Stills from the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.
Last year, we published a book review by translator Yujia He about the legendary writer Joan Didion, "She Wrote the Most Stolen Books in American Bookstores", when she had not yet left this world. She died at her home in Manhattan, New York, on December 23 last year, in mourning by many.
If you've read her words, you can understand why, despite her maverick personality, she is still loved by countless people. Throughout her life, she has endured the pain of loss and insisted on a calm record. The light that bursts out of her words will not fade away because of her departure.
Yes, many readers will always miss her.
Author | Song Shuang
In The White Album, Joan Didion writes: "Mount Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway, and Oxford, Mississippi, to William Faulkner... Many parts of Honolulu have always belonged to James Jones (American novelist, masterpiece "Vietnamese Diary") ... A place always belongs to those who claim that it is the hardest, the most soul-stirring and constantly tearing it apart, shaping it, rendering it, loving it so much that they recreate it in their own imaginations. ”
"California, on the other hand, belongs to Joan Didion." Michiko Kakutani, a well-known book reviewer at The New York Times, said of her.
《The White Album》
Joan Didion
Farrar, Straus and Giroux，1990-10
Sacramento is the capital of california, but many people think that the capital is Los Angeles. In the mid-19th century, all the people who wanted to get rich overnight poured in because gold was found here. The gold rush made the little-known town restless for a time, and the first transcontinental railroad terminal was built here, which became California's first municipality.
Didion was born in 1934 to a Republican family in Sacramento, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. Didion's father worked in the insurance industry and real estate investment, and later spent most of his career in the military. They moved frequently, so she never had the experience of attending a school for long. In her 2003 memoir, Where I Came From, she wrote that this kind of life made her feel like she was always an outsider.
On March 18, 1972, Joan Didion with her typewriter. (Photo: Jill Krementz)
In the 1950s, Didion won first place in the "Prix de Paris" writing contest sponsored by Vogue magazine and got a job at Vogue. She moved to New York and spent 7 years at the magazine, from publicity copywriting to close-up editor.
Here, Didion's writing was rigorously trained. "In 8 lines of headings, everything has to work, every word, every comma." She said later.
While working at Fashion, she wrote her first book, The Running River (1963), which tells the story of a family disintegration from Sacramento. The book introduces themes from her later writing—violence, fear, and the experience of losing control of the world.
In the 1960s, when Didion was in her twenties, she showed up at the right time and place and became famous in one fell swoop.
《Run River》
Vintage，1994-04
California
Didion's California isn't a California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, has a jacuzzi, and spends a lot of money on Rodeo Avenue, but the West.
She shows the imagery and grandeur of the West in her book Where I Came From: "If you're a Californian, you should show courage, kill the rattlesnake, and move on." ”
Didion's California is set against the backdrop of modern California, filled with boring socialites and lost hippies. Unlike the object of her writing, she lived in an upscale neighborhood with no hippies—tudor-style houses lining the streets, white, colonial-style, colonnade mansions.
California. /unsplash
Writer Michelle Dean writes in Didion – Journalistic Exploration and Feminism that Didion suddenly found a path that suited him. California in the 1960s was a great place to collect "dog blood" stories, allowing Didion to write long stories of ups and downs.
Didion also realized that writing material was pouring in to her. She fixed her gaze on the marginalized and made the counterculture lifestyle known to the public.
Readers fell in love with Didion, and she quickly became an icon of a generation.
In 1968, Trek to Bethlehem was published. This collection of essays on Didion's experience in California later became one of the masterpieces of the New Press Movement and her first nonfiction work.
Trek to Bethlehem
By Joan Didion, translated by He Yujia
CITIC Publishing Group, Beijing Times Mandarin, 2021-6
Didion is very good at writing, and everyone knows that. But she's better at adding her feelings and memories to her writing, and cares less about the serious, neutral, and calm guidelines of news reporting. Didion's writing style is summed up in the famous "personal color without personal touches", which is her trick and her trick.
She likes to flesh out the story with cumbersome details, add to the sense of presence with a large number of quotations, and metaphor is also essential— intellectuals are keen on this.
Didion wants readers to see her book immersed in the chaos of the real world described in it—the ambitious politicians, the artists trying to establish a new order in the arts, and the dramatic upheavals that American society has experienced. The New York Times spoke highly of Trek to Bethlehem, calling it "elegant, complex, subtle, and ironic."
Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menan argues in Joan Didion's Activism that Trek to Bethlehem is not a standard journalism because Didion doesn't do real interviews.
In the book, Didion presents the flippantness and stupidity of people's conversations, with hippies talking to him saying a whole bunch of "great" (slang "groovy") words and repeating the cliché of "flower power" (a slogan that originated in Berkeley, California, as a symbol of the anti-Vietnam War movement).
Stills from the documentary "Woodtosk Festival". On 29 April 1969, the Woodtosk Festival opened with hippies from all walks of life, and the theme of the festival was "Peace, Anti-War, Fraternity, Equality".
She immersed herself in the scene, internalizing the confusion that people experienced into her personal confusion, and that was the feeling she wanted. Menan said: "She is putting herself in danger and she may be swept into the abyss and become a lost soul. ”
Didion saw many things that puzzled her—why parents abandoned their children on the highway strip, why teenagers in Harlem would do evil in Central Park at night, why middle-class men would sexually prey on young girls, and most importantly, why the media would pay attention to these stories.
Menan argues that Didion's writing doesn't embody something deeper. He said Didion understood that her work was a failure on the level of "understanding" the story. She can see with X-ray eyes what's going on in the world, and she can make it visible to her readers, but Didion can't explain it.
Didion and the media of the time exaggerated the hippies and everything they represented, when in fact these people were only an inconspicuous part of the social trend. But the news coverage of this period left an indelible impression that at the end of the 1960s, everyone was depraved.
In 1968, when Trek to Bethlehem was published, the media stopped paying attention to the degeneration of youth. In response, Menan sarcastically wrote: "This is a way of life, not a life." ”
Didion's second book, "Let It Be," is almost a true portrayal of her in Hollywood and Las Vegas.
《Play It As It Lays》
Farrar, Straus and Giroux，2005-11
In Hollywood, Didion became socially diligent, and she wasn't well versed in it, but had to. Didion circled proms, cocktail parties, and boring charity dinners, making out with dignitaries and stars like Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Billy Wilder, natalie Wood, and so on.
"Let It Be" has a lot of bad plots and characters. In that era, the old Hollywood was gone, the new Hollywood had not yet arrived, and Didion was in this long transition period, and she once again felt lost and anxious.
After Trek to Bethlehem and Let It Bethlehem, Didion re-evaluated his practice as a journalist and his understanding of American life, politics, and even moral judgments. She decided to get what she didn't get in the hippies.
She took aim at herself. In The Year of Fantasy and Blue Nights, readers see a female writer obsessed with describing herself.
Me, me, me
Didion gave a lecture at his alma mater called "Why I Write." She begins by pointing out that the sound you'll hear in these three words is "I, I, I" ("Why I Write" contains the pronunciation of "I").
She continued: "I write entirely to discover what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I'm seeing, what it means, what I don't want, what I'm afraid of. ”
Author Barbara Grizotti Harrison, in a notorious 1980 essay titled Joan Didion: The Only Disconnect, called Didion "the neurastheated Cher (American female singer)" in a style that was "a bunch of tricks" and whose theme was "always herself."
In 2011, New York Magazine reported that the criticisms "still annoy Didion decades later."
"Her talent is to portray the mood of culture," the American writer Katie Love said in an interview with The New York Times, "didion managed to express the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s through her own very special personal writing." She fits perfectly with the era, slightly paranoid, somewhat hysterical, and highly emotional. ”
The nonfiction writer Francine Pross said of Didion's writing qualities: "She uses a voice in her book that has never been seen before—Western, feminine, anxious. ”
Prows lists all the places and topics that Didion has touched on during his writing career, including California, New York, Hawaii, El Salvador, Las Vegas, Miami, John Wayne (American movie star), Patty Hirst (granddaughter of American media magnate Hearst), Vietnam, The Central Park Joggers, The Black Panther Party (a black society in the United States), the presidential election, Newt Gingrich (an American politician), Doris Lessing (a British writer), feminism, hippies, movies, books, and news.
"Behind all these topics and places is her calm, alert, sad and anxious voice," Prows said, "and every sentence [in her work] has an electric shock anxiety that makes people sleep and forget to eat." You're waiting for some electric flint to appear, but there isn't, so read on. ”
Menan, for her part, argues that interpreting Her emotions as a reflection of the times and imagining her "always speaking for us" is a common mistake in evaluating Didion's work, as this is simply not her way of presenting herself.
Blue Night
By Joan Didion, translated by He Yujia
Times Mandarin International | Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, 2019-5
Actually, Didion is just speaking for herself, she cares about the times and she cares about herself, and the things she doesn't understand, most people don't understand, but people think Didion can, and in fact, she probably can't. It is increasingly discovered that Didion is not like most of us. She's weird, and that's why people want to read her work.
However, because Didion hates interviews, it's hard to know what's going on in her heart. Her interview answers were dismal, filled with "I don't know" crap. Didion was sure that readers would learn nothing from the interview. "The question of the interview doesn't matter to me." She said.
"I've dedicated my life to writing." Didion writes, "As a writer, since childhood, when my words were far from being pencil on paper, I developed in my mind the idea that meaning itself resides in the rhythm of words, sentences, and paragraphs; I have also mastered a writing technique that hides all my thoughts and beliefs behind the increasingly impenetrable ornaments of words." My way of writing is my way of being, or it has become my way of being... I can only find meaning by going beyond words. ”
Critic John Leonard said helplessly: "For 40 years I've been trying to figure out why her (Didion) sentences are better than mine or yours. The answer is the rhythm, and they strike at you. ”
Didion believed that the structure of the sentence was crucial to her writing. In the New York Times article Why I Write (1976), she wrote: "Changing the structure of a sentence changes the meaning of the sentence, just as the position of the camera changes the meaning of the subject, and the arrangement of the words is also important." ”
She was deeply influenced by Hemingway's succinct writing style, which taught Didion the importance of sentences in the text, and she was also influenced by Henry James, who wrote "perfect, indirect, complex sentences.".
Fragile products
In the summer of 1968, Didion experienced a nervous breakdown, and in a subsequent psychiatric evaluation report, she was diagnosed with a vertigo and nausea attack. It wasn't until 1972, after experiencing chronic migraines, that Didion was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease has been with her throughout her life.
Didion is very emaciated, and like Lily McClellan, the heroine of Running Rivers, she has "amazing weakness" (5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 95 pounds) and "extreme slenderness". Didion's friend Calvin Trilling joked: "She doesn't look like she works at the docks. ”
Didion was short, and everyone who saw her would be the first to realize it. She has tiny bones, fingers and limbs. Didion, 44, "was a woman, but disguised as the body of a young girl," the media wrote.
Didion's face was always filled with sadness, a sadness that has a long history and is well known to everyone. In 1977, fashion journalist Sally Quinn met with Didion, then 42, for tea at the Madison Hotel, just after He had published The Book of Prayers.
Everyone thought that Didion and her work were similar in temperament, such as despair, sadness, and the next second she was going to shed tears. However, Quinn discovers that Didion is a "comedian" and she is amused. "I don't know why people say I'm sad." Didion shrugged and laughed.
Didion is extremely sensitive to sunlight, and even indoors, she wears huge sunglasses that cover half of her face. There was a southern softness in Didion's voice, which she thought was an accent from Sacramento High School, and her voice was so gentle and low that people often had to crane their necks to listen to her.
All in all, Didion gives the impression of being very "fragile", she has the restrained femininity of the Oriental, often wearing long skirts, skirts as if hanging on her, loose but without losing style. When she was young, she had a beautiful intellectual face, intelligent, sharp and fresh. In fact, in the fashion field, Didion has always had a place – in 2015, Didion was also invited by Celine to shoot an advertisement for sunglasses.
For nearly 50 years, the Didion craze has been around. Readers from all over the world are fascinated by her tone and expression, and most importantly , her sense of fashion. "The photograph of a hand-held cigarette lying on a Chevrolet sports car preserves Didion's gaze and gives Didion more." Paper magazine wrote.
The "Didion-style women" became well-known literary figures: women who were delayed by the promises of men, who traveled the country along the highway, trying to erase the pain of the past. These women have lost their men to divorce, cancer or suicide, and their children are cynical. Didion-esque women are outsiders to society, but also survivors.
In Trek to Bethlehem, Didion carefully portrays himself as a man who is as familiar with life on the edge as the characters in the book. She wrote that she was "nervous", drinking "gin and hot water to relieve pain, and using dextroamphetamines (central nervous system irritants) to relieve alcohol".
In reality, she did not see any "marginal" qualities in her life. When the Washington Post reporter interviewed Didion, she was sitting in her study, and her home had everything fashion magazines touted — comfortable, orderly and elegant, with sofas covered in printed cotton, orchid and porcelain elephants on the mantelpiece, and dozens of picture frames containing photos of family and friends.
Joan Didion in New York on March 1, 2006. (Photo: Steve Pyke)
Didion's life was perfect, but there seemed to be something wrong with the curtains in the family's dining room, as the perfect geometric shape of the folds caused her migraines, and she told reporters she was planning to make a new set of curtains.
Today's topic
What do you think of the hippie movement?
This article was first published in New Weekly Issue 605
Joan Didion: She never spoke out for the times