One of the vast O’Keeffe Sky Above Clouds canvasses floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. ‘Who drew it,’ she whispered after a while. I told her. ‘I need to talk to her,’ she said finally.
My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming that the glory she saw in the work reflected a glory in its maker… that every choice one made alone … betrayed one’s character. Style is character.
It is easy to see here how quickly sentimentality proceeds to nonsense. The extent to which style isn’t character can be gauged by (for example) reading a literary biography, or by trying to imagine a genuinely fruitful discussion between Georgia O’Keeffe and Miss Didion’s seven-year-old daughter: a scene of painful mawkishness springs unavoidably to mind. When the child whispered, ‘I need to talk to her,’ Miss Didion should have whispered back, ‘Quiet, I’m working,’ and got on with her job. As it is, Miss Didion gives us a tremulous pep-talk on O’Keeffe’s career, fondly stressing the ‘crustiness’ and ‘pepperiness’ of ‘this hard woman’, ‘this angelic rattlesnake’. She sums up:
In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. ‘That evening star fascinated me,’ she wrote ‘ … My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot them. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.’ In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record. Ten watercolors were made from that star.
A tribute to ‘hardness’, from one tough performer to another, becomes a husky gasp of shared prostration.
‘Style is character.’ Or, as Miss Didion puts it: Style is character. If style were character, everyone would write as self-revealingly as Miss Didion. Not everyone does. Miss Didion’s style relishes emphasis, repetition, re-emphasis. Her style likes looking at the same things from different angles. Her style likes starting and finishing successive sentences with identical phrases. Take these two little strophes, separated by a hundred-odd pages in the present book:
In the years after World War I my mother had put pennies for Grace [Episcopal Cathedral] in her mite box but Grace would never be finished. In the years after World War II I would put pennies for Grace in my mite box but Grace would never be finished.
And:
In 1973 the five pillboxes on Makapuu Head had seemed to James Jones exactly as he had left them in 1942. In 1973 the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had seemed to James Jones less formidably rich than he had left it in 1942…
Both passages evoke the passing of time with the same reflexive cross-hatching. Equally, you know when to ready yourself for some uplift, because each sentence – like the one about Miss Didion’s shopping-centre — contains more ‘and’s than a song by Leonard Cohen: ‘I thought about barrack rats and I thought about Prewítt and Maggio and I thought about Army hatred and it seemed to me that night in Honolulu …” That night in Honolulu, that day in Chicago. It is a style that has become set in its own modulations, proclaiming its individuality by means of a few recurrent quirks and lilts. In other words, it has become mannered.
It could be argued that the same thing happened to Miss Didion’s fiction. Run, River (1963) is an exemplarily solid first novel, mildly ambitious in construction and restrained in delivery and scope — contentedly minor, above all. It is set in rural California during and after the Second World War, and examines familial and community power-balances in relaxed, elegant, clichéless prose. Miss Didion’s somewhat top-heavy interest in madness and stupefaction — the vanished knack of ‘making things matter’ — puts in an early appearance here, but it is at least placed against a background where not everything is mad and stupefied. The trouble starts with Play It As It Lays (1970). This is when the Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or a manner, to answer to it. Here come divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spiced-up paragraphs, forty-word chapters, and the sort of italicised wedges of prose that used to be called ‘fractured’. The ‘bad’ characters are movie people who drink and take drugs to excess, sleep with one another a lot, and don’t go crazy. The ‘good’ characters are movie people who drink and take drugs to excess, sleep with one another a lot, and do go crazy. The bad characters are shallow pragmatists. The good characters are (between ourselves) shallow nihilists. We are meant to think that BZ, the ruefully degenerate producer, is acting with perversely heroic decorum when he kills himself with vodka and Seconal at the end of the book (‘Don’t start faking me now__Take my hand’). And we are meant to think that Marie, the ruefully degenerate actress, is actually trumping BZ in the nihilism stakes by the shrewd expedient of not killing herself. The book closes: