EMILY DEPRANG

On Joan Didion, on the Morning After My Twenties

Being an idealist in Austin in the summer of 2001 was almost perfunctory. Y2K had given everybody the morbid thrill of impending disaster followed by the cocky thrill of still being able to buy gas with a credit card. The WTO riots in Seattle in 1999 had definitely done something, maybe, or at least had given the feeling that something had been done. (The passive voice can be useful.) When I sat in an airplane hangar next to a straight-edge punk girl and watched footage of the riots set to Rage Against the Machine, I felt they meant something, though I couldn’t have said what. Bush vs. Gore had given diverse groups something to fight together, and this was before September 11, when we relearned fear and obedience and found out exactly to what degree a small, committed band of citizens can change the world.

Tom Petty supposedly said, “I don’t go to Austin. The weather’s too nice, the girls are too pretty, and the dope’s too cheap. I can’t get anything done!” Damn straight. And the nothing that a lot of people got done back then (I moved away in ’04) was a kind of spastic activism (spaztivism?) that burns a lot of energy but doesn’t get a lot done. You know, the kind of activism that can usually be called a “gesture.”

I was an old hand at gestures. I always wanted to be two things: a writer and “good.” I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be, but I knew how to be good: gestures. One meal a week doesn’t keep anybody from starving to death, but getting up early on a Saturday to go serve it makes you “good.”

Then, in the summer of 2001, I read Joan Didion’s “On the Morning After the Sixties.” In the space of ten minutes, it reversed my polarities. Suddenly, I knew exactly what kind of writer I wanted to be, and I had no idea how to be good.

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“I am talking here about being a child of my time,” she begins with enviable confidence. For Didion, contemplating the sixties evokes, foremost, a memory not from the sixties at all—not even close, in fact—but an afternoon in 1953, her sophomore year at Berkeley, when young Joan spent a Saturday afternoon reading Lionel Trilling on a leather couch at a fraternity house and listening to a middle-aged man plunk morosely at an untuned piano. She would recall this afternoon, which she now admits seems “so exotic as to be almost czarist,” as a reference point throughout the actual sixties, during which her alma mater would convulse with the political awakening of the children of its time.

In their hands, Berkeley would become an ideological and literal battleground, complete with barricades. “And barricades are never personal,” Didion claims. “We were all very personal then, sometimes relentlessly so, and, at that point where we either act or do not act, most of us are still.” Her generation was defined by having grown up “convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error.”

Didion’s so-called Silent Generation, she says, was silent not because they shared the era’s optimism or feared its repression but “because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.”

When I read this now, the grande dame of New Journalism sounds like Tyler Durden writing for Vanity Fair. But that’s not how it struck me then. It seemed then so brutal that it had to be true.

Of course, Didion wouldn’t have been half as persuasive if she’d been blunt. Instead of grounding her position in the actual issues at Berkeley (racial discrimination and the suppression of student organizing), she offers as evidence scenes from her emerging understanding that adulthood would be “morally ambiguous” and, well, sad. Besides the day-drinking fellow, whose clumsy efforts at the frat piano told Didion “something I had not known before about bad marriages and wasted time and looking backward,” there was a woman she spotted picking daffodils in the rain and the teacher who got drunk one night and disclosed to her his bitterness and fear.

Seeing no antidote for disappointment, she elects not to be poisoned by hope. “We would make a separate peace,” she declares. “We would do graduate work in Middle English . . . make some money and live on a ranch. We would survive outside history.” That’ll show ’em.

But that didn’t pan out either, exactly. Didion gave it her best shot; she lived alone, read Camus and James, and “watched a flowering plum come in and out of blossom.” She swapped coasts, then swapped again. “What I have made for myself is personal, but not exactly peace,” she says. Some of her silent confederates killed themselves, but even those who endured live with what she posits as a burden of insight unique to her generation: the futility of working for social change. “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade . . . ,” she says, “but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”

*

Oh, Joan.

For years, I was sold on this conclusion. And what did it cost me to believe that, really? Didion wrote that barricades are never personal, but as middle-class white women, it’s more accurate to say few barricades’ successes or failures touch us personally. So it’s easy, from a postprandial drowse on a leather couch in the sun, to consider apathy the most existentially valid attitude toward life. And it’s also easy, when sentences are beautiful and methodical and frank bordering on shameless, to mistake their content for truth. To a young person manic with good intentions but stalked by the fear that nothing she was capable of would ever do any good, Didion was a bitter relief. “Yes,” she told me in her gentle, steady, non-manic voice, “yes. It’s O.K. that you’re useless because it’s all for shit. Isn’t it nice to be calmer and more mature than everyone who tries?” She was calling my secret name.

Didion, like lots of writers and like myself, suffered from depression. Not the “depression” that she wrote as characterizing her generation but clinical depression, a disease, one with a cause and treatment and symptoms, like assuming that a stranger fiddling with a piano is trapped in a terrible marriage.

Like I said, “On the Morning After the Sixties” reversed my polarities. Suddenly I knew exactly how I wanted to write: nonfiction, the socio-personal, the essay, the careful cadence, the voice that commands quietly, abstract-concrete-abstract-concrete—all that. And I simultaneously stopped knowing how to be “good.” She was right, after all: man is flawed, social institutions are going to be flawed, and if I were honest, it would be awful nice to live “outside history.” I underlined it. I felt both called out and excused.

I still made gestures after that, but fewer and fewer. I stopped believing anything I could do would “affect man’s fate in the slightest.” I stopped looking for my barricade. This didn’t exactly help my depression. But medication did, and so did realizing how dumb this beautiful essay is. “Why should the individual make an effort on anyone’s behalf unless there’s a good chance of, like, fixing the human condition?”

There’s no such thing as mankind. There’s no such thing as arriving or winning, and there’s no scorecard at the end. But we all run out the clock somehow.

How did I idolize someone who could look at an integrated lunch counter and say, “Meh”?

She wrote real purty.