The New Journalism of the Sixties
59
left behind filed desultory missing-person reports, then moved
on themselves.24
During her stay in Haight-Ashbury, Didion talks with hippies, teen-age
runaways, drug users, self-proclaimed revolutionaries, political activists, rock
musicians, and various denizens of the counterculture movement—each one
serving as a flesh-and-blood symbol of the societal fractures taking place. In the
fullest sense of the New Journalism style, Didion calls upon the lyrical qualities
of the novelist to capture, in a highly realistic manner, scenes of 1960s street
life. Through extensive use of dialogue and descriptive detail (clothing worn,
music played, rooms slept in, streets roamed), Didion captures the feel of
rootlessness and aimlessness that was a part of everyday life in the HaightAshbuiy district. These techniques are apparent in the following passage from
Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was
raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the
beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane,'’ he says, and his
voice drops. "This chick tells me there’s no meaning to life
but it doesn’t matter. We’ll just flow right out. There’ve been
times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast
again, at least there I had a target. At least there you can
expect that it’s going to happen.” He lights a cigarette for me
and his hands shake. "Here you know it’s not going to." I ask
what it is that is supposed to happen. "I don’t know,” he says.
"Something. Anything.”25
While the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem ask more questions
about the nature or cause of social fragmentation than provide answers, Didion
prefers to characterize it as more of a moral, rather than social or political,
dilemma. This is particularly evident in the essay, "On Self-Respect,” in which
Didion says that many contemporary Americans lack a "moral nerve” that their
ancestors possessed. She observes that people with self-respect exhibit a moral
toughness that can be termed "character.” More precisely, Didion defines
character as the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own actions in
life.26 For Didion, self-respect also entails the recognition that anything worth
having in life has its price:
People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk
that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go
bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which
every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are
willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play
at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.27
Thus, Didion characterized 1960s America as a nation whose people were either
too immature or undisciplined to take responsibility for or acce BF