(“Well, my dear, I used to go home, sit in the tub, and weep,” one young woman said.) In an interview with The Paris Review, in 1978, Didion said, “Every day I would go into office with eight lines of copy or a caption or something. After she had wielded her pencil on another writer’s copy-flashing, all the while, a large aquamarine and silver ring-the writer was wrung out. By the accounts of Didion and her contemporaries, Talmey was an unsparing editor and boss. The editor-in-chief then was Diana Vreeland, but the more detailed work was done by Allene Talmey, who had been with Vogue since the mid-nineteen-thirties and became an associate editor in 1963. Producing captions, Didion has said, was part of mounting “the monthly grand illusion” of a glossy magazine. In a lecture at U.C.L.A., Didion said, “I’m not much interested in spontaneity.
Irony in her work consists largely of the plain statement of such detail, inflected by the innocent, mad, or bad-faith language of the people or institutions she is writing about. It is usually direct and declarative it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions there is a wealth of concrete detail. None of this adequately describes her prose. At the same time, she has a reputation for being brittle and spectral, barely there. Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer, her prose like a shiny carapace. It is a matter of style, where style is verifiable presence on the page. The captions Didion wrote make up a minor, telling aspect of the mythology around her work, though perhaps “mythology” is the wrong word. In Vogue, by the sixties, captions were surprisingly substantial pieces of writing, accorded what might seem a remarkable amount of editorial care. No” and “The Manchurian Candidate” about the atom bomb, Telstar, and the construction of the Guggenheim about the budding careers of Willem de Kooning, Woody Allen, and Barbra Streisand and about the death of Marilyn Monroe, whom she called “a profoundly moving young woman.” And she composed photo captions: those “signposts,” as Walter Benjamin put it, that had become essential to the printed magazine page in the twentieth century. She also wrote short, unattributed paragraphs-they cannot be called essays, articles, or pieces-for Vogue’s regular “People Are Talking About” column. Her first signed piece, in June 1961, was a short essay on jealousy, which already showed certain features of her mature writing: an earnest consideration of the brittle contours of her own character, and a fine attention to language, including her own. In the early nineteen-sixties, while on the staff of Vogue, Joan Didion was only half known to the magazine’s readers.
Treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” -Joan Didion “Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised
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