Democracy (iii)

from the novelist Joan Didion and publisher Simon & Schuster

The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.

That first sentence of the first chapter sets the scene around one ocean, on atolls of the southwest, my own Aleutians of the northeast, in the cities of Manila, Honolulu, and Jakarta, at the air bases of Clark, and Johnston, at Bien Hoa, and Tan Son Nhut.

We are in the modern world after the 15C when voyagers from the south finished settling the last island just as discoverers from the north began to map them all together. We are past the modern world after 1945 when the old empires fell and the new one started using nuclear weapons.

It’s not strictly a monologue or a prologue but a speech from one character to another such as sets the scene for a play. Those often are between supporting players you may never hear from again at length or even see but Jack and Inez are the leads of this feature.

Jack does most of the talking, at Inez. If another man wrote the novel that would be his naive masculinism of the day.

From Joan Didion it is reportage on a representative man. The author is the woman who speaks.

Jack Lovett speaks to Inez Victor at Honolulu in 1975 as Roy Batty had done to Rick Deckard at Hollywood, Joan Didion’s workplace, 2 years before she published this novel. “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

“Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.”

The scene Jack sets is the Pacific of the Commander in Chief, Pacific, United States Navy, a theater of the Cold War, where indeed Jack observed light we hope no one ever will see again. But what he took from it all at the end of the show to the woman he loved across the 1950s, 60s, and 70s was how the sun came up.

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 3 so far addressed to Democracy by Joan Didion. The first posted on July 30, 2022 and the second on November 1, 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.