It was after this realization that I began trying to find the “point” of California, to locate some message in its history. I picked up a book of revisionist studies on the subject, but abandoned it on discovering that I was myself quoted, twice. You will have perhaps realized by now (a good deal earlier than I myself realized) that this book represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely.
I can remember starting Primary School in 1984 and the small building of thin walls and low ceilings in the village of Rathcool, with a large poster of the 1916 revolutionaries hanging on the wall facing the entrance. This was the first sight upon entering the school and I grew to recognize the face of Padraig Pearse as a modern day quasi-saint. I grew to understand that my identity as an Irish child was as much a product of nationalism, as the Catholic faith with which I was raised. The priests who visited us in school were the symbolic descendants of those martyrs who hosted secret masses under the yoke of British rule, spreading God’s love under the threat of persecution. When I walked under the threshold of my secondary school building, significantly to be taught each of my subjects through Irish instead of English, my eye was drawn to the Latin motto painted on tiles in the floor Pro Deo et Patria.
Cut to the present day, with reports of the abuse of children by Catholic priests the world over; my country well on track for a double-dip recession due to the ineptitude and greed of our national leaders; the conflict in Northern Ireland perpetuating itself out of a constant recycling of hatred divorced from any ideological concerns – disillusioned seems too small a word to fit my state of mind. Thankfully that is why we have things like the Hark A Vagrant strip by the enormously talented Kate Beaton. Oh tis good to laugh.
Joan Didion’s book is informed by an investigation into the myths and aggrandized history that surrounds the ‘manifest destiny’, march to California. This is as much to situate herself as a product of this ‘immigration’, as a discussion of what makes up contemporary America.
As such the opening chapters of this book detail the efforts made by Didion’s ancestors to cross the Americas. There are startling stories of whole families throwing themselves across the wilderness, with the risk of starvation, attack by the creatures of the wild and being snowed in before crossing the Sierra Nevada mountain range. There were also encounters between the colonists and the native Indians who lived on the plains. A relation of Didion’s leaves a diary describing one such meeting, where her husband entertained a curious group of Indians by demonstrating the use of fire-arms. This also served to warn them of their capability as an offensive weapon of course.
The fiction of Jack London is also examined, as much a product of the mythologising of America as a late contribution. Particular attention is drawn to his novel The Valley of the Moon. The unironical naming of the heroine Saxon Roberts suggests just how London regarded his own status as an ‘Old American, a representative of the civilizing force emanating from Britain. A second novel, The Octopus by Frank Norris, concerned with the grand narrative of ‘Wheat’, is chosen for its ambivalence. Popularly considered a simplistic attack on corporate America (one quote features that phrase so recurrent in Lovecraft’s purple prose ‘cyclopean’), Didion reveals that its passages identify the would-be romantic farm-hands as fellow exploiters of the land, who arrived too late to establish themselves as the train barons and such had.
Further sections of the book trace the development of middle-class life in the author’s home town, considered so anathema to American ideals of being classless, with aristocracy itself a supposedly abandoned European decadence. In as much as this is a study of American history, Didion’s book celebrates the incredible efforts of families and individuals to tame the landscape of California, while refusing to romanticise the results.
A thought-provoking and incisive dialogue with the past. For a historical study, this book is uncommonly moving.
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October 12, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Stacey
Such a well written post and food for thought on how deeply ingrained your country’s past reflects on the person you are today. Without romanticizing I have often felt that the toughness and tenacity of early Canadians (and the gruelling winters of course) have made us a nation of hardy people and very different from our American neighbours despite what others may think!
Ha Emmet you made me think so early in the morning on the day back after a long weekend. Not an easy task ;)!
October 14, 2010 at 8:58 am
Emmet
Cheers Stacey, your comments are always so kind. Yes I was surprised at how well Didion situated herself into the historical account. This made it a very personal memoir as opposed to what could have been a dry account of past events.
October 14, 2010 at 10:53 am
#115 Gateway by Frederik Pohl « a book a day till i can stay
[…] is funny. I enjoyed reading Joan Didion’s book from yesterday, with its descriptions of immigrants and pioneers crossing the wilds of […]
April 6, 2012 at 2:00 am
Andrew & Rachel.
I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley of California, very near to Sacramento where Didion’s family is from. I discovered her writing in high school (in 2005, so I was able to read everything of hers prior to The Year of Magical Thinking) and immediately fell in love with her style and subjects, especially her writing about California. It wasn’t until I read this book that I began to doubt that my feelings about the supposed destruction of the land where I grew up were genuine.
There was something about being raised in California that gave me a false sense of ownership over the land. When new subdivisions were being build, I would be more or less outraged that someone had sold land that they owned for future strip malls and subdivisions. I would talk about it with my parents, themselves born in different states, and we would commiserate about the suburban sprawl brought on by these new people. Didion writes about this betrayal, especially at the hands of new people: “New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.” What I didn’t realize until I was an adult was that my family are these new people, that my roots in California were not as deep as I had originally felt them to be, and therefore my ownership over the land completely fictional in every possible way.
In Part III, Didion discusses Victor Davis Hanson and his book The Land Was Everything. A quote she highlights goes like this: “I do not think I shall ever leave the San Joaquin Valley of California. Courage, a friend tells me, requires me to grow up and leave, to get a better job elsewhere; cowardice, he says, is to stay put, possumlike, as the world goes by. But at least my credentials as a San Joaquin Valley loyalist are unimpeachable, and thus my lament over its destruction genuine.” When I read this, I completely ignored Didion’s point in mentioning this quote. I had finally found, in written words, what I had felt about the development of the land around my city. What I ignored but later discovered was the fact that Mr. Hanson laments his own version of California, one that does not necessarily align with what was really happening and what will continue to happen to California. I also ignored my own misapprehensions and misunderstandings, my version of California, and can still, like Didion, “to this day confront them only obliquely.”
April 6, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Emmet
Andrew, thank you so much for your comment. I am happy that the review inspired you to share your recollections of this book’s setting.