Clearly — !

I’m talking about a dust jacket. It features the celebrity-author photograph by Annie Liebowitz and graces the newly-published edition of Notes to John, Joan Didion’s memoranda of meetings with a psychiatrist in 2000-1, when she, her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, about whose alcoholism and other problems Didion was consulting the psychiatrist, were all still alive.

If you slip the dust jacket off the book and flatten it out — no, if you glance at the front of the dust jacket for a moment and then do as I said, you’ll notice a contrast right away. There is light and color on the left half of the photograph. On the right, there is Joan Didion, sitting in what is presumably her home office, and you might be forgiven for thinking that the image is in black-and-white. On the part of the picture that appears on the rear of the dust jacket, there is a lighted lamp, whose ecru shade glows yellow, as does its empty-column glass base. This causes the blue-greens of the image on the computer screen to stand out, at least as color. Now that the whole of the desk in the window is visible, it is clearly littered with mildly colorful items, especially a porcelain bowl, painted with fish or dragons (or something), that I should like to know more about. These things, in the lamplight and alongside the computer, bring out the color in the author’s face and arms.

That’s it: the whole photograph — and it takes the whole photograph to do this — brings Didion, who died at the end of 2021, to life.

Or maybe not. Maybe celebrity photographer Annie Liebowitz just knows how to take pictures that look meaningful. Certainly it must be assumed that she did a little more than walk into Didion’s home office and snap her shutters. In the rear of the populated half of the photograph stands a starkly modern floor lamp that the photographer may have decided to turn off. Without its light, the room seems not so much bathed as rinsed in a chaste northern daylight arguably inadequate to the needs of elderly eyes.  Interestingly, the empty but lighted half of the photograph shows two crumpled tissues, one next to the mouse pad and one at the base of the lamp. These details suggest that Liebowitz is not an interior-décor photographer.

The impulse to catalogue what’s visible is almost irresistible to someone like me, who grew up on the 1963 Cloisters catalogue description (cribbed, I think, from the work of Erwin Panofsky) of what is now known as the Mérode Altarpiece, packed with such decodings as this: “The rays of the sun passing through the window give visual form to the popular medieval allegory of the perpetual virginity of Mary, which St Bernard explained thus…” Beauty takes a back seat to cleverness: catnip. But I resist.

The telephone behind Didion’s head does remind me of a poignant story. Shortly after my late wife and I moved into the last apartment that we would share (next door and up two flights from the one I’m writing in), a technician’s error cut the entire building’s landline cable; neither the building management nor Verizon would pay for the repair, and it was never fixed. That’s the story. Kathleen, very unhappy about this, went to the AT&T shop down the street and came home victorious. She produced a line that could be attached to the phone at her bedside. I tried to explain to her that it was not a landline; but simply a cable attached at its other end to a locked-in mobile phone. But it looked like a landline to her, and what’s more, it restored service to the chunky appliance that took up so much of her nightstand. The look and feel of a landline trumped the reality.

What is that curious box-like thing lying on the desk blotter? I think we can rule out a pack of cigarettes or a deck of cards. And what about that porcelain dish next to it? What is it doing in an office, in such proximity to a hanging-file cart? It is hard for me to imagine Didion writing about it; she did not take a professional interest in “things,” especially things of typically feminine interest. Why is the dish empty? Was it empty when the photographer arrived? Would Claude be able to recognize the pattern, so that I could shop for one like it at Replacements?

Who was in charge of this book? Who wrote the foreword and the afterword, both very brief, that bookend Didion’s notes? Who decided where footnotes were needed and then wrote them? Who chose Liebowitz’s photograph, which was not, we must remember, taken for the purpose. Joan Didion would not, I think, disapprove of these mystifications. I never met her, but I can imagine her impassive smile.

I don’t have a home office. I have never had one, to listen to me, although in two of our apartments in this building there was a room that some people, and even Kathleen at times, would refer to as such. I resisted with my preferred nomenclature: first (and for thirty years), called the Blue Room (upper case) after the color of the walls, and then, for much the same reasons, the rather smaller book room (lower case). That hanging file in the dust-jacket photograph: is it full of writerly drafts? Or do the folders contain contracts and other professional-business papers? I would find its presence, out in the open, very distracting. But let’s not go into how I keep my files. The important thing is that I have a better view from my desk, especially now that the leaves are out. Even in winter, the red brick but multiply-windowed wall of the building across 87th Street is screened by the branches’ nervily organic twists and turns.

As for my desk, what does it say about me? It says the same thing that every writer’s desk says, but with unusual explicitness. It says, almost geometrically, that I am not a person who does not notice or care what his desk looks like. But unlike most desks of any kind, it does little to remind me who I am. There are only two overt mementoes, and both are reminders of Kathleen: a photograph taken not long before I met her, and an important if unimpressive award of which she was the first recipient. Oh, and an eensy plastic spider.