Joan Didion and Norman Mailer: The literary odd couple

Joan Didion and Norman Mailer do not immediately strike you as two writers who should have had much in common.

Mailer was loud, combative, theatrical and seemingly incapable of entering a room without eventually becoming one of the principal subjects under discussion. He ran for mayor of New York. He got into fights. He appeared on television and argued with people. He wrote about politics, war, sex, boxing and himself, frequently managing to combine several of these subjects at once. Norman Mailer didn't simply have a public persona. At times, Norman Mailer appeared to be the principal character in the ongoing Norman Mailer production. He was always the main character.

Didion was something else entirely. Small, watchful, controlled. Dark glasses, cigarette, notebook. She cultivated the impression of somebody sitting quietly at the edge of the room while everyone else made the potentially catastrophic mistake of forgetting she was there.

Mailer walked into the story while Didion waited for it to reveal itself, and yet these two apparently opposite writers admired one another. More importantly, they were both wrestling with essentially the same problem. What if conventional journalism wasn't telling the truth?

Joan Didion reads Norman Mailer

We arrived here because of Gary Gilmore. In the last piece, I wrote about Mailer's The Executioner's Song, his enormous 1979 "true life novel" about Gilmore, the convicted murderer who demanded that the state of Utah carry out his death sentence.

The book presented us with another version of the problem Truman Capote had created with In Cold Blood. Capote transformed murder into beautiful literature and made his own manipulation almost invisible. Mailer attempted something different. He flattened his prose, suppressed his famously conspicuous authorial personality and allowed the voices of Gilmore and the people around him to dominate.

Joan Didion loved it. And I mean loved it.

Reviewing The Executioner's Song in 1979, she called it "an absolutely astonishing book". She thought Mailer had captured something rarely encountered in literature: an authentic voice of the American West.

Didion recognised in Mailer's deliberately plain sentences something much larger than stylistic restraint. She saw Utah itself, the roads and motels and trailers and mountains, and behind them what she called the "vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience". It was a place permeated by a dread "so close to zero that human voices fade out".

The more I thought about that review, the less surprising Didion's enthusiasm seemed.

Of course Joan Didion recognised what Mailer was doing.

She was a writer of the West too.

Two writers looking at America

Didion came from Sacramento, California. The West wasn't scenery she discovered as a journalist. It was part of the mythology she inherited.

California runs through her writing as both place and idea: the promises people make about reinvention, the stories families tell themselves about where they came from, the instability lurking beneath apparently prosperous lives. Her California is full of swimming pools and freeways and subdivisions, but beneath the sunlight something is frequently coming apart.

Mailer came from somewhere very different. He was born in New Jersey and grew up in Brooklyn. His imaginative America was more public, argumentative and theatrical. He was drawn towards the places where the country staged its conflicts: political conventions, protest marches, boxing rings, wars, presidential campaigns.

Didion watched America fracture from the edges.

Mailer liked standing near the explosion.

Yet both came to distrust the reassuring idea that a journalist could simply arrive, gather the facts and report what happened.

That distrust placed them, however awkwardly, within the broad phenomenon that became known as the New Journalism.

When journalism started behaving badly

"New Journalism" is one of those literary labels that becomes less useful the more neatly you try to apply it.

There was no membership card.

Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Hunter S. Thompson did not all sit down together and agree on the rules. Their politics differed. Their styles differed enormously. Even their ideas about what journalism was supposed to accomplish could be radically different.

But something was happening in American writing during the 1960s and 70s.

Writers were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the conventions of supposedly objective journalism. The traditional reporter was meant to disappear behind the facts. Who the journalist was, what they felt and how their presence affected the situation were largely treated as irrelevant.

The New Journalists began asking an awkward question. What if they weren't irrelevant at all? What if pretending the observer wasn't there actually made the journalism less truthful? This is where Didion and Mailer, despite appearances, suddenly begin moving towards one another.

Both understood that there is always somebody looking. They just had completely different ways of dealing with it.

Norman Mailer enters the story

If you want to understand Mailer's solution, read The Armies of the Night. The book grew out of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, a massive demonstration against the Vietnam War. Mailer attended the protest, gave a drunken speech, was arrested and spent the night in jail.

A conventional reporter might have attempted to separate those experiences from the account. Mailer did the opposite. He made Norman Mailer a character.

Not only that, he wrote about Norman Mailer in the third person, examining his own behaviour with the amused, sometimes merciless attention a novelist might give an invented character. The book even announces what it is doing in its subtitle:

History as a Novel/The Novel as History. There is something wonderfully audacious about this.

Mailer is effectively saying that I cannot give you an objective account of what happened because I was there. I experienced it from one particular body, with one particular temperament, set of prejudices, amount of alcohol and considerable ego.

So instead of hiding that problem, he makes it part of the book. The journalist becomes evidence.

Joan Didion disappears into the room

Didion's solution looks almost completely opposite. In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she explains one of the advantages she possessed as a reporter. Her physical presence encouraged people to forget about her.

"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive," she wrote.

People relaxed. They behaved naturally. They said things. Didion listened, and then came the warning that started this entire journey:

"Writers are always selling somebody out."

It's funny until you think about what she means. Mailer enters the room and practically announces that Norman Mailer has arrived. Didion enters the room and allows you to forget Joan Didion is there.

Which journalist would you trust? I'm not sure the answer is Didion.

The Summer of Love, according to everybody else

One of the clearest examples is "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" itself.

In 1967, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury had become one of the great stories America was telling about itself. This was the counterculture, the Summer of Love, hippies, drugs, sexual liberation, young people rejecting the dead conventions of their parents.

There was an obvious story available, and Didion didn't trust it. She went to Haight-Ashbury and watched.

What she found was not a coherent revolution but fragmentation. Runaways. Drugs. Children who seemed barely to understand the ideology supposedly explaining their lives. People drifting through rooms and streets without much sense of what came next.

The essay refuses to provide the reassuring explanation journalism normally supplies. Didion doesn't discover the secret meaning of the counterculture and present it to us neatly packaged.

Instead, she gives us fragments. Snippets of conversations. Rooms and people. A five-year-old child on LSD, and gradually the fragments become the argument. Something is coming apart.

Didion never needs to stand in the middle of Haight-Ashbury shouting that conclusion. She lets us notice it. Or, more accurately, she arranges things so that we think we noticed it ourselves, which is a very different kind of authorial power.

Mailer says look at me

Now put that beside The Armies of the Night. Mailer doesn't pretend the observer is neutral because Norman Mailer could not possibly be neutral. He is vain. He is drunk. He is politically engaged. He is competitive. He behaves absurdly. He changes his mind. He wants to impress people.

And he tells us.

There is an honesty to that which conventional journalism can find embarrassing. The reporter normally arrives already disguised as "the reporter", as though professional identity somehow removes personal history, temperament, politics, vanity and fear.

Mailer tears off the disguise. Here I am. This is what I thought. This is what I did. This is how ridiculous I looked doing it. Now perhaps we can talk about what happened.

The strange thing is that making the journalist more visible can make the account feel more trustworthy.

At least we know where he is standing.

Didion says look over there

Didion's method is almost the inverse. She doesn't usually make herself the spectacle. Instead, her presence registers through selection.

This person. That sentence. This motel. That swimming pool. The peculiar thing somebody said while driving on the freeway. The detail that everyone else in the room apparently considered irrelevant.

Didion's journalism can seem observational because she is not constantly explaining what she thinks. But this is not objectivity. It is control. Perhaps more control than Mailer exercises.

Mailer shows you the hand holding the camera. Didion makes you forget there is a camera, and this is where her warning about writers selling people out becomes more than a witty line. She knew exactly what she was doing.

The strange honesty of subjectivity

Perhaps this was one of the most important things the New Journalism, made famous by Tom Wolfe in the 1973 anthology, understood. Objectivity can itself become a performance.

Every piece of journalism begins with decisions. Someone decides which story deserves attention, whom to interview, which quotation to use, which detail opens the article and which fact appears seventeen paragraphs later. The writer is already there. The question is what to do about it.

Mailer sometimes responded by making his subjectivity enormous. In The Armies of the Night, he essentially says: you want to know what happened at the Pentagon? Fine. First you need to understand the unreliable, egotistical, occasionally drunken man through whose eyes you are going to see it.

Didion's subjectivity works differently. She doesn't always tell you what to think because she doesn't need to. Her intelligence operates through juxtaposition and omission. Put these two details beside each other and suddenly an entire cultural fantasy collapses.

One writer expands himself until we cannot ignore him. The other reduces herself until we forget to be suspicious. Both are manipulating us, and both might also be telling us something true.

And then there is The Executioner's Song

This brings us back to why Didion's admiration for The Executioner's Song is so interesting, because Mailer does something in that book that looks almost Didionesque.He shuts up.

The Mailer of The Armies of the Night had put himself at the centre of history. The Mailer of The Executioner's Song almost vanishes. Contemporary reviewers noticed the transformation. The great self-dramatising personality had apparently become invisible.

Didion understood that this invisibility was itself a literary achievement. She recognised that Mailer's flat sentences were not evidence that he had stopped shaping the material. They were the shaping.

She was particularly alert to his control of sentence structure. Mailer, she argued, was an obsessive stylist for whom "the shape of the sentence is the story".

That is such a Didion thing to notice. Other readers saw a writer restraining himself. Didion saw a writer making choices. Of course she did.

Perhaps they weren't opposites after all

The more you put Didion and Mailer beside one another, the less odd the couple becomes.

Their temperaments were radically different. Their public personas could hardly have been further apart. Mailer was noisy where Didion was quiet, expansive where she was compressed, theatrical where she was controlled.

But both understood something fundamental about writing nonfiction. The observer changes the story, and sometimes simply by being there. Sometimes by admitting he is there. Sometimes by sitting quietly enough that everyone forgets she is listening.

This is also why both writers were drawn towards moments when the official American story seemed inadequate to the reality underneath it.

Mailer looked at the Pentagon march and refused to write straightforward political reportage. Didion looked at the Summer of Love and refused to write the story everybody expected.

Mailer looked at Gary Gilmore and abandoned the flamboyant voice for which he was famous. Different subjects, and different techniques, but the same suspicion, and the facts are not enough.

So who would you rather have in the room?

I keep returning to that question. Norman Mailer arrives at your political demonstration and makes himself part of the story. Joan Didion arrives at your house, sits quietly in the corner and listens.

Mailer may be exhausting. Didion terrifies me, because at least Mailer warns you. His ego announces itself from across the room, with that main-character energy always present. 

Didion's great advantage was that people forgot she was there. They talked. They behaved normally. They revealed themselves.

Then she went home and decided which details meant something: "Writers are always selling somebody out."

We started this journey with that sentence. Rachel Cusk made me wonder what happens when somebody recognises themselves in fiction. Truman Capote showed us what happens when a writer transforms real murder into literature. Norman Mailer tried to step aside and let other people's voices dominate.

And now we have somehow arrived back at Joan Didion.

Perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.

Because Didion and Mailer, those apparent literary opposites, had both recognised the same uncomfortable truth.

There is no invisible writer. Mailer walked into the story and announced himself. Didion sat quietly at the edge of it and watched. The keyt thing is neither was objective, and neither was absent.

They simply had very different ways of making us forget who was holding the camera, and if Mailer and Didion showed us what happens when the journalist admits that objectivity is impossible, there was another writer waiting to take that idea much further.

Hunter S. Thompson didn't merely step into the story. He blew up the distinction between the story and the person reporting it, but that's another stop on the journey.