Goodbye to “Goodbye to All That”

I came late to Joan Didion, first really digging into her work when I was in grad school for journalism. That’s where I read her seminal 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” which perfectly captures the ambivalence of being young and living in New York, once you’ve passed the point of being enraptured and have begun to suspect it might be time to leave. It’s one of those rare, brilliant pieces of writing to vividly capture a very particular moment in a way that makes it feel timeless.

Readers of this essay tend to understand it in very personal terms, though it’s influence has a lot to do with when one first comes to it. If you come to it early, it might spark anticipation for a time in your life like the one Didion describes, make you look forward to the world-weariness that looks wonderfully romantic from a distance. If you come to it when you’re already a New York writer-type encountering various professional roadblocks and stressing about the future, the world Didion presents looks both eerily familiar and enviably exotic—a much mythologized time in journalism, but one that feels very far away.

“Goodbye to All That” is about time passing, the accumulation of memories. It’s about figuring out who you are in a particular place, realizing that you’re in a fleeting moment and feeling alternately grateful for and desperate about it. It’s about a certain kind of growing up, and so of course, it’s an object of nostalgia itself. Originally the title of a World War I memoir by Robert Graves, since Didion made it her own, “Goodbye To All That” has been recycled as the titles of (to name but a few): a 1970 essay by Robin Morgan about the women’s movement, Representative Cynthia McKinney’s remarks at a 2002 reception for the Congressional Black Caucus, Andrew Sullivan’s 2007 cover story in The Atlantic explaining “Why Obama Matters,” an article by Steve Wasserman in the Columbia Journalism Review about declining book review coverage, a piece in the American Prospect about why liberals should avoid looking to the 1960′s for inspiration, an Entertainment Weekly blog post about the end of two characters’ storylines on Days of Our Lives, articles by Tony Judt in both The New York Review of Books (a book review) and The Nation (about anti-Semitism), a 1997 Christopher Hitchens piece in the NYRB about Che Guevara’s writings, Jonah Goldberg’s 2005 National Review piece pondering the end of “compassionate conservativism” as well as the subtitle of his 2001 explanation to readers of the same magazine about for why the Review dropped Ann Coulter’s column, and a blog post by Anthony Bourdain. Phew.

So, big surprise: regardless of religion, political affiliation, temperament, or seriousness of situation, everyone has something they’re ready to move past in a decisive, symbolic way. This particular title—resolved yet blasé—is the perfect way to mark that kind of moving on. Susan Dominus used it as a lynchpin for her recent article bemoaning the fading world of journalism as she knows it, harkening back to Didion’s essay more than directly than most of those other writers.

The title of Didion’s “famous elegy for the passing of youth…has been reverberating through my mind on a regular basis,” Dominus wrote. For her, it’s a sort of refrain to (or running commentary on) this recession’s endless media layoffs, which themselves signal an end to what it looked like and meant to be a journalist in Didion’s New York, and for awhile, in Dominus’s. “Ms. Didion tired of the same faces at the same parties, the gossip about book advances, the uneasy courtship of press and publicists, the endless cycle of aspiration and pretense,” Dominus wrote. “She eventually learned ‘that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair,’ as she wrote in one defining line. Everyone outgrows the scene eventually, but it was nice to know it was there.”

I bet it was. “Nice to know it was there” isn’t something writers of my generation can take for granted, because increasingly, it’s just not there—every browser refresh brings more depressing news. Forget fancy lunches, valuable mentorship, dreaming big, choosing from a range of available jobs in your field; there are no jobs, period, and no one can even afford to eat lunch out. Goodbye to all that, indeed.

But can you really say “goodbye” to a time you only knew in a mythic sense? My grad school friends and I are in a strange position, with a very clear idea of journalism’s past, a hazy sense of what might be its future, and a secure foothold in neither. Many of us grew up dreaming about working at the publications that are laying people off, slashing their freelance budgets, or folding altogether. And if we didn’t grow up aspiring to them, we certainly did as grad students two short years ago, when—incredibly—things were a lot different. Or at least different enough: Many of the publications our professors told us to pitch to don’t exist anymore, or have limited their contributors to an ever-shrinking staff. The landscape has changed so drastically in such a short time that we often wonder what professors in journalism programs can possibly be telling their students about their prospects—students in programs that have seen, if anything, increased enrollment. We imagine those classrooms as dark, depressing places, and in general, we’re glad to have gotten out of while the going was (relatively) good.

Journalism is locked in a very public, self-conscious struggle with what it was and what it may become. It’s a situation that’s both exciting and confounding to those of us working in the middle. Sure, lots of professions are struggling to come to grips with new realities, economic and otherwise. But journalism’s experience of these changes has, I think, been particularly sticky, all tied up with denial and hopelessness and unfounded optimism and promising innovation. The changes confronting the business are huge and seemingly sudden; they affect not just how we do our jobs or even just the jobs themselves, but every detail of how the job is defined—both what we’re writing about and how we’re writing about it. That’s created new divisions and hierarchies and resentments, many of them stratified along generational lines. It’s impossible to work in journalism today without being reminded of what once was, what we missed, what we came to the game too late to appreciate. Every generation  and occupation has it’s own myths, but journalists seem particularly steeped in them, even as doing the job well requires that we not to get too lost in what came earlier.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” Didion’s essay begins. “I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my  finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” For better or worse, the circumstances around the next “goodbye” seem largely out of our hands. Sometimes I envy the time when disenchantment was a choice—a specific stage rather than the general state of things. But maybe it just looks that way now because it’s gone.

Photo by johnbmwflora