Notes from an Angry Eccentric on Reading Joan Didion's "Notes on the South"

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“It occurred to me almost constantly in the South,” wrote Joan Didion in 1970, “that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I simply have knifed somebody?”

Joan Didion, image courtesy The Los Angeles Times

I can’t overestimate the vindication I feel in reading these sentences. It comes from the 2017 publication of South and West, from notebooks Didion, one of the most insightful observers of American culture from the 1960s through the early 21^st century, kept while traveling through the South in 1970.

I began re-reading Joan Didion when trying to figure out what book to take on the plane on a recent trip to Vermont. For decades, I’ve been smitten by Didion’s brain and persona, her shrewdly observational neurotic intelligence. Didion, who died in 2021, wrote in order to figure out what she thought. She said so. So do I. So do many of us.

She also understood her writing as a way of asserting control over her life and her world. That’s central to her heartbreaking last two books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, books about grief, the first for her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, the latter for her daughter, Quintana, for in these books she comes to terms, more fully than ever, with the fact that, at the end of a long career, her intelligence cannot save her.

So I recently re-read Didion’s first two nonfiction collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, appreciating her nuance in a time that seems to lack it. I don’t find, for example, her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement” to be anti-feminist, as several younger writers have recently attested. I see it as criticizing the classism of the movement at the time – Alice Walker, after all, did the same thing from a Black woman’s perspective – and aspects of what Didion felt to be naivete connected to hope in politics.

So I was excited at the start of South and West, where explains, “John and I were living on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. I had wanted to revisit the South, so we flew there for a month in 1970. The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan. We went wherever the day took us. I seem to remember that John drove. I had not been back since 1942-43, when my father was stationed in Durham, North Carolina, but it did not seem to have changed that much.”

Joan Didion, image courtesy The New Yorker

I knew I’d feel two ways about this little book. I’d be mesmerized by the South as seen and sieved through Didion’s brain, and as much as the South has driven me to the kind of anger she describes in the sentence with which I started this essay, I knew I’d also feel defensive.

For one thing, feeling defensive is in the DNA of the South, most evidently in those white Southerners who still can’t admit to themselves the screamingly obvious truths about what the Confederate States of America was all about, but also in those Southerners, and I am one, who commit their lives to striving to face the truth and to telling it. It’s annoying, for example, to hear people preface their condescension for the South with telling me where else in the country they’re from and then showing how little they know about the racism and violent history of their own place of origin.

Meridian Mississippi, 1960s

“Everyone from Mississippi begins on the defensive,” Didion writes. I recognize this fact. When she uses the phrase “these people,” however, she pushes me back. She imagines the water in the shower in a Mississippi hotel to be dirty and when she slips and falls in the rain, she imagines the ground covered in oozing snakes. Is this the Didion whose inscrutable “cool” everyone describes? It’s true I’ve always forgiven her regular use of the word “one,” when she means “I,” and her getting stuck in repeating phrases like “may or may not,” and I recognize that what occasionally bothers me in her tone in “Notes on the South” relates to what bugs me in those word choices.

Didion might be best in these notebooks in the section called “An Afternoon in Meridian with Stan Torgerson.” Torgerson was the white owner of the black radio station in Meridian, Mississippi. He thought himself quite progressive, even as he said things like, “We don’t have any antagonist-type black leaders working against racial harmony.” After Didion dropped Torgerson off, she drove through the middle of town, then stopped to ask the old white man with the shotgun what he was firing at on the tops of buildings. He told her casually enough that he was shooting at pigeons.

Just as I’m thanking Didion for validating my anger, for seeing the innate hurt in coming from this corner of the country, she describes seeing a movie starring Eva Marie Saint in a Meridian theater. The audience, she says, watched “as if the movie were Czech,” and she thinks back just a few weeks to a dinner party she attended in Malibu where Eva Marie Saint was present. And now again I’m annoyed.

I’ve been saying for years that the South is central to the American social self and American politics and that voices from the South who could help this vast country better understand itself get ignored. I’ve been saying that New York gave Donald Trump to America, but doesn’t understand why America accepted the gift. John Oliver Killens, a great and largely forgotten black writer from Georgia, argued in the 1960s that culturally and sociopolitically, America is largely a “Southern” country. I’ve been saying for years that however many idiotic voices the South offers up, it also has the potential to help America see itself, look itself in the eye, even to help America heal. I’ve been saying that most of America doesn’t know itself because it doesn’t know the South from inside.

John Oliver Killens, photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1954

Two years ago, I idiotically worded a message to a transplanted Californian about how much it often hurt to be from this place. The two of us seemed never to understand anything the other person said. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that this person perceived me as a Southern stereotype. I felt, rightly or not, that this person’s whole existence here had something of the “othering” ethnographic about it. And so, I responded, stereotypically, with offensive defensiveness. And because I am that angry eccentric that Didion imagines she’d be here, my response surely confirmed all the suspicions of the person to whom I wrote. My apology was not accepted.

Reading Didion on the South reminded me of my rude and regretful communique. Didion was right in 1970 in what she called her “dim and unformed sense” that the South, “for America,” was “the future,” and also “the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.” She writes about it, though, not as if she’s visiting some kind of “psychic center” of America, but as though she’s traveled to another country.

Joan Didion in 1970

I love Didion, I will always think of her as one of my favorite writers, and I do recognize absolutely that in coming to the “psychic center” of the American future, she had indeed come to another country. And that country was her own. And it would elect a New Yorker named Donald Trump twice.

It does not exonerate the sins of the South, nor excuse the foolishness of any particular white working-class vote, to understand that “these-peopling” people who take every first step from a position of defensiveness also bears responsibility for the Trumpification of the United States. I wish Didion had kept on across the South. I wish she’d gotten past Alabama. I wish her skills in empathy were always as strong as her powers of perception.