I have a special affection for essays. It has been a long time since they enjoyed much popularity in the wider culture. I suppose I should say "respect" rather than "popularity" since articles are a debased form of essay and currently compose most of the publishing industry's output. The authors I admire most are those who write essays with the same qualities most often attributed to novelists - muscular prose, pitch perfect diction, and a musical sense of timing. I admire George Orwell to the same extent I despise Jane Austin.
Novelists bear the responsibility of the authorial voice. This is a massively complicated phenomenon I do not pretend to understand. The levels of artifice in written fiction are so dense I can't begin to contemplate pealing them away. Essays are simpler without ever being simple.
I confess to never having read Joan Didion before this week. I have no excuse for this. I thought Slouching Toward Bethlehem would be a good place to start. This collection is work she wrote in her 30s and I'm amazed how good it is. I think authors age at around the same speed as architects - some flash in their 20s but most don't really find their place until they are past retirement age. Anyway, in this collection she has rendered a version of the late 60s in the USA I have never seen before. In the eponymous essay, one she describes as the most difficult piece she ever wrote, we see San Francisco at what must have been the early stages of the massive migration that made that city the place to be (or claim to have been) during the few years we now consider "the 60s". Didion's portrait simply does not mesh with any vision I have ever seen or read of that place and time but the tremendous lucidity of her prose makes it so compelling I have no choice to doubt everything I previously thought I knew. It is as different from any other voice as Hunter Thompson's work of the same period (and as different from Thompson as is possible to imagine). I have the benefit of her own comments about the piece, a kind of cheat sheet to aid my interpretations, and they make it clear what she is really writing about the emergence of a generation who are incapable of reading - at least, reading with the intelligence and sophistication required for her work and maybe not "unable" as much as "disinclined" or "unlikely". Throughout the piece she wrestles with her own irrelevance while everyone else in the text seems driven towards their own, whether in the form of drugs or gurus or plain idiocy. I am a clever guy and, with enough time, I might have got there myself but the essay takes on so many other topics, includes them in an ambitious depiction of a city at a specific time (one in the midst of tremendous change and the locus for dozens of different "movements") I would have stumbled a lot before I reached the goal. Which is another way to say it is a rich piece that rewards multiple readings. It's also a downer. In one of the preceding pieces Didion writes a relatively uncomplicated love letter to John Wayne. In another she discusses the fascination with (pre-crazy as fuck) Howard Hughes. Both these are excellent examples of the genre and of Didion's considerable talent but they are not even close to the emotional impact of Slouching. After my first reading I would say Didion's feeling about San Francisco in '67 was "nonplussed". It is very easy to write a bad essay that makes it unclear what your opinion is but exceptionally difficult to write a good essay that produces the same lack of clarity.
Didion's essays (from this period anyway) leave space for her readers. She is nothing like Orwell in this way. Orwell was a polemicist - and I say that with both admiration and approval. Didion seems like a disinterested observer. Of course, she isn't. Where I can select the lines in Orwell that prove my point, with Didion I would have to imagine what isn't there, or discuss the careful structuring (not architecture) of the piece, or the opinions she allows others to give. Her work is subtle and very, very fine. And, I remind myself, these are the products of her 30s.
I also picked up the 800 page or so volume of collected essays We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live - something I wish I had read a year ago. I am anxious to see how her work changes over the years while, at the same time, very much want to give myself time with each of the essays individually. Books of collected essays are great and the only available option for people like me who couldn't read the essays as they were published - at the rate of a few a year. But the temptation to dive in and read them all as if they were a novel is hard to resist.
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