Occasional Prose (28 page)

In the same way, I have found it hard to make out what connection there can be between Joan Didion’s
Democracy
, opening with a memory of the pink dawns of early atomic weapons tests in the Pacific, and Henry Adams’s
Democracy
, which deals with the dirty politics of the second Grant Administration. And, leaving aside Henry Adams, I do not quite see how democracy comes into the Didion tale except for the fact that two Democratic politicians (both Vietnam-war opponents) and a CIA man play large roles in it. For Adams, “democracy” had become a coarse travesty of the ideal of popular rule, indissociable from the gravy train and the grease spots on the Congressman’s vest. For Miss Didion too, the term is rich in irony, though corruption by now is so universal that it can no longer be identified with a party or tendency or grand ideal betrayed. There is nobody left like Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, Adams’s high-minded Philadelphia mouthpiece, to feel shocked.

The Didion novel, which arrives at its climax in March 1975, while the character “Joan Didion” is teaching her course at Berkeley and the Vietnam War is winding down, can be described as a murder story set in Honolulu—a murder without a mystery in that the elderly “blueblood” killer of a nisei politician and of his own “socialite” daughter proudly announces culpability from his room in the downtown YMCA. I have put “blueblood” and “socialite” in quotation marks to indicate the colonial, road-show quality of the island’s palmy social life, which always seems to have an airport (once dock-side) lei around its neck.
Aloha oe
. In Hawaii, the fiftieth state of the Union, United States imperialism can claim a happy musical-comedy-style ending. And yet the islands, like Kenya, like the Bahamas, have been prone to quite classy murder, often, as in this case, though not always, involving a transgression of the color line. I remember the Massie (blond wife of a naval officer) case,
the
Pacific-coast newspaper sensation when I was a girl, and the intriguing name of the victim and rape suspect whose body was found in the white officer’s car trunk—Joseph Kahahawawa.

As I say, in
Democracy
no mystery is made about the murder of Representative Wendell Omura, Democrat of Hawaii, and Janet Ziegler, daughter of the killer and Harry Victor’s sister-in-law, on the Zieglers’ lanai. For “lanai” read “porch,” and for “Harry Victor” read “Democratic Presidential hopeful in the 1972 primaries” (conceded in California before the polls closed). What is left murky is what the Congressman was doing on the lanai early in the morning with Janet Ziegler. And that is the least of the arcana. “Cards on the table,” the author declares, introducing herself to the reader on page 17. Yet despite an appearance of factuality achieved by the author’s total recall of names, middle names, dates, by perfect chronometry of arrival and departure times and stereophonic dialogue of imaginary newsworthy figures,
Democracy
is deeply mysterious, cryptic, enigmatic, like a tarot pack or most of Joan Didion’s work.

One way of looking at that work is to decide that it has been influenced by movies; hypnotized by movies would be more appropriate. Maybe that is what coming from California, even as far north as Sacramento, does to you. Like the camera, this mental apparatus does not think but projects images, very haunting and troubling ones for the most part, precisely because they are mute. Even when sonorized, as has happened here, they remain speechless and somewhat frightening in their stunned aversion from thought. This powerful relation to film, stronger that that of any other current author, must account for her affinity with Conrad, whose tales and novels—above all
Nostromo
,
The Secret Agent
, “Heart of Darkness”—seem to have anticipated film, like an uncanny prophecy.

What was new in Conrad was the potency of an image or images, often inexplicable in purely reasonable terms; why should “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” have been tumid with meaning for T. S. Eliot (who used it as an epigraph for “The Hollow Men”) if he had not heard some pidgin sorcery in the summing up? Certainly one senses Conrad in Miss Didion’s
Democracy
; he has passed through this territory, making trail blazes. The novel seems closer to “Heart of Darkness” than the literal-minded movie
Apocalypse Now
did, which was also trying to talk about the end of Vietnam and unspeakable “horrors,” located upriver in the film. One odd development in
Democracy
, though, as compared with any Conrad text, is that the narrator—in Conrad usually the immensely talkative and indeed (dare I say it?) too garrulous Marlow—has been virtually silenced. What the character “Joan Didion” offers us is mainly brisk narration, impossible to construe as comment or rumination, unlike Marlow’s chatter, but I shall come back to “Joan Didion” later.

For the moment, I want to forget about the cinematic influences and effects—the freezes and rapid fades and the humming sound track that make themselves felt in whatever she has done since
Run River
(1963)—and concentrate on examining the construction of this particular book as book. Yet here too I am reminded of what one might call an allied art. The construction of
Democracy
feels like the working out of a jigsaw puzzle that is slowly being put together with a continual shuffling and re-examination of pieces still on the edges or heaped in the middle of the design. We have started with a bit of sky (those pink dawns); now and then, without hurry, a new piece is carefully inserted, and the gentle click of cardboard locking into cardboard is felt—no forcing. Despite the fact that the pieces are known to us, face down and face up, almost from the start, there is an intense suspense, which seems to be causeless (no cliff-hanger this, no heroine tied to the railroad tracks), suspense arising from the assembly of the pieces, that is, from the procedures of narrative themselves. “This is a hard story to tell,” the author says on page 15. It is a hard story to listen to, boring in the primal sense of the word—“making a hole in or through with a drill.” Some parts of it are painful in their own right, shocking (or would have been to Henry Adams’s Mrs. Lightfoot Lee), but what mainly hurts is the drilling, the repetition, in short, the suspense of waiting for the narrative line to be carefully played out, the odd-shaped piece inserted.

Here are three successive paragraphs and the start of a fourth from the first page.

“He said to her.

“Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.

“Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.

“He said ...”

And here is a later paragraph, but still from the first pages, when we are getting into the story:

“Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said one night in the spring of 1975, one night outside Honolulu in the spring of 1975, one night in the spring of 1975 when the C-130s and the C-141s were already shuttling between Honolulu and Anderson and Clark and Saigon all night long, thirty-minute turnaround at Tan Son Nhut, touching down and loading and taxiing out on flight idle, bringing out the dependents, bringing out the dealers, bringing out the money, bringing out the pet dogs and the sponsored bar girls and the porcelain elephants. “Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor, “Harry Victor’s wife.”

Important information has just been passed: Harry Victor is “someone,” a national celebrity. Before long it turns out that he has been a congressman, a senator, a war opponent, a Presidential candidate, that he has been photographed with Eleanor Roosevelt and Coretta King; the first tip-off that he is also a prize heel comes on page 55. So that phrase, “Oh shit, Inez, Harry Victor’s wife,” that keeps returning like a refrain is derisive for the one who speaks it—Jack Lovett, an “information specialist” and CIA man, a spook. The refrain comes back over and over, collecting incrementa, like a round. “Scotland’s burning, Scotland’s burning, Fire fire fire, Pour on water, Pour on water.” Or: “Oh shit, Inez. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew. Down the tubes, the bartender said. Bye-bye Danang. Harry Victor’s wife.”

A round, but better, as I said, a puzzle. The enigma lies in the slow deliberation with which the picture is filled in. The dialogue (or monologue) begins in the pink light of the Honolulu airport in late March 1975. The atomic tests of 1952, ’53 (“Christ they were sweet”) are a flashback. On page 29, a shooting is mentioned after some Honolulu social history, after the introduction of “Joan Didion” (“Call me the author”), after the introduction of a swiftly palmed photo of Paul Christian, Inez Victor’s father, playing backgammon barefoot with John Huston in Cuernavaca in 1948, followed by a second photo of him—barefoot once more and in handcuffs—taken by a newspaper photographer on March 25, 1975, outside the Honolulu YMCA.

And so, finally, fourteen pages after the first mention, the name Harry Victor comes up again, with the strong indication that the individual referred to is a “name,” as evidenced by the
New York Times
’s caption of the photo of the murderer: “Victor Family Touched by Island Tragedy.” A few pages later, the group of interlocked pieces entitled Jack Lovett is fitted into the picture. Another flashback presents him as he first looked to the author (in 1960, in a photographer’s studio on West 40th Street) when she and Inez Victor were both working on
Vogue
, the author in the features department and Inez Victor in fashion.

Jack Lovett is what was called then “an older man”; the author recalls “thinking that he could be [Inez’s] father.” Inez Victor is smiling at Jack Lovett in a certain way. “He can’t stay,” she tells Joan Didion in the
Vogue
photographer’s studio. “Because he’s running a little coup somewhere. I just bet.” A few pages later, there follows a piece of WNBC film taken March 18, 1975, showing Inez Victor dancing at a party on the St. Regis Roof given by the Governor of New York—that would have been Hugh Carey, no? But the date of the network clip, “one week exactly before Paul Christian fired the shots” out in the mid-Pacific, refers to a quite different calendar of events.

Now, the fact is that from 1956 to 1963 Joan Didion did work at
Vogue
in the features department; it is in
Who’s Who
. When you consider that Inez Victor, b. Inez Christian, d. Paul and Carol Christian, cannot be found in
Who’s Who
or any other book of reference (not even
Who Was Who
), you may find that spooky, more so, actually, than Jack Lovett’s occupation. It raises the question “What are we supposed to believe here?” in an uncanny way. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! What is a live fact—Joan Didion—doing in a work of fiction? She must be a decoy set there to lure us into believing that Inez Victor is real in some ghostly-goblin manner, as real anyway as the author herself is. For that purpose, the classic narrator, the fictive “I,” could not serve, evidently. Or just seemed dated in a deconstructing universe. Before the end of the novel, in a flash-forward, the author is represented as actually flying to Kuala Lumpur to see Inez Victor, who by that time is working in a camp for refugees, having separated from Harry Victor and their children, Adlai and Jessie, and all their world. Does this mirror a real journey that Joan Didion has pressed into service to meet a fictional need (to end the novel), as other authors are apt to do with loose material that happens to be lying around?

In current theories of fiction, much attention is given to the role of the narrator, considered as sheer verbal device, without correspondence to any anterior reality. Yet if I understand Joan Didion right, here she is doing the exact opposite, inserting an arrestable fact—herself—into the moving sands of fiction. I am not sure what the result of the undertaking is. It may well be to diminish the fictional likelihood of “Inez Victor” while leaving the reader to wonder about the reality of “Joan Didion.”

In fact, the problem of “originals” haunts this peculiar fiction, intentionally, I should guess. It is an eerie lighting effect, making the strange appear familiar and the familiar strange. At times Harry Victor seems meant to recall one of the Kennedys (most likely Bobby) or all of them. There is a hint of Jack’s womanizing, and the suggestion that Inez Victor may have a “drinking problem” brings to mind Teddy and Joan. The new generation of the famous family makes its entry with Jessie Victor’s teen-age drug habit. Yet when a flashback to the ’72 primaries gives us a quick shot of Harry Victor conceding California (in other words, the ball game), it is a reverse image of 1968 and Eugene McCarthy conceding to Bobby, except that nobody could picture McCarthy as the original of a ruthless power-seeker capable of naming his son Adlai. Naturally, Adlai, who organizes a campus vigil for “the liberation of Saigon” virtually as soon as his voice changes, is a perfect Victor junior.

What is wrong with the Victors, father and son, what is wrong with their multiple originals, can be summed up in a word—celebrity. They are all media divinities, “names,” a nominalist’s nightmare, mere vocables. “Harry Victor’s wife” can only escape the condign punishment that goes with the status by “burying herself” in Kuala Lumpur. Inez Victor’s penance is the book’s resolution—the final phrase in the canon of “Bye-bye Danang.” It is odd how it reminds one of the last act of Eliot’s
Cocktail Party
. Celia Coplestone, you remember, a smart-set Londoner, having found her vocation with a penitential order of nurses on an island in the “East,” is crucified near an anthill by natives.

I have noted the cinematic quality of Joan Didion’s work and the relation of the present construction to puzzles, specifically of the jigsaw kind. I might also have compared the narrative line to a French seam—one big stitch forward, one little stitch back, turn over and repeat on other side of cloth—valued in dressmaking for its strength and for hiding the raw edges of the cloth. Still another set of correspondences is discernible in literary reminiscences and allusions, beginning, obviously, with the title: Henry Adams, Hemingway, Mailer, Orwell, Wallace Stevens, Delmore Schwartz, A. E. Housman, W. H. Auden, Kierkegaard. The ending must be a pointed reference to Eliot, and on page 16 one has met some lines in italics followed by the words “So Trollope might begin this novel.”