Revisiting “The White Album”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Thus begins Joan Didion’s “The White Album”, a masterpiece of modern American prose that has been rattling around in my head for a while thanks to an afternoon revisit. It’s a memoir of a time I lived through, but participated in only peripherally, being as yet still a young teen and therefore limited in mobility, both physically and perceptually.

The late 1960s played out in our suburban living room courtesy of a hand-wired Zenith color television that was my mother’s faithful companion and the unchallenged family nexus. If we were home, it was on. We ate dinner before it and we talked over it. Through the Zenith’s rounded-rectangle window, we watched John Glenn’s Friendship 7, the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK; we watched Ed Sullivan introduce The Beatles and Lorne Greene raise Adam, Hoss and Little Joe; we watched Vietnam and Walter Cronkite and Carol Burnett and Johnny Carson; we watched Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver and Abby Hoffman and Hubert Humphrey; we watched clever ads for Mr. Clean and Electrolux vacuums and 20-Mule-Team Borax and Richard Nixon; we watched The Summer of Love and Woodstock and the Democratic Convention in Chicago. We watched students demonstrate against the war and Julia Child demonstrate boeuf bourgignon.

What I saw on TV, Joan Didion was living through in person. The White Album is filled with the names of the day: Huey Newton, Jim Morrison, Eldridge Cleaver, Charles Manson. Didion sat on the vinyl floor of a studio while The Doors created an album. She knew Linda Karpelan, who was to be exonerated from guilt in the Manson/Tate killing spree. She was obsessed with the Ferguson brothers, murderers of whilom silent-film star Ramon Novarro. She missed out on the Berkeley demonstrations but got in on a penny-ante copycat version at San Francisco State. But unlike many who were actually there, she had her marbles intact and a virtuoso pen with which to record her observations. The White Album—a series of crystalline vignettes of the Sixties’ end—is the result.

Joan Didion writes as few can; her prose, sparse and clean, is a literary treasure that might not seem all that remarkable to the uninitiated. But it is remarkable—astonishing, really. Forged from a journalist’s hard-earned economy but shaped by an observant eye and given motion by a pitch-perfect ear, lingua Didionesca is an American vernacular of sinewy splendor.

“I made bouillabaisse for people who did not eat meat. I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin”—this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.”

This excerpt—assembled from a haunting mélange of ingredients that would likely curdle in the hands of any other writer—becomes all the more compelling if we realize that it is the leadup to the revelations of the Manson/Tate murders. That “demented and seductive vortical tension” was about to be made palpable as the world became aware of the senseless brutality that had just taken place in the gracious villa in the hills. At the end of “The White Album” Didion wonders if perhaps it was this event that marks the end of the 1960s, that time of revolution and rethinking and resistance.

It may well have been. I view the 1960s somewhat differently, myself, probably due to my own first-hand experience being mostly of the aftermath, in the form of people with minds damaged by drugs or their youth destroyed. So I’m not so sure about assigning such an operatic conclusion to the decade’s turmoil. I seek a whimper instead, something small and mean and threadbare and pointless. So I wonder if the 1960s ended when that first rosy-cheeked, well-raised Middle American kid, who a few decades earlier might have been a war hero or a heartbreaking statistic from Iwo Jima, retched out his last onto a vermin-infested futon in a grubby upstairs flat on Schraeder Street, a teenaged corpse embalmed with lysergic acid.

I saw nothing romantic about the Summer of Love. Apparently neither did Joan Didion, if one reads “The White Album” or “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” But I can’t express myself in prose as well as she does; I can’t do that at all.

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