Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold Page #6

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until I found...

The New York Review.

I asked her, I said, "How did you...

start writing these pieces

about politics and...

Salvador and Miami and so on, because

you talked about how insecure you were."

She said, "Bob Silvers."

That was her answer,

was that he gave her the confidence

to not even question her doing it.

I remember reading some

of her things, I believe, in LIFE magazine

where she was a kind of

special correspondent,

and I thought, "What a fresh... voice."

But she hadn't written about

domestic politics

or from war zones before.

How did you know she could do that?

Well, just from talking to her

and reading her work,

I saw that she was

immensely knowledgeable, perceptive.

A sharp observer.

And I wanted to know,

as a matter of my own curiosity

as an editor and as a friend,

what she thought.

Have you ever visited a morgue?

I remember spending some time

in the L.A. County morgue,

and immediately the minute you walk in,

you make an accommodation so that...

if a body suddenly presents itself to you

or touches you, you're not going to...

Or if you have to watch an autopsy,

you're not going to get sick. Um...

And I think that's what's

happened in El Salvador.

It's quite a brutalizing experience.

There was a...

This awful civil war in Salvador.

The Americans were supporting

a very, very brutal...

terrible government.

We talked about it

and the idea was that she would go there.

She wanted to go there.

She wanted to get in on that.

You'd pick up the paper

and these horror stories would be there

and you kind of had to

get to the bottom of them.

- Was it dangerous?

- What, El Salvador?

It... It was the most dangerous place

I've ever... I ever hope to be.

I mean, it was terrifying.

I had never covered American politics.

It simply was outside

my whole interest range.

It seemed to exist

only to maintain itself.

I mean, it didn't seem to have

any relationship

with the people

who hung around gas stations.

It didn't seem to connect

with the rest of the country.

They tend to speak

a language common in Washington

but not specifically shared

by the rest of us.

They talk about programs and policy

and how to implement them.

Or about trade-offs

and constituencies

and positioning the candidate...

and distancing the candidate...

about the story and how it will play.

They speak of a candidate's performance,

by which they usually mean his skill

at circumventing questions.

Not as citizens,

but as professional insiders...

attuned to signals pitched

beyond the range of normal hearing.

Her piece on Cheney...

is enormously foreseeing...

of the whole course...

of Bush politics and the Iraq war.

She undertook to write

about the Bush administration,

the Bush war and, above all,

Cheney, who she saw...

as a decisive...

and bullying...

and really quite brilliantly evil figure.

Cheney reached public life

with every reason to believe

that he would continue

to both court failure and overcome it.

Take the lemons he seemed determined to

pick for himself and make the lemonade...

then spill it...

then let somebody else clean it up.

"Wilding." New York City police say

that's new teenage slang

for rampaging in wolf packs,

attacking people just for the fun of it.

A woman jogging in New York's

Central Park last Wednesday night,

raped and nearly beaten to death.

She is a white

Wall Street investment banker.

Police said the youths were joking

about the crime in their jail cell.

What drew you

to the Central Park jogger case?

Oh, it was just a natural story for me.

Everything about that story...

was a lie.

She was deeply suspicious

about how everyone was leaping into this...

These... This double image

of evil and good.

To understand is to forgive.

I don't wanna understand what motivates

someone, uh, to engage

in this kind of horror.

Calling us animals

is not going to get problems solved

- and this is what we want to do.

- You better believe I hate the people

that took this girl

and raped her brutally.

You better believe it.

One vision, shared by those

who had seized upon

the attack on the jogger

as an exact representation

of what was wrong with the city...

was of a city systematically ruined,

violated, raped by its underclass.

The opposing vision, shared by those

who had seized upon the arrest

of the defendants

as an exact representation

of their own victimization,

was of a city in which the powerless

had been systematically ruined,

violated, raped by the powerful.

I was just this kid living in Flatbush...

um, reading these very elegant words.

When you're on that side of being

described based on your skin color,

you read very cynically.

And so I read reports

in the New York Post, the Daily News,

The New York Times, very cynically.

And it was almost as if I was waiting...

for Joan to write the piece

that I needed to read.

Um... Because it was something that...

any reasonable person,

once they had stripped...

Um, as she would say,

the narrative of its rhetoric...

Um, the story was of old grievances,

right?

Old political grievances in the city.

I, myself, have always found

that if I examine something,

it's less scary.

We always had this theory that

if you kept a snake in your eye line...

the snake wasn't gonna bite you.

That's kind of the way...

I feel about confronting pain.

I wanna know where it is.

The doctor told you,

"John, the ticker's bad"?

The ticker is bad and that I was

a candidate

for a cardiovascular catastrophe.

And, uh, so, it tends to focus

and concentrate the mind very well,

so, I began to think about...

who I was, how I got to this point

and how it affected my life as a writer.

What made you move to New York?

John wanted to move.

He was restless.

He felt as if he was stale.

His plan was to spend

more time in New York.

You have a little resentment?

Actually, we never had

any of those feelings.

People found it hard to believe,

but neither John nor I

was ever jealous of the other's work.

I was happy to see him back in New York.

His exercise was walking

in Central Park in the mornings.

Sometimes he'd picked up,

not only the gossip from the dinner party

the night before, but the gossip from

whoever he ran into in Central Park.

John would roll his calls every morning

with fresh gossip

to a group of his friends.

And if any one of us had gossip for him,

he would yell "Joan, pick up!"

Even though her office was next door.

But if he did that...

the gossip had to be really good.

When my wife was alive,

we were couple friends.

We often went to dinner with them.

Among all the married couples I knew...

they were the ones

who were almost always together.

I always said...

they...

They're the sort of married couple that...

finished each other's sentences.

Although, John finishes Joan's sentences

more than Joan finishes John's sentences.

When you talked to them on the phone,

you realized

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