Joan Didion's California
Where I Was From, Joan Didion's meditation on the myths of California (Knopf, 2003), has been in the pile for quite a while, and I don't know why I put off reading it. I do know why I picked it up; Ms Didion's recent piece in the NYRB on Terry Schiavo (which I wrote about last week) left me hungry for more of the writer's peculiarly addictive blend of dry humor, muffled oracle, and utter sérieux (she must translate very well into French - although it appears that anybody là-bas who wants to read her can do so in English). And because I've been reading Them to Kathleen, I needed an alternative memoir to satisfy the craving that Francine du Plessix Gray has excited. Voilà, the perfect moment.
Where I Was From is a book of awakening, a work of grasping her earliest interior furniture, holding it up to the light, and finding it somehow fake or insubstantial. The writer springs from generations of Californians; many of her ancestors crossed the plains and the mountains before 1868, the year of the railroad. We can forget, nowadays, what a desert almost a third of our heartland is, but from the Rockies just beyond Denver to the Sierra Nevada on the California-Nevada border, the terrain is not hospitable to human beings. And it is not easily traversed, either, in wagon trains pulled by oxen. Many people died en route, most notoriously the Donner Party, in which some forty-odd people perished out of a company of ninety when the Party could not clear the snows of the Sierrra Nevada in the fall of 1846. Making the passage was an ordeal that, like warfare, produced legends but also silence. The people who got to California were heroically taciturn. This tough calmness was the ideal breeding ground for mythology, and by Joan Didion's day the mythology was so ingrained that she could give, in eighth grade, a concise account of it.
They who came to California were not the self-satisfied, happy and content people, but the adventurous, the restless, and the daring. They were different even from those who settled in other western states. 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. But we can't do this. We can't stop and become satisfied and content. We must live up to the our heritage, go on to better and greater things for California.
Seen along one plane, squinting slightly, this is all fairly true. California attracted adventurers and gamblers. And so on. What happened to Ms Didion in her forties, it seems, is that she suddenly saw California along another plane entirely, and understood that she had never bothered to press the meaning of what now struck her not as history but as mythology. Although the word does not appear in the excerpt from her valediction, the passage is heavy with the implication that what all those heroic pioneers did, from building the biggest cities in the west to building the greatest dams the world has known, was constructive. The world, and California in particular, was a better place for all that building, and the building must continue, so that the California and the world might become even better. It's an admirable call, if indeed surprisingly more boosterish than one can imagine Ms Didion ever being.
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