Where I Was From

by Joan Didion

  Perhaps the picture made by Saxon and Billy was equally arresting and beautiful, as they drove down through the golden end of day. The two couples had eyes only for each other. The little woman beamed joyously. The man’s face glowed into the benediction that had trembled there. To Saxon, like the field up the mountain, like the mountain itself, it seemed that she had always known this adorable pair. She knew that she loved them.

  Only later does Saxon discover what the reader (by this point almost four hundred pages into The Valley of the Moon) may well have suspected early on: “this adorable pair” are in fact “old stock that had crossed the Plains,” keepers perhaps of their own iconic potato masher, in any event kindred souls who “knew all about the fight at Little Meadow, and the tale of the massacre of the emigrant train of which Billy’s father had been the sole survivor.” Their rightful place in the California fable validated, Saxon and Billy settle in, determined to redeem the birthright of the “old stock” through the practice of scientific agronomy, which London himself imagined that he and his second wife, the woman he called his “Mate-Woman,” Charmian Kittredge, were perfecting on their own Sonoma ranch. London’s letters from this period speak of “making the dead soil live again,” of leaving the land “better for my having been,” of unremitting industry, transcendent husbandry. “No picayune methods for me,” he wrote. “When I go in silence, I want to know that I left behind me a plot of land which, after the pitiful failures of others, I have made productive…. Can’t you see? Oh, try to see!—In the solution of great economic problems of the present age, I see a return to the soil.”

  This was another confusion. His crops failed. His Wolf House, built to last a thousand years, burned to the ground before he and the Mate-Woman (or, as he alternately called Charmian, the Wolf-Mate) could move in. His health was gone. He battled depression. He battled alcoholism. At one point in 1913, the year Wolf House was completed and burned, he had only three dollars and forty-six cents left in the bank. In the end only the Mate-Woman kept the faith: “I am crazy for everyone to know about Jack’s big experiment up here,” Charmian Kittredge London wrote to a friend, Tom Wilkinson, on December 15, 1916. “So few persons think of it at all in connection with him—they slobber about his this and his that and his the other, and say nothing about his tremendous experiment—practical experiment—up here on Sonoma Mountain.” Just three weeks before this letter was written, Jack London had died, at forty, of uremic poisoning and one final, fatal, dose of the morphine prescribed to calm his renal colic. In the last novel he was to write, The Little Lady of the Big House, he had allowed his protagonist and author-surrogate to ask these questions, a flash of the endemic empty in a work that is otherwise a fantasy of worldly and social success: “Why? What for? What’s it worth? What’s it all about?”

  8

  THE Bohemian Club of San Francisco was founded, in 1872, by members of the city’s working press, who saw it both as a declaration of unconventional or “artistic” interests and as a place to get a beer and a sandwich after the bulldog closed. Frank Norris was a member, as was Henry George, who had not yet published Progress and Poverty. There were poets: Joaquin Miller, George Sterling. There were writers: Samuel Clemens, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, who only a few months before his death managed to spend a week at Bohemian Grove, the club’s encampment in the redwoods north of San Francisco. John Muir belonged to the Bohemian Club, and so did Joseph LeConte. For a few years the members appear to have remained resolute in their determination not to admit the merely rich (they had refused membership to William C. Ralston, the president of the Bank of California), but their over-ambitious spending, both on the club in town and on its periodic encampments, quite soon overwhelmed this intention. According to a memoir of the period written by Edward Bosqui, San Francisco’s most prominent publisher during the late nineteenth century and a charter member of the Bohemian Club, it was at this point decided to “invite an element to join the club which the majority of the members held in contempt, namely men who had money as well as brains, but who were not, strictly speaking, Bohemians.”

  By 1927, a year after George Sterling committed suicide during a club dinner for H. L. Mencken by going upstairs to bed and swallowing cyanide (he had been depressed, he had been drinking, Frank Norris’s brother had replaced him as toastmaster for the Mencken dinner), the Bohemian Club was banning from its annual art exhibit any entry deemed by the club “in radical and unreasonable departure from laws of art.” By 1974, when G. William Domhoff, then a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, wrote The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness, one in five resident members and one in three nonresident members of the Bohemian Club was listed in Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, Executives, and Directors. Among those attending the summer encampment at Bohemian Grove in 1970, the year for which Domhoff obtained a list, “at least one officer or director from forty of the fifty largest industrial corporations in America was present…. Similarly, we found that officers and directors from twenty of the top twenty-five commercial banks (including all of the fifteen largest) were on our lists. Men from twelve of the first twenty-five life-insurance companies were in attendance (eight of these twelve were from the top ten).”

  The summer encampment, then, had evolved into a special kind of enchanted circle, one in which these captains of American finance and industry could entertain, in what was to most of them an attractively remote setting, the temporary management of that political structure on which their own fortunes ultimately depended. When Dwight Eisenhower visited the Grove in 1950, eleven years before he made public his concern about the military-industrial complex, he traveled on a special train arranged by the president of the Santa Fe Railroad. Domhoff noted that both Henry Kissinger and Melvin Laird, then secretary of defense, were present at the 1970 encampment, as were David M. Kennedy, then secretary of the treasury, and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. John Erlichman, as the guest of Leonard Firestone, represented the White House. Walter J. Hickel, at the time secretary of the interior, was the guest of Fred L. Hartley, the president of Union Oil.

  The rituals of the summer encampment were fixed. There were, every day at twelve-thirty, “Lakeside Talks,” informal speeches and briefings, off the record. Kissinger, Laird, and William P. Rogers, then secretary of state, gave Lakeside Talks in 1970; Colin Powell and the chairman of Dow Chemical were scheduled for 1999. Local color was measured: the fight songs sung remained those of the traditional California schools, Berkeley (or, in this venue, “Cal”) and Stanford, yet it was a rule of the Bohemian Club that no Californian, unless he was a member, could be asked as a guest during the two-week midsummer encampment. (As opposed to the May “Spring Jinks” weekend, to which California non-members could be invited.) The list for the 1985 encampment, the most recent complete roster I have seen, shows the members and their “camps,” the hundred-some self-selected groupings situated back through the hills and canyons and off the road to the Russian River. Each camp has a name, for example Stowaway, or Pink Onion, or Silverado Squatters, or Lost Angels.

  For the 1985 encampment, Caspar Weinberger was due at Isle of Aves, James Baker III at Woof. “George H. W. Bush” appeared on the list for Hillbillies (his son, George W. Bush, seems not to have been present in 1985, but he was on the list, along with his father and Newt Gingrich, for 1999), as did, among others, Frank Borman, William F. Buckley, Jr., and his son Christopher, Walter Cronkite, A. W. Clausen of the Bank of America and the World Bank, and Frank A. Sprole of Bristol-Myers. George Shultz was on the list for Mandalay, along with William French Smith, Thomas Watson, Jr., Nicholas Brady, Leonard K. Firestone, Peter Flanigan, Gerald Ford, Najeeb Halaby, Philip M. Hawley, J. K. Horton, Edgar F. Kaiser, Jr., Henry Kissinger, John McCone, and two of the Bechtels. This virtual personification of Eisenhowers military-industrial complex notwithstanding, the Spirit of Bohemia, or California, could still be s
een, in the traditional tableaux performed at every Grove encampment, to triumph over Mammon, God of Gold, and all his gnomes and promises and bags of treasure:

  SPIRIT: Nay, Mammon. For one thing it cannot buy.

  MAMMON : What cannot it buy?

  SPIRIT: A happy heart!

  The transformation of the Bohemian Club from a lively if frivolous gathering of local free spirits to a nexus of the nations corporate and political interests in many ways mirrored a larger transformation, that of California itself from what it had been, or from what its citizens preferred to believe that it had been, to what it is now, an entirely dependent colony of the invisible empire in which those corporate and political interests are joined. In 1868, four years before he helped to found the Bohemian Club, Henry George, twenty-nine years old and previously unpublished, wrote a piece in the Overland Monthly in which he tried to locate “the peculiar charm of California, which all who have lived here long enough feel.” He concluded that California’s charm resided in the character of its people: “… there has been a feeling of personal independence and equality, a general hopefulness and self-reliance, and a certain large-heartedness and open-handedness which were born of the comparative evenness with which property was distributed, the high standard of wages and of comfort, and the latent feeling of everyone that he might ‘make a strike.’ ” This piece, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” was intended, of course, as an antidote to the enthusiasm then general about the windfall to be realized by giving the state to the Southern Pacific:

  Let us see clearly whither we are tending. Increase in population and in wealth past a certain point means simply an approximation to the condition of older countries—the eastern states and Europe…. The truth is, that the completion of the railroad and the consequent great increase of business and population, will not be a benefit to all of us, but only to a portion…. This crowding of people into immense cities, this aggregation of wealth into large lumps, this marshalling of men into big gangs under the control of the great “captains of industry,” does not tend to foster personal independence—the basis of all virtues—nor will it tend to preserve the characteristics which particularly have made Californians proud of their state.

  Henry George asked what the railroad would bring, but not too many other people did. Many people would later ask whether it had served the common weal to transform the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys from a seasonal shallow sea to a protected hothouse requiring the annual application on each square mile of 3.87 tons of chemical pesticides, but not too many people asked this before the dams; those who did ask, for whatever reason, were categorized as “environmentalists,” a word loosely used in this part of California to describe any perceived threat to the life of absolute personal freedom its citizens believe they lead. “California likes to be fooled,” Cedarquist, the owner in The Octopus of a failed San Francisco ironworks, advises Presley when they happen to meet at (where else?) the Bohemian Club. “Do you suppose Shelgrim [the Collis P. Huntington figure] could convert the whole San Joaquin Valley into his backyard otherwise?”

  “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” remained, into my generation at least, routine assigned reading for California children, one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen. I used to think that Henry George had overstated the role of the railroad, and in one sense he had: the railroad, of course, was merely the last stage of a process already underway, one that had its basis in the character of the settlement, in the very quality recommended by “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” as “a general hopefulness and self-reliance,” or “a feeling of personal independence or equality,” or “the latent feeling of everyone that he might ‘make a strike.’ ” This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in other words the pauperization of California, had in fact begun at the time Americans first entered the state, took what they could, and, abetted by the native weakness for boosterism, set about selling the rest.

  Josiah Royce understood this negative side of the California character, but persisted in what was for him the essential conviction that the California community was so positive a force as to correct its own character. He allowed that “a general sense of social irresponsibility is, even today, the average Californian’s easiest failing.” Still, he seemed temperamentally unable to consider an “average Californian” who would not, in the end, see that his own best interests lay in cooperation, in the amelioration of differences, in a certain willingness to forego the immediate windfall for the larger or even his own long-term good. This was the same “average Californian” who, by the year Royce wrote, 1886, had already sold half the state to the Southern Pacific and was in the process of mortgaging the rest to the federal government. For most of the next hundred years, kept aloft first by oil and then by World War Two and finally by the Cold War and the largesse of the owners and managers who would arrive in Gulfstreams for the annual encampment at Bohemian Grove, that average Californian had seen his “easiest failing” yield only blue skies.

  Part Two

  1

  IN the May 1935 issue of the American Mercury, William Faulkner published one of the few pieces of fiction he set in California, a short story he called “Golden Land.” “Golden Land” deals with a day in the life of Ira Ewing, Jr., age forty-eight, a man for whom “twenty-five years of industry and desire, of shrewdness and luck and even fortitude,” seem recently to have come to ashes. At fourteen, Ira Ewing had fled Nebraska on a westbound freight. By the time he was thirty, he had married the daughter of a Los Angeles carpenter, fathered a son and a daughter, and secured a foothold in the real estate business. By the time we meet him, eighteen years later, he is in a position to spend fifty thousand dollars a year, a sizable amount in 1935. He has been able to bring his widowed mother from Nebraska and install her in a house in Glendale. He has been able to provide for his children “luxuries and advantages which his own father not only could not have conceived in fact but would have condemned completely in theory.”

  Yet nothing is working out. Ira’s daughter, Samantha, who wants to be in show business and has taken the name “April Lalear,” is testifying in a lurid trial reported on page one (“April Lalear Bares Orgy Secrets”) of the newspapers placed on the reading table next to Ira’s bed. Ira, less bewildered than weary, tries not to look at the accompanying photographs of Samantha, the “hard, blonde, and inscrutable” daughter who “alternately stared back or flaunted long pale shins.” Nor is Samantha the exclusive source of the leaden emptiness Ira now feels instead of hunger: there is also his son, Voyd, who continues to live at home but has not spoken unprompted to his father in two years, not since the morning when Voyd, drunk, was delivered home to his father wearing, “in place of underclothes, a woman’s brassiere and step-ins.”

  Since Ira prides himself on being someone who will entertain no suggestion that his life is not the success that his business achievement would seem to him to promise, he discourages discussion of his domestic trials, and has tried to keep the newspapers featuring April Lalear and the orgy secrets away from his mother. Via the gardener, however, Ira’s mother has learned about her granddaughter’s testimony, and she is reminded of the warning she once gave her son, after she had seen Samantha and Voyd stealing cash from their mother’s purse: “You make money too easy,” she had told Ira. “This whole country is too easy for us Ewings. It may be all right for them that have been born here for generations, I don’t know about that. But not for us.”

  “But these children were born here,” Ira had said.

  “Just one generation,” his mother had said. “The generation before that they were born in a sod-roofed dugout on the Nebraska wheat frontier. And the one before that in a log house in Missouri. And the one before that in a Kentucky blockhouse with Indians around it. This world has never been easy for Ewings. Maybe the Lord never intended it to be.”

  “But it is from now on,�
�� the son had insisted. “For you and me too. But mostly for them.”

  “Golden Land” does not entirely hold up, nor, I would guess, will it ever be counted among the best Faulkner stories. Yet it retains, for certain Californians, a nagging resonance, and opens the familiar troubling questions. I grew up in a California family that derived, from the single circumstance of having been what Ira Ewing’s mother called “born here for generations,” considerable pride, much of it, it seemed to me later, strikingly unearned. “The trouble with these new people,” I recall hearing again and again as a child in Sacramento, “is they think it’s supposed to be easy.” The phrase “these new people” generally signified people who had moved to California after World War Two, but was tacitly extended back to include the migration from the Dust Bowl during the 1930s, and often further. New people, we were given to understand, remained ignorant of our special history, insensible to the hardships endured to make it, blind not only to the dangers the place still presented but to the shared responsibilities its continued habitation demanded.

  If my grandfather spotted a rattlesnake while driving, he would stop his car and go into the brush after it. To do less, he advised me more than once, was to endanger whoever later entered the brush, and so violate what he called “the code of the West.” New people, I was told, did not understand their responsibility to kill rattlesnakes. Nor did new people understand that the water that came from the tap in, say, San Francisco, was there only because part of Yosemite had been flooded to put it there. New people did not understand the necessary dynamic of the fires, the seven-year cycles of flood and drought, the physical reality of the place. “Why didn’t they go back to Truckee?” a young mining engineer from back East asked when my grandfather pointed out the site of the Donner Party’s last encampment. I recall hearing this story repeatedly. I also recall the same grandfather, my mother’s father, whose family had migrated from the hardscrabble Adirondack frontier in the eighteenth century to the hardscrabble Sierra Nevada foothills in the nineteenth, working himself up into writing an impassioned letter-to-the-editor over a fifth-grade textbook in which one of the illustrations summed up California history as a sunny progression from Spanish Señorita to Gold Miner to Golden Gate Bridge. What the illustration seemed to my grandfather to suggest was that those responsible for the textbook believed the settlement of California to have been “easy,” history rewritten, as he saw it, for the new people. There were definite ambiguities in this: Ira Ewing and his children were, of course, new people, but so, less than a century before, had my grandfather’s family been. New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.