Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays was a searing collection of essays by Joan Didion, most previously published in various magazines in 1965, 1966, and 1967, and taking place in California. In the Preface Ms. Didion shares how hard it is for her to interview people and to meet her deadlines. She describes her success as a reporter thus:

n  

"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

n

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is divided into three sections, the first being Lifestyles in the Golden Land. One of my favorite essays was the one entitled, John Wayne: A Love Song where Joan Didion related how she fell in love with John Wayne movies at the age of eight when she and her brother watched his films three times a week. Didion was able to interview John Wayne while in Mexico City filming The Sons of Katie Elder, his 165th movie. Another favorite was Where the Kissing Never Stops, an essay about Joan Baez and her school, The Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, in Carmel Valley in 1965. The final essay in this section was Slouching Towards Bethlehem, an essay covering the time she was reporting about the time she spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1965. Joan Didion shares that while she felt that this was the most imperative piece she was writing, it also left her despondent after it was printed. As a reader, it left me despondent as well.

The second section of the book entitled Personals is about keeping a notebook writing one's thoughts and dreams. A very interesting essay was on self-respect, who has it and who does not, it being the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life, not only in her experience but in many characters in literature. There was another essay on morality and another on going home again.

The third section being Seven Places of the Mind opening with her feelings and observations and the history of her native Sacramento, a favorite of mine as I lived there only a year but fell in love with the Sacramento valley. One of Didion's quotes:

n  

"In fact that is what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

n

In the Preface Joan Didion shares how she named this book of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years certain lines from the poem by W.B. Yeats were coming to mind:

n  

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

n
W.B. YEATS

Joan Didion is an insightful and skeptical thinker, an astute ironist, and a beautiful prose stylist: Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies her craft. While all of her essays are exemplary in form, some fall by the wayside of memory, and even only a week removed from my first foray in Didion, only a few remain with me with any moving power. Slouching Towards Bethlehem skirts the two worlds of my known (intimacy) and my unknown (distance): what it means to be a twentysomething, a skeptic, a thinker, an observational outsider-insider, a reader, and the world of the 1960s: the vestigial mirage of the American dream, and the fairy-dust optimism particular to California (and to drug-addicts).

I had held off reading Didion for a while, because more than I knew about her writing, I knew about her celebrity. The Joan Didion of 2013: the sheepish-looking neuresthenic of the upper-upper crust, with silver tableware and imported china, damask upholstery on ormulu footed furniture, does not invite sympathy nor empathy. She has become her own horror, a self-damaging neuralgia grown completely inward into herself. But the Didion of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (and, I hope, The White Album which I plan to read sometime soon) is a different sort of woman: one which balances the Janus faces of reflection: inward as well as outward. Much of this collection is a reflection on external, cultural phenomena: a murder case in Southern California, the alluring celebrity of John Wayne, the apotheosis of marriage in Las Vegas, the drugs and counterculture of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, and she develops a personal narrative about it: how she is affected by these phenomena, and what it meant to be exposed to them. Her essays have a literary flair, which court Fitzgerald-esque lyricism and Hemingway-an precision, exactness: her essays are thoroughly American, of an American rhythm and tempo, with a focus on the corroding core of the "American dream."

A particularly resonant essay, "Goodbye to All That" describes Didion's eight-year sojourn in New York City, when she was twenty up through twenty-eight.

n  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 before.n

As a twenty-three year old (recently initiated, adieu, twenty-two) I understand the conviction that what one feels, one is the first to feel, perhaps the only one ever to feel: all emotions feel unique, curried with the salt of freedom. If young childhood is the realm of dominant solipsism, young adult hood is the era of narcissism, egoism. It is necessary, I think, to go through this deeply narcissistic phase: we must, at sometime, be the true heroes of our life stories: alone and valiant like Odysseus. At twenty-something, the consequences of our actions are minor, we are yet-formed, yet-completed, we are free to fall and free to rise, but still free to be forgiven. In this period of our lives we must design and build a genuine ego, to replace the mask of entitlement and privilege of youth. Everything which is new is new only by our point of reference: ourselves, and impossible to conceive the true universality of it in the present. Literature, history, makes us feel often that we are not alone, that what we are feeling is rooted in something which is universal, eternal: but we still believe that we have a unique strain, an undiscovered permutation of the human condition.

Didion's essays On Self-Respect, On Morality, On Keeping a Notebook reveal the narcissistic compulsions of young adulthood: an age wherein we pen (figuratively and sometimes literally for the diary-inclined) the narrative of out life-stories, and also develop the character which we will assume. What draws people to literature, to story-telling, to TV and movies, is our desperate need for linearity in life. We understand the beginning-middle-end mentality, the rhythm of narratives is very comforting to us. We are a profoundly moralizing species, and narratives help us find meaning, even if it is artificial, created, posed: it comforts us to think that every action has an equal and opposite re-action, we are comforted by the abstract concept of justice, and the practice of it when it is in our favor. Didion acknowledges this compulsion:

n  I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people 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.n

As humans, we need some escape, or if not escape overtly, some structure which guards us from the brutal chaos of reality. We conceive of ourselves heroes, we are heroically justified, our self-respect buds, we become a solitary wanderer, discoverer, thinker, inventor: we measure ourselves by our potential, not necessarily by our accomplishments.

n  To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.n

Self-respect, according to Didion, is a "moral nerve" - those with self-respect "have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things." It is in the golden era of our lives, our twenties, when we are forced to pay for things: our material needs with money, and our mistakes with our self-respect. There is not currency so valuable as self-respect, and no wealth which is harder to regain when it has been lost.

I was moved, was empathetic, to what Didion has to say about her life, particularly her more personal essays. Her descent into neurotic inwardness is perhaps the extreme condition of her reflexive mastery in her earlier essays and works: for it is this aspect which shines. She is coolly self-aware at the age of thirty-two, where she has become a prisoner of her own privilege and self-communion in her later years.

n  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. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.n

It's a pleasure to discover a great writer somewhat later in life, one whom you had never personally engaged with despite hearing their name mentioned here and there for years. This book of classic essays by Joan Didion was my first encounter with her writing, and I was not disappointed. Her essays on morality and self-respect, as well as her vignettes from the reporting of a murder trial, 60s-era counterculture in California, and her own life as a young woman in New York City, evinced a level of elegance and quiet wisdom that was humbling. Some writers force you to pause, read, and reread to fully absorb a piece of knowledge which they're trying to impart to you. They don't just hand you their message on a plate, even if the plate is made of beautifully ornamented prose, but make you work a bit to absorb it. Didion's writing is like that. She displays a level of grace that is hard to find in writers today: a mixture of being at once self-possessed, reserved, skeptical, and honest about things. She sheds some light on her philosophy about how to carry oneself in her self-respect essay, first published in Vogue Magazine decades ago. Among other things, it's a byproduct of learning how to take accountability for ones own life and actions. That may sound simple, but in reality it is something that one has to consciously choose.

The essays in this collection were uneven, but the strongest ones were truly unforgettable. The backdrop to most of it is a harsh California landscape with which I'm as yet unfamiliar in my own life, but her New York essay was so visceral, across a span of decades and even cultural barriers, that I felt I could immediately imagine what her life must've been like there. It is a gift to be able to collect the wisdom that a brilliant person left behind in their writings, and I plan to collect more from her in future.

Love her prose style, but felt the collection was interesting without being outstanding. Many of the shorter pieces seemed to need to have been developed further, and others, like the true crime ones, were forgettable. There were moments like the title essay and “Goodbye to all that”, and a couple of others that struck home, but most fell short. ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’ was certainly not an earth-shattering read, but It was OK.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960's.

One critic describes the essay as "a devastating depiction of the aimless lives of the disaffected and incoherent young," with Didion positioned as "a cool observer but not a hardhearted one." Another scholar writes that the essay’s form mirrors its content; the fragmented structure resonates with the essay's theme of societal fragmentation. In a 2011 interview, Didion discussed her technique of centering herself and her perspective in her non-fiction works like "Slouching Towards Bethlehem": “I thought it was important always for the reader for me to place myself in the piece so that the reader knew where I was, the reader knew who was talking...At the time I started doing these pieces it was not considered a good thing for writers to put themselves front and center, but I had this strong feeling you had to place yourself there and tell the reader who that was at the other end of the voice.”

I remember being really impressed with Didion's novel 'Play It as It Lays' a couple of years back, and reading her nonfiction for the first time I was equally; if not more so, impressed with this seminal collection of essays, of which I didn't know that quite a lot of them had previously been published as magazine articles. Didion is certainly a powerful stylist, as she looks on like a surveyor at the shifting scene of American life in the Golden State during a time of social upheaval in the second half of the 60s, and there is a mesmeric quality to these kind of journalistic style pieces that really makes you feel like what she is writing about is of vast importance. There is a sense of language here that is reminiscent of a Hemingway for example, and the closely observed nature of the essays have a strong, short, sharp rhythm to them, making for un-complex, relatively easy reading. Through a world of acid, stoned dropouts, crazed cultists, desert motels, lost souls, and Hollywood, we move from a strange murder trial that shocked the community of an upwardly middle-class town near San Bernardino, to John Wayne, to the hippies of San Francisco who wandered both the country and their tripping minds in search of meaning and purpose, to Las Vegas marriages and the abandoned sight that is Alcatraz, amongst other things. Didion describes the distinct people she encountered, who all seemed to share the hushed bleakness of existing on the outskirts of a happy dream that never materialized. Really enjoyed reading her so far, and hope that continues next time. I'd say this would be a good place to start if one has thought about reading her but hasn't yet done so. For me, a great book all round, but if I had to get picky, then of the twenty essays my favourite five would be - 'Where the Kissing never Stops', '7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38', 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem', 'I Can't Get That Monster Out Of My Mind' and 'Notes from a Native Daughter'

perhaps my favorite Didion, very cherished

BEI TEMPI ADDIO


La ex casa dei Grateful Dead a 710 Ashbury Street.

Nonostante in un capitolo (questo libro raccoglie articoli usciti su riviste) dal titolo Non riesco a togliermi quel mostro dalla testa, la signora Didion esprima opinioni tranchant su Kubrick, Antonioni, Visconti, Bergman, dimostrando per la prima e unica volta che perfino lei può sbagliare, prendere cantonate e dire bestialità, ho amato questo libro e amo profondamente questa meravigliosa scrittrice, sentimento costruito su una breve intensa conoscenza (incontrata per la prima volta neppure cinque mesi fa, è la sua quarta opera che leggo e apprezzo a fondo).


Joan Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, nell’aprile del 1967.

Viene definita la migliore scrittrice vivente in lingua inglese (e io le auguro mille anni oltre gli 80 che compirà il 5 dicembre prossimo) e si dice che proprio nel giornalismo proponga il meglio di sé.
Il New Journalism, il giornalismo che è Letteratura, il giornalismo che è Arte: quello consacrato con la pubblicazione di “In Cold Blood”.

Io non saprei: la amo molto sia come romanziere che come scrittrice di memoir che giornalista.


Le cinque vittime del 9 agosto 1969 nella villa di Polanski al Benedict Canyon: da sinistra, Voityck Frykowski, Sharon Tate, Stephen Parent, Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger.

Cos’è che colpisce in questa raccolta?
Il fatto che Joan Didion sia sempre dentro la narrazione, che il suo io sia in prossimità dell’oggetto del racconto.
Non nel modo fastidioso che spinge a riportare tutto l’universo a se stessi, a misurare abissi e cieli sul metro del proprio vissuto: ma con quella sua capacità di trasformare le proprie difficoltà e debolezze in leve di forza, informando e illuminando senza intromettersi nel racconto.


Ruth Ann Moorehouse e altre due ragazze di Charles Manson.

Didion non scrive per svelare, ma per capire, non scrive per stupire, ma per ‘leggere’ il suo tempo, riesce ad andare oltre il qui e l’ora con parole che rimarranno per sempre vere.

Poche volte si incontra una scrittura che dice così tanto di chi scrive. E ogni parola della Didion ci racconta di una donna fragile, ma dalle mente affilata, una donna problematica, ma forte e intensa… una narratrice in grado di toccare l’anima delle cose, e farla sembrare la cosa più facile del mondo.

Per quanto coinvolta, partecipe, vicina e attenta, Joan Didion è un’osservatrice molto acuta, che riesce a mantenere un distacco spontaneo per riuscire a cogliere una prospettiva singolare e precisa.

Joan Baez canta durante una manifestazione di protesta.

Didion descrive e racconta, senza commentare, un’America in trasformazione, molto diversa da quella in cui è nata e da quella emersa nel secondo dopoguerra – un paese in movimento verso un futuro che non sembra radioso, mentre il presente lo è: all’inizio degli anni Sessanta, gli US sono prosperi ed effervescenti – ma sono già un popolo e una terra che hanno perso l’innocenza, dove anche le voci alternative mostrano limiti e cadute, una terra dorata sostanzialmente allo sbando.
Didion è per certi versi un’anticipatrice, sicuramente uno sguardo senza schemi né veli.



Racconta un fatto di cronaca nera e la suspense divora il lettore.
Racconta di Joan Baez e in una frase riesce a racchiuderla tutta.
Racconta di San Francisco e la sua scrittura si fa jam come quelle dei Dead nel Golden Gate Park.
Racconta di sé, “sul tenere un taccuino”, e mi fa venire la pelle d’oca.

Давно хотіла добратися до Джоан Дідіон. Отож нарешті.
"І побрели до Вифлеєму" - мабуть, найвідоміший її збірник репортажів, який вперше вийшов друком 1968 року, а відтоді мав добрих кілька десятків перевидань (кілька вже в 2000-х).
Культова книжка для Америки, яка насправді є збірником текстів, писаних для різних періодичних видань. Саме так. Журналістські статті, яким усім уже завернуло за п"ятий десяток (окремі з"явилися взагалі на початку 1960-х), писані з різних приводів і з зовсім різними засновками, які в книжковій формі створюють, утім, цілком цілісне враження, а крім того, досі можуть бути цікаві читачам. І не тільки американським.
Авторку постійно згадують через кому з Т. Вулфом, як одну з причетних до явища "нової журналістики". Цікаво тільки, що сама Дідіон при цьому журналісткою себе не вважає (ну, так, дописувала в New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, New York Review of Books, кому там іще - Life, Esquire; а ще працювала у Vogue, вигравши в юному віці літературний конкурс і переїхавши після того в НЙ; але ж це ще не робить порядну людину журналісткою:) До слова, коли її називають письменницею, вона начебто не протестує, і для цього теж має підстави, адже в неї є також кілька доволі успішних романів і автобіографічних книжок.
Насамперед у "Вифлеємі" йдеться про Каліфорнію 1960-х, але також і ширше - про американську контркультуру того часу, показану без звичного замилування і рожевих окулярів. Хоча трапляються і доволі сентиментальні фрагменти, тексти-освідчення в любові до різних міст - від Сан-Франциско до Нью-Йорка, де вона в різні періоди жила. Або людей (дуже симпатично про Джона Вейна). В заголовному репортажі (який також і найбільший у всій збірці) фігурує історія, яку найчастіше цитують у контексті цієї книжки, - про батьків-"мрійників", які дають своєму малятку пробувати LSD (але похмурим тут є не тільки це)).
В іншому тексті авторка бере якусь начебто цілком поточну подію з кримінальної хроніки (жіночка з якогось провінційного містечка пристукнула свого чоловіка заради грошей), але так майстерно реконструює не тільки факти, мотивацію злочиниці, а й виписує саме середовище, що вже з цього одного тексту з головою занурюєшся в атмосферу тієї Америки 1960-х.
Більшість текстів авторка пише від свого імені, і ця свідома настанова на суб"єктивність тільки грає Дідіон на руку. Тим паче, що своїм "я" авторка не зловживає, хоч і не приховує його. Ну, і ще в неї ідеальна риса для хорошої репортажистки - неймовірно вишколене око до деталей і лаконізм.
Щоб трохи розбавити цей сироп, скажу, що насправді деякі тексти здалися не особливо цікавими. Але штука, мабуть, іще в тому, що книжка дуже американська. Важко на 100% відстрілювати всі алюзії і т.д. для людини, яка в Америці - і не тільки 1960-х - не жила.

Back in May, in an Essay Mondays post, I kicked myself for waiting so long acquaint myself with the wonders of Joan Didion's writing. After that post I lost no time in acquiring Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a classic collection of her early investigative reporting and personal examinations published in magazines from the early to late 1960s; and having now read it, my admiration for Didion has only increased.

The bulk of the collection consists of mood pieces featuring the California and Nevada landscapes of the mid-1960s, along with a few of their famous and infamous inhabitants: a suburban housewife who murders her depressed dentist husband one dark night in 1964; a paranoid Communist bookstore owner obsessed with security; the distressed residents of the Carmel Valley who objected to Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. Although I think of Didion as much more contemporary than the classic LA noir authors, her portraits of California's seedy suburban underbelly and the sad glitz of Vegas made me feel I was next door to a Raymond Chandler landscape. She captures the dirty mythos of place, so pronounced in the American West, and combines it with a wry, reserved wit, quiet with a hint of steel underneath, and an extremely keen eye for a memorable line or an odd juxtaposition. I love this passage on Vegas, not only for its evocation of the Rat Pack-era Strip, but for how accurate it remains as an explanation of the bizarre fascination of the American Babylon:

Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies' room attendants with amyl nitrate poppers in their uniform pockets. Almost everyone notes that there is no "time" in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future (no Las Vegas casino, however, has taken the obliteration of the ordinary time sense quite so far as Harold' Club in Reno, which for a while issued, at odd intervals in the day and night, mimeographed "bulletins" carrying news from the world outside); neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks "STARDUST" or "CAESAR'S PALACE." Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with "real" life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. All of which makes it an extraordinarily stimulating and interesting place, but an odd one in which to want to wear a candlelight satin Priscilla of Boston wedding dress with Chantilly lace insets, tapered sleeves and a detachable modified train.

One gets the impression that, whenever Didion observes a tableau, she immediately starts to tell a story about it, and that the story has both the weight of accumulated legend and allegory behind it, and a bubble-pricking sharpness of detailed observation. This potent mix is applied to people as well as places (John Wayne, Howard Hughes, Joan Baez) although the people she discusses are always rooted in the place where she encounters them: a dusty, latter-day film shoot outside Mexico City, a locked, hunkering compound in the L.A. suburbs; a ranch in the Carmel Valley. The soul of these essays is in the places where they occur, just as Didion's own soul, as she explores in "Notes from a Native Daughter," is rooted in a vanishing Sacramento. Indeed, writing about the land and its inhabitants is, for Didion, frequently a way of looking at herself, and of examining American culture more generally: how (and why) do we choose our living legends? Why are we obsessed by certain stories? What does it say about us?

Toward the end of the book's first section is the long essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem": simultaneously a portrait of the hippie scene on Haight-Ashbury in 1967, and a heartfelt cry out against a perceived lack of meaning in the world. Didion writes in the Preface that she was crushed to find, upon publication, that readers perceived only the first mode and not the second: she had written a piece on coming to terms with disorder in the universe, and her readers encountered simple documentary on street drugs and teenage runaways. Personally, I think the essay works on both levels: I am glad to have such an evocative portrait of a now-vanished "scene," and I also recognize the all-too-universal darkness and chaos of the human condition in these stories of children who feed acid to their own babies. I was particularly impressed, in this piece, Didion's understated take on New Journalism: she is definitely a "presence" in this essay, and reading between the lines one can tell that she, the speaker, may be going through a pretty rough time herself, but she never plays up her own role. She acknowledges it, and lets it go.

Norris and I are standing around the Panhandle and Norris is telling me how it is all set up for a friend to take me to Big Sur. I say what I really want to do is spend a few days with Norris and his wife and the rest of the people in their house. Norris says it would be a lot easier if I'd take some acid. I say I'm unstable. Norris says all right, anyway, grass, and he squeezes my hand.

      One day Norris asks me how old I am. I tell him I am thirty-two. It takes a few minutes, but Norris rises to it. "Don't worry," he says at last. "There's old hippies too."

I loved Didion's portraits of the shiny new California and the vanishing California of old, on self-important think tanks, dusty Valley towns, and suburban misfits who bought into the dream, but the real high point of the collection for me was "On Keeping a Notebook," one of the only pieces in this collection without explicit ties to place (although of course it gets worked in there somehow). In it, Didion relates her practice of recording seemingly "useless" tidbits in her notebook—disconnected scraps of overheard conversation, details of a scene that strike her, for whatever reason, as evocative. One might assume, she writes (in fact even she has sometimes assumed), that she does this in order to have a factual record of what she has been doing or thinking, or that she is accumulating bits of dialogue that may come in useful for other writing projects down the road. But when she interrogates herself about the real function of her notebook, she acknowledges that it accomplishes neither of these goals, nor is it intended to; the real reason for Didion's notebook scraps is, in an almost Proustian way, to evoke the visceral past, to remain in touch with the person she once was and feel what that person felt upon hearing, for example, a cashier remark that her ex-boyfriend "left her no choice," or upon seeing a woman in a dirty Crepe-de-chine wrapper in a train station. The shock of recognition is the point: "to remember what it was to be me." Given that object, the literal "truth" of the notebook's contents is irrelevant:

[N]ot only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day's pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

I don't know whether I'm imagining the echoes of James Joyce's The Dead here, but either way that's a stunning paragraph.

Reading these essays now, in 2010, I processed some of them as period pieces, others as still-relevant, still others as timeless: all of them, though, were a joy.

Five stars for the writing. Didion is a brilliant writer, and I am old enough that I recall a few of these essays from their original publication back in the day. Her use of detail, the rhythm and cadence of her sentences—yes, a powerful writer. The collection is well worth reading, and a few of these essays are worthy of study as rhetoric. Certainly her sentences.

Why three stars? Only an entitled white person busy reflecting a narrow slice of the world could have written these essays, especially at the time they were written. The first is wonderful, but then it mostly goes downhill. The love letter to John Wayne reveals a self-important man who speaks of himself in the third person. No mention that he was an aggressive supporter of McCarthyism in the previous decade, no insight. Didion does her best to dis Joan Baez, whom she keeps calling a "girl" though Baez was 25 at the time and only 6 years younger than Didion herself. And why, after hearing that stunning soprano, would anyone consider it disreputable that Baez had no formal voice training? A very early essay "Self Respect" written in her 2os is awful, but then "On Morality" is a fascinating perspective. Some essays were genuinely trivial—why would I care about her fancy vacation in Mexico? The exposé on a leftwing think tank is so snide that I could barely stand to read it. The word "race" is used once, but Didion only speaks to and for and of white people. There are no people of color here, no Black people in these essays written mostly in the late 60s, no mention of Malcolm or Dr. King, or anything directly political. No reader would suspect that Native peoples existed in the 1960s. The people in her Hawaii essay are all northern European, too, with only a half-page mention of "Orientals" in a bit of dialogue from a schoolmaster, included to make him appear a bigot, which he is. (Most direct quotes are included to reveal the speaker, usually a middle- or working-class person, as stupid. So there's that bigotry too.) The only appearance of a Hawaiian in Hawaii is "the diamond that had been Queen Liliuokalani's"—not actually referring to a person but an artifact. Haight-Ashbury is a place for abusive drug-users from middleclass America (affluence matters). There is subtle and not-so subtle racism here, blatant classism, underlying entitlement in "all the sweet promises of summer and money." As if her entire audience was exclusive, conservative, rich, and white. Which it was.

I loved her memoir about the death of her husband (much later and back in New York) for its eloquent balance of research and personal experience. There is scant research in these essays. She admits in the forward to being a poor interviewer. She was also remarkably incurious. Obvious facts, obvious to anyone who cared to include them, and to a broader demographic, are absent. Their lack is felt.

In her final essay she expresses alternate sentimentality and disgust for the New York City where she partied for most of her twenties until she returned to California. "That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I discovered that not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it." These beautiful lines about her youthful foolishness, are written at the wise old age of thirty-three from Los Angeles.

It is significant that her title comes from the same source as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. W.B Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming," is a diatribe against Other cultures overwhelming and destroying European culture. But then Achebe was using the line ironically since it is European culture that has destroyed older cultures. So the writing is marvelous, but there are painful missteps that count.

As a final concern: Many (younger) people read these essays and believe they are receiving an accurate and complete picture of the people and movements of that time, the authentic period and issues Didion wrote about. That ticks me off. I wish they would employ a little skepticism. Didion isn't lying, but she does not provide an unbiased accounting. She has her people and they are not mine. I was there for some of what she describes. The best I can say about her perspective is she presented the view of the rich and beautiful and otherwise entitled elites... and not all of theirs.

Girando e girando nella spirale che si allarga il falco non può udire il falconiere

Venti articoli usciti su varie riviste negli anni ‘60. Raccolti assieme, formano un racconto lungo che ci parla degli USA anni ‘60 e della giovane donna che li attraversa, ne coglie i mutamenti profondi, e muta lei stessa. Ed è questo mix tra cronaca giornalistica e vicende personali, luoghi reali e luoghi della mente, che rende il libro un’ottima lettura.

Non a caso Didion mutua il titolo della raccolta da Il secondo avvento (integrale in esergo) potentissima poesia di Yeats sul cambiamento dei tempi e il conseguente spaesamento e terrore che questo genera (il falco gira in aria senza più la guida del falconiere, le cose crollano, il centro non tiene più, la bestia rinasce a Betlemme).

Tre sono le parti in cui sono suddivisi gli articoli.

La prima, “Sulla vita nella terra dorata”, include frammenti di California e dintorni. Difficoltà familiari con (forse) omicidio (Sognatori del sogno dorato). John Wayne, malato e a fine carriera (John Wayne: una canzone d’amore). Il sogno pacifista di Joan Baez (Dove non smettono mai di baciarsi). Gli assurdi matrimoni di Las Vegas (Sposalizi assurdi). Una generazione di giovani in acido (Verso Betlemme).

Lo sentii dire alla ragazza in un film intitolato Terra nera* che le avrebbe costruito una casa «sull’ansa del fiume dove crescono i pioppi». Si dà il caso che io non sia diventata il tipo di donna che può essere l’eroina di un film western, e sebbene gli uomini che ho conosciuto avessero molte virtù e mi abbiano portato a vivere in molti posti che ho imparato ad amare, non sono mai stati John Wayne e non mi hanno mai portato su quell’ansa del fiume dove crescono i pioppi. In fondo al cuore, nella parte in cui cade per sempre la pioggia artificiale, quella è ancora la battuta che aspetto di sentire.

In “Personali” troviamo riflessioni sul tenere a mente da dove veniamo e chi siamo stati (Sul tenere un taccuino), sui primi fallimenti personali e la consapevolezza di non essere all’altezza delle proprie aspettative (Sul rispetto di sé), su una possibile definizione di moralità (Sulla moralità).

“Penso che sia saggio mantenersi in buoni rapporti con le persone che eravamo un tempo, che le troviamo o meno una gradevole compagnia. Altrimenti si presentano senza preavviso e ci sorprendono, martellando la porta della mente alle quattro del mattino di una brutta nottata con la pretesa di sapere chi li ha abbandonati, chi li ha traditi, chi farà ammenda.”

Tra i “Sette luoghi della mente”, terza e ultima parte, troviamo una più vera California, quella della Sacramento Valley, il luogo d’infanzia dell’autrice (Osservazioni di una figlia nativa), le Hawaii, tra tradizioni, sviluppo turistico ed i memoriali di Pearl Harbour e quell’incredibile cimitero militare nel cratere di un vulcano (Lettera dal Paradiso, 21°19’N., 157°52’O). Alcatraz ed i suoi 4 abitanti dopo l’abbandono (Scoglio secolare). Newport e le sue assurde ville, simbolo distorto del capitalismo o del capitalismo distorto (La costa della disperazione). Una New York che seduce con le sue infinite possibilità ma che non regge al richiamo del Pacifico (Bei tempi addio).

È molto facile sedere al bar di, diciamo, La Scala a Beverly Hills, o da Ernie’s a San Francisco, e condividere la diffusa illusione che la California sia solo a cinque ore d’aereo da New York. La verità è che La Scala ed Ernie’s sono solo a cinque ore d’aereo da New York. La California è da un’altra parte. Molta gente dell’East Coast (o «back East» come dicono in California, anche se non a La Scala o da Ernie’s) non ci crede. Sono stati a Los Angeles o a San Francisco, hanno guidato attraverso un gigantesco bosco di sequoie, e hanno visto il Pacifico glassato dal sole pomeridiano al largo di Big Sur, e naturalmente tendono a credere di essere davvero stati in California. Non ci sono stati, e probabilmente non ci andranno mai, perché è un viaggio più lungo e per molti versi molto più difficile di quanto siano disposti a intraprendere, uno di quei viaggi in cui la destinazione balugina come una chimera all’orizzonte, sempre più lontana, sempre più piccola. Si dà il caso che io sappia di questo viaggio perché io vengo dalla California, vengo da una famiglia, o una congrega di famiglie, che ha sempre abitato nella Sacramento Valley.