White Albums

I have loved Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” for its voice and the way in which it captures the anomie and the chaos of the late 1960s. The era is mirrored in the narrator’s state of mind—discordant emotions, vertigo, dread, a conviction that no narrative could possibly speak to the prevailing condition (not just hers but of the country too). Nothing makes sense and there’s a palpable feeling of confusion (or is it loss?) in an essay that promises no happy ending.

After this latest reading of Didion’s I dug up the other “White Album”— the one by the Beatles. I hadn’t listened to it in years, but it got a lot of play in ’69 and ’70, at the height of the Vietnam war, when I too took part in protests, student marches, and strikes (even getting tear gassed in Minneapolis when one march turned rowdy).

The double covers of the album are now no longer crisp and white. And each side is imprinted with a dark grey ring from the two LPs within. There’s no title as such, only “The Beatles” engraved on the album’s surface. When the album was new, the letters melded into the white. Today, flecks of grime—from all those years ago—cling to the letters and give them prominence.

I thought of how both Didion’s essay and the album captured the disaffected feeling of a defining era. The Beatle’s “White Album” was a diverse, eclectic, blend of several musical forms that challenged the prevailing notion of popular music in the West. It also screamed “change” and “freedom”—to try things differently, either musically or otherwise. And it entertained, shocked, and provoked its listeners. Many of us tried to find meaning (both apprartent and hidden) in the lyrics, the titles and the new Eastern inflections and instruments. We didn’t know what we were doing then, but in some ways we were trying to make sense of not just the Beatles but also our world.

Much like first the listening of the album, the essay, at first reading feels confusing—all those names, those events, and a state of mind that figures so prominently in the narrative. It seems the essay would fall apart at any instant and spin out of control. But Didion’s personal experience and knowledge of the events and her incorporation of her own mental distress adds layers of complexity and her tight authorial control keeps the essay moving along from scene to scene. The work that went into this essay is not evident at first reading, but after my third or fourth time with the essay, I could see how elements that seemed disparate at first all cohere together in a loose arrangement.

Others might differ with me, but I believe that there is little that is superfluous in this essay. All the maneuvering and the shifts in the narrative line are intended to show that Didion is very much in charge of what she puts on the page. It’s an example of authorial control, with her experience as the pivot point for the narrative. The self is always present and intrudes on the narrative as in her abrupt interjection of her psychiatric diagnosis, which is jarring and gives a reader pause to wonder about Didion’s motive. The mystery is solved soon enough—Didion wants the reader to know that she was convinced that “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.” Heady days indeed.

I love the irony in this essay too. Despite Didion’s protests how all the disorientation—hers and the nation’s—is adversely affecting her storytelling skills but she produces a story that hangs together quite well. Maybe not coherently and neatly but at least in a way that shows the “senseless chain of correspondence” that was the sixties. And somehow we survived it and so did Didion and perhaps we are all a little better for it.

My two “The Beatles” LPs, although a little scratchy, are still in pretty good shape. I played them a couple of times after reading Didion and relived another time, another place, another life.