Event announced with due importance by Stair Galleries of New York. «An American Icon: the Collection of Joan Didion». Auction scheduled for Wednesday 16 November at 11 am local time. Proceeds destined to Columbia University for scientific research and assistance to patients with Parkinson’s and other movement disorders, and to the Sacramento Historical Society for the provision of scholarships to women engaged in literature. The story of a life is up for auction. Furniture, paintings, embroideries, personal effects, which belonged to the journalist author of «The year of magical thought». The desks she had in the house. Her books pulled off the shelves that had housed them for decades. Unused notebooks, collected in groups bound by thin ribbons. Shells and pebbles she kept on the mantelpiece, scattered like rose petals. Memories of Sacramento. Malibu. Travel to Europe. Of artist friends.
Joan Didion’s readers find objects they have learned about from its pages and others discover them. The «Hurricane Lamps». Spode dishes. The Victorian style rattan armchair. The Chinese coffee table in lacquer and bamboo. The footstool decorated with small dot flowers. The fake tortoiseshell sunglasses. Two music boxes, one works, the other no longer. Two colored glass bells. An IBM 5 typewriter. A round lacquered tray. A circular Edwardian mirror. Le Creuset pots. A «Study of cherubs for the decoration of a ceiling» attributed to Ventura by Arcangelo Salimbeni, «called Bevilacqua». The drawing of a kitten sleeping curled up in the heat, by Guido Gruenwald. Seven pillows. A Loro Piana cashmere shawl and a pure cashmere plaid. A miscellaneous group of eyeglasses. Six candlesticks. Joan Didion’s world in fragments. Light shatters. A slight kaleidoscope that composes and breaks down. And it always surprisingly changes, depending on the point of observation. A pair of scissors. A block. A brass letter “J”. A glass paperweight with daisies inside. Two boxes of French powder filled with metal clips and paper clips. A pack of twelve Pilot Precise V7 pens. Some magnifying glasses.
Traces of a woman’s existence. About a woman who wrote for work and talent. With existence played around the need to make a note to stop an idea before it disappears. And that thirst for reasoning that leads to organizing materials, to keep in order to find, to keep in order to trace. In the drawers. In the folders. By tapping and cataloging. The notebook as an essential, primary, indispensable good. Joan Didion and writing about her. First of all. Despite the loss of everything: the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne and then of her young daughter Quintana. Then pain had turned Joan Didion into essential steel and discovered. All tense nerves, dark eyes and unanswered questions. The pain had transfused into her writing. With the stubborn air of precise reconstruction. And the stubborn accuracy of the reporter that starts with the details. Lot 77 of the auction is the Random House vocabulary that once belonged to John. It is a volume from 1970. It bears the marks of years of frequent use. Worn sheets, slightly faded. A precious object. In “The Year of Magical Thought”, in a dazzling sequence, Joan Didion reported with regret that she had lost forever one last legacy of thought left by John. “One day, while I was talking on the phone in his study, I absentmindedly leafed through the pages of the dictionary which he had always left open on the table next to his desk. When I realized what I had done I was horrified: what word had he been looking for the last time, what was he thinking about? Had I lost the message by leafing through the pages? “