The Center Cannot Hold
A Review of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem
September 2014
When she was twenty, or twenty-one, Joan Didion moved to New York. She did not know how long she would be there; she did not know what she would do, where she would live, how she would survive. She went in search of a promise, an ideal out of reach for the young Sacramento born writer. Moving through a series of apartments, never staying in one place for too long, six months became eight years. She lived in the illusion that “nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach”. A world in which she believed she had “all the afternoons in the world”. Soon however, this golden dream started to fade and she began to feel emptiness. After eight years in New York, living a picturesque life of never ending wonder—late night parties, walking home at dawn, drinking Bloody Marys and eating gazpacho—she began to feel as if the world, as she understood it, no longer existed. The young Joan Didion, twenty-eight and newly married, saw that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” in her own life. So she and her husband left New York and all that behind. They went to California, the land of Joan’s youth. The young family moved to Los Angeles, on the pretext of staying there for a six month sabbatical but stayed much longer. Joan went to San Francisco, studied the district of Haight-Ashbury, returned to Sacramento and explored the desert lands of the valley. What she found there was a reflection of her own soul. She discovered an entire society that was living under the delusion of having “all the afternoons in the world” and in reality, everything was falling apart.
In her collection of essays titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem Didion goes on a physical and mental exploration of a world falling a part. The entire collection is named for one essay in particular, written during her time in Haight-Ashbury, which she named for the poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats The words of this poem haunted Didion during her years in California, “reverberated in [her] inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there”. In his poem, it seems as if Yeats, writing post World War I, was actually predicting the state of society in the 1960s.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
The subjects and themes of this poem recur throughout Didion’s collection of essays. The falcon circling farther and farther away from his master is seen in the many stories of people losing touch with what gives them purpose, such as is seen in her essays on self-respect and morality. This is then expounded upon as being the reason for anarchy being loosed upon the world with children of Haight-Ashbury and the monsters created in Hollywood. The loss of innocence is knitted into stories of desperate wedding ceremonies in Las Vegas. Joan Baez is a representation of what happens when innocence is lost; a person can become an empty shell, a personality before they ever were a person. The idea of the worst triumphing over the best is seen in the account of Howard Hughes’ riches and the “fantastically elaborate stage setting for an American morality play in which money and happiness are presented as antithetical” that is New Port. These recollections are interspersed with feelings of despair and looking towards the imminent end of all things. This is noticeable in Didion’s description that “the desert, any desert, is indeed the valley of the shadow of the death” and the depressing symptoms of Santa Ana winds. All of these subthemes hint at the greater theme of things falling apart. Didion achieves this through piecing together simple descriptions of inconsequential events in a tone of eloquent ambivalence.
In the introduction, Didion explains briefly that she had to leave New York because she could not work and no longer found meaning in her writing. She does not return to the subject until the end, when she explains the exact circumstances of leaving New York and returning home to California. Of her years in New York, Didion writes that the city was not just a city, that “[New York] was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself”. To her, New York was never completely real, it was some miraculous idea, an ideal dreamed up while living across the country in the deserts of California. When the reality of New York began to impose itself on her dream of the place, things began to fall apart. She says that by the time she was twenty-eight “everything that was said to [her she] seemed to have heard before, and [she] could no longer listen”. While she may have thought this experience was unique to her, Didion found upon leaving the big city that this disintegration happens to all who live in the mirage of an ideal. When romantic ideals overcome reality, life becomes a dangerous game of illusion. All is a mirage.
The thing about living a life in search of a romantic ideal is that one will never be content. The romantic ideal is often equated to “happiness”, but the idea of “happiness” has become distorted. “Happiness” has been put on a pedestal that cannot ever be reached. This is because once one level of happiness is reached, after a brief time of contentedness, there appears to be a higher level. As Tolstoy says of Miss Karenina, “If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.” It is in the vain search for this greater something that society gets stuck in a degrading cycle of discontent. Didion’s first essay in this collection, titled “Dreamers of the Golden Dream”, is the story of Lucille Miller. This story is set in the San Bernardino Valley, an ominous land settled by and subsequently abandoned by the Mormons. It is 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”. An hour north of Los Angeles, this is the California often over looked. It is filled with people who came there from somewhere else, in search of something better; “Here is where they are trying to find a new lifestyle, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers”. Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller became the subject of the newspapers in the desperate search for a new lifestyle. The daughter of two Seventh-day Adventist schoolteachers, Lucille attended Walla Walla College and in 1949 married Gordon “Cork” Miller. It was not long before the “radiant” bride turned into a discontented housewife. Perhaps what drove Lucille Miller to drug her husband, drive him to the edge of an empty road, cover him with gasoline, and light the car on fire can be put down to the simple explanation of unhappiness. From the very beginning, as her father would say, “she wanted to see the world” and what she had around her was not enough of it.
Shortly after their marriage Cork Miller bought a dental practice in the desert valley and the family settled in a “modest house on the kind of street where there are always tricycles and revolving credit and dreams about bigger houses, better streets”. Despite the fact that seven years later they had achieved that bigger house on the better street, the Miller family was discontent. Cork suffered from stomach ulcers, depression, and the family was in debt, but that is not the justification for Lucille’s unhappiness. That is not what led her to murder her husband. The specifics as to why exactly Lucille Miller murdered her husband are still not entirely clear. To all intense purposes, it appeared as if the couple was attempting to fix their crumbling marriage. However, she was still unhappy and that unhappiness led her to do something extreme. The truth is that when there is always a pervading idea that there is something bigger and better out there, one becomes disillusioned by the mirage of the ideal. Lucille believed there was something better out there and became the victim of her own ideals.
Her “something better” was for a time the husband of her close, departed, friend Elaine Hayton. During the trial it came out that there were other men besides Arthwell Hayton and that Hayton had never actually loved Lucille, but that was inconsequential. Lucille Miller’s story is not a new one. Like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, Lucille Miller went searching for a dream she thought she deserved, only to discover that it would forever be out of reach. As Flaubert said, “we must not touch our idols, the gilt sticks to our fingers”. This significance of the affair, or affairs, is that Lucille’s biggest sin was that she was “a woman who wanted too much”. She wanted to live a life of pervading golden afternoons, she wanted always to have something bigger and better, and somewhere in the search for that romantic ideal she lost reality. She touched her idol, but it was not what she thought it was, and it began to crumble. Once reality is lost, all things fall a part. In the end she had to pay the cost, she was judged by the very people she was trying to rise above, “housewives, a machinist, a truck driver, a grocery-store manager, a filing clerk”.
From the San Bernardino valley Joan Didion traveled north to San Francisco. At the end of Golden Gate Park lays the district of Haight-Ashbury. Today there are still the remnants of what this colorful street once was: the smoke shops, stores filled with tie-dye and hippie paraphernalia, street performers, the occasional protesters, and always the children who once ran away and never went home. Here was the birthplace of the beat movement, the realm of Jack Kerouac and the stomping grounds of the hippies. While today it is a tourist center with a few interesting shops and vegan cafes, homage to the days of the past, when Joan Didion roamed these streets in 1967 it was the heart of the hippie movement. In this land pervades a different kind of dream. It is not the physical bigger and better dreams of Lucille Miller. It is an ideal above the physical body, something of transcendence. In her song “Woodstock” Joni Mitchell captured this ideal with the line “I am going to try an’ get my soul free”.
How does one free the soul? In San Francisco in the 1960s, and for many in 2015 as well, the answer was most commonly through the use of drugs. Marijuana, acid, LSD, these were all vehicles in which to transcend the body in search of the ideal. The youth of the 1960s were not in search of some physical “something better”, but rather an abstract “something better”. Perhaps this dream was happiness, perhaps it was peace. Joan Baez, singer-song writer and symbol of this generation, embodied this “something better” in her persona. In the way that she tried to “hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone’s adolescence”. The ideal of the beatnick, hippie generation was one of eternal innocence, thought to be enlightenment. However, in the attempt to reach this eternal adolescence, innocence was effectively drowned.
Didion’s style in this particular essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, reflects the discontinuity of life under the influence of drugs and ambiguity. The fragmentation of the form shows the fragmentation of society. She switches between different encounters with various characters; an elusive person named Deadeye who used to be an Angel, Don and Max who live free of “Freudian hang-ups”, an Officer named Gerrans who is unwilling to talk. In every situation these acquaintances seem to want something, but they do not articulate what. Didion describes them as a generation of “children waiting to be given the words”. They appear to be after some ultimate “beauty”, for ultimate peace and understanding. So they trip on acid, they smoke marijuana, they get down with “smack”, but in the end all it does is leave them wanting more. To Didion this was “the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum”. It was the epitome of the center not holding, of atomization. The atom is at the core of all things. It is made of a nucleus, of equal parts neutrons and protons, which is surrounded by a valence of electrons. The energy of the electrons is what holds the atom together and allows the atom to connect with other atoms, thus creating something. What Didion saw in the “atomization” of society was that the valence electrons were disappearing. For something to be atomized, it is reduced to separate atoms, thus disconnecting it from its surroundings. It becomes separated from that which makes it whole, essentially separating it from that which was reality.
In the society in which Didion had emerged herself, she saw that the center was not holding. People were losing touch with the things that connected them to others and to reality. By focusing so intently on the allusive ideal of eternal innocence or of some internal, transcendental peace, these people lost touch with the rest of the world and with humanity. They grew up “cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforces the society’s values”. Didion ends this essay with two disquieting images. One of five-year-old Susan on acid and the other of three-year-old Michael chewing on an electric cord while the adults dig in the floor boards for dropped drugs. They may have been searching for meaning, but in the words of another Joni Mitchell song, “it’s life’s illusions I recall/ I really don’t know life at all”.
This atomization pervades in Didion’s writing as to the reason for the decay in society on the whole. In her essay “On Self-Respect” she explores the subject of what the center is and how it comes to be disconnected. Self-respect begins with character. Character, according to Didion, is the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life. From this character springs forth self-respect. People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. To have the courage of one’s mistakes is to be in touch with reality. Once one can accept responsibility of oneself, the center is strong, and then comes “the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent”. On the other hand, in lacking self-respect, one becomes the victim of others projections.
“We are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions to us…At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.”
Without self-respect, we lose a sense of “self” and instead become a reflection of how others would see us. We then live trying to meet and exceed expectations that seem constantly out of reach. For as soon as one expectation is met, we are met with another and another. These expectations are synonymous to romantic ideals, the promise of a dream, the mirage of endless afternoons. These are the romantic ideals that plagued Lucille Miller, the children of Haight-Ashbury, the young brides of Vegas, the millionaires in New Port, the young Joan Didion herself living in New York. When our own centers are not holding, we fall prey to the romantic allure of the ideal, which ultimately leads to defeat. Everyone is in search of the image that they represent, in search of a promise. When that image is not grounded, when self-respect is not present, then that promise will always be evasive.
This all comes back around to Joan Didion when she was twenty or twenty-one, in New York believing that she had all the afternoons in the world. The belief in those golden afternoons of spending time with friends and not worrying about the next day was what made her center hold. She was in search of a promise she thought was New York; in the end, that promise was just a mirage. When the mirage began to fade, her center could no longer hold. Just like Lucille Miller’s expectations for seeing the world were all a mirage, and Joan Baez’s persona and the mansions of New Port. The decay of these things came because they grew from unrealistic expectations of a promise. A promise that had no real ground. When people live in a hazy world of romantic ideals, unformed ideologies, of unlimited afternoons, reality slips away. They do not have self-respect, they do not have character, and things are bound to fall apart. In order to keep things together, be it the self or society, the center must be held to reality.
In her collection of essays titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem Didion goes on a physical and mental exploration of a world falling a part. The entire collection is named for one essay in particular, written during her time in Haight-Ashbury, which she named for the poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats The words of this poem haunted Didion during her years in California, “reverberated in [her] inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there”. In his poem, it seems as if Yeats, writing post World War I, was actually predicting the state of society in the 1960s.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
The subjects and themes of this poem recur throughout Didion’s collection of essays. The falcon circling farther and farther away from his master is seen in the many stories of people losing touch with what gives them purpose, such as is seen in her essays on self-respect and morality. This is then expounded upon as being the reason for anarchy being loosed upon the world with children of Haight-Ashbury and the monsters created in Hollywood. The loss of innocence is knitted into stories of desperate wedding ceremonies in Las Vegas. Joan Baez is a representation of what happens when innocence is lost; a person can become an empty shell, a personality before they ever were a person. The idea of the worst triumphing over the best is seen in the account of Howard Hughes’ riches and the “fantastically elaborate stage setting for an American morality play in which money and happiness are presented as antithetical” that is New Port. These recollections are interspersed with feelings of despair and looking towards the imminent end of all things. This is noticeable in Didion’s description that “the desert, any desert, is indeed the valley of the shadow of the death” and the depressing symptoms of Santa Ana winds. All of these subthemes hint at the greater theme of things falling apart. Didion achieves this through piecing together simple descriptions of inconsequential events in a tone of eloquent ambivalence.
In the introduction, Didion explains briefly that she had to leave New York because she could not work and no longer found meaning in her writing. She does not return to the subject until the end, when she explains the exact circumstances of leaving New York and returning home to California. Of her years in New York, Didion writes that the city was not just a city, that “[New York] was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself”. To her, New York was never completely real, it was some miraculous idea, an ideal dreamed up while living across the country in the deserts of California. When the reality of New York began to impose itself on her dream of the place, things began to fall apart. She says that by the time she was twenty-eight “everything that was said to [her she] seemed to have heard before, and [she] could no longer listen”. While she may have thought this experience was unique to her, Didion found upon leaving the big city that this disintegration happens to all who live in the mirage of an ideal. When romantic ideals overcome reality, life becomes a dangerous game of illusion. All is a mirage.
The thing about living a life in search of a romantic ideal is that one will never be content. The romantic ideal is often equated to “happiness”, but the idea of “happiness” has become distorted. “Happiness” has been put on a pedestal that cannot ever be reached. This is because once one level of happiness is reached, after a brief time of contentedness, there appears to be a higher level. As Tolstoy says of Miss Karenina, “If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.” It is in the vain search for this greater something that society gets stuck in a degrading cycle of discontent. Didion’s first essay in this collection, titled “Dreamers of the Golden Dream”, is the story of Lucille Miller. This story is set in the San Bernardino Valley, an ominous land settled by and subsequently abandoned by the Mormons. It is 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”. An hour north of Los Angeles, this is the California often over looked. It is filled with people who came there from somewhere else, in search of something better; “Here is where they are trying to find a new lifestyle, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers”. Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller became the subject of the newspapers in the desperate search for a new lifestyle. The daughter of two Seventh-day Adventist schoolteachers, Lucille attended Walla Walla College and in 1949 married Gordon “Cork” Miller. It was not long before the “radiant” bride turned into a discontented housewife. Perhaps what drove Lucille Miller to drug her husband, drive him to the edge of an empty road, cover him with gasoline, and light the car on fire can be put down to the simple explanation of unhappiness. From the very beginning, as her father would say, “she wanted to see the world” and what she had around her was not enough of it.
Shortly after their marriage Cork Miller bought a dental practice in the desert valley and the family settled in a “modest house on the kind of street where there are always tricycles and revolving credit and dreams about bigger houses, better streets”. Despite the fact that seven years later they had achieved that bigger house on the better street, the Miller family was discontent. Cork suffered from stomach ulcers, depression, and the family was in debt, but that is not the justification for Lucille’s unhappiness. That is not what led her to murder her husband. The specifics as to why exactly Lucille Miller murdered her husband are still not entirely clear. To all intense purposes, it appeared as if the couple was attempting to fix their crumbling marriage. However, she was still unhappy and that unhappiness led her to do something extreme. The truth is that when there is always a pervading idea that there is something bigger and better out there, one becomes disillusioned by the mirage of the ideal. Lucille believed there was something better out there and became the victim of her own ideals.
Her “something better” was for a time the husband of her close, departed, friend Elaine Hayton. During the trial it came out that there were other men besides Arthwell Hayton and that Hayton had never actually loved Lucille, but that was inconsequential. Lucille Miller’s story is not a new one. Like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, Lucille Miller went searching for a dream she thought she deserved, only to discover that it would forever be out of reach. As Flaubert said, “we must not touch our idols, the gilt sticks to our fingers”. This significance of the affair, or affairs, is that Lucille’s biggest sin was that she was “a woman who wanted too much”. She wanted to live a life of pervading golden afternoons, she wanted always to have something bigger and better, and somewhere in the search for that romantic ideal she lost reality. She touched her idol, but it was not what she thought it was, and it began to crumble. Once reality is lost, all things fall a part. In the end she had to pay the cost, she was judged by the very people she was trying to rise above, “housewives, a machinist, a truck driver, a grocery-store manager, a filing clerk”.
From the San Bernardino valley Joan Didion traveled north to San Francisco. At the end of Golden Gate Park lays the district of Haight-Ashbury. Today there are still the remnants of what this colorful street once was: the smoke shops, stores filled with tie-dye and hippie paraphernalia, street performers, the occasional protesters, and always the children who once ran away and never went home. Here was the birthplace of the beat movement, the realm of Jack Kerouac and the stomping grounds of the hippies. While today it is a tourist center with a few interesting shops and vegan cafes, homage to the days of the past, when Joan Didion roamed these streets in 1967 it was the heart of the hippie movement. In this land pervades a different kind of dream. It is not the physical bigger and better dreams of Lucille Miller. It is an ideal above the physical body, something of transcendence. In her song “Woodstock” Joni Mitchell captured this ideal with the line “I am going to try an’ get my soul free”.
How does one free the soul? In San Francisco in the 1960s, and for many in 2015 as well, the answer was most commonly through the use of drugs. Marijuana, acid, LSD, these were all vehicles in which to transcend the body in search of the ideal. The youth of the 1960s were not in search of some physical “something better”, but rather an abstract “something better”. Perhaps this dream was happiness, perhaps it was peace. Joan Baez, singer-song writer and symbol of this generation, embodied this “something better” in her persona. In the way that she tried to “hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone’s adolescence”. The ideal of the beatnick, hippie generation was one of eternal innocence, thought to be enlightenment. However, in the attempt to reach this eternal adolescence, innocence was effectively drowned.
Didion’s style in this particular essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, reflects the discontinuity of life under the influence of drugs and ambiguity. The fragmentation of the form shows the fragmentation of society. She switches between different encounters with various characters; an elusive person named Deadeye who used to be an Angel, Don and Max who live free of “Freudian hang-ups”, an Officer named Gerrans who is unwilling to talk. In every situation these acquaintances seem to want something, but they do not articulate what. Didion describes them as a generation of “children waiting to be given the words”. They appear to be after some ultimate “beauty”, for ultimate peace and understanding. So they trip on acid, they smoke marijuana, they get down with “smack”, but in the end all it does is leave them wanting more. To Didion this was “the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum”. It was the epitome of the center not holding, of atomization. The atom is at the core of all things. It is made of a nucleus, of equal parts neutrons and protons, which is surrounded by a valence of electrons. The energy of the electrons is what holds the atom together and allows the atom to connect with other atoms, thus creating something. What Didion saw in the “atomization” of society was that the valence electrons were disappearing. For something to be atomized, it is reduced to separate atoms, thus disconnecting it from its surroundings. It becomes separated from that which makes it whole, essentially separating it from that which was reality.
In the society in which Didion had emerged herself, she saw that the center was not holding. People were losing touch with the things that connected them to others and to reality. By focusing so intently on the allusive ideal of eternal innocence or of some internal, transcendental peace, these people lost touch with the rest of the world and with humanity. They grew up “cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforces the society’s values”. Didion ends this essay with two disquieting images. One of five-year-old Susan on acid and the other of three-year-old Michael chewing on an electric cord while the adults dig in the floor boards for dropped drugs. They may have been searching for meaning, but in the words of another Joni Mitchell song, “it’s life’s illusions I recall/ I really don’t know life at all”.
This atomization pervades in Didion’s writing as to the reason for the decay in society on the whole. In her essay “On Self-Respect” she explores the subject of what the center is and how it comes to be disconnected. Self-respect begins with character. Character, according to Didion, is the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life. From this character springs forth self-respect. People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. To have the courage of one’s mistakes is to be in touch with reality. Once one can accept responsibility of oneself, the center is strong, and then comes “the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent”. On the other hand, in lacking self-respect, one becomes the victim of others projections.
“We are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions to us…At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.”
Without self-respect, we lose a sense of “self” and instead become a reflection of how others would see us. We then live trying to meet and exceed expectations that seem constantly out of reach. For as soon as one expectation is met, we are met with another and another. These expectations are synonymous to romantic ideals, the promise of a dream, the mirage of endless afternoons. These are the romantic ideals that plagued Lucille Miller, the children of Haight-Ashbury, the young brides of Vegas, the millionaires in New Port, the young Joan Didion herself living in New York. When our own centers are not holding, we fall prey to the romantic allure of the ideal, which ultimately leads to defeat. Everyone is in search of the image that they represent, in search of a promise. When that image is not grounded, when self-respect is not present, then that promise will always be evasive.
This all comes back around to Joan Didion when she was twenty or twenty-one, in New York believing that she had all the afternoons in the world. The belief in those golden afternoons of spending time with friends and not worrying about the next day was what made her center hold. She was in search of a promise she thought was New York; in the end, that promise was just a mirage. When the mirage began to fade, her center could no longer hold. Just like Lucille Miller’s expectations for seeing the world were all a mirage, and Joan Baez’s persona and the mansions of New Port. The decay of these things came because they grew from unrealistic expectations of a promise. A promise that had no real ground. When people live in a hazy world of romantic ideals, unformed ideologies, of unlimited afternoons, reality slips away. They do not have self-respect, they do not have character, and things are bound to fall apart. In order to keep things together, be it the self or society, the center must be held to reality.