Democracy (i)
from reporter Joan Didion at Vogue
The back cover of the novel is a glamor shot. The woman in the photograph won a job as a researcher at Vogue right out of college in 1956. She became one of the organic intellectuals of publishing in New York, as did her close contemporary Susan Brownmiller and dozens of thinkers of their vintage not burdened with a penis.
Joan Didion also read the stories and wore the clothes of the women’s magazines as Susan, of the Congress of Racial Equality and the New York Radical Feminists, did not. Joan was a woman of the people who had conquered and then managed our continent, and our hemisphere, and both our oceans for the United States.
The title of the novel is Democracy. Within the sophisticated fiction we glimpse Joan discussing the historian Henry Adams with graduate students at Berkeley, where she had earned her degree from the University of California, the state where she was born. Henry was a man of the north Atlantic seaboard who wrote candidly
how the early administrations of the new republic schemed to take all the New World from the other empires. Those governments of the United States included his family, their allies, and rivals. Henry’s own novel Democracy, set after our next revolution, shows power in families and clans vying to lead the people, the demos, the mob who rule.
In Joan’s version of Democracy we have all fetched up in the Pacific, wading as in her photograph perhaps in Hawaii where the novel begins with a beauty, a native daughter of one of the white families who took the place over. Viet Nam appears in her father, a builder in the occupation of the Republic of Viet Nam. The country appears as well in her lover, an asset or executive of the Central Intelligence Agency.
We don’t make men like that any more, thank god, and women like Joan and Susan now exercise their intellect as managing partners of white shoe fixer law firms. They don’t write books. As we read Democracy again and again I will point out how rare a view it affords of the representative American men who sent our people there, and also of their kids my age you likely have not heard much from unless like me you know them personally.
Right now I return to that hot shot of one good-looking author. It is relational, the way I shoot photographs. Joan is looking at her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, who is looking at her, both presenting Joan to the world. What fun, like Jill Krementz’ glamor shot of her man the novelist Kurt Vonnegut in a field of flowers.
Joan dedicated Democracy to Quintana, and also to her niece Dominique, already 2 years dead of murder. The author later also survived her 16 year-old photographer, dead suddenly in 20 years after rapid hospital admissions for pneumonia, septic shock, hematoma, and pancreatitis, stations of the cross for the falling-down drunk.
Some people can’t handle it. I should be surprised if she drank that much more than her family and friends. Their people in that day got hammered at lunch, at dinner, and before bed. The other woman in Joan’s dedication, one of the oppressed of her sex who escaped to practice medicine, almost made 100.
Joan was already a tough bird before she buried everyone she cared for. She had a mind of winter already in this tropical photograph. To quote the Wallace Stevens we share, she saw nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Let us read what she wrote from Viet Nam.
This was the first Viet Nam letter of 3 so far addressed to Democracy by Joan Didion. The second posted on November 1, 2023 and the third on November 5, 2023.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.