There is a genre of writing one might label “Sneering at the South.” A Charles Simic essay, first published in The New York Review of Books years ago, is exemplary. A writer who is from and lives elsewhere visits the South, rides around for a few days, writes down what he or she sees. Typically, they see a lot, but it’s a kind of invisible sight. There is precious little activity, but within the lethargy there is the amber-frozen freak show of the South, site of moral decrepitude, site of the country’s sins, left to fester and skew, where Puritan religious signage grows like weeds and the self-rationalizing monologues function as a kind of witnessing. The narrator of this journey is a quietly appalled reporter. The underlying rhetorical question is, “Can you believe this place?”
Joan Didion’s book South and West is one such book, though it’s an odd book to be sure, not really a book qua book, but an agglomeration of notes. The first section of 107 pages contains notes she made during a visit to the South with her husband in the summer of 1970. She thought that it would lead to something, but it never did (except this incidental volume). The second, much shorter (and much less interesting) section is about California and the environment surrounding the Patty Hearst trial. (This second section is less interesting mainly because there isn’t enough of it.) In other words, it’s a non-book book, or the kind of book that only famous writers with long distinguished careers get to publish — a book of scraps.
But these are quite interesting scraps. Previously, in my younger years, I was awfully defensive whenever one of these sneering at the South pieces arrived. I was put out for years — years — over that Simic piece. Don’t even get him started. But either I’ve mellowed or the Didion scraps are really that good, because I found myself genuinely enjoying her notes. Does she say anything particularly new about the South? Not really. She hits all the points that everyone else seems to hit — the relentless heat, the seeming absence of anything to do, the hair, the sports, the weird voodoo billboard religion. She captures the post-integration mindset of the white middle class in a couple of wonderful monologues, where she just lets people go on and on.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
“He had the smooth, rounded face of well-off New Orleans, that absence of angularity which characterizes the local genetic pool.”
“It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken.”
“Before the doctor came in a nurse took my history, and she seemed not to believe a word I said. While I waited in my white smock I began to see it through her eyes: A woman walks into a clinic, a stranger to Meridian. She has long straight hair, which is not seen in the South among respectable women past the age of fourteen, and she complains of an injured rib. She gives her address as Los Angeles, but says the rib was injured in a hotel room in New Orleans. She says she is just ‘travelling through’ Meridian. This is not a story to inspire confidence, and I knew it as I told it, which made meeting her eyes difficult.”
“In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”
“We had drinks, and after a while we took our drinks, our road glasses, and went for a drive through town. Mrs. Evans had grown up in Grenada, had been married once before, and now she and her second husband — who was from Tupelo — lived in her mother’s old house. ‘Look at all those people standing around in front of that motel,’ she said once on the drive. ‘That’s a cathouse,’ her husband told her. We went out to a lake, and then to dinner at the Holiday Inn, this being another of those towns where the Holiday Inn was the best place to eat. We brought our drinks and a bottle in with us, because there was no liquor served, only setups. I am unsure whether the bottle was legal. The legality or illegality of liquor in the South seems a complication to outsiders, but is scarcely considered by the residents. At dinner some people were watching us, and later came over to say hello to the Evanses. They introduced us as friends from California. ‘We were wondering where you were from,’ one of them said.”
“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 mind but just kept talking, and 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.’ He said he had not wanted to see us in New Orleans, at Ben C.’s, because at Ben C.’s he was always saying things he would not ordinarily say, playing a role. [Ben C. is the well-off New Orleanian of the first quotation above. — ed.] Greenville, he said, was a different kind of town. He had spent some time in Los Angeles once but could not face it. ‘It was the weather,’ his wife said mildly. ‘The weather was bad.’ ‘It wasn’t the weather,’ he said, and he knew exactly what it was.”
She begins in New Orleans, meanders around the Mississippi Gulf Coast, wanders up to Birmingham, back tracks through Mississippi and the Delta. There is no plot, no argument, no newsworthy event. There are merely small towns passed, observations collected, strings too short to use. These really are notes. Perhaps my appreciation grows out of a change within me. Perhaps I agree with these sneering at the South pieces more than I did when I was fresh out of college. Or perhaps rather than full on agreement, the observations serve as thrilling little whippit blasts of confirmation. Particularly here, the condescension inherent in the sneering pieces is subdued. She’s not overtly judging. She is just glamorously, serenely observing. One can almost see the expensive sunglasses.
Perhaps it’s the laconic precision of her prose. One wonders if Didion, as a person, was a difficult travel companion — astringent, hyper-particular, compulsively judgmental when confronted with the flux of travel — because her prose, conversely, is so precise and controlled and chilled. There is a moment when she puts her clothes in at a laundromat and goes to buy a cup of ice, and as she chews on the ice walking back, I thought: this is the perfect metaphor for Didion’s prose. It hurts your teeth, but it’s oddly refreshing.
Even though she’s describing the atmosphere from the summer of 1970 — almost fifty years gone now! — much of what she observes would still be accurate. James Fallows has a series of articles in The Atlantic that talk about industry finally coming to Mississippi, a topic many of Didion’s interlocutors go on and on about. Things are always on the verge of getting drastically better. Another evergreen topic is a strange defensiveness about being from and/or living in Mississippi (not that I myself would ever participate in this defensiveness, heavens). One wonders how much has really changed, aside from the obvious — the internet and slight political progress. Reading this book often makes present southern reality feel not historically distant but more like Back to the Future II. It contains the same plot and the majority of the same actors but the costumes are slightly different. The shoes now lace themselves but the same old complexities remain.