Free Where I Was From by Joan Didion

aren’t you?’” A few months before, describing himself as “socially ineffective as regards genuine ‘team play,’ ignorant of politics, an ineffective member of committees, and a poor helper of concrete social enterprises,” as well as “a good deal of a non-conformist, and disposed to a certain rebellion,” Royce had acknowledged that the idea of community to which he had devoted his career remained in some way alien to him: “When I review this whole process, I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness. This is what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley, and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains.… So much of the spirit that opposes the community I have and have always had in me, simply, deeply, elementally.”
    So much of the spirit that opposes the community: of course he had it in him, considering what he was: “… because I am a Californian ,” he himself had written, “as little bound to follow mere tradition. …” In 1970 I spent a month in the South, in Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi, under the misapprehension that an understanding of the differences between the West and the South, which had given California a good deal of its original settlement, would improve my understanding of California. Royce had fretted over the same question: “Very early … this relatively peaceful mingling of Americans from North and South had already deeply affected the tone of California life,” he noted in California: A Study of American Character. “The type of the Northern man who has assumed Southern fashions, and not always the best Southern fashions at that, has often been observed in California life…. He often followed the Southerner, and was frequently, in time, partly assimilated by the Southern civilization.” One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.

7
    T HOMAS KINKADE was born in the late 1950s and raised in Placerville, El Dorado County, where his mother supported him and his siblings by working as a notary public, piecework, five dollars a document. The father had left. The family lived much of the time in a trailer. By the early 1990s “Thomas Kinkade” was a phenomenon, a brand on his own, a merchandiser who could touch a snow globe or a stoneware mug or a night-light or a La-Z-Boy chair with the magic of his name and turn it to money, a painter so successful that by the end of the decade there would be throughout the United States 248 Thomas Kinkade “signature galleries,” seventy-eight of them in California alone, most of those in malls or tourist areas, four for example in Monterey and another four in Carmel, two exits down Highway 1. Since very few of Thomas Kinkade’s original oil paintings were by that time available, and since those that were had risen in price from about $15,000 in the early 1990s to more than $300,000 by 1997, the pictures sold in these 248 “signature galleries” were canvas-backed reproductions, which themselves sold for $900 to $15,000 and were produced by the 450 employees who labored in the hundred-thousand-square-foot Morgan Hill headquarters of Media Arts Group Incorporated (“MDA” on the New York Stock Exchange), the business of which was Thomas Kinkade.
    The passion with which buyers approached these Kinkade images was hard to define. The manager of one California gallery that handled them told me that it was not unusual to sell six or seven at a clip, to buyers who already owned ten or twenty, and that the buyers with whom he dealt brought to the viewing of the images “a sizeable emotional weight.” A Kinkade painting was typically