Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Didion’s “Notes From a Native Daughter” outlines how changes going on in Sacramento are aligned with Didion’s own shifting concept of the place as her childhood home. McClellan Field opened in 1935, leading to the rise of the aerospace industry in Sacramento that coincided with Didion’s time there; her parents’ and grandparents’ idea of Sacramento would be far more in line with the agriculture community that was fading as the most important aspect of the community. The character of Sacramento that Didion laments is one that was already leaving the Valley at the time of her moving there, and she notes that the new generation won’t have access to it at all.

The thornier question for Didion is what meaning lies in older ideas of community. Her assertion earlier in the essay that “California is somewhere else” (i.e. Los Angeles or San Francisco) would indicate that the true nature of California itself is slipping away as the Central Valley grows and changes (171). There’s an element of self-delusion that she points out about the adults around her growing up. They were willing to blame a drowning on a child being from out of town even though locals drowned in the Sacramento River all the time, and Latin American products are a part of Sacramento’s otherwise largely white dominant culture.

Didion is clear that the idea of some central character of place is a myth, and a deeply personal one, handed down through generations. She points out the difficulty of writing about her home when she says, “I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers” (178). She is aware of her own romanticization and admits this is part of what allows her to consider that the Aerojet employee’s idea of Sacramento is as valid as her own.

The essay closes on the image of the burned-down home with a trailer on the property. It is a powerful metaphor for inevitability of change and Didion’s lingering belief that something important is being lost. Though Didion knows that the Embarcadero of downtown Sacramento is a fabrication of history laid on top of a less romantic reality, she closes on an ambivalent note of relating to a persona in the W.S. Merwin poem she quoted earlier in the essay who is unable to see that she is mourning her own loss of self.

“Letter from Paradise, 21° 19’ N., 157° 52’ W.” follows a similar track, but Didion observes Hawaii as an outsider and so brings a less romantic eye to the history of the place. She begins the essay with a bit of self-deprecation that hints both at her self-characterization as someone who suffers from anxiety and how that anxiety makes her a person ill-suited for the relaxed lifestyle of Hawaii. She is wary of a society that does not have a sense of its own mortality, which is why she gravitates to the Pearl Harbor ships and the cemetery rather than the beaches of Waikiki filled with tourists.

Hawaii is a place that is well-suited to Didion’s theme of change, as it has been through three different incarnations in her lifetime; the oligarchical regime of a few powerful agricultural families, the wartime Hawaii that brought with it an increased diversity and the dissolution of the economic structure of the islands, and its contemporary vision of itself as a getaway paradise powered by tourism. Didion sees the second version of Hawaii as the most indicative of Hawaii’s true nature, in part because it was what allowed Hawaii to move out of a period of cultural stagnation and out of the grip of a powerful elite who did not associate with the Indigenous or Asian immigrant population.

Didion takes pains to note that the bodies from Vietnam are beginning to be buried in Hawaii, and it is situated in the Pacific in what will be a theater of war for the foreseeable future; the locals even intimate that they would be safe from sweeping change or nuclear war in the event of the breaking of the Cold War détente breaking. They are both protected from war, yet in the constant shadow of its past and future.

The Punahou school, which Didion uses as an example for Hawaii’s new identity, was an important prep school reserved primarily for Hawaii’s Big Five agricultural dynasties that shifted its demographics to serve the best and brightest of any race. For the 1960s, the cultural politics and inclusion of Asian students that Didion notices going on there would be progressive, even as it still caters to the elite. Didion sees conflicting ideas at work in the image of Hawaii as a melting pot and a desire for long-time White residents to retain a sense of separation that they claim is based on class. For most Hawaiian residents, Hawaii remains a product they are selling, and Didion thinks that they have bought in to a myth that is underwritten by war and privilege. Didion thinks that their lives, which are relatively easy in her view, prevent them from seeing the true nature of the place.