Joan Didion (2017) South And West From a Notebook.

I’ve read bits of Joan Didion’s writing and decided to read more. South And West translates into two sections on ‘Notes on the South’ and ‘California Notes’.

She explains: ‘John and I were living in 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…I seem to remember John drove.’

Her autobiographical impressions resurfaced in Where I Was From. What she already knew. White child, like her, were the most privileged children in America, better still if you were a boy, but everything was melting away. Holding the line was based on lies about their collective past, good old-fashioned Southern decorum and Christian values.

‘On the Road from Meridan to Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Signs: Welcome to Alabama! Take a Fun Break!  782 000 Alabama Baptists Welcome You!

Dixie Gas stations, all over, with Confederate flags and grillwork.

In Dempolis around lunchtime the temperature was around 96 degrees and all movement seemed liquid. An Alabama state trooper drove slowly around town. I put a penny in the weighing machine on the main street. My weight was ninety-six and my fortune was “You are inclined to let your heart rule your head.”

In the drugstore a young girl was talking to a woman at the counter. “I’m gonna run off and get married,” the girl said. “Who to?” the woman asked. “The girl crumpled her straw paper. “I’m gonna get married,” she said stubbornly, “I don’t care who.”

Didion was an anomaly because she kept her hair straight. Only girls under twelve kept their hair straight like that in the South. She asked the girl doing her hair if she was still at school. She snorted, she was almost twenty. She’d been married for three years and lived in a trailed with her husband and three kids. It was too hot at night and too hot during the day. They hoped for better.

‘Downriver and Home

The names of plantations going south on 61: Baconia, Lydia and Evanna. On the billboards: PESTICIDE DYANAP. A plantation sound of Onward: Reality Plantation.’

Agent Orange is alive and well and has come home. ‘Silent Spring’ did not reach the South.

‘We stopped at Walker Percy’s in Covington, Louisiana. We sat out the back by the bayou and drink gin and tonics…Walker never paid us any mind: “The South,” he said, “owes a debt to the North…tore the Union apart once…and now only the South can save the North.”

Didion’s road trip offers a snapshot of where America was more than fifty years’ ago. Good-old-boys hanging onto power and keeping their boot firmly down on ‘Riggers’ (source of content, the moron’s moron, and former President Trump). A system of privilege based on large chunks of government cash and subsidies keeping the system afloat. But a flaunting of the myth of frontier autonomy and going it alone mixed in with a hatred of government rules and taxation of any kind.  

Didion called these places the ‘psychic centre’.  A kind of American Stonehenge. The future… a ‘secret source’ of either benevolent or malevolent energy.’ With the election of Trump in 2016, it turned wholly malevolent. Perhaps the great tidal wave of history is turning? I’m not so sure.