The Last Love Song (51 page)

2

Just over six months later, her former
National Review
colleague John Leonard would write in
The New York Times,
in a review of
Play It As It Lays,
“There hasn't been another American writer of Joan Didion's quality since Nathaniel West. She writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it; and yet the characters go on bleeding afterwards.”

On the front page of the Sunday
New York Times Book Review,
novelist Lore Segal wrote, “A new novel by Joan Didion is something of an event.” This was true, Segal said, not because of Didion's previous novel, but because “she has gathered quite a following with her nonfiction pieces.” It was “interesting to wonder what sort of fiction Miss Didion's beautiful writerly skills would now make of her clear-eyed and anguished perception of our time.”

The rough drafts and notes for the novel archived in the Bancroft Library suggest word music and silence were at stake in composing the book as much as an accurate “perception of our time.” As Didion said later, “I just wanted to write a fast novel.… [I]t was going to exist in a white space. It was going to exist between the paragraphs.” She was harking back to the mysteries in pioneer tales and family histories. Who was telling this story? From what angle? And why? How would our understanding be affected?

She made elaborate notes to herself concerning narrative distance and the flexibility of point of view. Originally, “I wanted to make it all first person,” she said, “but I wasn't good enough to maintain [it] at first.… [O]ne night I realized that I had some first person and some third person and that I was going to have to go with both, or just not write a book at all. I was scared.”

Finally, she understood that, for the reader to
feel
Maria's dislocations, it would be necessary to alienate Maria not only from the other characters but also from the novel's controlling voice. Thus, the “pull-back third person” narrator (the novel's omniscient consciousness) never acknowledges Maria's abortion. It's only in “close third,” when the voice creeps nearer Maria's perceptions, that trouble can be traced. Of course, the “pull-back” voice and the “close” voice are the same—like a camera zooming in and out. The deliberate blurriness made it difficult for many readers to distinguish Maria, the narrator, and the author. This difficulty was compounded, Segal said in her review, by the fact that “in her essays [Didion] chooses to speak in her own person.… [S]he has given herself the task of interpreting and coming to terms with the period of time which has produced Maria,” and therefore “it is less impertinent than usual for the critic to deduce the writer from her creature.”

Yes and no. We mustn't dismiss the artist's craft. A consistent pattern emerged in Didion's revisions of
Play It As It Lays.
This pattern zeroed in on adverbs. Initially, her habit was to place adverbs
after
the verbs in every sentence. Often in revision, she would reverse this order. Thus “The water in the pool was always 85 degrees” became “The water in the pool always was 85 degrees.” The latter forced greater distance between subject and verb, a gap, a jump in a film reel—further fracturing Maria's perceptions of the world, and our view of her. Finally, Didion was
not
“her creature,” in spite of their many similarities. She was standing back, observing, shading.

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear,” she said. Like a series of musical staves, grammar became a set of bars between author and character, clarifying the substance and nature of the novel's performance.

Aesthetic considerations so dominated Didion's approach to the writing, they threatened to undermine the story structure. At first, the novel was set in New York. Maria was a model. Then she became an actress in California. In interviews, and in the essay “How I Write,” Didion said the novel's genesis had nothing to do with “‘character' or ‘plot' or even ‘incident.'” It began with “something actually witnessed,” she said. “A young woman with long hair and a short white halter walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. She crosses the casino alone and picks up a house telephone. I watch her because I have heard her paged, and recognize her name: she is a minor actress I see around Los Angeles from time to time, in places like Jax and once in a gynecologist's office in the Beverly Hills Clinic, but have never met. I know nothing about her. Who is paging her? Why is she here to be paged? How exactly did she come to this? It was precisely this moment in Las Vegas that made
Play It As It Lays
begin to tell itself to me.”

It was also true that she'd collected notes, clippings, and scattered observations for quite some time, including her early
Vogue
piece on Ingrid Bergman's “withdrawal” in front of the camera and an intriguing quote from a newspaper about “Bond Girl” Jill St. John, whom Didion had seen around Hollywood on the arm of Henry Kissinger. In the quote, which Didion jotted down among her notes for the novel, St. John complained that, as a minor celebrity and sex object, she was exposed to “all eyes,” but “no one talks to me.”

In November 1969, “I showed [the novel] to John and then I sent it to Henry Robbins,” Didion said. “It was quite rough, with places marked ‘chapters to come.'”

Many of the rough draft pages start with weather reports, as if a running climate record might impose order on the material.

The holes were enormous. What was certain was a sense of rhythm.

“Henry … and John and I sat down one night in New York and talked, for about an hour before dinner, about what needed doing,” Didion said. “We all knew what it needed. We all agreed. After that I took a couple of weeks and ran it through. It was just typing and pulling the line through. For example, I didn't know that BZ was an important character in
Play It As It Lays
until the last few weeks I was working on it. So those places I marked ‘chapter to come' were largely places where I was going to go back and pull BZ through, hit him harder, prepare for the way it finally went” (that is, BZ's overdose in front of Maria, from Michelle Phillips's story about her friend Tamar Hodel). “I didn't realize until after I'd written it that it was essentially the same ending as
Run River.
The women let the men commit suicide.”

For many readers, Maria's abortion is the centerpiece of the book—it is Maria's lowest point, physically and psychologically, and she never recovers from it. It is related, in her mind, to leaky pipes and crumbling houses. “I try not to think of dead things and plumbing,” she says.

When asked if the abortion was simply “a narrative strategy,” Didion said it “didn't occur to me until I'd written quite a bit of the book.” The book needed an active moment, a moment which changed things for Maria.…”

In fact, her notes indicate that the abortion scene was central all along to her conception of the story. Yet, in an interview in
The Paris Review
in 1978, she insisted plot devices in her novels were generally “very arbitrary.” For example, “I remember writing a passage in which Kate [Maria's emotionally impaired daughter] came home from school and showed Maria a lot of drawings, orange and blue crayon drawings, and when Maria asked what they were, Kate said, ‘Pools on fire.' You can see I wasn't having too much success writing this child. So I put her in a hospital. You never meet her. Now, it turned out to have a great deal of importance—Kate's being in the hospital is a very large element in
Play It As It Lays
—but it began because I couldn't write a child, no other reason.”

Perhaps, but it's essential to note that Didion later told radio host Michael Silverblatt that Quintana
was
the girl in
Play It As It Lays
: “By the time I finished it, she [Quintana] was clearly talking”; and Didion would continue to encounter trouble “writing a child,” even when, as in
Blue Nights,
her child was the ostensible subject of the book.

*   *   *

She told Henry Robbins she didn't want a novel in which a series of events
happened
to a character; the character's fall should be experienced imperceptibly by the reader—an enactment of fatalism.

Maria, she said, has no will. She is incapable of love. She cannot take positive action. She isn't brave enough to gamble.

“This isn't going to—you're never going to—you're never going to—this book isn't going to make it,” Dunne told her one night.

“And I didn't think it was going to make it, either,” Didion said. “[I]t was my third book and I had not made it until then.… You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine the moment when it suddenly will.”

Still, Dunne tried to help her as professionally as he could. In a long typed note, dated November 18, 1969 (written, therefore, in Hawaii), he said cautiously that he liked the novel but he had several reservations. The most serious of these concerned the character Ivan Morell (the name was later changed to Ivan Costello). Costello appears to be based on Noel Parmentel—Parmentel certainly thought so. “I told them both I wished to God they'd meet some new people,” he said. Didion's notes identify Costello as the other man Maria loved once, and by whom she had an aborted child. Originally, he was never to be seen in the novel, but he does make a cameo appearance.

Morell/Costello, Dunne wrote, needs to be firmly cast in Maria's New York past, with no continuing role to play in her life except as a destructive force against which her other loves are measured. Carter, Maria's husband, is a more stable version of Morell, Dunne said. This distinction should be clear.

In his view, Maria loved to cause trouble. Daily life she couldn't handle. Tragedy was a navigable sea.

*   *   *

Play It As It Lays,
published seven years after
Run River,
indicates a growing crisis of faith in narrative. Maria Wyeth, a disintegrating movie actress, no longer desires to close her eyes and make a wish, as Lily McClellan does at the end of the first novel. Instead, Maria defines herself by what she
doesn't
want: “She would never:
walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone after midnight.
She would never:
ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal.
She would never:
carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.
”

As in
Run River,
snakes in a garden open the book—pygmy rattlers and corals with “two glands of neurotoxic poison”—but archetypes, myths, and story logic fall away sharply thereafter. “To look for ‘reasons' is beside the point,” Maria says, one of her few confident statements. And: “I might as well lay it on the line, I have trouble with
as it was.
”

Even her name is problematic. She needs to inform the reader that “[my name] is pronounced Mar-
eye
-ah, to get it straight at the outset.” On even the simplest level, language wobbles.

“We had a lot of things and places that came and went,” Maria says, “a cattle ranch with no cattle and a ski resort picked up on somebody's second mortgage and a motel that would have been advantageously situated at a freeway exit had the freeway been built.” The consumer binge tearing apart the McClellans has left behind a hollow world for people like Maria. Even the old fairy tales (“
Ain't she the prettiest little bride?
”) are unavailable; in this sexual free market, relationships come and go like parcels of real estate.

Promise doesn't merely disappoint. It either fails to materialize—the freeway doesn't get built—or it fosters unprecedented tragedy. Domestic safety has been forfeited for a fragile public space: a badly planned for, poorly located motel.

As the novel begins, Maria tries, wanly, to orient herself. She cites an old narrative: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”

The reader wonders, Who are “some people”? Aside from literature professors and theater directors, who ever asks, “What makes Iago evil?” Maria is an actress, apparently with
some
classical training, but a Shakespearean she's not. As we learn more about her, we wonder where a perpetually stoned film player could encounter people who talk this way?

The movies Maria's friends make are hardly John Wayne Westerns. They are trifles, forgettable narratives, illusions of fear or pleasure, promoting no code other than instant self-gratification. In one film, made by her husband, bikers gang-rape Maria.

Snippets of film dialogue filter into the real lives of the movie people as nuggets of fake cleverness. A man to whom Maria confesses her emptiness dismisses her desperation. Then he says, apropos of nothing, “You got a map of Peru?” When Maria doesn't respond, he snaps, “That's funny, Maria. That's a line from
Dark Passage
.”

In this lost paradise, language has become completely unmoored, no longer serviceable.

And the reliable old road story? It offers only speed.

The novel is related through various points of view, starting with Maria, shifting to her husband, then to a friend. After these initial first-person sections, the book is divided into eighty-four fragmented, omnisciently narrated segments. The quick, vivid fragments and the fluid points of view give the novel a restless urgency—a set of flimsy binoculars in the hands of a witnessing intelligence always on the move, chasing after Maria, focusing and refocusing, zooming in on the run. What holds the novel together, even as Maria splinters before our eyes, is this relentless pursuit of an elusive quarry.