Review: ‘The Last Love Song,’ a Biography of Joan Didion
BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
Loss, nostalgia for a vanished past and “the
unspeakable peril of the everyday” represented by “swimming pools, high-tension
wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet” — these are the
themes that have animated Joan Didion’s work, since “Slouching Towards
Bethlehem” established her as one of America’s most distinctive and acute
literary voices almost five decades ago.
All her fears about the precariousness of life
were horribly realized in December 2003, when her daughter, Quintana Roo, went
into a New York hospital with an apparent case of flu and was soon lying unconscious
in an intensive care unit, suffering from pneumonia and septic shock; days
later, her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, sat down for dinner and
collapsed, dead from a massive heart attack. Quintana would die about a year
and a half later at the age of 39.
Ms. Didion, now 80, chronicled these events in
two books — “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), a shattering contemplation
of loss and grief and sorrow, and “Blue Nights” (2011), a more elliptical meditation on her
daughter’s life and death — much as she chronicled the rest of her life in her
other work: her nervous collapses, her marital ups and downs, her anxieties,
her illnesses, her craving for stability. In “The Last Love Song,” Tracy
Daugherty — a fiction writer, and the author of critically acclaimed
biographies of Donald Barthelme and Joseph Heller — unavoidably draws heavily
upon Ms. Didion’s own writings while at the same time trying to draw
distinctions between her real life and her literary persona, between her
experiences as a daughter, writer, wife, and mother and what he astringently
describes as her “working her brand.” He notes, for instance, that Ms.
Didion wrote in “Blue Nights” about thinking of taking Quintana, then an
infant, with her on assignment to Saigon, during the Vietnam War, implying that
she was so unprepared to be a mother that the absurdity of such an undertaking
never occurred to her. In fact, he writes, she was anything but clueless — “she
was a steely professional, not about to let motherhood get in the way of her
career.” What stopped her, Mr. Daugherty argues, was the simple fact that
Quintana’s adoption had not yet been finalized and “she could not be
transported out of state, much less out of the country.”
The Didion who emerges from “The Last Love
Song” is both a frail, angst-ridden outsider and a shrewd Hollywood and New
York insider; a vulnerable witness to history and a hardheaded survivor; a
writer drawn to theatricality and extremes, and a woman who prizes order and
control. Mr. Daugherty — who did not get Ms. Didion’s cooperation — does an
agile job here of examining how his subject’s life illuminated the eras she
traversed (and vice versa). He uses her experiences, much as Ms. Didion did, as
an index of the cultural convulsions that rocked the country during the 1960s
and ’70s, while at the same time, using her literary methods and musical sense
of language to chart her peregrinations between California and New York, and
her intellectual evolution over the years.
Joan Didion, shown in 1977, is the
subject of a biography. Credit Associated
Press
There are a few tasteless and superfluous
lapses into gossip in this book — in one case, he even notes that a source’s
observations “should be taken with heavy pitchers of salt.” And Mr. Daugherty
dances nervously (though not as nervously as Ms. Didion has) around the subject
of Quintana’s emotional difficulties and alcoholism, quoting a close friend who
says her depressions and drinking were “probably intertwined” with her final
illness (acute pancreatitis, which Mr. Daugherty writes, is “usually caused in
young people by prolonged drug or alcohol abuse”). For the most part, this
thoughtful and ambitious biography remains focused on Ms. Didion’s writing,
using her life to shed light on her highly autobiographical work. Mr. Daugherty
reminds us of the pioneer past of Ms. Didion’s family — her mother was a
descendant of Nancy Hardin Cornwall, who, with her husband, had followed the ill-fated
Donner-Reed party west, but split from the group in Nevada — and how this
indelibly shaped her vision of California, and how California, in turn, became,
for her, a metaphor for the promises and betrayals of America.
Over time, her nostalgia for a vanished
frontier — the wagon-train mentality of its first settlers, the stoic
individualism embodied by her beloved John Wayne — would mutate into something
more ambivalent, an acknowledgment that selfishness and what she called a “mean
scrambling for survival” had always lain beneath the romantic myths.
The author Tracy Daugherty. Credit Jeff Sklansky
Although readers may not agree with all of Mr.
Daugherty’s assessments of individual Didion books, his biography evinces a
deep appreciation of her skills and idiosyncrasies, and an understanding of how
writers like Conrad, Hemingway and her college professor Mark Schorer (who
sharpened her awareness of textual nuances and the use of point of view) helped
her forge her singular style. Mr. Daugherty expertly dissects Ms. Didion’s
preoccupation with narratives — not just with the techniques of storytelling
but also with the subtexts undergirding the personal and political story lines
mapped in her work.
At the same time, Mr. Daugherty tries to tease
out correspondences between Ms. Didion’s life and those of the heroines in her
novels — most notably, anxiety over troubled or wayward daughters, from the
emotionally impaired Kate in “Play It as It Lays” to Marin, the fugitive
radical, in “A Book of Common Prayer” to the drug-addicted Jessie in “Democracy.” He suggests that Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne’s
focus on their own careers and self-absorption as writers sometimes sidelined
Quintana when she was little (she was frequently parked with Ms. Didion’s
parents, when they were traveling); that the Hollywood scene she knew as a
teenager fueled her penchant for medicating her anxieties with alcohol and
drugs; and that Ms. Didion was often in denial about Quintana’s problems. He is
tough on Ms. Didion as a parent but arguably no tougher than Ms. Didion has
been on herself (in print and in interviews) about her shortcomings as a
mother, who missed or misread clues to Quintana’s unhappiness and screened off
her worst worries and fears.
After finishing “Blue Nights,” Mr. Daugherty
reports, Ms. Didion felt increasingly “weary, listless,” less inclined to push
herself, less invested in maintaining the momentum she’d once prized, uncertain
whether she would write again. Even her commitment to the pioneer imperative of
stoicism and survival, he writes, had begun to waver. He quotes her saying to a
friend, “There’s something missing in survival as a reason for being, you
know?”
THE LAST LOVE SONG
A Biography of Joan Didion
By Tracy Daugherty
Illustrated. 728 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $35.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/books/review-the-last-love-song-a-biography-of-joan-didion.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-
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