The Perfect Prose of a Joan Didion Photo Caption

If style is discovered, Didion found hers writing about pictures.
Joan Didion lounges on an armchair.
Joan Didion, who worked as a junior editor at Vogue, said that producing photo captions was part of mounting “the monthly grand illusion” of a glossy magazine.Photograph from Everett / Shutterstock

“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” —Joan Didion

In the early nineteen-sixties, while on the staff of Vogue, Joan Didion was only half known to the magazine’s readers. Her name appeared intermittently. 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. She also wrote short, unattributed paragraphs—they cannot be called essays, articles, or pieces—for Vogue’s regular “People Are Talking About” column. She wrote about “Dr. 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.

In Vogue, by the sixties, captions were surprisingly substantial pieces of writing, accorded what might seem a remarkable amount of editorial care. The captions Didion wrote make up a minor, telling aspect of the mythology around her work, though perhaps “mythology” is the wrong word. It is a matter of style, where style is verifiable presence on the page. Didion is frequently described as an exact and exacting writer, her prose like a shiny carapace. At the same time, she has a reputation for being brittle and spectral, barely there. None of this adequately describes her prose. It is usually direct and declarative; it is filled with parallelisms and rhythmic repetitions; there is a wealth of concrete detail. 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. In a lecture at U.C.L.A., Didion said, “I’m not much interested in spontaneity. I’m not an inspirational writer. What concerns me is total control.”

Producing captions, Didion has said, was part of mounting “the monthly grand illusion” of a glossy magazine. 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. By the accounts of Didion and her contemporaries, Talmey was an unsparing editor and boss. 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. (“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 [Talmey’s] office with eight lines of copy or a caption or something. She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working.” In a profile of Didion in the New York Times, in 1979, Talmey herself recounted how she would ask Didion to write a caption of three or four hundred words, and then together they would cut it down to fifty. “We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write.”

The Times article coincided with the publication of “Telling Stories,” Didion’s only collection of short fiction—if you can call three stories a collection. In the book’s preface, she elaborates on her time at Vogue and the rigors of working under Talmey. “We were connoisseurs of synonyms,” she writes. “We were collectors of verbs.” Certain words went in and out of fashion—“to ravish” was for some months an editorially approved verb. “I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favoured noun: ‘ravishments’, as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Fabergé eggs, other ravishments.” Didion and her young colleagues learned—or else “did not stay”—to use active verbs instead of passive, to make sure “it” always had a nearby reference, to reach for the O.E.D. to insure surprise as much as precision. And, most of all, they learned to rewrite, time and again, in search of the correct balance of elegance and excitement. “Run it through again, sweetie,” Talmey would say. “It’s not quite there.”

“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” I came across the sentence first online, in the 1979 profile, where it is offered as an example of Didion’s caption-writing for Vogue at the start of her career. So much to admire, not least the verbless economy of the sentence, as if the caption’s function—its act of pointing, or its open-handed gesture—does away with the need for verbs. (What would the verbed alternatives be? “All through the house are colour, verve . . .” Or “one finds.” The additions all seem to weaken the sentence.) The caption directs us to a single picture, but it also stands for a whole; “all through the house,” with its slumberous familiarity—“It was the night before Christmas . . .”—conjures time as well as space. In her preface to “Telling Stories,” Didion recalls that Talmey liked things, especially qualifiers, to come in threes. And so it is here, with the somewhat abstracted features: “colour, verve, improvised treasures.” What is an improvised treasure? A found object, or Duchampian readymade, the value of which derives from the artist-collector’s choosing and acquiring it? Or maybe “improvised” refers to a casual mode of display, to a style of living with things rather than to the things themselves?

Then we have “happy but anomalous coexistence”—“happy” here meaning apt, fortunate, and pleasing, rather than pleased or (in the nearly vanished sense) happenstance. I like the way this term has been elongated, allowed to spread itself around. The absence of stricturing commas around “but anomalous” is in line with Didion’s later style: she knows better than most when to leave out the commas for which other writers (or their editors) instinctively reach, to let grammar and a certain sonic ease do their work. The sentence sounds like Didion in its rhythm, care, and thrift, and also in its swerve toward something more troubling or mysterious, the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at work.

Was I right to think about the sentence in this way? Here is what I found when I turned from the Times to Didion’s more detailed account, in the preface to “Telling Stories,” of her time at Vogue—an apprenticeship, she says, that is too easy to mock. At first, she composed merchandising copy, and then promotional copy (“the distinction between the two was definite but recondite”), and eventually editorial copy. As “a sample of the latter,” Didion includes our caption, or an extended version of it:

Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence. Here, a Frank Stella, an art nouveau stained-glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein. Not shown: a table covered with frankly brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard.

The sentence, at least in this telling, is followed by two more that open out, show us the treasures, and include both some nice economies (“a Mexican find,” not “a find in Mexico”) and bright phrasing: the “frankly brilliant oilcloth.”

But run it through again, because we’re not quite there. On the desk in front of me—an eBay find, at fifty dollars—I have the August 1, 1965, issue of American Vogue. In the way of popular magazines of that period, it reads now as a surprisingly highbrow artifact. There is a substantial feature on Giacometti, a movie review by Elizabeth Hardwick, and a report by Didion on the new National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City: “One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities.” A few pages after Didion and Hardwick, the magazine announces its twenty-fifth Prix de Paris, “a career competition for college seniors,” the first prize a year on the magazine as a junior editor and a trip to Paris, to see the shows. Didion herself had won the prize, in 1956, with an essay on the California architect William Wilson Wurster. It was what brought her to New York; she turned down the Paris trip in favor of real work at the magazine.

Didion’s caption appears in the “Fashions in Living” department, alongside a culinary conversation with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and a short drinks feature titled “Through Deepest Summer with Zest and Cube.” The piece to which Didion contributed is called “The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers”—the plural denoting both Hopper and his wife, the actor Brooke Hayward—and was written by the novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, with photographs of house and family by Hopper himself. Southern’s tone is hipster New Journalist, a touch embarrassing even for its time. His opening paragraph: “The Den Hoppers are tops in their field. Precisely what their field is, is by no means certain—except that she is a Great Beauty, and he a kind of Mad Person.” Southern leads us on a zany tour of Hopper’s acting career, his politics (a “jaunt” to photograph the Selma marches earlier that year), counter-cultural affiliations (Ginsberg, et al.), and his art collection, a subject on which Southern solicits an approving comment from Frank O’Hara. It’s an entertaining, imprecise, and exhausting sort of writing, rather like its author’s description of his subject: “To walk down a city street with him is like being attached to a moving adrenaline pump.”

“The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers,” in the August 1, 1965 issue of Vogue, for which a young Joan Didion wrote photo captions.Source: Vogue

There is energy of a kind in the captions, too, but it is coolly and rigorously contained. “Left, Mrs. Hopper, who is the actress Brooke Hayward, poses in a red leather chair for Robert Walker, junior. The pillow reads ‘Long May It Wave.’ ” Or this: “To visit the Hopper house is to be, at every turn, surprised, freshly beguiled by a kaleidoscopically shifting assemblage of found objects, loved objects, objets d’art.” At the bottom of the first page of the piece, one finds the passage that Didion quotes in “Telling Stories”—the passage later cited by the Times and, as “an early example” of her Vogue editorial copy, by Didion’s biographer, Tracy Daugherty. Or, rather, you find this: “Opposite, above, through the house, colour, verve, things in happy, anomalous coexistence. Here, a Frank Stella painting, an art nouveau stained glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein painting.”

The piece was written by the novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, with photographs of house and family by Dennis Hopper himself.Source: Vogue

What has happened, exactly? Let us stick with the first sentence for now. Never mind the italics, or the comma instead of a colon. Onward, to the most obvious difference, which is of course this: “things in happy, anomalous coexistence.” Things. In the caption as printed on page 138 of Vogue, the word comes three lines from the bottom, at the right-hand limit of a run of short nouns: “house, colour, verve, things.” (I feel justified in treating the sentence in this line-by-line fashion, because Didion tells us that she was working within not only strict word limits but character counts too: the shape of available space on the page mattered.) Things—it subtracts from the rhythm of the sentence heard aloud, and seems in all respects a feeble word choice, inexact and thin.

Except, except: recall that line of Didion’s in her piece about the Mexican museum. Here is the whole sentence: “Inside, the collection is too overwhelming to see all at once; one comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities.” Sometimes, in the face of profusion, when tempted by treasures, you need instead a word as unshowy as “things.” The caption is seventeen lines long, printed in small sans-serif type. And it starts like this: “Up in the Hollywood Hills, above the Sunset Strip, Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Hopper (portraits, above left) have a house of such gaiety and wit that it seems the result of some marvellous scavenger hunt, full of improvised treasures, the bizarre and the beautiful and the banal in wild juxtaposition, everything the most of its kind.”

There they are, the “improvised treasures,” as if some careless admiring guest has picked them up and put them down in the wrong place. It’s not the only phrase in Didion’s remembered version of her caption that looks like it’s been moved from where we first found it. Here, again, is the second sentence, from 1965: “Here, a Frank Stella painting, an art nouveau stained glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein painting.” And the version she gives us in 1978: “Here, a Frank Stella, an art-nouveau stained-glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein.” So much better without the repeated “painting.” And what about the thing not shown: “a table covered with frankly brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard”? Actually, that is shown, but four pages further on, with the caption “Everywhere in the Hopper house the point is to amuse, to delight. Near right, above, in the breakfast room, the table covered with brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard.”

Enough detail, enough quotation. Between 1965 and 1978, what is Didion doing and why should I, let alone you, care? When I first found these disparities, I was seized with the sort of excitement that must overtake real scholars when they discover, for example, telling variations among printed or manuscript copies of the same great poem. But a photo caption from a fashion magazine, a scrap of anonymous juvenilia—how could such a small detail matter? Except it did, or does, to Joan Didion. Perhaps the printed version is evidence of Talmey’s editing and Didion’s rewriting, with fragments of the first effort—“run it through again, sweetie”—dispersed about the magazine’s pages. Or (and I vastly prefer this possibility) Didion has gone to the magazine—it would not be unusual to keep your early periodical appearances around for thirteen years, or longer—and improved upon the version she wrote in 1965.

An attention to sound—to getting the right sound—in writing has been for Didion a lifelong occupation. In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she tells us, “As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” But she doesn’t just hear things. She sees them, too:

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

This is from “Why I Write,” a piece that Didion wrote for the Times, in 1976. “The picture dictates the arrangement.” You have to wonder where a writer would learn such a lesson, or learn to express it in such terms, if not from writing about actual pictures. When I was the age Didion was when she composed these captions for Vogue, I was used to writing only about books, writing about words, writing about writing. I learned to write about everything else—what we might call life— by training myself to write about photographs. That practice was an excellent education in hearing the affinities between words and things, between the structure of a scene and the shape of a sentence. The picture dictates the arrangement: this is what I hear Joan Didion discovering, then reminding herself of thirteen years later. She was getting used to writing, she said, about the kind of people who had Stellas and Lichtensteins and bargains from Mexico. But she was also just getting used to putting one thing beside another.

This essay was drawn from “Suppose a Sentence,” which is out in September from New York Review Books.