Didion on the South

            A very quirky little book by Joan Didion, called South and West: From a Notebook (2017), is mostly about the South. Her “Notes on the South,” taken during a 1970 visit, reveal some strange impressions about the region, which she formed during a road trip starting in New Orleans, continuing along the Gulf Coast as far as Biloxi, up to Hattiesburg and Meridian, on to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, back to Oxford, and then down the delta and back to New Orleans. “The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan,” she writes about the trip she took with her husband John Gregory Dunne. Her general impression of the South might be summed up in her peculiar, repeated reaction to the light there: New Orleans “is dark…the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects it but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence.” And on the Gulf Coast “the light is odd…light entirely absorbed by what it strikes.”

            New Orleans is preoccupied “with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style.” She does nail that feature the deep South shares with fundamentalists everywhere: “the solidarity engendered by outside disapproval.” And yet, she believes that the South, not California, is for America “the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”

            But her method is to present in detail her observations of the backwardness, prejudice, ignorance, and squalor of each tiny gas station-cum-eating joint in rural Mississippi and Alabama where they stopped—and then to record interviews with the country-club set, which in this case includes Hodding Carter III. The method leaves out the whole huge middle, and she acknowledges it.

            In the very short “California Notes,” Didion uses an informal commission to observe and write about the 1976 Patty Hearst trial to ignore the trial and look at some of her own misapprehensions about her class and its tastes, which she absorbed growing up in California. Though she does not say it expressly, she must have realized that she could not look at Patty Hearst and her background with the objectivity she had once imagined she possessed. Her account of the trial was never written.