Joan Didion: South and West (From a Notebook)

 Joan Didion writes from an excerpt from her famous notebook of a trip across the South in June of 1970.  Called South and West.  A confirmed Californian in the Heart of the South during the George Wallace Days when the South was still distinctive.  A trip she took with her husband John Gregory Dunne through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.  A capsule of Southern observations in 1970.  Observations, brief, cursory, but not W.J. Cash type of analysis.  A collection of very short essays.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks---of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles.  South and North gives us two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s, read together they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape.  (Back cover)

Joan Didion is at the pool at the Howard Johnson in Meridian at the intersection of I-20 and I-59.    In this collection of short writings she seems to visited at  every pool at every motel where she stayed.

P. IX

The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan. 

Tennessee Williams thought he was made for New Orleans.

William Faulkner moved there when he was fired as the postmaster in Oxford.

Nobody remembers anything anymore especially our country's history even in the South which is supposed to always be looking backwards. William Faulkner famously said the past isn't over. It isn't even past. Not anymore. It is past now. (Added here)

1-16-25

P. XVIII

An unquestioned premise among those who live in cities with international airports is that Enlightenment values will come to all of America just as Thomas Jefferson thought that Unitarian values were the future, but they were wrong. But the South has become the future now instead.

WINFIELD 

P. 73-74

Maybe the rural South is the last place in America where one is still aware of trains and what they can mean, their awesome possibilities.

I put my clothes in the laundromat and walk on down the dirt at the side of the road to the beauty shop.  A girl with long straight blonde hair gave me a manicure.  Her name was Debby.

"I got one more year at Winfield High," Debby said, "then I'm getting out."

I asked where she would get out to.

"Birmingham," she said.

I asked what she would do in Birmingham.

"Well, if I keep on working while I'm in school, I'll have enough hours for my cosmetologist's license.  You need three thousand, I got twelve hundred already.  Then I'll go to modeling school.  Debby reflected for a moment.  "I hope I will."

GUIN

P. 77-80

At a motel in Gu-Win.  Can you believe that the Pulitzer Prize writer Joan Didion was at a motel in Gu-Win, Alabama, in June of 1970?  I did not know there was a motel in Gu-Win unless it's the one I would say is in Guin itself on the highway.

Her description doesn't sound like Guin.  She speaks of a drive-in in Hamilton.  No, that's Gu-Win.  Her details take liberties.

P. 101

In Greenville, a different kind of town.

P. 105

We stopped at Walker Percy's in Covington, Louisiana.  We sat out in back by the bayou and drank gin and tonics and when a light rain began to fall, a kind of mist,  Walker never paid any min but just kept talking an walking up to the house to get fresh drinks.  It was a thunderstorm, with odd light, and there were occasional water-skiers on the black bayou water.  "The South," he said, "owes a debt to the North. . . tore the Union apart once. . . and now only the South can save the North."  

So in the summer of 1970 fledgling West Coast writer Joan Didion felt like she had to visit the South.  She felt this urge which I don't really understand, but maybe she was on to something.  To understand this country maybe you have to come to terms with the South especially now in what will unfortunately be knowns as  the Age of Trump.  (Added)