Didion evening

Joan Didion is a Berkeley girl, well she was; her feet remember the Wheeler steps after decades of absence ("I found that discovery deeply moving," she explains) so she still is. ("In those times, we didn't believe in the efficacy of politics" — the sixties hadn't yet arrived.) She learned to type by retyping Hemingway ("There was not a word I wanted to change") and recalls with fondness every article.

We had wandered down Channing to the First Congregational Church of Berkeley this evening, gathered round a certain Joan Didion, for a `conversation' about Where I Was From, and other matters, facilitated by Cody's and the J-School, two institutions that can only be considered natural forces of the Berkeley environment.

It was the sort of bookshop event (but held in, as I wrote already, the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, which felt oddly appropriate, and furthermore the audience, most of whom who could easily be Didion's kids, with many her contemporaries and only a few, like us, her grandkids, the audience, white, middle-aged, well-dressed, and hyper-educated, could easily have been the very congregatio0n of the First Congregational Church) the sort of bookshop event where persons come to give public hearing to their various theories in audience with the Author (or get her to comment on their pet poltical provocation), the Author who generally sort of tiredly dismisses these theories as she defends her masterpiece yet one more time (shouldn't the prose stand alone? isn't it finished?) — in short, it was the sort of event that, were I an author, I think I'd chronically loathe.

Looking at her portrait on the jacket to Slouching Towards Bethlehem you'll see a fiercely independent spirit, a force to be reckoned with. But here we saw a tiny, tiny woman, a tiny woman in little black shoes, who writes "some of the best prose of our time," yet reads in something of a monotone. Of course, our real suspicion had to do not with any kind of frailty but with the little black shoes, the whole New York City-ness. Someone broached the question, leading up with a quotation about just picking up and leaving California. Oh Yes, she replied in the affirmative, as if to with a verbal wave of the hand label us all childish hangers-on to a by-gone dream. How did she leave California? "I Moved On," she explained.

Well. I'm always a bit suspicious about those who bemoan the audacity of our times, as it seems to me this attitude fits equally in any age. I dare not accuse Didion of this, but maybe she does or maybe her readers think she does or maybe they do themselves. ("I'm always being shocked, deeply shocked." Where is California most off its rocker? "The failure of large numbers of people to be truthful to themselves about how they got to be where they are. ... Californians tend to think that they deserve Better... But I'm not saying they don't." "Almost nobody in Los Angeles has any sense of where the water came from... At all. They'll be surprised."

But then there is that haunting New York issue. How can we trust this particular matriarch when she, in the end, abandoned California, abandoned us? Moved on, as it were. Her voice now definitely raised she responds to this allegation emphatically: "This book is clearly a love letter," continuing: "You don't spend that much time berating someone unless you have some feeling for them."