Like Mailer, Didion chooses particularly grotesque phenomena as Signs of the Times. And like Carlyle, she reveals both the representative and grotesque qualities of a religious figure as part of her knife thrust at the heart of the age. In "James Pike, American" she presents a lapsed Episcopalian bishop as her predecessor presents the amphibious pope — that is, as the embodiment of the grotesque spiritual ills of the age. She finds him, first of all, "a character so ambiguous and driven and revealing of his time and place that his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Jaffa might well have read only JAMES PIKE, AMERICAN" (White Album, 53). Pike Represents to Didion modern amorality, for this once-bishop of California was a man who, she emphasizes, felt himself bound to no oath and no responsibility. For example,
he invented an ecclesiastical annulment to cover his divorce from 'his first wife' Jane, although no such annulment was actually granted. 'In his mind,' his biographers explain, 'the marriage was not merely a mistake, but a nullity in the inception.' In his mind. He needed to believe in the annulment because he wanted to be Bishop of California. [55-56]
Didion relates that she first encountered Pike's approach to life and religion in his pastoral tract If You Marry outside Your Faith, "and I was struck dumb by Bishop Pike's position, which appeared to be that I had 104 not only erred but had every moral right and obligation to erase this error by regarding my marriage as null, and any promises I had made as invalid. In other words the way to go was to forget it and start over" (56). As she concludes, here was a man who believed that the world could be reinvented whenever such would convenience us, a man who felt no responsibility to anything but his present need — and yet (and this is what makes him a Representative Man) who considered himself a spiritual leader.
"Here was a man," Didion marvels, "who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over, to shed women when they became difficult and allegiances when they became tedious and simply move on, dismissing those who quibbled as petty and 'judgmental' and generally threatened by his superior and more dynamic view of human possibility" (51). As she concludes, Pike's belief that "the world can be reinvented smells of the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring" (57-58). Like Carlyle's pope, Didion's bishop embodies the spiritual disease of the age and as such stands forth a pathetically grotesque Sign of the Times.
If her discussion of Bishop Pike reminds us of Carlyle's earlier treatment of George Hudson, a stock swindler he made the subject of one of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, that of the vulgar late nineteenth-century mansions in "The Seacoast of Despair" reminds us of Ruskin's Stones of Venice and "Traffic," in part because Didion repeats the Ruskinian strategy of using a nation's taste as an index to its spiritual state and also because she alludes directly to the Victorian sage.l6 Throughout this brief piece
Such use of individual people as symbolic grotesques appears elsewhere throughout her work. For example, in Slouching towards Bethlehem, she had earlier treated Michael Laski as such a symbolic type in "Comrade Laski C. P. U. S. A. (M.-L.)" and Howard Hughes as one in "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38." She concludes that we dwell upon Hughes because he reminds us that "the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake . . ., but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy" (71).
Similarly, Tom Wolfe's Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1982) both follow the Ruskinian tradition. The Painted Word, like much of Modern Painters, attacks established critics for blindness and pretentiousness, while From Bauhaus to Our House follows both The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture. in attacking contemporary architects for incompetence, ignorance of the past, and false professionalism.
Didion points to the meaning and significance of the worship of Mammon. According to Didion, "Newport is the monument of a society in which production was seen as the moral point, the reward if not exactly the end, of the economic process. The place is devoid of the pleasure principle" (White Album, 210). Thus far she makes her points much in the manner of the great Victorian creators of this genre, but when she proceeds to examine the life led within these houses, she makes a woman's criticism of it. She points out that although these lavishly decorated mansions would at first seem to have been the province of women and their very reward for having attained the status of wife to a Captain of Finance and Industry, in fact the very opposite is the case: these are men's houses in which women have only an illusory freedom. Furthermore, "the very houses are men's houses, factories, undermined by tunnels and service railways, shot through with plumbing to collect salt water, tanks to store it, devices to collect rain water, vaults for table silver, equipment inventories of china and crystal and 'Tray cloths — fine' and 'Tray cloths — ordinary"' (212). These mansions are great machines which crush rather than free their occupants. "The mechanics of such houses take precedence over all desires or inclinations; neither for great passions nor for morning whims can the factory be shut down, can production — of luncheons, of masked balls, of marrons glacés — be slowed" (212). Newport turns out to be "homiletic," according to Didion. It turns out to be "a fantastically elaborate stage setting for an American morality play in which money and happiness are presented as antithetical." The builders of these mansions "had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child's primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living. In that way the lesson of Bellevue Avenue is more seriously radical than the idea of Brook Farm. Who could fail to read the sermon in the stones of Newport?" (213). Or perhaps we should say, who, now that Didion has instructed us, could fail to find this sermon there?
Last modified 19 March 2008