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by Ruth Zemel

In "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Joan Didion captures the contradictions and moods of California in the 60s. She writes about John Wayne, Allen Ginsburg, and Dr. Strangelove, about LSD, the International Nonviolent Army, and, of course, about Haight Street, San Francisco, where a subculture of hippies was defining a new way to live. Didion's essays explore the dualities of the West Coast as well as those of her own mind. Contrasting the beauty of California Dreaming with the tragedy of misplaced ambition, they reveal a conflicted mentality-compassionate yet critical, empathetic yet disapproving. Under the surface, her examination of dreams and innocence exposes a judgment on subjectivity and illusion, a pervasive distrust of truth. And perhaps even more intriguing than the verdict itself are its underlying implications on morality. For behind Didion's characters and cities and their stories lies an instruction of how to live in an ambiguous world, how to come to terms with the "personal."

In "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," a dead-end sign marks the ambitious Lucille Miller's home. The streets are lined with "sunken" lemon groves, their false beauty representative of Didion's characters: "too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare" (5). Lucille strives for advancement and love, yet the "retaining wall" of her unyielding society keeps her from her dream (5). California in the 60s was where the "social hemorrhaging was showing up," Didion explains in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" (85). Hers was a nation where "people were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing" and "those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves" (85). The world was harsh, jealous, and cruel. And through its whirlwind of oppressive winds and nightmare and abandonment, Lucille fights for a way out.

Yet she is not a hero, and here lies the key to Didion's complexity. For while she appreciates Lucille's ambition, Didion finds tragedy in her misdirection and disillusionment. Negative imagery communicates this conservative disapproval for those chasing something from "the movies and the newspapers," those seeking to "do it right" in the wrong way (4). "The dream," Didion writes about San Bernardino, "was teaching the dreamers how to live" (17). She cites Vegas weddings as another example of a culture shaping expectations in "Marrying Absurd." "People expect more when they get married," a Vegas reverend informs her (80). His statement creates a distasteful irony, however, because he is referring to his inability to consolidate 3-minute ceremonies into a nightly mass wedding. Didion observes a pregnant 18-year-old celebrating one such marriage in a Strip restaurant. While her family drinks cheap pink champagne, the girl suddenly bursts into tears. In a brilliant move, Didion then explains that they were tears of overwhelming happiness, for "it was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be!" (82). Lucille's "illusion veil" victimizes this child bride, too, masking California's dismal opportunities for women and condemning its wives to a "conventional" life of misery (28, 17).

While Lucille and the Vegas brides learn "how to live" from society, many of Didion's characters combat California's bleakness with isolation. In "Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)," Didion finds a man who battles the "nothingness" of life with a routine and a cause (66). His unwavering idealism and theoretical certainty allow him to find meaning in a strict regimen of trivialities, creating for himself "an immutably ordered world in which things matter" (63). Didion sympathizes with Laski, admitting that she herself knows "something about dread" and appreciates "the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void" (63). Similarly, she yearns for the innocence of folk legend Joan Baez in "Where the Kissing Never Stops." The pull of Baez' Institute for the Study of Nonviolence lies in its Peter Pan enchantment, its warmth and innocence. "It was like Christmas, but it wasn't," explains an adoring student (50). The security beckons Didion, too: "Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator," she recounts wistfully, "and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm" (60).

Yet once more condemnation lurks beyond Didion's empathy. Her sarcastic portrayal of Laski's title (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party U.S.A.) as well as his guarded severity and foolish certainty reveals that she finds his trivialities childish. In a "ceremony as formal as a gathering of the Morgan partners," for example, Laski interrogates a comrade on their daily income. "Nine dollars and ninety-one cents," the member reports. "What was the total number of papers sold?' 'Seventy-five.' 'And the average per hour?' 'Nineteen.' 'The average contribution?' 'Thirteen and a half cents'" (65). The insignificant nature of the finances partnered with Laski's paranoid distrust in disclosing the information creates a pitiable irony. And while comforting potato salad entices us to enter Baez' world, Didion sees past her charm to a child refusing to grow up, to a child of "ersatz" and "shallow" innocence (57). For Didion herself has grown up. She once found comfort in her childhood, noting a recipe in "On Keeping a Notebook" that made her feel warm and safe. Yet the sauerkraut no longer puts her at ease, for behind her longings lingers that same criticism, the acknowledgment that although the world of potato salad and love and naiveté is appealing, it differs little from Comrade Laski's fantasy land.

At the heart of this criticism, in fact, is a statement about truth. For "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" reveals far more than the conclusion that Lucille's dreams are misdirected. Both the essay's strategic organization and its explicit inconclusiveness indicate that Didion writes more about our perception of Lucille than of her story itself. She initially reports Lucille's husband's car accident as a fact and creates sympathy for the grieving widow-leading us to believe we know the truth. Yet we have heard only Lucille's version of the truth. "A tape recording of the service was made for the widow," Didion cunningly informs us next, "who was being held without bail in the San Bernardino Country Jail on a charge of first-degree murder" (7). In one sentence, Didion transforms Lucille from a pitiful widow to a potential murderess. As new perspectives emerge-opinions of Lucille's father and baby-sitter, the police and jury, her lover and his fiancée and the rest of society-in concert with probing details about Lucille's life, Didion proves that we are easily manipulated. She determines that subjectivity clouds our judgment, that narrow-mindedness inevitably buries the truth.

This instinctual subjectivity is motivated in part by a natural desire for beauty, a need to extract harmony and order and meaning from a dreary reality. To Baez' students, babies and flowers and Allen Ginsburg poems are "beautiful" (49). Unworldly brides find "niceness" in Las Vegas, and the Haight Street drug culture gets "a real trip" from a blue detergent blob cutting through grease (82,116). "Everything," is beautiful, a hippie explains (116). Yet Didion disagrees. She confronts the falsity of beauty herself when a woman she once found flawless resurfaces as "old and irrevocably tired" (140). "For a while after that I did not like to look in the mirror, and my eyes would skim the newspapers and pick out only the deaths," she writes of her revelation that the world was cruel and disappointing. "I noticed for the first time that all the strangers I had seen for years were looking older than they once had been" (141). To her, poems where "dawns are roseate" and "skies silver-tinted" attest only to naiveté and simplicity (110). Reality falls short of these ideals, for in San Bernardino, deceitful lemons lurk behind glossy appearances.

Yet Didion recognizes the permeation of subjectivity in her own life, realizing that she is not exempt from the lure of illusion. Confronting this instinct in "On Keeping a Notebook," she discusses her concentration on impressions and emotions, rather than on the factual details of her life. When questioned by her family about accuracy, she replies simply, "that's how it felt to me" (137). This supports her earlier ideas about subjectivity, indicating that circumstance influences our realities, that narrow perspectives corrupt our vision. Yet it seems to imply that she, albeit knowingly, makes the same mistake as her characters-that she allows feelings to artificially color her recollections, that she values their comforts over reality. When Didion remembers snow where there was none, she finds justification in the importance of emotions. Yet when Comrade Laski discovers "theory," he is disillusioned, when Joan Baez treasures "feelings," she is childish. This apparent contradiction finds resolution, however, when Didion integrates her ideas on truth with those of morality and social purpose.

To Didion, conventional "morality" merely justifies social convenience and masks selfish motives. She denounces "the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come" and scorns our inclination to allow the "implacable 'I'" to dictate our actions (204). "We have no way of knowing what is "right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil," she declares in "On Morality," questioning everything in the Socratic tradition (162). In the Apology, Socrates avoids letting fear of the unknown force him into conclusions about death. Similarly, Didion declares that she will not invent truths to combat her cynicism, that she will not qualify her theory and fall back into "the quite contradictory position that the ethic of conscience is dangerous when it is 'wrong' and admirable when it is 'right'" (162). Somehow, she must come to terms with her own subjectivity and reconcile it with the honesty she demands from everyone else. Somehow, she must justify the rationality that allows: "that is how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow" (134).

In the character of Socrates, Plato writes that true wisdom lies in the realization that we know nothing. "Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good," says Socrates about an esteemed teacher, "I am better off than he is-for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know" (13). Didion places importance not on reaching some elusive "truth," but on this sort of Socratic wisdom, on consciousness and honesty and integrity. In her notebook, she subjugates accuracy for emotion. Yet she realizes her subjectivity, and that is the distinction she draws between herself and her erring characters. Her purpose "has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking" (133). "It is all right," she reasons, "so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why" (163). While she recognizes her own humanness, Didion defies these comfortable illusions; she rejects the various "opiates" that would enable her to overcome her cynical view of the world. Her wisdom, her understanding of truth, lies in the refusal to create meaning where none exists.

Yet this resolution leaves Didion grasping for purpose and direction. "The exhilaration of social action," she explains in "The White Album", is merely "one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for awhile that dread of the meaningless that is man's fate" (205). She wishes, however, that social action could "matter" in her own life, and if she "could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest," she explains in "The Morning After the Sixties," she "would go to that barricade" (203). For even Socrates finds meaning in a purpose, believing himself to be "a sort of gadfly, given to the State by the God" (21). Without the illusions of ambition or ideology or beauty, Didion lacks direction. A 23-year old character from Haight Street gives voice to this concern:

Steven has the idea that California is the beginning of an end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know its not going to." I ask what it is that is supposed to happen. "I don't know," he says. "Something. Anything." (98)

The difference between Steven and Didion herself lies in his last thought-his reliance on "Something. Anything." Didion places no such importance on external conditions. Unlike Steven, she realizes that nothing is coming, realizes that his disappointment is inevitable.

For happiness cannot be found through delusion, she warns us. In "On Self-Respect," she tells us that we must all ultimately face the fact that reality does not live up to our dreams. "However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether we respect ourselves" (144). According to Didion, salvation is not found outside oneself-and here we finally see the grave mistake of Lucille Miller, Michael Laski, Joan Baez, and the Haight Street hippies. However appealing the lure, both Socrates and Didion caution, self-deception results only in falsity. "He only gives you the appearance of happiness," Socrates explains of the arrogant teacher, "and I give you the reality" (27). One day, Didion echoes, "one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one home" (147). In escaping the personal, we can only lose ourselves.

And it is in this focus, in the "personal" and "how it felt to me," that Didion reveals her secret fascination. Using Alcatraz as a metaphor for her lifestyle, Didion depicts a hell where prisoner Doc Barker willingly chooses death over life in his cell. She writes of a place with "big lights playing over the windows all night long" and "guards patrolling the gun galleries" and "silverware clattering into a bag as it was checked in after meals" (208). "Warning! Keep off! U.S. Property," a sign threatens in the entranceway to the former prison (208). Yet although her world of cynicism and harshness may seem uninviting, Didion concludes in "Rock of Ages" and "On Self-Respect" that it also promises substance and clarity. To Didion, the deserted island is "a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke" (208). It is a place where people "accept responsibility" for their lives, where they are willing to acknowledge the risks of reality, where illusions crumble to self-respect and character (145). Didion seeks refuge from dishonesty, and she finds it in the uninterrupted purity of Alcatraz.

For above all, she cannot identify with the social current of the 60s. Didion grew up in an earlier, more reserved period-a generation "distrustful of political highs" and convinced that man's innate imperfection, rather than an outside force, stood in the way of the ideal (204). As the atom bomb appeared and Communist hysteria spread, the external was disappointing. Without the exhilaration of free love and peace movements and idealistic social change, the only meaning students could find for their lives was in the "personal." The doctrines and political declarations of the 60s consequently strike her as childish and utopian, the product of a misdirected optimism. And here lies the explanation for both her criticism and her compassion, for her condemnation of subjectivity and her understanding of its lure, and for her resulting conviction that the only realistic happiness for man lies in solitude, in a deserted Alcatraz prison. At least there, she writes, we can understand ourselves.

Works Cited

Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Noonday Press, 1968.

Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Pocket Books, 1957.Plato. The Apology of Socrates. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Santa Barbara: Bandanna Books, 1993.

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