The Last Love Song (46 page)

Later, Wolfe would say, “Despite the skepticism I brought [to the story]
I
[was] suddenly experiencing
their
feeling.… If I could stop what I was doing, I would be one of the Pranksters.”

Didion never went that far in the Haight. Still, as Wakefield wrote, “though her own personality does not self-indulgently intrude itself upon her subjects, it informs and illuminates them.” This is what made her journalism so unique: “The reader comes to admire what can only be called the
character
of this observer at work.”

*   *   *

In preparing the collection for publication, Didion labored hard to
shape
her character, in the way the essays appeared together as a package. It was Robbins's idea to lead with “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a brilliant choice, Didion thought, as she had come to accept his view that the book reflected a native daughter's confrontation with California: her reevaluation of youthful romance, her wonder and dismay at the changes time had forced.

At the last minute, she inserted into her preface the paragraph explaining her paralysis over writing's irrelevancy, and her need to confront disorder. This sewed a thematic thread through pieces written, initially, far apart and for different reasons.

The final essay she wrote for the book, her profile of the hopeless revolutionary Michael Laski, whom she'd thought was the “cat's ass,” according to Dunne, anchored another theme central to the volume: “I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of the world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” In this seamless melding of her personality with that of her subject; the fluidity of style, combining confession with political cant, all in the same smooth rhythm; and in the sweeping, if ironic, statement about behaviors and beliefs (ending with an implicit assertion of principles), she demonstrated the advantages of the New Journalism.

It was a book of outsiders and extremists. It was a book of geographical and spiritual improbabilities. The essays, both empathetic and restrained, assumed the reader was a friend—a friend who listened to rock 'n' roll and who'd voted for Barry Goldwater. “I had a strong feeling that it was necessary, that there was no reason to trust the reporter unless you knew where the reporter was. And if you didn't know where the reporter was standing, then I really objected to the notion of objectivity … because it didn't seem to me very real,” she said.

As for voice:
Run River
had taught her one kind of rhythm. “The fiction voice is like a liturgy, there's a lot of repetition,” she said. In her nonfiction, she discovered that in addition to repetition, there were a “lot of clauses. It gets denser and denser. I'm not going to make it simple. It seems to me you can get a lot more thought in. You can make it come alive.”

Nonfiction, then, could be as challenging to compose as fiction. And she had become a different writer since publishing her novel.
Run River
was the work of someone longing to live outside the bonds of history, in a lazy, unchanging current of nostalgia smelling of rice and hops.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
was a frightened, reckless embrace of what was and what could never be, of what would flourish only briefly and then die.

On the cover, Robbins wanted a Ted Streshinsky photo of her, capturing her “beauty,” her “hunted look.” She was dead set against a bright “hippie” jacket (FSG
did
splash a small rainbow over the title). She preferred a jacket based around a stark black-and-white photographic image, for two reasons: This was a book of fact, and a photo would suggest that; but also, in our time, everyone knows photos can be manipulated,
blurring
fact and fiction. This would give the cover a great feeling of
now,
of
what's happening.
As for the author photo, maybe Ted's pose of her eating an apple during a hippie demonstration, she said, or a shot of her in a cell at Alcatraz: something grainy, perhaps even washed-out, something “pretty shocking,” to the point of “downright mystery.”

In the end, Robbins got the “hunted” look he wanted—Didion in Golden Gate Park, standing troubled, gazing into the distance, while the missing children huddle nearby. But her cover suggestions show how intensely involved she was in manufacturing her public image, off the page and on.

The attention to detail paid off. Generally, the reviews were laudatory.
Time
chided her for being “bleak and joyless”; her tone was “somewhere between Despond and Nostalgia.” But the book “approaches art,” the reviewer said. “What most captivates the reader is the fascination of discovering how her brittle sensibilities and flamboyant neuroses react to events … Didion suffers constantly, but compellingly and magically.”

Gender was a major issue for reviewers. “Journalism by women is the price the man's world pays for having disappointed them. Here at their best are the unforgiving eye, the unforgiving ear, the concealed hat-pin style,” wrote Melvin Maddocks in
The Christian Science Monitor.

And
Time
's review concluded with Didion's wish in “John Wayne: A Love Song” for a man who would take her “to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” “Many young men (and older ones, too), reading her sentimental, compassionate, and appealing passages would be willing to do just that,” said the magazine.

7

Tom Wolfe was a lightning rod and his exuberant style, stippled with typographical play, was rigged to pop like a can of snakes, but after the appearance of
The Armies of the Night
and
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
no one could doubt the seriousness and power of the New Journalism, however broad the label may have been (and wildly
inaccurate
—as Jack Newfield said, “Defoe, Addison and Steele, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain were all new journalists according to most definitions”).

“In the Sixties you kept hearing that reporting was the new art form. While that was beguiling, I felt that not enough was said about how complex it had become,” said Nora Sayre, one of the best journalists of the period (she was the New York correspondent for
The New Statesman
). “First, you struggled with the facts you knew and couldn't print—since you didn't want to send certain people to jail or to be subpoenaed for your confidential sources. Second, many were afraid to talk to you, fearing that they would be quoted accurately—just as much as they feared misquotation. (Valid fears.) Third, although you deplored the traditional media's distortions and felt you must correct the straight press, honesty often demanded that you report bad news from your own side.”

She agreed with Robert Scholes: Ours was a hysterical age. This fact placed special burdens on storytellers. Scholes coined another new term,
Hystorians.
“The so-called stylistic excesses of such men as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe are in my view no more than the indispensable equipment they must employ in doing justice to our times,” he said. “[H]ysteria cannot be assimilated and conveyed by one totally aloof.” He joined the chorus decrying the faded formulas of old-fashioned journalism, which merely supported a given paper's editorial policies. “The hystorian fights this tendency toward formula with his own personality,” Scholes said.

In the simplest, gravest terms, this meant being a witness to your time. A solemn responsibility. “I am not the society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves,” Didion would assert in one of her essays. And yet she protested too much. She ended this same piece by tracking the “movements of the Army day” at Schofield Barracks and concluded, “James Jones had known a simple truth.” “[T]he Army was nothing more or less than life itself.” If the whole is the sum of its parts, then the life of our times rests in each of us, particularly in those devoted to the act, and the art, of witnessing. A dedicated hystorian (in an “old bikini bathing suit”), Didion felt this in her bones.

*   *   *

In the late summer of 1968, after her return from Hawaii, after the flurry of reviews for
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
and her visit to St. John's Hospital, she and her fellow reporters would need to strain their witnessing powers to the limit to keep pace with what appeared to be the rapid disintegration of America's democratic process.

With LBJ's weary admission of failure and the murder of Bobby Kennedy, the choosing of the new president was cast in an elegiac light. The Mass mourning for Kennedy would be the last image of unity—of diversity
truly
coalescing—in this troubled political season.

In August, during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and particularly during the violence in Chicago, it was as if the war in Vietnam had spread across the globe, to be fought in front of Macy's.

REACH OUT AND GRAB THE GREATEST SUMMER EVER
, said banners on the sides of Chicago police trucks.

“Chicago is a police state,” Paul Krassner, editor of the underground magazine
The Realist,
warned his readers. “The cops want to turn our parks into graveyards.”

“We will try to develop a Community of Consciousness,” Abbie Hoffman said.

And in an example of what Norman Mailer called “hippie prose,” Ed Sanders of the rock band the Fugs expressed many young people's expectations of their week in the Windy City: “[J]oy, nooky, circle groups, laughing, dancing, sharing, grass, magic, meditation, music, theatre, and weirdo mutant-jissomed chromosome-damaged ape-chortles.”

The stage was rigged to explode.

While convention chair Carl Albert tried to keep order in the hall, wheezing his pinched Okie vowels at the cameras, and Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye broke protocol, standing at the podium and reciting the country's perils rather than cheering his candidate, kids on the streets greased their faces with Vaseline, anticipating tear gas. Tear gas set your breath on fire. In Lincoln Park, Allen Ginsberg's Hindu chanting sounded like a death rattle, ravaged by the poison. Behind him, William Burroughs stood like a ghost, wearing a gray fedora.

In McCarthy headquarters inside the Hilton Hotel, people tore up sheets to make bandages for victims of police clubs. The city sealed its manhole covers with hot tar so that no one could hide below street level.

Stop, children, look around.

There's a man with a gun over there.

For most observers, the debacle at the Democratic Convention was the summer's main political news. Didion saw it differently. In a city run by a thuggish mayor, a place where money moved on rivers of blood, where the smell of watery shit seeping from slaughterhouses still hung like prophecy in the air, the horror in the streets was not surprising.

The real story had taken place weeks earlier in Miami, a city Lyndon Johnson had once described as “not American.”

It was a city of old Cubans seething with resentment, armed with packets of plastique; of late-night deals at the edges of airport runways; and the story was, the Republicans had come to town. The country's deep pockets had gathered for cocktails in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel. The most ambitious men in the nation were there: John Wayne. Barry Goldwater. Ronald Reagan. Billy Graham. Richard Nixon arrived to the fanfare of two marching bands playing “Nixon's the One,” while blond cheerleaders danced beneath floating red balloons and Graham proclaimed him more realistic than Jesus. It was
his
time—the “time, I think, when the man and the moment in history come together,” Nixon said.

While Nixon stood in the convention hall, weaving a sweet narrative of his journey to success from the bosom of a peace-loving, football-playing family, from nights as a boy listening to distant train whistles and dreaming of “faraway places where he'd like to go,” the real story found its syntax in the daily numbers of war dead in Vietnam, the bodies flown to the Punchbowl Crater—for in defeat, four years earlier, Barry Goldwater had managed to stamp his policies on the political Right. His passions guided the party now (the party's other venerable leader, the more temperate Dwight Eisenhower, languished that summer in Walter Reed Hospital following a series of heart attacks). The war had become America's major global initiative.

But here was the other part of the story. The “country had learned an almost unendurable lesson—its history in Asia was next to done,” Mailer reported from Miami. Goldwater's vision “depressed some part of America's optimism … the country had begun to wear away inside.”

And now, riding these vast crosscurrents, California was about to seize the White House.

Nixon's California was the Golden Land of Golf, of Puritanism and austerity.

Didion had traveled sun-hardened stretches in the center of the state, where these concepts failed to stick, as did the idea of America as a cultural or economic force. In
that
California, people spoke in tongues and played with rattlesnakes in defiance of Satan or Uncle Sam. They'd put a gun in your face if you came anywhere near them. They'd pick up young hitchhikers off the sides of the roads and vanish with them, fates unknown, in the hypnotic memory wipe of ceaselessly moving metal. That California, too, would accompany Tricky Dick to the banks of the Potomac, whether he knew it or not.

It was his time. But his time was beyond him. Beyond us all. That was the story told in Miami in the summer of 1968.