Californian Education

Here is a little ode I wrote to Berkeley English, my home for the past four years. I loved being an English major; I would do it all again in an instant; I recommend the department most highly.

Four years ago, I entered the UC Berkeley English department in large part because it had been Joan Didion’s English department from 1953 to 1956. Of course I knew in an academic sense that Joan Didion (the National Book Award winner, New Journalism pioneer, and lauded essayist of coastal-elite cultural criticism that spoke for an entire generation) went to Berkeley — but in my sophomore year, poring over her letters and notebooks and first drafts in the Bancroft Library, I saw that Joan Didion went to Berkeley, lived and breathed in Berkeley, and that long after she had graduated, never let go of Berkeley. Objectively, Didion had died in 2021, the winter of my freshman year, but the Bancroft archive brought her to life in front of me. Here’s one example of many: in 1955, at the beginning of her senior year, Didion wrote in a letter to her friend Peggy, “Ever since school started, I’ve been developing a mild case of paranoia…My classes are terrible (this really is senior-itis with a vengeance).” 

Well. I’m sure we all know the feeling. As Didion would go on to write in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “the themes are always the same.”

And they are. In her junior year, young Didion took a course on Henry James, and in the blue book for her final exam made the argument that “all of James’ writing seems to begin with human consciousness as a blank sheet. The tabula rasa ready to register impressions, perceptions, experience.” She would echo this almost ten years later in her 1965 essay “Notes From a Native Daughter,” observing, “it is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past as if it had simultaneously begun, tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagons started west.” 

Perspectives of California come and go — but what Didion was tested on in her exams seemed to stick. In a 1977 interview, given over twenty years after she had graduated, Didion recalled that the book that made “one of the strongest impressions” on her while she was in college was James’ Portrait of a Lady, remarking, “Isabel Archer was the prototype romantic idealist. It trapped her, and she remained a prisoner of her own ideal.” Curiously, the same can be said about many of Didion’s own female characters: from 1963’s Run River to 1996’s The Last Thing He Wanted, her heroines experience failing marriages, terrorist daughters, arms dealer fathers, and other situations of personal or political espionage with the same dead-eyed stare on their faces and generic brute-force boyfriends in their rooms. They are, and remain, prisoners of their own ideals. 

But Didion, in her blue book for the James class, also wrote fondly of James’ “emphasis on individual morality, responsibility, and renunciation.” She noted that “there are so many meanings, and so many of them contradicting…and I think that much of this ambiguity stems from the fact that, for James, each man lives his own ethic.” (Classic blue book technique here — use commas to make the sentence as long as possible, with a “the fact that” for good measure.) Here we begin to understand that for all of Didion’s fascination with people trapped in fugue states, societal anomie, and cycles of random violence, she was obsessed with the individual ethic, too. In another interview from the 70’s, Didion testifies, “I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man’s soul. I have an aversion to social action because it usually means social regulation…interference, rules, doing what other people wanted me to do. The ethic I was raised in was specifically a Western frontier ethic. That means being left alone and leaving others alone.”

Of course, beyond helping create the opposing frameworks of the one living the individual ethic and the one imprisoned in their own ideals, Berkeley appears explicitly in much of Didion’s work. In “On the Morning After the Sixties,” she coolly observes, “the mood of Berkeley in those years was one of mild but chronic depression.” In Run River, her heroine is “awake every night, listening to the Campanile strike in the coastal fog and feeling intensely sorry for herself” (been there, done that). In her 1984 novel Democracy, the character of Treat Morrison — that is, the love interest, former CIA operative, and Berkeley alumni — nods to May Benton Treat Morrison, for whom Morrison Library over there in Doe is named. 

What was it about this place? What was it that kept Didion, and what is it that has kept us for all these years? Why is it that, in his New Yorker piece on “the end of the English major,” Nathan Heller specified that there are “institutional outliers to the recent trend of enrollment decline, the most prominent [being] UC Berkeley”? 

In an address that Didion gave in 1981 as Berkeley alumni of the year, she said, “I have thought a great deal about what kind of institution Berkeley is or should be. And it seems to me that…Berkeley is precisely what it should be. Berkeley will never provide answers. What Berkeley will continue to do, for its alumni as well as for its students, is raise questions at the deepest possible level, which is a kind of coherent act in itself.”

If you, like me, feel that upon receiving a degree from an English department, have more questions than answers, more questions than could ever possibly be answered, fear not. Didion understood, many years after her graduation, that this was inevitable. 

So where do we go from here? The last line from Didion’s “Why I Write,” published in 1976 off of another address given at Berkeley, is this: “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.” 

Cover: "Pity" (1765) by William Blake