Series of twenty essays that reflect the zeitgeist of the 1960s in (mostly) California. It is about dreams and ideals and changes. These essays were published in magazines and were brought together into this collection by the author. It speaks to the many difficulties in adapting to the major changes taking place in America at the time. Topics include drugs, hippies, teen runaways, and the Vietnam War, as well as famous people of the time such as Joan Baez, John Wayne, and Howard Hughes. Didion has a unique voice. She evokes a time and place, and her writing is eloquent. It feels like she is assembling a collage of scenes she has witnessed. She captures the fragmentation of social mores as they morph from the rigidity of the past to a rather chaotic future. Some are more appealing to me than others but together they provide a view of the widespread social changes of the 1960s.

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 decided to get my Joan Didion on this summer in preparation for the biography that comes out next month, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first essay collection, seemed like a good place to start. It's true that some of these essays are hopelessly dated, kind of like those true-crime articles that appear in Vanity Fair that no one's going to care about in five months, let alone fifty years (although the majority of these particular essays were published in The Saturday Evening Post). But overall, these essays give a vivid sense of the California vibe in the 1960s, and some of them hold up very well. "Goodbye to All That" could have been written yesterday, and the title essay was particularly striking--when Didion talks about the young people of the counterculture and how many of them seem to just be repeating phrases they heard other people say, it seemed like it could apply to any generation. But mostly I liked the little tidbits about Joan herself that I got along the way: She's the kind of person who can't wait to flee Honolulu and Newport, RI, but when she tours the nearly deserted island on which the abandoned Alcatraz is slowly deteriorating, she longs to stay. Joan in her early 30s seems precocious compared to people of a similar age these days. It's going to be interesting to see how her voice changes as she gets older.

It is a sunny spring afternoon and Spud, Dwayne, Sue Ellen, Bob and me are sitting in Golden Gate Park getting turned on. There are hippies everywhere, as far as the eye can see, all joining hands in one big community of Love. Not far off The Dead are playing one of their endless songs before a group of gyrating girls who can’t be a day over fourteen.

“Hey Dwayne,” Bob says, “don’t bogart that joint, help a brother in need.”

“Sorry man,” Dwayne says, “I wuz thinking about sumthin' I read in the Saturday Evening Post. Creep Forward, Jerusalem. Any of you cats read it too?"

"Yeh," says Bob, "Chick seems to think because she hung out with some junkies on Haight she’s an authority on the drug situation there.”

“What drug situation?” Sue Ellen says, bloodshot eyes sticking out of her head like two radishes in an overgrown garden patch.

“Five-year-olds on acid, man.”

Dwayne laughs and says, “Oh that ain’t nothing, I fed my pet turtle STP once. Critter thought it wuz God Almighty or something, man, I kid you not.”

“Get outta here, you never fed any turtle any drugs, not if I’m the president of the United States of America,” Spud says.

“I swear to you I did. That turtle started bobbing its little head to the tune of a mystery band and sounds came out of its throat, man, all tortured, like it wuz doing an impression of James Brown.”

“Ha ha, far out!”

"Dig this: after a few minutes of James Brown shenanigans it flips over onto its shell and starts doing this spinning trick, very slow at first, then faster and faster like a reverse top, and the shell gets to spinning so fast it levitates a whole foot off the ground, yogi style, and hangs there a full minute. Then suddenly a voice comes booming out of it like the voice of Doom: 'Dwaaaaaaayne,' it says, 'I am your faaaaaather. Everything, Dwaaaaaaaayne, every word you’ve ever spoken, every thought you’ve ever had, every vibe you’ve ever felt, every kiss you’ve ever kissed, every love you’ve ever loved, every chord you’ve ever played, every girl you’ve ever laid, everything, Dwaaaaaaaaayne, was born in the womb of my gullet. My gullet is the origin of what you are, Dwaaaaaaaayne. Without my gullet, you’d be a bullet without a gun, a son without a father, water without rain, pain without dying, a lion without…'"

“Your pet turtle is starting to sound like Allen Ginsberg, man,” Bob says. “Here gimme that, you’re bogarting again. What wuz I saying anyway? Oh yeh, I saw that Didion chick down on the Tenderloin the other day. She wuz wearing a long black trench coat and holding a tiny notebook in her hand. Had a shifty look in her eye. Got bad vibes from her, man. Thought she wuz a narc—or worse, a nun. Turns out she wuz just some journalist taking notes for an article she wuz writing about our so-called lost generation. Wonder what BS she’ll come up with next. She don’t know shit from Shinola about us and I reckon she’s a hundred years old too. Says can’t any of us speak proper English, but let me tell you something: Dwayne’s pet turtle, high or sober, could write a better English than what I seen in Crawling into Soddom or whatever that piece of crap I read was called.”

At this Bob inhales deeply and gazes off into the distance, to where the Golden Gate Bridge, colossus-like in red steel girders, bestrides the magnificence of yet another setting sun.

I read this essay collection – Joan Didion’s first – earlier this year, but of course I had been hearing about it for decades. It and other Didion books like The White Album are famous in a way that few such collections are. And you can easily see why. The best of these pieces open up the possibilities of the essay form, and they show off an enquiring, questing, rigorous mind.

I’ll never forget the book’s opening essay, “Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream,” which on the surface seems like an account of a real-life case of adultery and murder in San Bernardino County. Didion pays attention to scenes you wouldn’t get in an ordinary true crime account: the era, the place, the noir movies everyone must have watched. There’s one remarkable passage where she walks you – or, more likely, drives you – through a neighbourhood, listing all the store names and slogans, and the details accrue and tell you as much about the milieu and atmosphere in which the crime will take place as any CSI report.

Other memorable essays include an affectionate, nostalgic profile of an aging John Wayne; a piece on Carmel, CA neighbours protesting a school for nonviolence run by folk icon Joan Baez (oh how Didion quietly captures her sanctimoniousness); and the bold title essay, set in the counterculture scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood which, in a couple dozen pages, got me to understand more about the movement than a dozen movies and novels.

And there’s the lovely, elegiac (and often quoted) essay, “Goodbye To All That,” about Didion’s few years living in Manhattan as a young woman before she moved to California. It will make you think about your own dreams, aspirations and life-changing decisions.

Not all the essays are as remarkable as these. Some feel perfunctory or overly oblique. But what a voice. What a prose stylist. And, if the comments from my female journalist/writer friends are any indication, what a role model.

“We tell each other stories,” to quote Didion, “in order to live.” Although these stories are over 50 years old, they still tell us so much about what it’s like to be alive.

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'

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.

“...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.”

I loved these essays. I could go on quoting Didion on and on, there are just too many great passages, great insights from her.

The truth is that I am full of envy. I envy Joan Didion’s facility with words. In a vernacular that is erudite without being stuffy, poetic without being overly romantic, extremely precise and sharp, she distill her thoughts skilfully.

I actually listen to it in audio format, and I know I am going to listen to one or another essay when I need something short to amuse me. But I am also going to buy the book because I want to highlight some passages, and because I want to give my own cadence to her voice. Diane Keaton narrated the version I listened and I did enjoy her voice. She sounded youthful, and made Didion’s monologues less cultured or intellectual than I perceive Didion to be. Which, surprisingly, I felt worked well. It gave Didion’s thoughts a new layer, more accessible and amicable.

This collection is said to capture the essence of 1960’s America, and I think it does. We have John Wayne, Joan Baez, San Francisco and hippies… yet, the personal essays will stay with me longer: self-respect, immorality and the power of going home are obviously more material to me than historical commentary on America.

I don’t know what I will read next, because it will be such a letdown after this book. I feel I am coming down from a high, and right now all I wanted is more of Didion’s words. Like a junkie I may just start from the beginning again. Someone please help me!

California musings.

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.

Sometimes you fall in love with a book's preface, and it guarantees a pleasurable endeavor is about to begin, and indeed, it did. Didion is a journalist, and as such she has the crispness and incisiveness that the trade demands. She paints the scenes as she slices it for you, showing one piece at time. I love her voice, her no nonsense, and the drawn conclusions.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem's title is taken from a Yeats poem, The Second Coming that resonated with Didion through the years. These 1960s essays are unrepentant views of California: the strange, the discordant, the bleak, and the sublime. They are a reckoning.

The format is three sections of thematically related material.

Lifestyles in the Golden Land

"John Wayne: A Love Song" is an elegiac tribute. Didion captures that sense of multiple times at once, when a person is a series of self, laid like translucent glass, like negatives and you see them all at once.

n  As I t happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.n

"Where the Kissing Never Stops" is an essay about Joan Baez and her school of nonviolence in Carmel Valley. Didion writes about neighbor opposition, the events going on, and Baez's surreal disconnectedness from which she observed the elements of the world that interested and rejected everything else. Definite floaty feel.

"California Dreaming" is a piece about a Santa Barbara think tank.

"Marrying Absurd" is a reflection on the wedding business of Las Vegas. It is surreal as you're imagining.

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is one of the longer pieces, and as the eponymous representation of the entirety I like to try and dissect it more. Why was it chosen as such, does it have a gestalt of the essay collection manifested within it?

I'm not sure. It is a maelstrom of conflicting angles that are jammed together from the sublime to the abject. From transcendental experiences to race baiting and 5 years old on acid and peyote.
But I love this passage:
n  Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held a society together.n - Haight-Ashbury '67


Personals

"On Keeping a Notebook" is amusing with anecdotes.
n  Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.n

"On Self Respect" is an excellent essay on self worth, honor.
n  To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.n

"I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind" is a critique of the mythos of Hollywood as the Monster, "The System". As if the studios haven't fallen from power.
n  These protests have about them an engaging period optimism, depending as they do upon the Rousseauean premise that most people, left to their own devices, think not in cliches but with originality and brilliance; that most individual voices, once heard, turn out to be voices of beauty and wisdom.n

"On Morality" oh my, yes. Pointed critique.
n  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.n

Going Home", just think for a moment what that means to you before reading on. . .
n  Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one's past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room.n


Seven Places of the Mind

"Notes from a Native Daughter" highlights what a gem this essay collection is at representing California. It is also an ode to the fading Sacramento of Didion's childhood.
n  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 - love this.

"Letter from Paradise 21° 19' N., 157° 52' W."
A shift in perspective about what Hawaii represents to Didion from origin that was the devastation of December 7th to holiday vacation resort. A view of the Arizona memorial, a cemetery and the Punchbowl with new graves being dug for the Vietnam dead. It's rather haunting to read, disembodied. Heavy with belonging and change of ownership issues.

"Rock of Ages" is a retracing of what Alcatraz was like after the prisoners left and before it was a park attraction. This desolate rock watched over by two keepers.

"The Seacoast of Despair" respins the reality of Newport, Rhode Island and the robber baron mansions that line the way. This is one of two places essays that doesn't address California, but it does juxtapose the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA.

"Guaymas, Mexico"
All about escaping from LA across the desert, and the desert as transcendent experience. Finally losing oneself and then deciding to go home again.

"Los Angeles Notebook" is five vignettes, peek-a-boos of LA. The Santa Ana selection is my favorite, but the snippets are so quick and pointed that they all amuse; the bikini in Ralphs is a close runner-up.
n  Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as reliably as the long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.n

"Goodbye to All That" is Didion's New York stage. The beginning, the middle, and the end. The end is Los Angeles.
n  Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.n

And that's all, folks! Highly recommended and on my to purchase list to add to my California/Los Angeles shelf.

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."

Joan Didion, where have you been all my life? My husband has been trying to get me to read her books for years, and I see now how blindly stupid I've been in not reading her sooner.

Most of the essays in "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" are wondrous; there were only a few that didn't amaze me. (The piece on the Haight-Ashbury district, for example, dragged on way too long and wasn't as interesting as it would have been when it first appeared in 1967. Similarly, the 1964 piece on Hollywood was so enmeshed in the present that it doesn't seem relevant some 40 years later.)

But the rest of the book awed me. My favorite essays were "John Wayne: A Love Song," "On Self-Respect," "On Keeping a Notebook," "On Going Home" and "Goodbye to All That."

Joan Didion's writing moved me the most when she got personal. The story of celebrating her daughter's first birthday was bittersweet, knowing that in real life, Didion's only daughter died young from septic shock. And yet, I treasured that moment of Joan gazing at her baby in her crib, hoping for the best for her.

I can't finish this review unless I mention the author's preface, which I confess I've read and reread several times to fully appreciate it. One night I read a paragraph of it to my husband, who said, "That's my favorite paragraph of hers." Here is a section of it:

"I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent... I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through a call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so tempermentally 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."

I could pull a great quote from every one of the essays in this book, but that would ruin the fun of you discovering it for yourself.

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.