I’m reading a
heavy book now, heavy in weight, not in content. But when I take it to bed and
try to balance it on my quilt-covered torso, my skinny, already-chilly wrists
poking up out of the covers, I find that it is just too heavy.
So I shove it under the pillow on the unoccupied side of
the bed and reach out to the bookcase on my left and pluck forth Joan Didion’s
“The White Album.” Something I
read before, but so what. It’s full of her essays, which means that I could get
a couple in before the first doze.
Joan Didion. I
whisper her name over and over under my breath. First, there’s the Joan. A sturdy, weighted, rectangle of
a name. A brown brick on your porch, under which you could hide the key to your
front door.
And then, the Didion.
A plump, darting bird of sound. A custard of
a name, with a small sweet piece of chocolate in the center. Diddy-inn,
Diddy-ahn, Diddy, diddy, diddy…a name belying her steadfast, intelligent,
writerly seriousness.
I do all this
nonsense and think I should go see
someone.But then I am
into one of the essays, one that describes Berkeley in 1953 when she went to
school there. I was still in high school in Connecticut then, a sophomore.
I
never gave a thought to Berkeley, California at that time. I didn’t know Joan
Didion; she was a student and hadn’t begun her significant writing career. And
I hadn’t begun my own life—I was still a kid, a daughter, not even knowing what
I wanted to do, except that I hoped it might have some art in it. But it was still
just grades and boyfriends and clothes and music and not having a clue.
But there was
Joan Didion in Berkeley, walking those paths on the Cal campus. That these would later become paths that I
walked on when I was a wife and a mother of three in 1964, is not an image I
would have conjured. But then I left Connecticut in 1959 to go to California
and we had gotten to Berkeley by 1964.
I still hadn’t
read her.
But I’m in and
out of her book this night, because I keep bringing up the two of us, utterly
different in every way, remembering images of her from magazine photos, thin,
tiny little her, with her straight hair and bangs, simple good clothes, a
solemn look on her face.
Her sentences stride along on the pages and I am
constantly impressed with the way she sees things. She writes about
both-sides-now, like the Joni Mitchell song.
From her
group, “Sojourns,” this fragment, her own, non-Kerouac, “On the Road,” ---I agreed passionately. I disagreed passionately. I called room
service on one phone and listened attentively on the other to people who seemed
convinced that the “texture” of their lives had been agreeably or adversely
affected by conversion to the politics of joy, by regression to lapidary
bleakness, by the Sixties, by the Fifties, by the recent change in
administrations and by the sale of The Thorn Birds to paper for
one-million-nine.
She sat
there---so many theres---and took notes in her little notebook. She was In Person to the events of the Day
and she mused in print about Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the strike at
San Francisco State, the Sharon Tate-La Bianca murders.
There is something very compelling about the
quiet way she assesses each subject. She has reminded me, (and why do I always
forget this?) of the millions of different stories walking around, the ones
that can eject a person from self-involvement for a moment.
So nice to get Out
of oneself! So nice to observe the rest of humanity!
This book is a
beauty. How lucky for me to have
forgotten the contents over the years and be returned to it, almost as new, so
much time later.
So then it
became morning and I took the book out of the bed and brought it downstairs. In
the afternoon, I brought it along to two doctors’ appointments and a couple of
trips to Lunardi’s, just in case the lines were long.
I was disappointed when
they were not.
I stopped saying the author’s name whimsically and instead
nodded to her, wherever she is, in admiration. And by now I have made a list in
my mind of the people I must buy copies for, so I can envision their lit-up
faces when they open the first pages and read the title section of “The White
Album.”
Treasure.
LOvely.
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