The Last Love Song (25 page)

McDowell had befriended James Agee through Father James H. Flye at St. Andrew's School in Sewanee, Tennessee. At Vanderbilt, he met the young writer Peter Taylor. McDowell had a penchant for “pounding the sidewalks and just plain selling the books,” said James Laughlin, a poet and the founder of New Directions. This, along with his links to Southern authors, put McDowell and Obolensky on the map. Under their imprint, Agee's
A Death in the Family
appeared posthumously. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller.

McDowell left the firm in 1960. For a while, Obolensky carried on. “I didn't like the publishing business,” he says now (subsequently, he became a financial analyst specializing in oil and gas, high-tech industries, nuclear power, metals and minerals). “It was a disappointment all around. A disaster. No matter what you do, it's a cash-and-carry situation. Publishers never get credit for what they do and authors always feel put upon.” He lost over a million dollars in the field.

“To be very frank, I never liked her,” Obolensky said of Didion. “She was fixed on herself, a stick-in-the-mud, a diamond that needed to be faceted. But she had good people working for her and they led me to believe she would be a fine author to have. ‘She's the greatest thing since Post Toasties,' they said. I relented. I thought, Well, we've got a backlist, we're okay, and I'd be delighted to publish this first novel.' And what we did for her, we did flat out. The presentation on the page, the margins—everything was perfect.”

Titles were the first sign of trouble: Neither
Harvest Home
nor
In the Night Season
was remotely commercial, Obolensky argued. He came up with
Run River.
“What does it mean?” Didion asked him. “It means life goes on,” he replied. Didion said, “That's not what the book is about.”

He urged her to change her style. “I felt she was too precious. She didn't have any punch or balls. I like fists and chins, stomp and gouge.” Obviously, editor and author were miserably matched.

“She had total disregard for anything that was not borne for her, with her, or by her,” Obolensky explained to me. “Doing anything for her was like throwing a rock in a pond.”

Later, in interviews, Didion would admit she “didn't know how to do anything at all” with this novel: “I wasn't accomplished enough.”

“Right. Sheer indulgences,” Obolensky said. “Flashbacks and stream of consciousness … certain people love it. But I felt it was extraneous and the book suffered—she suffered—for it. She lost ground on stuff she didn't have to lose ground on. There was very little she would change. We were very professional and we were good and we were writers. But she was filled with her own magnificence—and that's always a loss for the author.”

With her thousand-dollar advance, Didion took a two-month leave of absence from
Vogue
to finish the book. “That's why the last half is better than the first half,” she said. Parmentel critiqued the pages for her; she'd argue with him but almost always decide he was right. Obolensky hired a young freelance editor, Carol Houck Smith, to streamline the story. Smith couldn't get anything past him, Parmentel said.

“I kept trying to run the first half through again, but it was intractable,” Didion said. “It was set. I'd worked on it for too many years in too many moods.”

“Moods? I don't know what her private life was like,” Obolensky reflected. “If you're an introspective writer, it shows, and she wasn't. She wasn't a refreshed human being.”

*   *   *

“Obolensky had a wonderful party for
Run River
at his town house,” Parmentel recalled. Despite the editor's battles with his author, “by then, he'd got the bit in his teeth and said, ‘This is going to win a Pulitzer.' He went all out for her. If Joan's complained about him since, she's an ingrate.

“Bobby Short came to the party. Billy Graham came to the party—the fighter, not the preacher. And Montgomery Clift—he was drunk.”

“You've written a great American novel,” Parmentel told Didion. He didn't miss the fact that her character Ryder Channing, all smooth talk and suits, alcohol and charm, was his spitting image.

3

The rough drafts of what became
Run River,
archived now in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, confirm Didion's perception that her ambitions outstripped her abilities, though the book is hardly the failure she later considered it to be. Its evocations of the Sacramento Valley are achingly vivid, and if the book's nostalgic tone is mired in misunderstandings of California history, it still conveys passion and grievous loss.

Early versions of the story emphasized the lives of valley men more than women, a focus on social
change,
on builders and promoters. Subsequent drafts tilted the narrative toward mothers, sisters, and daughters, who, more than the men, experienced the
effects
of “progress” in the most intimate social realms. This perceptual shift gave Didion's theme greater nuance:
“Things change. Your father no longer tells you when to go to bed, no longer lulls you with his father's bourbon, brought out for comfort at Christmas and funerals.”

Had Didion augmented this angle of vision with a more intimate point of view, she might have achieved her desire to present the past and present simultaneously, to show how thoroughly nostalgia can grip an individual sensibility. Instead, she played with chronology in draft after draft, fracturing time, resequencing events, calling more attention to the hand of the author, cutting and pasting, than to the minds of her characters.

Run River
is set on a postwar California ranch. Lily and Everett McClellan are the grandchildren of pioneers. They were married by a justice of the peace whose son spoke with a thick “Okie voice:
Ain't she the prettiest little bride…”
This voice, the nasal grate of the interloper with no links to local soil, mocks Lily's and Everett's dream of paradise. Their dream founders in the state's transition from agriculture to industry, self-reliance to profligate consumerism. Everett has “little interest … in using the land” responsibly; he wants “only to have it.” He cannot grasp that the American economy is shifting—money is made from money now, and the land is just an afterthought. Lily is trapped in a cycle of meaningless social events where other desperate women “talk about their diets and their children and their golf scores, display their even dispositions and their gold charm bracelets, and … go home to take off the bright clean linen dresses, to lie on hot sheets and wait patiently for the day to begin again.”

Children of privilege, of increasingly seductive consumer choices, Everett and Lily have lost the Old West notion of setting a strict code and living by it. Their families have realized the goal of “
lots of land / Under starry skies a-bove
” but in the new postwar economy, for a new middle-class generation, the “pastures of plenty” are no longer stakes in the future, but parcels to buy and sell and buy again. The stars are not to be wished on, but invested in; they are satellites manufactured by local industries.

It's not that earlier generations behaved better than Lily and Everett; alcoholism and infidelity
always
defined ranching life, in Didion's version of history. It's that the elders were more discreet with the knowledge of others' foibles, and cleverer at cleaning up the messes. The new generation's fumbling is a shocking erosion of social etiquette.

Didion's interest in language and American narratives appears in the book's imagery and echoes of earlier literary works: in the social satire reminiscent of Edith Wharton; in the Gothic description of the McClellan family's decline, as in the fall of Poe's Ushers; in the detail of the burned-out light on the McClellans' riverfront dock, a sharp counterpoint to Daisy's light at the end of
The Great Gatsby;
and of course in the road trips—brief, failed attempts at escape into destinies less obscure. At one point, following an abortion (the
final
end to the Old Way of Life), Lily rides a Greyhound bus through the San Joaquin Valley, in an afternoon heat scorching “towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed … on the verge of dematerializing; there was the sense that to close one's eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible.” This moves beyond the Joads' weary disillusionment. It is Eliot's wasteland transposed on the sunny promise of the West.

Though Didion resisted strict chronology, she did offer, at Obolensky's insistence, a relatively straightforward presentation of events. Her familiarity with American literary tropes implies belief in a national tale, or several chapters of it, peopled with familiar types (the pioneer, the adulterer, the wastrel brother, the thwarted housewife, each has a name vaguely redolent of the area's past, but, in fact, more suited to Hollywood—Knight, Everett, Ryder—underscoring Didion's longing for a simple, moral story. There is even a snake in this garden, in the novel's opening scene). At the end, Lily wonders what to tell her children about their suicide father: “She was not certain that he had been [a good man] but it was what she would have wished for him, if they gave her one wish.” Despite her despair, this first Didion heroine dreams of John Wayne, of fairy tales offering people chances to indulge their whims or live out their destinies.

Didion's later novels would wrestle more directly with the nature of narrative—specifically, with narrative's limits—but in
Run River
we see the seeds of this obsession: two distinct narrative concepts tussle in the book, stemming from the pioneer families' confrontations with history. “
We could make the reasons,
” Everett thinks, wondering how he might defend his murder of a real-estate speculator: that is, we can write the story ourselves, or rewrite it, to suit our self-perceptions. Narrative as open destiny, the American dream of self-invention: a
gambler's
outlook.

On the other hand, Lily believes it's a little “
late for choosing … quite as if it hadn't always been
.” As the spawn of pioneers, they are prisoners of the past, their roles already written, their narrative function clear: to uphold and extend tradition. Lily's worst failure is her inability to understand the role of
ranch wife.
She is locked into a rigid fate but has no inkling of how to fulfill it on her way to the end.

*   *   *

It is striking that this novel, written on the cusp of a volatile new decade, offered no sense of the social tremors appearing in other works of the time, in the political writing of the Beats, say, or in Grace Paley's short stories about restless wives and mothers, just then beginning to appear, or in Philip Roth's first novel,
Goodbye, Columbus,
hinting at the gender battles to come, or in Walker Percy's bomb-haunted
The Moviegoer.
For the Didion of
Run River,
cataclysmic social change had already occurred. The Apocalypse had come. Time—narrative—had been warped beyond repair: “The future was being made … right here in California,” Ryder Channing announces while chopping up valley ranches.

The future was being.

Past, present, and to come—
coincidence
—pressure-packed into a single, world-altering phrase. In the economic boom of the 1960s, this apparently airtight formulation (
we can have it all—right now!
) would open unforeseeable gaps in the national narrative.

*   *   *

Forty years after publishing
Run River,
Didion would declare the novel tainted with a “tenacious (and, as I see it now, pernicious) mood of nostalgia.” Falsely, the book equated “change” with “decline,” blind to the fact that Californians had
always
been “willing to traffic [their] own history” for economic gain. There
was
no “old” California to lose. Ever.

Her reconsideration appeared in
Where I Was From.
The self-critique was brave, pitiless, and incisive, but it did not credit
Run River
's real achievement, which was, as she admitted sotto voce, to present a “not inaccurate characterization of the way Sacramento, or for that matter California itself, felt to a child growing up during the postwar boom years, the late 1940s and early 1950s.”

“[F]or my family,” read one half of Didion's dedication of the novel—the folks who suffered to acquire and work the land and were now in danger of losing it (though how must her family have felt about the book's portrait of inbreeding among old California ranching families, with its implication of planting insanity?).

“[A]nd for N,” read the rest of the dedication. If this was an acknowledgment of Noel Parmentel, then the book's epigraph, an excerpt of Robert Lowell's poem “Man and Wife,” was a good-bye note to him. Didion quoted only a section of Lowell, details pertinent to the book's plot—broken intimacy, madness, homicide. What she didn't quote (but Parmentel must have known it) was the poem's evocation of a soulless New York, literary types outdrinking one another in a hot Village apartment.

4

“A member of
Vogue
's staff for the past several years, Joan Didion grew up in California, and lives, now, there and in New York. Her first novel,
Run River,
has just been published by Ivan Obolensky.”

This contributor's note appended “American Summer”—an article examining longings for innocence and the bitterness of young adulthood—in the May 1963 issue of
Vogue.
Its reference to living in California part-time precedes by over a year Didion's
actual
move back west but indicates she was not remaining quiet about her disillusionment with Manhattan. While finishing the second half of
Run River,
she often flew to Sacramento on night flights. The planes were nearly empty, seven or eight men, maybe, about half of them wearing short-sleeved shirts, ready for the beach, the other half still dressed for the East.