Democracy
Joan Didion
Book Club June 30, 2024
I am a thirty four year old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini
bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific
waiting for a Tidal Wave that will not come. 1
I spent what seemed to many people I knew an eccentric amount of time in
Honolulu, the particular aspect of which lent me the illusion that I could at
any moment order from room service a revisionist theory of my own history,
garnished with a vanda orchid. 2
I knew little of Joan Didion other than from stories in the media and talk show appearances until I read The Year of Magical Thinking when it came out in 2005, her memoir of coming to terms with her husband John Gregory Dunne’s sudden death. At the time I was reading a biography of Mary Shelley, which detailed the derangement of grief she suffered after the deaths of her small children Clara and William, the one following not long after the other. I wanted to understand that state of consciousness better, the better to understand Shelley’s literary work.
Fortuitously for me and my reading history, correspondences appear between Democracy, published in 1984, and The Year of Magical Thinking that make the latter seem designed to complete the former. More precisely, the two seem written to complement each other, the earlier book in an uncanny sort of anticipatory mode. Didion is part of the American literary tradition of mourners who express a grief that is at the same time retrospective and prospective, alongside Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne; expressing a grief that works as prophecy as well as remembrance.
Didion grew up in California and lived there for most of her early writing career in the 1960s through the ’80s, an explainer of the ways of that state to the public. Hawaii must have appeared to her as a living analogy: as California to most of her readers was a distant and exotic place – nominally white American but with a mixed heritage, and folkways, history and loyalties of its own – so Hawaii must have felt to her – an other America one step further removed. And so the novel’s protagonist, Honolulu native Inez Victor, is something of a many-layered analog of the author: born and raised in relative privilege, had a romance with an older man but turned from him to marry and start a family with someone nearer her own age, shuttled between her home state and New York building the family business. But Inez is something of an orthogonal analogy if there can be such a thing; an example both of a conventional life path fortunately narrowly avoided and a fulfilling destiny regrettably slipped through the fingers – a shadow self, with multiple projections onto the backdrops of possibility.
And this shadow is fugitive, seen in the corners of eyes and grainy snippets of film, standing in the wings at conventions and speeches. She has the anticipatory stare at the horizon through dark glasses of a native of the frontier. Her native Pacific horizon is where the flares of nuclear tests appeared, and where the tidal wave would come from. Didion the narrator says: “As for wanting to work with refugees, she finally did, in Kuala Lumpur, and it occurred to me when I saw her there that Inez Victor had herself been a kind of refugee. She had the protective instincts of a successful refugee. She never looked back.”
Democracy was published two years after Didion’s niece was brutally murdered by her boyfriend. But if the grief of that made a mark on this work, it is not reflective, but if anything works simply as validation of the prophetic mode of the watcher at the frontier, the mourner in waiting. Was that mode born in Inez when her mother left her father and returned to the mainland, abandoning her and her older sister Janet as well? Or when her lover described the light of the nuclear tests to her? Or when she left him to go to college on the mainland, married a young man with good prospects, became the wife of a senator, of a presidential candidate?
I recall being present one morning in a suite in the Hotel Doral in Miami, amid
the debris of Harry Victor’s 1972 campaign for the nomination, when a feature
writer from the Associated Press asked Inez what she believed to be the “major
cost” of public life.
“Memory, mainly,” Inez said…
During the 1972 campaign and even later I thought of Inez Victor’s capacity for
passive detachment as an affectation born of boredom, the frivolous habit of an
essentially idle mind. After the events which occurred in the spring and summer
of 1975 I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism
for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison
cargo. Eject crew.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion tells her husband:
“You should have married someone more like Lenny.” Lenny was my sister-in-law,
Nick’s wife. Lenny entertained and had lunch with friends and ran her house
effortlessly and wore beautiful French dresses and suits and was always
available to look at a house or give a baby shower or take visitors from out of
town to Disneyland. “If I wanted to marry someone more like Lenny I would have
married someone more like Lenny,” John would say, at first patiently, then less
so.
Inez and Lenny, shadows, ruminations on a life avoided. Of course, Inez like Lenny could not have known what lay ahead, what shadows even this conventional life portended. Inez’s father went to North Africa “looking for himself” (that is to say, finally exploring his latent homosexuality, another haunting alternative life shadow); he comes back with a young friend named Mark and develops a revulsion for the hypocrisy and corruption of his privileged class – which culminates in him walking into the lanai of his daughter Janet’s house and shooting her to death, as well as a congressman Janet had been having an affair with.
Didion could not have known about the shadows ahead either, but in grief’s prophetic mode she wrote about it in Democracy before she memorialized it in Year. When Inez runs away from her family mess, her former lover Jack Lovett appears and takes her into his care. He has remained faithful to her all these years in his own way, even through two marriages, quietly keeping tabs on her as he worked for the CIA in the Pacific region. They rekindle their affair, but their time together is short. He dies suddenly of a heart attack:
She had sat on the edge of the pool with Jack Lovett’s head in her lap until
the Tamil doctor arrived. The Tamil doctor said that the twenty minutes she had
spent giving Jack Lovett CPR had been beside the point. The Tamil doctor said
that what happened had been instantaneous, circulatory, final. In the blood, he
said, and simultaneously snapped his fingers and drew them across his throat, a
short chop.
There is a correspondence between this passage and Didion’s description of her husband’s death after he collapsed at their dinner table – EMTs were called, they worked on him for some time, took him to the hospital, where she was informed he was gone. Much later, she got around to reading the autopsy report:
“Lividity.” Post-mortem lividity…
I looked up “lividity” in the handbook on forensic pathology that John kept on
the shelf above his desk. “Although lividity is variable, it normally begins to
form immediately after death and is usually clearly perceptible within an hour
or two.” If lividity was clearly perceptible to the triage nurses by 10:10
p.m., then, it would have started forming an hour before.
An hour before was when I was calling the ambulance.
Which meant he was dead then.
After that instant at the dinner table he was never not dead.
I now know how I’m going to die, he had said in 1987 after the left anterior
descending artery had been opened by angioplasty.
You no more know how you’re going to die than I do or anyone else does, I had
said in 1987.
But she was wrong of course. But was the similarity of descriptions of the suddenness of the two men’s deaths really prophetic? Or did Didion shape the description of her own husband’s death to conform to the fiction she had written decades earlier? Does the prophetic nature of grief make a mockery of attempts to create plausible narratives?
She added a memory of her husband triggered by the sight of the stained glass window at St John the Divine church:
…the Christmas of 1990, the Christmas during which John and I had been doing
the crash rewrite on the picture that never got made, had involved that window.
We had staged the denouement of the picture at St. John the Divine, placed a
plutonium device in the bell tower (only the protagonist realizes that the
device is at St. John the Divine and not the World Trade towers), blown the
unwitting carrier of the device straight out through the big rose window.
But that movie was made, that is a description of the climax of a film called The Peacemaker3, released in 1997, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, whose screenplay Joan played no role in writing. It seems she saw and remembered the movie, picked out a shiny piece of it set in a place she was intimately familiar with, and nested it into her story, like a magpie. And why not? If grief takes over memory and leaves room for nothing but reflection and anticipation, why bother to construct a believable story? Do these derangements of narrative play a role in her literary project of depicting the nature of grief? Is freedom to order up a new personal history one of the compensatory gifts of grief, a prophet’s prerogative?
Didion arranged a new narrative for Inez. After Jack’s death she did not return to her family, but realized her ambition to work with refugees, as an administrator of camps in Malaysia. This narrative seems to have been inspired by a couple Joan and John met a few years before the writing of Democracy, and were described in Year: Joseph4 and Gertrude5 Black. The two couples socialized while participating in cultural exchange programs in Indonesia. The Blacks were a successful academic couple who, late in their careers, went to work for the Roosevelt Foundation, traveling the world to teach and administer aid in undeveloped regions. John later spoke of them regretfully as emblematic of a road not taken by him and Joan, a life of service.
Regrets and service are the products of the parallel retrospective and prophetic natures of grief, which collapse narrative. For in the end, the tidal wave came; not to Hawaii where Joan had been hiding, but to Indonesia and Malaysia, where Inez was working. It came one year almost to the day that John died, marking the end of the year of magical thinking. It made refugees and mourners of everyone in its path that it did not kill; rich and poor, tourist and resident, equally in need of aid. Joan anticipated it, but she could not have predicted it; just as she could not have predicted that her own daughter would be dead less than a year later, at almost exactly the same age Joan and Inez were at the publication of Democracy.
These are simply correspondences, notions that prophets and the grieving trade in. But Inez found correspondences more reliable than narratives in keeping the dead and their memory with her. And eventually so did Joan. She caught up with her shadow. The watchers on the frontier know they must be prepared to run, to escape, to warn at any time, and the watchers and the mourners know they are one. The final prophecy of grief is refugee status and mourning for all survivors, each producing the other. That prophecy is in the end a gift of compassion; in other words, roll up your sleeves now, because you know the wave and the survivors are coming.