Let Me Tell You What I Mean review – Joan Didion’s unwavering presence
In her essay Last Words, Joan Didion describes the literary detritus left behind in the wake of Ernest Hemingway’s suicide: “a discrete body of work different in kind from, and in fact tending to obscure, the body of work published by Hemingway in his own lifetime.” The continual publication – and the fact that Hemingway had no control over it – disconcerts Didion. “You care about the punctuation or you don’t, and Hemingway did.” The fact that his posthumous life of letters could be used by others to make verdicts on his brilliance is terrifying; writers move words, syllables, lines on the page all in an effort to create something “shored against … [their] ruin”. What is left when this is ignored?
Didion frequently cites Hemingway as a major influence on her writing. For her, as for him, control on the level of the clause, the sentence, the paragraph is no small concern. In a 1977 interview with Sara Davidson of The New York Times, Didion tells of agonising over the comma – or its absence – in the first sentence of Democracy (1984). Hemingway’s deathly vulnerability is more than an essay subject – it is a disturbing recognition of what can occur to the writer who loses ownership of their carefully modulated prose.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean is slim volume of twelve essays from 1968 to 2000; all works that have not appeared in collected volumes before. Its very publication is a statement of continued, defiant, literary presence. At 86, Didion is still around – and can still organise, edit, and publish her work; she is still going to tell us what she knows, sees, and thinks.
The essays vary in subject from the dullness of newspapers (Alicia and the Underground Press, 1968), to college rejection (On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice, 1968), and the life of the theatre director Tony Richardson (The Long-Distance Runner, 1993).
Why I Write (1976) is included in the volume. This essay – with its title borrowed from George Orwell – is an exposition of the unavoidable first-person I-ness of writing. Didion declares that writing is “an aggressive, even a hostile act”; this belief echoes her statement from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) that, “writers are always selling somebody out.” For Didion writing is, at its core, about eroding “the reader’s most private sense”’ it constructs and corrodes two “Is” as both writer and reader fall under its power.
In her 1968 essay, On Keeping a Notebook, Didion reminds her readers that she cannot escape her own subjectivity – she is, and always will be, “the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress”. But in this later essay the subjectivity is more radical – it is less an unavoidable fact of all observation than the very existence of those observations; Didion writes so as to understand what she thinks, and her essays are the products of this.
In part, this revelation feels like false modesty. Didion declares that she cannot think in abstractions, and has always been drawn to the concrete, observable facts of life – her essays are simply her means of understanding what she sees. Yet, this is the woman who has catalogued the problems of 1980s El Salvador, the exiled Cuban experience in Miami, the dark side of the 1960s drug scene, and the soul of California. While she may write to explain situations to herself, she has done a wonderful job of explaining them to many others.
Regardless, the essay captures a contradiction that lies at the heart of all of her writing. Didion is adept at describing feelings, scenes, and images in imitate, tangible detail. Yet, in her novels and essays, readers are left on the other side of an unbridgeable divide; to read a Didion essay is to know, in chromatic detail, of what you cannot know and cannot experience. This is not because Didion’s writing is not good enough. Quite the opposite; it is so brilliant – and dances with such a sense of first-person delight – that any reader momentarily senses the personal I at its centre, the locus of the knowledge and experience, before being shunted rudely back to their own existence.
In this collection, this first-person delight comes across in Pretty Nancy (1938). Notionally an essay about Nancy Reagan, Didion’s text is more an exposition of what it is like to observe, to note, and to record; we learn far less about Nancy’s daily life and pretences for journalists than we do of Didion’s ability to wryly see through it all.
The Long-Distance Runner is a verbal explosion of vignette and colour; just as Tony Richardson created scenes on stage, Didion creates them in her prose. What is the description of his house “filed with flowers and birds and sunlight and children” other than a stage direction itself? Didion has often described how novels come to her in vivid images, shimmering around the edges; the pictures in her prose also glimmer, reflect, and shift when placed under close observation. For a woman who so frequently describes her reliance on concrete facts rather than abstract ideas, it is hard to draw a distinct line between her prose and her fiction.
The collection ends with Everywoman.com (2000) – an essay on Martha Stewart, the American businesswoman famous for her recipes and ability to market scenes of domestic life. It feels bizarre to read Didion so eloquently pick apart an element of modern life – the contradictions inherent in celebrity culture – when she is so closely associated with the mid-20th century. But Didion’s intense attention to detail can turn its hand to anything.
It might be too much to ask of an octogenarian in the midst of a pandemic, but I would do anything – anything at all – to read Didion’s succinct and witty prose on some of the more bizarre elements of contemporary culture. She would be brilliant on Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, or she could have a fascinating discussion with Melania Trump. As with every single one of her other subjects, she would write with unflinching sincerity and clarity, who knows what we might discover in her sentences.
In the dark depths of my email drafts is a long, winding, adulatory, and unquestionably annoying email to Didion. Even if I could find her email address (does the queen of the typewriter even use email?), I would never send it; Didion must know how much of an impact she has had on so many readers without reading another piece of semi-incoherent fan-mail. But its existence – I periodically add to it with more inane observations – is a testament to the fact that Didion’s clipped clauses and unwavering focus have had a life beyond herself. Her writing is brilliant in its personal experience and embrace of subjectivity, but she has always let other people in along the way. Just for a second, we are all the shy girl hiding from her classmates in the dirty raincoat.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean is published by HarperCollins (£12.99).