Certain vibrations of the bus would trip his brain somehow and suddenly bring back the sensation of the rocketing DMT trip and it would be necessary to speed up and keep moving. The sweet wheat-fields and dairy lands of America would be sailing by beauty rural green and curving, and Sandy is watching the serene beauty of it … and then he happens to look into the big rear-view mirror outside the bus and—the fields are—in flames :::::::: curve and curdle straight up in hideous orange flames::::: So he whips his head around and looks way back as far as he can see and over over to the horizon and it is nothing but flat and sweet and green again, sailing by serene.
Wolfe kicked off chapters with poetry:
A very Christmas card,
Kesey’s new place near La Honda.
A log house, a mountain creek, a little wooden bridge
Fifteen miles from Palo Alto beyond
Cahill Ridge where Route 84
Cuts through a redwood forest gorge—
A redwood forest for a yard!
A very Christmas card.
He stacked words like children’s building blocks:
In describing the rape scene, Wolfe wrote with a spectator’s verisimilitude.
[S]ome blonde from out of town, one of the guests from way out there, just one nice soft honey hormone squash, she made it clear to three Angels that she was ready to go, so they all trooped out to the backhouse and they had a happy round out there. Pretty soon all the Angels knew about the “new mamma” out in the backhouse and a lot of them piled in there, hooking down beers, laughing, taking their turns, making various critiques. The girl had her red and white dress pushed up around her chest, and two or three would be on her at once, between her legs, sitting on her face in the sick ochre light of the shack with much lapping and leering and bubbling and gulping through furzes of pubic hair while sweat and semen glistened on the highlights of her belly and thighs and she twitched and moaned, not in protest, however, in a kind of drunken bout of God knew what and men with no pants on were standing around cheering, chiding, waiting for their turn.
This passage bothered Kesey when he read it in Wolfe’s book. He felt Wolfe was pulling his punches by not naming names and revealing the malefactors. “Certain passages—such as the Hell’s Angels gangbang—would have been stronger if he had used the names of the real people that participated,” Kesey said years later in an interview with Paul Krassner. “Kesey thought that I made a tragic moment look like farce,” said Wolfe.
It was the sole discordant note in the book, the point at which Wolfe’s prose style uneasily intersects with an event that might have benefited from a more restrained approach. It worked far more effectively when Wolfe got into Kesey’s head during an acid trip:
The ceiling is moving—not in a crazed swirl but along its own planes its own planes of light and shadow and surface not nearly so nice and smoother as plasterer Super Plaster Man intended with infallible carpenter level bubble sliding in dim honey Karo syrup tube not so foolproof as you thought, bub, little limps and ridges up there, bub, and lines, lines like spines on crests of waves of white desert movie sand each one with MGM shadow longshot of the ominous A-rab coming up over the next crest for only the sinister Saracen can see the road and you didn’t know how many subplots you left up there, Plaster Man, trying to smooth it all out, all of it, with your bubble in a honey tube carpenter’s level.
For passages like this, Wolfe would revert to a “controlled trance” (Wolfe’s term). Before writing each chapter, he would review his notes, then close his eyes and try to imagine himself in the mental states of his characters—a process of intellectual “sense memory” that he felt was akin to Method acting. But even that didn’t get him as close to the source as he really wanted to be. Wolfe had been hesitant to drop acid when Kesey urged him to do so at La Honda, but no amount of research could get him close enough to the feeling of an acid trip unless he experienced it first-hand. He traveled to Buffalo, New York, where a friend of his had access to LSD, and dropped 125 milligrams. “I felt like my heart was outside my body with these big veins,” he said. “As I began to calm down, I had the feeling that I had entered into the sheen of this nubby twist carpet—a really wretched carpet, made of Acrilan—and somehow this represented the people of America, in their democratic glory.”
Fortunately for Wolfe, such specious insights didn’t make it into The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The reviews of the book, which was published in August 1968 on the same day as his second collection of articles, The Pump House Gang, were far more enthusiastic than the notices for The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is an astonishing book,” wrote C. D. B. Bryan in the New York Times Book Review. “Wolfe is precisely the right author to chronicle the transformation of Ken Kesey from respected author of ‘And One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ [sic] to an LSD enthusiast…. Wolfe’s enthusiasm and literary fireworks make it difficult for the reader to remain detached.” The Nation’s critic Joel Lieber wrote, “You get excited reading this history. Its words reach as close to the feverishness of the thing itself as possible.”
Such reactions were just the thing Wolfe had been aiming toward—to bring the reader as close to the Prankster experience as he possibly could without becoming an active participant. With his one-two publishing punch, Wolfe had scaled the heights of literary fame, but “I didn’t have enough money to be a celebrity.” His total income before taxes that year was only $17,500.
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
Tom Wolfe’s dispatches from the West Coast for the Tribune and Esquire were field reports for a readership that maintained at best a disdainful attitude toward the youthquakes that were rewriting the Social Register, turning class into an easily acquired accoutrement rather than a privilege of birthright. The lifestyle experiments transpiring in Los Angeles and San Francisco as typified by Kesey and the Pranksters were so foreign to the primarily Republican Trib readership as to be more suitable for National Geographic. Wolfe was doing his level best to introduce West Coast culture to New York, and he did so with the enthusiasm and optimism of the initiate stumbling onto some Edenic glen where new social paradigms were washing away fusty domestic rituals and arrangements that had lain dormant for years.
But not every writer covering the youth movement was as enamored of the tectonic shifts occurring in California, and one in particular would always maintain a detached skepticism that bordered on existential dread. Joan Didion, unlike Wolfe, was a child of the West. She was born in 1934, but her ancestors had migrated to California in the nineteenth century from points east such as Virginia, Arkansas, the Carolinas, and Illinois, places where the failed dreams of financial bounty led to a great migration to where the crops were rumored to grow as tall and hearty as poplar trees. They had endured long, grinding treks by covered wagon across the Oregon Trail and barely survived the Humboldt Sink in Nevada (where the Donner-Reed party met its garish end; Didion’s great-great-great grandmother Nancy Hardin Cornwall was a Donner party member), settling in California’s Central Valley, whose vast, flat, alluvial plains seemed to hold the promise of eternal prosperity.
As a young child Didion heard the stories of her ancestors and their great struggles to tame this unsettled territory, forging new identities as farmers from the soil of the last undeveloped region in the country. Sacramento, where Didion was raised by a homemaker and an Air Force officer who served on the local draft board and then drifted into local real estate, was an exurb adrift in uneasy suspension from the rest of the state. But by the late forties, it seemed to Didion that the stories she had been told of the crystalline rivers and majestic plains had already been supplanted by the new narrative of unchecked corporate development, the colonization of the city by aerospace firms and other commercial enterprises. This new boomtown development coexisted with the old Sacramento in ways that gave Didion intimations of the impermanence of things in California, the chimerical nature of the great western dream that her ancestors h
ad dreamed.
Even Sacramento became a mirage for Didion as she was jostled from base to base during her father’s tenure in the Air Force. So Didion withdrew deeper into herself, finding solace in the novels of Hemingway, Conrad, and James. “I tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it,” she recalled in 1979.
She wrote her first story at the age of five. “I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl,” Didion recalled, “but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.” In high school, Didion worked as a stringer for the Sacramento Union, saving up enough money to buy herself an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter; she taught herself how to put sentences together by typing passages from her favorite books.
Didion didn’t know that this shape-shifting image of California that she maintained throughout her young life would become the raw material of her greatest work as a writer when she left Sacramento to attend the University of California, Berkeley, as an English major. After winning a writing contest for a story on the San Francisco architect William Wilson Wurster, Didion left for New York after graduating in 1956 and found a job at Vogue writing captions for editor Allene Talmey. Didion eventually graduated to stories about country homes, clothing designers, and other personalities, where a high premium was placed on getting the finer details of the products just right while avoiding the extraneous adjective or verb, the unnecessary descriptive word.
Didion fell in love with New York as only a rural initiate could love it. “Nothing was irrevocable,” she would later write, “everything was within reach. Just around the corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never seen or done or known about.” New York was an “infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”
And yet the West maintained a powerful grip on her; she missed the region terribly. Even as Didion was moving up the masthead at Vogue, eventually becoming an editor, she dreamed of Sacramento and the great silted rivers in which she had swum. Her first novel, Run River, which was written after hours while Didion was still working at Vogue, was a paean to the Sacramento Valley as it existed in her dream life, “the way the rivers crested and the way the tule fogs obscured the levees and the way the fallen camellias turned the sidewalks brown and slick during the Christmas rains.” But it was also a novel that pitted the encroachment of modernity against the disturbances of rural life; in the novel, the protagonist Lily McClellan’s mother sells off parcels of her land to make way for tract housing, while the body of her daughter Martha is inexorably exhumed from its grave by the swelling river.
Didion was making it in the city that was the big brass ring for journalists who came of age in the 1950s, but eventually the great media culture clamor—the endless cocktail parties, the enforced bonhomie of an intensely private person impelled to become a public one—sent her back to California. Newly married to John Gregory Dunne, an ambitious young writer at Time who longed to write novels and with whom she had adopted a baby girl they named Quintana Roo, Didion moved to Los Angeles in 1966.
The paradise of her youth had been wiped clean; a new generation of exiles had laid claim to the freedoms and opportunities that had brought Didion’s forebears across the Midwest in the 1800s, and the Dust Bowlers in the 1930s after them, to a golden land that was wide open and unfettered by entrenched notions of class and tradition or the heavy baggage of historical continuity. This is the place where Tom Wolfe had seen new statuspheres spring up from nowhere, but Didion longed for that old continuity. In its absence, chaos and anarchy were free to roam.
For Didion, geography was destiny. Just as the land on which she was reared had shaped her view of the world as indeterminate, so her subjects in her earliest magazine stories were shaped by the natural laws of California, a state that, despite a postwar population boom that was unprecedented in American history, was still a wild, untamed desert that could tamp down the heartiest souls with obdurate force. Like previous migrants in search of some elusive destiny in the West, Didion’s subjects were drawn by the Hollywood myths, only to encounter the same dust and desolation.
Didion saw disorder at every turn in California: in the hollowed-out eyes of the drug-addled hippies in the Haight, in suburban housewives staring down hope and losing, in the sun-baked concrete enclaves far away from the Pacific breezes. Shortly after moving back West, Didion became “paralyzed by the conviction 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.”
In her story “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left?” which ran in the May 7, 1966, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, Didion chronicled in chilling detail the story of Lucille Miller, the child of strict Seventh-Day Adventists, who was reared in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and “came off the prairies in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio.” Instead, Miller found herself in San Bernardino, a city “haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.” Miller’s story, which Didion had read about in the Los Angeles Times, seemed ripped from the pages of a James M. Cain potboiler. On October 7, 1964, “a night when the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk,” Miller, deep into an illicit affair with a local attorney named Arthwell Hayton, immolated her dentist husband alive in his VW Bug in an attempt to collect on his life insurance.
For Didion, Miller’s story seemed to typify the desperation of all those lonely lower-middle-class strivers out on the fringes of L.A., the California “where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-a-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.” Miller expected one thing and got something else.
Didion seemed an unlikely writer for such a tawdry story. A painfully, almost pathologically shy interlocutor, Didion somehow made her reticence work to her advantage. “Most of my sentences drift off, don’t end,” she said. “It’s a habit I’ve fallen into. I don’t deal well with people. I would think that the appearance of not being very much in touch was probably one of the reasons I started writing.” Instead of pushing and prodding her subjects into revealing themselves, Didion let them fill in the awkward silences, discreetly jotting it all down in her spiral notebook. In this fashion, she achieved a rapport with her subjects that eluded most traditional reporters.
For this story, Didion interviewed Miller, her friends and family members, and the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and meticulously pored over court transcripts to carefully piece together the timeline of the murder and its aftermath. The story is structured like a film noir; Didion skillfully unfurls the narrative without tipping her hand. The reader learns the facts as they are revealed to the protagonists in the story itself, culminating in a courtroom climax that leads to Miller’s incarceration and a final visit to the Millers’ vacant house on Bella Vista Road, with the television aerial “toppled on the roof, and a trash can [was] stuffed with the debris of family life: a cheap suitcase, a child’s game called ‘Lie Detector.’”
Didion’s omnivorous eye ranged over the San Bernardino courthouse during the Miller trial, catching the small but revealing details that elevated the story beyond a true-crime tale into a morality play, the battle between darkness and light that seemed, for Didion, to permeate every aspect of contemporary California life. “So they had come,” Didion wrote,
to see Arthwell, these crowds who milled beneath the dusty palms outside the courthouse, and they had also come to see Lucille, who appeared as a slight, intermittently pretty woman, already pale from lack of sun, a woman who would turn thirty-five before the trial was over and whose tendency
toward haggardness was beginning to show, a meticulous woman who insisted, against her lawyer’s advice, on coming to court with her hair piled high and laquered. “I would’ve been happy if she’d come in with it hanging loose, but Lucille wouldn’t do that,” her lawyer said.
Lucille Miller’s was not an isolated case; it was emblematic of the dislocations of a region that obliterated its past as fast as it constructed new myths to replace it, withholding all of the golden dreams that it so tantalizingly proffered, a culture that granted its residents permissiveness as it if were an inalienable right but extracted a pound of flesh in return.
Didion saw this all so clearly in San Francisco, with the countercultural revolution in full bloom. Where others preferred to see a new community of the young rising like daisies from the cracked sidewalk streets, Didion saw a village of lost children, the fallout of a fractious society with a high divorce rate, where “adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”
Didion embarked for San Francisco in the spring of 1967 on assignment from the Saturday Evening Post. She had only the flimsiest of conceits—to take the measure of the hippie scene—and even flimsier contacts. So she hung around awhile and insinuated herself with some of the kids she met on the street, and they invited her into their crash pads, offered their drugs and food to her.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 15
