Slouching Towards Bethlehem

This is another brief sketch focused on place, this time of the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, that were built by some of the most powerful industrialists of American History. Didion has been told about the distasteful excess of these mansions, but seeing them, she realizes that they have somehow moved beyond the concept of taste into something else: “the metastasis of capital, the Industrial Revolution carried to its logical extreme” (210). The houses are impressive but do not at all indicate to Didion that there was space for happiness or comfort in them.

To Didion, these houses are more connected to the earning of money than any other principle. She likens them to factories in their design and concludes that the men who built them must have done so knowing that happiness was not the point. To Didion, the mansions indicate that the production ethic of the Industrialists led to the restrictive, unhappy lives they must have led in these homes. 

Didion writes that she was sick of Los Angeles, so she and her husband decided to drive to Guaymas, not necessarily to relax at the beach but to get away from themselves, which begins by driving through the desert. For Didion, the desert is a disorienting place, and arriving at Guaymas, which she describes as a lost place. They stay at a large hotel outside of town, and they spend a week fishing and laying in hammocks. When they realize there’s nothing else to do but go see a movie in town, they decide to go home.

Didion describes an uneasy feeling that takes hold when the Santa Ana winds are coming. The winds have a profound, well-documented effect on people. Didion recalls being told that Indigenous people would throw themselves into the sea when the winds came, and there is a mix of science and folktales surrounding the wind. It is a foehn wind, which is caused when a mass of cool is on a leeward slope of a mountain is warmed as it comes down the slope. Foehn winds have a history of being associated with irritability, increased suicide rates, and increased crime. An Israeli physicist has discovered that there are more positive ions in the air before and during a foehn wind, and Didion says that there’s a mechanistic connection between the ions’ effect on the body and unhappiness.

Easterners complain about the lack of weather in Los Angeles, but Didion asserts that this is a mischaracterization. Los Angeles has periods of violent rain and twenty or so days a year of Santa Ana winds, which typically bring wildfires. She details a recent fourteen-day period of Santa Ana winds by looking at news headlines: the hills burning, traffic incidents up, and several grizzly crimes occurring before the wind broke. The Santa Ana winds prove to Didion how close Los Angeles is to chaos at all times.

Didion describes a bout of insomnia and staying up late listening to a call-in radio show. The callers debate the merits of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Office and whether or not a rattlesnake can swim. One caller is particularly upset about Brown’s book, saying she will buy it only to burn it, then saying she wishes people still burned witches.

On an extremely hot day, Didion goes to Ralph’s grocery store in a bathing suit. She is accosted by a woman, who follows her through the store criticizing her for wearing a bathing suit at Ralph’s. Didion ignores the woman, who remains relentless in her criticism.

Didion then relays an experience at a swanky Hollywood party, where she overheard the wife on an English actor bluntly expose her husband as a homosexual. The essay closes with Didion in a piano bar, eavesdropping on typical Los Angeles conversations. A screenwriter and a construction worker complain about the millionaires in Montecito, and the piano player is criticized by a drunk when he doesn’t know a song. Didion gets up and calls a friend in New York; when the friend asks her why she is at the piano bar, Didion responds, “Why not?” (224).

The essay begins with the nursery rhyme “How Many Miles to Babylon,” which is followed by Didion saying of her time in New York, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends” (225). Didion first arrives in New York when she is twenty, and she already has the feeling (from movies and music) that New York will not be the same as it was. However, at this time she is young and confident, convinced that her coming experience will be unique. She gets an apartment and tells the man she is dating that she will stay for six months, which becomes eight years.

Didion says she wants this essay to explain why she no longer lives in New York, which she claims is a city only for the young. In her early days, Didion loves New York, and she fails to understand her friend’s laughter and cynicism when she tries to convince him to go to a party to meet new people. She is young and making very little money, but she still feels she has found an ideal. In her mind, her life in New York is always temporary, and she always feels as though in a few months she will leave without realizing that she’s living her real life there.

Didion grew up far from New York, so her vision of it is idealistic. She spends her time with Southerners who share her viewpoint and can’t manage to get home for the holidays like her, as opposed to people who grew up in the Northeast. Because of this romantic notion of New York, Didion doesn’t buy furniture for her apartment or put down roots, and when she eventually leaves New York, she leaves most of her belongings behind. In her first apartment, the only thing she does to decorate is put up golden curtains, which aren’t weighted properly and get tangled up and wet from rain. She realizes at twenty-eight that her life in New York hasn’t been an idealistic dream but a real experience: “[I]t had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it” (233).

Now, Didion’s memory of New York is in flashes and images, including having headaches in apartments at five in the morning and hanging out on fire escapes, or waiting for a televised rocket launch at a bar and watching a cockroach on the floor instead. Still, she relays her enjoyment working in the magazine industry, and she always cherished the sense that she could be anonymous there. She also enjoyed the parties, but she writes that she eventually learned the lesson it is possible to stay in New York too long, and Didion did.

Didion says she fell into a deep despair at twenty-eight, and New York lost its appeal. During this time, Didion lashes out at friends and has a miserable time. It’s also when she gets married, which she says is a good idea at a bad time because she still struggles with depression until her husband suggests they get out of the city. She agrees, and they move to Los Angeles, where she has now lived for three years. On her last trip back, New York had lost its romanticism, and returning to LA, she knows that it is her home.