Alistair Murray

Go Back Into the Blue

There is something oddly enchanting about Joan Didion. Her prose features the kind of jagged, sharp, spellbinding, poetic, almost Bob Dylan-like sentences that leads some to use words like ‘rough’ to describe its lyrical refrains and labyrinthine twists. It has made her iconic: a literary celebrity, of sorts (assuming one is willing to forgive the oxymoronic feel to such a phrase). While in her latest memoir, Blue Nights, Didion laments loss, it would require blind asininity to review the book as one about loss of life alone. Blue Nights, in addition to its extensive discussions on loss of youth, among other things, also includes poignant personal reflections on what the author views as her own frailty. “Could it be that I did not figure in … the irreversible changes in mind and body,” she reflects. “The way in which your awareness of this passing time — this permanent slowness, this vanishing resilience — multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life?”

“Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.” Words, the “correct stance” for “the attitude, the tone,” Didion confesses, have always come easily to her. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote in The White Album. Indeed, fear of losing this grasp on storytelling becomes apparent in Blue Nights. “I tell you this story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.” While forgivably solipsistic, there is nothing arrogant about Didion’s work, nor is there any of the regrettable narcissistic self-pity one might expect to find in such a memoir. Instead, Blue Nights in particular presents a regretful reflection on parenting and motherhood – subjects on which the author is heartbreakingly unforgiving. “I don’t know many people who think they have succeeded as parents,” one chapter begins. It speaks highly of her forceful directness, the ‘sharpness’ or ‘roughness’ so many have attempted to adequately describe, that she should begin with so few words, and sobering words at that. And it is that forcefulness that makes Blue Nights so readable. And so emotional, too. She certainly doesn’t hold back. At no point does Didion seriously contemplate legacy and its significance, but one sentence stands out in particular: “When we are talking about mortality,” she writes, “we are talking about our children.”

“Today would be her wedding anniversary.” On the evening that her husband John Gregory Dunne died, Didion had returned from the hospital where their adopted child, Quintana Roo, had been lying unconscious since Christmas. Two days after Dunne’s funeral, she collapsed due to a massive hematoma in her brain, surgery followed; she died shortly after.

The book’s chapters are primarily composed of short episodic memories; for example, of Didion’s sudden fear: fear of the ‘Broken Man’, a figure of her daughter’s nightmares Quintana is said to have so vividly described, Didion herself would begin to believe he existed. Fear, too, of losing the little girl she sees lying on the floor of their Brentwood Park home, sobbing, “Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.” Didion’s capacity for visual richness is astounding. It is difficult to forget the passage which quotes her husband’s wedding toast to his daughter, in which he recalls the image of Quintana walking down a hill to school, the image of his daughter in a ponytail – “a towhead in that Malibu sun” – before the wide blue of the ocean, the image that made Didion cry. It’s an acute description to register; she does it. Just as she tells of “the bright red soles of her shoes” as she kneeled at the altar, “the stephanotis in her braid, the plumeria tattoo through her veil,” the way seasons in Southern California suggest violence but “not necessarily death.” This quality of description is inescapable throughout and demonstrates not only Didion’s unique understanding of language but also her subject, and her ability to communicate her understanding to the reader.

Considered in full, it would be impossible to deny that fear features heavily throughout the book. As a personal litany of the perceived failures of a mother, Blue Nights tells us of the daughter the author adored, the daughter who harboured, like many adopted children, an innate and disconsolate fear of abandonment. Perhaps even more memorably, she confronts some of the questions most mothers dare not ask aloud, and the question ‘everyone who has ever waited’ to bring a child home has asked herself: what if I fail to love this baby?

Those who haven’t read the book may find the title a little off-putting, slightly too generic, somehow. But as Didion does exceptionally well in explaining the extended thematic metaphor it introduces: “In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue…. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming … yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise….During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come.” And then she delivers the key line: “Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.” The image of ‘blue nights’ as Didion terms it, the nights in which one finds oneself ‘swimming in the colour blue’, is an abstract idea when applied to the way her mind “turned increasingly to illness, to the end of promise,” but are described with admirable lucidity and simplicity. “Did I believe the blue nights could last forever?”

Naturally, as with any Didion memoir, there is the ability for the reader to infer some sense of wealth and opulence: the very mention of Christian Louboutin, or pricey hotels, would be hard to miss. In an unfortunate consequence, it gives ammunition to those who sneer at Quintana’s life as one of ‘privilege’ – an inference that Didion roundly dismisses. “‘Privilege’ is an opinion. ‘Privilege’ is an accusation. ‘Privilege’ remains an area to which — when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later — I will not easily cop.”

Blue Nights has been endowed with the meaning and beauty our world’s most familiar and repeated clichés deplorably lack. While we’re told constantly to ‘cherish the moment’, there often appears to be a kind of sneaking insincerity embedded in the phrase itself, but in Didion’s work it seems as if, unlike those awful clichés, the author actually means it. “‘You have your wonderful memories,’ people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone … Memories are what you no longer want to remember.” Such is the invariable feeling of lament that underwrites much of the book. “Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

This book is not a eulogy for her daughter as much as it’s not a biographical work for the author; the storyteller, the woman who famously observed that we tell stories in order to live, is not telling a story. It’s a reflection. But to simply say that does little to fully represent the deeply personal nature of its episodes. What more can one say except that it’s heartbreaking? Truly heartbreaking. We hardly know Quintana, due to what John Banvillle described as her ‘fleeting presence’ in the book, due to, he posits, her mother’s unwillingness to evoke her daughter too vividly, as if she could not bear to do so. But we know her absence, and we know how much that means to Didion; and to know her absence is enough – to understand her absence is to understand her. Almost.

Go back into the blue.

I myself placed her ashes in the wall.

I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.

I know what it is I am now experiencing.

I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.

The fear is not for what is lost.

What is lost is already in the wall.

What is lost is already behind locked doors.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

You may see nothing still to be lost.

Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.