The White Album by Joan Didion Page B

someone said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our f raises des b ois he had advised me as well that “no man is an island . ” As a matter of fact I hear that no man is an island once or twice a week, quite often from people who think they are quoting Ernest Hemingway . “What a sacrifice on the altar of nationalism,” I heard an actor say about the death in a plane crash of the president of the Philippines . It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony . “Those men are our unsung heroes,” a quite charming and intelligent woman once said to me at a party in Beverly Hills . She was talking about the California State Legislature .
    I remember spending an evening in 1968, a week or so before the California primary and Robert Kennedy’s death, at Eugene’s in Beverly Hills, one of the “clubs” opened by supporters of Eugene McCarthy . The Beverly Hills Eugene’s, not unlike Senator McCarthy ’s campaign itself, had a certain déjà vu aspect to it, a glow of 1952 humanis m: there were Ben Shahn posters on the walls, and the gesture toward a strobe light was nothing that might interfere with “good talk,” and the music was not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless-steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson . There at Eugene’s I heard the name “Erich Fromm” for the first time in a long time, and many other names cast out for the sympathetic magic they might work (“I saw the Senator in San Francisco, where I was with Mrs . Leonard Bernstein ... ” ), and then the evening’s main event: a debate between William Styron and the actor Ossie Davis . It was Mr . Davis’ contention that in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner Mr . Styron had encouraged racism (“Nat Turner’s love for a white maiden, I feel my country can become psychotic about this”), and it was Mr . Styron’s contention that he had not . (David Wolper, who had bought the motion picture rights to Nat Turner, had already made his position clear: “How can anyone protest a book,” he had asked in the trade press, “that has withstood the critical test of time since last October?”) As the evening wore on, Mr . Styron said less and less, and Mr . Davis more and more (“So you might ask, why didn’t I spend five years and write Nat Turner? I won’t go into my reasons why, but ... ” ), and James Baldwin sat between them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in understandable but rather theatrical agony . Mr . Baldwin summed up: “If Bill’s book does no more than what it’s done tonight, it’s a very important event . ” “Hear, hear,” cried someone sitting on the floor, and there was general agreement that it had been a stimulating and significant evening .
    Of course there was nothing crucial about that night at Eugene’s in 1968, and of course you could tell me that there was certainly no harm and perhaps some good in it . But its curious vanity and irrelevance stay with me, if only because those qualities characterize so many of Hollywood’s best intentions . Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of particulars to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade . Marlon Brando does not, in a well-plotted motion pictu re, picket San Quentin in vain: what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention . Things “happen” in motion