To live through 2017 has required girding oneself daily against a rising sense of panic. Everything is on its head. Every day, a fresh assault on reality, the feeling that gravity is no longer a sure thing. Reality itself seems to be merely fiction.
As such, in the past year I have found myself thinking over and over of Joan Didion’s opening lines to her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” in which she reports on the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the “cold late spring” of 1967, a half-century ago. To describe the experience, she takes a line from W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” — “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” — that leans on a metaphor of something like gravity or centrifugal force.
The phrase, and the essay, is an apt introduction to a writer convinced that the center is disintegrating more every day, and that our lives are often futile attempts to grasp for it, just a little longer. It also furnishes the title for Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary about Didion’s life and work directed by her nephew, the actor and filmmaker Griffin Dunne (and funded partly through Kickstarter).
Dunne’s film functions best as an introduction to Didion’s life and work. It covers her whole life, including, in some detail, the late years, in which she tragically lost both her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. And unlike Tracy Daugherty’s mammoth 2015 biography, the film was made with Didion’s participation. She’ll be 83 in December, and is frail but full of memories — as guarded as her prose, but Dunne captures the fleeting expressions that cross her face after she finishes answering his questions, and they can, once in a while, speak volumes that never make it onto the page when she writes. That alone makes it worth watching.
Still, there is something a bit unsatisfactory about Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, especially if you’re already familiar with Didion’s work. It’s laced with Didion’s own words, but — perhaps because it takes a straightforward documentary approach, with archival footage and talking-head interviews and narration — it doesn’t reveal much. More crucially, its workmanlike cinematic language can’t quite capture the urgency and expansiveness of Didion’s vision as a writer, and how keenly and bitingly she managed to forecast the insanities that plague our time.
If you just skim the surface of Didion’s half-century of controlled, lucid prose — which unfortunately the film often is forced to do — you might be tricked into thinking Didion thinks we’re going to be okay. She doesn’t. Her sentences feel like they’re carved from cool marble, but with hot blood running through them, and for her that’s the whole idea; in her 2005 memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, she wrote that since her childhood she had “developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.”
The notion that words have meaning, both in what they say and in how they say it, seems in 2017 like an idea teetering on a precipice. But even those who believe in words sometimes have trouble finding their way through them. Didion has been fighting that battle for half a century.
Joan Didion has been chronicling the shrinking center of American gravity for her whole career
“The center was not holding,” Didion writes at the opening of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” No better way to describe that time for her, and for me, no better encapsulation of the cold wintry months that began this year. Gravity, gone.
She goes on:
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 misplaced 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 left behind filed desultory missing persons reports, then moved on themselves.
The truly remarkable thing about “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is that Didion isn’t writing about history from a distance. Over her career she’s often written her best work in the journalistic mode; this essay first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in late 1967, then furnished the title for her first essay collection, published a year later.
The collection is made up of magazine pieces, each individually contained, but I think that book is most properly considered a memoir — even though Didion isn’t always the central figure. She with her smooth, sharp voice, which seems to have brimstone bubbling just beneath the surface, is our guide. She’s writing a memoir on America’s behalf, attempting to trace the steps that got us to this precipice.
She hasn’t stopped, even as she’s shifted genres from journalism to fiction to memoir and back again. To read Joan Didion for the past several decades is to be made aware, as if by a bright light shining through a fog, of a cliff’s edge toward which we’re collectively inching. There’s no map or script or logic to guide us, but onward we go, gravity losing its grip on us with each step. We’re always just about to break free and hurl ourselves into the abyss. The center won’t hold forever.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem put Didion on the map; in the New York Times Book Review, Dan Wakefield wrote that it was “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.”
Though she was writing and publishing fiction at the same time, Didion kept working as a journalist; her next collection, The White Album, gave us in its title essay the much-quoted line “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The essay is a virtuosic attempt by Didion to capture the hazy dissociative state of mind in which she spent the late 1960s and early ’70s — she pegs it to “around 1966” to 1971 — and then, like a laser, she narrows down to scenes from her life and her reporting during that time, when people were simply disappearing in California and into her own house; “I had the keys,” she writes, “but not the key.”
“The White Album” unfolds like a series of semi-connected vignettes in which Didion is present but often slips into the background to let us see what was happening around her. She sits watching the Doors in a recording studio, waiting for Jim Morrison to arrive. She throws a party at home and discovers Janis Joplin has shown up. She visits Huey Newton at the Alameda County Jail and Linda Kasabian, a member of the Manson family, at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles.
At the essay’s end, she reflects on how she knows the end of all these people’s stories but still doesn’t know what any of it was really about: “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on ‘Midnight Confessions’ and on Ramon Navarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.”
This is all technically about Didion, but she has always written as if she’s a cipher for the larger whole, a sense of dread lurking behind a quietly brutal pair of observing eyes. When she writes about her migraines, she is really writing about a bigger matter, the tendency of Americans to insist we all push away our feelings and pains through any means possible and put on a productive, happy face. When she writes about keeping a notebook, she’s really writing about the desperate struggle to piece together meaning from the randomness of quotidian life. When she writes about her family’s migration to California, or about leaving New York, or about visiting the South, she wants us to see how the inexorable push to leave and move and migrate and punt the past is buried in our national psyche, and how pretending our histories both private and public stay in the past never really fixes things in the end.
In 1991 — but perhaps most vitally to 2017 — she wrote a searing essay for the New York Review of Books titled “Sentimental Journeys” about the five young African-American boys accused of raping and murdering a jogger in Central Park. It’s a case about which future president Donald Trump has long held some definite and deeply racist opinions, on which he doubled down as a presidential candidate, 14 years after the Central Park Five were exonerated. Didion wrote about how rhetoric and images obscure the truth and thwart justice, and she’s only grown more correct.
Didion went on to publish books and articles on politics, on Reagan and Bush, on Cuban expats in Miami. She wrote screenplays with her husband and novels on her own, all laden with a sense that something has gone very wrong. President Obama awarded Didion the National Humanities Medal in 2012 (footage pops up in Dunne’s documentary) in recognition of her status as a lodestar in American letters. When John Gregory Dunne, and then their daughter Quintana, died suddenly and left her reeling, she took to the page again to process her grief and, through that, the experience of grief, the way it leaves us in a pattern of cyclical thinking and shatters hope. Griffin Dunne’s documentary shows her having healed, a bit, but the wounds are still visible in between her words.
And I suppose that’s what I was reminded of watching Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, and what I am left feeling so near to the anniversary of the 2016 presidential election: grief and the sensation that the center is giving way. If only, confused Americans have been saying all year, revisiting the moment of shock with the same kind of cyclical, magical thinking Didion mimics in her late work — if only the campaign had gone another way, if only we’d spotted the trend line years earlier, if only people were more civil, if only someone had said the right thing, given the right money, if only, if only.
Different people have different answers to these questions, and different answers for the future. But I can’t shake the feeling that we ought to have been listening to Joan Didion more carefully all along.
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold opens in limited theaters and on Netflix on October 27.