The Last Love Song Read Free Page A

would not know want.” In the 1950s, the GI Bill, housing loans, and government spending on computer development, aerospace, and foreign investment created what Beers calls the “Blue Sky Tribe,” a new middle class that worshiped a “God [endorsing] progress, personal and national,” and that believed it would live happily ever after in spotless, crime-free suburbs. Those invited to join the tribe—the people among whom Didion was raised—flourished in the new economy and voted conservatively in order to maintain it until the dream faltered in the 1980s.
    In an early essay entitled “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Didion sketched another version of this particular Western narrative. “John Wayne rode through my childhood,” she wrote, determining “forever the shape of certain of [my] dreams.” He suggested “a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free … at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”
    Later, when Didion claimed narrative lost its intelligibility for her, she was not speaking abstractly, as so many of her contemporaries were, about the craziness of the 1960s, the mass upheavals attending the Vietnam War protests, the sexual revolution, or the civil rights movement, though these events touched her. She was mourning the loss of a very specific story with its bright river and its cottonwoods, its silvery satellite stars beaming riches down on a tamed and temperate West.
    Nor were the causes of her losses abstract, nothing as soggy as the notice our nation has borne in every decade of its existence that America had “lost its innocence” (how many times can innocence be lost?). No. Didion is as precise in her reporting as she is in her rhetoric and phrasing. Things stopped fitting for her when John Wayne, who was always and forever “supposed to give the orders,” got cancer. An unexpected crack in the narrative. “I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western,” she laments, “and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne.”
    Still later, she was “shocked and to a curious extent personally offended by the enthusiasm with which California Republicans … jettisoned an authentic conservative [Goldwater]” and rushed to “embrace Ronald Reagan,” a less principled man, in her view. She registered as a Democrat, the first and perhaps the only member of her family ever to do so, she says. She does not list her problems with Reagan but makes it clear that, for all his Western posturing, he was simply no John Wayne.
    For a while, after a dream fails, nothing seems to make sense. But Didion has never presented herself as a wide-eyed naïf. She admits that even as she fell for the John Wayne mystique, she understood that the world was “characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities.”
    Her prose is filled with little dodges like this: a subtle certainty in the face of doubt, hinting that we do not know the woman behind the books as well as we think we do. In part, the impulse to hedge reflects her Western upbringing (she comes from a family of gamblers). “I think people who grew up in California have more tolerance for apocalyptic notions,” she once said, thinking of earthquakes, floods, and fires. “However, mixed up with this tolerance for notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is the belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much part of being in California.” More