The White Album by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

detailing his pique in the pages of Look, and drove into the Jordanian desert in a white Ford Cortina rented from Avis . He went with his former student and bride of nine months, Diane . Later she would say that they wanted to experience the wilderness as Jesus had . They equipped themselves for this mission with an Avis map and two bottles of Coca-Cola . The young Mrs . Pike got out alive . Five days after James Albert Pike’s body was retrieved from a canyon near the Dead Sea a Solemn Requiem Mass was offered for him at the cathedral his own hubris had finished in San Francisco . Outside on the Grace steps the cameras watched the Black Panthers demonstrating to free Bobby Seale . Inside the Grace nave Diane Kennedy Pike and her two predecessors, Jane Alvies Pike and Esther Yanovsky Pike, watched the cameras and one another .
    That was 1969 . For some years afterward I could make nothing at all of this peculiar and strikingly “now” story, so vast and atavistic was my irritation with the kind of man my grandmother would have called “just a damn old fool,” the kind of man who would go into the desert with the sappy Diane and two bottles of Coca-Cola, but I see now that Diane and the Coca-Cola are precisely the details which lift the narrative into apologue . James Albert Pike has been on my mind quite a bit these past few weeks, ever since I read a biography of him by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, The Death and Life of Bishop Pike, an adoring but instructive volume from which there emerges the shadow of a great literary character, a literary character in the sense that Howard Hughes and Whittaker Chambers were literary characters, a character so ambiguous and driven and revealing of his time and place that his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Jaffa might well have read only james pike, American .
    Consider his beginnings . He was the only child of an ambitious mother and an ailing father who moved from Kentucky a few years before his birth in 1913 to homestead forty acres of mesquite in Oklahoma . There had been for a while a retreat to a one-room shack in Alamogordo, New Mexico, there had been always the will of the mother to improve the family’s prospects . She taught school . She played piano with a dance band, she played piano in a silent-movie theater . She raised her baby James a Catholic and she entered him in the Better Babies Contest at the Oklahoma State Fair and he took first prize, two years running . “I thought you would like that,” she told his biographers almost sixty years later . “He started out a winner . ”
    He also started out dressing paper dolls in priests’ vestments . The mother appears to have been a woman of extreme determination . Her husband died when James was two . Six years later the widow moved to Los Angeles, where she devoted herself to maintaining a world in which nothing “would change James’ life or thwart him in any way” a mode of upbringing which would show in the son’s face and manner all his life . “Needless to say this has all been a bit tedious for me to relive,” he complained when the question of his first divorce and remarriage seemed to stand between him and election as Bishop of California; his biography is a panoply of surprised petulance in the face of other people’s attempts to “thwart” him by bringing up an old marriage or divorce or some other “long-dead aspect of the past . ”
    In Los Angeles there was Hollywood High, there was Mass every morning at Blessed Sacrament on Sunset Boulevard . After Hollywood High there was college with the Jesuits, at Santa Clara, at least until James repudiated the Catholic Church and convinced his mother that she should do the same . He was eighteen at the time, but it was characteristic of both mother and son to have taken this adolescent “repudiation” quite gravely: they give the sense of having had no anchor but each other, and to have reinvented their moorings every day . After