The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty Page B

benefited from the uptick in business, but they would never acknowledge the federal government’s role in the changes. To admit the influence of outsiders, Easterners, government men, would suggest limits to one’s proud independence. In 1936, construction began on McClellan Air Force Base (then called McClellan Field). Mather, another local airfield, reopened after a dormant period. These developments were good news economically, but they brought an influx of workers from afar, began to change the city’s look and feel, and gave the Didions one more reason to cherish their glorious past and embrace whatever seemed inviolable about the present.
    The Sunday aunts did their best to keep the past rolling. Miss Pearl Didion was busy with the Saturday Club, founded in 1893 to sustain classical music in Sacramento. Genevieve Didion was a powerful engine propelling the Camellia Society and eventually created a Camellia Grove in a park across the street from the state capitol, in honor of the valley’s pioneers. Her efforts were part of the progressives’ attempts to boost their own spirits by revising history—among other things, recasting the city’s founder, John Sutter, not as the economic opportunist he was, but as an agricultural dreamer.
    In addition to music and flower clubs, Sacramento had a literary society, but no Didions seem to have joined it.
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    For a time, Didion’s literary activities stayed in her bedroom. Soon after becoming obsessed with tales of the Donner Party, she set a framed picture of Donner Pass on her dresser. In Run River, she writes of a woman “whose favorite game as a child” was “‘Donner Party,’ a ritual drama in which she, as its originator, always played Tamsen Donner and was left, day after day, to perish by the side of the husband whose foolish miscalculations had brought them all to grief.” We’re invited to wonder if the Donner Party game occurred to Didion much earlier in life than during the writing of her first novel.
    Theatricality and drama appealed to her as much as writing—playacting was fun and seemed to suggest something true about people, in a family whose emotions were often masked (Didion said her mother gave a “successful impersonation of a non-depressed person,” a magnificent performance).
    â€œI wanted to be an actress,” Didion said. “I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse [as writing]. It’s make-believe.… The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.”
    Declarations, evasions, confessions lay at the heart of drama. Didion’s desire to capture accurate dialogue led her to leave her bedroom clutching her notebook. She’d go skulking in hallways, behind half-closed doors, eavesdropping on adults, recording their remarks. On the whole, the Didion family disappointed her in this unwitting project. For example, Didion’s grandfather, her father’s dad, “didn’t talk,” she recalled. “I don’t think my grandfather knew my or my brother’s names, he would always address us as ‘hey you.’” And the conversations were rarely dramatic. “If you were born in Sacramento and bragged about the place, you were ‘puttin’ on airs,’” William Burg told me. “If you were a little uncomfortable about the city, it was easier to sell it to outsiders. A slightly disdainful aspect was an appropriate class attitude.” In Didion’s earliest essays on Sacramento, her disdain is apparent, but the attitude was not useful in her initial dialogue exercises. Still, she liked secretly gathering details. “There used to be a comic strip when I was little called Invisible Scarlet O’Neil,” she recalled. “Invisible Scarlet O’Neil was a reporter. She would press a band on her wrist, become invisible and cover the story invisibly. And everybody