One of the best lines ever written in journalism was by Joan Didion in her 1966 profile of Joan Baez. The singer was 24 at the time, and a figurehead for a movement just reaching its zenith. “Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person,” wrote Didion, “and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her.” Didion not only anticipated celebrity culture but also offered an acute summary of the way in which people get trapped by their own personas. Fifty years on and the observation is as sharp as it ever was.
Didion has been everywhere this summer, in a new biography, a documentary in progress and the ad campaign for Céline, in which she appeared in her customary style, with flat hair and don’t-bother-me sunglasses. To reread her is, for many of us, to revisit the person we were when we first read her, a peculiarly Didionesque exercise that can make the head spin: how many levels of self-consciousness can you get to before the brain turns around and eats itself?
I thought about this while rereading John Wayne: A Love Song this week, an essay from 1965 and a perfect example of Didion’s art. Her prose is best known for its coolness but she is also a romantic, given at times to all-out schmaltz, and the opening paragraphs of John Wayne, full of trees and wind and a brittle nostalgia, read as something written under the influence of Carson McCullers.
But then Didion pulls off her signature move, calling attention to her own artifice – she is, she writes, describing a dream, but one that she is not yet quite free of – without compromising its effect. Over the years, one graduates from admiring Didion’s self-mythologising to admiring the way she undermines it.
Of course, by pointing out that it’s all a pose, Didion is merely assuming a more sophisticated pose, and in later essays these switchbacks gave rise to a self-indulgence that occasionally glued up the works.(I’m thinking in particular of her 1990 essay on the Central Park jogger, in which the elegiac tone spun out of control). But what joy, in those early essays, to observe how, over the course of a single long piece, a writer could set up her persona only to dismantle it and skip off, blame-free.
The made-up candidate
An equally famous outing for Didion was the 1988 US presidential race – Michael Dukakis v George Bush Sr – when she upset a lot of political hacks by writing in the New York Review of Books about their sycophantic coverage. Joe Klein, who she was particularly hard on, retaliated in the New Republic, accusing Didion of being “bereft of qualifications” and basing her observations on dinner-party chat.
The current Republican line-up is almost too silly to waste Didion on, but you do wonder how she’d deal with Donald Trump. He is so absurd, so made-up, that to do him justice you need a writer of equal imaginative standing. But who? Trump is, as everyone says, “beyond satire”, in which case one looks to the surrealists. I think Ben Marcus, the short story writer, would do a fine job, or maybe the novelist Ali Smith. If only Italo Calvino were still around.
He’ll take Manhattan
The pope takes Manhattan sounds like a bad premise for a Muppets movie, but it’s the only way to describe what it is like here this week. In the 7-Elevens there are Pope Francis dolls ($19.99). The traffic situation is so dire that office workers who commute by car have been told to work from home. Mobile phone networks are expected to suffer under the strain. Worst of all, the post office has warned residents in seven Manhattan postcodes, including mine, that they can’t guarantee delivery during the papal visit. Way to win friends.
