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