The White Album
No, this isn’t about the Beatles 1968 album The Beatles, which also has the parenthetic subtitle White Album. That collection was to be their ninth studio recorded LP, or to be more accurate, double album, which appeared in November 1968. It was famous at the time for its plain white double sleeve with no graphics or design, just the words ‘The BEATLES’. With 30 songs, 19 of which we learnt had been written during a Transcendental Meditation course in India, almost all were recorded at the now famous Abbey Road Studios. The result was wide range of musical styles, including rock and roll, blues, folk, country, reggae, avant-garde, hard rock, music hall and ‘psychedelic’ music, a result which also gave listeners evidence that each of the Beatles was beginning to strike out in their own direction.
The album was a glorious and unconstrained mosaic. It contains some classic tracks, among my favourites of which are Back in the UUSR, Dear Prudence, Ob-La-di Ob-La-Da, The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Blackbird, Rocky Raccoon, Why Don’t We Do It In the Road, Sexy Sadie, Honey Pie, Revolution # 1, and Good Night. In case you might not have noticed, it is one of my favourite albums! It deserves a blog of its own. However, with just a tinge of reluctance, it is time to stop prevaricating and shift to the real focus of this commentary, to another favourite, but this time to a book.
The White Album is a 1979 collection of essays by Joan Didion, published over the previous decade in various magazines. As one critic, Michiko Kakutani, later observed, the book made it clear “California belongs to Joan Didion.” (New York Times, November 7, 2014). The volume took its title from the first essay, ‘The White Album’, which was chosen as one of the 10 most important essays since 1950 by Publishers Weekly in 2013. Strikingly, the paperback edition cover has a slight Didion leaning against her enormous Corvette Stingray.
That first essay, The White Album, is autobiographical, detailing loosely related events in the author’s life in the 1960s, primarily in Los Angeles, California, initially written in 1968, and rewritten in 1978. The opening sentence of this essay, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” would become one of Didion’s best-known sayings. Just to read this one essay is to discover what an extraordinary, self-reflective and perceptive talent Joan Didion possessed. It charts her psychological insecurities and worries, as we go through a kaleidoscope of events, which range from drug related experiences, meetings of the Black Panthers, a studio recording session with The Doors, discussions with several other musicians, right through to prison conversations with Linda Kasabian, one of the followers of Charles Manson, who was to testify against him over the horrible murder of the actress Sharon Tate.
To read Joan Didion’s work inevitably raises the question as to what’s the nature of the perspective she offers. She comes across at times as Jewish, but she was brought up an Episcopalian, and remained so throughout her life. At times she comes across as snarky and cynical, but part of her charm is the way is she comes across as remarkably open and frank. You can never be sure where the next observation has its basis. She lived for most of the first half of her life in California, but eventually moved to New York, and while I think of her as a New Yorker, I wonder what that really means. If only Joan Didion was here to tell me.
The rewards of reading her essays are many, but above all she manages to be sharp, even cutting at times, but also to be personal: it is as if she is saying, ‘yup, this person whose life I’m reporting on is pretentious and insensitive, so let me explain how I see her’ and in doing that, we see Joan Didion more clearly. A dry-eyed and occasionally pugnacious observer, she tells you just how she sees it. She could write beautifully, sometimes with subtle nuance, and sometimes with almost caustic irony. I find her writing a compulsive delight.
In a recent review of her work, Alissa Wilkinson put it well:
Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma.
And her work, which spanned well over a half-century, reads like an account of a country careering toward a cliff.
(In The New York Times, April 26, 2024)
Perhaps one way to explain her approach is to look at several of the essays in The White Album. Actually, in many ways it was the book before The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first collection of essays published in 1968, which might be regarded as the key work she’d produced (she had written a novel before that). She was just 33 years old when it appeared, and it contains a collection of essays written on assignment for various journals: The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Holiday, Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. They are the output of a cultural critic at work, and together they document her view that things were falling apart, and that all the excitement in places like Haight-Ashbury wasn’t acknowledging they were already on a downward slide.
In the same way as in that earlier book, The White Album is another collection of her writing which had appeared in various magazines but, written a decade later, in 1979, it’s apparent a shift has taken place. Now the tone is more personal, descriptive both of her psychological troubles (you don’t have to read far between the lines to see that), but more directly of profiles of people she met in the cinema industry, and various other extraordinary figures appearing in the West Coast scene. Some she wrote about are still familiar, at least as names, with essays on the Black Panthers, the Doors, the Manson family. Some were very personal, like the uncomfortable revelations included in her essay on migraines, In Bed.
She was direct and perceptive in commenting on other people’s shifts in their writing. One example is an essay in The White Album on Doris Lessing. I had first read several of Doris Lessing’s books when a colleague gave me a boxed set of the first four books in the Children of Violence series. I think she was trying, gently, to help me realise how little I knew about women. The first three books in the series, Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage and A Ripple From the Storm were mind-blowing, an occasionally searing account of Martha Quest’s life as she grows up, from child to married woman to activist. I was stunned, only to discover, a year later, my colleague hadn’t read any of the books, but she thought they would be ‘good’ (perhaps good for me!).
By the time the last, fifth, book in the series appeared, The Four-Gated City, the setting had moved from South Africa to London, and now Lessing’s novels had a purpose more than revealing stories (it appeared after that other amazing volume, The Golden Notebook). Joan Didion gets Doris Lessing right, at least as I see her. She reminded me that Doris Lessing wrote books in order to solve problems – for the reader. I guess I’m weak, but I prefer to have the text, and come to my own conclusions. Didion puts it well: “the impulse to final solutions has been Mrs Lessing’s dilemma but the guiding delusion of her time. It’s not an impulse I hold high, but there is something finally very moving about her tenacity.”
The White Album is full of personal insight, insights which also offer a perspective on the world and how it was changing. Towards the end of the collection is an essay titled On the Morning After the Sixties. Reflecting back on a decade of social action, student revolutions, and a time when she and others believed it was possible to change the world, her final comments were sanguine:
“What I have made for myself is personal, but not exactly peace. Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after. Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recover which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of America’s three-year executive-training program. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen on such a happy ending”
In some ways, it seems that Joan Didion writes without worrying how she will be seen. She’s writing at the end of the 1970s, honestly reflecting on what happened, and where it led. She is very direct about what she saw. In one essay, on The Women’s Movement, she carefully dissects the slow but steady drift away from its founding ideology, as half-truths and simplifications were exposed. She describes how many ‘converts’ to liberation began to seek ‘romance’ rather than escaping oppression, wanting to have the chance to live a new life, one which was essentially much like the lives had been lived before the initial phase of revolution had burst on the scene. Dispirited? Disillusioned? No, I think, just realistic. To use one of my favourite phases, she was a ‘dry-eyed’ observer of the world around her.
That first, title piece in the collection, The White Album, is also the longest article in the collection. Continuing from that memorable opening line quoted earlier, she goes on to observe, “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” As the essay continues, she puts us on notice, making it clear that her initial thoughts might be misleading.
She cites a doctor’s report on an outpatient psychiatric patient, whose responses are ‘highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times”. It’s not hard to guess that the patient was Joan Didion, the text of her report from Santa Monica’s St John’s Hospital. She had suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea, just before being named the Los Angeles Times ‘Woman of the Year’. A droll comment is attached, where she observes “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.” Four pages into the piece, reading it yet again, I am absorbed by the wonderful personal, journalistic, idiosyncratic and insightful way Didion writes. Perhaps I could save time by simply encouraging you to buy and read the whole book!
For five years in the late 1960s, Didion lived in Hollywood. There were many such large houses in the neighbourhood, mainly occupied by “rock-and-roll bands, therapy groups, very old women wheeled down the street by practical nurses in soiled uniforms, and by husband, my daughter and me.” A possibly unusual location for an observer of the Los Angeles scene – the reader gets the sense Didion might not have spent all here time there doing housework! For certain, there seemed to be many visitors to the house, and many occasions when Didion was serving up food for people who might, or might not, stay the night.
In one passage, she describes sitting on the cold vinyl floor of a recording studio on Sunset Boulevard, watching The Doors. Most of the time, all but one person were busily practicing, while the engineers were fooling around with the recording machinery. This was going on as they awaited the arrival of band member four. Of course, you’ve already guessed, the missing band member was Jim Morrison. He eventually arrived. Despite liking The Doors, she couldn’t last watching for all the weeks it took for the recording process to be completed. Other pop stars came to her house. “Someone once brought Janice Joplin to a party at the house on Franklin Avenue: she had just done a concert and wanted brandy-and-Benedictine in a water tumbler. Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat. Spending time with music people was confusing … time as never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later.” Episodic and as confusing as the times, you have the sense you are in the room as Joan Didion relates the events: she manages to make you feel you are in the room occupied by one crazy group after another.
Another vignette concerns the Black Panthers and the trial of Huey Newton. The description of interviews with Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver is mesmerising: both had adopted that well-known approach of established politicians, which is never to answer the question you are asked, but respond with something you wanted to say, which might be a slogan, an irrelevant piece of history, or a half-baked view of what might be about to happen. Once again, Didion has us in her grip: “I had always appreciated the logic of the Panther position, based as it was on the proposition that political power began at the end of a barrel of a gun”. She goes on to tell us Newton had even specified the particular gun in a memorandum ‘Army .45, carbine; 12-gauge Magnum shotgun with 18” barrel, preferably the brand of High Standard; M-16; .357 Magnum pistols; P-38.’
Didion is unrelenting. Further into the account, we get her packing list for travel when working on an article for a magazine, as well as what would go into her carry bag. No sooner than we’ve read that than we’re at a sit-in at San Francisco State College, to be followed by meeting with Linda Kasabian, one of the Manson gang. As she puts it, when talking about returning from a Kasabian hearing a few days later, life is full of moments to teach us something. To illustrate this we read about her watching Kasabian and two friends drive off in a top-down Cadillac convertible, as they wave back to her. At the end of a jumble of moments from that day, she adds: “I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did.” She’s there, we’re there, and somehow it does make as much sense as anything else does.
The end of The White Album article is sad. She reports that she now knew little about what happened to most of the people she’d met and who were central to those heady late 1980s. She knew Eldridge Cleaver turned from being a Black Panther to an entrepreneur. She knew Jim Morrison died in Paris. She knew Linda Kasabian fled to New Hampshire, but in her case they caught up years later, taking their children on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. It is as if most of those years were a crazy dream – and perhaps they were.
