"It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with proof that things fall apart."
"Considered as artists, we perhaps have no need to interfere in the affairs of the world," answered Alfred Camus when asked about the role of artists, "But considered as men, yes."
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion's (December 5, 1934 - December 23, 2021) bold interference in the world's affairs. Her subject was the shattered, hollow American dream in its most physical manifestation: the state of California.
"This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion but hard to buy a book...the country of teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers' school."
In his road trip around America John Steinbeck felt alienated in California, especially his hometown Monterrey, which had erected a theatre in his name. "The future always looks good in the Golden Land," Didion reminded us, "Because no one remembers the past." Face to face with his stardom and the death of his memory, Steinbeck was eager to leave.
This is a story about love and death in the golden land and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles... but is in certain ways an alien place: a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.
October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.
It was 1967. With journalism, personal voice, detachment, and immediacy, Didion brought her nymph-like person and the Zeus-like persona into the public consciousness.
She grabs our chin: This has happened, is happening. Pay attention.
"It seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point."
Do we understand it today?
San Francisco graffiti. I took these photos years ago, struck by the physical energy that must have been involved.It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart: I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.
Didion's subject was deleterious change. Not unraveling, as we might say colloquially, but falling apart. "The center will not hold," observed Didion in an elegant concretization of feeling.
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people hid the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
Knowing this much, Didion jumped to California to witness the lives most affected by the gyrating center, "I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around."
Didion's subject is the tension of false hope against the shockingly true reality of absurd changes.
"This amazing and nonsensical RAF outpost was colossal. It was at least a mile long on each of its four sides, and there were paved streets called Bond Street and Regent Street and Tottenham Court Road. There were hospitals and dental surgeries and canteens and recreation halls and I don't know how many thousands of men lived there..."
A century earlier Charles Darwin landed in Tahiti and found an almost replica English village in the middle of the small island including "roses of several kinds, honeysuckle, jasmine, stocks, and whole hedges of sweetbriar."
I sat next to one such wedding party in a Strip restaurant the last time I was in Las Vegas. The marriage had just taken place; the bride still wore her dress, the mother her corsage. A bored waiter poured out a few swallows of pink champagne ("on the house") for everyone but the bride, who was too young to be served. "You'll need something with more kick than that," the bride's father said with heavy jocularity to his new son-in-law; the ritual jokes about the wedding night had a certain Panglossian character since the bride was clearly several months pregnant. Another round of pink champagne this time not on the house, and the bride began to cry. "It was just as nice," she sobbed, "as I hoped and dreamed it would be."
Is there another art form that requires such rapid movement? Dance perhaps. Graffiti is the time-lapse of dance.The term Slouching Towards Bethlehem is from a W. B. Yeats poem, "The Second Coming":
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold...
From W. B. Yeat's poem "The Second Coming"
Didion's writing and subject remind me of another poem, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," written twelve years earlier. A different decade but the same widening gyre, Didion peered over its edge while Ginsberg wrote from its pit.
To claim a space, tag it, and change it is powerful and requires a person who sincerely wants to be heard.In September 2020, orange, ashy light poured into San Francisco windows and opened eyes for days. Fire season. Are we all in the gyre? Is anyone watching from the edge?
San Francisco, August 2020.If you are new to Didion, begin with Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Imagine this fierce young talent who sprung into the world like a fully-armored goddess. End with Blue Nights and A Year of Magical Thinking, her autobiographies of grief.
Breathing is so difficult, said my friend in San Francisco. Said George Floyd. Wrote Joan Didion.
"There is an unadmitted icy panic," wrote James Baldwin, "coiled beneath the scaffolding of these present days, hopes, endeavors.." Didion knew the same.
