Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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.

joan forever!

i still like didion's longform (longest form?) writing the best, but in truth no one was doing it like her and no one is doing it like her and no one ever will.

absolutely one of a kind.

bottom line: the very best.

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tbr review

the best you can look is if you're carrying a copy of this book around as you browse at an indie bookstore

To jest wspaniale napisane, ale w ogóle mnie nie obchodzi :I

My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray with white lettering. I recall her clutching the book as though it were a lifeline, a rope to a past she never had. I felt the book must be some passageway to adulthood, some essentialness of feminism that both intrigued and bored me. I recall loving the title--the evocation of the Bible that seemed almost sacrilegious to me, a child of a conservative Christian family. Slouching . . . Bethlehem . . . nothing but trouble can come from such a book.

I wonder what my mother must have thought of this collection of essays about people, places, lifestyles so radically different than anything in her experience, yet which were happening simultaneous to her sheltered life. While her days were filled with Sesame Street, Tang, laundry, cutting crusts from bread for fussy her elementary school-kids' lunches, Joan Didion was writing of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, where runaways were drugged and traded as sex toys, used up and strung out by nineteen; of Howard Hughes buying up blocks of Las Vegas like she bought boxes of Cheerios; of Joan Baez, wispy, earnest, and reclusive in the Monterey County Courthouse, trying to save her Institute for the Study of Non-Violence from the squares who worried that the hippies would drive down their property values.

Did my mother dream California dreams? Did she wish for a New York interlude, to be young and in love, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, such as Joan Didion had in 1960s? Did she yearn for the warm waves of the Pacific curling on the sands of Hawaii? Such freedom young Didion had, such time to feel angst, to observe others, to write clear-eyed and fiercely about her time and place in a world where people filled their voids with drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll.

I imagine my mother reading about a gathering of earnest young activists and intellectuals "reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm" and wishing she were in their midst, instead of pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of Pak-n-Save, filling it with boxes of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Hamburger Helper.

This collection of twenty essays, originally published in a variety of magazines, chronicles Didion's internal and external worlds at a singular time in modern American history. Her cool, unsentimental observations that have come to exemplify California during the mid 60s and 70s, her unwavering voice carrying the mantle of feminism, unafraid to admit how very angry and afraid she really is. Unabashedly admitting a lifelong crush on John Wayne, a manufactured, wooden caricature of the American man.

Perhaps it is this voice my mother held onto so tightly, searching in Didion's words for the key to self-expression, independence, and experimentation—all the things my mother missed as she moved straight from childhood to motherhood. Perhaps she longed to belong to Didion's California where

". . . time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew."

Oh, don't we all?

My 2nd read. A classic. Many joys here but particular faves are Where the Kissing never stops (about Joan Baez's school for non-violence which her neighbours went to court to get banned), On Morality (why if you find a dead body in the desert you shouldn't just abandon it - kind of a precursor to Raymond Carver's So Much Water So Close to Home and the film Jindabyne that was made from it) and On keeping a notebook (self-explanatory). Listened to the audiobook - Diane Keaton's delivery is perfect, deadpan with occasional quirky curlicues which (apparently) some on audible found irritating - but if you read those reviews you'd never listen to an audiobook!

The immutable shadowed silhouette of Didion's coup cut moves threateningly across the dusted walls of a Californian city sprawl at dusk. A cackling laugh is heard as she overhears the still developing speech of a young budding counterculture, a broad image is spun in bland prose and then haughtily dismissed from her West coast perch of pure aestheticism. Everyone knows Joan Didion is better than them, but that you can physically experience that fact so strongly while simultaneously feeling as if you must be endeared by her provincialism leaves you paralysed. But Didion has already moved on, the bourgeoise eye of Sauron turned upon the last frontier, a rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem.

I first read Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem a half a century ago, when my friend Stephanie recommended it to me. Upon re-reading it, I was amazed to find that the book had not aged. I have, but the Didion's essays were as fresh as they day they were written. The title essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," about the Hippies of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was so fresh because there were no attitudes present in writing which would tend to age it.

In the essay "Where I Was From," she writes about the typical misapprehensions that Easterners have when visiting the Golden State. They think they have seen California, but have they?

They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips in which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing.

How true! Back in 1971, when I first read the book, I had no idea of where I had been living for the previous four or five years. I thought I knew, but I didn't.

I was delighted that the book hit me as being so fresh, when so many of the books I re-read tend to be anything but.

Having recently read "Play It As It Lays," I was interested to read some of Joan Didion's non-fiction. Published in 1968, this collection of non-fiction captures the feel of America during the Sixties, when the counter-culture was in full swing, but optimism was losing its way.

The essay that gives its titles to this collection deals with Haight-Ashbury and paints a picture of hippies, not wandering the streets with flowers in their hair, but wandering, drugged and lost. This is a portrait of young runaways, toddlers given acid, the lost and the tragic. Another favourite of mine was that of a crime, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," of manipulation, greed and adultry.

I will admit that I often lacked understanding of this collection. I have never visited California and never felt inspired to do so. I was born in London and not until the Sixties, so my memories are that of the Seventies onwards. Still, this is a fascinating, if uncomfortable, portrait of a time and place.