Why I love Joan Didion
For paragraphs like this, from her essay on Howard Hughes, written in 1967:
By July of 1967 Howard Hughes is the largest single landholder in Clark County, Nevada. “Howard likes Las Vegas,” an acquaintance of Hughes’s once explained, “because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich.” Why do we like those stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of power and money in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
Beautiful.
Eat it John Lahr.
kate – I am guffawing. You can’t let it go!!!!
Gawd love ya Sheila,
This reference to Joan Didion is why I continually check out your blog. You are a smart cookie. I learn something most everytime I read your stuff.
Thank you,
Susan
Susan – you’re so nice! Thank you!!
Wow, what a take. I never thought of it like that. Like some people out of necessity due to their inability to conform and tame their eccentricities (lucky them) are almost destined to accumulate wealth and power in order to merely live a life that accomodates them. Anyway, what she said.
Excuse me,
I’d like to add that Joan is the sister in law to Dominick Dunne. And when he isn’t writing about murders of the wealthy and on Larry King, he writes a juicy Vanity Fair column.
Also, If I may, I’d like to reccomend a delightful Hollywood read; Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary. Private letters from inside the studios of the 1920’s. Cari Beauchamp. Forward from Sam Goldwyn Jr.
I think it’s a good Sunday afternoon read.
Carry on,
Susan