The Last Love Song (45 page)

Papers came a day or two late from the mainland. On the morning after the California primary, people stood around the newsstand at the Royal Hawaiian reading about the heavy voter turnout. None of them knew that at that very moment Bobby Kennedy lay dying in L.A.'s Good Samaritan Hospital.

During the afternoons, Dunne left Didion alone with Quintana to visit the Armed Forces Recreation Center at Fort DeRussy in Honolulu. Troops from Saigon, Danang, and Bien Hoa came for five-day leaves to meet their wives and mothers. Maybe he'd get a story. One day he heard an orientation officer warn the troops, “You are at all times prey to subversive elements. These subversives will try to induce you to desert. If you become suspicious of any subversive elements, contact the proper military authorities and safeguard your country.”

Late one afternoon, Dunne agreed to watch Quintana, and Didion got a chance to wander off alone. She dropped by the Punchbowl again. Banyan trees and rain trees waved in the center of the crater, over the fresh, moist graves. Mothers and fathers wept in curling mist.

She went to Schofield Barracks, where James Jones had set his mighty novel
From Here to Eternity.
The base was located near the Wahiawa Reservoir, in a scrabbly part of the island, a mix of red dirt and crushed white coral, smoky with cane fires, plagued with signs for massage parlors and collard greens. Jones's book made
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
seem paltry. And yet no one here seemed to have read it. The bookstores didn't stock it.

Diesel slicked the air.

She remembered afternoons she'd spent as a girl on army posts, wearing a red poppy on her dress, following her father around the country. She remembered playing with dogs on the lawns of lieutenant colonels, sitting in clear sunshine and reading books that seemed to matter. These days, the national press was reporting that residents of Bikini Atoll, living in intolerable slums on a place called Kill Island, were still unable to return to their home, twenty-two years after the atomic tests.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

The ashy yellow light, slanting now through the canebrakes, appeared to burden the limbs of the palms.

5

Didion had a busy June. In addition to visiting Hawaii, while
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
made its way to reviewers' desks, she was diagnosed in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica with severe alienation and “reality contact” impairment. The Rorschach, Thematic Apperception, and Sentence Completion tests, as well as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory suggested “a personality in process of deterioration”; “the content of patient's responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations”; she has a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.”

That she submitted to these tests as her book materialized suggests the overwhelming levels of anxiety, anticipation, and pressure caused by publication, a common circumstance for authors. To some degree, her profile fits
any
“creative personality,” particularly in the letdown after an especially fertile span, when a project is done, one relinquishes control of it and can only await the reactions of strangers.

She wrote that her breakdown did not seem to her “an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968”—a thematic aperçu within “The White Album”'s tour of social disintegration, but a swift elision of her personal troubles. Certainly, in the wake of the spring's political assassinations and campus upsets, no one felt sanguine. “Many saw the unleashing of a dark, latent psychosis in the national character, a stain that had its start with the first settlement of a hostile continent,”
Time
reported. Recently, in New Orleans, District Attorney Jim Garrison, in a high-profile trial, had raised the possibility of conspiracy in the killing of JFK, lifting the lid on Miami's Cuban exile community and certain connections in that city with the mob, rekindling public doubts about the veracity of the Warren Report; Didion was not alone in believing she shared, in the words of her doctors, “a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations.” She lived in the very neighborhood of cultural meltdown, glamour gone groovy gone gritty, with weekly demonstrations and threats of violence just blocks away on the Strip; she lived in the Hollywood rumor mill, steeped in stories of bigger and bigger parties, harder and harder drugs. Tales of orgies fluttered like scented envelopes up and down the hills. It had become chic to keep a pair of handcuffs in the bedroom. “[L]ibidinal preoccupations … distorted and bizarre” (a concern for Didion's analysts) would have appeared in the psychiatric profiles of anyone north of La Brea.

Could Didion really have been surprised by the results of her tests? As the young California poet Robert Hass had written, “It became clear to me that alienation was a state approaching sanity, a way of being human in a monstrously inhuman world, and that feeling human was a useful form of political subversion.”

In fact, Didion's push to finish her essay collection, the pressure of the looming contract for an uncompleted novel, her husband's unhappiness with the reception of
his
book, as well as the rigorous travel schedule they maintained as reporters for
The Saturday Evening Post,
was reason enough for “an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out.”

A psychosis in the national character was never the point. And Elavil would not be the answer.

In roughly the same period, personally and professionally, Didion responded to a
Harper's Bazaar
questionnaire, “Singular Voices: 100 Women in Touch with Our Times.” Aside from asserting that the most significant change in our society was its “total breakdown,” her answers sketched a woman generally at peace with herself, insofar as peace was possible on a daily basis in a tumultuous time, in the midst of a hectic career. She seemed satisfied with her work—it was as “vital” to her as anything else in her life, and she would be “bereft” without it; she did not feel stifled in a male-dominated world—she could not imagine accomplishing anything without the encouragement of men; she cooked for relaxation and avoided all housework and laundry, leaving those chores to the maid, unless there was an emergency; she did not feel she had ever made a “significant choice”—“One day and one thing led to another and pretty soon a pattern was set, irreversible.”

How do you feel when you consider that you will probably live longer than most men?

“It never occurs to me,” she said.

6

In publishing circles, summer is generally considered a slow time for serious books: It's beach-read season. But in the spring and summer of 1968, while the president was reading about the decline of the King of Beasts in
Aesop's Fables,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux released three volumes the critics called essential to understanding the culture. The books were all associated with Henry Robbins.

They were Donald Barthelme's groundbreaking short story collection,
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts,
Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
and Didion's
Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Of Barthelme, William Gass wrote in
The New York Review of Books,
“[He offers] a dizzying series of swift, smooth modulations, a harmony of discords”—the new national speech. He chronicles our use of “love, wine, cigarettes, and hobbies, in our barricades, to shore against our ruin,” and he reports that it “is not going well.”

In
The New York Times,
C. D. B. Bryan said Wolfe's “enthusiasm and literary fireworks … make it difficult for the reader to remain detached” while trying to determine if the counterculture is dangerous to, or prophetic about, America's future.

And Didion's old friend Dan Wakefield said flatly in
The New York Times Book Review
that
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
brought together “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years. Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of ‘art,' perhaps it is possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call ‘mere journalism,' but as a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.”

Wakefield's review made an issue of disagreements in the press about a new form of journalism, debates increasing in frequency and vehemence since the 1965 appearance of Capote's
In Cold Blood
and Jimmy Breslin's columns in the
New York Herald Tribune.
In the weeks before
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
's rollout, the publication of Norman Mailer's
The Armies of the Night,
about the march on the Pentagon in October 1967, intensified the arguments.

Alfred Kazin nicely framed the stakes Mailer had raised: “Mailer presents this book as [a] nonfiction novel,” he said. Like many contemporary American writers, he has been living the “‘crisis of the novel.' He … [has been] so sensitive to politics, power and society in America, so engrossed in the search for solutions and revelations that the moralist … left little time to the novelist.” Now, it was the “coalescence of American disorder (always an obsession of Mailer's) with all the self-confidence he feels as a novelist … that has produced ‘Armies of the Night' … [I]t is a fact that only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive.”

Said Gay Talese, Mailer's fellow traveler, “The new journalism, though often reading like fiction, is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form. The new journalism allows, demands in fact, a more imaginative approach to reporting, and it permits the writer to inject himself into the narrative if he wishes.”

This is a variation of Didion's admiration of the reporting available in the underground press. Traditionalists were disturbed by what they perceived to be a reckless disregard for objectivity and a narcissistic insistence on placing the writer front and center. It's also true that many of the attacks on the New Journalism were personal responses to Tom Wolfe's abrasive personality (in print). He deliberately irritated literary purists. In 1972, writing with typical insouciance in
New York
magazine, he'd summarize his view of the skirmish: The New Journalists “never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world … causing panic, dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century…”

It was this sort of braggadocio in his attack on
The New Yorker
in the
Herald Tribune
(“Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!”) that raised Dwight Macdonald's hackles. He published a two-part piece in
The New York Review of Books
entitled “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine” (August 26, 1965, and February 3, 1966). “A new kind of journalism is being born,” he wrote. “It might be called ‘parajournalism' from the Greek
para,
‘beside' … ‘against': something similar in form but different in function … It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism, and the atmospheric license of fiction. Entertainment rather than information is the aim of its producers…”

This literary infighting held little interest for readers—or for most writers, who just went about their business—but a few points emerged from the battle that shed light on the changing nature of American literature, and suggested why, taken together, Barthelme, Wolfe, and Didion were essential to understanding the current state of the culture. It was precisely the “crisis of the novel” that birthed Donald Barthelme: Fearful that traditional literary forms could not adequately present the realities of our monstrously inhuman world, he had created a language for fiction embodying, like a trash compactor, our wasteful, contradictory speech, and, by extension, our mixed self-perceptions. From the opposite direction, traditional journalistic forms proved inadequate to contain the nation's growing appetite for extravagant experiences, many of them made possible by new drugs and new technologies that no one, it seemed, could control.

Like Mailer, Didion revered the novel's lyricism and interiority, but she, too, felt the genre's crisis: Story premises no longer held for her. Plot and character had gone spongy, soaked through with predictability. Like Wolfe, she wanted to report the essentials of our national life, but who knew what they were now—certainly the
Los Angeles Times
hadn't a clue
,
speaking, as it did, in a journalistic code chiseled decades earlier.

New language and new forms were necessary, but they would not be easily achieved. Even Wolfe stumbled along the way. In his first pass at Ken Kesey, he wrote, “So far nobody in or out of the medical profession knows exactly what LSD does to the body, chiefly because so little is known about the workings of the central nervous system as a whole.” This was as stuffy as
anything
in the
Times.
For Wolfe, it took plunging into the experience to get the essence of the story. One night, he dropped 125 micrograms of acid. Instead of reporting on the drug, he found language to convey it (channeling himself through
Kesey's
trips—this was journalism, not autobiography): “The ceiling is moving—not in a crazed swirl but along its own planes its own planes of light and shadow and surface…”