Didion returns to her favorite topic

There is a certain awkwardness in meeting Joan Didion for the first time. Part of it is owed to simple awe: Didion has influenced, powerfully, an entire generation of writers who would interpret California.

Part of it, too, comes from a sense of knowing almost too much about this tiny woman in charcoal slacks and simple brown sweater who appears at the door of her Upper East Side apartment. Didion has served up so much of herself in print -- the psychiatric evaluations, the migraines, the startling personal bulletins:

“I am a 34-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.”

That was from “The White Album,” the 1979 collection of essays that vaulted Didion to the top of the heap of California writers. As it turns out, Didion’s California output would drop off considerably after that. Instead, she would turn her talents toward other topics -- Miami, Central America, national politics.

“I became more interested,” she explained, seated now in the apartment’s front room, “in the arrangement of the world, in politics as it were, which I had not been before.”

At the same time, she could not let California go, and for the past quarter-century, much of it spent here in New York, she worked and reworked her ideas about the native land she thought she knew so well. The result of all this brooding is a provocative memoir entitled “Where I Was From” (Knopf), to be released at the end of the month.

The “was” in the title points toward where Didion has traveled with this exercise, putting into the past tense notions about California that had been passed down to her across generations. “Where I Was From” represents, as Didion herself writes, “an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.”

The book weaves together Didion’s reflections on her family history, a survey of pertinent California literature and some ground-level reportage to produce a layered inventory of items that, as she puts it, do not “add up” in California.

Such as:

An aversion to Big Government -- in a state that, from the start, has relied heavily on huge chunks of federal money, money to build the Southern Pacific and other railroads, money to irrigate its valleys, money to propel the Southern California aerospace industry....

An enduring affection for a romanticized agrarian past, untroubled by the historic dominance of corporate agriculture and a well-proven willingness among the state’s “yeoman farmers” to subdivide and sell, when the money’s right....

And a chronic conviction, held without any sense of irony, that all was paradise, until the latest wave of newcomers washed in. Indeed, Didion’s most fundamental revision involves the idea that California, particularly her California of the Sacramento Valley, “changed” with the booms that followed World War II.

“One of the big stories of my childhood was how much California had changed, and to come to the realization that it hadn’t changed at all, that it was the same” was one of many surprises she encountered on her journey. “Yes, it changed in superficial ways, but the basic attitudes didn’t change a whole lot.”

*

Challenging her past

The book represents a return by Didion, not only to the topic of California, but also to the personal touches that “embroidered,” to use one of her favorite words, her earlier writing.

Reassembling her thoughts about California, however, required her to delve back into her own life, to reexamine family lore and hand-me-down mythologies that she had left unchallenged through much of her life.

She writes movingly of the eccentricities, and passing, of her parents -- the father who, under treatment for “tension,” would take long walks across the Golden Gate Bridge, a perilous exercise for the seriously depressed; the mother who eschewed dusting or making beds, because the dust would return and the beds would be slept in again.

The writing of “Where I Was From” began in earnest in the spring of 2001, not long before the death of her mother, but the intellectual sifting began years earlier: “Actually, I started writing some of this stuff down about my family in the ‘70s, but I could never go anywhere with it. I hadn’t thought any of it through. I still was not looking very analytically at the story.”

Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, moved to New York 15 years ago, in part, she said, to be closer to their daughter who was attending Barnard. She discounted, however, the suggestion that leaving California perhaps helped her to see it with greater clarity.

“I think,” she said, “I was just getting older and thinking about it more.”

She offered, as a “tiny little thing,” a revelation that came to her upon completion of the memoir. She still retains a California driver’s license, which she would renew using her mother’s address: “And it occurred to me when I finished this book that the next time my license comes due, I probably wouldn’t renew it in California, because my mother is not there. And” -- here is the revelatory part -- “it didn’t bother me. It always had bothered me before.”

What, not being in California?

“Not being in California. When we moved here, in 1988, I immediately agreed to do a series of ‘Letters from Los Angeles’ for the New Yorker, which I never wanted to do when I was living in Los Angeles. So I was spending time out there, at least for the first year or two. I kind of wanted to leave it unknown to anybody whether we actually lived there or moved here.”

Did it feel more comfortable, easier, returning with this book to the familiar ground of California?

“No, I didn’t find it easier. It was unfamiliar territory. I was trying to go places I hadn’t gone before. I never exactly knew where this was going. I would just sort of feel it out as it went along.”

And so into the hopper went “Our California Heritage,” her eighth-grade graduation speech at Arden School. In went the pioneer diaries from the crossing, both those of her ancestors and of strangers. She lingered over an entry that recorded the discovery of a certain Miss Gilmore -- a 17-year-old who’d been left behind on the trail, along with her freshly buried parents and ailing kid brother, by a wagon train eager to make it to California before the snows.

“When you jettison others so as not to be ‘caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains,’ ” Didion asks in her text, “do you deserve not to be caught? When you survive at the cost of Miss Gilmore and her brother, do you survive at all?”

And in went pertinent bits from her rereading of early California literature, among them an 1868 polemic from Henry George, challenging the enthusiasm with which Californians were prepared to greet, and subsidize with land, the Southern Pacific, and Josiah Royce’s lament, in 1886, that “a general sense of social irresponsibility is, even today, the average Californian’s easiest failing.”

In, too, went her study of growth patterns, which demonstrated that the post-World War II boom, said to be so whopping, was in fact in keeping with the pace set after the Gold Rush and maintained ever since: “ ... Rates of growth that systematically erased freshly laid traces of custom and community.”

In went her reporting of the Spur Posse affair in Lakewood, the Los Angeles riot. In went her instinctive response to other departures from the California script she thought she’d known -- the decline in public education, the concurrent boom in prison construction:

“There seemed to be many towns in California ... so impoverished in spirit as well as in fact that the only way their citizens could think to reverse their fortunes was by getting themselves a state prison.

” ... Then I remembered, then I realized.

“We were seeing nothing ‘new’ here.

“We were seeing one more version of making our deal with the Southern Pacific....

“We were seeing one more enthusiastic fall into a familiar California error, that of selling the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder....”

Now critics might suggest it took Didion a long time to reach this destination, to come to grips with the fact that Californians, from the start, have never managed to pull off, as Wallace Stegner phrased it, “a society to match our scenery.” This is Benjamin Schwarz’s point in an Atlantic Monthly review, that Didion’s “revelations would seem to display an astonishing ignorance of the historiography of and commentary on California written over the past 60 years, including that of Carey McWilliams and Kevin Starr.”

Didion, however, seems more than tough enough on herself -- her self-effacing candor, in fact, is one of the book’s charms. She refers in one typical passage to the “blinkering effect” of the California mythology she inherited and left unchallenged, discovering only deep into her years “what was clearly a fairly tenacious wish not to examine whatever it was I needed to believe” about the place.

“It was after this realization,” she adds wryly, “that I began trying to find the ‘point’ of California, to locate some message in its history. I picked up a book of revisionist studies on the subject, but abandoned it on discovering that I myself was quoted, twice.”

It is with a certain humility then that she tosses this effort onto the ever-teeming pile of literature attempting to make sense of California. She does not consider it the last word on the place -- or even her last word on it.

“I didn’t get all the answers,” she said. Maybe, she added, “I got to the question.”