Joan Didion’s South and West is loosely defined as a travel essay, but of course, like all of Didion’s writing, it delivers so much more.

The book is comprised of excerpts from notebooks Didion kept in the 1970s. The first part, ‘Notes on the South‘, traces a road trip that she took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Along the way, she chronicles her observations about the small towns they pass through and she gently examines the deeply rooted (and sometimes unquestioned) beliefs about race, class, and heritage held in the South.

“Southern girls are notoriously husband hunting, but I guess that’s the same everywhere.”
It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

The second (much shorter) part of the book, ‘California Notes‘, came about when Didion was commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine to write a piece on the Patty Hearst trial (although she never completed the assignment). Instead, while watching the trial, Didion thought about her own upbringing in Sacramento, and how that had shaped her.

Together, Notes on the South and California Notes, provide a snapshot of the American political and cultural landscape at a particular point in time. I read warily – it is fair to say that in terms of politics and culture, America is currently poised on a terrifying edge. What would Didion find in the South and the West now? I won’t speculate* but I will share a couple of the things that I really enjoyed about this book.

Firstly, the hotel swimming pools. This isn’t a road-trip story, it’s a superbly written record of motor-inn swimming pools. In Biloxi she stays at a motel with a pool that is ‘…large and unkempt, and the water smells of fish.’ Things improve in Meridian, and she devotes a whole notebook entry to the pool at the Howard Johnson’s, which is perched at the intersection of east-west and north-south highways. Sitting by the pool, Didion says that she ‘…felt the euphoria of Interstate America. I could be in San Bernardino, or Phoenix, or outside Indianapolis.‘ In Birmingham, her swim draws attention from patrons at a bar overlooking the pool – “Hey, look, there’s somebody with a bikini on…” and in Tuscaloosa she notes that ‘…everything seemed to be made of concrete, and damp.’

The pools provide points of comparison, as do other markers, such as food, weather, and monuments in small towns. The net result of these details is a rich picture of towns in the South.

It was a fatalism I would come to recognize as endemic to the particular tone of New Orleans life. Bananas would rot, and harbor tarantulas. Weather would come in on the radar, and be bad. Children would take fever and die…

I think I never saw water that appeared to be running in any part of the South.

In Demopolis around lunchtime the temperature was 96 degrees and all movement seemed liquid.

Secondly, Didion captures so much about race, history, and class in vignettes that don’t feel controversial.

When I think now about New Orleans I remember mainly its dense obsessiveness, its vertiginous preoccupation with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style. As it happens, these particular preoccupations all involve distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny and to leave deliberately unmentioned, but in New Orleans such distinctions are the basis of much conversation, and lend that conversation its peculiar childlike cruelty and innocence.

4/5

One day … we spent hours making shrimp bisque and then had an argument about how much salt it needed, and because he had been drinking Sazeracs for several hours he poured salt in to make his point. It was like brine, but we pretended it was fine.

*it might sound impossible, however, I have a self-imposed media blackout on news, which I intend to keep in place for the next four years. I have found the pieces about American politics that have trickled through my barriers, distressing. I realise I can’t block out everything but nor do I have to be exposed to it constantly. My family are cooperating 🙂