Joan Didion’s Blue Nights

Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1775-1842), Mont Blanc (1807) — her memoir is much about her relationship with her daughter whom she continually painted

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 the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.

I reviewed and praised highly on Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two Joan Didion’s first book of mourning, A Year of Magical Thinking out of my own experience and from the point of view of her argument or thematic assertions about time, death, how illness is treated in the US. A Year of Magical Thinking was written within a year or so of Didion’s husband’s sudden death (December 30, 2003), and its semi-traumatized tone comes from the nearness of this event — the book’s origins in time — as well as the devastation she had begun to experience and continued dealing with around the time of her husband’s death. Quintana Roo, her only child, an adopted daughter (adopted March 3, 1966, the day of the child’s birth) also began to experience severe brain hemmorhages and come near death repeatedly in incident after incident in ICU units: Quintana died August 26, 2005. A double whammy if ever there was one.

Perhaps I should have put the review of A Year of Magical Thinking on this blog as very much a woman’s book, the bereft widow is a sub-genre of its own in fiction (e.g., A Serious Widow by Constance Bereford-Howe; In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill) l’écriture-femme of the type that emerged in the later 18th century. Mourning the death of a beloved daughter is not as common a type: Nadine Trintignant’s Ma fille, Marie is intended to expose the horrors of wife abuse and specifically how and why her daughter’s murderous husband got away with destroying her daughter. Often as in poems by women poets on their relationship with their daughter, the text will be an elegiac celebration of what has been lost (because the girl grew up and married, went away, died, there was an estrangement), e.g.,

To my daughter On Being Separated from Her on Marriage

Dear to my heart as life’s warm stream
   Which animates this mortal clay,
For thee I court the waking dream,
   And deck with smiles the future day;
And thus beguile the present pain
With hopes that we shall meet again.

Yet, will it be as when the past
   Twined every joy, and care, and thought,
And o’er our minds one mantle cast
   Of kind affections finely wrought?
Ah no? the groundless hope were vain,
For so we ne’er can meet again.

May he who claims thy tender heart
   Deserve its love, as I have done.
For, kind and gentle as thou art,
   If so beloved, thou art fairly won.
Bright may the sacred torch remain,
And cheer thee till we meet again.

— Anne Hunter née Home (1742-1821)

Or the woman will present her book as intended to educate her daughter or grand-daughter (Louise D’Épinay’s Conversations d’Émilie). Didion’s book is a memoir of her daughter’s life and character too (she includes a poem the girl wrote as a child) and herself seen through the perspective of death.

The plot-design and ostensible purpose of Didion’s book turns on a simple conceit: reminding me of Liv Ullman in a recent Bergmann film, Sarabande sitting before a table loaded with old photos, (some of which are of her daughter, now mentally ill in an asylum), Didion sits before old photos and relics of her daughter, and slowly goes over the phases of Quintana’s life (not necessarily in chronological order), interwoven with the punctuated crises of her journey into death. I regret to admit the book is a muddle. First we are not told what is killing the daughter: acute pancreatitis, most of the time brought on by alcoholism: it’s too painful for Didion to tell what led to her daughter turning to alcohol. It ought to have been central to the book as it’s partly about her own sense of failure as a mother. I know I often felt at a loss to know precisely what Didion was saying, as when she gets very indignant the idea (“‘Privilege’ is an accusation …”) she led a “privileged” life as did this girl as her daughter. I know from experience how people can become offended if you tell them they have led a privileged life, but all Didion is for two pages is defensive (pp. 75-77).

I regret the book is a muddle because I found it unbearably moving, especially towards the end, when I had to close it now and again because I could not go on. If possible it’s better than A Year of Magical Thinking anyway: a subtle point others might not see, & I can’t prove, is that she’s so intently sincere — the book becomes about her bond to the earth through her daughter (though having a child who has now predeceased her — she quotes passage after passage about how mortally painful this is). Her book begins with the deep axiom: What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripedes [sic] said that. A Year was written in the aftermath of her husband’s death; this 7 years after her daughter’s, and this may also account for the sense of depth continually. The sudden insights into the sources of grief rang into my brain. Across her houses or apartments she kept mementos she is in the habit of saving, so many from different occasions, they crowd out space for presently used and useful items. The great lines (poetry) come and go: she writes:

In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment … In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

A really striking memory is of Quintana’s poignant fragment of a novel: very like Jane Austen’s niece, Anna Austen Lefroy (“Which is the Heroine?”, Quintana wrote a novel intended to gain her parents’ respect, but one which showed rather just how deep her anxieties at being this brilliant power-couple’s daughter went; meditation brings out that Quintana feared her parents would abandon her, was more intensely afraid of her parents’ not loving her than most children — because she had been adopted? because Didion herself lived in fear she could not keep this child safe? I know that one strong desire I have towards my daughters is that they shall be safe. Didion also feels the novel showed that “she had no idea how much we needed her” (pp. 50-51, p 82).

Blue nights are twilight, that time of night when the blush of blue suffuses the sky in part of California, just before evening or night sets in; here on the east coast it’s that “gloaming” light I have seen and love myself when there is this blush of goldish light-auburn sort of late in the afternoon, just as the sun is setting, in Leeds 4 decades ago now all yellowish.

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93), The Gloaming, Leeds (1883)

I’ve gotten my husband and younger daughter to go walking with me around 4:45 pm in November here in Alexandria so we can all three be in this light together, which in Alexandria is a whitish glow, experience the world while in it. In Blue Nights Didion presents herself as having received warning signals that she would lose her daughter before she herself died. These signals appear to be the death of others she, John Gregory Dunne and Quintana knew intimately as part of Quintana’s growing-up. Didion appears surprised to realize how many friends she has had, contemporaries of her daughter some of them, who are now dead. The key here is to bring out the naivete I realize I shared in until this past August 4th: I too counted “happiness and health and and love and luck and children as ‘ordinary blessings.'” They are not. At any time, especially after middle-age, death can strike.

The signals though are also recurring unexplained scenes, such as Quintana

wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia [a flowering plant in the Malibu house]. Let me just be in the ground, she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

I surmise these are remembered episodes of intense depression not attached to the otherwise happy narrative of a simple conventional life she gives Quintana: good school, loving parents, happy marriage as the goal of Quintana’s life. Yet unlike A Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights does not jar, arouses no suspicion it’s a made-book. There is no gap between a bright surface and name-dropping social life and what she’s saying and doing literally. Obscurely surfacing now and again there is an admission rather that her daughter did not do what high-end parents expect: go to university (?), have the admired career (?). This comes out from her perspective as a parent:

I do not know many parents who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies. The very definition of success as a parent has undergone a telling transformation: we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independence (which is to say into adult) life, to ‘raise the child, to let go

For myself I used to say to both daughters, I don’t know what will make you happy or fulfilled, and so am not sure what goals I should try to inculcate. I would only go so far as to try to urge on them solvency (that I achieved only with my husband in later years) and independence of character (that I’ve not). Maybe for safety … Perhaps I should have put before them high expectations of money, career, status and assumed that would make them proud at least of themselves. I didn’t want to pressure them into what was beyond them, maybe, a false measuring stick for their character and circumstances.

I recommend this book as a kind of patchwork of moments remembered, with the proviso she gives us more than once that these have been re-shaped to be more endurable, e.g., “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember” (p. 13). In many of these she gives explicit or clear utterance to thoughts which we may try to reach ourselves for consolation or self-education and not manage. She goes over books she read with Quintana when Quintana was young: precious to me was reading with Laura Caroline: The Tenth Good Things about Barney by Judith Viorst, a story enabling parent and child to cope with the death of a beloved pet. She took it with her when she left home to live with her first husband, and both of us remember that cats dream of eating lovely cans of tuna in heaven.

The end of the book tells of Quintana’s funeral (she was cremated and her ashes put in a wall in the Cathedral of St John the Divine where she was married), Vanessa Redgrave’s marvelous one-woman performance of A Year of Magical Thinking off-Broadway (pp. 165-70), all the while dwelling on old photos, memories now of people who were young and admired icons when Quintana was young and now are very old (Sophia Loren an unexpected one) or gone (dead). But above all Didion’s loneliness, her aching sense of loss. She’s no longer here:

Vanish.
Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.
Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.
Go back into the blue …

Let us recall:

Brightness falls from the air
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die — Thomas Nashe

There is now no day in Didion’s life when she does not see her girl’s face and long to pluck Quintana from where Didion cannot reach her.

My dreads are voiced in this book: the sudden utterances went through my heart like the blood that flows there which I used to say stood for him: he is the blood that flows through my heart I’d say. how will I cope? will I lose much that my admiral built for us? will I be able to hold onto it or me. My crazinesses perhaps to come when I lose Jim: “I imagine telling her. I am able to imagine telling her because I still see her” (p. 187). I’ve picked out four photos of Jim I mean to print out larger and frame and put about the house. He wants to be cremated and I know going to a grave to stand over a corpse in reason and reality makes no sense. But to burn his body up permanently is hard. He wants an urn like the one he saw in an HD Met opera performance of Giulio Cesare, with a saying no less: “There’s some corner of a foreign mantelpiece/That is for a while England.” But I don’t want him to vanish, I will want to reach him unbearably. I imagine others reading this (or her Year of Magical Thinking) who have gone through some version of what she has will profit from her book.

Ellen