As noted earlier this year in my discussion of Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook (2017) by Joan Didion:
The non-fiction work of Joan Didion is one of my go-to reads … I think her work resonates with me as a fellow Californian (growing up between the Pacific breakers and the snowy Sierra Nevada) who leaves the West to go "Back East" to live.
These two essay collections reflect even more strongly this push/pull between the West and the East. After Henry, twelve essays grouped geographically on Washington, New York, and California and serves as a memorial to her editor, Henry Robbins of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Where I Was From is a memoir, not so much of her life, but of the California that was.
In the Washington section of After Henry, the three essays deal primarily with the political side of Washington: “In the Realm of the Fisher King” (1989) pages through the years of the presidency of the consummate Californian (e.g. a non-native), Ronald Reagan. “Insider Baseball” (1988) finds Didion following the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns of that year; and “Shooters Inc.” (1988) speaks to the propensity of politicians to use military “sideshows” to distract the public.
The California series is most compelling. “Girl of the Golden West” (1982) is a meditation on Patricia Hearst’s memoir, Every Secret Thing (1982) and riffs on the relationship of the pioneer California families (like the Hearsts) to contemporary California and it’s landscape:
The extent to which certain places dominate the California imagination is apprehended, even by Californians, only dimly. Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery. From “Girl of the Golden West” (1982).
“Pacific Distances” (1979-91) and “Los Angeles Days” (1988) are looks at life on the eastern edge of the Pacific Rim while “Down at City Hall” (1989) is an examination of Los Angeles mayor, Tom Bradley. “L.A. Noir” (1989) is all murders and movies. “Fire Season” (1989) an excellent depiction of a defining element (literally) of California, fire, specifically the wildfires that are ever present to the Californian, but rise in the national consciousness only when they rise to the level of cataclysm. “Times Mirror Square” (1990) a good summary history of the Los Angeles newspaper world (and its relation to the industry, “back East”):
Californians until recently spoke of the United States beyond Colorado as “back east”. If they went to New York, they went “back” to New York, a way of speaking that carried with it the suggestion of living on a distant frontier. From “Times Mirror Square” (1990)
“Sentimental Mirror” (1990) covers the Central Park Jogger crime and it’s resultant fall out.
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The “was” in the title is very telling. Didion portrays even the most rooted Californian as tempted by the next place, she notes her mother saying: “California, she said, was now too regulated, too taxed, too expensive. She spoke enthusiastically, on the other hand, about moving to the Australian outback.”
A telling portion of the book is Didion’s printing of a school essay (1948) she wrote on the people of her native land:
They didn’t come west for homes and security, but for adventure and money. They pushed in over the mountains and founded the biggest cities in the west. Up in the Mother Lode they mined gold by day and danced by night. San Francisco’s population multiplied almost twenty times, until 1906, when it burned to the ground, and was built up again nearly as quickly as it had burned. We had an irrigation problem, so we built the greatest dams the world has known. Now both desert and valley are producing food in enormous quantities. California has accomplished much in the past years. It would be easy for us to sit back and enjoy the results of the past. -- "School Essay" (1948) in Where I Was From by Joan Didion (2003)
But perhaps the most important insight into the nature of the Californian (or perhaps any person) is that to understand where you are from, you need to leave. This struck me when I was 30 years removed from California and visiting Riverside in the Imperial Valley, I mentioned I was living in Washington, and it was commented, “I have a cousin in Seattle.” But even time and distance too often fail to lift the veil of the “was from”:
Yet California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who are from there. We worry it, correct and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country.
But part of this enigma is the nature of time and place. The “was from” is not just a factor of place or distance, but of time and the inexorable changes that occur when you briefly close your eyes or turn to look at the inescapable present. Didion recounts driving with her mother:
I had repeatedly assured her that we were, at last pointing out an overhead sign: 101 North. “Then where did it all go,” she had asked. She meant where did Gilroy go, where was the Milias Hotel, where could my father eat short ribs now. She meant where did San Juan Bautista go, why was it no longer so sweetly remote as it had been on the day of my wedding there in 1964. She meant where had San Benito and Santa Clara Counties gone as she remembered them, the coastal hills north of Salinas, the cattle grazing, the familiar open vista that had been relentlessly replaced (during the year, two years, three, the blink of the eye during which she had been caring for my father) by mile after mile of pastel subdivisions and labyrinthine exits and entrances to freeways that had not previously existed. For some miles she was silent. California had become, she said then, “all San Jose.”
The tragic story of the Donner-Reed Party (1846-47) resonates with Californians, especially those of us from the North and brought up in the shadows of the Sierras. For Californians, the Donner-Reed story is ultimately heroic and not tragic, perhaps, this is because, as Didion notes:
One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.
But to get to “am from” from “was from” is a journey that can only be made over the course of a lifetime. Didion quotes from a letter from Virgina Reed, one of the surviving children of the Donner-Reed Party:
“I have not wrote you half of the trouble we’ve had, but I have wrote you enough to let you know what trouble is … We have left everything, but I don’t care for that. We have got through with our lives. Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody. Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.”
The past admits no shortcuts to the future: “Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can”, this Didion tells us, and I believe, is the only path from “was from” to “am from.”
After Henry: Read: January 17, 2020 | Buy on Kindle
Where I Was From: Read: January 12, 2020 | Buy on Kindle
See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.
