Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2006 | Page 62

58 Popular Culture Review night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true; I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.20 Utilizing the novelist’s eye for detail, nuance, and irony, Didion's essays examine a fundamental lack of connectedness in the Sixties experience. Early in the twentieth century, Americans achieved a sense of connectedness by existing in a “community in place'’21 where emotional and spiritual sustenance was provided by family members, neighbors, church members, and co workers—all of whom lived in the same community from birth to death. With support systems that were fixed in place and could continually be called upon, a greater sense of certainty and order prevailed. However, as of the 1960s, Americans have lacked a sense of connectedness by existing in a “community in space,"22 where the major systems of support (in terms of gaining information, advice, knowledge, and wisdom) are the mass media, rather than a grandfather, pastor, or long-time neighbor. The America Didion chronicles is a nomadic one—both physically and spiritually—where lives are continually being uprooted either in the incessant search for identity, or as a means of escaping disappointment or failure when the American Dream sours. The concept of atomization in the Sixties—the notion that the center of society is not holding—is fleshed out in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The essay chronicles the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco in 1967. For Didion, San Francisco is where the “social hemorrhaging" was showing up. Only by confronting disorder face-to-face could she come to terms with the disorder of her own life—a personal disorder that at the time left her “paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed."23 Meanwhile, Didion describes the societal disorder of 1967 in almost poetic fashion: 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 fourletter words they scrawled. It was country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to tom city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now leam the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those