Vibrations.”
Yet even in its most casual iteration, Didion’s voice, with its sensitivity to the grotesqueries and vanities that dance beneath the skim of daily experience, is unmistakable. The New Orleans atmosphere “never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence.” The audience dutifully watching Loving at the movie theater in Meridian gazes at the screen “as if the movie were Czech.” The rivers are always brown and still: “A sense,” she writes, “of water moccasins.” Didion’s implacable fatalism is at home in the South, particularly in New Orleans: “Bananas would rot, and harbor tarantulas. Weather would come in on the radar, and be bad. Children would take fever and die.”
She made her tour in a rental car but the road-trip aspect is barely commented upon; instead we have the surreal image of Didion swimming her way across the Gulf South through its motel pools. At the Edgewater Gulf Hotel pool in Biloxi “the water smells of fish,” at the Howard Johnson’s in Meridian a child dries off in a Confederate-flag beach towel, at the Ramada Inn in Tuscaloosa “everything seemed to be made of concrete, and damp,” in Winfield the pool is filled with algae, at the Oxford Holiday Inn the broadcast of a radio station can be heard underwater, and at the St. Francis Motel in Birmingham, her bikini attracts excited comment from the bar. Lying poolside, she feels “the euphoria of Interstate America: I could be in San Bernardino, or Phoenix, or outside Indianapolis,” but these motels have the appearance of stage sets. They are American markers artificially planted in the brooding wildness of the Deep South, which in these notes resembles a foreign country as exotic as El Salvador, Vietnam, Granada, or the other tropics “of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy” to which she gravitated in her nonfiction and fiction.
Even the glimpses of unlikely beauty—the wild carrots growing around the raised railroad tracks in Biloxi, the small girl sitting in the sawdust stringing pop tops from beer cans into a necklace—contribute to the general atmosphere of uneasiness, rot, and “somnolence so dense it seemed to inhibit breathing.” There is a long tradition of northern visitors seeing in the Gulf South an atmosphere of perpetual decline, in which “everything seems to go to seed.” Didion quotes Audubon’s line about “the dangerous nature of the ground, its oozing, spongy and miry disposition,” though you could go back to 1720, when a visiting French official described the territory as “flooded, unhealthy, impracticable.” Didion is on narrower footing, however, when she describes her central thesis:
a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.
How could the hidebound South, with its perpetual disintegration and defiant decadence, at the same time represent the future? Didion admits the idea seems oxymoronic, but she is onto something. Part of the answer, she suspects, lies in the bluntness with which Southerners confront race, class, and heritage—“distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny, and to leave deliberately unmentioned.” In the South such distinctions are visible, rigid, and the subject of frank conversation. She visits Stan Torgerson, the owner of Meridian’s “ethnic station,” who programs gospel and soul and a show called Adventures in Black History, “to point out the contributions black people have made.” He speaks of the importance of increased minimum wage and education funding, while being careful not to overstate his own open-mindedness. “I’m not saying I’m going to have a black minister come home to dinner tonight,” he tells her, as they drive through the deserted downtown, “ ’cause I’m not.” Didion encounters the same conception of social order at the Mississippi Broadcasters’ awards banquet, where the lieutenant governor decries violent campus protests, and in Birmingham where someone jokes about the “feudal situation” in which white tenants live on wealthy country estates. Everybody in the South knows where they stand. There is no shame in discussing it. It is suspicious, in fact, to avoid the subject.
This kind of thinking seemed retrograde in the seventies. From the vantage of New York, California, even New Orleans, it still seems so today. But this southern frame of mind has annexed territory in the last four decades, expanding across the Mason-Dixon Line into the rest of rural America. It has taken root among people—or at least registered voters—nostalgic for a more orderly past in which the men concentrated on hunting and fishing and the women on “their cooking, their canning, their ‘prettifying’ ”; when graft as a way of life was accepted, particularly in politics, and segregation was unquestioned; when a white supremacist running for public office was “a totally explicable phenomenon”; when a wife knew better than to travel through strange territory with a bikini and without a wedding ring.
An unquestioned premise among those who live in American cities with international airports has been, for more than half a century now, that Enlightenment values would in time become conventional wisdom. Some fought for this future to come sooner. Others waited patiently. But nobody seemed to believe that it would never arrive. Nobody, certainly, in Los Angeles or the Bay Area, which since Didion’s reporting has only accelerated in its embrace of an ethic in which the past is fluid, meaningless, neutered by technological advancement. In this view the past is relegated to the aesthetic realm, to what Didion describes in “California Notes” as “decorative touches”—tastefully aged cutlery and window curtains. In this view the past was safely dead and could not return to bloody the land.
Two decades into the new millennium, however, a plurality of the population has clung defiantly to the old way of life. They still believe in the viability of armed revolt. As Didion herself noted nearly fifty years ago, their solidarity is only reinforced by outside disapproval, particularly disapproval by the northern press. They have resisted with mockery, then rage, the collapse of the old identity categories. They have resisted the premise that white skin should not be given special consideration. They have resisted new technology and scientific evidence of global ecological collapse. The force of this resistance has been strong enough to elect a president.
A writer from the Gulf South once wrote that the past is not even past. Didion goes further, suggesting that the past was also the future. Now that we live in that future, her observations read like a warning unheeded. They suggest that California’s dreamers of the golden dream were just that—dreamers—while the “dense obsessiveness” of the South, and all the vindictiveness that comes with it, was the true American condition, the condition to which we will always inevitably return. Joan Didion went to the South to understand something about California and she ended up understanding something about America.
—Nathaniel Rich
New Orleans
December 2016
John and I were living on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. I had wanted to revisit the South, so we flew there for a month in 1970. The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan. We went wherever the day took us. I seem to remember that John drove. I had not been back since 1942–43, when my father was stationed in Durham, North Carolina, but it did not seem to have changed that much. At the time, I had thought it might be a piece.
New Orleans
…the purple dream
Of the America we have not been,
The tropic empire, seeking the warm sea,
The last foray of aristocracy…
—STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT, John Brown’s Body
Would that I could represent to you the dangerous
