American Death Trips

By LANCE MORROW

THE WHITE ALBUM by Joan Didion; Simon & Schuster; 223 pages; $9.95

She stands there in her dust-jacket photograph, a tiny woman of 95 Ibs., with the figure of a spare 14-year-old. She stares out with the enormous, haunted eyes of a Keane waif, of a wounded bird, menaced and fragile. Readers who have grown over the years to admire the superb moody intelligence of Joan Didion's prose have first had to learn that this alarming vulnerability is an affectation and a part of her strategy as a writer. Despite all the fits of weeping and the killer migraines and the California dreads that blow across her novels and essays like the Santa Ana winds, Didion is on the whole as tough as a bounty hunter, and about as fragile as a brick of molybdenum. The wounded bird is even something of a predator.

Didion's novels (Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer) are less interesting than her collections of magazine pieces; paradoxically, the novels do not exert the dramatic force of her journalistic essays. Didion is best when the literary transaction is personal and direct, when she is a live character reporting her own wanderings through the splendidly strange California of the late '60s and the '70s, a California that elaborately belongs to her because it is in part her own invention, like the persona that describes it.

There are moments when Didion overdoes her performance of journalism-as-nervous-breakdown. "I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' " she wrote about the title piece of her brilliant 1968 collection. "The pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece." Her new collection of magazine articles, The White Album, contains a disagreeably calculated column she wrote for LIFE in 1969. "I had better tell you where I am, and why," Didion begins. Uh oh. The student of Didion is not surprised to learn that she is sitting with her husband in a room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu (a favorite stage setting), waiting for a tidal wave (which somehow acquires added metaphysical meaning from the fact that it never shows up) and trying to avoid the subject of whether to get a divorce.

Didion as a rule uses her self-dramatizations with an artist's instinctive discretion. She is an alert and subtle observer, with a mordant intelligence and a sense of humor with touches of Evelyn Waugh in it. She offers a lethal description of fatuous Hollywood political chatter. " 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' some one said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our fraises des bois, he had advised me as well that 'no man is an island.' " The White Album is full of the bizarre details, the eye for blinding weirdness, that made Slouching Towards Bethlehem one of the purest leftover artifacts of the '60s. Didion again collects clippings of American death trips: the brothers who bludgeoned Ramon Novarro, for example; and the 26-year-old woman who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit; the child's fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol.

In Didion's pieces, the players of the late '60s and the '70s come back in their vivid dementia: Hell's Angels, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Huey Newton, Bishop James Pike. Charles Manson peers in at the window. Linda Kasabian, the star prosecution witness against Manson, recruited Didion at one point to go to I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and buy her a dress for court: "Size 9 Petite. Mini but not extremely mini. In velvet if possible." Didion and Roman Polanski turn out to be godparents to the same child.

But The White Album is mellower than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion ranges more widely. A libertarian with a trace of Goldwater in her, an individualistic Westerner, Didion writes witheringly of bureaucrats who would tie up the Santa Monica Freeway (an eccentric passion of the woman in the yellow Corvette) by installing the restrictive "Diamond Lane." Didion, a sometime screenwriter, gives a wonderful insider's analysis of Hollywood as "the last extant stable society." She dismisses the women's movement with some hauteur: "To those of us who remain committed mainly to the ex ploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism." The article is, among other things, very funny, and a pure expression of Didion's contempt for cant.

The woman Didion seems most to admire is the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

Style is character, the author pronounces in italics. She then describes O'Keeffe in terms that sound like her ambitions for her own character: "She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees."

Excerpt

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. 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.

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