58 new york | january 3–16, 2022
The CULTURE PAGES
Joan Didion’s GreatestTwo-Word Sentence
The power of an ice-cold, unflinching gaze.
By Molly FischerDidion’s response impressive. I think about
this a lot. I think about it whenever I say
“Wow.” And I think about it now, looking
back over a career that gave rise to count-
less lines that in the years since I encoun-
tered them have “never been entirely
absent from my inner eye” or ear, as Didion
once wrote of the Hoover Dam.
“Oh, wow”: unimpressed, unperturbed,
over- but also underwhelmed. A “wow”
delivered in the same spirit as Didion’s
claim that she found it “astonishing” that
anybody actually liked the characters in
Manhattan—as if bearing witness to
behavior so pathetic as to be stunning.
Roger Hurwitz of MIT is getting himself
all worked up about “objective decadence
cum subjective meaninglessness.” Didion
is watching like he’s a particularly large
beetle rolled on itsback.
It is a response that distills the Didion
persona down to five letters. She was ever
the observer, surveying human folly from
a deliberate distance, amazed and not
amazed by what she saw. This was the pos-
ture she adopted when meeting a Haight-
Ashbury 5-year-old on acid. “The five-
year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me
she is in High Kindergarten,” Didion wrote
in the title essay of Slouching Towards
Bethlehem. “I sta r t to a sk if a ny of the other
children in High Kindergarten get stoned,
but I falter at the key words.” Years later, in
an interview for his documentary on her
life, Griffin Dunne asked his aunt what
that moment was like. “Well, it was—”
Didion said, and paused. “Let me tell you,
it was gold.” (Oh, wow.)
Her mode was cool scrutiny even when
the object was herself. She catalogued her
frailties, her habits, her predilections—and
her marriage to John Gregory Dunne, awhat readerly experience matches the pleasure of a well-
executed, well-deser ved takedow n? When the cr itic is shar p enough, the
subject praise-glutted enough, the results are exquisite—succulent, tart,
worth any mess. ¶ Forty-two years ago, Joan Didion—who died on De-
cember 23 at 87—delivered one such delectable specimen. “Letter From
‘Manhattan’” was the restrained headline that appeared above her 1979
New York Review of Books essay on Woody A llen’s late-’70s oeuv re. A nd,
if only in a certain sense, the essay that followed was restrained as well.
Didion was not unleashing a tirade; tirades were not her style. Rather,
she was describing—with exasperated
precision—a body of work whose popularity
she found “interesting, and rather astonish-
ing.” Allen’s characters possess “the false
and desperate knowingness of the smartest
kid in the class,” Didion wrote:
These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have
dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus
ethics. They share sodas, and wonder
“what love is.” They have “interesting”
occupations, none of which intrudes in
any serious way on their dating. Many
characters in these pictures “write,”
usually on tape recorders. In
Manhattan, Woody Allen quits his job
as a television writer and is later seen
dictating an “idea” for a short story, an
idea which, I am afraid, is also the
“idea” for the picture itself: “People in
Manhattan are constantly creating these
real unnecessary neurotic problems
for themselves that keep them from
dealing with more terrifying unsolvable
problems about the universe.”“What love is”: The scare quotes are chill-
ing in their absolute disdain. This gives you
the general flavor of the review, which is
memorable—but the real coup de grâce,
and the reason this essay most often comes
to mind for me, was something that arrived
only later. A few months after Didion’s
review appeared, the NYRB published a
selection of responses from readers. Ran-
dolph D. Pope of Dartmouth College con-
gratulated Didion on providing “a perfect
example of how a mind too full with culture
is unable to understand humor.” Roger
Hurwitz (MIT) advised that she would “do
better to be alarmed by than morally supe-
rior to the attitudes, concerns and mores
Mr. Allen’s characters reflect.” John Romano
(Columbia) spent 647 words chastising her
for—among other offenses—treating Allen’s
characters’ brand of self-absorption as tire-
some and distinctly contemporary, rather
than placing them in an intellectual lineage
that stretched back centuries.
The NYRB also published Didion’s
response to these letters. It reads, in its
entirety, “Oh, wow.”
Reactions like Randolph D. Pope’s or
John Romano’s are hardly what any
writer hopes for when sending a piece of
prose into the world. Nonetheless, such
reactions do arrive, and with them the
temptation to reply—that is, to defend
oneself somehow. This impulse is not
always doomed, but it usually is.
Which is, at least in part, what makes