Tribute: The sources of Joan Didion’s signature style

Joan Didion's style was marked by declarative statements, repetition, specificity, and ironic understatement. (2008 Photo: David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

Joan Didion is a writer whom it’s impossible to discuss without referring to her prose style. “Cool”, “unsparing”, and “unsentimental” are some of the ways this has often been described, both by those who admire her work and others who feel that her manner was tinged by condescension and unearned superiority.

There are at least three influences that merged to create this style of declarative statements, repetition, specificity, and ironic understatement. To various degrees, it ranges across her early fiction, her famous essays on California and American disorder, and finally, her grief-stricken memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.

First, the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway which, of course, inspired so many others. Didion started to read him when she was 11 or 12, she recalled in an interview. Finding his sentences magnetic, she decided some years later to type them out and see how they worked. “It’s a great way to get rhythms into your head,” she explained. “I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.”

Then, there was her stint with Vogue magazine in the early 1960s. Of note during this time, as Brian Dillon has pointed out, are her photo captions. “In an eight-line caption everything had to work, every word, every comma,” Didion recollected in the Paris Review. “It would end up being a Vogue caption, but on its own terms it had to work perfectly.”

This was an art taken seriously by the magazine’s associate editor Allene Talmey, from whom Didion learnt a great deal. “We were connoisseurs of synonyms,” she remembered. “We were collectors of verbs.” Didion would go into Talmey’s office every day with a draft, and the latter would “mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working”. In Talmey’s words, “we wrote long and published short”.

Dillon unearths an example from the August 1965 issue: “Up in the Hollywood Hills, above the Sunset Strip, Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Hopper (portraits, above left) have a house of such gaiety and wit that it seems the result of some marvellous scavenger hunt, full of improvised treasures, the bizarre and the beautiful and the banal in wild juxtaposition, everything the most of its kind.” As with so much of Didion’s later work, the energy here, for Dillon, is “coolly and rigorously contained”.

The third source, drawing from the above two, is her self-confessed inability to think in abstractions. For her, writing had to be specific and tangible. In her essay Why I Write, she spoke of describing the pictures in her mind. “The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture.”

Hemingway, Vogue, and thinking in pictures may have shaped Didion’s sentences on the page, but behind these were deeper factors that created an individual sensibility. As she wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking: “I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am.”

This was linked to the influence of location which, for her, meant growing up with the flat horizons and weather variations of Sacramento. “Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world,” she once said.

Beyond this, in a 1965 essay on contemporary fiction, Didion had deplored “an absence of moral toughness” in the nature of recent novels. As Deborah Nelson has pointed out, this feeling created scepticism, stoicism and lack of self-pity that even led her to criticise the feminist movements of her time.

For Didion, Nelson feels, style or the indifference to it “is not a question of beauty but a logical extension of the politics and morality of writing well”. This is what drew her to find aesthetic solutions “to problems of dislocation and, towards the end, a personal burden of grief”.

To write with style, Didion wrote in the same essay on fiction, “is to fight lying all the way”. That, till the last, is what she strived to do.

Also read: Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ who explored culture and chaos, dies at 87