The New Yorker Radio Hour - Hilton Als and Emma Cline on the Late Joan Didion

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Joan Didion tried and failed, she said, “to think”; that is, to write about abstractions and symbols, and make grand arguments in the manner of the New York intellectuals of her time. Instead, the California native—who died in December, at the age of eighty-seven—built her work around close observation of American life as she saw it, withholding judgment. And while many of her intellectual contemporaries belong now to a bygone era, “for my generation,” Emma Cline notes, “her influence is so massive.” Cline’s best-selling novel “The Girls” is set in nineteen-sixties California, on the fringes of a cult—what we might think of as Didion country. “I almost can’t think of a writer who is more of a touchstone for every writer that I know.” In fact, younger writers need to “unlearn” her voice, Hilton Als tells David Remnick, in order to find their own. Als notes that Didion eventually rejected the persona of her early works, which was imbued with white female fragility; and she was prophetic, he notes, in placing race and gender at the center of America’s battles.    Since Joan Didion’s death, The New Yorker has published Postscripts by Als, Cline, Zadie Smith, and Nathan Heller. Some of Didion’s own contributions to The New Yorker can be found here.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm not very analytical. I just tend to think if something's out there, then I've got to show it to somebody else. That's the late Joan Didion, speaking on WNYC in 1987. I'm very, very bothered all the time by people not seeing what's out. there, not wanting to see things that are perfectly obvious. Joan Didion had a long and evolving career from her early novels through the extraordinary essays

about American life in the 60s and the 70s, the political reporting of the 80s and 90s, and then the memoirs of personal loss in the 2000s. Didian died when she was 87, just before the holidays. And in the week since, there's been an outpouring of a claim that shows something quite clearly. Joan Didion's reputation continued to grow over the decades, where some of her contemporaries seem now like voices of another time. Didion still speaks to several generations of writers and readers. I like words, and I like making, I'm very excited by seeing what can be done with words.

So why is Joan Didian's work aged so well? In The New Yorker we published a number of postscripts on Didian, and I'm going to talk with two of our contributors. The critic Hilton Al's will join us in a second. But first, here's Emma Klein. Emma, how you doing? Good, how are you? Klein has written fiction and essays for The New Yorker

and her novel, The Girls, from 2016, is about a young girl drawn into a cult in 1960s, California, what we might think of as Joan Didion country. You've chosen a passage from Joan Didion to read. Can you set this passage up for us? Yeah, so this is her. from her essay called Why I Write that she delivered when she was a lecturer at Berkeley when she was 40, and she had attended Berkeley as an undergraduate.

During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried with a kind of hopeless late adolescent energy to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. In short, I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably, back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered by everyone I knew then, and for that matter, I have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hagellian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window in the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on and the Bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was

wondering if the lights were on in the Bevatron, you might immediately suspect if you deal in ideas at all that I was registering the Bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the Beavitron and how they looked. A physical fact. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the city of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries

around Carcina Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short, my attention was always on the periphery on what I could see and taste and touch on the butter in the Greyhound bus. Emma, tell me a little bit about you. your first encounter with Joan Didion's work. What did you read? How did it strike you? You're from a similar part of the country. Yes. I think I must have first come across her in high school, reading one of her essays for a class. And yeah, I think so much of what I was drawn to at first was somebody writing about the landscape where I was from and kind of honoring that landscape in the same way that I saw other landscapes honored and talked about. Yeah, and the specificity of those

images and the sort of regional specificity really spoke to me. If there's a single work that really sticks with you that had the biggest mark on you as a human being and as a writer, what is it? I really love her fiction, but the nonfiction to me is what's always sort of stuck with me, like slouching towards Bethlehem, the essays in that book, and the White Album. I think both of those really are the ones I return to again and again. She famously said that she writes to find out what she thinks and not to make an argument that's conceived ahead of time. Can you talk about her influence in writing, journalism that seeks as opposed to argues?

Is that had a real mark on you? Yeah, definitely. I think for me when she talks about, you know, she writes, you don't write it, it writes you. She's following these images that has what she calls like a shimmer in the mind, almost like this life force in you that seeks out these images with some intelligence beyond your conscious mind. And I think definitely for me, in both fiction and nonfiction, that way of thinking, that way of thinking. has allowed me to, you know, to be able to start off a project without knowing where it's going and using the process of writing to kind of track the contours of my own thinking. I think her style that that approach has been massively influential, definitely to my generation.

Her influence is so massive. I almost can't think of a writer who is more of a touchstone for every writer that I know. You don't really work anything through just sitting around and thinking about it. You have to write it down. We're talking about the legacy of Joan Didion, more in a moment. Hilton Al's is a longtime staff writer and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Hilton started with a passage from Joan Didion's novel, A Book of Common Prayer, published in 1977. The reason I chose this selection, it says a great deal about her life as a report.

and a fiction writer. It is the story of a woman told by another woman who is an anthropologist who gives up the field and she wants to understand self-delusion, really, and how society makes dreamers. So I thought rather than go to an essay that might be more familiar, I would show that her concerns were across the board in fiction and nonfiction. Here is what happened. She left one man, she left a second man, she traveled again with the first. She let him die alone. She lost one child to history and another two complications.

I offer in each instance the evaluation of others. She imagined herself capable of shedding that, baggage and came to Bocca Grande, a tourist, una tourista. So she said, in fact, she came here less a tourist than a sojourner, but she did not make that distinction. She made not enough distinctions. She dreamed her life. She died hopeful, in summary. So you know the story. Of course, the story had extenuating circumstances, weather, cracked sidewalks, and parage arena, but only for the living. Hilton, I wonder as a writer, if you had spent the evening reading that prose and that prose

rhythm that you could get it out of your ear to write like you. I mean, it's just such an indelible, innuble incantation when you read it. Yes. It's very interesting to fall under her spell and one of the things that you have to do as a young writer is really unlearn her. Because the voice is really so much a part of the story. You have to, in a way, it's a very important lesson to learn how to fight against her in order to find your own voice. Do you ever think the voice fell into, I hate to say it, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but self-parody?

Sometimes there seems to be, there's the amazing work, and then once in a while you feel you're hearing, as with Hemingway, as with, I guess with any great writer, them doing themselves. Is that unfair? I don't think that's unfair. I think that it happens to all of us, actually. That at one point or another, you forget what you sound like. And I think that when writers fall into that trap, it's actually because they don't remember what they've done before and they don't actually remember what they sound like. And it's almost as if they're starting afresh and they're thinking, oh, what a wonderful new voice I've discovered.

And they're forcing it a little. Yes. Hilton, I know you knew Joan Didion and you interviewed her. There was a spectacular interview that you did with her for the Paris Review. And you're working on an exhibition. inspired by her life and work. What was she like? Well, one of the things that

really has to be stressed is how funny she was, and also a person who loved to laugh. I was by no means one of her intimates, but one of the things that was very striking to me was her willingness

to talk to young writers and to be interested in young writers and to support them in any way that she could. That also goes unremarked. Her incredible generosity toward younger writers and her willingness and ability to laugh. I think those things got kind of left out of the obituaries

that I read, certainly. Yeah, the public impression of her is of somebody of almost really solemn presentation. Yes. And you don't imagine her as the, you know, Chris Rock of her moment. But how do you mean funny? Well, I think that, for instance, if she didn't like something, she wouldn't say, I don't like the thing. She would just say C-minus or A-plus if she liked it.

What do you make of her politics? Famously, she was noticed first not by some left-wing journal, but in fact, by William F. Buckley noticed James Gideon early on, and she comes from not the California of the left, but something else. She began as a Goldwater Republican. Yes.

I think that I'm fascinated by people who make those transitions or leaps from one set of beliefs to another, and I think that those beliefs really were her father's. her parents and her family at that time. I don't think that she was really so much a Buckleyite as she was interested in writing. And I think that her experience at the National Review showed her that the politics weren't her politics after a while. My being drawn to political issues is relatively recent, actually. I don't know what caused it, But one morning I just started reading the paper in a different way.

Hilton, you wrote in your appreciation of Didion this. No country but America. Thank you for making me do it. That's what I'm here for. Merry Christmas. Yeah, exactly. Hilton, you wrote, no country but America could have produced Joan Didion, and no other country would have tolerated her.

Oh, what made her unique to our country and how Americans relate to the world? Well, I think that, first of all, we're able to have a political language that's much more complicated and way less ideological than most other places in the world. And I think that another underestimated aspect of her writing was her political analysis. And so if you're going to be an analytical verbal woman, I don't know that many cultures that really would tolerate that. Well, let's hope that it continues to tolerate it. Yes, exactly. In the 80s and 90s, did he interned to world events and political affairs in works like Salvador? And after Henry, where she writes about, of course, a famous essay on the Central Park Jogger

and the kids who were put in jail as an outrage. Children, yes. Why do you suppose this work is regarded or at least read a little bit, less than, say, the white album and slouching toward Bethlehem? Well, I think that that is a very good question, David, and it has a lot to do with something that I mentioned, that's a very sort of touchy aspect about the image or nostalgia for white female fragility. And we talked about that a little bit in the essay that I wrote for you,

and it has a lot to do with the drama of fragility and the privilege of fragility. And I think that, again, after Goldwater, after the National Review, and then after becoming a persona in the essays, she realized that, as she said, she didn't want to be Miss Lonely Hearts. And I think that the later political reporting and analysis are less read because she doesn't give an inch to the reader. in terms of a familiar presence, the familiar presence of that white female, fragile persona

that did become a persona after a while, and I'm glad that she jettisoned it as a thinker and as a writer because it was limiting after a while. There's a documentary about her made by her nephew Griffin done from a few years ago, and for me, the most vivid moment is when she felt, sesses up to what all reporters feel at some time or another. She says she was hanging out with the doors. Oh, yes.

And she encountered in Hayd Ashbury a six or seven-year-old kid. In high kindergarten, high kindergarten. And the kid is high on acid. Yeah. And she said it's gold. Exactly. In other words, not I'm reacting as, you know, in a maternal way. As a person or as a woman.

or anything, right? It's writer's gold, and you're standing there. And I think that we talk about that in our obituary for her is that you're not anything when you're standing there. And in order to write it down,

you can't be David Remnick and I can't be Hilton Al. David and Hilton have to go away. And the writer has to take over and see that it's gold for the piece. And it's some kind of combination of predatory and professionalism.

Yes, and also kind of absence, too, right? That we don't get to be ourselves now. We don't get to be the nurturing people everyone loves. We get to be writers. Hilton, thanks so much, and thank you for the essay. Talk to you soon. Bye. You can find an essay by Hilton Al's on the late Joan Didion at New Yorker.com, along with pieces by Emma Klein,

Lady Smith and Nathan Heller. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus at Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.