The White Album by Joan Didion

First published: 1979

The Work

In “The White Album,” the first essay of the collection, Joan Didion states her prime concern—U.S. national myths do not fit the facts of American lives. She states that there came a time when “I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.”

This long first essay begins with the description of her own experience with psychiatric examinations, with living in an old house on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. The house was scheduled to be torn down; it was waiting for the wrecker’s ball. She records the bizarre testimony of two young men who had murdered the film star Ramon Navarro for no reason and describes her friendship with Linda Kasabian, who testified at the Manson trial. There were also the unfocused and almost friendly anti-Vietnam Black Panther demonstrations and a recording session with the Doors, who seemed to hardly know each other, and a mystifying interview with Eldridge Cleaver. None of these experiences held together to make a narrative of America in the years between 1966 and 1971, although this essay represents ten years of searching on Didion’s part.

All nineteen of these essays point up the gulf between the facts and what people make of them in order to tell themselves a story and thus give meaning to what they experience. Bishop James Pike of San Francisco is revealed as a man interested only in the show although myth would make a mystic of him when he disappeared into the desert. The facts of his life reveal an ambitious man who entered the church for power and fame only. The essay bears the ironic title, “James Pike, American.”

Didion is fearless in exposing what she sees as systems of thought that give a false sense of authority, and of party lines that make narratives for their own purposes out of facts that do not come together or that do not really explain what it is said they explain. An example is the trivialization of the women’s movement in a litany of shared household chores, day care centers, and exciting jobs. The result is an expectation of romance, of fun, and a chance to work at a potter’s wheel. Says Didion, “The movement is no longer a cause but a symptom.”

In 1970, Didion visited Hawaii but her report of that visit, “In the Islands,” was not meant for a travel magazine. She visits the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which is on the island of Oahu and in the center of an extinct volcano. She watches an American family arrive from California to bury their son who has died in Vietnam. She interviews a commanding officer at Schofield Barracks, made famous by James Jones in From Here to Eternity (1951), but none of the officers or soldiers knows who James Jones is.

“Good Citizens,” is Didion at her cynical best, questioning the final unimportance of the highly publicized political actions of liberal film stars, capturing the falseness of the “photo opportunity” in Mrs. Ronald Reagan’s garden (in which the photographer has the first lady of California pretend to pick a rhododendron), and describing a visit to a meeting of optimistic Jaycees who hope the world is what it no longer can possibly be. The White Album spares no one, Didion’s factual description tells the true story. Critics agree that she is an elegant prose stylist and that she is rightfully one of America’s most celebrated journalists.

Bibliography

Anderson, Chris. Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Anderson, a major theorist of literary nonfiction, characterizes the work of Didion, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer as bearing witness to disjunctions in American experience. Relying on classical and contemporary rhetorical and literary theory, he focuses on the relationship between style and theme. Rather than reading Didion’s essays to explicate her fiction or explain her personality, he analyzes them as texts, attending closely to structure, tone, voice, and presence.

Duffy, Martha. “Pictures from an Expedition.” The New York Review of Books 25 (August 16, 1979): 43-44. This review essay praises The White Album primarily for the quality of Didion’s voice. Duffy’s analysis of some of the essays, particularly “The Women’s Movement,” is clear and balanced, though brief.

Felton, Sharon, ed. The Critical Response to Joan Didion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Felton’s introduction to this collection surveys Didion’s body of work up to 1993, drawing thematic connections across the genres. The volume contains reviews, selected critical response, a chronology, and an excellent bibliography.

Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti. “Joan Didion: The Courage of Her Afflictions.” The Nation, September 29, 1979, 277-286. In an extended analysis of several of Didion’s novels and essays, Harrison attempts to figure out why readers find Didion’s style so appealing. A stylist herself, she finds Didion petty and whiny, entirely self-absorbed and cold. A portion of the article addresses Didion and feminism.

Henderson, Katherine Usher. Joan Didion. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Writing for the general reader, Henderson summarizes each essay in The White Album, noting thematic trends and connections to Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Her analysis focuses on Didion’s use of architecture both thematically and as a metaphor for the structuring of her essays.

Malin, Irving. “The Album of Anxiety.” In Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations, edited by Ellen G. Friedman. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984. This very brief essay offers a close reading, section by section, of The White Album.

Muggli, Mark Z. “The Poetics of Joan Didion’s Journalism.” American Literature 59 (October, 1987): 402-421. Claiming that “close analysis of individual journalistic texts have been rare,” Muggli reads Didion’s nonfiction in The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem as both journalism and literary text. He calls Didion “one of the great American prose-poets.”

Schow, H. Wayne. “Out of Africa, The White Album, and the Possibility of Tragic Affirmation.” English Studies 647 (February, 1986): 35-50. Schow compares the work of Danish writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Didion as women and as writers on opposites sides of what he calls the “philosophical watershed” created by two world wars. He reads the work of both as dealing with the perceived collapse of cultural meaning and social order. His analysis attends especially to form, theme, tone, and sense of place.

Towers, Robert. “The Decline and Fall of the 60’s.” The New York Times Book Review, June 17, 1979, 1. Towers begins his review by claiming that “the effectiveness” of “The White Album” as an essay is in “the use to which personal neurosis has been put.” His praise for the essay, which he sees as the best in the volume, relies on a connection between Didion’s psychological state and her writer’s voice.