I have just finished reading Crooning, John Gregory Dunne’s collection of essays, reviews, and general articles about life in the latter half of the 20thcentury. The collection, published in 1990, includes anecdotes and observations that Dunne has gleaned from his multiple perspectives as a screenwriter, novelist, and critic. Nine of the thirteen pieces were first published in the New York Review of Books.
Dunne was married to writer Joan Didion, whose own work (Slouching toward Bethlehem, The White Album, and others)also chronicled contemporary life. Over their 40-year marriage, they collaborated on a number of screenplays, including the 1976 version of A Star is Bornand True Confessions, the latter an adaptation of Dunne’s novel. Dunne died in 2003. In a way, his death was their last collaboration: Didion’s 2005 memoir, The Year of Living Dangerously, recounts her life in the year following Dunne’s sudden death by heart attack over dinner in their New York apartment on the evening of December 30, 2003. For it, she won the National Book Award.
Dunne grouped chapters them under several themes. The first, “West of the West,” explores people and events he encountered during his early career in Los Angeles, beginning with the story of his personal and professional friendship with Dan James, a screenwriter (and one-time landlord of Dunne and Didion) who was blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s, but who continued to be productive as “Danny Santiago.” He also writes about how the need for a steady supply of water changed lives in California communities around Los Angeles and about what he learned as a reporter about the life and death struggles facing residents of South Central L.A.
A section entitled “The Public Sector” contains five essays about well-known public figures from the period, including Edward Kennedy, William F. Buckley, and Tom Wolfe, along with an essay entitled “REMFs” a close look at how class defined who fought in the Vietnam War and how the Vietnamese calculated their path to victory. “REMF,” it turns out, was military slang in those days for “Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers” (a term that he considered as a possible title for the collection). It is a compelling take on the Vietnam War.
Dunne includes four essays in a section on “The Industry” that recalls his experiences, often in collaboration with Joan Didion, as a Hollywood screenwriter. Two chapters detail the role of the screenwriter in the “industry” as he learned it negotiating deals with producers and directors, and working on a variety of films. He also profiles some early Hollywood executives, such as Sam Spiegel (Lawrence of Arabiaand The Bridge on the River Kwai), Sam Goldwyn, and others.
A section called “Laying Pipe” looks at the environment that produces the events that journalists cover. A major chapter is about the trip that Joan Didion and he took to Israel in 1987, just before the uprising of that year. Dunne gives us a close look at the people of Israel and Palestine, the policies that separated them, and how their interactions shaped the Middle East in those years in ways we still feel today. It is a powerful piece of real-time reporting.
The book concludes with several chapters on writing both as a creative process and a business.
What makes the collection special is that, in every instance, Dunne writes not from the perspective of a detached journalist, but from his own direct experience with the subject. His essays come across not so much as objective journalism, but as memoirs, and that makes the content come to life in a fresh way.
For three decades and more, Dunne chronicled life during decades of major social change from the Sixties onward. However, Dunne and his contemporaries were not Baby Boomers. Dunne was born in 1932; Joan Didion in 1934. Tom Wolfe, who Dunne writes about in Crooning, was born in 1930. They were, ironically, members of the Silent Generation who grew up during the Depression and came of age after World War II. As an early Baby Boomer myself, I am often surprised that some of the great figures of the period were younger members of Dunne’s generation. John Lennon, for instance, was born in 1940. So, I get a bit concerned that the great insights into American culture and world events from my younger days—the days that Dunne, Didion, and others of their generation documented—will be lost on future generations. If and when that happens, we lose a generational perspective on a remarkable period in our history—a period marked by Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, assassinations, the first landing on the Moon, and the first flowering of the Information Age.
There is a concept of social development called the “expanding communities” model. It describes how, as we age, our identity as a member of a community expands. Initially, we see ourselves only in terms of our immediate family. As we grow and enter school, our family becomes our private identity, while our classmates become part of an expanded public identity. Later still, our profession becomes our public identity, and our school friends become part of an expanded private identity. And so it goes. I wonder if we should also be aware of our “place” in time, moving from the immediacy of childhood to a sense of ourselves as part of a yearly school cohort and, later, as part of a generation. Then, we can look beyond our generation to see ourselves as part of a culture. This, perhaps, is the ultimate benefit of reading writers like John Gregory Dunne, who give us a fresh perspective on times we may have lived through, but did not fully experience.
I bought Crooning last year at the annual used book sale of the local American Association of University Women here in State College. The next sale is in a couple of weeks. It is like foraging in the culture. Can’t wait.
