Sun 6 Oct 2024

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The White Album by Joan Didion

I think the funny thing about Joan Didion’s The White Album, is how complex it is, definitely not as minimalist as the colour white. This collection of essays follows San Francisco in its most boisterous, Didion in her most turbulent in spirit – but what a backdrop for amazing writing. She again touches upon some of the most difficult eras of America – the 60s and early 70s.

 

We tell ourselves stories in order to live – the most quoted of all her writing, begins the essays – neatly organised into five sections – the first containing the collection’s title, the other four identified by major topic or theme – covering everything from the Episcopalian bishop of California, James Pike, through to the Black Panther meetings, cultural figures  and the several prison meetings of Linda Kasabian – the former follower of Charles Manson who testified against the group for the Sharon Tate murders.
 

I think my favourite section is Sojourns, with enlightening chapters such as In Hollywood, capturing the realities of filmmaking and the critique of film –

 

“To recognize that the picture is but the by-product of the action is to make rather more arduous the task of maintaining one’s self image as (Kaufman’s own job definition) “a critic of new works” […] A finished picture defies all attempts to analyse what makes it work or not work:…” p.164-165

 

And a paragraph I find very amusing:

 

“About the best writer on film can hope to do, then, is to bring an engaging or interesting intelligence to bear upon the subject, a kind of petit point on Kleenex effect which rarely stands much scrutiny. “Motives” are inferred where none existed; allegations spun out thin speculation…” p.165-166

 

Didion has a very blasé method of scrutinising both film maker and film reviewer in one paragraph. She highlights the very favoured role of filmmaker in creating films which in themselves create self-image through their work. However, only as a cause of what is happening around them – an artist who without their subject(s) or environment is nothing, but isn’t that the truth of all art? And within this, she suggests as an art form, is a method of maintaining self-image. From there she describes the work of a film reviewer, who she states later in the essay “…whose actual work is somewhere else…” I think this is to do with her own inability to describe films as a writer, and the difficulty she finds in critiquing them, though she enjoys watching them. 

 

I love how brutally honest she is about her thoughts  on Hollywood and its façades, whilst also portraying the fact that this is one of the most triumphant times of film-making in history, producing some of the best actors, directors, writers and films of all time – but only because of the reality of the world around them, and so she was right, the picture is but the by-product of the action – but one which is constantly tied to the artist’s own image. How very meta of her to describe film, isn’t all film made up of “images”?

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The other chapter which struck me was ‘In Bed’ which describes Didion’s own experience of her own art form, and the experience of writer’s block or the physical sensation which brings her out of such a state, as she writes about her “migraines”:

“You don’t look like a migraine personality,” a doctor once said to me. “Your hair’s messy.  But I suppose you’re a compulsive housekeeper.” Actually, my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.”  p.171

 

Here she describes herself - a writer with her own struggle of perfectionism. It is through recognising the physical sensation, that she is brought back into her body.  She describes the migraine as a “circuit breaker and the fuse emerged intact. There is a pleasant convascalent euphoria… “I notice the nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing,” poetically, she juxtaposes the natural to the manmade glass, just as she describes the naturally human sensation of pain and her writing. I think here she’s trying to explain the personal battles of living through the surface of chaos, and the hardship of living through a time which she doesn’t fully comprehend and one she struggles to put down in words.

 

There is something captivating about The White Album as a collection of essays, but one which is quite bleak, and unhopeful.  Amid the political environment of American conservatism of the 60s, she doesn’t sugarcoat the direction or misdirection of her country. There is a certain uncertainty in her writing which echoes the realities of today, even outside of America and the 60s/70s, through the chaos of Brexit, COVID, gun violence, Presidential exploitation, and so forth, she understands and warns the reader that uncertainty is constant and regenerated through the ages.

 

Overall, a very worthwhile read, but I am certainly biased as someone who is determined to read all Didion’s works (and slowly working her way through her repertoire), an absolute icon IMO. The only thing is that this is probably the saddest one I’ve read so far, one to dip in and out of, perhaps as a pallet cleanser from other things you’re reading – especially when you’re looking for something punchy and gritty. One which reminds you that history indeed repeats itself, and that sometimes uncertainty comes with the certainty that life keeps going…

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Rating: 8/10