Joan Didion Essay Two: From Bishop Pike 1969 to Nob Hill 2020

1969

When I was about ten years old, on a farm in rural Iowa, the magazines we got filled with stories about the death of Bishop James Pike.   I remember them clearly - I may have liked the morbidity of it.   In 1969, Bishop James Pike and his wife rented a car in Israel, drove into the desert, and their car stalled.  They had no water, and of course no radio, and the nearest human lay in an unknown direction and distance.   His wife went on a long, nearly hopeless hike for help, and was rescued.  Pike, a lifelong chain-smoker in weaker health, waited for some period, then walked, and died from a fall and from dehydration.

Didion 

I remembered this story, but had never looked it up as an adult.   In March 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I booted up the audiobook of Joan Didion's The White Album.  Didion is famous for her essays on California in the 60's and 70's.   In The White Album, in the chapter "American Republic," she tells the story of Pike.

For Didion, Pike was one of the great charlatans, narcissists, and self-promoters of his era.

Born in 1913, he was raised on the East Coast, then in Los Angeles, and darted around several colleges (the Jesuit University of Santa Clara, then USC and UCLA) before ending up in law school at Yale in 1938.   After working for the Securities and Exchange Commission, he showed up in Divinity School.  His ascent was fast - to St John the Divine in New York City, and quickly thereafter Bishop of California, seated at Grace Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill.  Pike was on the front edge of every social issue, while for an Episcopalian leader he developed far-off-the-chart theological views (he doubted "The Trinity").  One biographical article noted he recovered from alcoholism through AA and spoke highly of twelve-step programs.   He was booted out of his Grace Cathedral post by about 1966. 

Didion's essay on Pike leaves little room for sympathy, at least from Didion.  In Israel in 1969. he was only 56, but was with his third wife, nearly thirty years younger. 

Nob Hill 2020

I work in biotechnology consulting, partly where I live in Los Angeles and partly in my San Francisco office, at WeWork, at the Golden Gate Theater building, at Sixth and Market.  This is the edge, or closer than the edge, of the Tenderloin.  When I am there on Wednesdays, it is about a fifteen minute walk northbound up Taylor Street from Sixth and Market, past the Union Square area, and to the peak of Nob Hill.   In only a few minutes, this walk takes you from where $1 is a lot of money, to where $1M is a typical point of discussion.   On Nob Hill, you have the Huntington Hotel and the Mark Hopkins, and the magnificent Grace Cathedral, an edifice that stands high and glorious like Westminster or Notre Dame.  In the quadrangle, which reminds you of an Oxford cloister, on Wednesdays at 630 pm there is an AA meeting of about fifty people.   I wonder now if it has been there since the Bishop Pike held the pulpit on Sundays, in the kaleidoscopic city of San Francisco in the 1960s.

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The LA Times on Joan Didion - December 2021 - here.


 

Joan Didion Essay One: Joshua Wolf Shenk and the LaGuardia Shuttle

(Disclaimer - this short essay is based on my memory of reading The Opposite of Cool in the collection Slouching Towards Los Angeles, not on direct quotes from the essay.)

In March of 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I read the new book of essays about LA and about Joan Didion - Slouching Toward Los Angeles (entry point here, Amazon here.)  I love Los Angeles - I came here in 1990 for four years at age 30, met my wife here, and we moved back permanently in 2003.   I also love knowing details here - this is where Mae West lived, this is where Buster Keaton's studio was, this is how you take the subway to the light rail to Pasadena, this is where Joan Didion lived on Franklin Avenue, near the beautiful Runyon Canyon hiking park, currently closed due to COVID.

For me, the most wonderful moment in reading Slouching Towards Los Angeles came in an essay by Joshua Wolf Shenk.  Shenk is an author who's lived in New York, and Los Angeles, and eventually settled in Las Vegas (website here, Twitter here).

In 2005, Shenk had published his first book, and was at LaGuardia for the shuttle to Boston, where he was giving a book reading at Harvard Square in a few hours.  The person in line ahead of him was - Joan Didion.   She was going to Boston to talk about "The Year of Magical Thinking," her book on the death of her husband and its aftermath.   Shenk struck up a conversation.   He gave his own talk that evening, and one of the organizers there was on her way to the Didion talk nearby, and Shenk went along.  Afterward, the line for autographs from Didion was very long, and Shenk asked the assistant to help get his own signed copy. 

A few days later, the copy arrived in New York, To Josh, From Joan Didion - followed by a completely illegible scrawl.   Shenk returned to the page again and again, and the extra words eluded him.

Time goes on, and Shenk is teaching a college class on literature and highlights the idea that every author has some keynote, some motife or theme, through all their work.   For Didion, the class decided, it was specificity of place.   It's not John Roberts in LA, it's John Roberts, driving his light blue BMW down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  It's not going to church - it's going to church at St. John the Martyr, on Pine street, where it meets Sixth Street on the corner with the big oak tree.

Suddenly, as the class continues, Shenk opens the front page of the Didion book and the autograph is legible for the first time.  It is, "To Josh, From Joan Didion, from the shuttle."


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The LA Times on Joan Didion, December 2021, here.