In the Matter of the Commas

Summary

1. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Joan Didion and her daughter, Quintana, were looking at a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. The work, Sky Above Clouds IV, hung across a landing, so they had a gulf of air between themselves and the flat white shapes that span a long wall at the museum. It is a giant painting, practically a mural, as wide as the abstract Barnett Newman canvases that you can walk along and let fill the whole of your vision. But this work floats at a distance, celestially, and you just look out at it. There are 192 square feet of clouds. You are in an airplane. “Who drew it?” Quintana whispered to her mother. “I need to talk to her.” On which Didion reflected, in her 1979 essay collection The White Album: My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming … that the painting was the painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character. Style is character. Didion held on to that belief throughout her career. How you write or paint is who you are, she thought. Sometimes she went further. Style not only showed your character but, as she wrote in a late novel, might even reveal your politics, your ideas about the world—what you had come to think and believe. In his review of The White Album for The London Review of Books, Martin Amis mocked the scene with Quintana at the Art Institute. Style had nothing to do with character, he wrote. It was a ridiculous notion. In Chicago, Didion showed “how quickly sentimentality proceeds to nonsense,” Amis wrote. “If style were character, everyone would write as self-revealingly as Miss Didion. Not everyone does.” Plenty of writers remain anonymous, or produce books that seemingly have little to do with their real lives. Didion had fallen in love with an idea that could not withstand scrutiny, according to Amis. “The ...