![]() ![]() ![]() That’s why Didion, and other American writers, found the country so fascinating. Still, we think of the South as a rich civilisation built on foul and unstable foundations – great cities and rural splendour reliant on obsolete practice and the rotten joke of slavery. And such wilderness -not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something old and rank and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilisation and its discontents but a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect.ĭidion makes a lot of space in her notebooks for Southerners all too aware of their history and trying to turn things around. Children would take fever and die, domestic arguments would end in knifings, the construction of highways would lead to graft and cracked pavement where the vines would shoot back… The temporality of the place is operatic, childlike, the fatalism that of a culture dominated by wilderness. Weather would come in on the radar, and be bad. Bananas would rot, and harbour tarantulas. Joan Didion’s recently released notebooks capture the feeling of the American South as it must have been as she drove through it in the summer of 1970:Ī fatalism I would come to recognise as endemic to the particular tone of New Orleans life. ![]()
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