“This’ll prove it,” says John Gregory Dunne, thrusting a fan of invitation cards under my nose. “Decline. Decline. Decline. OK?”
“Selective,” is how Bob Silver, editor of The New York Review of Books, describes their social priorities. He is a rather selectively social figure himself, king of a snobby, self-regarding New York literary circle which moves chiefly in its own orbit, as close-knit and mutually supportive as Bloomsbury. I had met him on the Thursday, when the Didion-Dunnes had taken me to Susan Sontag’s book launch at the New York Public Library. Here, in a room something like the entrance to the Paris Ritz, the glum-faced authoress shook her grey hair at me like a shaman and failed to smile when Joan Didion drew her attention to a review in the Los Angeles Times Magazine which described Sontag as “a former Valley girl”. We met Sontag’s son, the author David Rieff; the journalist Lesley Garris and her playwright husband, Arthur Kopit; Dr Steve Wasserman, the editor of Times Books; and Mac Griswold, co-author of the book on American gardens, to name but a few.
Manhattan literati having replaced movie stars, the Didion-Dunnes seem set to stay in New York. Highly strung but well grounded, and well off for many years now, Joan Didion characterically portrays herself in her writing as alienated, fragile and adrift. There is a sense, as one literary critic put it to me, that she is “ethereal, special, seemingly made of a different substance from the rest of us”. In a writer so far from sentiment, this can seem precious. From a mixed bag of her books:
“I am a 34-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves.”
“I took that bright pink boat to Pearl Harbor, but I still do not know what I went to find out… because there was a point at which I began to cry, and to notice no one else.”
“I still could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and still could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries.”
“I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears.”
It seems that she is aware that readers can be irritated by all this dampness. “It was once suggested to me,” she writes in “On Self-Respect”, “That, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag.” She did, of course, see the humour of the thing. She wrote: “It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.”
