South and West by Joan Didion

At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference, doesn't figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.

How could it have come to this?

I am trying to place myself in history.

Joan Didion's South and West isn't really a book, or if it is, it's a failed book, the scaffolding to a book. Published in 2017, it was taken from her notes, and mostly about a trip that Didion took throughout the deep South in the 1970s, followed by a brief collection of memories of California occasioned by the abduction of Patty Hearst. Whether Didion meant to contrast the two, I have no idea, but the contrast is there from the beginning of her journey through the South, which she writes attracted her because it seemed to be "for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center." It was also a kind of return for Didion, who spent a few turbid years in Durham, North Carolina. Never mind the vast difference between Durham and Birmingham; the South may be, for Didion, a kind of shadow life not lived.

It's clear enough to me why the manuscript of the "South" section of South and West, at least, waited years to be published: Didion has no idea what to do with the South. She applies her journalistic eye, her withering eye, everywhere, but what she sees lies only at the surface of things: signs, gravestones, the front porches of houses. The language that Didion uses to describe the South is the language of mystery; the kudzu and tropical greenery seem, at every vantage point, to conceal an essential impenetrability. Uncharacteristically, Didion seems to shrink from the South. She seems to spend much of the trip in hotel swimming pools. She even tells us that she finds these pools, with their familiar interchangeability, comforting.

The greatest insights of the South instead come from the mouths of the few people that Didion interviews--all of whom seem to be known acquaintances from the world of writing and the academy. Like the white southerners of V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, they offer up a fear of change and integration dressed up in the language of moderation. One interviewee laments how he has been forced by integration to send his kids to private school, and somehow manages to make it sound like a tragedy for the Black kids, too. (Didion interviews no Black Southerners, though they linger at the margins of the scrupulously reported scenery.) Is this the dark heart that Didion gestures at? It seems to me that these cultural dynamics, while vile, are not particular difficult to understand, and do not amount to any kind of essential mystery. But Didion has no interest in probing further into this or anything else, and it seems to me that in the place of insight she offers a number of Gothic metaphors, chief among them that of the snake pit. The still brown waters of the Mississippi provides a "sense of water moccasins." An anecdote tells of dripping gasoline down a snake hole to make the snake emerge, "drunk" and easy to kill. Over and over again--in a way she might have toned down, I think, if she'd ever fashioned these notes into something more--she imagines snakes lurking in the greenery. No wonder she doesn't want to touch.

We get Didion's tremendous power of noticing, but no understanding. At a movie theater in Meridian--another fungible place and easy escape from the part of the world she supposedly wanted to discover--she describes the crowd as gazing at the screen "as if the movie were Czech." But how does a Mississippian watch a movie any differently than a Californian? And why should they understand it any less? It seems like a rich comment, to me, from someone so obviously stymied by her own choice of subject. Better to say that Joan Didion looked at the audience as if they were Czech.

The "West" part of South and West is even less polished, more partial. It's slapdash in a way that reveals the true nature of the book as "notes"; "South," by contrast, seems to have gone through at least some process of arrangement and shaping. And yet, it has a richness to it that "South" never manages, especially with regards to the effusive material culture of the Californian upper middle class: the "Lilly Dache and Mr. John hats, the vicuna coats, the hand-milled soap and the &60-an-ounce perfume." In these shop-items Didion gets deeper into the identity and culture of the Californian West than she ever allows herself to do in "South"--or, at least, that's how it seems to me as a Southerner. Maybe a Californian would feel differently. But I don't think so. "West" reads like a quickly abortive attempt by Didion to find her own place in the world, her "place in history," as she writes, and though she quickly hits a wall--it's not easy to write about yourself--it made me go back and think about "South" as an attempt to do the same thing by contrast, to discover the Californian Didion by discovering the Didion-that-was-not in the South. Perhaps it's not the South that Didion was shrinking away from in those hotel pools--maybe it was herself.