Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The real review to read is Vivian's, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
What she said.
Bonus: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories...
"From Hollywood to Malibu: Mapping Joan Didion’s Los Angeles," a 6 3/4 min [sic] read.
More links and photos in the notes, below.

She made a big impression (not always positive, mind) on everyone she met. A remarkable writer, woman, mother, human being.
Partial reread notes, 2020.
The shorter essays were the ones that really rang my chimes this time. Some of the longer ones, well, kind of dragged. The most striking ones for me, this time:
• John Wayne at Churubusco Studio outside Mexico City, in 1965, making his 165th movie.
• Joan Baez at the Monterey County Board of Supervisors in 1966, where a neighbor objected to her Institute for the Study of of Nonviolence in Carmel Valley.
• Talking with Michael Laski, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group, at their West Coast HQ in Watts, 1967. Comrade Simmons is reporting the income from sales of the Party newspaper: $9.99 from the sale of 75 newspapers, for contributions ranging from 4 cents up to 60c. Not a good day, Laski remarks.

Perfect little time capsules from the 1960s: all 3 5-star! Once again, for more details, see Vivian's. Lots more worthwhile stuff in the Didion, well worth your time. Recommended.

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
-from "Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)"

Before reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem I had an image of Joan Didion as a sort of voice for the '60s counterculture, someone who was very much on the inside of the movement looking out. I didn't have to get through many of the essays here to realize how wrong I was: whatever interest in or understanding of the hippies and activists and flower children she may have demonstrated in her work, she never positioned herself as one of them. "A few days ago," she writes revealingly in "Letters from Paradise," "someone just four years younger than I am told me that he did not see why [the wreckage of the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor] should affect me so, that John Kennedy's assassination, not Pearl Harbor, was the single most indelible event of what he kept calling 'our generation.' I could tell him only that we belonged to different generations."

Didion is first and foremost an observer, not a participant, always at a remove from the action if never actually detached from it. Her iconic sunglasses are a fitting metaphor for the way she faces the world: she takes everything in, but never gives more than she wants to away. As a result, many of her essays end just when it seems she's getting to the point. She builds up an impression from a cluster of details, she immerses us in a distinct place and mood, she seems to be nudging us toward some deeper understanding—but then at the critical moment she withdraws and leaves us alone to decide what meaning, if any, underlies it all. And it’s rarely clear that there is any meaning—that the America she describes is anything more than a blank screen onto which empty commercials and propaganda can be projected.

That’s not to say Didion is impartial: every writer, and especially those claiming to portray real life, must make a million deliberate decisions about what to put in or leave out. She herself denies any intention, in her private journal-writing at least, to get down "an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely," she continues, "an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess." Empty as the world she portrays may sometimes seem, it is still her portrayal, and by extension her sense of emptiness, too. The emptiness is an artistic choice.

And that brings us back to my earlier point, about Didion’s noncommittal attitude toward the social trends of her time and place, her insistence that she belonged to "a different generation." She sees little of real or lasting value in free love platitudes or acid trip revelations or revolutionary ideology with no action to back it up. The dewy-eyed students at Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence she depicts as naive and impotent. The druggies and groupies and runaways that populate San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District are vacuous and vain and misguided, maybe dangerously so. Nor is she any more impressed by movie stars or oil tycoons, or the regular old American Dreamers of the middle class—except perhaps in that these people are at least less ashamed of the materialism that drives them and their desire to be left alone. Even the passage I quoted at the top of my review (from probably the most devastatingly dismissive essay in the whole collection, on the founder of the Marxist-Leninist branch of the American Communist Party) indicates a sort of repudiation disguised as understanding: whatever drug or idea they choose to do it with, she assures us, these people are all deluding themselves.

It's a worldview I admit some sympathy for, and one I suspect is endemic to writers and artists everywhere. (c.f. James Baldwin: "You have to have the [guts] to protest the slogan, no matter how noble it may sound. It always hides something else; the writer should try to expose what it hides.") And Didion makes her case, or anti-case, convincingly: there’s no one in this book, aside from maybe Didion herself, who I think I’d actually enjoy spending more than a few minutes with.

But still there came a point toward the end of the collection where the sense of disillusionment became almost stifling. Like a true existentialist (I’ve been reading an anthology of existential writings alongside this one, so the two have become linked in my mind) Didion recognizes that no single ideology or belief system is sufficient to speak for all of humankind; but unlike the existentialists, she seems unwilling to commit herself, as an individual, to anything at all. "You see," she explains in "On Morality,"

n  I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is 'right' and what is 'wrong,' what is 'good' and what is 'evil'. . . . Of course we would all like to 'believe' in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in the New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality."n

I’ll gladly join in with rejecting simplistic "causes" and reductive political rhetoric, but to insist that morality itself is no more than an instinct for self-preservation or adherence to an arbitrary "social code" is a bridge farther than I’m willing to go. It may be true that we must make our own way in the world as individuals, but we should not become so wrapped up in notions of subjectivity that we deny the value of others and their own individual rights and dignity. To suggest otherwise, especially in a decade of such moral significance as the one in which Didion wrote these essays, seems to me irresponsible at best, and at worst a little cowardly. But I guess she'd reply that that’s only another moral judgment on my part, and therefore not to be taken too seriously.

Even so, I did find a lot of virtue (if you'll forgive the word) in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion writes with an elegant precision, erudite but never pretentious, which lends even her most disenchanted or downright pessimistic pieces a clear and striking beauty. She has a sincere fondness for her homeland of California (the Golden State is maybe the only thing she does express unreserved affection for), and an acute sense of the many discrete parts and places that make up the Californian whole. She is sharp in her analysis of other people and, in the handful of essays in which she turns her gaze inward, makes no excuses for herself, either. "On Self-Respect" was my favorite selection of this kind, and the one that has given me the most to think about since reading it.

Bethlehem was my first by Didion, but it won't be my last. Whatever reservations I may have about her message or lack thereof, she's nevertheless an unparalleled chronicler of those times when, to quote the Yeats poem which gives this collection its title, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity."

From the book....

“I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”

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Didion's greatest two-word sentence.....

https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/joan-d...

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My family moved from a small town in New Hampshire to the SF Bay Area when I was age 7. There was no “Silicon Valley” then. If Didion were writing about California today, I am sure a new volume would include her unique take on the land of tech. Since my childhood, I have traveled all over California. In addition to those travels, I spent my first two years going to college in Orange County before transferring to Berkeley. And five years after college living in LA County before returning to the Bay Area. During that time in LA, my wife and I made the drive to San Bernardino to look after my aunt.

The first essay is about San Berdoo and her prose is Chandleresque, as in this opening paragraph……

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, 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. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.”


I am not surprised Didion considers her cover essay on the Haight in the 60’s to be her best. I finally read it a year ago online. The dark underbelly didn’t surprise me. I was in middle school at the time and found the behavior of older Boomers somewhat dismaying. Charles Manson knew where to look for confused runaways to build his cult.

What I didn’t realize was that almost no one understood her Haight piece after it came out. She was really bothered by this……

“The [Bethlehem] piece was important to me. And after it was printed I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece, failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads. Disc jockeys telephoned my house and wanted to discuss (on the air) the incidence of “filth” in the Haight-Ashbury, and acquaintances congratulated me on having finished the piece “just in time,” because “the whole fad’s dead now, fini, kaput.” I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.”

When a more recent Didion book came out, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” I saw an interview with her in which she surprised the questioner by saying she regretted becoming a writer. “I should have become a physicist instead,” Didion declared.

That’s hindsight, of course.

A matching event to the Summer of Love was Woodstock, two years later. Today there’s Burning Man, which has something called the Playa Restoration Team to clean up and restore the desert in a month-long effort. This was not the case with Woodstock, where the flower children left behind a garbage dump.

https://www.google.com/search?q=woods...

The excellent Slouching Towards Bethlehem essay.....

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2...

“…my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.”

A marvelous collection of diverse essays written in the 1960s. I thought these would speak to the California girl in me, but when her essay about of being young in New York--a place I’ve never been--came alive in my mind, I realized that what captured my interest wasn’t the subject. It was the writer.

Didion starts with a true crime story, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” and not because of shock or exploitation but because of the way she developed the piece, I couldn’t take my eyes off the prose.
“It was in the breakup that the affair ceased to be in the conventional mode and began to resemble instead the novels of James M. Cain, the movies of the late 1930’s, all the dreams in which violence and threats and blackmail are made to seem commonplaces of middle-class life.”

She continues with more profiles of Californians, including the title piece about time spent in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967. This was my least favorite, perhaps because I already knew so much about the place. She uncovers a very pathetic view, matching the Yeats poem about World War I that serves as epigraph to the collection.

Next she gives us a section of personal essays, which all felt honest, unusual, and so relatable to me. From “On Keeping a Notebook”: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

She heads the last group of essays perfectly: “Seven Places of the Mind.” These demonstrated my favorite kind of travel writing--specifically describing the melding of a place, time and experience. She takes you to a specific spot where her mind took an interesting turn, and whether it was New York or Mexico of her own California, I felt like I was along for the ride.

A brilliant collection; both of a time and timeless.

The wry and casual elegance of Didion's prose style remains quite special despite the endless attempts at imitation in the decades that have followed; she also has that rare talent of being able to make you think you're reading something lightweight, even disposable and then at the last minute flooring you by unleashing an unexpected torrent of significance and resonance.

But as lovely and thoroughly enjoyable as these essays were, I will always be grateful for a disclosure Didion makes in the collection's short preface:

n  "I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic."n

I read these several sentences at a particularly dark moment early on in my thesis writing process where I also found myself suddenly unable to string together a simple sentence, despite the fact I was writing on topic I have been thinking about for years and years and am ready to share my thoughts on. I was ready to write: and suddenly couldn't.

Needless to say I wrote this out on a index card and stuck it above the wall on my desk, and now it serves as kind of a talisman, the reminder I often need of the sheer hard work of writing and that even the very best--even those who give the impression of such effortlessness and ease of articulation--must valiantly struggle sometimes too.

The next day I started writing again. And while there is much to appreciate about this book, I will always treasure it for that.

Hey, yeah. The 1960s? Happy times, heavy times. These are the opening lines to the 1972 cartoon movie Fritz the Cat - a movie I was drawn to decades later when I discovered it in my late teens. For me it was a window to a more exciting time, an era narrowly missed, a world that was only just waking up, when to be young meant to live freely and love easily, and to seize the day and change the world required no more than to step outside one's own front door.

Well, that's how I saw it at the time, but of course things weren't really like that. The fires of change were fueled by deep turmoil and conflict. The cultural, sexual and racial oppression was heavy, and the wild desire for freedom was in many ways the direct response. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the mood of the times is captured beautifully in Didion's soaring and perceptive prose. It's there in the bitter, spiteful conservatism of the woman she meets in the store, who simply cannot come to terms with the audacity of a woman who would wear a bikini. You can sense it in the gloomy countenance of the teens, burned out on psychedelics, for whom any notion of a future has been so annihilated that the mere concept of a thirty year old is barely comprehensible. There is a palpable anxiety, a desperation that permeates the landscape of California - that California of the 1960s: a shimmering moment in time, mystical and otherworldly, and yet even so, all too real. Heavy times indeed.

Ale to się świetnie czytało - ten obraz USA późnych lat 60., który podaje nam Didion przefiltrowany przez jej dystans, spokój, wyważoną obserwację, której nie brak jednak zrozumienia i czułości, to było coś wspaniałego. W tych tekstach jest coś ostatecznego - dla mnie one wszystkie traktowały o jakimś końcu, o jakimś przemijaniu, o sprawach, które odchodzą w zapomnienie. Didion pisząc te teksty, była bardzo młoda, a jednak już wtedy moim zdaniem niesamowicie rozumiała, na czym polega odchodzenie i wiedziała, jak patrzeć, by dostrzec coś, co zniknie bezpowrotnie.

The best way to enjoy Joan Didion's work is desultorily. Don't be in a hurry, and don't be bothered by expectations.

My favorite piece was the final one, called Goodbye to All That. It's about her experience of falling out of love with New York City. I have never been to NYC, nor do I have any desire to go there, but I am old enough to look back on my youth and understand exactly what she was getting at when she wrote the piece.

"One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before...
Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was...
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about...
I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes. and none of it would count."

I could make mistakes and none of it would count. Oh, how I remember that feeling.

I rated each of the twenty essays individually and came up with an average of 3.75 stars.