Janet, tell her we’re retiring her number.”
“Mort’s raising a subtle point here, Billy,” Harry Victor said. “Pick up a phone.”
Inez crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the fire. On the day Carol Christian left for good on the Lurline Janet had not stopped crying until she was taken from the Pacific Club to the pediatrician’s office and sedated, but Inez never did cry. Aloha oe . I am talking here about a woman who believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon. She could never get the tenth. The tenth should have been Night Star , but was not. During the 1972 campaign and even later I thought of Inez Victor’s capacity for passive detachment as an affectation born of boredom, the frivolous habit of an essentially idle mind. After the events which occurred in the spring and summer of 1975 I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew.
11
I N the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what Jack Lovett called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley, lecturing on the same short-term basis on which Harry Victor had lectured there between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions; living alone in a room at the Faculty Club and meeting a dozen or so students in the English Department to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers. I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy (the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought), between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer. “The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants” and “this war was a racket like all other wars” were both George Orwell, but were also an echo of Ernest Hemingway. “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he” and “he began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross” were both Henry Adams, but struck a note that would reverberate in Norman Mailer.
What did this tell us, I asked my class.
Consider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society.
Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words, consider the social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.
Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How? It so happened that I had been an undergraduate at Berkeley, which meant that twenty years before in the same room or one like it (high transoms and golden oak moldings and cigarette scars on the floor, sixty years of undergraduate yearnings not excluding my own) I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole, and at the scene of all I had left unlearned I could summon up only fragments of poems, misremembered. Apologies to A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz:
Of my three-score years and ten
These twenty would not come again.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over
Twenty years and the spring is over.
This was the school in which we learned
That time was the fire in which we burned.
Sentimental sojourn.
Less time left for those visions and revisions.
In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said “falling.”
“Mort’s raising a subtle point here, Billy,” Harry Victor said. “Pick up a phone.”
Inez crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the fire. On the day Carol Christian left for good on the Lurline Janet had not stopped crying until she was taken from the Pacific Club to the pediatrician’s office and sedated, but Inez never did cry. Aloha oe . I am talking here about a woman who believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon. She could never get the tenth. The tenth should have been Night Star , but was not. During the 1972 campaign and even later I thought of Inez Victor’s capacity for passive detachment as an affectation born of boredom, the frivolous habit of an essentially idle mind. After the events which occurred in the spring and summer of 1975 I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew.
11
I N the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what Jack Lovett called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley, lecturing on the same short-term basis on which Harry Victor had lectured there between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions; living alone in a room at the Faculty Club and meeting a dozen or so students in the English Department to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers. I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy (the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought), between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer. “The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants” and “this war was a racket like all other wars” were both George Orwell, but were also an echo of Ernest Hemingway. “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he” and “he began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross” were both Henry Adams, but struck a note that would reverberate in Norman Mailer.
What did this tell us, I asked my class.
Consider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society.
Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words, consider the social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.
Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How? It so happened that I had been an undergraduate at Berkeley, which meant that twenty years before in the same room or one like it (high transoms and golden oak moldings and cigarette scars on the floor, sixty years of undergraduate yearnings not excluding my own) I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole, and at the scene of all I had left unlearned I could summon up only fragments of poems, misremembered. Apologies to A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz:
Of my three-score years and ten
These twenty would not come again.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over
Twenty years and the spring is over.
This was the school in which we learned
That time was the fire in which we burned.
Sentimental sojourn.
Less time left for those visions and revisions.
In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said “falling.”
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