Didion’s Elegiac Memories

Blue Nights
By Joan Didion
(New York: Knopf, 2011)

“I wanted the yellow roses right there, where Vanessa had left them, with John and Quintana on the stage of the Booth, lying there on the stage all night, lit only by the ghost light, still there on the stage right down to the inevitable instant of the morning’s eight-a.m. load-out.” –Joan Didion

In Joan Didion’s new book, Blue Nights, she writes a second elegy, this time on the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo. Blue Nights is an unplanned sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking, a lament on the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. The latter was transformed into a one-person play, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play with Vanessa Redgrave.

For me, reading Didion is like running into an old friend, due as much to geography as having been guided by her through the decades of popular culture, the movies, and politics. She is like a violin string or a jazz ensemble that resonates with the music of the zeitgeist from the fifties forward into the double aughts. While I was stuck, mostly, in Taos, she was traveling around her native California from Sacramento to San Francisco to Los Angeles with time out for New York. She reported on and, more importantly, wrote essays about her impressions of events, as she does in Blue Nights, in a way that makes you feel as if you are emotionally present but just detached enough to absorb the scenes with your senses and reflect on them like an observer. Having been reared in the mountain valleys of the High Sierra and Lake Tahoe, not far from her hometown of Sacramento, I respond to Didion’s intimate knowledge of California.

She frequently writes as the working screenwriter she is  about popular culture or while covering various formative political movements. Popular culture is a prism through which to view the world. She wrote a perceptive piece about Ronald Reagan for The New York Review of Books years ago, about the actor playing the role of President. The piece rings absolutely true.

Didion’s prose has this wonderful rhythm and she constantly juxtaposes past and present, the private and the public in a way that epitomizes the best personal essayist. Even as you are touched by her private grief, you learn about (professionalized) medicine, say, the “imperfect art,” she calls it as well as the details about the show business milieu, which she humanizes. Though I am not personally inclined to read about flowers or fashions, when Didion refers to these details I am mesmerized. And she gives you a dose of the way the world has changed during her own seventy years or so in an immediate and vivifying context.

For those of us who have spent say, a lifetime reading Didion, now she provides us with further poetic impressions of the journey. A longtime ago, she wrote a piece about her senior year at Berkeley and how during, I think, a philosophy class, she was distracted by the flowers outside her window. Today, due as much to endurance as to her skills as an observer, she has become a rare psychological and philosophical sounding board, using the poetics of prose as insight, while she narrates her impressions of the bittersweet human condition.