DEMOCRACY, A NOVEL, TAKES its title from Henry Adams’s Democracy, subtitled An American Novel. On page 71 of Joan Didion’s new book, the author speaks of a course she gave in the spring of 1975 at Berkeley, where she met with a dozen or so students in the English Department “to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers.” In that light, George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer were considered as pairs of similars—to me an unlikely thought. In sentences of Orwell she heard an echo of Hemingway, and in sentences of Adams she heard a note of the Mailer to come. How the sentences she quotes from Orwell resemble any of Hemingway’s or how Adams’s forty-foot dynamo foretells Mailer is not elucidated, nor how they relate to their authors’ notions of democracy.
In the same way, I have found it hard to make out what connection there can be between Joan Didion’s Democracy, opening with a memory of the pink dawns of early atomic weapons tests in the Pacific, and Henry Adams’s Democracy, which deals with the dirty politics of the second Grant Administration. And, leaving aside Henry Adams, I do not quite see how democracy comes into the Didion tale except for the fact that two Democratic politicians (both Vietnam-war opponents) and a CIA man play large roles in it. For Adams, “democracy” had become a coarse travesty of the ideal of popular rule, indissociable from the gravy train and the grease spots on the Congressman’s vest. For Miss Didion too, the term is rich in irony, though corruption by now is so universal that it can no longer be identified with a party or tendency or grand ideal betrayed. There is nobody left like Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, Adams’s high-minded Philadelphia mouthpiece, to feel shocked.
The Didion novel, which arrives at its climax in March 1975, while the character “Joan Didion” is teaching her course at Berkeley and the Vietnam War is winding down, can be described as a murder story set in Honolulu—a murder without a mystery in that the elderly “blueblood” killer of a nisei politician and of his own “socialite” daughter proudly announces culpability from his room in the downtown YMCA. I have put “blueblood” and “socialite” in quotation marks to indicate the colonial, road-show quality of the island’s palmy social life, which always seems to have an airport (once dock-side) lei around its neck. Aloha oe. In Hawaii, the fiftieth state of the Union, United States imperialism can claim a happy musical-comedy-style ending. And yet the islands, like Kenya, like the Bahamas, have been prone to quite classy murder, often, as in this case, though not always, involving a transgression of the color line. I remember the Massie (blond wife of a naval officer) case, the Pacific-coast newspaper sensation when I was a girl, and the intriguing name of the victim and rape suspect whose body was found in the white officer’s car trunk—Joseph Kahahawawa.
As I say, in Democracy no mystery is made about the murder of Representative Wendell Omura, Democrat of Hawaii, and Janet Ziegler, daughter of the killer and Harry Victor’s sister-in-law, on the Zieglers’ lanai. For “lanai” read “porch,” and for “Harry Victor” read “Democratic Presidential hopeful in the 1972 primaries” (conceded in California before the polls closed). What is left murky is what the Congressman was doing on the lanai early in the morning with Janet Ziegler. And that is the least of the arcana. “Cards on the table,” the author declares, introducing herself to the reader on page 17. Yet despite an appearance of factuality achieved by the author’s total recall of names, middle names, dates, by perfect chronometry of arrival and departure times and stereophonic dialogue of imaginary newsworthy figures, Democracy is deeply mysterious, cryptic, enigmatic, like a tarot pack or most of Joan Didion’s work.
One way of looking at that work is to decide that it has been influenced by movies; hypnotized by movies would be more appropriate. Maybe that is what coming from California, even as far north as Sacramento, does to you. Like the camera, this mental apparatus does not think but projects images, very haunting and troubling ones for the most part, precisely because they are mute. Even when sonorized, as has happened here, they remain speechless and somewhat frightening in their stunned aversion from thought. This powerful relation to film, stronger that that of any other current author, must account for her affinity with Conrad, whose tales and novels—above all Nostromo, The Secret Agent, “Heart of Darkness”—seem to have anticipated film, like an uncanny prophecy.
What was new in Conrad was the potency of an image or images, often inexplicable in purely reasonable terms; why should “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” have been tumid with meaning for T. S. Eliot (who used it as an epigraph for “The Hollow Men”) if he had not heard some pidgin sorcery in the summing up? Certainly one senses Conrad in Miss Didion’s Democracy; he has passed through this territory, making trail blazes. The novel seems closer to “Heart of Darkness” than the literal-minded movie Apocalypse Now did, which was also trying to talk about the end of Vietnam and unspeakable “horrors,” located upriver in the film. One odd development in Democracy, though, as compared with any Conrad text, is that the narrator—in Conrad usually the immensely talkative and indeed (dare I say it?) too garrulous Marlow—has been virtually silenced. What the character “Joan Didion” offers us is mainly brisk narration, impossible to construe as comment or rumination, unlike Marlow’s chatter, but I shall come back to “Joan Didion” later.
For the moment, I want to forget about the cinematic influences and effects—the freezes and rapid fades and the humming sound track that make themselves felt in whatever she has done since Run River (1963)—and concentrate on examining the construction of this particular book as book. Yet here too I am reminded of what one might call an allied art. The construction of Democracy feels like the working out of a jigsaw puzzle that is slowly being put together with a continual shuffling and re-examination of pieces still on the edges or heaped in the middle of the design. We have started with a bit of sky (those pink dawns); now and then, without hurry, a new piece is carefully inserted, and the gentle click of cardboard locking into cardboard is felt—no forcing. Despite the fact that the pieces are known to us, face down and face up, almost from the start, there is an intense suspense, which seems to be causeless (no cliff-hanger this, no heroine tied to the railroad tracks), suspense arising from the assembly of the pieces, that is, from the procedures of narrative themselves. “This is a hard story to tell,” the author says on page 15. It is a hard story to listen to, boring in the primal sense of the word—“making a hole in or through with a drill.” Some parts of it are painful in their own right, shocking (or would have been to Henry Adams’s Mrs. Lightfoot Lee), but what mainly hurts is the drilling, the repetition, in short, the suspense of waiting for the narrative line to be carefully played out, the odd-shaped piece inserted.
Here are three successive paragraphs and the start of a fourth from the first page.
“He said to her.
“Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.
“Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.
“He said ...”
And here is a later paragraph, but still from the first pages, when we are getting into the story:
“Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said one night in the spring of 1975, one night outside Honolulu in the spring of 1975, one night in the spring of 1975 when the C-130s and the C-141s were already shuttling between Honolulu and Anderson and Clark and Saigon all night long, thirty-minute turnaround at Tan Son Nhut, touching down and loading and taxiing out on flight idle, bringing out the dependents, bringing out the dealers, bringing out the money, bringing out the pet dogs and the sponsored bar girls and the porcelain elephants. “Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor, “Harry Victor’s wife.”
Important information has just been passed: Harry Victor is “someone,” a national celebrity. Before long it turns out that he has been a congressman, a senator, a war opponent, a Presidential candidate, that he has been photographed with Eleanor Roosevelt and Coretta King; the first tip-off that he is also a prize heel comes on page 55. So that phrase, “Oh shit, Inez, Harry Victor’s wife,” that keeps returning like a refrain is derisive for the one who speaks it—Jack Lovett, an “information specialist” and CIA man, a spook. The refrain comes back over and over, collecting incrementa, like a round. “Scotland’s burning, Scotland’s burning, Fire fire fire, Pour on water, Pour on water.” Or: “Oh shit, Inez. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew. Down the tubes, the bartender said. Bye-bye Danang. Harry Victor’s wife.”
A round, but better, as I said, a puzzle. The enigma lies in the slow deliberation with which the picture is filled in. The dialogue (or monologue) begins in the pink light of the Honolulu airport in late March 1975. The atomic tests of 1952, ’53 (“Christ they were sweet”) are a flashback. On page 29, a shooting is mentioned after some Honolulu social history, after the introduction of “Joan Didion” (“Call me the author”), after the introduction of a swiftly palmed photo of Paul Christian, Inez Victor’s father, playing backgammon barefoot with John Huston in Cuernavaca in 1948, followed by a second photo of him—barefoot once more and in handcuffs—taken by a newspaper photographer on March 25, 1975, outside the Honolulu YMCA.
And so, finally, fourteen pages after the first mention, the name Harry Victor comes up again, with the strong indication that the individual referred to is a “name,” as evidenced by the New York Times’s caption of the photo of the murderer: “Victor Family Touched by Island Tragedy.” A few pages later, the group of interlocked pieces entitled Jack Lovett is fitted into the picture. Another flashback presents him as he first looked to the author (in 1960, in a photographer’s studio on West 40th Street) when she and Inez Victor were both working on Vogue, the author in the features department and Inez Victor in fashion.
Jack Lovett is what was called then “an older man”; the author recalls “thinking that he could be [Inez’s] father.” Inez Victor is smiling at Jack Lovett in a certain way. “He can’t stay,” she tells Joan Didion in the Vogue photographer’s studio. “Because he’s running a little coup somewhere. I just bet.” A few pages later, there follows a piece of WNBC film taken March 18, 1975, showing Inez Victor dancing at a party on the St. Regis Roof given by the Governor of New York—that would have been Hugh Carey, no? But the date of the network clip, “one week exactly before Paul Christian fired the shots” out in the mid-Pacific, refers to a quite different calendar of events.
Now, the fact is that from 1956 to 1963 Joan Didion did work at Vogue in the features department; it is in Who’s Who. When you consider that Inez Victor, b. Inez Christian, d. Paul and Carol Christian, cannot be found in Who’s Who or any other book of reference (not even Who Was Who), you may find that spooky, more so, actually, than Jack Lovett’s occupation. It raises the question “What are we supposed to believe here?” in an uncanny way. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! What is a live fact—Joan Didion—doing in a work of fiction? She must be a decoy set there to lure us into believing that Inez Victor is real in some ghostly-goblin manner, as real anyway as the author herself is. For that purpose, the classic narrator, the fictive “I,” could not serve, evidently. Or just seemed dated in a deconstructing universe. Before the end of the novel, in a flash-forward, the author is represented as actually flying to Kuala Lumpur to see Inez Victor, who by that time is working in a camp for refugees, having separated from Harry Victor and their children, Adlai and Jessie, and all their world. Does this mirror a real journey that Joan Didion has pressed into service to meet a fictional need (to end the novel), as other authors are apt to do with loose material that happens to be lying around?
In current theories of fiction, much attention is given to the role of the narrator, considered as sheer verbal device, without correspondence to any anterior reality. Yet if I understand Joan Didion right, here she is doing the exact opposite, inserting an arrestable fact—herself—into the moving sands of fiction. I am not sure what the result of the undertaking is. It may well be to diminish the fictional likelihood of “Inez Victor” while leaving the reader to wonder about the reality of “Joan Didion.”
In fact, the problem of “originals” haunts this peculiar fiction, intentionally, I should guess. It is an eerie lighting effect, making the strange appear familiar and the familiar strange. At times Harry Victor seems meant to recall one of the Kennedys (most likely Bobby) or all of them. There is a hint of Jack’s womanizing, and the suggestion that Inez Victor may have a “drinking problem” brings to mind Teddy and Joan. The new generation of the famous family makes its entry with Jessie Victor’s teen-age drug habit. Yet when a flashback to the ’72 primaries gives us a quick shot of Harry Victor conceding California (in other words, the ball game), it is a reverse image of 1968 and Eugene McCarthy conceding to Bobby, except that nobody could picture McCarthy as the original of a ruthless power-seeker capable of naming his son Adlai. Naturally, Adlai, who organizes a campus vigil for “the liberation of Saigon” virtually as soon as his voice changes, is a perfect Victor junior.
What is wrong with the Victors, father and son, what is wrong with their multiple originals, can be summed up in a word—celebrity. They are all media divinities, “names,” a nominalist’s nightmare, mere vocables. “Harry Victor’s wife” can only escape the condign punishment that goes with the status by “burying herself” in Kuala Lumpur. Inez Victor’s penance is the book’s resolution—the final phrase in the canon of “Bye-bye Danang.” It is odd how it reminds one of the last act of Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Celia Coplestone, you remember, a smart-set Londoner, having found her vocation with a penitential order of nurses on an island in the “East,” is crucified near an anthill by natives.
I have noted the cinematic quality of Joan Didion’s work and the relation of the present construction to puzzles, specifically of the jigsaw kind. I might also have compared the narrative line to a French seam—one big stitch forward, one little stitch back, turn over and repeat on other side of cloth—valued in dressmaking for its strength and for hiding the raw edges of the cloth. Still another set of correspondences is discernible in literary reminiscences and allusions, beginning, obviously, with the title: Henry Adams, Hemingway, Mailer, Orwell, Wallace Stevens, Delmore Schwartz, A. E. Housman, W. H. Auden, Kierkegaard. The ending must be a pointed reference to Eliot, and on page 16 one has met some lines in italics followed by the words “So Trollope might begin this novel.”
This is part of the book’s knowingness—not an altogether pleasant quality. The knowingness makes a curious accompaniment to the celebrity theme, for Joan Didion clearly does not care for the celebrity circuit and one of the attractions Jack Lovett has for her—and possibly for Inez too—is that he is not in Who’s Who, does not have his name on his whiskey bottle in a Hong Kong restaurant (in fact has a false name taped to his quart of Black Label); Jack Lovett is a solitary who drowns in a hotel swimming-pool and is shipped out in a body bag. His profession requires him not to be known and to leave no fingerprints on what he touches.
Still, to be known and to be knowing are not so far apart. Everyone in Democracy is some kind of insider. It is not merely the Harry Victors and their entourages; the author herself has some complicity in the insider-outsider game—seven years at Vogue leave their mark. In the milieu of this Democracy, not just people but places and times can be poker chips: the St. Regis Roof, the Dalton School, Grant Park in Chicago at the ’68 convention, where Harry Victor is not shy about getting himself tear-gassed for the camera of a Life photographer. But to appreciate that detail, you have to know about Grant Park, and not everybody does. To be knowing about the right names implies, moreover, being knowing about the wrong names—Dow Chemical, Air Asia, Air America. That is very important too.
The names of airports can be spent like coin: Anderson, Clark, Travis, Johnston, besides the old penny-ante ones like Tan Son Nhut. I am not sure where some of these airports are (I guess most of them are in the Pacific) or whether they are military or civilian. But I know that I ought to know. That is the special kind of insecurity—fear of not belonging to a club—that Hemingway had a genius for producing in his readers and in a colleague like Scott Fitzgerald, who even confessed to Ernest that he thought his own penis was too small. The spoor of Hemingway is all over Democracy, like the print of the Abominable Snowman. Not your table manners, not even your morals, but saying the wrong thing (as poor Scott Fitzgerald apparently did rather often) excludes one forever.
The greatest sinner in Democracy is Harry Victor, who infallibly pronounces sentences like “I’ve always tried to talk up to the American people. Not down. You talk down to the American people at your peril. ... Either Jefferson was right or he wasn’t. I happen to believe that he was.” That “happen to believe” will cook him for all eternity—I agree with Joan Didion there. Yet to my mind, that is insufficient evidence for artistic damnation. A man who identifies a ghastly young woman he has brought along to a London dinner party as “a grandniece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States” condemns himself socially whenever he gives tongue; in real life, with any luck, one could avoid meeting him. But in a novel, once such people are met, I think one has the right to ask to know them better before sending them unpardoned to hell. Is the ear the ultimate moral judge?
For all its technical mastery and on-target social observation (Miss Didion is wonderful not only at hearing her characters but at naming them—take “Inez”), there is a depthlessness in Democracy as there was in A Book of Common Prayer. We would need to know a Harry Victor from the inside looking out to feel his real hollowness; it is tiring just to listen to his sound track playing over and over. This is true for most of the characters, though with the bit parts the effect is stunning: “‘This is a stressful time,’ the doctor said,” following his previous one-liner, “It might be good to talk about therapy.” The bigger role of Jessie, the Victors’ teen-aged, heroin-shooting child, does not come off so well; perhaps the unexplained in her (like the manner of her arrival in Saigon without a passport) bulks somewhat too large. To my mind, the best character is Billy Dillon, Harry Victor’s aide, who has the good fortune—which is also the reader’s—of being a consciously funny man.
But, finally, what is one to make of Jack Lovett, inscrutable by profession from beginning to end? Whatever one decides, one must applaud the author’s nerve in making a CIA agent in his sixties the love interest and parfit gentil knight of her book. Actually, this is a romantic, even a sentimental novel, with the CIA man and the congressman’s wife as a pair of eternally faithful lovers, constantly separated and constantly reunited till his death and burial under a jacaranda tree—after which Inez Christian Victor has only one choice, in essence the choice of Guinevere: to take the veil. Kuala Lumpur is her Almesbury. “Mother Teresa,” Billy Dillon dryly observes. That Inez Victor (and her creator) clearly prefer a CIA agent to a famous liberal senator may indicate a preference for action over talk or just a distaste for United States hypocrisy—the larger aims of Harry Victor and of “the store” being at bottom the same. Maybe those are the “cards on the table” that were promised when we first met “Joan Didion” in that early chapter.
Possibly. As I said to start with, the book is deeply enigmatic. For the reader willing to sweat over them, there are a number of half-buried puzzles. One riddling passage, I confess, has been tormenting me for weeks. It appears for the first time on page 18: “So I have no leper who comes to the door every morning at seven. No Tropical Belt Coal Company, no unequivocal lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.” “Joan Didion” (she is the one talking) seems to mean that as a novelist she lacks some of the reliable old machinery that might have helped her tell her story. On page 78 the thought recurs. Inez is watching her unconscious sister Janet through a glass partition in the third-floor intensive care unit of Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. Janet is on life support. Inez is still wearing a plumeria lei given her at the Oahu airport. “This scene is my leper at the door,” the author tells us, “my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.”
Does the reader recognize anything? For the leper, my friends and I have tried Conrad, Kipling, Graham Greene, Waugh’s Handful of Dust—in vain. The Tropical Belt Coal Company looks more promising in that it is more specific. That leper could be anywhere. In The Ten Commandments, maybe, of Cecil B. De Mille, just as well as in Graham Greene. But no Tropical Belt Coal Company of fiction comes to mind, and indeed it sounds like a joke: Does anyone burn coal in the tropics? Yet coal is mined in Borneo; that is in the world atlas.* As for the figure on the hillcrest, it could be an Indian in any old Western. Perhaps all the elements in the puzzle are out of movies. Perhaps Joan Didion is just wishing that she were an old-time screenwriter rather than a novelist. If that is it, I am irritated. To be portentous, one ought to be deeper than that. I feel a bit like Alice when she heard the Duchess speak calmly of “a large mustard mine near here.” Of course, the Duchess could speak calmly because that was Wonderland. And possibly that is the right way to take this latest Joan Didion—calmly, not setting out to solve sphinxine riddles, not looking for influences and analogues, not hoping for the author’s sake to exorcise the malign shadow of Hemingway, certainly not asking how Wendell Omura got on Janet’s lanai or how, precisely, old Hem, than whom no more elitist writer ever took up pen, could illustrate in his sentence structure any idea of democracy. Just let it go.
April 22, 1984
* Numerous readers wrote in to tell me that the Tropical Belt Coal Company is on the first page of Conrad’s Victory. Yes. And one reader proposed that the leper came out of Flaubert’s “St. Julian the Hospitaler.” That does not ring a bell for me.