Customer Reviews

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Decades after the fact, this collection of essays is a bit of a period piece, but some of it holds up quite well. The subject of the famous title story -- which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 -- is about the Haight Street scene and, more to the point, the breakdown of human connection that Didion believed that scene represented. She is similarly gloomy about New York in "Goodbye to All That," and about California in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." Though she was in her late 20s and early 30s when she wrote this material, she clearly saw much of what was going on in the 1960s as the activities of a different generation from her own. In any case it's these pieces, along with one about John Wayne, that stand out here, and remain, after all these years, pretty close to extraordinary. Some of the other material (a piece about Joan Baez, etc.) is less memorable. I bought this in the hardback Modern Library edition with a useless introductory essay by Elizabeth Hardwick (but a great photo of Didion on the front cover). Should've gone with paper.

Didion's collection of essays was recommended to me by writing instructors as an example of excellent essay writing. I found it to be just that. In the first third, she writes a series of remarkable essays about California in the late 1960s. The middle third contains personal essays. And the book finishes with a collection of essays about different places she's been - New York, Hartford, Hawaii, Sacramento.

What makes her writing most impressive is her masterful presentation of portraits, inserting herself just occasionally to remind the reader of who the photographer was, to inject humanity. She does an excellent job combining place and character and shows that long sentences can work. This book is useful both an as example to those who aspire to writing better essays and as a memorable voice from the 1960s.

This classic 1968 work is justly renowned as Joan Didion's finest collection of essays. Its central theme - and the theme behind much of what Didion writes - is the atomisation of American culture, the way in which things have fallen apart and left millions adrift from the cultural and ethical moorings that their ancestors took for granted. 33 years later, it is ironic to look back on the period that the writer depicts with such grim pathos when it is celebrated as a time of idealism and freedom by the survivors of the sixties. Many pieces in the first and third sections of the book ("Lifestyles in the Golden Land" and "Seven Places of the Mind") seem rather dated; the piece which made the most impression on this reviewer was the least ambitious of the group; to me, the portrait of Comrade Laski of the CPUSA-ML is a tiny masterpiece of irony. The pieces from the second section ("Personals")were much more enjoyable, especially "On Keeping a Notebook" and "On Self-Respect." Overall, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is more memorable for the author's endearing prose style than for the individual essays.

I am relieved to have finally read Didion's much acclaimed book of essays, which was published in 1968--and so it's old. So what? Didion is old, too, and probably an even better writer because of it. But even back then her skills were blazingly and brilliantly sharp. Aesthetically the work is not beautiful--there's no poet in Didion, although the title of the book is from a fantastically riveting poem by Yeats, which she quotes prior to the preface. Beauty is no matter, however, because Didion's essays are the archetype, the Platonic Form; put simply: the way it should be done. The book is divided into 3 sections. The first section is comprised of essays on 1960s California. It is here that we find Didion's diamond, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", which is a quasi-insider's view of San Francisco's Haight-Ashberry drug culture circa 1967. Other memorable essays from this group include an elegy-esque piece for John Wayne titled, "John Wayne: A Love Song" and "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38", a portrait of California wealth painted in the image of Howard Hughs. The second group of essays is a collection of Didion's personal reflections on subjects such as self-respect, morality, and the poignant "On Going Home". Didion ends the book with a series of seven essays on places she has visited: Hawaii, Mexico, Alcatraz, Los Angeles, to name a few. Here her ruminations are vivid and blunt, but also exciting. The reader feels as though she has taken a trip of sorts to the places Didion portrays so clearly and persuasively. Clear and persuasive are Didion's hallmarks. Hers is a style whose fruit is truly a masterful group of essays.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the best book of essays I have ever, by the grace of God, been fortunate enough to own and read. In essay after essay, I found myself saying,"Go on, Joan. You said it, Joan. We are the same, you and I, Joan, etc." That is the type of book Slouching Towards Bethlehem is. Reading it, slowly, meticulously, I felt such a close kinship, a bond, not with the writer but with her words -- so carefully chosen and wonderfully articulated. These essays are not meant, honestly, for teenagers, although, if given a chance, the totality of the book would be most beneficial for their pliable and socially indoctrinated minds.

The purport of this book is something that I can so easily identify with: the disappearance of the past for the establishment of a fragmented, roughly organized new society with newfangled, unaccustomed societal perceptions as well as an aggressive casting off of the traditional value system of those who were born and raised a long time before the emergence of the radical, cataclysmic sixties. These essays explore, through author Joan Didion's own feelings and experiences and the feelings and experiences of those she encountered, the disharmononized emotions of the hippy generation vs the elders of the more reactionary periods, periods where: Free Love, Acid Trips, Groovy, Crystal Snorting Gurus and Muumuu Dressed Followers seemed a complex and social oddity in the hierarchy of those who were deemed, "Not with it, man."

What is so nice about these essays is that they are not condescending; there were and are thousands upon thousands of citizens and non-citizens alike who had and have no clue whatsoever as to what the counter-culture represented (me, honestly, being one in that vast catagory). Joan Didion thrust herself into its epicenter, and with a keen eye took it all in, trying to understand. The darkness of the counter-culture I think is best represented in the title essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehen" on page 101: "Pretty little 16-year-old chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Hight Street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy..." That was the darkness of the counter-culture, but that is not representative of the entirety of it. Didion's family can be traced back all the way to the Donner-Reed tragedy in which cannibalism was the well known result. Thus, California is liked to that sole dark act; it is forever historically and symbolically linked, California becoming tarnished and not the land of "Golden opportunity." That is one way of looking at the counter-culture. Or it can be viewed in this fashion, in the essay: "Rock of Ages" about Alcatraz Island on page 208:

"I saw the shower room (in Alcatraz) with the soap still in the dishes. I picked up a yellowed program from an Easter service...and I struck a few notes on an upright piano with the ivory all rotted from the keys and I tried to imagine the prison as it had been, with the big lights playing over the windows all night long and the guards patrolling the gun galleries and the silverware clattering into a bag as it was checked in after meals, tried dutifully to summon up some distaste, some night terror of the doors locking and the boat pulling away. But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusion, and empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke..."

Maybe that is what the hippy generation was trying to flee from: "Human vanities. Human illusions."

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a book where the search for meaning is in of itself the comprehension of change. And that is what the sixies, like other decades represented, another unusual facet of life.

Like a lot of folks I have a fascination with the '60's and the title essay from this collection, a look at the hippie 'scene' in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, is one of the classic contemporary reports on the counter-culture. Ironically the title, picked from Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming', was intended to suggest that hippiedom was the coming paradigm; in reality Didion completed her essay shortly before the 'death of the hippie'. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the best book of essays I have ever, by the grace of God, been fortunate enough to own and read. In essay after essay, I found myself saying,"Go on, Joan. You said it, Joan. We are the same, you and I, Joan, etc." That is the type of book Slouching Towards Bethlehem is. Reading it, slowly, meticulously, I felt such a close kinship, a bond, not with the writer but with her words -- so carefully chosen and wonderfully articulated. If you're looking for another great book to read, try "The Bark of the Dogwood" with its jaw-dropping scenes, hilarity, and darkness all woven together. It takes place in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and well into the 90s, showing a variety of culture and class. Not to be missed, this one.

I have owned several copies of this book, and have given away more copies than I can count. It's a book I come back to, at least once a year since 1980, when I first read it. It seems to me to be better and better each time. The times it's about may be long gone, but the issues at the heart of these essays haven't changed much at all.

Much has been made of Didion's take on California, and this book is laden with essays about the place, and the people, and a particular time that - as other reviewers here have noted - has a different resonance in popular culture than the one she presents here. Didion herself recently professed some alarm at the idea that she is an expert on the place (in 'Where I Was From'), but there's no doubt that she's provided more food for thought about contemporary culture than almost anyone else.

But the real strength of her writing is in her prose style, in which not a single sentence is sloppy, or ill-considered. Her style is distinctive, but it's not just for show. There are other fine essayists working today, but few are as disciplined and considered as Didion in the way they write.

It's probably a toss-up as to whether this book or 'The White Album' is a better place to start with Didion's work. I think 'The White Album' is a more cohesive collection, but there are better individual essays in 'Slouching', including the sublime essays in the 'Personals' section. And chances are that once you've read one, you'll read the other, and in that case it makes sense to start with the earlier collection, which is this one.

This is a wonderful collection of essays by a keen observer of the popular scene. Particularly in an age when we have come to romanticize the "Summer of Love" and all that it is worthwhile to take a look back at what at least one talented writer saw and wrote at the time. Apart from the excellent title piece we get "Notes from a Native Daughter" which captures California in a way that I never thought anyone could, "The Seacoast of Despair" which hits Newport right smack between the eyes (who else but Didion could come up with a line like "To stand in the dining room of The Breakers is to imagine fleeing from it, pleading migraine"? We also get a truly lovely homage to John Wayne, a spooky story about Howard Hughes,etc. etc. Apart from the "native Daughter" however the essay that has haunted me for 20 years is the final "Goodbye to all that" -it is strangely wonderful to be assigning it as class reading to students who are now as old as I was when I first read it. I think the years have been kind to this and to most of the rest of this anthology.

Like a lot of folks I have a fascination with the '60's and the title essay from this collection, a look at the hippie 'scene' in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, is one of the classic contemporary reports on the counter-culture. Ironically the title, picked from Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming', was intended to suggest that hippiedom was the coming paradigm; in reality Didion completed her essay shortly before the 'death of the hippie'. She did no real investigating and so never saw the beatnik connection: the hippies were both a continuation of Beat philosophy and a human overload that collapsed the fragile community that had developed in the area in the early '60's. The irony is compounded by another essay in the collection in which she revisits her childhood town - Sacramento, California's state capital. Didion never mentions it but the Governor was at the time a certain fellow named Ronald Reagan! A Hollywood politician, beneath the notice of such as our journalistic Joan. Well, at least someone WAS slouching toward Bethlehem...

Didion affects a kind of cool, ironic detachment but like Tom Wolfe, another of the formerly 'new' journalists, there is an underlying disdain of her subjects intended to exalt her judgement at their expense. Ultimately she comes across as a small soul in a large and incomprehensible world.

This is a fabulous, interesting read, a book of essays by Didion, regarding the 1960's, particularly the West and California. Through pieces about suburban murder, Las Vegas weddings, the counter-culture movement in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco, Sacramento's history, Communists, life in New York as a young woman, the Santa Ana winds, John Wayne, Hawaiian history, and personal reflections on herself, among others, Didion confesses a perspective of directness, dry humor, irony, and insight that trump immediate judgements and delve into a level of beauty that is poetic and modern.
None of her subjects is treated condescendingly, though the shock and disturbance of a mute but bright little kid, whose mother is dropping acid and probably far too young herself strikes Didion. As does the image of a young girl, maybe five, who is fed acid, and other drugs, by her juvenile mother. At the same times, in the essay about Hawaii, Didion doesn't shy away from showing a society ingrained with racism, where people become tourist products and exotic characters.
Didion analytically writes about morality, and respect, two issues that pervade her more journalistic writing, with an individualistic and logical feel, one that humanizes constantly, reminding that our own self analysis and judgements are inconsistent things, hardly enough for us to deny the awe of others.
So quicky Las Vegas weddings, diligent and unsuccessful Communists and pioneering drug abusers are not lent a foolishness or an evil. They are observed and presented, and written with the possibility of going one way or another.
Throughout Didion captures a time and many places, a mystery and a depth that expose the 1960's in America, and California for more than the sum of it's parts. Where the flower power/feminism movements are sometimes regarded as sweet revolutions, here they are infused with some less than glorious characteristics. And the paradise that is Hawaii, or Southern California are shown to be as troubled and dark as they are sunny and warm.
This is an essential read. Joan Didion is a terrific writer, capable of communicating clearly, but not her opinion, or a mere judgement. Her voice is subtle, and her quotes and dialogue are kept to a minimum, while her mind, works as a filter through which the varied subjects flow, exposing a deeper humanity.
The Modern Library version also features a history of Didion's writing, and an essay by Elizabeth Hardwicke about Slouching Towards Bethlehem.