Joan Didion Center Stage in My Mind, Reading “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT”

This is the experience I have reading Didion (and the reason her writing is numbered among the contemporary nonfiction classics):

It is as if I am in a theater and the lights have dimmed chasing away distractions; an unlit figure on the stage begins speaking, as if directly to me, in a privileged conversation, intimate. Her voice is steady, wise, and yet, there is a breath that is skipped, held and then released. Is it mine? Is it hers? I don’t know. We are getting acquainted, Joan Didion and I. She the writer, I the reader, as she revisits her young, impetuous self, stepping from a DC-7, the New York haze wrapping its fermented grandeur around her California bronzed shoulders and sun-streaked hair. She continues telling her story, inviting me to feel her wonder and smell the city’s acrid blend of beauty and decay.

The stage lights begin to rise; a single spot holding the author in its center. The girl fresh from the relentlessly hot summer of the Sacramento bowl will become the shivering drenched rat before she finds her way into the magic of “Xanadu,” but, never, to being home in The City. And that is what she must explain to New York’s High Literary Fashion, High Culture, natives—after she escapes. It is something they won’t understand.

If you’ve never picked a grapefruit sized peach, hot and bursting with sweet ripe liquid that your mouth cannot contain, your fingers cannot hold back from trickling down to your elbows, you cannot understand Joan on the corner of Lexington Avenue.  If you haven’t walked beneath the knarled blackened trees on an Oakley or Brentwood farm, the hot, dry air pungent with peach wine fermenting within the fallen fruit, seeping into the earth, in what was the sleepy farmland between San Francisco and Sacramento, you may not understand the moment when she bites into that street vendor’s offering. How the taste took her to a home stored deep inside, inside her and inside the peach and she knew then that there would be losses suffered for being where she did not belong. But her words challenge you to try; try to remember that taste, that fragrance—the one that instantly takes you home, even to a home that no longer exists.

The voice of the matured woman looking back on her 21 to 28 year old self has changed in the passing of the paragraphs as it did in the passing of the years. She replays the passion, the magic in her tone as she took the taxi ride and chirped to the sardonic gentleman about “new faces” that one day she will realize are the same faces, always the same no matter how many fresh ones arrive. But then the light on the stage from which the author is speaking begins to broaden and I can picture her in a soft, naturally draped, cotton blouse, airy linen capris, and her toes peeking from brushed un-dyed leather sandals. Home in California.

And then, as Didion comes to the end of her performance—if inside my head—I see her pull her shoulders back, just a bit, her body pulling itself up, drawing in a breath to confess, that really, she was one who had to learn without “profit[ting] from the experience of others…” It is a confession that reaches out to each new generation, or new entrant into the writers’ province.

As for me, I don’t identify with the magic that is New York because I was, and always will be a bi-coastal girl, but my coast in the East is really a gateway: Pittsburgh at the confluence of three rivers heading into what was once the West, Ohio, and rolling toward the Mississippi and the thick hot air over the Gulf of Mexico. And my west coast is the Los Angeles of my birth and San Francisco where I fell in love walking amid the gold and jade that glittered under brightly lit red awnings in the gilded windows of Chinatown’s shops. And raised babies under endless azure skies; planting a field with snow peas and cantaloupe, zucchini and tomatoes, pole beans and corn stalks. No, I never spoke of California as “the coast” or the east as the path to Xanadu. They are both home—because my heart lives where my loves reside. But that’s no hindrance to being drawn into Joan Didion’s experience; her intimate tone creates a link to whatever magic place you gained entrance to, but also managed to find your way out of.

"My Daidu, straight and wonderfully made of various jewels of different kinds
My Yellow Steppe of Xanadu, the summer residence of ancient Khans
My cool and pleasant Kaiping Xanadu..."

Sage Khan (1368)

And, as for Didion, she always unlocks the poetic spark inside this writer, even if to argue a different vision. That’s what makes a classic: the ability to turn a lock within the reader’s mind and allow the universality of human drama to occupy the stage within.

That is the value in having sites like byliner.com, theatlantic.com—to provide a link for those who might otherwise never find a Joan Didion, an E. B White (outside of Charlotte’s Web), or a Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo journalism” where the story was all about him, really, from the beginning, but in a see-me-equals-see-a-bit-of-yourself (or of the rest of the world, fools who hated women jockeys in the 1970 Kentucky Derby) form of self-revelation. Indeed resurrecting the beautifully written, humanly poignant, once groundbreaking and still relevant like, Gay Talese on Sinatra, because the story is richly characterized, narratively vibrant and possessing the human drama-tension-arc that never grows old. Or Hemingway, although old-school (read: not politically correct in terminology, if not sympathies), who carefully spun a tale within the frame of early twentieth century reporting. Or the Tom Wolfe versus Hunter S. Thompson reporting notes gone public—breaking all the rules—to great effect.