Topic: The feedback of “vacuum”: A review on Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem
By Gong Lei（江離）
Published in 1968, Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem had long been recognized as one of the exemplary work of New Journalism. Still, despite its linguistic dexterity, questions might arise on Didion’s attitude toward the “rebellious” youth subculture of that time, that if her political inclination and conservative upbringing would prejudice her observation, and also whether her work could truly do justice to the spiritual content as well as legacy of the 60s’ Haight Ashbury community. For example, Maria Bustillos, an editor from the alternative magazine Popula, criticizes its title piece contains a “chilly, just barely veiled disdain” toward the hippies, while David Ulin, a book critic from the Columbia Journalism Review, praised it as an “incisive commentary”.[1] My paper does not see Didion’s piece as an intentional vilification toward the hippies community, yet I would argue that due to the hippies’ suspicion toward her profession as a journalist, the historical circumstance that the Haight was actually in an inconspicuous decline during her visit, and most importantly, her personal choice to stay uninvolved to the hippies’ “psychedelic” experience, she was unable to cross the gap between herself and her investigated “object” and to comprehend the true cultural and empirical impact that the movement had left on an entire generation of participants. Her work is undeniably a valued and alternative account on a community that was about to wind down, yet on the whole she was just an observer of its outcasts, who found herself to be situated in the perplexing backwash of a movement that she was neither capable of explaining or to empathize on. In her essay, doubts were reasonably raised, feelings and reflections were honestly and intelligibly weaved, but the pivotal materials (namely, the direct experience and the time that required) for a thorough cultural assessment were simply not at hand.
I would start by discussing how her profession had hindered her endeavor in studying the Haight phenomenon. In my opinion, there had already been palpable misreadings and value conflicts between both Didion and the hippies since the very outset of their intercourse. For the hippies’ side, their attitude toward journalists had always been ambivalent. On one hand they were enthusiastic about making their community and messages known to the world through the “cost-free” coverage of media,[2] yet on the other hand they were also sickened by the idea that of “selling off” their existence to the Establishment, so eventually they would be just acting as what the public expected instead of being who they wanted to be.[3] Therefore, when journalists like Didion arrived on the scene they were not rejected by the community, but neither did they receive any earnest welcome from the population, while some young hippies even mocked them as “media poisoners”. Then, for Didion’s attitude, I would say she had exhibited both an uneasiness and wariness toward the new-sprung adolescent culture. It is apparent that she did not have much knowledge of the latter’s habits as well as codes. For example, in the start of her essay, she did not even seem to aware that many hippies actually had an aversion toward the term “hippies”, which was more of a media’s forging, and they generally preferred to be called as “freak” or “head”.[4] However, despite her unfamiliarity with their culture, something was clearly lurking her mind, as she remarked at the end of her work that “romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism”. Paradoxically, it is also she who concluded her experience as witnessing “a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum”. So, here comes the question: why would she perceive the hippies, of whom in her words were just a bunch of “unequipped children” (or psychedelic burnouts), as posing such a daunting menace to the society? In my view, there could be two possible explanations for her “intuition”. The first would be more obvious, that is their ignorance would make them easy to be manipulated by a small number of people with ulterior motives. Yet I found myself more inclined to the second explanation, which is that she was in fact unconsciously correlating the hippies to the zealous movement of the New Left. As if we look back at another article she wrote two years earlier, On Morality, she had quoted Lionel Trilling’s saying that “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes... Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion”, and hence underscored her point that “nor do I want you to inflict your conscience, however reasonable, however enlightened, upon me”. Though not explicitly stated, these words were clearly responding to a certain kind of social phenomenon and ideological trend during that time. And if we also did recall some of the well-known propositions of the Port Huron Statement (i.e. “Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct... Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate”), we might then better understand where Didion’s concerns lay, as well as what her blindspot would be. She might not be extremely familiar with the young people’s agenda (if there was really an unified one), but she was definitely discomforted by many of their wishful thinking and presumptuous rhetoric, as well as their oversimplified assertions toward the reality. Certainly, there had to be differences between the hippies and the student protesters, and she did try to “come to terms” with the younger generation by coming to Haight Ashbury and to see the phenomenon by herself. Yet conceivably, she found herself unconvinced of their beliefs; or to say, no one there would really bother to convince anyone about anything, because as what the historian Charles Perry recounts, “insisting on your own opinion was taboo”, and each acidhead was supposed to feel united and "all One" in their “psychedelic” experience.[5] Therefore, lacking a clear-cut idea of what was going on, in Slouching Toward Bethlehem Didion was actually not criticizing the hippies on a “traditional” moral ground, but was rather on the lack of meaning of their behaviors. However, such a judgement might be overlooking an elemental fact, which is that as a journalist, unlike the dropouts, who were in Haight because they were still in search of a “purpose” in life, Didion came with a discernible purpose. And this elemental difference evoked tension between her and the “children”, as we could see, her contrived worldly-wise cynicism was often met with the frivolous and “meaning denial” attitude of the latter. And as both side had to a degree activated their defence mechanism toward each other, it is quite predictable that Didion would not be able to obtain much worthwhile information or sincere reflections from the participants, thus biasing her commentaries on the whole Haight Ashbury movement.
Another easily-ignored aspect for the evaluation of Slouching Toward Bethlehem would be the context of which the work was produced. It was written between the Human Be-in and the Summer of Love, a time by which the Haight’s population was soaring yet its spirit was withering, and the community was gradually sinking into a stage of lethargy. As scholar Anthony Ashbolt points out, “The Summer of Love itself propelled an unsustainable population explosion and... fueled a culture of despair more than one of hope”.[6] And one just need to imagine, that what would happen, when a whole generation of dropouts from all over the nation were all suddenly flooding into a less-than-200-acres district. What Didion described as a “Dickensian picture of life” was certainly foreseeable, and was not an exaggeration. However, it should be noted that the Haight movement was originally stemmed from a spirit of “community experimentalism”. There were miscellaneous people and beliefs existed within the community, and its intellectual composition could range from the bohemian tradition, the Beat literature, the newly-developed psychedelics theories, to the abstract explorations and practices of the Zen and the Indian mysticism.[7] The nuclear fear was no doubt implanted in everyone’s mind, but there were also widespread optimism regarding the development of science and technology, and many people truly believed that they would soon live in a “post-scarcity” age, by when “the robots will do all the work”, and the hippies were going to be “the first wave of the technologically unemployed”.[8] And here came a “challenge of leisure”: what people were gonna do in their newly-acquired excessive spare time? Therefore, the origin of Haight was about experiment, about what “human” can do in the “imminent” future that the hippies envisaged. And they did try to put their ideal into practice: the San Francisco Mime Troupe, of which their members absorbed techniques from Artaud's Theater of Cruelty and Brecht's social didacticism, would carryout “happenings” on the streets for not just embodying the notion of participatory theater and “the collapse of boundaries between art and everyday life”, but also in the hope of “turning hippies into inherently revolutionary life-actors”;[9] The Diggers would provide free stew in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park everyday at 4 pm, and along with their witty remarks toward the public, like “Why do kids panhandle for dimes instead of tomatoes?”[10] However, soon the surge of population after the Human Be-in had made this “community experiment” no longer operable. Figures like the Beat poet Lew Welch called on the hippies to leave the Haight ahead of the Summer of Love, and throughout 1967, the Diggers and their fellows also started to move out to the nearby rural communes.[11] As once again recalls by Perry,
“The free food had become irregular long before summer; the Digger crash pads... were supplemented by truly dangerous places charging 25¢ or 50¢ a night. The dealing economy, which had made the original community possible, suffered its regular seasonal drought during the summer of 1967 and in any case had become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The Job Co-op turned into an underground press distributorship and then collapsed.”[12]
From the above, we can see how the population swell caused by the media spotlight had gradually paralyzed and degenerated the Haight Ashbury, turning it from the original “community experiment” to a mere tourist hotspot, and finally became the somber “reality” that Didion depicted in her work. The even more ironic reality was that, as what the historian Jay Stevens notes, “at the climax of our story, all the major players are offstage” - Ken Kesey was in prison; Owsley Stanley was rumored to be secretly developing the next superpsychedelic; and Timothy Leary had “gone tribal” in Millbrook, New York.[13] Throughout her trip Didion was unable to meet the core figures (e.g. Pranksters) of the Haight, nor did she have any chance to experience its previous vitality. It would be safe to say that, at least subconsciously, she did come to San Francisco with some hope in discovering the intellectual content or aspect of the movement, yet at the end but to realize she simply had no access to them, and what awaited her was just the desolation of the place and the inarticulateness of some outcast “children”. Didion thought what she saw as a living proof of the atomization of the society, but in fact what she was actually experiencing was the atomization of the Haight community. The place might resemble a likeness to that of a vacuum - but first and foremost, it was a relic of an unfulfilled experiment.
Lastly, and perhaps also the most fundamental cognitive gap between Didion and hippies, was their attitudes toward the “psychedelic” experience, namely LSD. Ironically, if one of the strength of New Journalism is to allow the reporter to immerse herself in her “story”, so as to bolster its feeling and ambiance, here Didion’s immersion was only fractional. When Norris, one of her “friend” asked her if she wanted to “take some acid”, she declined the offer. And for the rest of piece (or at least most of the time), we are actually just seeing how she “observed” the others to go on their trips. Certainly, there should be no moral responsibility for a journalist to risk her health so as to empathize on her objects, and if she did really take the acid, she might not be able to conduct such a sober account of events as what we now can see. However, her choice to not even once try the drug did make her almost completely insulated from her respondents’ “experience”. As Stevens analogizes, “Try describing the taste of ice cream to someone who has never had any, and multiply that difficulty by a thousand”.[14] And if there was really an united “ideology” for the whole Haight Ashbury, then it would no doubt be LSD. That was what brought the community together, as well as what gave hopes and directions to its miscellaneous members. In fact, LSD had even acquired a near-holy status among its “believers”. To many people, it was not only a tool to expand your consciousness, but also an answer, and an epiphany to everything. Timothy Leary asserted that it was the “one True Reality Itself”, “The only way out (for mankind’s future) is biochemical”, and the media-dubbed “revolution” was in essence an “evolution” in insiders’ eyes.[15] For the followers, as Perry put it, it was “a gateway to experience itself, to spontaneity, to visions of unsuspected connections between things; an equivalent of the contemporary avant-garde art project that combined ritual, psychodrama, political amelioration and the expounding of all secret things”, and this “deconditioning” agent was “suitable for destroying the roots of war, racism, fascism and all other evils based on narrow-mindedness and repression”.[16] Admittedly, we may now find some of these laudings a bit naive and overstated. Yet there are also something Perry mentions about the efficacy of LSD which is pretty objective and tenable, as he describes, the purpose of psychedelic experience is mainly about suppressing the users’ “faculty of discrimination”, i.e. “the mind's ability to discriminate (the reality) according to levels of importance (in our habitual cognition)”, and this faculty tends to bring us to focus on a single thing rather than others. Consequently, “whatever we are familiar with tends to become mere background... A chair becomes just a chair, something about which we have nothing more to learn. As adults we do not see a chair with the same intensity with which we examined one when we were children”.[17] And the function of LSD is to emancipate its user from it, to make “all details (in his world) equally important and all connections equally valid”, so that “In a sea of perpetually changing impressions, the meaning of anything can differ wildly from moment to moment... A place might disclose its utter uniqueness... (the LSD hallucinations was) not about full-Hedged visions of things that are not there, but extraordinary and uncontrollably shifting interpretations of things that are”.[18] Therefore, one of the major shortcoming of Didion’s piece is that she had failed to realize (or had underestimated) the profound impact that the “psychedelic experience” could have brought on a whole lot of upcoming generation of artists, writers and musicians. Sometimes she did touch on the subject a bit, such as the character Tom once mentioned that he could “write behind STP, but not behind acid”, because STP allowed him to keep his forebrain functioning, yet Didion then simply displayed no desire to further dig into the matter. Rather, she had chosen to mourn the loss of an older, simpler, and more nostalgic aesthetic, as such inclination was reflected pretty plainly when she skimmed through Gerry’s poetry,
“They are a very young girl’s poems, each written out in a neat hand and finished off with a curlicue. Dawns are roseate, skies silver-tinted. When she writes ‘crystal’ in her books, she does not mean Meth.”
Hence, we can see that there was a sizeable cognitive gap between Didion and the hippies due to her refusal to take the acid. And while the latter was exhilarated by LSD as newly-unearthed source of inspiration, Didion found the idea unpalatable in the first place, and was also skeptical about the purported “promise” of the hallucinogenic drug. However, her absolute detachment to the “psychedelic experience” had also rendered her powerless in delineating its downsides (she could not even tell how a “bad trip” would feel). It could be said, then, in the above aspect, she had also exemplified the same inarticulateness as the “children” that she ran into.
There is a well-known line made by the French author Albert Camus in his work The Rebel, that “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”[19] Interestingly, if we contrast the attitude between the hippies and Didion, while the former’s LSD experiment might be a kind of inquiry to “the essence of being”, it was the latter who had exposed the most palpable nostalgia in her writing. As in the piece that she dedicated to John Wayne, she wrote,
“And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he (Wayne) suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”
From her recount, the United States really did seem like a promised land for every dedicated man before the insufferable “atomization” took place. However, if we look closer at the true Zeitgeist of the 50s and the early 60s, we might find that the above depiction was a bit over-idealized. As many people would have remembered, the post-war years was in fact an era of conformity which suppressed individualistic culture. A report from the Time in 1965, observed that “almost everywhere boys dress in madras shirts and chinos, or perhaps green Levis. All trim and neat. The standard for girls is sweaters and skirts dyed to match, or shirtwaists and jumpers plus blazers, Weejun loafers and knee socks or stockings.”[20] The image could not be made more lackluster and stereotypical. Kenneth Kenniston, a social psychologist of that time, also wrote a book called The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society, which discussed the covert doubt and estrangement of people under the harmonious and affluent semblance of the country, “men talk of their growing distance from each other, from their social order, from their work and play, and from the values and heroes which in a perhaps romanticized past seem to have given order, meaning, and coherence to their lives.”, “Alienation, once seen as imposed on men by an unjust economic system, is increasingly chosen by men as their basic stance toward society.”[21] The sterility and insipidness of people’s life was perhaps best epitomized in the Pete Seeger’s 1963 hit song, Little Boxes, written by Malvina Reynolds, and in the early 50s there was also the censorship of McCarthyism. Therefore, the Haight Ashbury movement was in fact a conscious and also conscience-driven reaction to the aesthetic rigidity and spiritual impoverishment of its previous decade. As what Perry emphasizes, rather than being “the sink of know-nothingism and self-indulgence” that many people thought it to be, it was “inhumanly serious-minded and nobly intentioned”, because the hippies were not just “wrestling with the problems of war and technology and human nature on an intellectual level”, but were also “risking their health and sanity and future and life in pursuit of answers”.[22] Admittedly, the cultural contribution of a movement is always hard to reckon by quantitative means, but its most enduring legacy would be that it had broadened people’s horizons and thus facilitating “a greater tolerance for deviant behavior and belief” in the subsequent American society.[23] The “do your thing” motto advocated by the Diggers also inspired many teenagers of that generation to free America from its cultural inertia, while the “psychedelic experience” introduced the artists to a complete new field of aesthetic possibility, as people had started to learn to appreciate things “from as many different angles as possible”.[24] The appraisal of the Haight movement did undulate over times, yet even its critics could not deny that it did help to foster their reflections toward the essence of almost every phenomenon and issue in our today’s world. Certainly, here is not to totally gainsay Didion’s account as well as her insight in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. As mentioned before, there were fundamental value conflicts existed between her and the hippies, as it reflected in her another essay Self-Respect,
“(Those who know Self-respect) have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things... when they do play, they know the odds... To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth... (is to have) the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”
Therefore, it is pretty predictable that she would find her longtime belief (“character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs”) to be utterly at odds with the hippies’ abstract psychedelic “idea” like the “reality had to be consciousness itself, rather than an object of consciousness”, or their everything-in-life-is-transient-so-take-it-easy attitude, as exemplified by the Grateful Dead’s songline “Such a long long time to be gone/and a short time to be there”.[25] In fact, one might actually find some of Didion’s criticisms regarding the hippies’ over-reliance of drugs fair and well-founded, as even the pro-hippies historian Jay Steven had to admit, “While the Best and the Brightest (hippies) were grooving on the cosmic, the second-rate and the venal were appropriating the traditional slots of power”, and the “experiment” was never always successful, as in some far-gone cases, “...something did die, something that was subtler than the organic body, something that the burned-out hippie with his glazed eyes and dated slang exemplified in the extreme”.[26] And even for Didion, who was never a didactic moral preacher, found this situation disheartening and unjustifiable, as in On Morality, even when she had employed a rather nihilistic approach toward the subject, she still affirmed the righteousness of people’s instinct that “we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.” The reason behind is simple: it is about promise, and about the responsibility that thus adhered. Therefore, it was indeed morally tenable for Didion to question, mainly to the leading intellectuals of the Haight movement, that if they really know the price of things? Because as what Albert Camus points out, once you took up arms for the revolution, you had “accepted a burden of guilt which increased in proportion to the degree of liberation (you) proposed to introduce”.[27] Hence this merit of Slouching Toward Bethlehem should definitely be recognized. However, what Didion had severely overlooked in her work (which is also what her prejudice was), is that the state of “being stoned” itself was not self-explanatory for a person’s degradation in his character nor belief, nor did it necessarily entail his assured doom, because people were different, just as the seeming crumbling of certain orders and values in one’s mind did not mean the same would be felt in the others’ either. As Camus also highlights in his work, that “If men cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man”, so even a as extreme “rebellion” as the hippies’ one was is not equal to the rejection of all humanistic values.[28] The Haight-Ashbury experiment did “come crashing to the ground” after the Summer of Love in 1967, yet for the survivors, their stories go on.[29] And the once regarded “vacuum” in the society, now sounds more and more like an echo of affirmation.
11 April, 2021
Footnotes
Works Cited list
Ashbolt, Anthony, 'Go ask Alice': Remembering the Summer of Love forty years on., Australasian Journal of American Studies, Australia New Zealand American Studies Association, December 2007, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 35-47.
Bradford D. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in 1960s America, University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Bustillos, Maria, The Center Held Just Fine - Joan Didion, First Lady of Neoliberalism, Popula, Oct 15, 2018. From (https://popula.com/2018/10/15/the-center-held-just-fine/?fbclid=IwAR2Wa3Pux8OFDvk8jZkqs94LGKtgi-pf6X2Y1vhcLYh1D7Zfne9m9nK8fNE)
Camus, Albert, The Rebel, trans. by Bower, Anthony, 1951. From (http://www.bibotu.com/books/2013b/Camus,%20Albert%20-%20The%20Rebel%20(1951).pdf)
Keniston, Kenneth, The Uncommitted: Alienated youth in American society, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. From (https://ia802801.us.archive.org/18/items/uncommittedalien000773mbp/uncommittedalien000773mbp.pdf)
Perry, Charles, The Haight-Ashbury: A History, Random House, 1984. From (http://cjayarts.com/pages/library/CharlesPerry-haight_ashbury.pdf)
Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Perennial Library, 1988. From (http://cjayarts.com/pages/library/JayStevens-storming_heaven.pdf)
Ulin, David, What Happened Here? Joan Didion’s forty-year-old cautionary tale still fits America, Columbia Journalism Review, Feb 25, 2010. From (https://archives.cjr.org/second_read/what_happened_here.php?fbclid=IwAR2NM31cuRmWhYhfp04m_dx9_kRKM0g1_xyq9z5cFdzz7IOABCpTH-CFyg4)
