Joan Didion / The Searcher

 

John Wayne

The Searcher

In 1965, nearly forty years before the publication of Where I Was From, her most recent and most sustained meditation on her native state of California, Joan Didion wrote “John Wayne: A Love Song.” 

By Hilton Als

JUNE 24, 2004

In 1965, nearly forty years before the publication of Where I Was From, her most recent and most sustained meditation on her native state of California, the novelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote “John Wayne: A Love Song.” In the essay, Didion describes a trip she made to Estudio Churubusco, outside Mexico City. There a film was being shot–The Sons of Katie Elder, a western starring Dean Martin and John Wayne. For years before visiting the set, Wayne had loomed in Didion’s imagination as the kind of man–a man emblematic of the Old West–who’d build a woman a home “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” That this was a line Wayne crooned in another movie Didion saw when she was a child did not make the image of the house, the cottonwoods, the bend in the river and Wayne’s scripted intention any less real for her.

Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement

The Danish memoirist built a literature of disaster, brick by brick.

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Hilton Als

February 8, 2021

Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs, “The Copenhagen Trilogy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation. It’s because the author, who died by her own hand in 1976, when she was fifty-eight, makes profound and exciting art out of estrangement. Like a number of dispassionate, poetic modernists—the writers Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler, say, or the visual artists Alice Neel and Diane Arbus—Ditlevsen was marked, wounded, by her own sharp intelligence. Her world—the world she describes in “Childhood,” “Youth,” and “Dependency,” the three short books that make up the trilogy—was cash poor, emotionally mean, and misogynist. The sun must have shone sometimes in Denmark before and during the Second World War, but the atmosphere in “The Copenhagen Trilogy” is damp, dark, and flowerless. It’s not so surprising, then, that one of the first works Ditlevsen published, as a teen-ager, was a poem titled “To My Dead Child”: 

I never heard your little voice.
Your pale lips never smiled at me.
And the kick of your tiny feet
Is something I will never see. . . .
See how I kiss your icy hand,
happy to be with you yet awhile,
silently I kiss you, weeping not,—
though the tears are burning in my throat.

The sadows in Truman Capote´s early stories

THE SHADOWS IN TRUMAN CAPOTE’S EARLY STORIES

By Hilton Als

 OCTOBER 13, 2015

Truman Capote´s Biography

Truman Capote stands in the middle of his motel room, watching the TV. The motel is in the middle of the country—Kansas. It’s 1963. The crummy carpet beneath his feet is stiff, but it’s the stiffness that helps hold him up—especially if he’s had too much to drink. Outside, the Western wind blows and Truman Capote, a glass of scotch in hand, watches the TV. It’s one way he gets to relax after a long day in Garden City or its environs as he researches and writes “In Cold Blood,” his nonfiction novel about a multiple murder and its consequences. Capote began the book in 1959, but at first it wasn’t a book; it was a magazine article for The New Yorker. As originally conceived by the author, the piece was meant to describe a small community and its response to a killing. But by the time he arrived in Garden City—the murders had been committed in nearby Holcomb—Perry Smith and Richard Hickock had been arrested and charged with slaying farm owners Herbert and Bonnie Clutter and their young children, Nancy and Kenyon; as a consequence of that arrest, Capote’s project shifted focus, got more involved.