In October 2016 I attended an event at Politics & Prose bookshop, in Washington, DC. Arlie Russell Hochschild was talking about her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which recounts her recent travels through Louisiana in order to unknot the Great Paradox: why (white) people who most need the federal government's help often oppose politicians and policies that would deliver that help.
The book had added relevance in the run-up to the November presidential election, and the audience – educated, well- intentioned liberals – was trying to understand why some of their compatriots were embracing Trump. Were there, among them, some we could lead into the light – by taking seriously, for instance, the legitimate economic grievances of downwardly mobile populations? Or were they, by and large, as unregenerately racist, sexist and xenophobic – that triad of evils so often trotted out it had nearly lost meaning – as a portion of them proudly claimed to be, a bile that was rising in our nation’s collective throat?
Several things Hochschild said that day came back to me as I read Joan Didion's South and West, a slim book of excerpts from her notes on two essays that were never written: one, brief reflections on a trip to San Francisco to cover the Patty Hearst trial, in 1976, which led, years later, to her book Where I Was From; the other, far meatier, a report on a 1970 road trip through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Hochschild and Didion both refer to the sense of siege that besets poor white southerners, of having been the butt of too many jokes, too often condescended to by northerners and coast dwellers. “The solidarity engendered by outside disapproval, a note struck constantly,” Didion writes of Mississippians.
But Didion’s take on southerners is far more laconic and less forgiving than Hochschild’s. She doesn’t hide her disapproval, even her distaste. “The isolation of these people from the currents of American life in 1970 was startling and bewildering to behold. All their information was fifth-hand, and mythicized in the handing down.” She can’t allow herself to get too near Jackson, because planes leave from Jackson for California and New York, and she knows she won’t be able to resist the urge to hop right on one.
The impulse behind Didion’s trek through the land of Confederate bath towels, snakes, swamps, decay and “fever of unknown etiology” was a “dim and unformed sense . . . that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”
This unlikely idea of the south as America’s future, like the essay itself, never coheres, although it may seem less improbable now than it did in 1970. Nathaniel Rich argues as much in his introduction: that the southern frame of mind has expanded into the rest of the rural United States, among people on the one hand nostalgic for a past in which the men hunted and fished and the women cooked, canned and prettified and, on the other hand, living in a present in which, as Didion had it, a white supremacist running for public office is “a totally explicable phenomenon”.
Didion was referring to the segregationist George Wallace. Now we mean our 45th president – or “45”, what Americans who can’t bear to utter Trump’s name call him. As for nostalgia, a billboard recently erected in North Carolina reads: “Real men provide. Real woman appreciate it”. There is certainly an atavism at work in the US. But there is also a corresponding awakening. That billboard, like virtually every conservative gambit these days, whether grave or laughable, immediately provoked plans for a protest, instigated via Facebook by a local woman who said she’d never organised a protest in her life.
South and West reads like a teaser, and it had the effect of sending me back to Didion's great, idiosyncratic political writings from decades past, and there were some jarring parallels. When she wrote that no one could've missed "the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as in a wildlife documentary, when things did not go his way", she was describing not Trump but Bill Clinton, the man Republicans blamed for the "moral and intellectual disarmament" that befalls a nation when its president is not "being a decent example" and "teaching the kids the difference between right and wrong". It was William J Bennett, conservative pundit and subsequent Trump apologist, who said that.
In 2002 Didion delivered a lecture published as Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History that describes the country she encountered when she set off on a book tour a week after 9/11. What she experienced was Americans who were far shrewder than she, in her numbed state, was able to be. Her audiences could already see that, within days of the attack, "a good deal of opportunistic ground [was] being seized under cover of the clearly urgent need for increased security" and that "national unity" had quickly come to mean "acquiescence to the administration's pre-existing agenda".
She returned to New York to find an opposing impulse at work: the attack was being “obscured, systematically leached of history and so of meaning”, reduced to “repeated pieties that would come to seem in some ways as destructive as the event itself”.
This all sounds disconcertingly like the calls for unity after the 2016 election. There was a line that held all Americans should wish their president to succeed, as though, no matter who our president is, his success is necessarily to the country’s benefit. Even some traumatised liberal commentators said this in the early days. It was a line that ignored the fact that what Trump’s “success” would result in (and we had amassed enough evidence for this) was damage to or destruction of the institutions that had allowed the country to freely elect him in the first place and that gave it some chance to check him and some hope of surviving him.
Given the state of things I found myself, as I read South and West, wishing Didion were younger, still taking road trips and covering political conventions, performing the kind of evisceration of the current administration that she has on previous presidents and powermongers. Instead we have these notebooks from the past, what Rich calls a "glimpse inside the factory walls", which add to a body of work that is in continued dialogue with our present and future, whose insights disturb and whose prose, elliptical and dread laced, provides such singular and unsettling pleasure.
Molly McCloskey's new novel, When Light Is Like Water, is due in April from Penguin
