Within the early nineteen-sixties, whereas on the workers of Vogue, Joan Didion was solely half recognized to the journal’s readers. Her title appeared intermittently. Her first signed piece, in June 1961, was a brief essay on jealousy, which already confirmed sure options of her mature writing: an earnest consideration of the brittle contours of her personal character, and a positive consideration to language, together with her personal. She additionally wrote quick, unattributed paragraphs—they can’t be referred to as essays, articles, or items—for Vogue’s common “Individuals Are Speaking About” column. She wrote about “Dr. No” and “The Manchurian Candidate”; concerning the atom bomb, Telstar, and the development of the Guggenheim; concerning the budding careers of Willem de Kooning, Woody Allen, and Barbra Streisand; and concerning the demise of Marilyn Monroe, whom she referred to as “a profoundly shifting younger lady.” And she or he composed picture captions: these “signposts,” as Walter Benjamin put it, that had grow to be important to the printed journal web page within the twentieth century.
In Vogue, by the sixties, captions have been surprisingly substantial items of writing, accorded what might sound a outstanding quantity of editorial care. The captions Didion wrote make up a minor, telling side of the mythology round her work, although maybe “mythology” is the incorrect phrase. It’s a matter of favor, the place model is verifiable presence on the web page. Didion is incessantly described as a precise and exacting author, her prose like a shiny carapace. On the similar time, she has a popularity for being brittle and spectral, barely there. None of this adequately describes her prose. It’s normally direct and declarative; it’s crammed with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions; there’s a wealth of concrete element. Irony in her work consists largely of the plain assertion of such element, inflected by the harmless, mad, or bad-faith language of the individuals or establishments she is writing about. In a lecture at U.C.L.A., Didion stated, “I’m not a lot focused on spontaneity. I’m not an inspirational author. What considerations me is whole management.”
Producing captions, Didion has stated, was a part of mounting “the month-to-month grand phantasm” of a shiny journal. The editor-in-chief then was Diana Vreeland, however the extra detailed work was finished by Allene Talmey, who had been with Vogue because the mid-nineteen-thirties and have become an affiliate editor in 1963. By the accounts of Didion and her contemporaries, Talmey was an unsparing editor and boss. After she had wielded her pencil on one other author’s copy—flashing, all of the whereas, a big aquamarine and silver ring—the author was wrung out. (“Effectively, my pricey, I used to go house, sit within the tub, and weep,” one younger lady stated.) In an interview with The Paris Assessment, in 1978, Didion said, “Every single day I might go into [Talmey’s] workplace with eight traces of copy or a caption or one thing. She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very offended about additional phrases, about verbs not working.” In a profile of Didion within the New York Instances, in 1979, Talmey herself recounted how she would ask Didion to write down a caption of three or 4 hundred phrases, after which collectively they’d reduce it all the way down to fifty. “We wrote lengthy and revealed quick and by doing that Joan realized to write down.”
The Instances article coincided with the publication of “Telling Stories,” Didion’s solely assortment of quick fiction—for those who can name three tales a set. Within the e book’s preface, she elaborates on her time at Vogue and the trials of working underneath Talmey. “We have been connoisseurs of synonyms,” she writes. “We have been collectors of verbs.” Sure phrases went out and in of vogue—“to ravish” was for some months an editorially permitted verb. “I additionally recollect it, for numerous points extra, because the supply of a extremely favoured noun: ‘ravishments’, as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Fabergé eggs, different ravishments.” Didion and her younger colleagues realized—or else “didn’t keep”—to make use of energetic verbs as a substitute of passive, to verify “it” all the time had a close-by reference, to achieve for the O.E.D. to insure shock as a lot as precision. And, most of all, they realized to rewrite, repeatedly, in the hunt for the proper steadiness of magnificence and pleasure. “Run it via once more, sweetie,” Talmey would say. “It’s not fairly there.”
“Reverse, above: All via the home, color, verve, improvised treasures in comfortable however anomalous coexistence.” I got here throughout the sentence first on-line, within the 1979 profile, the place it’s provided for instance of Didion’s caption-writing for Vogue firstly of her profession. A lot to admire, not least the verbless economic system of the sentence, as if the caption’s perform—its act of pointing, or its open-handed gesture—does away with the necessity for verbs. (What would the verbed alternate options be? “All via the home are color, verve . . .” Or “one finds.” The additions all appear to weaken the sentence.) The caption directs us to a single image, however it additionally stands for a complete; “all via the home,” with its slumberous familiarity—“It was the evening earlier than Christmas . . .”—conjures time in addition to area. In her preface to “Telling Tales,” Didion recollects that Talmey appreciated issues, particularly qualifiers, to come back in threes. And so it’s right here, with the considerably abstracted options: “color, verve, improvised treasures.” What’s an improvised treasure? A discovered object, or Duchampian readymade, the worth of which derives from the artist-collector’s selecting and buying it? Or perhaps “improvised” refers to an off-the-cuff mode of show, to a method of residing with issues fairly than to the issues themselves?
Then we’ve “comfortable however anomalous coexistence”—“comfortable” right here which means apt, lucky, and pleasing, fairly than happy or (within the practically vanished sense) happenstance. I like the best way this time period has been elongated, allowed to unfold itself round. The absence of stricturing commas round “however anomalous” is consistent with Didion’s later model: she is aware of higher than most when to go away out the commas for which different writers (or their editors) instinctively attain, to let grammar and a sure sonic ease do their work. The sentence appears like Didion in its rhythm, care, and thrift, and in addition in its swerve towards one thing extra troubling or mysterious, the suggestion within the remaining phrase of an impish curating character at work.
Was I proper to consider the sentence on this method? Here’s what I discovered after I turned from the Instances to Didion’s extra detailed account, within the preface to “Telling Tales,” of her time at Vogue—an apprenticeship, she says, that’s too straightforward to mock. At first, she composed merchandising copy, after which promotional copy (“the excellence between the 2 was particular however recondite”), and finally editorial copy. As “a pattern of the latter,” Didion consists of our caption, or an prolonged model of it:
