Joan Didion’s Emotional Blackmail: An Affair of Every Heart

I once knew an eight-year-old named Martha who wrote stories, unexceptional in every way except one: the heroine of each was a nightclub singer, Sandra, whose life was complicated by the constant threat of blackmail. In some stories Sandra was blackmailed by a shadowy Syndicate, in others by her estranged husband (“Mark,” a déclassé Fed); in still others, dating from Martha’s costume period, the pressure was applied by the boys at the Land Office, who alone knew that Sandra, a long time before and in another country (Dodge City), had committed an indiscretion so unspeakable that Martha could only hint at it. All Martha’s plots turned on blackmail; each of her dénouements was a study in blackmail foiled.

When I asked how Martha had hit upon this particular story line, her mother, a young woman of relentlessly laissez-faire principle, pointed out that blackmail was in fact the prevailing motif in all Martha’s favorite bedtime stories, from “Cain’s Hundred” to “Have Gun, Will Travel.”

“Every time the telephone rings,” she added, “Martha expects it to be anonymous.” Although we both smiled, more or less at Martha’s expense, there is a sense in which Martha is right: a sense in which blackmail, that fairly uncommon fact, emerges as a commonplace of life. What Martha watched, after all, were our generation’s miracle plays, the ritual dramas in which our deepest tensions work themselves out in symbolic terms. From Euripides to MCA-Revue, Shakespeare to Desilu, no storyteller has ever told us a tale we did not already know. We could scarcely understand the Medea did we not understand that a woman holds the tacit power of blackmail over the man who takes her, as Jason took Medea, from home. (I betrayed my father for you: almost no one says it, almost everyone has used it.) To read Joseph Conrad is to read about blackmail, part of the heart of all the darkness; Henry James would seem inexplicably tedious had we no feeling for the play of power, the startlingly literal blackmail, which operates among all of his characters, pervades every drawing room, shadows each well-rolled lawn.

We have all, in brief, known blackmail. Forget the symbolic trappings, the anonymous telephone calls, the clumsily printed scare notes; forget what the boys at the Land Office know or do not know. What is blackmail, after all, but what lawyers sometimes call it: “the demanding of money or other advantage on the threat of exposure of information, true or false, about the victim.”

Or other advantage: in those terms, to have neither blackmailed nor been blackmailed reveals an absence of involvement, a rather dismal abdication of the game. Demanding an advantage is something we are all born doing, and many of us pay ransom, willingly or unwillingly, as easily as we breathe. Ransom is the telephone call one does not want to make, the letter written only to appease, the presents—from such tangibles as Christmas bourbon to such ephemera as Of course I love you—one gives compulsively. Emotional blackmail is rarely so overt as an on-the-line demand, seldom so extreme as the threat of illness or suicide—although most of us, if we have lived long enough (say twenty years), have heard that one. Most often, we begin paying ransom on cues as barely perceptible as a set of the mouth apparent only to the victim, as subtle as a few words—wasn’t the day nice—which translate, in the alchemy of blackmail, and now you’ve gone and ruined it. There is, and each of us knows it, as much vicious extortion in the lyric “Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m blue/My disposition depends on you” as in thirteen weeks of the Dick Powell Show.

Blackmail is, then, an affair of every heart, as common and as various as the very ways of human involvement: there could be no liaison so idyllic that someone, some time, did not demand an advantage; no commitment so unambiguous that the committed could not wonder, some bleak three o’clock in the morning, who was using whom. Blackmail can operate between parent and child, man and wife, employer and employee; can operate even among chance acquaintances, where it usually travels disguised as good manners. If it is, clearly, good manners for me to try to charm the stranger with whom I am dancing, it is just as clearly—if I am vulnerable (say I feel unattractive, or say my husband is behaving outrageously over by the piano)—blackmail.

I once had a friend who practiced blackmail: perhaps we have all had one. Mine would sometimes ask me to cancel an engagement in order to type a manuscript for him, then arrive toward midnight, the piece still unwritten, and explain that I could type it between four and six A.M., and why was I pulling that long face; not only upon me but upon anyone who would play along, he made demand after absurd demand. “Just this once,” he would say, hinting darkly at “emergencies,” “deadlines,” “saving my life.” Our occasional protests would draw forth no retractions but only impassioned apologies, colored with vivid intimations of his undiagnosed ulcers. (Other times it was angina, and on his most imaginative days it was cirrhosis.)

Some of us loved him and some of us did not, but whether we did or not we all acquiesced, helpless before the undertone his every plea carried: I need you. We acquiesced neither because he was charming (most of the time he was notably not) nor because he was a good and generous man (I think he probably was), but simply because he was bold enough or amoral enough or scared enough to make use of what exists in almost every heart: the potentially disabling fear of failure—in some cases neurotic, in others well-founded. I can’t count on you, he would complain if thwarted, salting what was for some of us an ugly raw wound. We would see in his reproachful eyes, suddenly, the sister we had failed, the friend we had hurt—all the opportunities for goodness or glory or marks in heaven we had ever muffed, miserably. In brief, he could expose us to ourselves, and we quite flatly bought him off.

Self-exposure: the word self is the heart of the matter, the essential distinction between the blackmail practiced in the flickering land of prime time and the blackmail we all know. In either case, of course, the key is vulnerability; one who has no secrets can scarcely be threatened with exposure, a premise so obvious that it has provided several years’ worth of scripts for “The Untouchables.” Because few of us have anything much to hide from others, few of us can be reached by the obvious extortionist. Put to it, we can live with our indiscretions. What we can not live with, all too often, are the secrets we keep from ourselves. We may call it irrational, but we know it to be true: it is easier to stare down any scandal than to be forced to recall the unkind word screamed, twenty years ago, at one’s grandmother.

There is, of course, nothing irrational about it. We remain, most of us, vulnerable: one thinks of few who have made the peace that frees them from their own Eumenides. Instead, we play games with ourselves. Afraid that we might be, if the truth were known, neither what we would like to be nor what we appear to be, we blackmail ourselves, count ransom in with the rent, one of the costs of living. If we are less than certain that we are as loving as we pretend to be, we can deceive ourselves with excessive proofs of devotion: consider those cliches in literature and life, the children who resign their own lives to care for ailing parents. (Although the parents are conventionally portrayed as the blackmailers of the piece, think, for a moment, not only of the impeccable self-images those children gain for themselves but of, as well, the telling way in which they are relieved of obligations they could not, perhaps, face, decisions they could not, perhaps, make.)

We can do the favors we do not care about doing until our every moment is made dull and aching with resentment we are afraid to admit; we can commit ourselves to interests which are not our own until we no longer remember, really, who or what we wanted to be. We can ignore our own needs in order to meet the needs of others, and then blackmail back with the knowledge that we have done exactly that; we can give over our lives to impossible people, live with alcoholism, chronic infidelity, emotional criminals of the most blatant variety—and in so doing we can gain the right, and rather inexpensively, to place the blame for our thinness, our pallor, our crippling shortcomings, upon those for whom we have given up so much. All the world need do is look at the record: are we not loving, are we not good.

Unhappily, we do not quite convince ourselves. The harder we try, the more exorbitant the ransom becomes: a certain ineradicable honesty lingers on, afflicting us with total recall for every item on the debt we are piling up against ourselves. As Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “If once you have paid him the Danegeld/You are never rid of the Dane.”

Getting rid of the Dane in each of our hearts is, of course, no easy task. It involves admitting that the favors we do for others are done, quite often, not for others but for ourselves, admitting that no one holds us in thrall but ourselves, that we are our own favorite victims. It involves, really, nothing more or less than admitting to ourselves who and what we are, a feat of such epic proportions that those attempting it sometimes seem in the grip of advanced autonarcosis.

And if you find it easier to live with the Dane, then do not weep to me about the Danegeld.