According to a number of media sources, on December 23, 2021, American writer Joan Didion died at the age of 87 at his home in Manhattan, New York, due to Parkinson's complications.
Born in California in 1934, Joan Didion established her place in contemporary American literary history with her outstanding fiction, screenplay, essays, and literary journalism. In 1968, at the age of 34, Didion published a nonfiction anthology, Trek to Bethlehem, which was hailed by The New York Times as "a rich work presenting the best prose writing in America today."
Her best-known novel, The Year of Whimsy, won the 2005 National Book Award. In 2007, she received the National Book Foundation's Annual Medal for Writers of Outstanding Contributions to National Literature. In 2013, the U.S. government awarded Joan Didion the National Medal for the Arts and Humanities of America.
Today we republish the old article in memory of this writer and to express our deepest respect to her.
Written by | Zhong Na
In joan Didion's most widely circulated black-and-white photograph, she is dressed in a plain ankle-length dress, holding a cigarette in front of her, leaning on her car, a Corvette stingray, looking straight into the camera. There are many memorable photos of her, but this one best represents Didion — vulnerable, calm, alienated, and most representative of California — car, loneliness, freedom.
Joan Didion's most widely circulated black-and-white photograph.
It is impossible to mention Didion without mentioning her style. In 1968, at the age of 34, Didion published a nonfiction anthology, Trek to Bethlehem, which was hailed by The New York Times as "a rich work presenting the best prose writing in America today." By the end of the 1990s, she had recorded the pulse of American society, politics, and culture with sharp brushstrokes, including in the "White Album" and "Salvador" and other reporting collections, and published several novels at the same time.
Contemporaries came and went, and Didion remained in the reader's field of vision. In the 21st century, after losing her husband and daughter one after another, she wrote her memoirs "The Year of Fantasy" and "Blue Night", facing the heavy blows of life with extraordinary courage. In the Internet age, her golden sentences circulated on the Internet, such as "We tell stories to survive" and "Writers are always betraying others". Her black-and-white bust is printed on a cultural and creative cloth bag, floating in the subway station, book fair, coffee shop, looking at you coldly, with a smile of imminent departure.
01
The strong style of "Daughter of California"
The Didion style has become a derivative. People feel the appeal, if not for specific reasons. At first, it hits you through words, they are short and pithy, vivid and recognizable. Later, it began to detach itself from the text and become attached to the writer: her life on both sides of the United States, her mysterious atmosphere with hotels, cars, sunglasses, and cigarettes, and her tacit cooperation with her husband, John Gregory Dunn, who was also a writer. In 2015, fashion brand Celine invited the 80-year-old Didion to work with him — which seems to be the most straightforward recognition of Didion's style.
In 2015, fashion brand Celine invited 80-year-old Didion to collaborate.
Once the style is equivalent to the work, it will bring the risk of regurgitation. The British novelist Martin Amis once said slyly that Didion's contribution to the new journalism was a "precarious, occasionally brilliant, distinctly feminine writing", which was "sometimes humble, sometimes arrogant, intimate and straightforward, self-deprecating, listless, and implicitly selfish." ”
It's hard to say whether this is a textual criticism or a personal attack, but in this series of contradictory descriptions, Didion's writing is even more confusing. What exactly is her style? What is style itself?
Back at the beginning of Didion's non-fiction writing, "Trek to Bethlehem", it is her California that comes to mind. For this "Daughter of California," there is no unified California. It is the San Bernardino Valley, "tyrannical and cruel", "the Mojave Desert on the other side of the mountains"; it is also the hometown of the Sacramento Valley, where the summer air is "hot and shivering, the grass is sunburned white", and August is like "a long ordeal". It's Las Vegas, with its tall sign "towering over a landscape as desolate as the lunar surface, with only legumes and rattlesnakes," and Los Angeles, where the sea was eerily serene and sleepless during typhoon visits. These California fragments, echoing and contrasting, frustrate the gentle California of imaginary blue seas and sunny days, exposing a rougher, dryer, harsher climate. Compared to the livable temperate climate, it is extreme and dramatic. Didion said Sacramento has two rivers that flood in the winter and drought in the summer.
When reading Didion, you may want to skip the large sections of the scene description. But doing so will leave you with the soul of the work. In 1977, at the age of 42, Didion was interviewed by the Paris Review about the impact of climate on her writing:
"I grew up in a dangerous natural environment and I think the environment and climate affect people beyond their imagination ... These extreme conditions affect the way you treat the world. If you're a writer, they'll show up. If you sell insurance, you won't. ”
Environment and climate have combined to create the darkest tragedy in Sacramento's history. In the spring of 1846, during the westward expansion, several families from the east formed the Donner-Red Brigade, took livestock and belongings, and traveled thousands of miles to Nevada, trapped in the snowy mountains due to errors of judgment and extreme weather, and began to eat people after running out of food. It was not until early the following year that some of the members, with the help of Indian tribes, reached the Sacramento Valley and were rescued.
Trek to Bethlehem, translated by He Yujia, version: Beijing Times Mandarin | CITIC Publishing Group, June 2021
During the same period, Didion's high ancestors also came to Sacramento to discover and reclaim his own fields. History is hidden in nature: In the same field, Didion walked her dog for her brother and swam in a river where her ancestors had swam for a century, from the melting snow water of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, clear and turbulent, with rattlesnakes lying on the surface of the stone to soak up the sun. Like many Sacramentoers, Didion grew up listening to the harrowing experiences of the Donner-Red Brigade, while inheriting countless legends. "Anyone's memories are not real memories, but only the shadows of other people's memories, stories passed down by word of mouth by family members." Mountains, weather, animals, vegetation, they are not only external objects, but also symbols, symbols and metaphors, and there is a secret connection between them and the humans who gaze at them.
02
Capture the moral blood of the environment
Man is a product of the environment. Climate and ethics are inextricably linked. This conviction was engraved in the bones of the Puritans who pioneered the frontiers, and also flowed in the blood of Didion in a more covert way. In Golden Dreams, Didion reports on a murder in rural California. In the opening chapter, she uses a huge and exhaustive brushstroke to describe a "demon wind" raging and morally invalid "transformation of the outside world". "The hot, dry Santa Ana wind swept through the desert at a speed of a hundred miles per hour," people were religious and could "easily dial a specific number to listen to a pre-recorded prayer," but the divorce rate was "twice the national average, with one in thirty-eight people living in a trailer."
In such a place, housewife Lucille Miller was accused of deliberately murdering her husband and faking the scene of an accident in an attempt to defraud a huge bail. In the eyes of the police, this is not even an "interesting" case: Lucille Miller's statements do not match the facts in many ways, she and her husband have long been at odds, and she had an extramarital affair with local lawyer Asheville Haydn, during which Haydn's wife mysteriously died. The truth is coming out.
Joan Didion with her husband and daughter. Husband John Gregory Dunn died in 2003, and a year and a half later, she lost her daughter again.
However, Didion was not interested in these superficial facts. She cares about Lucille Miller, a once naïve but ambitious outsider who grows old in an ominous village and is betrayed by her lover for love and money. She was filled with desire that made the jury hate her and the town's attention to the case. On the day of the Miller trial, Didion, like a long-awaited documentary filmmaker, turned the camera on the crowd of onlookers and slowly swept through:
"On January 11, 1965, the weather in Southern California was bright and warm... Catalina Island seems to float on the sea level of the Pacific Ocean, and the scent of citrus blossoms wafts in the air... A seventy-year-old man living on a pension drove his own touring sedan, at five miles per hour, through the three poker parlors in Gardena, shot all three pistols and a number twelve shotgun into the window, wounding twenty-nine people... A little further north, a sixteen-year-old child jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. ”
Meanwhile, at San Bernardino County Courthouse, the Miller case went to trial. A lot of people came, squeezed and squeezed, and the glass doors of the court were all squeezed to pieces... Everyone began to line up at six o'clock in the morning, and female college students squatted in the courthouse all night, bringing a lot of whole wheat biscuits and low-sugar drinks. ”
On the narrowest level, this description is meaningless to the facts of the case. But intuition tells us that it is closely related to the Miller case, because "no one is an island" and one person's happiness can be another person's pain. After Lucille Miller was found guilty, her loyal defender, Sandy Slegel, screamed, "Each of you is a murderer," and we know from the long shot that Sandy was not all right, but not all wrong. God Didion seemed to be saying, "Whoever among you is sinless can first stone her." ”
"The Year of Fantasy", translated by Tao Zehui, edition: New Classics| Nova Press, January 2017
The highest form of mercy may be irony. This point is vividly reflected in "Comrade Lasky, the Marxist-Leninist Branch of the Communist Party of The United States". The short essay of less than six pages is a sketch of the character of the protagonist, Michael Lasky, in a few strokes, outlining the image of a young Los Angelesian who believes in Marxist-Leninist communism. By 1967, a decade after the craze of McCarthyism had subsided, and the communist decline that had prevailed in the United States, youth like Lasky had become a minority. His unwavering enthusiasm contrasted with his actual influence, and "only a dozen people participated in the march he organized on Labor Day." Yet Didion liked the young man with mild delusions of persecution, his incompatibility with the world, and his "devotion to the extreme cause of doomed failure because of a very sharp fear."
She hid this appreciation in a scene that took place at the Workers' International Bookstore at the end of the article. At the end of the day, Lasky and several key cadres, like "partners in an investment bank," reviewed the sales of the Voice of the People tabloid.
"Mr. Simmons—comrade, what is the total income?"
"Nine dollars and ninety-one cents."
"How long did it last?"
"Four hours."
……
"Maximum donation?"
"Sixty cents."
"Minimal?"
"Four cents."
As such, present without comment, let the meaning emerge in the facts. This way of writing keeps Didion at a distance from the reader and gives her words a "cold feeling". At the same time, she is extremely "hot", never afraid to reveal herself in writing, and highly loyal to her own preferences and tastes. In 1976, in an essay for The New York Times, "Why I Write," Didion wrote that the three words "Why I Write" shared a syllable, and that was "I." "I write entirely to figure out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I'm seeing, and what it means. What I want to get, what I'm afraid of. While studying at Berkeley, she realized that she was not good at academic thinking and was "not a legitimate resident of the world of ideas." "My attention is always on the edge, I can see, taste, touch something, like butter and greyhound buses... I just knew what I wasn't, and it took me years to find out what I was. ”
03
Why Trek to Bethlehem has become a non-fiction classic
Didion is a writer who excels at depicting the outside world, but the pictures that end up on paper are all sifted through her memories—at the end of the day, she gazes at and portrays her own spiritual landscape. That's why her best early works leave the reader not with some kind of insight, but with some kind of impression; what we feel is not the world itself, but the imprint it leaves on the eyewitness's mind.
In his masterpiece "Trek to Bethlehem", in addition to the general lament of the opening "the center is difficult to maintain", Didion does not dig deeper into the drug and violence problems that spread among California hippies, nor does he attempt to analyze the entire social system by interviewing expert authority. (In fact, her interviews with police officers were quickly blocked; some of her interviewees were wary of the media she represented.) As she says, she is not a writer who is known for her thinking and analysis, at least not at this stage. But her obsession and trust in visual imagery injected unprecedented vibrancy into the news coverage of the time. What she did was follow the group to the rally, chatting at their home, participating in observing their lives, objectively and calmly recording her interactions and frictions with them, but not mentioning the dangers she might be in. She is deeply engaged but highly distant, using herself as a container.
The reader is so immersed in the facts and so curious by the enigmatic narrator that when the heartbreaking scene unfolds before our eyes, we forget to think and, together with Didion, fall into a wordless fear of the world: on the living room floor, a five-year-old girl in a double-breasted coat looks at the comic while intently licking the white psychedelic drug applied to her lips.
Unearthing such a hard spiritual landscape requires a sharp weapon, and that is language. In Why I Write, Didion also writes, "I know only one thing about grammar: it has infinite power. Changing the structure of a sentence changes the meaning of the sentence, just as changing the orientation of the lens changes the meaning of the object being photographed, and the effect is significant and absolute. There are many people who understand the angle of the lens, but very few people who understand the sentence (structure). ”
"Blue Night", by Joan Didion, translator: He Yujia, version: Times Chinese International | Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2019
You see, when thinking about grammatical structures, didion's metaphor is still the lens of creating visual language. In "The Perfect Picture Caption of Joan Didion," New Yorker contributor Brian Dillon conducted archaeology on her early magazine career. In the early 1960s, Didion worked for Vogue, where, in addition to writing short essays and short unsigned columns, one of her major responsibilities was to write illustrations for the magazine's illustrations. Erin Tarme, the associate editor who directed her, has been in the business for nearly three decades, using a pencil to fork redundant words from manuscripts and make a big fuss about an inaccurate verb.
According to Tarmay, she asked Didion to write a three- or four-hundred-word picture caption and then, along with her, cut it down to five crosses. Under the influence of Talmei, Didion and her colleagues became "connoisseurs of synonyms and collectors of verbs", learning to use active voices and look up dictionaries to ensure that words were accurate and refreshing. Most importantly, they learned to rewrite in order to "find the right balance between elegance and warmth." Didion once shared a profile he wrote in Costume and Beauty, published on August 1, 1965:
"Turning the page, above: Looking at the whole house, the colors, vitality, and objects of the casual collection coexist harmoniously and jump out of the ground. Pictured, a painting by Frank Stella, an Art Nouveau stained-glass glass, and a painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Outside: A table, a straight white and shiny tarpaulin, purchased in Mexico for fifteen cents a yard. ”
In addition to the concise wording, the choppy rhythm, and the clever description, what impressed me was the word "outside the picture"—in describing the picture, Didion not only paid attention to the ornaments in the picture, but also completed some of the items that were located outside the picture, such as the oilcloth that was "purchased in Mexico for fifteen cents a yard". Since then, she has begun to pay attention to the information that appearances cannot carry, weaving her favorite narratives between the inches. In "White Album", Didion, who is more sensitive than anyone, has already revealed the secrets and ideas of his style. She writes, "Every choice a man makes—every word she chooses or rejects, every stroke she falls or falls—exposes her character." Style is character. ”