Joan Didion

she just doesn't seem like a good reader of Didion to me; she's all worked up that Didion is concerned with surfaces, and she is, but it's a way of getting at stuff. Harrison misses all the stuff.

omg i'm just posting all the same things i posted to ilx 5 years ago :/

thinking about it more i think some of what you admire, horseshoe - the refusal to really psychologize or reduce - is what makes her fiction unsuccessful for me. like, the characters in 'common prayer' have a sort of uncanny valleyness to them, the exist as impossible simulacra. i mean i think thats partly intentional ("i have not been the witness i wanted to be") but think this manqué quality extends beyond being purposeful.

that whole first paragraph of the harrison just makes me feel like omar telling weebay "when u come at the king, you best not miss." if you are going to try and murk didion you have to BODY her because otherwise people reading your essay are just going to be thinking about how good didion is at doing exactly what youre failing to do.

i haven't read the book of common prayer, but i don't think she refuses to psychologize; she just does it fitfully, tentatively and obliquely. it works in democracy which i think is semi-autobiographical and also largely about the trickiness of and gaps in memory. (i guess harrison must hate it.)

but maybe i am undermining my case for didion as an ultimately sympathetic interlocutor. TBH i kinda like it when she is being a mean girl! imo the 60s sort of deserved it. xp

i also think if you write an essay accusing Didion of being all style no substance and thereby invite comparisons between the style of your own essay and Didion's superior style, well, you've kind of played yourself. or is that exactly what you just said, max. otm.

yes that is exactly what i just said, i just used violent metaphors and compared it to the wire

when i say she's sympathetic, it's because i believe she cares about the people she writes about. i don't exactly think she's sympathetic in the sense of being likeable. her meanness is purposeful.

whenever i think about didion at length i realize i am comparing her to jane austen in my mind. not sure if this is really accurate at all, but i love both those mean ladies.

xp lol i should go to bed

heh, all i meant is that when people object to didion over her meanness/snobbishness i want to go in two directions--i want to say both, "well, DUH, that's why i like her," but also, "she's actually not that mean or snobby"

i always want to say joan didion is a snob because she's actually better than everybody else

but yeah, i don't really think she's a snob, just awkward. omg how do i keep saying the same thing?

i always want to say joan didion is a snob because she's actually better than everybody else

― horseshoe, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 3:04 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm. you are otm all over this thread!

but i don't think she refuses to psychologize; she just does it fitfully, tentatively and obliquely

yeh, sure, you put it better: she refuses 'to get inside their heads'. which i can see as a virtue in her reporting! certainly that kind of empathizing can involve submerging someone in an entirely alien terminology (lol, projecting)

i admire harrison's essay for not really attempting any 'elegance' but just coming at it blunt & ugly. the lavender thing was terrible tho, yeah.

her meanness is purposeful

yes, sometimes! & the 60s did deserve it! but sometimes i just feels like smallness to me, rather than real objectivity.

haha maybe the pinefox will wake up soon & carry this torch for me, but i think im ~done~

i wish someone had revived a thread abt an author we all liked :/

no, it's good that all these smart people dislike didion. but it means i will never stop obsessing about her. or sleep.

i think this is my favorite joan didion mean girl moment

[re: her takedown of woody allen in the nyrb]

To the Editors:

What piques screenwriter Joan Didion so much about those large, enthusiastic audiences Woody Allen gets is that they seem to recognize themselves in lives that Didion finds unimportant. People who live such lives are unimportant to Didion because they “go to restaurants and ask one another hard questions” about “relationships,” something only “adolescents” still discuss much. Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living—which is what, by the way, if it isn’t the self or others? Losing weight? More likely, it’s vocations. Careers. Movie deals.

Didion complains that Woody Allen is stuck in the “fairly recent” notion of finding or making or inhabiting the self, as a central obsession. She’s right that it’s recent: those who trace it back to Augustine are exaggerating, a little. But surely the literature of “recent” centuries is richer for the works of people who’ve made this same faux pas. It’s what modern narrative art is mostly about, and Didion is sophomoric (“adolescent?”) in complaining that Woody Allen hasn’t managed to rehabilitate pre-modern modes of being, such as “attaining grace.” Didion would make a vice out of the fact that Woody Allen keeps to the side of the street he knows best—the sign of a tyro, by the standards of Hollywood, where a “writer” is someone who can dish out visions of the Gold Rush, the Boxer Rebellion, or the Lower East Side with equal competence. She calls the narrowness of Woody Allen’s focus “self-absorption.” Another word for it is modesty.

Admittedly there’s nothing modest about the list of things he lives for in Manhattan, but that’s not what Didion doesn’t like about it. Instead she notes that it’s “modishly eclectic,” which is a too deft way of saying that the list isn’t governed by any particular fashion or set of fashions. Here Didion’s need to attack the mindlessly modish audience (for roller-skating in crumpled linen, is it?) overcomes her intellectual honesty. The “Jupiter,” as she knows, is not at all a stylishly unfamiliar symphony—I think I’ve heard it in the Park—nor is a passion for “Potato Head Blues” likely to win you fancy friends. Didion may resent Woody Allen’s public display of his connoiseurship—and a (gorgeously) indulgent scene it is, too—but she shouldn’t pretend she knows his tastes to be modish when she can’t, because they ain’t. For instance: she says that the point of listing Sentimental Education is to obviate a gauche reference to Madame Bovary. A subtle discrimination, indeed! To know which of these two novels is hipper than the other betrays a suspiciously keen eye for what’s in, what’s out. Keener than Allen’s.

Which brings me to his defense on one last point, and here I’m answering not only Joan Didion, but also my friend Michael Wood, who in these pages [NYR, June 29, 1978] made the point that Allen doesn’t know as much as he implies about the bulk of his literary references. Probably there’s truth in this; that bulk is rather large. But when an allusion is apt—and even illuminating—it deserves credit even from the knowing. And the concerns of Sentimental Education have an eerie relevance to the concerns of Manhattan. In Frédéric Moreau as in the character Woody is endlessly playing, strength of feeling isn’t a source of action but rather an enfeeblement. By reminding us of the barely sympathetic, weak Frédéric, Woody Allen is reinforcing not the central character but those others in the film (or in the audience) who doubt his strength, his maturity, his authenticity. To say that this similarity in the themes of the two works is just accidental might be quite correct, but it would also be an instance of not crediting on the screen what we wouldn’t hesitate to find—and maybe praise—in a flawed but intelligent novel.

John Romano

Columbia University, New York City

Joan Didion replies:

Oh, wow.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/oct/11/theyll-take-manhattan-3/

i mean sometimes i just admire her as a master zinger, frankly

yeah, that's classic.

she's right that manhattan isn't a serious movie in the way woody allen aspires for it to be, but she does come off sort of joyless in the review. such a good movie!

ya it kinda bugs me that she dislikes woody but i cant really imagine them inhabiting the same world anyway so ill settle for ignoring her article and savoring her "oh, well"

lol i mean "oh, wow"

morelike oh, snap

It's a little odd or touching to see Michael Wood crop up in that 1978 letter.

i don't think she's a snob or anything, she's just really brainy.

it can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous. i think she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway, thank goodness.

I never read Joan Didion. I would see her books in stores and heard people talk about her. I always grouped her with Susan Sontag for some reason and assumed her work had no relevance for me and my concerns. If I love Marguerite Duras and Marina Tsvetaeva, should I read Didion?

No!

Estela, why can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous? Curious. Also are you referring to Didion when you say "she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway..." because Didion should be not only a woman at this point but a seasoned author.

she's otm about Manhattan.

I still prefer her political writing to anything else: her talent for skewering people for their language never found a better, to quote T.S. Eliot, objective correlative.

Most of us remember very well these secret signals and sighs of adolescence, remember the dramatic apprehension of our own mortality and other “more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,” but eventually we realize that we are not the first to notice that people die. “Even with all the distractions of my work and my life,” Woody Allen was quoted as saying in a cover story (the cover line was “Woody Allen Comes of Age”) in Time, “I spend a lot of time face to face with my own mortality.” This is actually the first time I have ever heard anyone speak of his own life as a “distraction.

BOOM!

How exactly is that a criticism of Woody Allen?

oh, wow

How is it not?

Midnight in Paris is the latest example of an Allen film being so damn clumsy about its literary allusions; they're more like tags of erudition than references.

Woody Allen never tries to hide in his films how he believes much in life is a distraction from death, to make work, love etc a waiting/putting off of death. I don't see how his own honesty about this neuroses is a criticism.

I don't think he's hiding it in his films!

oh whoops sorry -- you said that. Anyway, why should give him credit for honesty?

she's also arguing that these attitudes -- and how he clothes them in undifferentiated psychoanalytic jargon -- are juvenile.

Then am I not getting something? Is she take Allen to task as a person or a film maker?

I'm not necessarily giving him credit for being honesty. I just don't think there has ever been undercover motives with Allen's films. Scenes From a Mall is not a literary references to Bergman, but a love of him films and knowing he could never recreate it. But he tried. Woody Allen has always been himself which is a failed person who can't sort life out. He admires other peoples work and borrows heavily from it. Sure America isn't attached to freudian babble, but Allen was, for better or worse. I think through his failures he manages to create a body of work that is distinctly his own. I think the failures Didion points out about Allen are included in his films, he displays it. I mean yeah that's him.

Geez I should sleep

So many good posts in this thread, esp from horseshoe and estela. I agree that Harrison comes off as a crank, especially in the beginning of the essay. There's too much envy blurring her better points. In the part where she lays out the "trick" to Didion's sentences, I found myself thinking "but...that's a great sentence" at almost every example she uses. Didion's style is unimpeachable. Which is a shame because I think Harrison's more political point about Didion seems like a fair criticism. There IS something very End-Of-History-conservative about Didion's almost knee-jerk skepticism of anyone who seems to hold a sincere belief in something.

assumed her work had no relevance for me and my concerns

this is odd to me!

Estela, why can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous? Curious. Also are you referring to Didion when you say "she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway..." because Didion should be not only a woman at this point but a seasoned author.

― *tera, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 6:39 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i can't obviously speak for estela but when i read didion i very much get the sense that her fantastic ability to read situations, places and people means that shes also very aware (too aware, maybe) of her own place in those situations, and that awareness, combined with a ready insecurity and--this is maybe what estela alludes to?--an early life in which she was taught, implicitly and explicitly, as many women were and are, that she should be quiet and avoid pronouncement and confrontation, turns into a fear of pomposity.

i mean i wouldnt say didion has a 'slight' self-consciousness--i feel like (in what ive read which is not everything didion!) shes all self-consciousness. & i think that self-consciousness is (insofar as its what gives her that ability to read situations and relationships and so forth) what makes her so good, but (insofar as heightened self-awareness can, maybe even tends to, lead to crippling insecurity) it also makes her scared of how she must sound.

i just woke up so that probably doesnt make much sense. also i am over-thinking this. i will say that i think didion's "fear of pomposity"/"self-consciousness" is related less to her lived experience than it is to... "how her brain works" in some sense. so it doesnt matter that shes a seasoned writer now. its like saying "woody allen is successful and respected, why is he still so neurotic."

So many good posts in this thread, esp from horseshoe and estela.

otm. and everyone else! i love didion but its cool to hear ppl like lamp and pinefox getting to the heart of why they're not on board

There IS something very End-Of-History-conservative about Didion's almost knee-jerk skepticism of anyone who seems to hold a sincere belief in something.

Can you develop this? What I see isn't skepticism of sincerity so much as scorn for malnourished or incoherent thinking in support of a sincere position.

Martin Amis, in the rather good essay on Didion's style already referenced by Pinefox above, suspects her of being "defensive" in her attack on Manhattan. He accuses her of being scathing about other people's lack of cultural and literary sophistication while repeatedly betraying her own. The argument is subtle and doesn't lend itself to easy summary, but it's worth getting hold of the piece if you're interested in Didion and/or Amis.

Writers being writers shockah

It doesn't read like that, Alfred. There are enough similarities (and political differences) between the two writers to arouse suspicion of professional jealousy but in fact Amis, who's perfectly capable of being bitchy and partisan, seems to be doing his best to be scrupulously fair on this occasion. He's willing to praise Didion for what he finds good in her. It's an intelligent, perceptive and balanced piece of criticism.