South And West - From A Notebook

In the summer of 1970, Joan Didion travelled through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with a notebook, a sharp eye and what appears to have been a constitutional inability to accept anything at face value. South and West: From a Notebook gathers the observations from that journey alongside notes made in 1976 while she was supposed to be writing about the Patty Hearst trial in San Francisco. She did not, in the end, write the trial piece, but Didion’s abandoned assignments have a habit of producing more interesting literature than most writers’ completed ones.

The South she encounters is not presented as a neat region awaiting explanation. It is humid, ritualised, suspicious, theatrical and burdened by memories that seem to have acquired property rights. Didion records conversations, meals, motels, courthouse squares, graveyards, radio broadcasts and the peculiar emotional weather of places where history is not safely in the past but sitting nearby, listening to what everyone says.

These are notebook entries rather than a polished travel narrative, which means there is no cheerful itinerary, no list of recommended restaurants and very little indication that the author has travelled anywhere for the purpose of enjoying herself. Instead, Didion notices what people wear, what they avoid saying, what they say repeatedly and what the arrangement of a hotel room reveals about an entire civilisation. Other travellers bring home souvenirs; Didion brings home unease.

Her South is full of elaborate courtesies, old resentments, social codes and conversations that seem simultaneously intimate and impenetrable. She listens to people discuss race, class, politics, family, violence and the future while remaining alert to the distance between the words being spoken and the thing actually meant. A lesser observer might have asked for clarification. Didion simply writes it down and allows the silence around it to become part of the evidence.

The second section turns westward to California and Didion’s own complicated relationship with the place. Asked to cover the Patty Hearst trial, she instead becomes preoccupied with San Francisco, Sacramento and the contrast between California’s self-invented mythology and the deeply rooted traditions of the South. California likes to imagine that history can be escaped by driving far enough west; Didion, being Californian, knows better.

Although slim, South and West is dense with the qualities that made Didion such a distinctive writer: precision, coolness, curiosity and an unnerving talent for spotting the crack in a perfectly respectable surface. She rarely announces her conclusions. She places the details carefully, steps away and leaves the reader to notice that the room has become colder.

Published in 2017 from notebooks written decades earlier, the book is both a fragment of unfinished journalism and a completed portrait of the author’s way of seeing. It catches America at particular moments in 1970 and 1976, yet its arguments about regional identity, memory, race and belonging remain disturbingly current. Evidently the future arrived but neglected to tidy up.

This is an excellent book for admirers of Didion, students of American culture, travellers who distrust travel writing and anyone who enjoys prose capable of turning a roadside lunch into an inquiry concerning the national character. It can be read quickly, although Didion’s sentences tend to remain behind after the pages have finished, quietly rearranging the furniture in one’s mind.

This copy is in Near Fine condition, meaning that it has come through its own journey with considerably less wear than America. Offered by Crappy Old Books, it is a compact, elegant and quietly unsettling volume from a writer who could enter a room, note the curtains and somehow leave with a diagnosis of the republic.

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