Joan Didion, eulogist
Death is one of the few times when such adulation can be passed off as tribute rather than embarrassment. Though it is still embarrassing, mourning some famous stranger. Some are more embarrassing than others, but all eulogies are to a degree: we are embarrassed because we are speaking, embarrassed because we have survived.
Writers are a lot of things to a lot of people because of the simple fact that they write and people read them. To me, Joan Didion was an author I kept thinking I’d get around to. I’d read a handful of her 1960s essays and liked them, despite having little interest in that endless American epoch, which continues to be strip-mined for nostalgia and myth. In used bookstores I almost bought South and West twice before putting it back for something else. So I appreciated the flood of recommendations upon her death. The New York Review, for instance, took much of her work from behind the paywall as tribute. Critics and writers shared favorite essays and passages. I read and skimmed them on my phone, delighting in the confidence of her language, her exactitude and scorn.
I also happened to have a copy of The 1980s & 90s lying around, so I opened it a few days after she died. I landed on “After Henry,” the titular essay of her 1992 collection and a eulogy for her longtime editor and friend, Henry Robbins. It may seem odd to name a collection of essays about Los Angeles and the Reagan Administration after a friend, but the dedication transcends the collection. Didion writes: “the editor, if the editor was Henry Robbins, was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it.” It is a devastating and vulnerable tribute:
On the July morning in 1979 when we got word from New York that Henry Robbins had died on his way to work a few hours before, had fallen dead, age fifty-one, to the floor of the 14th Street subway station, there was only one person I wanted to talk to about it, and that one person was Henry.
After Didion’s death, one much-shared screenshot on Twitter was from a TIME interview from last January:
TIME: Do you fear death?
Didion: No. Well, yes, of course.
TIME: Do you have hope?
Didion: Hope for what? Not particularly, no.
On Twitter, the excerpt was used as proof of Didion’s cool, but the interview itself is more reflective of her disdain for treating authors like sages and celebrities. When the interviewer asks, “What does it mean to you to be called the voice of your generation?” Didion replies, “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
There is a difference between honoring a friend and extolling a celebrity—the former its own intimate and impossible act, the latter distorted by fame and fandom. Fame makes monuments of people; the actual person, some smaller thing, gets lost. Fandom, that thankless and insecure discipleship, confuses readership with access. Together they make a shaky spectacle of mourning, forcing each dead celebrity to lie in state and receive needless honors, to be incorporated as another datum into a relentless content cycle that will get over their deaths far quicker than their friends will. And yet this is how it happens. Ritual is important among the living. Some things must be made larger than life.
Eulogies make loss an occasion and fill it with language: contemplation, gratitude, self-indulgence. Didion’s dedication to Robbins is more moving than anything I’ve read about her own passing because it was written by a friend rather than a fan, and because it honors the dead not as a legacy or an icon but as one who helped, one who was there, one without whom life and writing are harder. And yet it does share something with all the online declarations of sadness over Didion’s death, something that perhaps all eulogies have in common: the embarrassment of never really being able to believe that it would actually happen:
I believed, by way of contemplating the future, that we would all be around for one another’s funerals. I was wrong. I had failed to imagine, I had not understood. Here was the way it was going to be: I would be around for Henry’s funeral, but he was not going to be around for mine.
ben tapeworm