Let Me Tell You What I Mean

 Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Joan Didion (Vintage, 2021)

        Some writers, and I think Joan Didion is one of them, ought never to go out of print. Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a collection of essays otherwise uncollected; this is less like the cutting room floor than a release of studio tapes of a classic band, fooling around and finding their greatness.

        I don’t exactly mean fooling around, of course. These essays were professional work, half of them written for the Saturday Evening Post, which was still published every other week in the nineteen-sixties. She’s always an economical writer, and these two-thousand-word pieces make every word pay.

        One of her subjects, here as always, is California. “A Trip to Xanadu” brings us to the Hearst castle, visible from Highway 1 as a vision to enchant children. “San Simeon was, moreover, exactly the castle a child would build, if a child had $220 million and could spend $40 million of it on a castle: a sand castle, an implausibility, a place swimming in warm golden light and theatrical mists, a pleasure dome decreed by a man who insisted, out of the one dark fear we all know about, that all the surfaces be gay and brilliant and playful.” The castle was given to the state, and kept up as one more rich man’s estate, with civil-service guides who are “treasuries of fact: 2,144 rose bushes in Mr. Hearst’s gardens, 5,400 volumes in Mr. Hearst’s private library…” but on the whole, she thinks, seeing the distant castle in the sky may have been the more satisfying experience.

        Her uncanny knowingness about the world we live in shows up in “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice.” Writing in 1968 about the 1952 experience of not getting into Stanford, she thinks “it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps, each of which must be successfully negotiated in order to avoid just such a letter as mine from one or another of the Rixford K. Snyders of the world.” Lord have mercy, those children are, at least, the grandparents of the current swarm of seventeen-year-olds chasing that brass ring, and the odds have only gotten worse. (Didion herself took a few junior college classes, and went on to Berkeley the next year; no harm done.)

        As you might expect, she writes about writing in a most matter-of-fact yet illuminating way. In her twenties, she worked at Vogue, writing the pretty copy for the pretty photographs. “It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’ and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.” It was a kind of boot camp, working not just by the inch but by the character. “All this was tonic, particularly to someone who had labored for some years under the delusion that to set two sentences side by side was to risk having the result compared widely and unfavorably to The Golden Bowl.”

        I made two discoveries while working on this: that my library, through the Libby app, can get me five or six other collections of Didion’s work as e-books; and that the venerable Saturday Evening Post still exists. It’s now published six times a year by a non-profit corporation, which also offers a website with the complete archives—sign me up!

        From the land of week-old snow, stay warm, my friends.