Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

I am honestly shocked by the rhapsodizing I've heard concerning her over the years. But I guess I shouldn't be. This smug sophisticate is precisely placed to give the establishment what it wants. It's very sly the way Didion guilelessly slouches through each scene, pulling out rugs, trying to spotlight ironies. She's the high-society poet of ennui, the vanquisher of unstylish rebels.

Viewed through the lens of her privileged bubble, challengers of the establishment, those rabble-rousing political types, are simple grotesques, naive child harbingers of chaos. This is because the ravages of inequality, injustice, state violence are faraway abstractions for her, unpleasantries to ruin a cocktail party (where she might show up just to look show more waifish, hide and judge people). Her heroes are figureheads of the capitalist fantasy machine like swaggering John "The Duke" Wayne and mega-rich playboy Hughes.

I finally had to stop after her nauseating ode to those 'self-loving' pioneers of the American frontier. You know the ones who swarmed the continent like locusts so we can have shopping malls instead of forests. Genocide can be wholesome fun as long as the victims are brown. Whoop-dee-doo for self-love. Her only previous mention of anyone of color is her painfully awkward and derisive depiction of a few faceless "negroes" in a crowd.

Does Didion deliver an insight or clever bon mot here or there? Hell, she spends every moment of her (stilted/shoe-gazing/chain-smoking/coke-swilling) life racing to jot down her every thought. She's bound to kick over a shiny pebble or two. But always she holds herself at a safe distance from life, never fathoming it in its essence. show less

Technically, Joan Didion writes well, very well. On the sentence level, as they say, she's impeccable. Yet I remained unconvinced reading this. This book drips with nostalgia and fear. Of warm childhood and early youth memories, juxtaposed with (the then) present-day troubles.

"The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.”

This book mostly reports on what seems to be the worst fears for Didion and her audience then: kids getting high on hallucinogens, wives murdering their husbands, the heros once infallible succumbing to illness just as show more anyone else would (John Wayne, unsurprisingly). Perhaps it's because I'm distrustful of nostalgia, and perhaps it's because I’ve read James Baldwin's essays from this era, that I'm not convinced that the worst thing that was happening in America in the 1960s was hallucinogens becoming popular or the hippie movement or the random unfaithful wife murdering her husband.

There's no effort to explore the reasons for “things falling apart”, but a great effort is made to observe them, coldly in certain cases in what I presume to be journalistic objectivity. Nostalgia is sedative, and a glorious not wholly accurate past serves its purpose when the future seems bleak and the present frightens. And, honestly, I doubt the readers of Vogue and the other places where these essays were published would have wanted a genuine exploration of chaos that erupted during that era. Instead they got well written reportage on California. Undoubtedly Didion’s anxieties must have been real, but this book, at the very least, seems out of touch. The essays “On Keeping A Notebook” and “Goodbye to All That” were very good though. show less

To read Didion for the first time is to regret not reading her earlier.

The first section is a wonderful snapshot of California at a particular stage of its existence—not pulling in those searching riches, as in the Gold rush and Silicon boom, but instead in those seeking a certain set of values. Those were the days when you could actually hitchhike, when your life could begin again in a new city. Sure, Didion goes the route of showing how darker intentions can lay under the placid, flourishing exterior of California's boom. But she also shows us places where there really aren't any dark impulses, or any impulses at all besides the urge to shut out the world.

This all comes to a head in the title essay of the book, whereby Didion show more bounces around San Francisco drug culture at around the same time that it was also portrayed in Pynchon's Lot 49. Unlike Pynchon, though, Didion's disaffected harbor neither suspicions nor aspirations of grand schemes—only a solipsism disguised as enlightenment or self-improvement.

I'm going on a tangent from the book here, but Didion's portrait of the era notably eludes a single question: why did this drug culture spring forth, and why did it go away? Here's a stab at a thesis.

The first answer has to be the dissolution of institutions; while that's been happening for a while, the combination of civil rights, second-wave feminism, and Vietnam was quite potent to the youth of that era. All three were quite destabilizing, at least the first two for the better.

So why did this culture stop? Well if the effect of drugs were to anesthetize yourself from the worries of the time, another development quickly outpaced drugs in both variety and reach: modern advertising. Advertising and consumer culture offer a release by buying things, while drugs are a more direct method. And those without money—those who advertising doesn't care to speak to, and those who have the most horrors to escape—are the populations still ravaged by drug abuse. Again, this is just a provisional thesis, but Didion's damning portrait of drugs as solipsism practically oozes from the page.

Didion's personality comes across in the opening and closing sections as an ever-present undertone, but asserts itself for the personal essays that comprise the middle third. There's a tremendous force of will there, along with an accepting understanding that she's fundamentally damaged goods—jarringly attested to by multiple asides. Didion would win a staring contest with the abyss.

All this talk about Didion's tone and ideas may obscure the most wonderful part of the book: her prose. She exhibits a tremendous command of the language—beautiful when she wants to be, but one of the all-time pithy greats when not. An image recurred in my mind while reading, impossible to quash or push away for long: a steel cable pulled taut, ringing from the tension. Aside from being a joy of craft, these qualities only add to Didion's thematic elements of a fallen race.

By the end, the collection title that seemed a mere lodestar at the outset has become a thudding truth. For Didion, death and loss suffuses all. She remembers New York City with the pure fondness of someone who accepts those times are gone, and doesn't harbor nostalgia's hidden bitterness that they ever went away. California—and to an extent, Hawaii—are a strange attempt at societal tabula rasa, constantly sweeping away the past to create itself anew, but beset by forces that would continue the cycle, do the very same back. Deliberately forgetting the past will only do so much to stave off its effects, and not learning words to describe the gathering storm… that won't stop—not even for a moment—the violent crash of reality. show less

After a viewing of Griffin Dunne's 2017 documentary, The Center will not Hold, I finally picked up Didion's debut work. As a cultural history of a singularly tumultuous time, the book is invaluable. But its real value is in the light it shines on the quickening of a great woman of letters, of a voice that would always be of its time yet still manage to detail the deep and lasting effects of mundane horror. Whether commenting on the ethics of self-respect or morality, or documenting the hippie culture in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury, Didion pulls the veil back in ways most authors would shudder at, exposing herself, and us, in every line. it's an evocative, and self-exorcising, read, and evidence of a truly unique intellect.

Highly show more recommended.
5 bones!!!! show less

Just the best kind of writing. It's inconceivable that these pieces are over 50 years old. The reporting is razor sharp and these essays are among the best I have read. The piece on john Wayne is wonderful. The long piece about Hawaii, 25 years after Pearl Harbor, in the middle of the Vietnam War, is astonishing. The essays on moving to New York and moving back to California are marvelous.

Pure coincidence that I came to this days after watching Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird which is as rooted in Sacramento as Didion. Not sure it's somewhere I need to visit, but the sense of place in both writers' work is remarkable.

Summary: A collection of essays, most originally published as Saturday Evening Post articles describing Didion’s first years back in California, during the height of the hippie movement.

I never read Joan Didion’s work while she was alive. Only in recent years have I developed a taste for essays, and as I read essayists, Didion’s name comes up repeatedly as a master of the craft. This work is her first non-fiction (she published a novel, Run, River, in 1963). This set of essays, most of which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, were mostly written between 1964-1967. These were her first years back in her home state of California after eight years of working for Vogue in New York City, to which she eventually returned.

The show more essays capture the ethos of California in the mid-1960s, the mix of sunny optimism, the agricultural belt of the Sacramento Valley, where she grew up, the nervous lassitude of Los Angeles when the Santa Ana winds rise, and the outlaw fighter John Wayne after he “licked the Big C” the outlaw cells that had threatened his life when she was on set covering the making of The Sons of Katie Elder, Wayne’s 165th film. In stark contrast, she profiles Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. She describes Baez as “a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.”

Her title essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, recounts her time in 1967 in Haight-Asbury during the “summer of love” where youth from all over the country flocked to San Francisco signaling an unraveling in the social fabric of the country, an inchoate longing. She describes the people she met, the flophouses like The Warehouse they lived, the prodigious use of drugs, and the do-gooders like Arthur Lisch with utopian visions who ended up caring for kids when they crashed, and the Zen alternatives to trips. Already, the demise of Haight was apparent to some.

“Personals,” the second section collects articles with a more interior focus: her notebook keeping, thoughts on morality and self-respect (“Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home”). She reminds us of 1960’s monster movies and what is like to go home when it is no longer home.

The final part, “Seven Places of the Mind” take us from Hawaii to Alcatraz to Newport and to her eight years in New York. The essay on Newport, “The Seacoast of Despair” gave voice to my own experience of the lavish mansions of a bygone age, sterile and sad. In New York, she describes the point at which she stopped believing in “new faces” and felt herself becoming increasingly estranged from the whole scene, rescued by her husband who took a six-month leave that turned into a long-term residence in California.

There is so much of interest here. Didion masterfully crafts sentences and tells non-fiction stories. She is a keen observer of herself, the places where she visits or lives, and the times through which she was living. Whether profiling the famous or the unknown, like Comrade Laski of the Communist Party of the United States of America, she opens our eyes to both their individuality and the ways they serve larger than life roles as types.

Some of us are at a point of reflecting back over our lives, and summing up what they’ve meant. These essays were a lens to consider at least a part of that life. I’m intrigued enough to read more of her insights on the times we have both traversed and how she made sense of them. It strikes me that we had so many dreams of changing the world and indeed, the world has changed, but not as we expected. I wonder if Didion was as surprised and unsettled as I find myself in looking at the the world sixty years later. Or did she indeed foresee the center that cannot hold and the beast slouching toward Bethlehem? show less

This is not really a review of the book but a comment I mad in response to a New Yorker article by Morris called The Radicalization of Joan Didion which explains why I will probably never finish reading this book.

Interesting read. I never finished "Slouching" and was never sure why--I figured it was because it was dated. What was shocking back then is now ordinary, and that was part of it. But more important was that her thesis--the point she accused others of missing--was that the hippies were a symptom of a breakdown of the society that produced them. The Yeats poem about the breakdown (auguring the second coming, but ignore that part) that gave it its title was supposed to underline this, but her readers mainly wanted to gawk at the show more weirdos. But she was as yet unbroken-down. And she was writing for the unbroken-down.
Her "radicalization" was yet to come. I couldn't stay with it because I, a person from the future, was already more radicalized than the Didion of 1967.
As Morris makes clear, the radicalized Didion sees the myths of America as a disguise for the predations of business. The human interest story is hiding what should be seen politically as personal.
But is all journalism just myth making for capitalism, then? Even the exposé's goal is to keep the reader entranced to the last word, perhaps by giving them the enjoyable experience of personal radicalization. Is that where Morris wanted to leave us? show less