / Fright­ful, sheer, no-man-fath­omed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The near­ly unim­peach­ably author­i­ta­tive ethos of Didion’s voice con­vinces us that she can fear­less­ly tra­verse a wild inner land­scape most of us triv­i­al­ize, “hold cheap,” or can­not fath­om. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review inter­view , Didion—with that tech­ni­cal sleight of hand that is her casu­al mastery—called her­self “a kind of appren­tice plumber of fic­tion, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of arche­type of lit­er­ary mod­esty (John Locke, for exam­ple, called him­self an “under­labour­er” of knowl­edge) while also fig­ur­ing her­self as the win­some hero­ine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch com­e­dy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jen­nifer Jones, a char­ac­ter who learns to thumb her nose at pow­er and priv­i­lege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Lin­da Kuehl’s death—meant that Did­ion wrote her own intro­duc­tion to the Paris Review inter­view, a very unusu­al occur­rence that allows her to assume the role of her own inter­preter, offer­ing iron­ic prefa­to­ry remarks on her self-under­stand­ing. After the intro­duc­tion, it’s dif­fi­cult not to read the inter­view as a self-inter­ro­ga­tion. Asked about her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of writ­ing as a “hos­tile act” against read­ers, Did­ion says, “Obvi­ous­ly I lis­ten to a read­er, but the only read­er I hear is me. I am always writ­ing to myself. So very pos­si­bly I’m com­mit­ting an aggres­sive and hos­tile act toward myself.”

It’s a curi­ous state­ment. Didion’s cut­ting wit and fear­less vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty take in seem­ing­ly all—the expans­es of her inner world and polit­i­cal scan­dals and geopo­lit­i­cal intrigues of the out­er, which she has dis­sect­ed for the bet­ter part of half a cen­tu­ry. Below, we have assem­bled a selec­tion of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay col­lec­tion The White Album brought togeth­er some of her most tren­chant and search­ing essays about her immer­sion in the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the ide­o­log­i­cal fault lines of the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. The title essay begins with a gem­like sen­tence that became the title of a col­lec­tion of her first sev­en vol­umes of non­fic­tion : “We tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live.” Read two essays from that col­lec­tion below:

“ The Women’s Move­ment ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Did­ion has main­tained a vig­or­ous pres­ence at the New York Review of Books since the late sev­en­ties, writ­ing pri­mar­i­ly on pol­i­tics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insid­er Base­ball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teach­ings of Speak­er Gin­grich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opin­ions, or the Hinge of His­to­ry ” (2003)

“ Pol­i­tics in the New Nor­mal Amer­i­ca ” (2004)

“ The Case of There­sa Schi­a­vo ” (2005)

“ The Def­er­en­tial Spir­it ” (2013)

“ Cal­i­for­nia Notes ” (2016)

Did­ion con­tin­ues to write with as much style and sen­si­tiv­i­ty as she did in her first col­lec­tion, her voice refined by a life­time of expe­ri­ence in self-exam­i­na­tion and pierc­ing crit­i­cal appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she pub­lished an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay there that returns to the theme of “yearn­ing for a glam­orous, grown up life” that she explored in “Good­bye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glass­es ,” Didion’s gaze is stead­ier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tem­pered and hard­ened by New York, but on her­self as a child “deter­mined to bypass child­hood” and emerge as a poised, self-con­fi­dent 24-year old sophisticate—the per­fect New York­er she nev­er became.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Related posts:

Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

Add a comment

Leave a reply.

Name (required)

Email (required)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Click here to cancel reply.

• 1,700 Free Online Courses
• 200 Online Certificate Programs
• 100+ Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs
• 1,150 Free Movies
• 1,000 Free Audio Books
• 150+ Best Podcasts
• 800 Free eBooks
• 200 Free Textbooks
• 300 Free Language Lessons
• 150 Free Business Courses
• Free K-12 Education
• Get Our Daily Email

Free Courses

• Art & Art History
• Classics/Ancient World
• Computer Science
• Data Science
• Engineering
• Environment
• Political Science
• Writing & Journalism
• All 1500 Free Courses
• 1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses

Receive our Daily Email

Free updates, get our daily email.

Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Free Movies

• 1150 Free Movies Online
• Free Film Noir
• Silent Films
• Documentaries
• Martial Arts/Kung Fu
• Free Hitchcock Films
• Free Charlie Chaplin
• Free John Wayne Movies
• Free Tarkovsky Films
• Free Dziga Vertov
• Free Oscar Winners
• Free Language Lessons
• All Languages

Free eBooks

• 700 Free eBooks
• Free Philosophy eBooks
• The Harvard Classics
• Philip K. Dick Stories
• Neil Gaiman Stories
• David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays
• Hemingway Stories
• Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels
• HP Lovecraft
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Free Alice Munro Stories
• Jennifer Egan Stories
• George Saunders Stories
• Hunter S. Thompson Essays
• Joan Didion Essays
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories
• David Sedaris Stories
• Stephen King
• Golden Age Comics
• Free Books by UC Press
• Life Changing Books

Free Audio Books

• 700 Free Audio Books
• Free Audio Books: Fiction
• Free Audio Books: Poetry
• Free Audio Books: Non-Fiction

Free Textbooks

• Free Physics Textbooks
• Free Computer Science Textbooks
• Free Math Textbooks

K-12 Resources

• Free Video Lessons
• Web Resources by Subject
• Quality YouTube Channels
• Teacher Resources
• All Free Kids Resources

Free Art & Images

• All Art Images & Books
• The Rijksmuseum
• Smithsonian
• The Guggenheim
• The National Gallery
• The Whitney
• LA County Museum
• Stanford University
• British Library
• Google Art Project
• French Revolution
• Getty Images
• Guggenheim Art Books
• Met Art Books
• Getty Art Books
• New York Public Library Maps
• Museum of New Zealand
• Smarthistory
• Coloring Books
• All Bach Organ Works
• All of Bach
• 80,000 Classical Music Scores
• Free Classical Music
• Live Classical Music
• 9,000 Grateful Dead Concerts
• Alan Lomax Blues & Folk Archive

Writing Tips

• William Zinsser
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Toni Morrison
• Margaret Atwood
• David Ogilvy
• Billy Wilder
• All posts by date

Personal Finance

• Open Personal Finance
• Amazon Kindle
• Architecture
• Artificial Intelligence
• Beat & Tweets
• Comics/Cartoons
• Current Affairs
• English Language
• Entrepreneurship
• Food & Drink
• Graduation Speech
• How to Learn for Free
• Internet Archive
• Language Lessons
• Most Popular
• Neuroscience
• Photography
• Pretty Much Pop
• Productivity
• UC Berkeley
• Uncategorized
• Video - Arts & Culture
• Video - Politics/Society
• Video - Science
• Video Games

Great Lectures

• Michel Foucault
• Sun Ra at UC Berkeley
• Richard Feynman
• Joseph Campbell
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Leonard Bernstein
• Richard Dawkins
• Buckminster Fuller
• Walter Kaufmann on Existentialism
• Jacques Lacan
• Roland Barthes
• Nobel Lectures by Writers
• Bertrand Russell
• Oxford Philosophy Lectures

Receive our newsletter!

Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.

Great Recordings

• T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land
• Sylvia Plath - Ariel
• Joyce Reads Ulysses
• Joyce - Finnegans Wake
• Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf
• Albert Einstein
• Charles Bukowski
• Bill Murray
• Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare
• William Faulkner
• Flannery O'Connor
• Tolkien - The Hobbit
• Allen Ginsberg - Howl
• Dylan Thomas
• Anne Sexton
• John Cheever
• David Foster Wallace

Book Lists By

• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Allen Ginsberg
• Patti Smith
• Henry Miller
• Christopher Hitchens
• Joseph Brodsky
• Donald Barthelme
• David Bowie
• Samuel Beckett
• Art Garfunkel
• Marilyn Monroe
• Picks by Female Creatives
• Zadie Smith & Gary Shteyngart
• Lynda Barry

Favorite Movies

• Kurosawa's 100
• David Lynch
• Werner Herzog
• Woody Allen
• Wes Anderson
• Luis Buñuel
• Roger Ebert
• Susan Sontag
• Scorsese Foreign Films
• Philosophy Films
• February 2024
• January 2024
• December 2023
• November 2023
• October 2023
• September 2023
• August 2023
• February 2023
• January 2023
• December 2022
• November 2022
• October 2022
• September 2022
• August 2022
• February 2022
• January 2022
• December 2021
• November 2021
• October 2021
• September 2021
• August 2021
• February 2021
• January 2021
• December 2020
• November 2020
• October 2020
• September 2020
• August 2020
• February 2020
• January 2020
• December 2019
• November 2019
• October 2019
• September 2019
• August 2019
• February 2019
• January 2019
• December 2018
• November 2018
• October 2018
• September 2018
• August 2018
• February 2018
• January 2018
• December 2017
• November 2017
• October 2017
• September 2017
• August 2017
• February 2017
• January 2017
• December 2016
• November 2016
• October 2016
• September 2016
• August 2016
• February 2016
• January 2016
• December 2015
• November 2015
• October 2015
• September 2015
• August 2015
• February 2015
• January 2015
• December 2014
• November 2014
• October 2014
• September 2014
• August 2014
• February 2014
• January 2014
• December 2013
• November 2013
• October 2013
• September 2013
• August 2013
• February 2013
• January 2013
• December 2012
• November 2012
• October 2012
• September 2012
• August 2012
• February 2012
• January 2012
• December 2011
• November 2011
• October 2011
• September 2011
• August 2011
• February 2011
• January 2011
• December 2010
• November 2010
• October 2010
• September 2010
• August 2010
• February 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006

©2006-2024 Open Culture, LLC. All rights reserved.

• Advertise with Us
• Copyright Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use

Perceptions of The Doors

Tuesday, october 26, 2010, joan didion - "waiting for morrison" in the age of rock (sounds of the american cultural revolution) & her collection of writings the white album.

No comments:

Post a comment.

Advertisement

We tell ourselves stories: didion’s “white album” takes to the stage, arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Photo: Lars Jan

I was told to wait outside a dinged-up stage door on Ashland Place, in Brooklyn. When I rang the bell, the door opened, and I was ushered through a series of winding passages and deposited by the front row of the theater. A monologue emerged from what sounded like a tape recorder. The voice was warbling about an unnamed patient experiencing a mental break:

It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure. The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me.

The lines would be instantly recognizable to any fan of Joan Didion’s now iconic essay “The White Album.” It’s the first moment when the reader begins to understand just how unwell and perhaps unreliable the narrator really is, when the kaleidoscope turns and the essay rearranges itself into something darker than expected. “The White Album,” first published in 1979, is perhaps the single work most closely associated with Didion, and 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of many of the events she describes: the Manson murders, the rise of the Black Panthers and Huey Newton’s arrest, the student takeover of San Francisco State College, and the writer’s own breakdown.

In the decades since “The White Album” was published, Didion has written many groundbreaking films, essays, and memoirs (including The Year of Magical Thinking , which was adapted into a play in 2007). A nominee for a Pulitzer and a National Book Critic Circles award, and the winner of a National Book Award, she also has the honor of being the inaugural author in  The Paris Review ’s Art of Nonfiction interview series . My own copies of her books have been underlined, highlighted, and dog-eared—now, I was hearing her words echo through the cavernous hall of the BAM Harvey Theater.

I had arrived on the set of Lars Jan’s production of The White Album during a period of frantic minor adjustments. Early Morning Opera’s adaptation of Didion’s essay would premiere at the BAM Next Wave Festival on November 28—in twenty-four hours—and the company had started rehearsals in the Brooklyn space only that morning. A white telephone for a surreptitious drug call had gone missing, the lighting during one sequence wasn’t quite psychedelic/psychotic enough, and the keyboard was failing to groan in the correct manner. Actors stretched in a corner while techs circled in the wings; the atmosphere cycled from excitement to tension to boredom and back again.

Jan stopped the action and called from the back of the house to Mia Barron, the voice of Joan Didion’s narrator (and also Jan’s partner). The moment needed tweaking, a beat added or subtracted. Like a ghost, Barron’s Didion wandered through the empty space of an antiseptic box made of metal and sound-dampening glass that occupied the center of the stage. It looked like a trailer designed by Philip Johnson, sparsely furnished with a mid-century wooden desk, a typewriter, records, and a few books.

Jan explained that the box would be filled with a party of semi-coached audience members, who would experience their own “happening” during the performance. This play within a play was meant to recall the house on Franklin Avenue where much of the essay’s action occurs: drug-fueled parties and Easter lunches, a trippy conversation about death auras with a babysitter, and a strange encounter with a thief who pretends to be a deliveryman. “Chicken delight?” he offers feebly, before running out the door. Throughout the show, there would be Super 8 footage from the protests Didion describes, musical performances, and a dance party—all happening against the backdrop of Barron’s narration. The cast refer to the people inside this fishbowl as the “inner audience.”

Jan, who wore a red-and-white beanie and mismatched canvas loafers, greeted me onstage and introduced me to Barron. Since founding Early Morning Opera in 2004, Jan has written and directed “genre-bending performance” pieces that stretch the limits of theater and visual spectacle, performing at venues such as the Whitney Museum and the Sundance Film Festival. Much of his work deals with social or political themes, but this piece was Jan’s first adaptation (and the first time he and Barron had collaborated on a project, “to save money on hotel rooms”). They were eager to get it right.

Adapting a work of such intentional ambiguity, however, presents challenges. The essay is fragmented and explicitly resists the easy formulas and structures of conventional narrative. It races through emotional registers and attempts to encapsulate an entire era in Didion’s life, flitting restlessly from scene to scene. “The White Album” doesn’t lend itself to dramatization.

“I think one of the most inspiring aspects of working with the material is it’s an incredible piece of collage,” said Jan. Rather than literally reenacting scenes, a small chorus rotates through the other speaking parts, with Barron’s Didion “surfing in a visual and energetic landscape.” Jan wanted to heighten this sense of chaos and juxtaposition through a layering of media.

“It’s not a Madame Tussaud’s wax museum where there’s somebody playing Huey Newton, or any of the characters in the essay,” Jan added.

Barron came to the material from a much more traditional theater background, having for many years written and performed on and off Broadway. “I’m much more a performer rooted in psychology and language, and that’s my pull to enter a world,” Barron explained. Though Didion has come to saturate contemporary culture—her image appears on everything from merchandise at the Strand to Céline ad campaigns—Barron’s goal is to get past the aura and find the occasionally aloof writer’s emotional core. “I have a deep interest, appetite, and compulsion to live inside her thoughts, and bring this language to life,” Barron said.

The primary challenge of adapting “The White Album,” however, has been not the text itself but getting permission to use it. For years, Jan and Barron had unsuccessfully tried to reach Didion: emails, through agents and friends, even sending typewritten letters on LP sleeves from the Beatles’ White Album . Through a mutual friend, the couple met Griffin Dunne, Didion’s nephew, who in 2017 released a documentary about her life, The Center Will Not Hold .

“Because our staging is in no way traditional … I think one of the selling points in our pitch to her was: We’re going to perform every word,” said Jan.

“It sounded really interesting, so I told Joan,” Dunne explained, calling from a room at the Chateau Marmont. Dunne feels the play brings out the way history rhymes with the present. Though many of the protests, murders, parties, and trials in the essay took place fifty years ago, the issues that sparked them have smoldered on: structural inequality, drug addiction, racism, police brutality, random acts of violence—a general feeling that we are watching the end of the world. “Maybe people are finding comfort in reading about a time that was just as fucked up as these times are,” said Dunne.

As the cast broke for dinner, I followed Jan outside. We walked through Fort Greene (where he used to live before he and Barron moved to Los Angeles), discussing the day’s rehearsal and the work that still had to be done that evening. Jan tried to shield his cigarette against the November wind while answering my questions about the timing of the show, and how the issues Didion raised in her essay still animate contemporary life in America.

“One of the questions that I want the piece to ask is: What is our trajectory? And how do we see ourselves headed toward 2068?” he said. “I think anniversaries are interesting because they give us the moment to reflect on the past, on what’s changed and what hasn’t changed.”

Would he have handled the material in the same way if he were staging The White Album on the essay’s fortieth anniversary, to coincide with Obama’s election?

“If we’d done it ten years ago, I probably would have been missing a big story,” he replied. “The divides and resistance to systemic change were actually still foundationally there in the country, and because of the promise of the moment, I would have just missed it.”

A young man carrying a duffel bag interrupted Jan to ask whether he’d be willing to trade a smoke for a tallboy of beer. “You can drink it later,” the man suggested.

Jan declined, but extended a cigarette from his pack.

“Thanks, man,” the man with the duffel bag replied, flashing a peace sign. It felt like a moment out of another time, something Didion herself might have witnessed in Berkeley or San Francisco or Los Angeles decades ago.

“I first read The White Album when I was sixteen,” Jan said. “I was excited about her connection with the counterculture. She was in the Doors’ recording session! She was meeting the Black Panthers! … I was into that nihilistic, almost cruel remove that characterizes Didion’s writing … She tends to cast a withering gaze in all directions.”

But in the intervening decades, Jan’s impressions of the text have changed.

“As I’ve grown older, though, really the very famous first sentence, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ has taken on more complex shades,” he said. “I went through feeling like: I am an artist, and I can create meaning, and that’s a source of power, to a version that’s more akin to, We create delusions to get by. And I find myself constantly pivoting between those two.”

Daniel Penny  writes about art and culture at  The New Yorker , Boston Review , and elsewhere. He teaches writing and visual culture at Parsons School of Design.

How the Manson murders changed Hollywood, explained by Joan Didion

“No one was surprised.”

by Alissa Wilkinson

When five people were murdered at Sharon Tate’s house on the night of August 8-9, 1969, the reverberations went far beyond the elite Hollywood community of which she was part. They were felt far beyond Los Angeles, too. By that fall, when police connected the murders (and those of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night) to Charles Manson and his cult-like “family,” Manson was well on his way to infamy, becoming a murderous icon and a symbol of an age.

Similarly, the murders would, for many, feel like the definitive end of the 1960s, and their optimism along with it. As Joan Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album,” the title piece of her 1979 collection , “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

But right after the murders happened, it was the community surrounding Tate’s house on Cielo Drive, and the broader group of people involved in show business in LA — which included Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne — whose nerves jangled most sharply. Didion explained in her essay:

There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin” — this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it — was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanksi’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised .

The first sentence of “The White Album” furnishes one of Didion’s most quoted lines: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She goes on to explain, through the rest of the essay, what she means: that humans survive the confusion and brutality of life by trying to find connections between events and extract meaning from those connections. We’re constantly trying to force seemingly random happenings into the framework of a story that might teach or show us something. But Didion isn’t so sure that the meaning we crave is truly available to us.

“The White Album” isn’t only about the Manson family and the murders; in it, Didion writes about hanging out with the Doors in the recording studio, visiting Huey Newton in jail, and navigating her own anxiety and suitcase-packing practices as a reporter during the late 1960s.

But the title makes it clear that the shadow of Manson hangs over the whole essay. It’s a reference to the 1968 Beatles album best known by its pure white cover art. But Manson was obsessed with that album, and told his followers it was the Beatles’ way of sending coded messages to the Manson family , warning them of the upcoming race war apocalypse (which he called “helter skelter,” after one of their songs). It’s part of what inspired him to tell his followers to kill the “pigs” on the weekend of August 8.

Didion had more than a mild interest in the case. After the passage quoted above, she writes about visiting Linda Kasabian in prison, and later buying a dress for her to wear to testify in court during Manson’s trial. (Kasabian was among the four members of the Manson family who went to Tate’s house, but she was standing lookout and did not actually kill anyone, which meant she was a prime witness in the case later on.)

In the essay, Didion uses the story of Tate’s murder to demonstrate how, in the aftermath of the event, it felt as if everything in the world had stopped making sense. She writes about strange coincidences and links: She bought a dress to be married in on the morning JFK was killed; later, she wore it to a party that was also attended by Tate and Polanski, and Polanski spilled wine on it. These and other coincidences don’t mean anything, she admits, but “in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else.”

And she revisits the connection in the last sentence of the essay: “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood [...] and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me see what it means.”

“The White Album” viscerally recreates the anxiety of the period: not just Didion’s, but the country’s. It locates the nexus of that anxiety as the summer of 1969, and especially the Tate murders. And while the country would go on to try to make sense of Manson and the murders in the coming months and years — people have been trying to make sense of them ever since — Didion suggests, in the end, that it’s an impossible task.

Most Popular

Your favorite brand no longer cares about being woke, what’s really happening to grocery prices right now, the nra just won a big supreme court victory. good., the obscure federal intelligence bureau that got vietnam, iraq, and ukraine right, the felon frontrunner: how trump warped our politics, today, explained.

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

More in Culture

Why the uncanny “All eyes on Rafah” image went so viral

Leaked video reveals the lie of Miss Universe’s empowerment promise

The Sympathizer takes on Hollywood’s Vietnam War stories

The NCAA’s proposal to pay college athletes is fair. That's the problem.

The WNBA’s meteoric rise in popularity, in one chart

Why the ludicrous Republican response to Trump’s conviction matters

Trump’s remaining 3 indictments, ranked by the stakes

A producer on The Apprentice alleges Trump used the n-word

Congress’s online child safety bill, explained

June 14, 2017

American Life , The 1960s

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

In her transformative essay from 1967, Joan Didion takes a closer look at the dark side of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture during the Summer of Love.

Joan Didion

• Share on Facebook (opens new window)
• Share on Twitter (opens new window)
• Share on Pinterest (opens new window)

Weekly Newsletter

The best of The Saturday Evening Post in your inbox!

[ Editor’s note: Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was first published in the September 23, 1967, edition of the Post . We republish it here as part of our 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love . Scroll to the bottom to see this story as it appeared in the magazine.]

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? —W.B. Yeats

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves “hippies.” When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile and made a few friends.

Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive.

A sign on Haight Street, San Francisco: Last Easter Day My Christopher Robin wandered away. He called April 10th But he hasn’t called since He said he was coming home But he hasn’t shown.

If you see him on Haight Please tell him not to wait I need him now I don’t care how If he needs the bread I’ll send it ahead.

If there’s hope Please write me a note If he’s still there Tell him how much I care Where he’s at I need to know For I really love him so!

Deeply, Marla

I am looking for somebody called Deadeye (all single names in this story are fictitious; full names are real), and I hear he is on the Street this afternoon doing a little business, so I keep an eye out for him and pretend to read the signs in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a kid, 16, 17, comes in and sits on the floor beside me.

“What are you looking for?” he says.

I say nothing much.

“I been out of my mind for three days,” he says. He tells me he’s been shooting crystal, which I pretty much know because he does not bother to keep his sleeves rolled down over the needle tracks. He came up from Los Angeles some number of weeks ago, he doesn’t remember what number, and now he’ll take off for New York, if he can find a ride. I show him a sign on the wall offering a ride to Chicago. He wonders where Chicago is. I ask where he comes from. “Here,” he says. I mean before here. “San Jose. Chula Vista, I dunno,” he says. “My mother’s in Chula Vista.”

A few days later I see him in Golden Gate Park. I ask if he has found a ride to New York. “I hear New York’s a bummer,” he says.

Deadeye never showed up that day, and somebody says maybe I can find him at his place. It is three o’clock and Deadeye is in bed. Somebody else is asleep on the living-room couch, and a girl is sleeping on the floor beneath a poster of Allen Ginsberg, and there are a couple of girls in pajamas making instant coffee. One of the girls introduces me to the friend on the couch, who extends one arm but does not get up because he is naked. Deadeye and I have a mutual acquaintance, but he does not mention his name in front of the others. “The man you talked to,” he says, or “that man I was referring to earlier.” The man is a cop.

The room is overheated and the girl on the floor is sick. Deadeye says she has been sleeping for 24 hours. “Lemme ask you something,” he says. “You want some grass?” I say I have to be moving on. “You want it,” Deadeye says, “it’s yours.” Deadeye used to be a Hell’s Angel around Los Angeles, but that was a few years ago. “Right now,” he says, “I’m trying to set up this groovy religious group — ‘Teen-age Evangelism.’”

Don and Max want to go out to dinner, but Don is on a macrobiotic diet so we end up in Japantown. Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. “I’ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner, and I come in three days late and tell her I’ve been with some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say, ‘That’s me, baby,’ and she laughs and says, ‘That’s you, Max. ‘“ Max says it works both ways. “I mean, if she comes in and tells me she wants to have Don, maybe, I say, ‘OK, baby, it’s your trip.’”

Max sees his life as a triumph over “don’ts.” The don’ts he had done before he was 21 were peyote, alcohol, mescaline, and Methedrine. He was on a Meth trip for three years in New York and Tangier before he found acid. He first tried peyote when he was in an Arkansas boys’ school and got down to the Gulf and met “an Indian kid who was doing a don’t. Then every weekend I could get loose I’d hitchhike 700 miles to Brownsville, Texas, so I could pop peyote. Peyote went for thirty cents a button down in Brownsville on the street.” Max dropped in and out of most of the schools and fashionable clinics in the eastern half of America, his standard technique for dealing with boredom being to leave. Example: Max was in a hospital in New York, and “the night nurse was a groovy spade, and in the afternoon for therapy there was a chick from Israel who was interesting, but there was nothing much to do in the morning, so I left.”

We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggins, a park in Nevada County, because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to take acid there. He says maybe we could go next week, or the week after, or anyway sometime before his case comes up. Almost everybody I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future. I never ask why.

I am still interested in how Max got rid of his middle-class Freudian hang-ups, and I ask if he is now completely free.

“Nah,” he says. “I got acid.”

Max drops a 250- or 350-microgram tab every six or seven days.

Max and Don share a joint in the car, and we go over to North Beach to find out if Otto, who has a temporary job there, wants to go to Malakoff Diggins. Otto is trying to sell something to some electronics engineers. The engineers view our arrival with some interest, maybe, I think, because Max is wearing bells and an Indian headband. Max has a low tolerance for straight engineers and their Freudian hang-ups. “Look at ’em,” he says. “They’re always yelling ‘queer,’ and then they come prowling into the Haight-Ashbury trying to get a hippie chick.”

We do not get around to asking Otto about Malakoff Diggins because he wants to tell me about a 14-year-old he knows who got busted in the Park the other day. She was just walking through the Park, he says, minding her own, carrying her schoolbooks, when the cops took her in and booked her and gave her a pelvic. “ Fourteen years old ,” Otto says. “ A pelvic .”

“Coming down from acid,” he adds, “that could be a real bad trip.”

I call Otto the next afternoon to see if he can reach the 14-year-old. It turns out she is tied up with rehearsals for her junior-high-school play, The Wizard of Oz . “Yellow-brick-road time,” Otto says. Otto was sick all day. He thinks it was some cocaine somebody gave him.

There are always little girls around rock groups — the same little girls who used to hang around saxophone players, girls who live on the celebrity and power and sex a band projects when it plays — and there are three of them out here this afternoon in Sausalito where a rock group, the Grateful Dead, rehearses. They are all pretty and two of them still have baby fat and one of them dances by herself with her eyes closed.

I ask a couple of the girls what they do.

“I just kind of come out here a lot,” one of the girls says.

“I just sort of know the Dead,” the other says.

The one who just sort of knows the Dead starts cutting up a loaf of French bread on the piano bench. The boys take a break, and one of them talks about playing at the Los Angeles Cheetah, which is in the old Aragon Ballroom. “We were up there drinking beer where Lawrence Welk used to sit,” he says.

The little girl who was dancing by herself giggles. “Too much,” she says softly. Her eyes are still closed.

Somebody said that if I was going to meet some runaways I better pick up a few hamburgers, cola, and French fries on the way, so I did, and we are eating them in the Park together, me, Debbie, who is 15, and Jeff, who is 16. Debbie and Jeff ran away 12 days ago, walked out of school one morning with $100 between them. Because a missing-juvenile is out on Debbie — she was already on probation because her mother had once taken her to the police station and declared her incorrigible — this is only the second time they have been out of a friend’s apartment since they got to San Francisco. The first time they went over to the Fairmont Hotel and rode the outside elevator, three times up and three times down. “Wow,” Jeff says, and that is all he can think of to say about that.

I ask why they ran away.

“My parents said I had to go to church,” Debbie says. “And they wouldn’t let me dress the way I wanted. In the seventh grade my skirts were longer than anybody’s — it got better in the eighth grade, but still.”

“Your mother was kind of a bummer,” Jeff says to her.

“They didn’t like Jeff. They didn’t like my girl friends. I had a C average and my father told me I couldn’t date until I raised it, and that bugged me a lot too.”

“My mother was just a genuine all-American bitch.” Jeff says. “She was really troublesome about hair. Also, she didn’t like boots. It was really weird.”

“Tell about the chores,” Debbie says.

“For example, I had chores. If I didn’t finish ironing my shirts for the week, I couldn’t go out for the weekend. It was weird. Wow.”

Debbie giggles and shakes her head. “This year’s gonna be wild.”

“We’re just gonna let it all happen,” Jeff says. “Everything’s in the future, you can’t pre-plan it, you know. First we get jobs, then a place to live. Then, I dunno.”

Jeff finishes off the French fries and gives some thought to what kind of job he could get. “I always kinda dug metal shop, welding, stuff like that.” Maybe he could work on cars, I say. “But I’m not too mechanically minded,” he says. “Anyway, you can’t pre-plan.”

“I could get a job baby-sitting,” Debbie says. “Or in a dime store.”

“You’re always talking about getting a job in a dime store,” Jeff says.

“That’s because I worked in a dime store already,” Debbie says.

Debbie is buffing her fingernails with the belt to her suede jacket. She is annoyed because she chipped a nail and because I do not have any polish remover in the car. I promise to get her to a friend’s apartment so that she can redo her manicure, but something has been bothering me, and as I fiddle with the ignition, I finally ask it. I ask them to think back to when they were children, to tell me what they had wanted to be when they were grown up, how they had seen the future then.

Jeff throws a cola bottle out the car window. “I can’t remember I ever thought about it,” he says. “I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once,” Debbie says. “But now I’m more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.”

I hear quite a bit about one cop, Officer Arthur Gerrans, whose name has become a synonym for zealotry on the Street. Max is not personally wild about Officer Gerrans because Officer Gerrans took Max in after the Human Be-In last winter, that’s the big Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park where 20,000 people got turned on free, or 10,000 did, or some number did, but then Officer Gerrans has busted almost everyone in the District at one time or another. Presumably to forestall a cult of personality, Gerrans was transferred out of the District not long ago, and when I see him it is not at the Park Station but at the Central Station.

We are in an interrogation room, and I am interrogating Gerrans. He is young, blond, and wary and I go in slow. I wonder what he thinks the major problems in the Haight area are.

Officer Gerrans thinks it over. “I would say the major problems there,” he says finally, “the major problems are narcotics and juveniles. Juveniles and narcotics, those are your major problems.”

I write that down.

“Just one moment,” Officer Gerrans says, and leaves the room. When he comes back he tells me that I cannot talk to him without permission from Chief Thomas Cahill.

“In the meantime,” Officer Gerrans adds, pointing at the notebook in which I have written major problems, juveniles, narcotics , “I’ll take those notes.”

The next day I apply for permission to talk to Officer Gerrans and also to Chief Cahill. A few days later a sergeant returns my call.

“We have finally received clearance from the chief per your request,” the sergeant says, “and that is taboo.”

I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Officer Gerrans.

Officer Gerrans is involved in court cases coming to trial.

I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Chief Cahill.

The chief has pressing police business.

I wonder if I can talk to anyone at all in the police department.

“No,” the sergeant says, “not at the particular moment.”

Which was my last official contact with the San Francisco Police Department.

Norris and I are standing around the Panhandle, and Norris is telling me how it is all set up for a friend to take me to Big Sur. I say what I really want to do is spend a few days with Norris and his wife and the rest of the people in their house. Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable. Norris says, all right, anyway, grass , and he squeezes my hand.

One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am 32. It takes a few minutes, but he rises to it. “Don’t worry,” he says at last. “There’s old hippies too.”

It is a pretty nice evening, nothing much is happening and Max brings his old lady, Sharon, over to the Warehouse. The Warehouse, which is where Don and a floating number of other people live, is not actually a warehouse but the garage of a condemned hotel. The Warehouse was conceived as total theater, a continual happening, and I always feel good there. Somebody is usually doing something interesting, like working on a light show, and there are a lot of interesting things around, like an old touring car which is used as a bed and a vast American flag fluttering up in the shadows and an overstuffed chair suspended like a swing from the rafters.

One reason I particularly like the Warehouse is that a child named Michael is staying there now. Michael’s mother, Sue Ann, is a sweet, wan girl who is always in the kitchen cooking seaweed or baking macrobiotic bread while Michael amuses himself with joss sticks or an old tambourine or an old rocking horse. The first time I ever saw Michael was on that rocking horse, a very blond and pale and dirty child on a rocking horse with no paint. A blue theatrical spotlight was the only light in the Warehouse that afternoon, and there was Michael in it, crooning softly to the wooden horse. Michael is three years old. He is a bright child but does not yet talk.

On this night Michael is trying to light his joss sticks and there are the usual number of people floating through and they all drift in and sit on the bed and pass joints. Sharon is very excited when she arrives. “Don,” she cries breathlessly, “we got some STP today.” At this time STP, a hallucinogenic drug, is a pretty big deal; remember, nobody yet knew what it was and it was relatively, although just relatively, hard to come by. Sharon is blonde and scrubbed and probably 17, but Max is a little vague about that since his court case comes up in a month or so, and he doesn’t need statutory rape on top of it. Sharon’s parents were living apart when she last saw them. She does not miss school or anything much about her past, except her younger brother. “I want to turn him on,” she confided one day. “He’s 14 now, that’s the perfect age. I know where he goes to high school and someday I’ll just go get him.”

Time passes and I lose the thread and when I pick it up again Max seems to be talking about what a beautiful thing it is the way that Sharon washes dishes.

“It is beautiful,” she says. “ Every thing is. You watch that blue detergent blob run on the plate, watch the grease cut — well, it can be a real trip.”

Pretty soon now, maybe next month, maybe later, Max and Sharon plan to leave for Africa and India, where they can live off the land. “I got this little trust fund, see,” Max says, “which is useful in that it tells cops and border patrols I’m OK, but living off the land is the thing. You can get your high and get your dope in the city, OK, but we gotta get out somewhere and live organically.”

“Roots and things,” Sharon says, lighting a joss stick for Michael. Michael’s mother is still in the kitchen cooking seaweed. “You can eat them.”

Maybe eleven o’clock, we move from the Warehouse to the place where Max and Sharon live with a couple named Tom and Barbara. Sharon is pleased to get home (“I hope you got some hash joints fixed in the kitchen,” she says to Barbara by way of greeting), and everybody is pleased to show off the apartment, which has a lot of flowers and candles and paisleys. Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and everyone dances a little and we do some liquid projections and set up a strobe and take turns getting a high on that. Quite late, somebody called Steve comes in with a pretty, dark girl. They have been to a meeting of people who practice a western yoga, but they do not seem to want to talk about that. They lie on the floor awhile, and then Steve stands up.

“Max,” he says, “I want to say one thing.”

“It’s your trip.” Max is edgy.

“I found love on acid. But I lost it. And now I’m finding it again. With nothing but grass.”

Max mutters that heaven and hell are both in one’s karma.

“That’s what bugs me about psychedelic art,” Steve says.

“What about psychedelic art?” Max says. “I haven’t seen much psychedelic art.”

Max is lying on a bed with Sharon, and Steve leans down. “Groove, baby,” he says. “You’re a groove.”

Steve sits down then and tells me about one summer when he was at a school of design in Rhode Island and took 30 trips, the last ones all bad. I ask why they were bad. “I could tell you it was my neuroses,” he says, “but forget it.”

A few days later I drop by to see Steve in his apartment. He paces nervously around the room he uses as a studio and shows me some paintings. We do not seem to be getting to the point.

“Maybe you noticed something going on at Max’s,” he says abruptly.

It seems that the girl he brought, the dark, pretty one, had once been Max’s girl. She had followed him to Tangier and now to San Francisco. But Max has Sharon. “So the girl is kind of staying around here,” Steve says.

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is 23, was raised in Virginia and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. “I feel it’s insane,” he says, and his voice drops. “This chick tells me there’s no meaning to life, but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just flow right out. There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again. At least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it’s going to happen.” He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. “Here you know it’s not going to.”

“What is supposed to happen?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

Arthur Lisch is on the telephone in his kitchen, trying to sell VISTA a program for the District. “We’ve already got an emergency,” he is saying into the telephone, meanwhile trying to disentangle his daughter, age one and a half, from the cord. “We don’t get help here, nobody can guarantee what’s going to happen. We’ve got people sleeping in the streets here. We’ve got people starving to death.” He pauses. “All right,” he says then, and his voice rises. “So they’re doing it by choice. So what?”

By the time he hangs up he has limned what strikes me as a pretty Dickensian picture of life on the edge of Golden Gate Park, but then this is my first exposure to Arthur Lisch’s “riot-on-the-Street-unless” pitch. Arthur Lisch is a kind of leader of the Diggers, who, in the official District mythology, are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand. The official District mythology also has it that the Diggers have no “leaders,” but nonetheless Arthur Lisch is one. Arthur Lisch is also a paid worker for the American Friends’ Service Committee, and he lives with his wife, Jane, and their two small children in a railroad flat, which on this particular day lacks organization. For one thing, the telephone keeps ringing. Arthur promises to attend a hearing at city hall. Arthur promises to “send Edward, he’s OK.” Arthur promises to get a good group, maybe the Loading Zone, to play free for a Jewish benefit. For a second thing, the baby is crying, and she does not stop until Jane appears with a jar of Gerber’s Chicken Noodle Dinner. Another confusing element is somebody named Bob, who just sits in the living room and looks at his toes. First he looks at the toes on one foot, then at the toes on the other. I make several attempts to include Bob before I realize he is on a bad trip. Moreover, there are two people hacking up what looks like a side of beef on the kitchen floor, the idea being that when it gets hacked up, Jane Lisch can cook it for the daily Digger feed in the park.

Arthur Lisch does not seem to notice any of this. He just keeps talking about cybernated societies and the guaranteed annual wage and riot on the Street, unless.

I call the Lisches a day or so later and ask for Arthur. Jane Lisch says he’s next door taking a shower because somebody is coming down from a bad trip in their bathroom. Besides the freak-out in the bathroom, they are expecting a psychiatrist in to look at Bob. Also a doctor for Edward, who is not OK at all but has the flu. Jane says maybe I should talk to Chester Anderson. She will not give me his number.

Chester Anderson is a legacy of the Beat Generation, a man in his middle 30s whose peculiar hold on the District derives from his possession of a mimeograph machine, on which he prints communiqués signed “the communication company.” It is another tenet of the official District mythology that the communication company will print anything anybody has to say, but in fact Chester Anderson prints only what he writes himself, agrees with, or considers harmless or dead matter. His statements, which are left in piles and pasted on windows around Haight Street, are regarded with some apprehension in the District and with considerable interest by outsiders, who study them, like China watchers, for subtle shifts in obscure ideologies. An Anderson communiqué might be as specific as fingering someone who is said to have set up a marijuana bust, or it might be in a more general vein:

Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about and gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street . . . . since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as . . . . on Haight Street. Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.

Somebody other than Jane Lisch gave me an address for Chester Anderson, 443 Arguello, but 443 Arguello does not exist. I telephone the wife of the man who gave me 443 Arguello and she says it’s 742 Arguello.

“But don’t go up there,” she says.

I say I’ll telephone.

“There’s no number,” she says. “I can’t give it to you.”

“742 Arguello,” I say.

“No,” she says. “I don’t know. And don’t go there. And don’t use either my name or my husband’s name if you do.”

She is the wife of a full professor of English at San Francisco State College. I decide to lie low on the question of Chester Anderson for a while.

Paranoia strikes deep — Into your life it will creep — is a song the Buffalo Springfield sings.

The appeal of Malakoff Diggins has kind of faded out, but Max says why don’t I come to his place, just be there, the next time he takes acid. Tom will take it too, probably Sharon, maybe Barbara. We can’t do it for six or seven days because Max and Tom are in STP space now. They are not crazy about STP, but it has advantages. “You’ve still got your forebrain.” Tom says. “I could write behind STP, but not behind acid.” This is the first time I have heard that Tom writes.

Otto is feeling better because he discovered it wasn’t the cocaine that made him sick. It was the chicken pox, which he caught while baby-sitting for Big Brother and the Holding Company one night when they were playing. I go over to see him and meet Vicki, who sings now and then with a group called the Jook Savages and lives at Otto’s place. Vicki dropped out of Laguna High “because I had mono,” followed the Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time, and has been here “for a while.” Her mother and father are divorced, and she does not see her father, who works for a network in New York. A few months ago he came out to do a documentary on the District and tried to find her, but couldn’t. Later he wrote her a letter in care of her mother urging her to go back to school. Vicki guesses maybe she will go back sometime, but she doesn’t see much point in it right now.

We are eating a little tempura in Japantown, Chet Helms and I, and he is sharing some of his insights with me. Until a couple of years ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London scene and says things like, “Just for the sake of clarity I’d like to categorize the aspects of primitive religion as I see it.” Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over. But then he considers the East Village Other , an “underground” biweekly published in New York. “The EVO is one of the few papers in America whose books are in the black,” he says. “I know that from reading Barron ’ s .”

A new group is supposed to play today in the Panhandle, a section of Golden Gate Park, but they are having trouble with the amplifier and I sit in the sun listening to a couple of little girls, maybe 17 years old. One of them has a lot of makeup and the other wears Levi’s and cowboy boots. The boots do not look like an affectation, they look like she came up off a ranch about two weeks ago. I wonder what she is doing here in the Panhandle, trying to make friends with a city girl who is snubbing her, but I do not wonder long, because she is homely and awkward, and I think of her going all the way through the consolidated union high school out there where she comes from, and nobody ever asking her to go into Reno on Saturday night for a drive-in movie and a beer on the riverbank, so she runs. “I know a thing about dollar bills,” she is saying now. “You get one that says ‘1111’ in one corner and ‘1111’ in another, you take it down to Dallas, Texas, and they’ll give you $15 for it.”

“Who will?” the city girl asks.

“I don’t know.”

“There are only three significant pieces of data in the world today,” is another thing Chet Helms told me one night. We were at the Avalon and the big strobe was going and so were the colored lights and the Day-Glo painting, and the place was full of high-school kids trying to look turned on. The Avalon sound system projects 126 decibels at 100 feet but to Chet Helms the sound is just there, like the air, and he talks through it. “The first is,” he said, “God died last year and was obited by the press. The second is, 50 percent of the population is or will be under 25.” A boy shook a tambourine toward us and Chet smiled benevolently at him. “The third,” he said, “is that they got 20 billion irresponsible dollars to spend.”

Thursday comes, some Thursday, and Max and Tom and Sharon and maybe Barbara are going to take some acid. They want to drop it about three o’clock. Barbara has baked fresh bread, Max has gone to the Park for fresh flowers, and Sharon is busy making a sign for the door which reads, DO NOT DISTURB, RING, KNOCK, OR IN ANY OTHER WAY DISTURB. LOVE. This is not how I would put it to either the health inspector, who is due this week, or any of the several score of narcotics agents in the neighborhood, but I figure the sign is Sharon’s trip.

Once the sign is finished Sharon gets restless. “Can I at least play the new record?” she asks Max.

“Tom and Barbara want to save it for when we’re high.”

“I’m getting bored, just sitting around here.”

Max watches her jump up and walk out. “That’s what you call pre-acid uptight jitters,” he says.

Barbara is not in evidence. Tom keeps walking in and out. “All these innumerable last-minute things you have to do,” he mutters.

“It’s a tricky thing, acid,” Max says after a while. He is turning the stereo on and off. “When a chick takes acid, it’s all right if she’s alone, but when she’s living with somebody this edginess comes out. And if the hour-and-a-half process before you take the acid doesn’t go smooth. . . .” He picks up a marijuana butt and studies it, then adds, “They’re having a little thing back there with Barbara.”

Sharon and Tom walk in.

“You bugged too?” Max asks Sharon.

Sharon does not answer.

Max turns to Tom. “Is she all right?”

“Can we take acid?” Max is on edge.

“I just don’t know what she’s going to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

“What I want to do depends on what she wants to do.” Tom is rolling some joints, first rubbing the papers with a marijuana resin he makes himself. He takes the joints back to the bedroom, and Sharon goes with him.

“Something like this happens every time people take acid,” Max says. After a while he brightens and develops a theory around it. “Some people don’t like to go out of themselves, that’s the trouble. You probably wouldn’t. You’d probably like only a quarter of a tab. There’s still an ego on a quarter tab, and it wants things. Now if that thing is sex— and your old lady or your old man is off somewhere flashing and doesn’t want to be touched — well, you get put down on acid, you can be on a bummer for months.”

Sharon drifts in, smiling. “Barbara might take some acid, we’re all feeling better, we smoked a joint.”

At 3:30 that afternoon Max, Tom, and Sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara’s room, and about 5:30 some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon’s lap. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until 7:30, when Max said, “Wow.”

I spot Deadeye on Haight Street, and he gets in the car. Until we get off the Street he sits very low and inconspicuous. Deadeye wants me to meet his old lady, but first he wants to talk to me about how he got hip to helping people.

“Here I was, just a tough kid on a motorcycle,” he says, “and suddenly I see that young people don’t have to walk alone.” Deadeye has a clear evangelistic gaze and the reasonable rhetoric of a car salesman. He is society’s model product. I try to meet his gaze directly because he once told me he could read character in people’s eyes, particularly if he has just dropped acid, which he did about nine o’clock that morning. “They just have to remember one thing,” he says. “The Lord’s Prayer. And that can help them in more ways than one.”

He takes a much-folded letter from his wallet. The letter is from a little girl he helped. “My loving brother,” it begins. “I thought I’d write you a letter since I’m a part of you. Remember that: When you feel happiness, I do, when you feel . . .”

“What I want to do now,” Deadeye says, “is set up a house where a person of any age can come, spend a few days, talk over his problems. Any age. People your age, they’ve got problems too.”

I say a house will take money.

“I’ve found a way to make money,” Deadeye says. He hesitates only a few seconds. “I could’ve made $85 on the Street just then. See, in my pocket I had a hundred tabs of acid. I had to come up with $20 by tonight or we’re out of the house we’re in, so I knew somebody who had acid, and I knew somebody who wanted it, so I made the connection.

“Since the Mafia moved into the LSD racket, the quantity is up and the quality is down. . . . “Historian Arnold Toynbee celebrated his 78th birthday Friday night by snapping his fingers and tapping his toes to the Quicksilver Messenger Service . . .”

are a couple of items from Herb Caen’s column one morning as the West declined in the year 1967.

When I was in San Francisco a tab, or a cap, of LSD-25 sold for three to five dollars, depending upon the seller and the district. LSD was slightly cheaper in the Haight-Ashbury than in the Fillmore, where it was used rarely, mainly as a sexual ploy, and sold by pushers of hard drugs, e.g., heroin, or “smack.” A great deal of acid was being cut with Methedrine, which is the trade name for an amphetamine, because Methedrine can simulate the flash that low-quality acid lacks. Nobody knows how much LSD is actually in a tab, but the standard trip is supposed to be 250 micrograms. Grass was running $10 a lid, $5 a matchbox. Hash was considered “a luxury item.” All the amphetamines, or “speed” — Benzedrine, Dexedrine, and particularly Methedrine (“crystal”) — were in common use. There was not only more tolerance of speed but there was a general agreement that heroin was now on the scene. Some attributed this to the presence of the Syndicate; others to a general deterioration of the scene, to the incursions of gangs and younger part-time, or “plastic,” hippies, who like the amphetamines and the illusions of action and power they give. Where Methedrine is in wide use, heroin tends to be available, because, I was told, “You can get awful damn high shooting crystal, and smack can be used to bring you down.”

Deadeye’s old lady, Gerry, meets us at the door of their place. She is a big, hearty girl who has always counseled at Girl Scout camps during summer vacations and was “in social welfare” at the University of Washington when she decided that she “just hadn’t done enough living” and came to San Francisco. “Actually, the heat was bad in Seattle,” she adds.

“The first night I got down here,” she says, “I stayed with a gal I met over at the Blue Unicorn. I looked like I’d just arrived, had a knapsack and stuff.” After that Gerry stayed at a house the Diggers were running, where she met Deadeye. “Then it took time to get my bearings, so I haven’t done much work yet.”

I ask Gerry what work she does. “Basically I’m a poet, but I had my guitar stolen right after I arrived, and that kind of hung up my thing.”

“Get your books,” Deadeye orders. “Show her your books.”

Gerry demurs, then goes into the bedroom and comes back with several theme books full of verse. I leaf through them but Deadeye is still talking about helping people. “Any kid that’s on speed,” he says, “I’ll try to get him off it. The only advantage to it from the kids’ point of view is that you don’t have to worry about sleeping or eating.”

“Or sex,” Gerry adds.

“That’s right. When you’re strung out on crystal you don’t need nothing .”

“It can lead to the hard stuff,” Gerry says. “Take your average Meth freak, once he’s started putting the needle in his arm, it’s not too hard to say, well, let’s shoot a little smack.”

All the while I am looking at Gerry’s poems. They are a very young girl’s poems, each written out in a neat hand and finished off with a curlicue. Dawns are roseate, skies silver-tinted. When she writes “crystal” in her books, she does not mean Meth.

“You gotta get back to your writing,” Deadeye says fondly, but Gerry ignores this. She is telling about somebody who propositioned her yesterday. “He just walked up to me on the Street, offered me $600 to go to Reno and do the thing.”

“You’re not the only one he approached,” Deadeye says.

“If some chick wants to go with him, fine,” Gerry says. “Just don’t bum my trip.” She empties the tuna-fish can we are using for an ashtray and goes over to look at a girl who is asleep on the floor. It is the same girl who was asleep on the floor the first day I came to Deadeye’s place. She has been sick a week now, 10 days. “Usually when somebody comes up to me on the Street like that,” Gerry adds, “I hit him for some change.”

When I saw Gerry in the Park the next day I asked her about the sick girl, and Gerry said cheerfully that she was in the hospital with pneumonia.

Max tells me about how he and Sharon got together. “When I saw her the first time on Haight Street, I flashed. I mean flashed. So I started some conversation with her about her beads, see, but I didn’t care about her beads.” Sharon lived in a house where a friend of Max’s lived, and the next time he saw her was when he took the friend some bananas. “Sharon and I were like kids — we smoked bananas and looked at each other and smoked more bananas and looked at each other.”

But Max hesitated. For one thing, he thought Sharon was his friend’s girl. “For another I didn’t know if I wanted to get hung up with an old lady.” But the next time he visited the house, Sharon was on acid.

“So everybody yelled, ‘Here comes the banana man,’” Sharon interrupts, “and I got all excited.”

“She was living in this crazy house,” Max continues. “There was this one kid, all he did was scream. His whole trip was to practice screams. It was too much.” Max still hung back from Sharon. “But then Sharon offered me a tab, and I knew.”

Max walked to the kitchen and back with the tab, wondering whether to take it. “And then I decided to flow with it, and that was that. Because once you drop acid with somebody, you flash on, you see the whole world melt in her eyes.”

“It’s stronger than anything in the world,” Sharon says.

“Nothing can break it up,” Max says. “As long as it lasts.”

No milk today — My love has gone away . . . The end of my hopes — The end of all my dreams —

is a song I heard on many mornings in 1967 on KFRC, the Flower Power Station, San Francisco.

Deadeye and Gerry tell me that they plan to be married. An Episcopal priest in the District has promised to perform the wedding in Golden Gate Park, and they will have a few rock groups there, “a real community thing.” Gerry’s brother is also getting married, in Seattle. “Kind of interesting,” Gerry muses, “because, you know, his is the traditional straight wedding, and then you have the contrast with ours.”

“I’ll have to wear a tie to his,” Deadeye says.

“Right,” Gerry says.

“Her parents came down to meet me, but they weren’t ready for me,” Deadeye notes philosophically.

“They finally gave it their blessing,” Gerry says. “In a way.”

“They came to me and her father said, ‘Take care of her,’ “Deadeye reminisces. “And her mother said, ‘Don’t let her go to jail.’”

Barbara has baked a macrobiotic apple pie — one made without sweets and with whole-wheat flour — and she and Tom and Max and Sharon and I are eating it. Barbara tells me how she learned to find happiness in “the woman’s thing.” She and Tom had gone somewhere to live with the Indians, and although she first found it hard to be shunted off with the women and never to enter into any of the men’s talk, she soon got the point. “That was where the trip was,” she says.

Barbara is on what is called the woman’s trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than $10 or $20 a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. “Doing something that shows your love that way,” she says, “is just about the most beautiful thing I know.” Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

It is a pretty nice day and I am just driving down the Street and I see Barbara at a light.

What am I doing, she wants to know.

I am just driving around.

“Groovy,” she says.

This is quite a beautiful day, I say.

“Groovy,” she agrees.

She wants to know if I will come over. Sometime soon, I say.

I ask if she wants to drive in the Park but she is too busy. She is out to buy wool for her loom.

Arthur Lisch gets pretty nervous whenever he sees me now because the Digger line this week is that they aren’t talking to “media poisoners,” which is me. So I still don’t have a tap on Chester Anderson, but one day in the Panhandle I run into a kid who says he is Chester’s “associate.” He has on a black cape, black slouch hat, mauve Job’s Daughters’ sweatshirt and dark glasses, and he says his name is Claude Hayward, but never mind that because I think of him just as The Connection. The Connection offers to “check me out.”

I take off my dark glasses so he can see my eyes. He leaves his on.

“How much you get paid for doing this kind of media poisoning?” he says for openers.

I put my dark glasses back on.

“There’s only one way to find out where it’s at,” The Connection says, and jerks his thumb at the photographer I’m with. “Dump him and get out on the Street. Don’t take money. You won’t need money.” He reaches into his cape and pulls out a mimeographed sheet announcing a series of classes at the Digger Free Store on How to Avoid Getting Busted, VD, Rape, Pregnancy, Beatings and Starvation. “You oughta come,” The Connection says. “You’ll need it.”

I say maybe, but meanwhile I would like to talk to Chester Anderson.

“If we decide to get in touch with you at all,” The Connection says, “we’ll get in touch with you real quick.” He kept an eye on me in the Park after that, but he never did call the number I gave him.

It is twilight and cold and too early to find Deadeye at the Blue Unicorn so I ring Max’s bell. Barbara comes to the door.

“Max and Tom are seeing somebody on a kind of business thing,” she says. “Can you come back a little later?” I am hard put to think what Max and Tom might be seeing somebody about in the way of business, but a few days later in the Park I find out.

“Hey,” Tom calls. “Sorry you couldn’t come up the other day, but business was being done.” This time I get the point. “We got some great stuff,” he adds, and begins to elaborate. Every third person in the Park this afternoon looks like a narcotics agent and I try to change the subject. Later I suggest to Max that he be more wary in public. “Listen, I’m very cautious,” he says. “You can’t be too careful.”

By now I have an unofficial taboo contact with the San Francisco Police Department. What happens is that this cop and I meet in various late-movie ways, like I happen to be sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game and he happens to sit down next to me, and we exchange guarded generalities. No information actually passes between us, but after a while we get to kind of like each other.

“The kids aren’t too bright,” he is telling me on this particular day. “They’ll tell you they can always spot an undercover, they’ll tell you about ‘the kind of car he drives.’ They aren’t talking about undercovers, they’re talking about plainclothesmen who just happen to drive unmarked cars, like I do. They can’t tell an undercover. An undercover doesn’t drive some black Ford with a two-way radio.”

He tells me about an undercover who was taken out of the District because he was believed to be over-exposed, too familiar. He was transferred to the narcotics squad, and by error was immediately sent back into the District as a narcotics undercover.

The cop plays with his keys. “You want to know how smart these kids are?” he says finally. “The first week, this guy makes 43 cases.”

Some kid with braces on his teeth is playing his guitar and boasting that he got the last of the STP from Mr. X himself, and someone else is talking about some acid that will be available within the next month, and you can see that nothing much is happening around the San Francisco Oracle office this afternoon. A boy sits at a drawing board drawing the infinitesimal figures that people do on speed, and the kid with the braces watches him. “ I ’ m gonna shoot my wo – man ,” he sings softly. “ She been with a– noth – er man .” Someone works out the numerology of my name and the name of the photographer I’m with. The photographer’s is all white and the sea (“If I were to make you some beads, see, I’d do it mainly in white,” he is told), but mine has a double death symbol. The afternoon does not seem to be getting anywhere, so it’s suggested we get in touch with a man named Sandy. We are told he will take us to the Zen temple.

Four boys and one middle-aged man are sitting on a grass mat at Sandy’s place, sipping anise tea and listening to Sandy read Laura Huxley’s You Are Not the Target .

We sit down and have some anise tea. “Meditation turns us on,” Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers. The middle-aged man, whose name is George, is making me uneasy because he is in a trance next to me and he stares at me without seeing me.

I feel that my mind is going — George is dead , or we all are — when the telephone suddenly rings.

“It’s for George,” Sandy says.

“George, tele phone.”

“ George .”

Somebody waves his hand in front of George and George finally gets up, bows, and moves toward the door on the balls of his feet.

“I think I’ll take George’s tea,” somebody says. “George — are you coming back?”

George stops at the door and stares at each of us in turn. “In a mo ment,” he snaps.

Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe? The first to send his wild wild vibrations To all those cosmic superstations? For the song he always shouts Sends the planets flipping out . . . But I’ll tell you before you think me loony That I’m talking about Narada Muni . . . Singing HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE

is a Krishna song. Words by Howard Wheeler and music by Michael Grant.

Maybe the trip is not in Zen but in Krishna, so I visit Michael Grant, the Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta’s leading disciple in San Francisco. Grant is at home with his brother-in-law and his wife, a pretty girl wearing a cashmere pullover, a jumper and a red caste mark on her forehead.

“I’ve been associated with the Swami since about last July,” Michael says. “See, the Swami came here from India, and he was at this ashram (hermitage) in upstate New York and he just kept to himself and chanted a lot. For a couple of months, pretty soon I helped him get his storefront in New York. Now it’s an international movement, which we spread by teaching this chant.” Michael is fingering his red wooden beads, and I notice that I am the only person in the room who is wearing shoes. “It’s catching on like wildfire.”

“If everybody chanted,” the brother-in-law says, “there wouldn’t be any problem with the police or anybody.”

“Ginsberg calls the chant ecstasy, but the Swami says that’s not exactly it.” Michael walks across the room and straightens a picture of Krishna as a baby. “Too bad you can’t meet the Swami,” he adds. “The Swami’s in New York now.”

“Ecstasy’s not the right word at all,” says the brother-in-law, who has been thinking about it. “It makes you think of some mun dane ecstasy.”

The next day I drop by Max and Sharon’s, and find them in bed smoking a little morning hash. Sharon once advised me that even half a joint of grass would make getting up in the morning a beautiful thing. I ask Max how Krishna strikes him.

“You can get a high on a mantra,” he says. “But I’m holy on acid.”

Max passes the joint to Sharon and leans back. “Too bad you couldn’t meet the Swami,” he says. “The Swami was the turn-on.”

“Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It’s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it’ll take for that to happen?” is a question a San Francisco psychiatrist asked me.

At the time, I was in San Francisco, the political potential of the movement was just becoming clear. It had always been clear to the revolutionary core of the Diggers, whose guerrilla talent was now bent on open confrontations and the creation of a summer emergency, and it was clear to many of the doctors and priests and sociologists who had occasion to work in the District, and it could rapidly become clear to any outsider who bothered to decode Chester Anderson’s call-to-action communiqués or to watch who was there first at the street skirmishes which now set the tone for life in the District. One did not have to be a political analyst to see it: The boys in the rock groups saw it, because they were often where it was happening. “In the Park there are always twenty or thirty people below the stand,” one of the Grateful Dead complained to me, “ready to take the crowd on some militant trip.”

But the peculiar beauty of this political potential, as far as the activists were concerned, was that it remained not clear at all to most of the inhabitants of the District. Nor was it clear to the press, which at varying levels of competence continued to report “the hippie phenomenon” as an extended panty raid; an artistic avant-garde led by such comfortable YMHA regulars as Allen Ginsberg; or a thoughtful protest, not unlike joining the Peace Corps.

This last, or they’re-trying-to-tell-us-something approach, reached its apogee in July in a Time cover story which revealed that hippies “scorn money — they call it ‘bread,’” and remains the most remarkable, if unwitting, extant evidence that the signals between the generations are irrevocably jammed.

Because the signals the press was getting were immaculate of political possibilities, the tensions of the District went unremarked upon, even during the period when there were so many observers on Haight Street from Life and Look and CBS that they were largely observing one another. The observers believed roughly what the children told them: That they were a generation dropped out of political action, beyond power games, that the New Left was on an ego trip. Ergo , there really were no activists in the Haight-Ashbury, and those things which happened every Sunday were spontaneous demonstrations because, just as the Diggers say, the police are brutal and juveniles have no rights and runaways are deprived of their right to self-determination, and people are starving to death on Haight Street.

Of course the activists — not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic — had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Or maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here . They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, diet pills, the Bomb .

They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words — words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just another ego trip — their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are 14, 15, 16 years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Peter Berg knows a lot of words.

“Is Peter Berg around?” I ask.

“Are you Peter Berg?”

The reason Peter Berg does not bother to share too many words with me is because two of the words he knows are “media poisoning.” Peter Berg wears a gold earring and is perhaps the only person in the District upon whom a gold earring looks obscurely ominous. He belongs to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, some of whose members started the Artist’s Liberation Front for “those who seek to combine their creative urge with socio-political involvement.” It was out of the Mime Troupe that the Diggers grew, during the 1966 Hunter’s Point riots when it seemed a good idea to give away food and do puppet shows in the streets, making fun of the National Guard. Along with Arthur Lisch, Peter Berg is part of the shadow leadership of the Diggers, and it was he who more or less invented and first introduced to the press the notion that there would be an influx into San Francisco this summer of 200,000 indigent adolescents. The only conversation I ever have with Peter Berg is about how he holds me personally responsible for the way Life captioned Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pictures out of Cuba, but I like to watch him at work in the Park.

Big Brother is playing in the Panhandle, and almost everybody is high, and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon between three and six o’clock, which the activists say are the three hours of the week when something is most likely to happen in the Haight-Ashbury, and who turns up but Peter Berg. He is with his wife and six or seven other people, along with Chester Anderson’s associate The Connection, and the first peculiar thing is, they’re in blackface. I mention to Max and Sharon that some members of the Mime Troupe seem to be in blackface.

“It’s street theater,” Sharon assures me. “It’s supposed to be really groovy.”

The Mime Troupers get a little closer, and there are some other peculiar things about them. For one thing they are tapping people on the head with dimestore plastic nightsticks, and for another they are wearing signs on their backs: HOW MANY TIMES YOU BEEN RAPED, YOU LOVE FREAKS? and things like that. Then they are distributing communication-company fliers which say:

& this summer thousands of unwhite un–suburban boppers are going to want to know why you’ve given up what they can’t get & how you get away with it & how come you not a faggot with hair so long & they want haight street one way or the other. IF YOU DON’T KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY.

Max reads the flier and stands up. “I’m getting bad vibes,” he says, and he and Sharon leave.

I have to stay around because I’m looking for Otto so I walk over to where the Mime Troupers have formed a circle around a Negro. Peter Berg is saying, if anybody asks, that this is street theater, and I figure the curtain is up because what they are doing right now is jabbing the Negro with the nightsticks. They jab, and they bare their teeth, and they rock on the balls of their feet, and they wait.

“I’m beginning to get annoyed here,” the Negro says. “I’m gonna get mad.” By now there are several Negroes around, reading the signs and watching.

“Just beginning to get annoyed, are you?” one of the Mime Troupers says. “Don’t you think it’s about time?”

“Listen, here,” another Negro says. “There’s room for everybody in the Park.”

“Yeah?” a girl in blackface says. “Everybody who ?”

“Why,” he says, confused. “Everybody. In America.”

“In America ,”the blackface girl shrieks. “Listen to him talk about America.”

“Listen,” he says. “Listen here.”

“What’d America ever do for you?” the girl in blackface jeers. “White kids here, they can sit in the Park all summer long, listening to music, because their big-shot parents keep sending them money. Who ever sends you money?”

“Listen,” the Negro says helplessly. “You’re gonna start something here, this isn’t right —”

“You tell us what’s right, black boy,” the girl says.

The youngest member of the blackface group, an earnest tall kid about 19, 20, is hanging back at the edge of the scene. I offer him an apple and ask what is going on. “Well,” he says, “I’m new at this, I’m just beginning to study it, but you see the capitalists are taking over the District, and that’s what Peter — well, ask Peter.”

I did not ask Peter. It went on for a while. But on that particular Sunday between three and six o’clock everyone was too high, and the weather was too good, and the Hunter’s Point gangs who usually come in between three and six on Sunday afternoon had come in on Saturday instead, and nothing started. While I waited for Otto I asked a little girl I had met a couple of times before what she had thought of it. “It’s something groovy they call street theater,” she said. I said I had wondered if it might not have political overtones. She is 17 years old, and she worked it around in her mind for a while and finally she remembered a couple of words from somewhere. “Maybe it’s some John Birch thing,” she said.

When I finally find Otto he says, “I got something at my place that’ll blow your mind,” and when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.

“Five years old,” he says. “On acid.”

The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes soda, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year, her mother has given her acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.

I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.

“She means do the other kids in your class turn on, get stoned ,” says the friend of her mothers who brought her to Otto’s.

“Only Sally and Anne,” Susan says.

“What about Lia?” her mother’s friend prompts.

“Lia,” Susan says, “is not in High Kindergarten.”

Sue Ann’s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm, though, which is probably why his mother was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. “You’ll fry like rice,” she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann’s macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn’t notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard that had been damaged in the fire.

This article is featured in the July/August 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post . Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

Yeats Poem © 1924 The Macmillan Company. Renewed 1952 Bertha Georgie Yeats. “Krishna Song” © 1967 by International Society for Krishna Consciousness “No Milk Today” © 1966-1967 Man-Ken Music Ltd.

Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now

Recommended

May 03, 2024

American Life , Travel

The 150th Running of The Kentucky Derby

Amy S. Eckert

Apr 24, 2024

American Life

The Woman Who Shut Down Fifth Avenue

Christina Stanton

Apr 17, 2024

Cable Neuhaus

I first came across “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as a song recorded by Eliza Gilkyson, which was on a CD I bought (in fact, I bought three CD’s by this singer) and I wondered what it was all about. I liked the melody and did not reference the lyrics; shameful of me, but time constrains. Anyway I have now read the essay by Joan Didion and being born in 1942 and just being slightly too old and off time, could never fulfil my destiny as part of an inclusive group. Reading this essay is like a tendril to the past and thoroughly nostalgic. Evocatively put together from experienced time, I loved it.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years by Greil Marcus – review

F or me, the most succinct and illuminating portrait of the Doors is still Joan Didion's masterful account of the evening she spent in the spring of 1968 "sitting on the cold vinyl floor of a sound studio on Sunset Boulevard" waiting for their lead singer, Jim Morrison, to turn up for a recording session. Stretching over just five pages, it was one of several sharp vignettes of countercultural life in California that made up the title essay of her second book of nonfiction, The White Album , published in 1979.

A detached but astute observer of the excesses of the late 1960s, Didion saw the Doors as a kind of dark Dionysian counterpoint to the utopian dreams of the time. "On the whole my attention was only minimally engaged by the preoccupations of rock-and-roll bands," she wrote, "but the Doors were different, the Doors interested me. The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors' music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation." She dubbed them "the Norman Mailers of the top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic sex".

Greil Marcus does not do succinct or detached. He is passionate, scholarly and deadly serious, sometimes to the point of unconscious self-parody, about the music he loves, whether it be the young Van Morrison or an obscure punk group such as the Mekons. In some ways, this makes him the perfect writer to take on board the Doors's contested legacy.

Some 40 years on from their short reign as Los Angeles's most portentous rock group, the Doors are still revered by some for the dark power of their lyrics and swirling music, and dismissed by others as pompous and overblown. The premature death of their lead singer and self-styled poet, Jim Morrison, in Paris in 1971, ensured the group's place in rock mythology, though Oliver Stone's 1991 biopic, which Marcus reappraises in a positive light here, may have dented that mythology for younger rock fans unused to such displays of emotional melodrama, on and offstage.

This book, though, is not so much a defence of the Doors as a celebration of what the group – and, by extension the 60s – represented. In one of the most thought-provoking chapters, titled "The Doors in the So-Called Sixties", Marcus writes: "The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part – when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted."

I would have loved a whole book on this subject, but Marcus, as ever, has a lot of ground to cover. That his scholarship often gives way to wild extrapolation is a Marcusian signature of sorts, and one that will irritate as many readers as it intrigues. The chapter devoted to the song "Twentieth Century Fox", for instance, reads as if he is musing aloud, leaping from a brief explanation of the lyric to the ways in which the song resembles a piece of pop art by Eduardo Paolozzi and a piece of classic pop music by Chuck Berry. This leads to a meditation on the difference between high and low pop art – Roy Lichtenstein v George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat – followed by an interrogation of Richard Hamilton's pop aesthetic. Before you've caught your breath, Marcus has moved on to a description of the underrated Wallace Berman's serial photographic assemblages and the graphic power of the flyers designed by Shawn Kerri for punk band the Germs.

All this is classic Marcus territory and it makes dizzying reading, but to what end? Were the Doors making pop art of a kind or not? Or, only briefly? And what to make of this assertion: "If 'Light My Fire' hadn't made the Doors into stars you can hear how their music could have curdled into artiness, everything self-referential, postmodern, each not a parody of something else, not a word having to mean what it said, the group more popular in Paris or Milan, especially during fashion week, than anywhere in America, just like Chet Baker." Phew! An interesting point that might have been better made without the whiff of cultural imperialism and rock snobbery. And when he writes of Jim Morrison being "engaged in a race against language for its own sake", you may, like me, feel he is unconsciously describing his own writing style.

When Marcus gets it right, though, he is an exhilaratingly original critic, taking the reader on a journey way beyond the tired cliches of most rock writing. His first book, Mystery Train , which places rock music in the context of American myth and folklore, is a case in point. So, too, is the constantly illuminating Invisible Republic , in which he explored "the old weird America" that Bob Dylan mined on The Basement Tapes . This time around, his treatise seems less assured, or perhaps less developed. There is no guiding theme to the book save for the one suggested in the subtitle: "A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years". The song-by-song approach works to a degree, though many of the versions he refers to are rare recordings or live bootlegs which only the true devotee will be prepared to track down.

Few bands epitomise the contradictions of the 60s like the Doors, whose music contained all the promise and the possibility of that time, as well as the chaos and the disorder. On a good night, they could sound like the best bar band in the world (the rough and tumble of "Roadhouse Blues", the surging momentum of "LA Woman") and be psychic explorers in tune with Vietnam-era America's collective death wish (the spiralling 12-minute Freudian saga that is "The End", later used brilliantly by Francis Ford Coppola to open Apocalypse Now , a movie that portrays Vietnam as the ultimate bad acid trip).

Marcus's spiralling mediation did send me back to the band's music for the first time in ages, and I was arrested once again by the lyrical and musical spell of songs such as "Soul Kitchen" – "Your fingers weave quick minarets/ Speak in secret alphabets/ I light another cigarette/ Learn to forget…" Marcus describes "Soul Kitchen" as "the Doors' own 'Gloria'", though there is nothing in the Van Morrison song as beautifully defeated as that "learn to forget" line.

This book may well make the most sceptical music fan think again about the Doors and their music, as well as the times that shaped them and they, in turn, helped shape. The reader will need a certain stamina and patience, but, as usual with Marcus, it's worth it in the end.

• The Observer
• Greil Marcus
• Music books

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

The Essential Joan Didion

Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here’s where to start.

Credit... John Bryson/Getty Images

Supported by

• Share full article

By Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at The Times. Her book “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine” will be published by Liveright next year.

• Published April 26, 2024 Updated April 28, 2024

The Joan Didion many people know is constructed from a few artifacts the real writer left behind when she died in 2021 . There’s her much-imitated (and sometimes parodied) 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” about leaving New York. There’s the packing list enumerated in her essay “The White Album,” written between 1968 and 1978, which is sometimes cited as aspirational , even instructional . There are the iconic photographs of Didion taken by Julian Wasser in 1968, commissioned for a profile in Time — particularly one in which she’s smoking while leaning against her Stingray, cooler than anyone has ever been, a vibe echoed in the 2003 ad Didion shot for the fashion brand Celine . And, of course, there’s her most famous line — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — which opens “The White Album” and is frequently invoked, wrongly, for inspiration.

Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma.

And her work, which spanned well over a half-century, reads like an account of a country careering toward a cliff. Didion may be best known as the California writer who chronicled midcentury cultural decay, but her body of work is much wider and deeper. She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales behind them.

In the years since her death, Didion’s star has only risen, with a museum exhibit , revivals of her play , a buzzed-about estate sale and the New York Public Library’s forthcoming unveiling of her joint archive with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. In the meantime, the state of the world has felt ever more confusing, and the line between reality and make-believe more blurred. So there’s never been a better time to dip your toe — or plunge your whole self — into the work of one of the finest, most perceptive writers in American letters.

I want to start with the foundational text.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) was Didion’s second book — her first was the 1963 novel “Run River,” written in her 20s as a Vogue staffer in New York. But even though 13 books of nonfiction and four novels followed it, “Slouching,” published when she was 33, remains fundamental to Didion’s oeuvre, and helped establish her reputation as a practitioner of the New Journalism.

Like all of her collections, the book consists of essays written on assignment for a variety of outlets: The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Holiday, Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. Taken together, they start to convey a portrait of the cultural critic as a young woman, and especially her sense, nurtured from a very young age, that the world was coming apart at the seams.

The book’s title comes from one of its essays, about the decaying vibes in late ’60s Haight-Ashbury. That’s in turn plucked from a Yeats poem, quoted as an epigraph. In the preface she writes that the essay was reported and drafted in an attempt to beat a despairing writer’s block: “If I was to work again at all,” she writes, “it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

Didion often spoke of writing as the way she figured out what she thought, which makes the title essay a must-read for understanding the author. But “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a jewel chest, and the shiniest gem inside it might be “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s classic essay about falling in and out of love with New York City.

The often-quoted “On Self-Respect,” which also appears in this collection, has a funny origin story: Didion wrote it as a Vogue staffer because the editors had put the headline on the cover without assigning a writer, and she happened to be around.

Was there a sequel?

Not exactly. But “The White Album” (1979) is kind of a follow-up to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” though it also works all on its own. The book’s title essay is somewhat autobiographical, an account of Didion’s life in Los Angeles during the 1960s, when she and Dunne were raising their daughter, Quintana Roo, and spending a great deal of their time with movie stars and rockers. Written as a series of vignettes, the essay floats from Didion’s psychological trouble to her encounters with familiar figures — the Black Panthers, the Doors, the Manson family. There’s a sense in which the essay is responsible for the way many of us born later “remember” the late 1960s; you could spot its DNA, for instance, in certain seasons of “Mad Men,” or in Quentin Tarantino’s film “ Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .”

On the whole, the essays in “The White Album” feel more descriptive of Didion’s life than earlier writings, but she expertly toed a fine line that made her readers (especially women) feel they knew her, even though she never really revealed a lot about herself in her writing. Other standouts in the collection include “The Women’s Movement,” which will give you a sense for Didion’s reluctance to call herself a feminist, and “Holy Water,” which becomes a personal history by way of California history.

I want to read Didion at her most vicious.

The cattiest (and thus maybe the funniest) essay Didion ever wrote was “Pretty Nancy,” a portrait of Nancy Reagan when she was the first lady of California. Didion, part of the fifth generation of a well-off Sacramento family, had absolutely no use for either Reagan from the moment the Gipper stepped into politics. For her, the Reagans became the prevailing metaphor for everything that was wrong with the American political scene, because she believed they thought, acted, campaigned and governed like Hollywood figures. “She has told me that the governor never wore makeup even in motion pictures, and that politics is rougher than the picture business because you do not have the studio to protect you,” Didion writes near the end of the profile, when the tone of irritated disdain is practically dripping off the page.

Despite inflicting a significant sting — Nancy Reagan mentions the essay in her own memoirs — “Pretty Nancy” wasn’t collected in any of Didion’s books until the final one, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” (2021). It’s a perfect glimpse into a young, irritated writer who knew exactly what she was doing.

Did she ever get swoony?

Words like “unsparing” and “cleareyed” are usually applied to Didion’s cultural analysis, but if you want to see her in full weak-kneed mode, read the essay “John Wayne: A Love Story.” (It’s collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”) In 1965, she finally landed a pitch she’d been longing for: The Saturday Evening Post commissioned Didion to travel to northern Mexico, where “The Sons of Katie Elder” — a western she’d later brush off in a paragraph-long review in Vogue — was shooting. The star was John Wayne, whom Didion had worshiped since watching him in a converted aircraft hangar on the Army base where her father was stationed during World War II. He became her idea of manhood, safety, strength.

Wayne-like characters pop up across Didion’s fiction, as does her longing for the kind of security this line represented to her. But Wayne as an actual person was important to her, too. When she finally met her hero on set, he was just coming off a lung cancer scare; she mentions his “bad cold and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set.” Famously, he’d used his diagnosis, and his tough-guy stature, to encourage people in the smoke-filled era to get screened for the disease.

John Wayne is key to Didion’s story for more than just entertainment reasons. Her political views, until well into adulthood, were sternly conservative, not as right wing as Wayne’s but nearly so — she used to announce at Hollywood dinner parties, seemingly for shock value, that she had voted for Barry Goldwater. She switched affiliations after the California Republican Party embraced Richard Nixon, but as late as the 1990s she was still saying she’d have voted for Goldwater in every election since, had he run.

Didion also ended up working in the movie industry, in one way or another, for her entire life, and it’s not hard to believe she was hooked on the business by her love of Wayne.

How much of a Hollywood insider was Didion, really?

Didion and Dunne considered themselves novelists first and journalists second, but they really paid their bills by writing and doctoring scripts. Their first produced movie was the 1971 addict drama “The Panic in Needle Park,” starring Al Pacino in his first leading role, and Kitty Winn, who won Best Actress at Cannes for the role. The pair wrote a number of scripts together, including “Play It as It Lays,” “A Star Is Born” (the Barbra Streisand one), “True Confessions,” “Up Close and Personal” and the HBO short film “Hills Like White Elephants.” If you really want a great overview of Hollywood through their eyes, you can’t do better than two of Dunne’s books: “The Studio” (1969), about life on the back lot at 20th Century Fox, and “Monster” (1997), about the travails they experienced getting “Up Close and Personal” made.

But Didion wrote about Hollywood, too. One of her most astute essays, “Hollywood: Having Fun,” was first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, then lightly revised and published as “In Hollywood” in “The White Album.”

“Hollywood: Having Fun” is a careening tour through the wheeling and dealing of the movie business, and also a way for Didion to take out-of-touch East Coast movie critics to task. (She specifically names Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, with whom Didion had briefly shared a movie review column at Vogue. By 1973, Kael was arguably the most powerful movie critic in America; Didion airily suggests she’s full of hogwash.) Didion believes that “much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally,” because if you don’t experience Hollywood directly then you can’t possibly understand how the sausage gets made and, thus, understand what you’re really seeing up on the screen.

What’s clear is that, having worked as a movie critic herself for a while, she’s not particularly interested in critics’ thoughts anymore, which leads to this brilliant line: “Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.” You said it, Joan.

What about Didion’s fiction?

Most people will tell you to read “Play It as It Lays” (1970), her second novel, and they’re not wrong. Like the screenplay version she and Dunne later wrote, Didion’s novel is a bleak tale of a melting-down actress in a tumultuous 1960s Hollywood.

But of her five novels, the best is “Democracy” (1984). Occasionally I think it might be the Great American Novel. Narrated by a journalist named Joan Didion, it’s mostly the story of Inez Victor, the wife of a Kennedy-style senator who ran a failed campaign for president. But Inez has been in love since she was a teenager with a man named Jack Lovett, whose occupation is unclear (C.I.A. agent? War profiteer?) but who, for her, represents safety. He is the John Wayne figure in the book. He can’t keep bad things away, but he can fix them.

“Democracy” ends tragically — all of Didion’s novels end tragically — yet with a note of romantic hope that turns the whole thing into a sweeping epic. You can almost hear the strings swelling.

I want to understand Didion’s politics.

Good luck. She did start out very conservative, and trended leftward into adulthood after getting fed up with Nixon and Reagan. Yet she remained very difficult to pin down. Her early work is full of takedowns of idealism on the right and the left, as if she is always looking at these matters through narrowed eyes.

But if you want to see, roughly, where she landed, then the place to go is her book “Political Fictions,” a collection of essays that had the misfortune to be published on Sept. 11, 2001. They’re mostly reporting from campaigns of figures like Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, or the travails of an impeached Bill Clinton, and the eye she casts is clearly one that wears Hollywood-colored glasses. Everything in a campaign or a presidency, she writes, is carefully choreographed in much the same way as a movie set. This is a sign, to her, of political decline, a category error that renders politics as flat, useless and commodified. The candidate is a product being sold to the public, just like a movie star. Don’t miss the review of Newt Gingrich’s work in “Political Fictions,” which she manages to take apart by simply listing his metaphors and references.

Once you’re done with “Political Fictions,” pick up “Where I Was From,” published a few years later, in which Didion retreads her own work and life story. It’s a re-evaluation, after both her parents’ deaths, of the myths and ideas she absorbed as a young girl in California, and thus a re-evaluation more broadly of American myths and legends. (She does some of the same work in the slim book “Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11,” which fiercely questions dogma that arose in the wake of the attacks and, in particular, ideas and articles published by The New York Times.)

What is one Didion essay that can’t be missed?

Didion’s most consequential essay may be “Sentimental Journeys, ” first published in The New York Review of Books in 1991 and later collected in “After Henry” (1992). It concerns the infamous case of the Central Park jogger and the railroaded confessions of the so-called Central Park Five, five teenagers wrongfully accused of the crime and sent to prison. In a full-page ad he personally paid to place in four local papers, Donald J. Trump, then a local businessman, called for their execution . In 2002, their convictions were vacated. (One of them, Yusef Salaam, is now a New York City councilman.)

In “Sentimental Journeys,” Didion comes at the case sideways, examining the stories that New Yorkers tell themselves about the city and its inhabitants. She writes about how racism distorts this story, and questions whether the jogger’s name should have been released to the public. And she explores how a single case such as this one, though hardly the only of its kind, can be wound up by the news media, politicians and opportunists into representing something much bigger and much less logical.

Her diagnosis has aged breathtakingly well. “In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general — problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color — the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented,” she wrote. In typical Didion fashion, that could have been written yesterday.

What was she thinking about near the end of her life?

Didion’s final two decades were filled with loss. On Dec. 30, 2003, Dunne and Didion returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in the hospital, where she was in a coma. Dunne suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Didion told the story of her year of grief in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the National Book Award. Just before the book was published, Quintana died. Didion toured in the midst of her grief, then wrote a theatrical adaptation, which opened on Broadway in March 2007, starring Didion’s longtime friend Vanessa Redgrave as the author.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is intense and cyclical, evoking the mind caught in a state of grief as much through its form as its content. Many who have read it in the middle of grief (including me) have found it profoundly cathartic. It’s representative of a writer who has turned her famously perceptive gaze upon herself, something she continued in “Blue Nights” (2011), which reflects on her daughter’s life.

It’s often overlooked, but as a supplement to reading these late Didion books, don’t miss her essay “ The Case of Theresa Schiavo ,” published several months before Quintana died. In it she wrestles fervently with the fate of Schiavo, a woman on life support who had become a source of national political debate. Once you know from her books what she went through while Quintana was on life support, the essay takes on a whole new meaning. Didion made the personal both cultural and political — a practice she’d honed over a storied career.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the woman known as the Central Park jogger. She survived the attack; she was not murdered.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of a screenplay Joan Didion wrote with her husband. It was “The Panic in Needle Park,” not “The Panic at Needle Park.”

How we handle corrections

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

Don DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here are his essential books .

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Author Interviews

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

Remembering essayist Joan Didion, a keen observer of American culture

Terry Gross

Didion, who died Dec. 23, was known her cool, unsentimental observations. Her books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking . Originally broadcast in 1987 and 2005.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Joan Didion’s Magic Trick

What was it that gave her such power?

Listen to this article

Listen to more stories on audm

Updated at 5:05 p.m. ET on July 22, 2022.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.    

“T hink of this as a travel piece,” she might have written. “Imagine it in Sunset magazine: ‘Five Great California Stops Along the Joan Didion Trail.’ ”

Or think of this as what it really is: a road trip of magical thinking.

I had known that Didion’s Parkinson’s was advancing; seven or eight months earlier, someone had told me that she was vanishing; someone else had told me that for the past two years, she hadn’t been able to speak.

Explore the June 2022 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

I didn’t want her to die. My sense of myself is in many ways wrapped up in the 40 essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album . I don’t know how many times I’ve read Democracy .

“Call me the author,” she writes in that novel. “Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion.”

There are people who admire Joan Didion, and people who enjoy reading Joan Didion, and people who think Joan Didion is overrated. But then there are the rest of us. People who can’t really explain how those first two collections hit us, or why we can never let them go.

I picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1975, the year I was 14. I had met Didion that spring, although she wasn’t famous yet, outside of certain small but powerful circles. She’d been a visiting professor in the Berkeley English department, and my father was the department chair. But I didn’t read her until that summer. I was in Ireland, as I always was in the summer, and I was bored out of my mind, as I always was in the summer, and I happened to see a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a Dublin living room. I read that book and something changed inside me, and it has stayed that way for the rest of my life.

Over the previous two years people kept contacting me with reports of her decline. I didn’t want to hear reports of her decline. I wanted to hear about the high-ceilinged rooms of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and about all the people who came to parties at her house on Franklin Avenue. I wanted to go with her to pick out a dress for Linda Kasabian, the Manson girl who drove the getaway car the night of the murders. I wanted to spend my days in the house out in Malibu, where the fever broke.

In 1969, Didion wanted to go to Vietnam, but her editor told her that “the guys are going out,” and she didn’t get to go. When her husband had been at Time and asked to go, he was sent at once, and he later wrote about spending five weeks in the whorehouses of Saigon.

Being denied the trip to Vietnam is the only instance I know of that her work was limited by her gender. She fought against the strictures of the time—and the ridiculous fact of being from California, which in the 1950s was like being from Mars, but with surfboards.

She fought all of that not by changing herself, or by developing some ball-breaking personality. She did it by staying exactly as she was—unsentimental, strong, deeply feminine, and a bit of a seductress—and writing sentence after sentence that cut the great men of New Journalism off at the knees. Those sentences, those first two collections—who could ever compete with them?

Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album created a new vocabulary of essay writing, one whose influence is on display every day of the week in the tide of personal essays published online by young writers. Those collections changed the way many people thought about nonfiction, and even the way they thought about themselves.

A thousand critics have addressed the worthy task of locating the errors of logic in those essays and calling out the various engines that turn the wheels: narcissism, whiteness, wealth. Frustrated by the entire cult of Didion, they’ve tried to crash it down by making a reasonable case against its foundational texts. God knows, none of that is heavy lifting. Joan Didion: guilty as charged.

From the September 2015 issue: The elitist allure of Joan Didion

But what no one has ever located is what makes so many people feel possessive not just of the stories, but also of their connection to the writer. What is it about these essays that takes so many people hostage?

At a certain point in her decline, I was gingerly asked if I would write an obituary. No, I would not. I was not on that particular train. I was on the train of trying to keep her alive.

I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion. I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything. I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.

The thing to do was get in the car and drive. I would go and find her in the places where she’d lived.

The trip began in my own house in Los Angeles, with me doing something that had never occurred to me before: I Googled the phrase Joan Didion’s house Sacramento . Even as I did, I felt that it was a mistake, that something as solid and irrefutable as a particular house on a particular street might put a rent in what she would have called “the enchantment under which I’ve lived my life.” What if it was the wrong kind of house? Too late: A color photograph was already blooming on the screen.

2000 22nd Street is a 5,000-square-foot home in a prosperous neighborhood with a wraparound porch and two staircases . The Didions had moved there when Joan was in 11th grade. It was a beautiful house. But it was the wrong kind of house.

The Joan Didion of my imagination didn’t come from a wealthy family. How did I miss the fact that what her family loved to talk about most was property—specifically, “land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access”? Why didn’t I understand the implications of her coming across an aerial photograph of some land her father had once thought of turning into a shopping mall, or of the remark “Later I drive with my father to a ranch he has in the foothills” to talk with “the man who runs his cattle”?

Perhaps because they came after this beautiful line:

When we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in.

On my first morning in Sacramento, there was a cold, spitting rain, and my husband drove me to the grand house on 22nd Street , where people are always dropping by asking to look at “Joan Didion’s home.” It was the largest house on the block, and it was on a corner lot. (“ No magical thinking required ,” the headline on Realtor.com had said when it was listed for sale in 2018.)

I stood in the rain looking up at the house, and I realized that something was wrong. She had described going home to her parents’ house to finish each of her first four novels, working in her old bedroom, which was painted carnation pink and where vines covered the window . But it was hard to imagine vines growing over the upstairs windows of this house; they would have had to climb up two very tall stories and occlude the light in the downstairs rooms as well.

Later, I spoke with one of Didion’s relatives, who explained that the family left the house on 22nd Street not long after Joan graduated from high school. The house where she finished her novels, and where she brought her daughter for her first birthday, was in the similarly expensive area of Arden Oaks, but it has been so thoroughly renovated as to be almost unrecognizable to the family members who knew it. In fact, the Didions had owned a series of Sacramento houses. But myths take hold in a powerful and permanent way, and the big house on 22nd Street is the one readers want to see.

The neighborhood was very pretty, and the gardens were well tended. But Joan Didion wasn’t there.

In some ways, Sacramento seemed to me like a Joan Didion theme park. In less time than it takes to walk from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride to the Pirates of the Caribbean, you could get from the Didions’ house on 22nd Street to a house they had lived in earlier, on U Street.

We drove around looking at places that I had read about almost all my life. Nothing seemed real, and there was almost no sign that Joan Didion had grown up there. If I lived in Sacramento, I would rename the capitol building for her. I would turn a park into the Joan Didion Garden, with wide pathways covered in pea gravel, as in the Tuileries.

I never imagined that I would see the two governor’s mansions she describes in “Many Mansions.” The essay contrasts the old governor’s mansion—a “large white Victorian gothic”—with the new, 12,000-square-foot one that was to be the Reagans’ home, but that was left unfinished after his second term. During this period she loathed the Reagans, but not for political reasons. She hated their taste.

The size of the house was an affront to Didion, as was the fact that it had “no clear view of the river.” But above all, she hated the features built into the mansion, things representative of the new, easy “California living” she abhorred. The house had a wet bar in the formal living room, a “refreshment center” in the “recreation room,” only enough bookcases “for a set of the World Book and some Books of the Month,” and one of those kitchens that seems designed exclusively for microwaving and trash compacting.

She didn’t just hate the house; she feared it: “I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable,” she wrote. (This is why some people hate Joan Didion, and I get it. I get it.)

Then there’s the old mansion, which she used to visit “once in a while” during the term of Governor Earl Warren, because she was friends with his daughter Nina. “The old Governor’s Mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world,” she wrote, “and probably still is.”

In the essay, she describes taking a public tour of the old mansion, which was filled with the ghosts of her own past and also the crude realities of the present. The tourists complained about “all those stairs” and “all that wasted space,” and apparently they could not imagine why a bathroom might be big enough to have a chair (“to read a story to a child in the bathtub,” of course) or why the kitchen would have a table with a marble top (to roll out pastry).

It is one of those essays where Didion instructs you on the right kind of taste to have, and I desperately wanted to agree. But in my teenage heart of hearts, I had to admit that I wanted the house with the rec room. I kept this thought to myself.

When my husband and I arrived at the old governor’s mansion, I started laughing. Nobody would want to live there, and certainly nobody in the boundless Googie, car-culture future of 1960s California. (It looked like the Psycho house, but with a fresh coat of paint.) That said, we drove over to the house that was originally built for the Reagans and that the state had since sold, and it was a grim site : It looked like the world’s largest Taco Bell.

The funny thing about all of this is that at the time Didion wrote that essay, Jerry Brown was the governor of California, and he had no intention of living in any kind of mansion. Instead he rented an apartment and slept on a mattress on the floor, sometimes with his girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt. And—like every California woman with a pulse—Didion adored him.

This is Joan Didion’s magic trick: She gets us on the side of “the past” and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present. The Reagans’ trash compactor is unspeakable, but Jerry Brown’s mattress is irresistible.

Before we left Sacramento we made a final stop, at C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, Didion’s alma mater. There was one thing I wanted to see: a bronze plaque set into cement at the top of a flight of stairs. I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been jackhammered out, but there it was.

This building is dedicated to truth liberty toleration by the native sons of the golden west. September 19, 1937

These plaques were once all over the state at different civic institutions, and especially in schools. The Native Sons of the Golden West is a still-extant fraternal organization founded to honor the pioneers and prospectors who arrived in California in the middle of the 19th century. The group’s president proclaimed in 1920 that “California was given by God to a white people.” The organization has since modernized, but you cannot look at the pioneers’ achievements without taking into account the genocide of California’s actual Native peoples. “Clearing the land” was always a settler’s first mission, and it didn’t refer to cutting down trees.

People from the East often say that Joan Didion explained California to them. Essays have described her as the state’s prophet, its bard, its chronicler. But Didion was a chronicler of white California. Her essays are preoccupied with the social distinctions among three waves of white immigration: the pioneers who arrived in the second half of the 19th century; the Okies, who came in the 1930s; and the engineers and businessmen of the postwar aerospace years, who blighted the state with their fast food and their tract housing and their cultural blank slate.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem , there’s an essay called “Notes From a Native Daughter”—which is how Joan Didion saw herself. It’s generally assumed that she began to grapple with her simplistic view of California histor y only much later in life, in Where I Was From . But in this first collection, she’s beginning to wonder how much of her sense of California is shaped by history or legend— by stories, not necessarily accurate , that are passed down through the generations.

“I remember running a boxer dog of my brother’s over the same flat fields that our great-great-grandfather had found virgin and had planted,” she writes. And she describes swimming in the same rivers her family had swum in for generations: “The Sacramento, so rich with silt that we could barely see our hands a few inches beneath the surface; the American, running clean and fast with melted Sierra snow until July, when it would slow down.”

She’s writing about a feeling of deep rootedness not just to the land but to the generations of her own family who lived on it. But she already knows that it won’t last. “All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears,” she writes.

When my husband and I had arrived in town, we’d stopped for a cup of coffee at the McDonald’s at Old Auburn Road and Sunrise Boulevard. You could see how flat the terrain was and how obviously it had once been ranchland. Who had sold that beautiful land to the McDonald’s Corporation? The Didions. Then we went to a clutch of small, unlovely tract houses, and found the street sign I was looking for: Didion Court. The tract houses were there because, according to the author Michelle Chihara , Joan and her family had once again sold a parcel of land.

What happened to the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling? None of my business, I guess.

Sacramento was a bust. I had the feeling that I could stay on the road forever and not understand Joan Didion. But as soon as we got on the freeway, it stopped raining, and after a while there were actual patches of sunshine and dry cement.

In Berkeley, things would begin to look familiar.

I was sitting on the floor of the “television room” in the Tri Delta sorority house on Warring Street in Berkeley. I hadn’t been in a sorority house in 40 years, but it all came back to me: the sleepy, underwater feel of the house at midday; the muffled sounds of a meal being prepared in the kitchen; the constant effort to keep a mild depression from growing; and the endless interest in candies and snacks.

The house was large and attractive, dove gray and—like all sorority houses—fortified. A gate, a locked door, a security camera, and a housemother, busy on the phone. The chapter’s president, Grace Naylor, gave me a tour and we chatted with a few girls sitting in the TV room. There was a wide staircase with a landing, perfect for making a dramatic entrance in a new dress or storming upstairs in a fit of anger. The rooms on one side looked out onto pretty Warring Street; the ones on the other side were filled with the view burned into the retinas of everyone who has ever lived in Berkeley: the beautiful campus and campanile, the flatlands, and beyond them the Golden Gate and the bay, the alluring city on the other side.

Naylor told me that until she’d gotten my email, no one had known that Joan Didion had lived in the house, although several members were fans of her writing. How could they possibly not know that, I wondered, and then was faced with the obvious answer: Didion had lived there 70 years ago.

When we sat down in the television room, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a single question I could ask. What is it like to live in a sorority house that you recently discovered Joan Didion once lived in? I was at a loss. But Naylor was the chapter president of a top-tier sorority, and she certainly knew how to organize a house visit.

“All our old scrapbooks are in here,” she said, gesturing toward some cupboards, and I glanced at them, suddenly on high alert. Would I like to look through them to see if we could find one from Didion’s years in the house?

I thought two things simultaneously: Eureka! (which is the California state motto) and This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me .

The scrapbooks were piled in the cupboards and weren’t necessarily in the best condition—what were the chances of finding one from 70 years ago? They were at once just some old scrapbooks of minor sociological interest, and also a slice of Didion’s life that the other vultures hadn’t yet picked over. Regarding Joan Didion, Tri Delt, I was vulture No. 1.

We started shuffling through the crumbling scrapbooks, and then suddenly the 1954 volume appeared. Because Joan Didion is cool, and because UC Berkeley is cool, many people assume she was in some way part of the revolution. But she arrived at Berkeley a decade too early.

The 1954 scrapbook was a testament to the Tri Delt house being the next right place for a rich girl from Sacramento who had gone to ballet class and Sunday school. It contained a photograph of the winners of a father/daughter look-alike contest, and a press clipping describing “one of the Gayest Parties for the young set,” which had taken place “in the Pebble Beach home of Dr. and Mrs. A. Carol McKenny.” It also contained so many engagement announcements that marriage seemed to be not just one tacit aim of ballet class, Sunday school, and Tri Delt but the entire point.

Toward the end of the scrapbook and with the vague suggestion that even our tiny, troubled Joan Didion had something of her own to look forward to: a Daily Cal clipping announcing that two Berkeley undergrads were headed to New York to take part in the Mademoiselle magazine program. Didion’s selection for the program revealed, if nothing else, that the people who chose the winners had an uncanny ability to spot early talent, all the way from Sylvia Plath in the ’50s to Mona Simpson in the late ’70s. The famous era was the 1950s. Girls from around the country were brought to the city of dreams, housed in the Barbizon Hotel, taught about layouts and martinis, and—should the worst happen—given the names of certain Park Avenue doctors.

Didion’s editorship took place between her junior and senior years of college; when she returned to Berkeley, she moved out of the Tri Delt house and into an apartment. I didn’t have much hope for the little brown-shingled apartment building she had lived in after the Tri Delt house. The house on 22nd Street in Sacramento had been interesting, but cold. The sorority house had presented me with a historically accurate picture, but a remote one.

Yet I pulled open the wooden gate of 2520 Ridge Road and stepped into a little garden that was shaded and filled with dark-green plants—and just like that, her living ghost rushed past me. She lingered for a few moments, and then she left, stepping into the vivid past, wearing her dirty raincoat and heading to the seminar that most freighted and engaged her: the writing class of the great Mark Schorer, whom I knew very well when I was growing up. He was a very kind person and also a peerless literary critic, and he found in Didion’s early work evidence not just of a great writer. “One thinks of the great performers —in ballet, opera, circuses,” he said. “Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything.”

And then Berkeley was over, and she headed back to New York because she had won the really big prize in the world of women’s magazines: the Prix de Paris at Vogue , which led to a job at the magazine. This was a marker of being the right kind of young woman—of having the right family, or the right schools, or the right wardrobe—in New York in the glamorous 1950s.

It had begun.

Joan Didion’s greatest essay is “Goodbye to All That.” It’s about the excitement and intoxication of being young in New York, from the moment she got off the plane “and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.”

She had “come out of the West and reached the mirage,” and the epigraph to the essay is part of an old nursery rhyme:

How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten— Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.

For years it was known as the greatest leaving–New York essay of all time. It’s about the revolving door, the way you can arrive there young, innocent, and new, but the very process of adapting to the city will coarsen and age you.

In 1996, a writer for New York magazine revealed something that had been carefully protected from the press, and that gives the essay a completely different meaning: What’s tearing her apart is a love affair that has ended with a man named Noel Parmentel. With that reading, you understand the essay’s insistently romantic tones: She can no longer bear to look at blue-and-white-striped sheets, to smell certain perfumes or Henri Bendel jasmine soap. “I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other,” she wrote.

Soon after coming to the city, she had fallen for Parmentel, a figure on the New York literary scene. A southerner who attended several parties a night, Parmentel was famous for getting drunk, insulting hostesses and guests, and letting loose with ethnic slurs. The heart wants what it wants.

Read: The things I would never do

In 2014, Parmentel agreed to be interviewed about the relationship by Tracy Daugherty, who wrote the indispensable biography of Didion, The Last Love Song . “She was better than all of them,” Parmentel said of the Vogue editors. “Far above those people in every way.” A lot of her colleagues at Vogue were jealous of her, he said: “This little nobody from Sacramento shows up in her little dresses and outshines them all. She’s smarter. Mannered. Better-bred.”

He helped her sell her first novel, which was in part dedicated to him, and which has an epigraph from the Robert Lowell poem “Man and Wife.” He would call her service and leave long messages; he would insult her, forget about her, reappear—but he wouldn’t marry her.

“This is the guy you ought to marry,” he famously told her about his mentee John Gregory Dunne. And—after visiting Dunne’s family home and noting the orderliness of its routines and the impeccable way that his mother kept house—she did.

The marriage “was a very good thing to do but badly timed,” Didion wrote. She was emotionally devastated, she didn’t know what to do with herself, and one night she and John ended up getting ferociously drunk at a party. They went to a diner for breakfast, and she cried. Later that day, he called her from his office at Time and asked her, “Do you mind if I quit?” She said no, and soon they were in California for a six-month trial that lasted 24 years.

Franklin Avenue

How many miles to Babylon? One and a half, as it turned out, but I didn’t know it yet.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1988 with a new job, a first husband, my Joan Didion books, and the gray-and-pink jersey dress I’d worn to my rehearsal dinner. Every day I drove through Hollywood on my way to the Valley, and I’d cross Franklin and think to myself, That must be the same Franklin Avenue that Joan Didion lived on .

I never went looking for the house, because Didion had explained in The White Album that it had been slated for demolition: “The owners were only waiting for a zoning change to tear the house down and build a high-rise apartment building.”

Once, it had been the most happening place in a certain world, the absolute crossroads of thrilling, louche Hollywood and the crackling world of ideas that were pouring in from the East.

Franklin Avenue Joan Didion is the one we all fell in love with. In that house she became the woman who walked barefoot on hardwood floors and onto airplanes, and went to the supermarket wearing a bikini. She’s the reason so many readers misunderstood the obvious fact of her conservatism—because she was cool. (How conservative? Throughout the ’60s she was famous for telling Hollywood friends that if she could she would vote for Barry Goldwater over and over again.)

She’s the one who paid the babysitter who told her she had death in her aura, then opened the French doors and went to sleep in the dark of a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” This is the Joan Didion who invented Los Angeles in the ’60s as an expression of paranoia, danger, drugs, and the movie business. The Joan Didion who took amphetamines to work and bourbon to relax, the tiny girl who was entirely in command of the helpless ardor she inspired.

The parties. How to account for what a huge hit the couple were almost as soon as they got to Hollywood? And also, how to account for Joan Didion, one of the century’s greatest prose stylists, doing all of that cooking, while being pestered by Nora Ephron for her Mexican-chicken recipe, keeping in mind the eccentric drinks orders of various rock-and-roll people (brandy and Benedictine for Janis Joplin), and clearing the drug takers from the landing outside her daughter’s bedroom?

Read: We sell ourselves stories in order to live

Those parties were something to see. But in 1979, Didion published The White Album and revealed that this period had been the hardest time in her life. In the opening pages of that collection, she reproduces part of her psychiatrist’s report, which caused a sensation; it was an advertisement for whichever idea you had of Joan Didion, either that she was bravely exposing what others might work hard to conceal, or that she was an exhibitionist.

In the report, she is said to have an “increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress,” and a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure.” She is, the report reveals, being pushed “further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.”

Didion writes that things she had been taught all her life no longer seemed to apply, that the script for how she had been raised to lead her life was never meant to be improvised on. “It was hard to even get my attention,” she says; her mind was on other things.

It was also in this place—and in this heavy weather—that she raised her only child, Quintana, from infancy through age 5. The couple had adopted the little girl a few days after her birth at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and she appears throughout these essays as a dream, a perfect child, almost as an abstraction. Her name alone—Quintana Roo, the name of a Mexican state—seemed to me, at 14, the perfect name for a baby: unique, mysterious, feminine. The kind of name a girl would give to a doll.

What really happened during those years? There is no reason, now, not to ask.

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Everyone who loves Joan Didion remembers that sentence—the shock of it, the need to race back up to the top of the essay to see if you’d missed something. “I had better tell you where I am, and why,” that essay, “In the Islands,” begins. She’s at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in a high-ceilinged room, the trade winds making the long, translucent curtains billow. She’s with her husband and 3-year-old Quintana, “blond and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei.”

But Didion hasn’t gone to Honolulu merely for the flowers or the trade winds. She is there “trying to put my life back together.”

When I first read The White Album , I was in my bedroom in my parents’ house and it was the deep middle of the night, and there it was, this flaming arrow. What could I do? Reach for my cellphone and type Did Joan Didion get divorced? There were no cellphones then. Reading, in those days, was just you and the writer, and all she had to reel you in with was a line of words. When I fell in love with Joan Didion, it was just the two of us and all of those electric sentences, and that was enough.

Everyone remembers that line about divorce, but no one seems to remember a different and perhaps more consequential line that appears later. She reports that during that week in Honolulu, husband and wife were considerate of each other, and no mention was made of “kicked-down doors, hospitalized psychotics, any chronic anxieties or packed suitcases.”

Kicked-down doors?

We all know about the famous and in many ways marvelous (in the sense of the miraculous, the supernatural) marriage of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. We know about it from The Year of Magical Thinking and from countless interviews and profiles and perhaps from personal experience. We know that their lives and writing careers were so deeply intertwined that they were rarely apart. They kept to a daily schedule that was like a dream writing life, each writing in the morning, then breaking for lunch; each returning to work until the early evening, when they had drinks and dinner together. If Joan went to get her teeth cleaned, John read the newspapers in the waiting room.

Dunne was fantastic company; he loved gossip and he always had A-plus intel. Calvin Trillin wrote a novel, Floater , in which a character is based on Dunne. When they both worked at Time , Dunne was forever coming into Trillin’s office, dramatically holding up his hand, and saying, “ This you will not believe.” The Didion-Dunnes’ marriage was one long conversation between two writers completely in sync about their beliefs on writing and always interested in what the other had to say.

But Dunne also had a legendary and vicious temper, and he was an incredibly mean drunk. Even his pals reported as much, because it would be impossible to assess the man without admitting to these central facts of his nature. They had read about the kicked-down doors, and many who were close to the couple had witnessed more examples of his rage.

Susanna Moore, who was the couple’s close friend and lived with them for a while on Franklin Avenue, writes in her memoir, Miss Aluminum , that there was “love between them, and respect.” But she adds that Joan “was also afraid of him, given the violence of his temper.”

Moore recounts a time when she was out to dinner with the couple, and she mentioned a bit of gossip she’d heard: There was talk in town that Jann Wenner was gay. Dunne exploded in rage, and took after her in such a manner that he had to excuse himself from the table. As he walked away, Moore started to get out of her chair. “Joan grabbed my arm and begged me to stay, making me promise that I would not leave her alone with him.”

There weren’t words in those days for how a man’s rage could shape the life of a woman who lived with him, but we have one now: abuse .

Didion never spoke openly about Dunne’s rage until near the end of her life. In 2017 her nephew, Griffin Dunne, made a documentary about his aunt, The Center Will Not Hold , which is full of photographs and family memories. As far as I know, the interviews she gave him are, poignantly, her last statements to the public.

At one point, she’s talking about marrying Dunne and the idea of falling in love, and she almost flinches. “I don’t know what falling in love means. It’s not part of my world.”

Later, she adds: “He had a temper. A horrible temper.”

What would set him off? Griffin asks.

“Everything would set him off.”

Someone recently told me that the house on Franklin was, in fact, still there—and when I thought about it, I remembered that at the very end of the street, the apartments give way to rambling 1920s houses. That’s where she lived.

I drove west on Franklin until I got to Camino Palmero, where the zoning changes. I parked down the street from the house, realizing I’d been walking right past it for 30 years. With each step closer, I felt more emotional. And there it was, in better shape than when Didion had lived in it, the cracked front path now covered in smooth pavement, the house freshly painted white, the lawn in perfect condition. It’s a healing center now, for a new-age spiritual group.

I stood looking at it as though I had found the way to Manderley, as though it were possible to take something out of the dream of reading and into the bricks and mortar of the other thing. Life. The tall French doors looked into the living room where there had been so many parties, the doors Joan had opened before going to sleep.

The house on Franklin was the only one that brought tears to my eyes. But of course they were tears for myself, not her. When she was in New York, there was a song on all the jukeboxes: “But where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?”

Gone, gone, gone.

When Joan Didion was living in Malibu, she learned that in one of the canyons there was a nursery that grew only orchids, and she began to visit it. Even as a child she had loved greenhouses; once she was informed that the purchase of a five-cent pansy did not entitle her to “spend the day.”

The orchid nursery was owned by the Hollywood producer Arthur Freed and his brother Hugo, but it was in the care of Amado Vazquez, a gentle and courtly person, transmitting, “in his every movement, a kind of ‘different’ propriety, a correctness, a cultural reserve.” She spent hours in those greenhouses filled with “the most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers.” Vazquez seemed to assume she had her own reasons for being there, and he would speak only to offer her “a nut he had just cracked, or a flower cut from a plant he was pruning.”

This was before orchids were widely cloned, imported by the millions, and sold in Walmart and Trader Joe’s. This was when orchids were rare, expensive, often propagated by hand . And, as Didion eventually realized, Vazquez was “one of a handful of truly great orchid breeders in the world.”

Didion learned how to read the labels of the hybrids he was growing, two orchids cross-pollinated and resulting—with luck, and after four years—in a new variety: Amabilis x Rimestadiana = Elisabethae . Eventually, she learned that the orchids there were worth “ten thousand to more than three-quarters of a million dollars,” and occasionally she would watch “serious men in dark suits” come to talk with Hugo, their voices hushed, “as if they had come to inspect medieval enamels, or uncut diamonds.”

The passage about the nursery comprises some of the final pages of The White Album , and I have thought about it so many times. From the tumult of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the near divorce to the danger of living in the “senseless-killing neighborhood” in a rented house slated for destruction—after all of that, she wants us to know, she had gotten to safety.

After seven years in Malibu, and very much against her own desires, she and Dunne moved to Brentwood—carefully groomed, hugely expensive, and with easy access to the best private schools—which was the beginning of the end of my great interest in her.

But in Malibu there was the house, and the crashing ocean, and Quintana was a little girl in elementary school, whose troubles had yet to emerge. Of all the things receding from Didion, Quintana was always the most urgent. Didion wrote two novels— A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy —about a daughter leaving her mother.

A few months after Didion and her family moved away, the notorious Agoura-Malibu firestorm roared through the canyons. Birds exploded in midair; more than 200 houses were destroyed; people waited on the beach to be rescued, because nowhere else was safe.

Shortly before the fire, Amado Vazquez had saved enough money to buy out the Freed brothers, and now the greenhouses were destroyed. He and Didion stood in the ruins, almost in tears. Years of his work destroyed, a fortune in stud plants.

One winter day, my husband and I made good time up the Pacific Coast Highway to Joan’s house. It had 132 private stairs down to the beach, and a long driveway. From the street, all you could see was the house number, 33428, on a simple, weathered sign. It wasn’t the kind of sign you associate with Malibu; it was the kind you associate with Stinson Beach or any of the other Northern California beaches where underplaying your hand is the thing to do, and putting your house number on a piece of driftwood nailed to the fence is the right way to do it. The setting was perfect. But the old house that she loved so much was gone, replaced with the modern one that’s there now.

The Didion-Dunnes would sometimes drive over the Ventura County line to eat fried fish. We did the same, eating in the huge open-air dining room at Neptune’s Net—established in 1956—and feeling very cheerful. That’s the thing about marriage: You can go for two whole weeks thinking, That’s it, we’ve gotten to the very bottom of things to talk about , but then you go for a drive on a sunny day and there you are, same as you ever were.

I hadn’t looked up the house on Franklin Avenue, because I thought it had been destroyed, and I had never looked up Vazquez’s nursery, because how could he have ever rebuilt it? But a few days before heading up the coast, I looked up the name— Zuma Orchids —and found it, about a mile up Zuma Canyon from the beach.

When I was young, I was so troubled for so long. My mind would rage beyond my control, and many times I would think of those trembling clouds of blossoms and that soft tropical air and wish I could go there, and now here I was, driving down a canyon road, all but deserted—and there it was.

I almost wanted to turn around. I realized—perhaps the lesson of the whole excursion—that I didn’t want these places to be real, because they lived so vividly in my mind. But I stepped through the greenhouse door and landed in Oz: more color and beauty than I could take in. An extremely kind man—Oliverio Alvarado—chatted with us. He had worked with Vazquez, who had died about a decade ago, and he welcomed us to look at the flowers. There were some of the common moth orchids, but there were other orchids, some so delicate and unusual that they lifted the flowers entirely out of the realm of Walmart and Trader Joe’s and once again elevated them to something precious and rare.

My husband picked out a few plants, and I worried that they would cost $10,000, but they didn’t. They were beautiful orchids, not stud plants. At one point Alvarado asked us how we had heard of the nursery—he must have seen something of the reverence I had for the plants, my sense of wonder.

I said that I had read about the nursery in a book by Joan Didion.

“Oh yes,” he said, brightening. “Amado made a hybrid for her.”

For a moment everyone was alive—Amado and also Joan and John and Quintana. But they’re all gone, of course. The difficult husband she adored, the difficult daughter she shaped her life around, and then Joan herself.

When I looked for the Joan Didion orchid, I couldn’t find it. But then I realized that I’d been looking for the wrong name.

Phal. James McPherson x Phal. Stuartiana = Phalaenopsis Quintana Roo Dunne

“When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours,” Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , “he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

The only John Wayne movie I’ve ever seen all the way through is The Searchers . But when Didion walked through the front door of my parents’ house when I was 14 years old, that’s what she did for me. She was a hot stock rising and I was a young girl falling, and she broke my fall.

From the January/February 2012 issue: Caitlin Flanagan on the autumn of Joan Didion

She was in Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer, and because my father was then the chair of the English department, he was sort of serving as her host. She came to our house for dinner, and she hardly said a word. But a week or so later, when my father said, “There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” that got my attention . Apparently, her office hours—usually the most monastic of an academic’s life—were being mobbed. Not just by students; by women from the Bay Area who had heard she was there and just wanted to see her. All of these women felt that Slouching Towards Bethlehem had changed them.

It wasn’t a book that was supposed to change anyone. Not only because that was by no means Joan Didion’s intent, but also because—look at the subjects. How can an essay about Alcatraz (as an attractive, mostly deserted place, not as a statement on either incarceration or the land theft perpetrated against California’s Indian tribes); an essay about a baby’s first birthday party; a forensic investigation of the marital tensions that led Lucille Miller to kill her husband—how can all of those add up to something life-changing?

Because in 1968, here was a book that said that even a troubled woman, or a heartbroken woman, or a frightened woman could be a very powerful person. In “Why I Write”—which was, in fact, the Regents’ Lecture—she famously described writing as an act of aggression , in which a writer takes control of a reader and imposes her own opinions, beliefs, and attitudes on that reader. A woman could be a hostage-taker, and what she held you hostage to were both shocking public events and some of the most interior and delicate thoughts a woman can have. This woman with the vanda orchid in her hair and her frequent states of incapacitation could put almost anyone under her power.

I had no power growing up, but I did have books and ideas, and I could be funny. I know I could have ended up being a magazine writer without ever having that chance experience. But what Joan Didion taught me was that it didn’t matter that I had such a messy, unenviable life—I could sit down, all alone, and write enough drafts to figure out what I thought about something and then punch it out into the culture.

Two years after her lecture, Mark Schorer died, and the year after that, my parents sold the house we lived in on Bret Harte Road. For reasons I don’t know, the current owner has allowed the house to return to nature. My mother’s flower beds are gone, and the lemon and lime trees, and the two glazed ceramic pots on either side of the front door that were always filled with flowers. Over the years, it’s been returning to the ground at the same rate I seem to be. When I was in Berkeley this fall, I only slowed down when I drove past it, because everyone was inside—Mark and my parents and so many of the professors who were in many ways my own professors. The only people who weren’t in there were my sister and me. The Flanagan girls—somehow the point of the whole thing.

I didn’t cry the day in December I learned Joan Didion had died , because I’d been told by so many people that it was going to happen soon. But I realized that in some part of my mind, I thought she’d pull it off, that she’d show illness and death a thing or two.

Read: Joan Didion was our bard of disenchantment

A couple of months later, during one of my endless Google searches, I came across one of those companies that track down addresses and phone numbers and public records. “We found Joan Didion!” it said, and offered to provide access to her cellphone number, address, email, and even “more!”

And for some reason, that was when I finally cut my losses.

I hadn’t gone looking for the actual Joan Didion or your Joan Didion or even “the reader’s” Joan Didion. I went looking for the Joan Didion who was partly a historical figure, and partly a great writer, and partly a fiction of my own design. And she lives right where she always has.

This article appears in the June 2022 print edition with the headline “Chasing Joan Didion.” It has been updated to reflect that New York magazine was the first publication to name and interview Noel Parmentel about his romantic relationship with Didion. The New York Times had previously reported that Didion was in a relationship in New York, but did not name Parmentel.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook

By maria popova.

After citing a seemingly arbitrary vignette she had found scribbled in an old notebook, Didion asks:

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. […] The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

To that end, she confesses a lifelong failure at keeping a diary:

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

What, then, does matter?

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’); impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy (‘Mr. Acapulco’) Stauffer; careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line ‘That’s my old football number’ touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,’ Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.

Once again, Didion returns to the egoic driver of the motive to write :

And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées ; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

Ultimately, Didion sees the deepest value of the notebook as a reconciliation tool for the self and all of its iterations:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. […] It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

The rest of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is brimming with the same kind of uncompromising insight, sharp and soft at the same time, on everything from morality to marriage to self-respect . Complement this particular portion with celebrated writers on the creative benefits of keeping a diary .

— Published November 19, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/11/19/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/ —

www.themarginalian.org

PRINT ARTICLE

Email article, filed under, culture joan didion writing, view full site.

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

By Joan Didion

Joan Didion , author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.​ Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Joan Didion

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

By Margaux Anbouba

By Marie Bladt

By Alexandra Macon

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no rôle too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Inside Joan Didion’s Entry Into Hollywood With Jim Morrison, Al Pacino and More

In an excerpt from “Money, Murder and Dominick Dunne,” Robert Hofler details the late writer’s studio films with husband John Gregory Dunne

Having just produced the film version of Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” Dominick Dunne looked forward to making a film with his brother, John, and his sister-in-law Joan Didion. The idea they all liked best was a film version of James Mills’ novel about a couple of young drug addicts on Manhattan’s rough Upper West Side. Didion summarized their film adaptation of “The Panic in Needle Park,” calling it “‘Romeo and Juliet’ on heroin.” It was the kind of short, snappy synopsis film executives loved and Didion delivered often in the early 1970s. The success in 1969 of such an offbeat hit as “Easy Rider” opened the door for another low-budget drug-themed movie, and the positive buzz on the Dunne-produced “Boys” helped, too.

Didion and the Dunne brothers’ ideas for casting their film were unorthodox but right in step with what Hollywood deemed hip in 1970. They wanted Jim Morrison of The Doors to make his screen debut as the drug addict Bobby in “The Panic in Needle Park.” Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne had met Morrison when The Doors were recording their third album, “Waiting for the Sun,” at the Two Terrible Guys Studio near Sunset and Highland in Hollywood. Morris showed up late, belligerent, drugged and ready to set his much-inspected crotch on fire with a match. Didion, on assignment from The Saturday Evening Post, hoped to get an interview with the rock star. When Morrison proved incommunicative, she instead wrote an essay about the recording session for her book “The White Album.” She noted how The Doors talked to each other “from behind some disabling aphasia…. There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever.”

Dominick Dunne secured a movie deal with Avco-Embassy, which had just released “The Graduate.” Even though the deal boasted a budget under $1 million, Dunne got the studio to put him up at the Volney Hotel, once home to Dorothy Parker, on East 74th Street in Manhattan. Since Didion and her husband were still working on the script, they took up residence at a much less desirable address, the Alamac Hotel, across Broadway and West 71st Street from Sherman Square, home to more addicts than trees and better known as Needle Park. Living at the seedy Alamac, they thought, would be part of their research.

The couple were on their way to being known as the Didions in Hollywood, much to John Gregory Dunne’s distress. Their friend Billy Hale, a major TV director, remembered their scouting Upper West Side locations for “The Panic in Needle Park.” “They went to Abercrombie & Fitch and bought all these jungle outfits. They were going into the heart of darkness. They took it very seriously,” he said. But not that seriously. They typically lunched on the other side of town at La Cote Basque.

Real panic struck when Avco-Embassy abruptly dumped the “Needle Park” project, and Dominick Dunne had to work overtime to negotiate a deal with Twentieth Century Fox and also try to hire a director. He much admired Jerry Schatzberg’s edgy “Puzzle of a Downfall Child,” starring newcomer Faye Dunaway. At the time, Schatzberg was better known for his fashion photography in Vogue.

“I read it with one eye and not much heart,” Schatzberg said of the Didions’s “Needle Park” script. What did excite him was a young actor whom Dominick Dunne wanted to cast after Jim Morrison proved too debauched (he died from a drug overdose in July 1971). The director had seen Al Pacino in the play “The Indian Wants the Bronx” and told his agent, “Boy, if ever I did a film, that’s the guy I’d like to work with.” Dominick also saw Pacino, but in another play, “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?”, and promptly thought of him to play Bobby in “Needle Park.”

“‘Al Pacino’ were the major words,” said Schatzberg. They were not major words, however, for the executives at Fox. Richard Zanuck and David Brown wanted another actor, one who was taller, better looking and better known. For a few weeks, Robert De Niro looked like a contender – although not a star, he had made one movie to Pacino’s none – but ultimately Pacino was cast.

Dominick Dunne proved to be superprotective of his relatives’ screenplay. “Nick got a little upset when he watched the dailies,” said Schatzberg. “His brother and sister-in-law wrote the script and maybe he was anxious about their seeing [the film]. I like the actors to improvise.”

Once shooting started in autumn 1970, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner sent a reporter to do a story on the film. Bridget Byrne arrived around midnight for a shoot near the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. Pacino told the reporter about the Method, his approach to acting. “When I have a scene in which I have to push [the character] Helen around, I push Kitty Winn around all day,” he said, then added, “Jerry doesn’t pretend to know anything about acting. But he has a sure instinct for what will work and what won’t, what looks right, what doesn’t.”

Dominick Dunne did not think such talk helped the film. Nor did John Gregory Dunne’s comment about New York City being a dying city, which was why he and his wife now lived in California.

“Needle Park” played the Cannes Film Festival, where Kitty Winn won the award for best actress on May 27, 1971. Al Pacino did not make the trip, having already started production on “The Godfather.” Schatzberg found the experience of having a film shown at Cannes to be part excitement, part humiliation. “We were put up at the Carlton a block away from the Palace – Nick, Kitty, Joan and John, and I came down. There was a big limo waiting for us. We drove one block and got out, and as we got out we saw the press running toward us.” Then the reporters ran right passed them; they were there to photograph and interview Michele Morgan, president of the Cannes jury. “Needle Park” received an excellent reception from the assembled filmgoers, and their applause bathed the American team in adulation as they walked down the grand staircase at the Palais des Festivals. “Then when we got outside, there was no limo and we had to walk back to the Carlton,” Schatzberg recalled.

Next up for the Didions was the film version of her 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays,” also to be produced by Dominick Dunne. Ned Tanen at Universal Pictures agreed to greenlight the film because he personally liked the director Frank Perry, and the studio had done well with his previous movie, “Diary of a Mad Housewife.” Tanen, however, went on to call the novel “Play It as It Lays” and its screen adaptation “a piece of s—.”

Dominick Dunne, Frank Perry and the Didions visited all the locations in the book – the desert, the beach, the L.A. freeways – and they screened “The Pumpkin Eater” and “Petulia,” movies that “experimented with time,” said Perry. They then holed up in Dominick’s Spalding Drive apartment for four days, using a bulletin board and multicolored cards to chart the sequence of scenes.

The film launched the film career of Joel Schumacher, hired at $200 a week to design the costumes. “Nick introduced me to his brother and sister-in-law. They were fantastic to me,” said Schumacher. “They had this house on the beach in Trancas, and they had what would be called a salon. It was very international.” John Gregory Dunne knew people from Life and Time magazines, Joan Didion had written extensively for Vogue and Saturday Evening Post. “It wasn’t just movie people., which was unusual at that time. Back then it was such a tiny one-industry town. You didn’t meet people from outside the film business,” said Schumacher. “But at John and Joan’s, there were a lot of great reporters, people who were covering wars. It was an incredible mix of people.”

But mostly, it was movie people with whom the Didions wanted to network to secure script work. Those movie people included “Play It as It Lays” stars Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, Julia and Michael Phillips, Martin Scorsese, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Steven Spielberg, and a smattering of fellow screenwriters. Paul Schrader described the soirées in Trancas as being “very heady.” In addition to barbecuing, swimming, sunbathing, and talking about movie, “a lot of these writers and directors helped each other,” said Schrader. “Even though we were relatively unknown, there was a real feeling that the world was our oyster.”

That heady mix at the Didions’ salons, however, did not include Dominick Dunne. “They invited me to their house at least once every other week,” said Schumacher. “Nick was never invited. Something was going on.” It had been going on since they lived together as brothers on Albany Avenue in West Hartford. Despite their seven-year age difference, Dominick resented John calling himself “Dad’s favorite son,” and worse, it was true. That father liked John’s “cheekiness” and he hated Dominick’s being a “sissy.”

Dominick Dunne later remarked how he got along great with his brother and sister-in-law on “The Panic in Needle Park” but “Play It as It Lays” was another story. He felt he had made valuable suggestions for the “Needle Park” script, as well as “Play It as It Lays.” The Didions, however, were not interested in his ideas. In turn, the couple began to worry about Dominick’s increasing substance abuse and how it adversely affected his reputation in Hollywood – and, by association, theirs.

Tanen’s hatred of “Play It as It Lays” only grew when he started seeing rushes. He called it Didion “vomiting up her life.” Regardless, the film was released in October 1972. Major critics like Vincent Canby in the New York Times and Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times liked it, but Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic and Pauline Kael in the New Yorker called it a pretentious bore. Dominick Dunne described it as having “won an award at the Venice Film Festival, but only ten people saw it. It was that kind of picture.”

After the film’s release, Dominick Dunne finally confronted Joan Didion about his being the prototype for the BZ character played by Anthony Perkins. BZ is a homosexual but closeted movie producer who commits suicide by swallowing a handful of pills or, as Didion wrote it, “a queen’s way of doing it.” The novelist told her brother-in-law no: the character was based on a man they both knew who, in Dominick’s opinion, bore no resemblance whatsoever to a closeted, suicidal movie producer. Dominick later admitted he should have seen the similarities between himself and BZ as soon as he first read the novel. He always had a “masseur to lunch,” just as BZ does. But he chose not to see.

As for Didion, she took a jaundiced view of the filmmaking process that brought “The Panic of Needle Park” and “Play It as It Lays” to the screen. In “The White Album,” published at the end of the decade, she wrote how studio executives back in 1970 were “narcotized by ‘Easy Rider’s’ grosses,” and criticized them for thinking “all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget…and this terrific 23-year-old kid director.” This article is excerpted from Robert Hofler’s book “Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts,” published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Copyright  c 2017 Robert Hofler

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

Joan Didion’s Hidden Goal—and Mine

I’ve taught her work for more than 25 years. it had a secret, one that’s more than a guide to me and my students..

For more than a quarter of a century, every year since I began teaching narrative nonfiction journalism at Stanford University, I’ve written this acronym on the board or put it on the screen, always by the third week of class:

“What would Didion do?” I tell students. They’ve just read “ Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream ” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem , the bible of long-form literary journalism. My lecture conveys this sentiment: Before one begins reporting, one must think about approach and voice for a story. Didion’s secret? Like Walker Evans , who photographed the present as it would be seen as the past, Didion knew what would be important 50 years later. The eponymous piece in Slouching was a post-mortem on the Summer of Love when everyone else was writing about it for the next day or the next week.

Now I have my students at Columbia read The White Album . Didion knew what would be vital for us today from the 1960s. We don’t need to hear from Jim Morrison or Huey Newton; she never interviews them because their rote quotes would have taken up real estate in her essays better spent on her truly revealing them by observation.

“Almost everything Huey Newton said had that same odd ring of being a ‘quotation,’ a ‘pronouncement’ ready to be employed whenever the need arose,” she writes. “I kept wishing that he would talk about himself, hoping to break through the wall of rhetoric.” She waits for hours with the rest of The Doors for Jim Morrison to show up for a recording session; when he finally arrived, she tells us, Morrison sat alone in a corner, lit a match, and stared at the flame before he slowly lowered it to his crotch.

She later said in an interview with the Guardian: “I don’t like to interview. The only time I liked to interview is when I had access to someone who was not used to being interviewed. Which would certainly not have been the case with Jim Morrison.”

Didion surely didn’t write Slouching as a how-to guide for literary nonfiction—but it became one for me as a young writer.

A confession: It was not love at first read for me. I didn’t know much about Didion until I took a newspaper job in Sacramento in 1980. Two of my colleagues implored me to read her. I bought Slouching , but it didn’t grab me. I tried starting it, but I gave up and set it aside. Nothing was grabbing me then. I was on the police beat and covering them critically; the cops investigated my past in Cleveland and tried several times to get me fired; I went to report on the war in El Salvador, the revolution in the Philippines—a host of other PTSD-inducing trauma. Those details don’t matter here but for this: After my second breakdown, in 1986, I finally read Slouching .

That’s when I started to become a writer. Slowly, I grasped her secret of writing for the future. I also learned about condensing story. It appears that Didion sat through Lucille Miller’s trial that spanned many days for “Some Dreamers,” but there are only a few paragraphs in that monumental essay from inside the courtroom. A lesser writer would have focused most of the piece on the trial. Instead, Didion uses the case to talk about the nature of heartbreak in the extreme, something of the murderer she sees in herself and she knows that others will connect with as well, more emotionally and more timelessly than they would to the details of a woman setting her husband’s car on fire.

I pose a question to students—is this essay in the first person? The word “I” never appears in it, yet it is first person. Consider this line, knowing the rocky background of her marriage to John Gregory Dunne: “Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one.” And this: “It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.”

This Didionesque use of art to explore pain is influencing River Styx Road , a collection of essays I’m writing that is a work-in-progress. I write in the draft, “We are told that when we dream of watching a man climbing out on to the rotting branch of a tall barkless dead tree, one hundred feet off the ground, we are really looking at ourselves. We are that man who is upside down, koala bear–style, shimmying farther and farther toward the fragile bone-white tip. The branch is going to break and he is going to plunge to his death. We try yelling for him to turn back, but no sound comes from our throat. This kind of mirror may pervade our waking hours: what we are drawn to pursue is a reflection of what troubles us.”

I would never compare myself to Didion; of course, like all writers who admire her, I wish that I could. But I try my best to channel her vision about thinking of the reader a year from the moment of creation, or if one is very fortunate, the reader a half century from now. Even if I don’t attain this lofty goal, WWDD is always in my head as I work.

I never met Didion, but I’ve gotten spiritually close to her. In 1986, I purchased a house at 23 rd and V Streets in Sacramento, four blocks from the “Didion House” on a hill known as Poverty Ridge, where Didion lived when she was in high school. I often walked past the 4,500 square-foot manse with a big porch meant for sitting on those hot August Central Valley nights.

Later, the woman I was engaged to had grown up in Rancho Cucamonga just a few blocks east of Carnelian and Banyan Streets, the site where Lucy Miller burned her husband Cork Miller to death in a 1964 Volkswagen. We visited my ex’s parents several times, going past that spot. The lemon grove where the murder happened was replaced by tract homes.

That engagement never led to a wedding. And recently, a long-term relationship ended with a woman I should be married to—both of these failures have been on my shoulders. It’s the worst kind of depression—I can’t blame them. I own the reason for them not working out.

By chance, I came to Sacramento from the East Coast for the holidays. I woke up Thursday morning to the news that Didion died. Oddly, when I was driving in downtown Sacramento on Wednesday, I had the urge to go by the Didion House. I was thinking of the end of the recent relationship, was feeling blue, and thought about walking the old neighborhood. It was raining hard and I blew it off. But I’m going to return on Friday, Christmas Eve, and leave flowers on the lawn.

Thank you, Joan.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

By Nathan Heller

In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, freelance writers married to each other and living in Los Angeles, were engaged to write a regular column for the Saturday Evening Post . This was a good gig. The space they had to fill was neither long nor short—about twelve hundred words, a gallop larger than the Comment that opens this magazine. The Post paid them well, and Didion and Dunne each had to file one piece a month. The column, called “Points West,” entailed their visiting a place of West Coast interest, interviewing a few people or no people, and composing a dispatch. Didion wrote one column about touring Alcatraz, another on the general secretary of a small Marxist-Leninist group. The Post was struggling to stay afloat (it went under two years later), and that chaos let the new columnists shimmy unorthodox ideas past their desperate editors. Didion’s first effort was a dispatch from her parents’ house. A few weeks later, her “Points West” was about wandering Newport, Rhode Island. (“Newport is curiously Western,” she announced in the piece, sounding awfully like a writer trying to get away with something.) The column work left time for other projects, and Didion spent the spring through September of 1967 on a ten-thousand-word assignment about the hippie movement, the rest on a novel she’d been struggling with. At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she’d churned out while a junior editor at Vogue ), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem ,” her first nonfiction book. It has claims to being the most influential essay collection of the past sixty years.

Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing “ The Year of Magical Thinking ” (2005), her raw and ruminative account of the months following Dunne’s sudden death. Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.

Because a sentence of Didion is unmistakable, people often presume that her advances were in prose style. The opening of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” collection announced her voice:

The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.

There’s the entwining of sensuous and ominous images. And there’s the fine, tight verbal detail work: the vowel suspensions (“ways an alien place”), the ricocheting consonants (“harsher . . . haunted . . . Mojave”), the softly anagrammatic games of sound (“subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies”). Didion worked hard at her sentences, and no magazine journalist has done better than her best. But style is just the baseline of good writing. Didion’s innovation was something else.

Most writers of nonfiction operate in the sphere of high craft: like a silversmith producing teapots, they work to create elevated and distinctive versions of known objects. A master will produce a range of creative variations, yet the teapots always remain teapots, and the marks of individuation rise from a shared language of form and technique. Didion’s nonfiction was produced in that craftwork tradition, but it operates more in the sphere of art: it declares its own terms and vernacular, and, if successful, conveys meaning in a way that transcends its parts.

The title essay of her second collection, “ The White Album ” (1979), offers the clearest glimpse of how that reimagination happens. The heart of the essay is a cluster of “Points West” columns: brief reports on protests at San Francisco State, a Huey Newton press conference, a studio visit with the Doors—her normal craftwork as a working writer. When composing the “White Album” essay, Didion lined those pieces up like flagstones in a path. Together, she knew, they had to tell a bigger story, because they came from the same place (coastal California) in the same time (1968) and from the same vantage (hers). But what was the story?

To figure it out, Didion started adding stones from elsewhere in the quarry: circumstances surrounding the production of the newsstand columns, details from her home life. She included an extract from a psychological evaluation she’d had that summer. (“The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses.”) She wrote about remembering a line by Ezra Pound on the drive to report at San Francisco State. She threaded these bits with what she called flash cuts, scene changes separated by space breaks; in other words, she started with the craft part—the polished sentences, the tidy magazine page—and built outward, collaging what was already published with what wasn’t, reframing and rejuxtaposing what had been previously pinned in pristine prose. This process of redigesting published craftwork into art is how Didion shaped her nonfiction books for fifty years. It made her farseeing, and a thorny voice about the way public stories were told.

The prickliness of Didion’s project was on my mind as I read her new collection, “ Let Me Tell You What I Mean ” (Knopf). “New” here refers mostly to the state of the binding, because the newest thing that Didion contributed is twenty years old. The foreword, very fruitful, is by Hilton Als . The volume’s keystone is a few “Points West” columns from 1968 which she in some cases had collaged into previous books but which have not been reprinted in their original, stand-alone form until now. In that sense, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is less a selected essays than a rejected essays, a director’s un-cut of her older work. Traditionally, this is the sort of collection squeezed out by itchy heirs after an author’s death.

Link copied

It’s happy news, then, that the book still offers some familiar pleasures. The earliest columns, from the late sixties, remain crisp and engaging on the page (not a given for late-sixties writing). Other essays, such as a piece on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from 1989, are, if not exactly urgent, nice to have around. Didion stopped publishing new material in 2011, a silence that’s well earned but bittersweet in light of recent events, and “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is meant to summon the old feelings. Yet the book ends up a study in the limits of Didion’s prose, because its parts, for all their elegance, don’t make a whole. Devoted readers will find the book unrecognizable as a Didion collection in any real sense.

To understand why, it is useful to go back to the summer of 1967, when Didion was writing her report on the hippies—the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The late-sixties youth movements purported to be about community and coming together, but Didion saw them as a symptom of a shared society unravelling and public communication breaking down. (The title comes from a Yeats poem that begins, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”) “It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization,” she later explained. Struggling to describe this dissolution, she decided to express the problem structurally. The hippie essay, written as a series of pruned scenes from the Haight-Ashbury separated by breaks, marked her first true use of flash cuts.

The piece “failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads,” Didion later wrote. But the concept of atomization, and the collage technique, stuck. When Didion was gathering essays for her first collection, she did something notable with a piece she called “Los Angeles Notebook.” She took one of her “Points West” columns, about the Santa Ana wind, and put a flash cut after it. She lopped off the opening to a critics piece she’d written on books by Helen Gurley Brown and dropped that in, followed by another cut. In this way, she built a new essay from the wholes and bits of old material, tracing out flares of life around Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. They were part of one story, but, crucially, they did not connect.

Didion had spent four years failing to write a novel called “ Play It as It Lays .” What she disliked in the work in progress, about an actress in Los Angeles, was that it smelled of “novel”; everything seemed formed and directed in a way that was untrue to life. In 1969, after reworking the “Los Angeles Notebook” essay, Didion saw how to make the novel work. “Play It as It Lays” (1970) is commonly said to be about anomie, but more specifically it’s about a world in insular pieces, of characters trapped in their Hollywood realms. (Didion envisioned a novel of tight scenes, consumed in a single sitting—a book written as a movie, in other words, and thus caged within the storytelling rhythms of the industry.) The novel’s short chapters, some of them less than a page, change vantage and jump characters among disparate spheres using freeways and white space. “I played and replayed these scenes and others like them, composed them as if for the camera, trying to find some order, a pattern. I found none,” one of her characters says. “Play It as It Lays” was Didion’s first fiction of atomization.

Didion went on to use the collage technique to assemble the long pieces in “The White Album” and the books that followed, reconsidering her own published craftwork and later bringing that scrutiny to texts produced by other people. Where she saw evidence of atomization in American society, she made efforts to push back.

“The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are the Wall Street Journal , the Los Angeles Free Press , the Los Angeles Open City , and the East Village Other ,” Didion wrote in a “Points West” column from 1968 which opens the new collection. She likes the alternative press not because it’s good or useful (“I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper”) but because it breaks past a communication barrier. These papers assume that the reader “will understand if they talk to him straight; this assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style.”

Shared language and a common ethic are precisely what Didion had noticed coming apart in the supposedly liberated togetherness of the late sixties. And the problem, in her view, did not fade when the love beads went away. In “ Insider Baseball ,” her influential piece for The New York Review of Books , born of tagging along with the Presidential campaigns of 1988, she argued that the so-called “democratic process” had become unlinked from the people it was supposed to speak to and for:

Access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.

Politics had come to be programming produced for élites, by élites, in a bubble disconnected from others. If this warning seemed eccentric on the eve of electing an institutional Vice-President and, four years later, the Man from Hope, it does not seem so today. The problem Didion first identified in 1967 has been treated as a revelation in recent years.

Her position as a disaffected insider—hanging out with the Doors but crying foul on the Summer of Love, writing for the newsstand but declaiming its idiocy—made her an aggressive contrarian. In fact, her recent canonization notwithstanding, Didion spent most of her career as a magnet for daggers in the letters columns. “Between Joan Didion and me it is still a missed connection,” a reader complained in 1969, responding to a Life column she wrote for a while (abortively, owing to its unpopularity with editors). In The New York Review of Books a decade later: “Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living.”

That was in response to a searing broadside against the films of Woody Allen which Didion published in 1979. Allen had recently released “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” reaching his peak of appeal among people likely to read essays by Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books . She objected to the films’ urbane-sounding references (“the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class”), and she was annoyed by characters’ superficial-seeming efforts to be deep (“They share sodas, and wonder ‘what love is’ ”). In Didion’s view, Allen’s movies were a simpleminded person’s idea of a smart person’s picture. She was needling her readers, naturally, but the objection also shows a lot about her narrative intelligence and about the way she should be read.

If atomization is one of the key concepts in Didion’s work, another is what she came to call “sentimentality”: belief in a story with a preordained shape and an emotional logic. That kind of storytelling was everywhere in America, she thought. And it was insidious, because it allowed destructive ideas to sneak in underneath the petticoats of right-thinking endeavors. One of the columns in the new collection picks apart a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. What irked Didion was that although the meeting seemed to be about taking responsibility, it actually refracted blame. “I thought that it was simply the predilection of many of the members to dwell upon how ‘powerless’ they were, how buffeted by forces beyond their control,” she wrote. “There was a great deal of talk about miracles, and Higher Presences, and a Power Greater Than Ourselves”—prefab sentimental stories that let gamblers avoid seeing things squarely. Done well, contrarianism is based on the idea that what matters isn’t which team colors you wear but which goal the ball lands in when you kick it. Didion did it well and, as with the hippies , traced how a moment of supposed healing spun toward delusion and drove people farther apart.

Atomization and sentimentality exacerbate each other, after all: you break the bridges of connection across society, and then give each island a fairy tale about its uniqueness. Didion was interested in how that happens. One of her most frequently read essays is a late-sixties account of loving and leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That.” It tends to be remembered as a half-trite paean to a white-collar New York youth, a kind of classed-up precursor to the “ Emily in Paris ” Weltanschauung. Yet the essay’s actual point is astringent. New Yorkers’ mythology about their city’s sophistication and specialness, Didion suggested, was another sentimental narrative. She had found her place in town by embracing that view, but outgrew it in time—“at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more,” she wrote. And so she moved to Los Angeles, where the grownups live.

This claim for California as a stronghold of urbanity and groundedness was contrary, even petulant. Didion had grown up in Sacramento and began her reporting from California at a moment when the national narrative of the West Coast—what went on there, what it meant—was shaped by editors and emissaries from New York. (That hasn’t changed.) But, where the Eastern press had decided that California stood for futurism, beaches, lush life, and togetherness, Didion insisted on a California of dusty houses, dry inland landscapes, fires and snakes, and social alienation. Like her contemporary the Bay Area poet Robert Hass, she was obsessed with the motions of mind but shy of abstractions; both realized that what is often called “the world of ideas” is vulnerable to tendentious manipulation. And so they pinned their ideas to details of landscape: this realization fixed to this tree, or the sight of the Bevatron at night, that one to a jasmine-covered porch—the Northern California style of intellection. What this meant was that thinking was an experiential process that emerged in movement from place to place—in the flash cuts—and you didn’t need a sentimental narrative in order to give it sense, as you did in New York.

Didion left the city in 1964, but this remained her perception when she returned twenty-four years later:

The insistent sentimentalization of experience . . . is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and for the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

This description of “distortion and flattening,” of reducing life to recognizable story lines, is from “ New York: Sentimental Journeys ,” a study of the Central Park jogger case that Didion wrote, in 1991, for The New York Review of Books . The case—in which a twenty-eight-year-old female banker was brutalized and raped and five youths of color were convicted, and then, decades later, exonerated—became a Rorschach blot, with some people (largely white) seeing a city “systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass” and others (largely of color) seeing a city “in which the powerless had been systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful.”

Didion saw something else: a city victimized by decades of fatuous thinking and poor planning. New York, she thought, had clung to sentimental narratives about melting pots and special opportunities—“the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital ‘energy’ ”—to the extent of being blind to the fraying of its civic and economic fibre. In crisis, New Yorkers simply doubled down, appointing heroes or villains in the jogger case, trying to keep the fairy tale aloft. “Sentimental Journeys” was a controversial piece when it appeared, yet it offered a frame for New York’s dramas over the next three decades. Even more important, it insisted on a link between the fate of a society and the way that its stories were told.

What it meant to be a writer—imaginatively and morally—had interested Didion since she spent her teen-age years retyping Hemingway sentences, trying to understand the way they worked. Fifty years later, she wrote about his afterlives in “ Last Words ,” an essay for this magazine condemning the publication of books that Hemingway had deemed incomplete. To edit a dead author’s near-finished work for publication, Didion thought, was to assume that he or she was playing by the usual rules. But it was precisely not working in this consensus realm that made great artists great.

A common criticism of Didion suggests that the peppering of her prose with proper nouns (the Bendel’s black wool challis dress, the Grès perfume) is somehow unserious. (For whatever reason, these complaints usually come from men.) But the correct way to understand this impulse is in the lineage of front writing. As Adam Gopnik has noted in these pages, it is Hemingway who’s forever telling you which wines to enjoy while fighting in Spain, how to take your brasserie coffee—how to make his particular yours. Didion feminized that way of writing, pushing against the postwar idea that women writers were obliged to be either mini Virginia Woolfs, mincing abstractions from the parlor, or Shulamith Firestones, raging for liberation. Part of what Didion took from Hemingway, by her account, was a mind-set of “romantic individualism,” “looking but not joining,” and a commitment to the details that gave distinctiveness and precision to that outside view. A trip to the Royal Hawaiian in the midst of a rocky marriage, the right soap to pack for a reporting trip while your husband stays with the baby: in Didion’s work, these were as important in their hard details as Hemingway’s crabe mexicaine and Sancerre at Prunier. Hemingway mythologized his authorial life style so well that generations of writers longed to live and work his way. Didion saw what he was doing, and appropriated the technique.

Yet what made the modernists daring was sometimes a weak point of their endeavor: the writing doesn’t always let readers know how it wants to be read. Hemingway’s theory was that if you, the writer, could reduce what you saw in your imagination to the igniting gestures and images—don’t elaborate why you feel sad about your marriage ending; just nail the image of the burning farmhouse that launched you on that train of thought—then you could get readers’ minds to make the same turns at the same intersections, and convey the world more immersively than through exposition. He explained his theory rarely and badly (hence the endless rancid chestnuts about lean prose, laconic dialogue, and crossing important things out), but Didion didn’t miss the point. “When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. . . . The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture,” she noted, in “Why I Write.” And yet she added in signposts Hemingway left out. A first-rate Didion piece explains its terms as it goes, as if the manual were part of the main text. She is perpetually on guard about saying stuff either not clearly enough (the title “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” emerges from her work) or so clearly as to be subject to “distortion and flattening,” and thus untrue to what she means.

“I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture” is how she puts it in “Telling Stories,” an essay from 1978 included in the new collection. She is explaining why she lost, or maybe never had, a desire to write salable short stories—tightly constructed pieces hung on a “little epiphany.” For her, the key to capturing life on the page without the usual sort of reduction, she says in the same essay, was figuring out how to use the first person across time.

Didion’s “I” ended up nearly as known as Hemingway’s “and,” and carries the same mixed blessing of being caricatured more than characterized. The caricature has Didion as a histrionic oversharer—a kind of literary Tori Spelling. Yet her reasons for embracing the “I” were mostly technical. You had to let readers know who you were and where your camera stood, she thought. It meant that Didion was always in her own crosshairs, and eventually turned the contrarian impulse on herself.

One of the commonest motifs in Didion’s writing is, bizarrely, Oregon Trail-type survivalism. She had been taught that those who colonized California were “the adventurous, the restless, and the daring.” She had been raised to believe that, as her mother put it, California was now “too regulated, too taxed, too expensive.” In “ Where I Was From ” (2003), she finally put this origin story of heroic, contrary individualism under the glass.

Didion built the book in her usual way, setting down reported articles and weaving in flashes of personal context. What created California economically and politically, she showed, was actually constant support from the East-reaching web of American society, industry, and, especially, the federal government. “The sheer geographical isolation of different parts of the state tended to obscure the elementary fact of its interrelatedness,” she wrote. The refusal to acknowledge this public interrelatedness, to insist on the determining value of the personal, the private, and the exceptional, had been California’s fragmenting delusion, and her own. I suspect that “Where I Was From” is among the least read of Didion’s nonfiction books, which is unfortunate, because it’s her “Gatsby”: the book in which she scrutinized her most basic ideas of heroic particularism and found that she had not escaped “the blinkering effect of the local dreamtime.” That’s a moving thing for a writer to acknowledge, and a hard one. The final sentences of the book are Didion’s suggestion that she’s not quite ready, in her life, to give the sentimental story up.

The intense burst of mythologizing that attended Didion’s books about the deaths of her husband (“The Year of Magical Thinking”) and her daughter (“ Blue Nights ,” from 2011) arrived, then, with a certain weirdness. One can now order something called a “Didion dress,” modelled on her late-sixties wardrobe. Not long ago, in a bookshop, I came across a Picador Modern Classics edition of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” shrunk down to pocket size, presumably to be carried in the way that certain people carry miniature versions of the Bible or the Constitution. I tried and failed to think of a writer who’d treat such a thing more mercilessly than the author of that book.

An artist who has spent years doing the work on her own terms should not look fashionability in the mouth. But it is odd to find Didion embraced by the world of mainstream sentimental thinking which she charged against for decades. One wonders whether the fans for whom she’s now an Instagram totem, or the many journalists who claim her, realize that she cast her career toward challenging precepts and paragons like theirs.

It matters only because everything matters. Didion once wrote, “Style is character,” and, because the phrase has seemed to apply to her life and work, it often gets quoted to mean that character comes down to nothing more than style. But the line, which appears in an essay about Georgia O’Keeffe, is actually about the burden of creative choice. “Every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character,” Didion wrote. Reducing the world, as on the canvas or the page, is a process of foreclosing on its fullness, choosing this way and not that one, and how you make those choices reveals everything about the person that you are. Didion praised O’Keeffe for “hardness” in trying to render in art what sensible people told her was unrenderable. “ ‘The men’ believed it was impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O’Keeffe painted New York,” she wrote. She was impressed by O’Keeffe’s snubbing of those who received her work devotedly but unseriously: “This is a woman who in 1939 could advise her admirers that they were missing her point, that their appreciation of her famous flowers was merely sentimental.” And she lauded O’Keeffe’s frank engagement with her time. “She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees,” Didion wrote, and she meant it, too. ♦

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Molly Fischer

By Emily Witt

By Hannah Goldfield