Right now I am in Los Angeles. I spent the holiday in the Dutch Caribbean, and my long trip back to California turned out to be several hundred dollars cheaper if it took me through Los Angeles rather than San Francisco, and anyway I hadn’t been in the Southland all year. As I was walking down Westwood Boulevard yesterday I saw signage for a Joan Didion exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum, and of course I immediately knew what I was doing that day.
The thing that startled me about this exhibition was how well it turned out that I knew Joan Didion’s life story, right down to the year she spent in North Carolina during the War. She was an obsessive self-cataloguer and I have read so much of what she wrote about herself. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that other people should also know the most famous essayist of our time. But I have loved her work from the first time I came across Slouching Towards Bethlehem because once she was a Californian living in the East and she wrote about being a Californian living in the East and before and after she was a Californian living in California and she wrote about that too and I have been all of those things. When I saw the ephemera of her life on display, I imagined the ephemera of my own life.
The placement here of Joan Didion’s McClatchy High School yearbooks and the belongings of her ancestors in the same space as the home photographs of a visibly pregnant Sharon Tate and a found-object assemblage from the Watts riots suggest profundity without actually demonstrating it, a sort of three-dimensional Kuleshov effect. To me this felt indecent in a way that recalled the most famous attack on Joan Didion, the old narcissist, and so it is a perfect representation of her legacy. Joan Didion is not just a Californian but California itself. California is water and Hollywood and we see a map of the Sacramento River from 1854 and footage of John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939) and we are shown excerpts of her work to demonstrate that she thought a lot about these things.
And yet, curiously enough, we find precious little about how exactly she thought. What does it mean that when she contemplated water, she was much more interested in the physical structures of water transportation than in any of the people affected thereby? We are never told. What we are told is that, as a good Californian, she took up a variety of liberal causes later in her life: she was deeply concerned about the role of America in Latin America and she always supported the defendants in the Central Park Jogger case. We are not told about her disgust at the introduction of carpool lanes on the freeway, although that too is a wholly Californian opinion, because it represents a California that is out of fashion now. We are merely told that she came from a Republican family.
Of the native son of the golden West, Barry Goldwater, there is but one mention: “Goldwater 1964” within a jumbled timeline of dates and places and events, indicating merely that the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign existed during Joan Didion’s life. For the visitors at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Joan Didion’s humane concern for the less fortunate fits their vision of California much better than her support of Barry Goldwater ever could. Yet across the ten counties of southern California, Goldwater received 44.3% of the vote, and the 1.9 million Southlanders who supported him and two years later Ronald Reagan surely represent one of California’s great contributions to the twentieth century, no matter how inconvenient it might seem. California is that California, too, and that California is the one that occupies so many pages of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her California book.
The division of America into “red states” and “blue states” dates back to 2000, when the litigation over the result of that election left American viewers staring at the state-by-state election map for weeks and codified the relationship of the two political parties to the colors they now use. I am not old enough to remember what came before 2000, but it appears that this coloring-book view of society and geography has gotten even flatter since then. Earlier this year I took a tour of the Texas state capitol in Austin, and as we were in the senatorial chamber a tourist repeatedly asked the guide about the composition of the state senate, not by asking how many were Republicans and how many were Democrats but by asking “how many red and how many blue.” I felt my ears burning. Last spring we were coming back home from the northern coast when we stopped for breakfast in Arcata and my mother was very concerned with a question I had never heard her ask before: how do people here vote? She was reassured when I pointed out that Arcata looked exactly like Santa Cruz, but it was disturbing to think that now people care.
Of course this is bad because it encourages national division and tribalism and all that, and plenty has been written about that, but it’s also such an unrewarding way to perceive the world to look at a physical environment and immediately draw conclusions based on its voting patterns. It encourages us to reorder the ways in which we think about geography to ensure that they are politically correct. San Francisco was a right-wing bogeyman for over half a century, but California only came to be thought of in the same way once it became fixed in the national imagination as a blue state. I’m not immune to this sort of thinking: a few days ago I was in Miami for the first time and went for a walk in the inner suburbs, and as I looked around Miami Springs I first felt an involuntary rush of contempt and then disgust with myself for feeling that way. The relentless stream of propaganda over the past few years pushing the notion of south Florida as a right-wing paradise has affected me just like it has everyone else.
We think about places as they ought to be based on the political narratives of our time, and inasmuch as Joan Didion is California, we think about her as California ought to be. Whatever she might have been in her time, she is a liberal icon now. She has to be for Californians to see themselves in her.
Naveed Chowdhury 