“Some real things have happened lately,” begins Joan Didion’s 1996 novel The Last Thing He Wanted, which follows reporter Elena McMahon’s partial romance with the bland Fratty-Chad-type government employee Treat Morrison as she tracks, and unwittingly participates in, a messy, sprawling South American arms deal partially orchestrated by her father, Dick McMahon.
One real thing has happened to me lately: complete and utter bewilderment and confusion experienced through the entirety of this novel. Part of this can certainly be attributed to a lacking understanding of 80’s political scandals, which the novel loosely (very loosely) follows. But more pressing is the plotlessness, chaos, and baffled disbelief which hangs over the narrative as a muddled, stormy cloud through which there is no visibility. I am a Joan Didion devotee, which all of you reading this (hi, Dad and Mom) know, but I will not be the first to acknowledge that her later fiction is not her finest work. Most of it is simply difficult to get through, winding, meandering, capacious and clipped at once, shoving structure and linearity to the side and lacking the devastating acuity that marks her most revered essays and novels. Still, some of Didion’s sentences glint in the darkness, not quite redemptive but definitely reconciling. This is where I want to look.
Describing Elena and Treat, Didion writes, “Of course they knew each other, understood each other, recognized each other, took one look and got each other, had to be with each other, saw the color drain out of what they saw when they were not looking at each other. They were the same person.” Beyond being lovely and strangely tender, this sentence summons a memory from long ago and far away: Wuthering Heights’ Catherine and Heathcliff. Cathy exclaims, “I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.” While Elena and Treat are not nearly as deranged, absurdly violent, and tortured a pair as Cathy and Heathcliff, their romance too is marked by a quality of togetherness and synthesis distinct from a calamitous, fragmented and refractory setting brimming with betrayal and turmoil. What these two have is special, Didion and Bronte say through their respective couples, and it is because they are the same, indivisible despite all of this difference.
This curious harmony is confirmed near the end of The Last Thing He Wanted, where Didion’s omniscient narrator observes, “Maybe she looked at him and saw the fog off the Farallons, maybe he looked at her and saw the hot desert twilight. Maybe they looked at each other and knew that nothing they could do would matter as much as the slightest tremor of the earth, the blind trembling of the Pacific in its bowl, the heavy snows closing the mountain passes, the rattlers in the dry grass, the sharks causing the deep cold water through the Golden Gate.” Here, gorgeous, grand, weathered imagery is characteristic of Didion's perception of California's fires, fissures, and fault lines accentuating the impermanence and unreliability of California living, as well as her dedication to the chill and heat of the region’s specific, symbolic beauty. It’s a passage that stabilizes Elena and Trent as a pair with sharp awareness of their place with each other against a torrentially destabilized background. The same sentiment surfaces in Cathy and Heathcliff’s story, albeit with through a more tormented delivery, as Heathcliff details feverishly digging up Cathy’s grave: “I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind… so certainly I felt that Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once: unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me: it remained while I re-filled the grave, and led me home.” Despite the absolute anguish and horror which marks the relationship of these two characters, and the utter weirdness and depravity of the context of this passage, Bronte here establishes them as inseparable and peaceful, with “relief,” “relinquished,” and “consoled” driving home the point that together, even after death, Cathy and Heathcliff can stand against dread and danger, sleet and wind.
I find it strange that Didion and Bronte, authors of incredibly disillusioned and dark accounts of 80’s America and 1800’s Yorkshire, position gravity-defying, supernatural, nearly transcendent relationships inside of such fraught circumstances with such certainty. It feels more romantic than it should, especially with the knowledge that Elena, Treat, Cathy, and Heathcliff all end up dead after leading generally unpleasant lives. Still, there’s something close to faith expressed in the longevity and power of a particular relationship built on understanding and interiority so immense that the two enclosed in it might just be the same. The bittersweet and lasting final sentence of The Last Thing He Wanted feels true for both Didion and Bronte in these novels: “I want those two to have been together all their lives.”
Cover image: Detail from Figures in a Storm by Joseph Mallord William Turner
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