What do I need to say about Joan Didion?! She’s bloody fantastic.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, probably Didion’s most favourably-received essay collection, takes us to the heart of 1960s California - the hippy movement, the judicial system, the modernisation of Sacramento (her hometown), and even Hollywood.

The best essay, in my opinion, is the book’s namesake, which includes the now iconic passage about a five year old on acid. (Yup, you read that correctly.)

Didion has such a clear voice, and she’s so damn smart. If you’ve not read any of works yet, this is a good place to start.

45th book for 2018.

I really liked both the writing and insights in "South and West".

I lived in Los Angeles for a few years, and traveled a fair bit around the state, and fascinated by the late 1960s, so this book should have been an immediate hit for me, but the essays rarely seemed to go anywhere. I would say they were mostly style over substance, but even the style wasn't that good much of the time. She doesn't engage in the subject matter sufficiently; and comes across as condescending and aloof. I am not sure there was one person in the book she wrote about that she actually liked (other than her baby and perhaps her father).

She framed some interesting aspects of California for me, but only two-stars because she never gets beyond her self-absorbed surface reflection.

2-stars.

Audiobook….(6 hours and 53 minutes long)….
…..read by Diane Keaton (‘outstanding’ as the voice narrator)
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was first published in 1968.

It was very engaging listening to Diane Keaton read sentences …with her wonderful enunciation choices……
yet reading these essays and articles would allow more time to pause-linger-and digest Joan Didion’s prose deeper…..(I’m sure of it)…
But….
still laidback from a recent Hawaiian vacation…
…soaking in our warm pool while rain ‘poured’ heavily…
Diane Keaton’s voice came through our outside Bluetooth speaker.
It had its own type ‘lingering’ pleasures in itself.

I grew up in this era — which Joan Didion writes about.
I lived here. Still live here. I am quite familiar with the counterculture during the 60’s in the SFBay area — including Monterey and Carmel —Palo Alto - Kepler’s book store in Menlo Park, Stanford- the music jazz festivals - Bob Dylan- the folk ways - the peace movement….etc.

PARTS WERE FUNNY…

MY OWN LOOKING BACK….
As a confused-late-bloomer-aware-teenager myself by the end of the 60’s….from being a gymnast pom-pom wholesome innocent ….
…..who remembers Peter-Pan collars - Kelly green with pink clothes …. matching shoes with handbags…..
I can still remember my own ‘shock’ ‘sightseeing’ and smelling the Haight Ashbury district back in the 60’s [it’s high-end chic today]….but in the 60’s, most parents didn’t want their kid anywhere near the hippie drug scene….(my mom gave me the piercing-killer looks and lecture— STAY FAR AWAY from Haight Ashbury > and DON’T have sex until marriage)….
We knew several ‘nice Jewish kids’ in our community who over-dosed on LSD. I was too afraid - PETRIFIED actually to take drugs….and I didn’t know how to be a flower child. (Admired the artistic talents though from those who made it look natural).
My fashion was too basic (clean cut boring)….
I failed from MOM’S - sex-lecture.
By age 21, enough was enough! I thoroughly enjoyed my first summer obsessively having sex several times a day — had to make up for lost years….
My first words after my first experience —
“That’s it!!!!!….what’s the BIG DEAL?”
Richard said….”hm….not the response he hoped to hear”….but then promised— “it would get better”. It did >> that summer….in Yosemite under waterfalls - etc.
But about the forbidden - anti Haight Ashbury in the 1960’s for ‘good girls’
Interesting—
…..years later, our older daughter lived in the colorful neighborhood—a half block up from Haight Ashbury ….until she moved to Los Angeles.
It gave me a subtle historical pleasure.…..

So….BACK TO THIS BOOK….
….knowing plenty about the 60’s era….
I felt the ‘audiobook format’ worked great for me….and that Diane Keaton was an added treat to listen to. Paul loved it too — chuckling often.
Paul joined me first in the pool….(that Diane Keaton pulled him in.
THEN…..
…..later at our kitchen table while we were making pottery planters from ‘disenfranchised’ tile squares….we kept listening to Diane do her thing —- READ WONDERFULLY….
It’s been an ‘art-project-couple-of-days’ here at home - mixed with rain-warm-water-soaking…..

THESE ESSAYS INSPIRED all kinds of conversations - of …..old memories!!!

Listening to this book with Paul was DEFINITELY ADDED FUN (“The Good Old Days”, he said)…..
Ha….the guy who ‘built’ and was living in a Tree House in Santa Cruz when I first met him …..
When I saw Paul’s gorgeous TREEHOUSE artwork and the stained glass windows ….I thought….”yep….a productive hippie”…..[worked for me]….
Paul went through Jewish conversion at age 9….when his mother married an Orthodox Jew (a couple years after the death of his dad)….His adorable Bar Mitzvah photos are in a photo book in our house.

MORE ABOUT THESE ESSAYS….
The title essay, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’, examined how society was failing…..[hippies - drugs - anti-establishment]….
Other essays include Joan Baez, John Wayne, influences from Howard Hughes…… etc.
Didion wrote about families, lifestyles, marriages in Los Vegas, misplaced children, morality, home, commune’s, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, insightful observations about Southern California, and New York City……etc.

Joan Didion had a reputation as one of the greatest writers in the literary world….”master observer”…..
And perhaps it was her gifts of perception, observation, and personal reflections about herself (autobiographical essays), along with her literary writing skills….that made her one of America’s premier writer.

I read “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights” yeas ago,(I still own the physical books)….and maybe I should them again — because I don’t remember appreciating her work — not substantially….
In fact …..if my memory is correct - there were aspects of her writing that didn’t sit enthusiastically jolly with me…..
Yet….I DID enjoy these essays….(a non-acid-enjoyable joint-listening trip)…..
So…did Joan Didion change? — [I don’t think so] — but I think I ‘have’.
I’m interested in reading more of her books now -
MUCH MORE than I was years ago!!!

Yep…..”Slouching Towards Bethlehem” has inspired me ‘towards’ …..reading several other of her books (both more essays and her novels).

NEVER a hippie chick: I was too ALL AMERICAN (but I did borrow my friends white go-go boots a few times)….
By the end of these essays…..I was a NEW JOAN DIDION fan……

I absolutely cherished these precious essays…

And last:
May Joan Didion Rest In Peace!

First published in 1968 to wide popularity, this collection of essays and journalism is a time capsule to the 1960s, for better and for worse, and mostly relating to the experience from a California perspective. There's no question to its significance. When it was published, I suspect readers were thrilled to have someone finally describe life in blunt terms. Reading it today, I found its strengths still lie in the authentic, slice-of-life style. Since I didn't live through the '60s, it felt refreshing to read about the era through cold truths, personal feelings, news-worthy events, and overall mindset of the time. This is day-in-the-life type stuff, which is much lighter and somehow comes across more real than thick history books.

Overall, while I'm glad I read it for the educational value, I didn't feel riveted enough to ever turn the page eagerly. One of those you got to be in the right mood for.

Maybe like 3.5?

Not entirely sure what to say about this one, other than I enjoyed it immensely. Didion's prose is about as good as any other contemporary author I've read, and she's got a knack for powerful imagery and seems to know how to drive a point home with real force and emphasis. As someone who was born a stone's throw away from Manhattan, the last essay in this collection, "Goodbye to All That," was among the most powerful for me. There's something hyperreal about New York, and there's certainly something hyperreal about youth, and the combination of the two can be at times explosive, in really disastrous ways.

Not to mention, Didion seems to set both the standard and the methodology for a great many literary essayists to come. After reading this book, I can hear much of Didion in the best contemporary essayists--David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Hilton Als come to mind. Her influence alone should make this worth reading, but never mind that--if nothing else, it stands on its own.

Didion explores an almost random series of social scenes, mostly around California, and mostly in the supposedly exciting 1960s. In observing her subjects, she shows no regard for any conventions of sociable positivity. She just watches people with a disturbingly candid eye, noting their habits of mind, their fragmented loyalties, their banalities, and even their potential for depravity. In 1965, during the era of the Beach Boys, she writes:

"... when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then it is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then it is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there."

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

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Joan Didion and Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays. Published in 1968, the book is a compilation of pieces commissioned mostly by the Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, ranging from exposés on John Wayne or Michael Laski (founder of the Communist Party USA) to essays on herself to the title piece, which documents runaways in Haight-Ashbury in 1967.

"Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is a wonderfully grimy long-read documenting the Flower Power era as it was turning ugly. I abandoned the book at the 70% mark, though. I don't feel that I was doing Didion's literary journalism any favors by binging one article after another. I wish I could've read these pieces as they were published in the 1960s, one per month. Taken together, I didn't feel they added up to much, except that every thinking person in every decade feels they're living in the end of times.

Joan Didion was born in 1934 in Sacramento, California. Her father was an Army Air Corps officer and the family relocated often. Didion discovered reading at a young age and began writing at the age of five. In 1956, she received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her senior year, Didion won 1st place in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and was awarded a job as a research assistant, working her way up to associate feature editor.

She relocated to California in 1964 after marrying fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, with whom Didion wrote assignments for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post to pay the bills. Essays, novels, non-fiction, memoirs and screenplays (Dunne & Didion adapted the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson version of A Star is Born) would follow. Since her husband's death in 2003, Didion maintains residency in both Los Angeles and New York City.



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
-- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende

I first read this collection years ago and loved it, which is proof that there is an ever changing time and place for books. This time, I appreciated the vivid snapshots Didion created but with the exception of the last essay, about her twenties in NYC, the essays did not resonate with me.

As you might have guess if your reading my reviews chronological I'm working my way through a 'modern classics' box-set which I got very cheap. Didion's collection of essays from the 1960s were a bestselling phenomenon on publication and heralded as taking journalism to a level of quality written prose. This however, did not resonate with me at all, as back in 2005, when I read this I gave it 3 out of 12.

That a collection of journalism sixty years old can leave you breathless is only one of the qualities of this collection and of this author. The stories in this collection put into the shade almost every working journalist or writer you will read currently. This is the sort of writing which should be the bench mark for anyone attempting to write about almost anything.

The essay 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem' should be read by anyone trying to understand the 1960's and is possibly one of the best personal accounts of what those turbulent years meant in America. Her observation of people and events is masterful, almost everyone who read and praised the piece at the time misunderstood it as Joan Didion describes in the introduction to this edition. That is not surprising because it is so non-didactic, it is all reportage, no commentary although there is plenty of attempts to question what that turbulent summer of love in San Francisco said about America and particularly young Americans at the time. She picks out trends that clearly were important but are now almost forgotten because circumstances have changed.

One of the most interesting things Didion picks up when speaking with the young people she encountered was their lack of any real sense of home or roots. It is forgotten how mobile the post WWII families were. I was born in 1958, so too young to have been a 'flower child' or take part in the summer of love in 1967, yet by the time I left grade/primary school my family had moved four times, to three different states and I had attended three different schools and that was not unusual. The 100,000 children (many of them as young as 14 and most not out of high school) not only had no family living close to them, they had no long term friends or neighbours. Even many of the places they lived were barely a few years old, sub-divisions of suburbs without history. Nowhere else was affected like the USA was by the 1960's - you didn't have 100, let alone one hundred thousand children leave home and come and squat around the King's Road in London - but they did come in those numbers to San Francisco. For many Americans it was a sign, along with Vietnam, civil rights marches and later riots, that their country was falling apart. Thousands of articles and books were written at the time and later to try and explain what was happening - none of them are worth reading and none of them said anything because they all went with a view already formed. Didion is one of the few who went and talked and listened.

What she reported had resonance then and now. It is rare to find any reporter who managed to convey the speech of those times the 'groovy', 'turn-on' and 'old woman' without sounding ridiculous or patronising. Way too many films and tv shows were made in the late 60's with characters using those, and similar, words and it always sounded fake. When Didion reports its use it doesn't sound fake, ridiculous maybe, like all youth group jargon and although the hippie kids of 1967 may have been shallow, it was a shallowness based on idealism and Didion captures that. I can't help preferring the idealistic shallowness of 1967 to the materialistic shallowness of the 'Valley Girl', MTV and Pauli Shore generation.

Didion also captures a great deal that was later expunged from the story, women were referred to as 'my old woman' without embarrassment and objectified and treated in way that is only slightly less shocking then her report of young white radicals in black-face (I kid you not) abusing and bullying a young black man as not revolutionary enough and calling him an Uncle Tom - it must be read to be believed - like her account of hippies giving small amounts of various drugs to their five year old children. Didion is never blind, accepting, or patronising in her reportage - it is just full frank and honest.

Which is what you can say about so much of the rest of the writing in this collection - most of which in various ways are about California and Sacramento where she grew up. They are fascinating and still say things worth reading - how many sixty year old pieces about Howard Hughes are worth reading? None I would imagine, except Didion's. In 1964 she reported on Hollywood after the demise of the 'studio system':

"(The demise of the studios promised) 'fewer and better' pictures, and what have we? We have fewer pictures but not necessarily better pictures...It (is) impossible to work honestly in Hollywood...what is left of the studios thwart...them, the money men conspire against them...their prints (are taken) before they finishing cutting. They are bound by cliches...the intellectual climate (is wrong)...if only they were allowed freedom...were allowed to exercise their voice..."

Plus ca change, the same could, and has been written again, and again in the sixties years since. But right from the start Didion recognised it as self-serving elision to avoid unpleasant truths.

Once you start quoting Didion it is hard to stop but I cannot resist the following from her essay on self-respect where, talking about cliches like Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton or the British empire being built by men who always dressed for dinner, she says:

"To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash course in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

I could easily go on quoting, or simply mentioning, writings which speak loudly to me and which I want to force on others. Least I do a poor job and put you off reading Didion I will stop and simply say these are writings that will not disappoint.