Joan Didion's Notebooks of the American South
On "South and West"
Nate Hanrahan, who has spent much of his life in the South, gives us a review of Joan Didion’s South and West. Published in 2017, the book is comprised of extended excerpts from her notebook as Didion traveled through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. My God is she good, her power is always felt, even in the short fragments shared here.
Only two notable things have ever happened in Oxford, Mississippi. JFK and RFK mobilized approximately 30,000 soldiers and federal agents to put down a riot preventing James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss in 1962. William Faulkner lived there and died that same year. Eight years later, Joan Didion wandered from Grenada, Mississippi and tried to find his home.
Faulkner’s old white house is on prominent display, and it’s easier to find than the Archie Manning statue, or the Library (a bar), or Square Books, or the Grove. But not in 1970.
We drove out on Old Taylor’s Road at night to look for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s house. There were fireflies, and heat lightning, and thick vines all around, and we could not see the house until the next day… I read a book about Faulkner in Oxford, interviews with his fellow citizens in Oxford, and I was deeply affected by their hostility to him and by the manner in which he had managed to ignore it.
In the lead-up to Didion’s arrival, Faulkner and books and black people were all just minor incursions on the oasis of Oxford in a desert of kudzu and poverty. The third observation in Didion’s Oxford notes is that there is barely a store in which to purchase a book. The second was that “the self-image of the Southern Blood as Cavalier” was very apparent there.
South and West doesn’t give a sense of what the South is like now. Oxford has changed. The drunk college boys still call themselves the Rebs, but it sounds like an affectation when there’s a nineteen year-old from Rockaway Beach in the group. The hushed racist barbs sound more like appeals to tradition than a philosophy of one’s own. The kids here read, or at least they buy books. There are a lot of Reagan-Bush muscle shirts on patriotic holidays, but the wearer wouldn’t know the name Barry Goldwater. Few of these rich sons of this poor state would use the word “cavalier.” Few could mount much of a defense of the Lost Cause, but they would try; they’re anti-intellectual in a more blunt way than their grandfathers. The only commonality they have with Faulkner, really, is getting wasted and skipping class.
South and West is just a notebook. The bones of a great Didion work, buried in a shallow grave, excised, and put on display for the gawkers, the real Didion-heads. It materialized as she drove around Mississippi and Alabama (from New Orleans) and then left one month later in disgust. The last line of the notebook, presumably an addendum in the 2000s, says simply: “I never wrote the piece.” Many notebook entries preserve the detached tone her followers try to shamelessly affect. In others, her disdain and confusion haven’t been sheared off.
At dinner one night in Birmingham there were, besides us, five people. Two of the men had gone to Princeton… They talked with raucous good humor about ‘Seein’ those X-rated movies’... This was a manner of speaking, a rococo denial of their own sophistication, which I found dizzying to contemplate.
The reader can still see the naked questions whose answer she would turn into a feeling, had the book been written.
Didion bends to triteness twice. Writers from the North and from Hollywood (to a real Southerner, the only two places besides the South) find themselves commenting on southern humidity before all else: “In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.” She evokes a less oblique piece of small talk from the book American Melodrama: “...Norman Mailer, who may know about such things, described the sensation of living and breathing in the Miami Beach atmosphere as ‘not unlike being made love to by a three-hundred-pound woman who has decided to get on top.’” (Mailer liked re-animating this brusque metaphor. He used it to describe Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full thirty years later: “At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman.”) After the Northern or the Hollywood writer brings up the weather, they bring up the war. “The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 was spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.” The weather and the war probably are the most important things to bring up. The trouble is that everyone does.
The specter of divorce haunts the best Didion essays of ’66 to ’77. The ghost also claws its way into the writing of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Vegas is a reflection of the last death throes of arrested development, a boy-man’s last stand against a commitment he made to a timid, smart young woman still living in L.A. His “memoir of a dark season” is dedicated to the man who was his wife’s first, and maybe greatest, love. The W. H. Auden quote that opens Vegas is a lesson Dunne must have internalized only after the manuscript was finished:
Like everything which is not the result of fleeting emotion but of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.
174 pages later he recollects calling Didion from his apartment on the strip. She tells him she’s depressed. He tells her a friendly prostitute lined up a nineteen year-old for him to sleep with. Didion tells him that it’s “research.” The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem—two collections containing essays from this period—are riddled with similar holes such as “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of getting a divorce” and “…the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want… between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” A marriage in such a state, in a land so pre-occupied with marriage, could never be allowed to feel comfortable.
Dunne accompanied Didion to New Orleans, but was rarely seen in the notes. His silhouette is backlit when dinner hosts ask why her husband allows her to “spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash.” She doesn’t note his coming to her defense, but she doesn’t record coming to her own. “I had never expected to come to the Gulf Coast married.” She visits a hospital in Meridian and she tells the doctor she has a husband. “This did not sound exactly right, either, because I was not wearing my wedding ring.” Most sections are headed by a location within the South: Meridian, Grenada, Biloxi. Each contains some inquiry into her marriage status, or a stranger proffering their own, conferring meaning upon themselves. Here in the South there is still that sense of marriage being a prerequisite for personal importance, but there is less marriage now. The right kind of women are still aggrandized here, but the wrong ones have sunk lower.
About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.
New places tend to upskirt our insecurities. When I visit San Francisco I feel that I do not make enough money, and when I visit D.C. I feel as though I am missing vital connections with important people. The chorus of South and West is sung by Didion’s insecurity about her marriage. But the discomfort with the oddity of her marriage was not so off-putting as the unions she found in Louisiana. “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been eccentric and full of anger… Would I have taken up causes, or would I simply have knifed someone?”
The anger builds and builds in her notes and it drives her back to New Orleans and to a “senseless disagreement on the causeway, ugly words and then silence. We spent a silent night in an airport motel and took the 9:15 National flight to San Francisco. I never wrote the piece.”
"The reader can still see the naked questions whose answer she would turn into a feeling, had the book been written." That's the best sentence in this review and it describes exactly what makes South and West feel unfinished in a way that's almost more revealing than the finished work would have been. You get to see the machinery before she polished it away. Didion without the Didion cool is still better than most writers at full temperature.