Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

by Joan Didion

The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.

I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.

But since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.

pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

“We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.

A tape recording of the service was made for the widow, who was being held without bail in the San Bernardino County Jail on a charge of first-degree murder.

Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one.

They were paying the familiar price for it. And they had reached the familiar season of divorce.

It might have been anyone’s bad summer, anyone’s siege of heat and nerves and migraine and money worries, but this one began particularly early and particularly badly.

It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.

the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.

It was all, moreover, in the name of “love”; everyone involved placed a magical faith in the efficacy of the very word.

“Oh, I’ve always been basically quite an honest person. ... I mean I can put a hat in the cupboard and say it cost ten dollars less, but basically I’ve always kind of just lived my life the way I wanted to, and if you don’t like it you can take off.”

“With her it was love. But with some I guess it’s just passion.”

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.

Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

Where did he come from, before the tall grass? Even his history seemed right, for it was no history at all, nothing to intrude upon the dream.

Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship’s a little truer That’s where the West begins.

“I licked the Big C,” John Wayne announced, as John Wayne would, reducing those outlaw cells to the level of any other outlaws, but even so we all sensed that this would be the one unpredictable confrontation, the one shoot-out Wayne could lose.

They communicated by sharing old jokes; they sealed their camaraderie by making gentle, old-fashioned fun of wives, those civilizers, those tamers.

They treated the oldest among them respectfully; they treated the youngest fondly.

Both Dr. and Mrs. Petkuss, the latter near tears, said that they were particularly offended by Miss Baez’s presence on her property during weekends. It seemed that she did not always stay inside. She sat out under trees, and walked around the property.

She could reach an audience in a way that neither the purists nor the more commercial folksingers seemed to be able to do.

“The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people,” she said. “The hardest is with one.”

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.

The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who “feels” things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.

They worry a great deal about “responding to one another with beauty and tenderness,” and their response to one another is in fact so tender that an afternoon at the school tends to drift perilously into the never-never.

Here they quote her ideas on peace . . . you know those . . . here she says ‘every time I go to Hollywood I want to throw up’. . . let’s not get into that . . .

To encourage Joan Baez to be “political” is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue “feeling” things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, “all vague.”

“Frankly, I’m down on Communism,” is her latest word on that subject.

She has made appearances for Democratic administrations, and is frequently quoted as saying: “There’s never been a good Republican folksinger”; it is scarcely the diction of the new radicalism.

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing. Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But it’s really God—playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven—shattering stained glass—playing a gigantic organ—thundering on the keys—perfect harmony—perfect joy.

This openness, this vulnerability, is of course precisely the reason why she is so able to “come through” to all the young and lonely and inarticulate, to all those who suspect that no one else in the world understands about beauty and hurt and love and brotherhood.

“Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Come on, Baez, you’re just like everybody else,’ but then I’m not happy with that either.”

So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences.

“Well, I realized, of course, that as long as I was in this flesh and this blood I couldn’t be perfectly nonviolent.”

“Would the V.D.C. call Ghandi bourgeois?”

With his striking appearance and his relentlessly ideological diction, he looks and talks precisely like the popular image of a professional revolutionary, which in fact he is.

he is rigidly committed to an immutable complex of doctrine, including the notions that the traditional American Communist Party is a “revisionist bourgeois clique,” that the Progressive Labor Party, the Trotskyites, and “the revisionist clique headed by Gus Hall” prove themselves opportunistic bourgeois lackeys by making their peace appeal not to the “workers” but to the liberal imperialists; and that H. Rap Brown is the tool, if not the conscious agent, of the ruling imperialist class.

Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary.

His place in the geography of the American Left is, in short, an almost impossibly lonely and quixotic one, unpopular, un-pragmatic.

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

I make a point of driving past it every now and then, I suppose in the same spirit that Arthurian scholars visit the Cornish coast.

The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.

“I hope he takes it in pennies,” a Wall Street broker said when Hughes, six years later, sold T.W.A. for $546 million, “and drops it on his toes.”

Why do we like those stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes.