‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ by Joan Didion
Ever since reading her critically acclaimed memoir The Year of Magical Thinking late last year I have come to view Joan Didion as a heroine of sorts. Not just as a writer, but as an overall human being. Born in Sacramento to two parents who were themselves native Californians, Joan Didion studied English at UC Berkeley and, after graduating in 1956, she moved to New York City to work at Vogue. During her time at Vogue she was also a regular contributor to the National Review and various other publications. In 1963 her first novel Run River was published, and this essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, followed in 1968. Her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award and was adapted for the stage, while her most recent nonfiction work Blue Nights was published last November. The former is a novel-length meditation on grief and memory informed by the loss of her husband John Gregory Dunne, while the latter is a heartbreaking elegy to their daughter Quintana Roo who died aged just thirty-nine. Didion is the author of many other works, the novels Play It As It Lays (1972) and Democracy (1984) being two notable examples, along with several other volumes of collected nonfiction.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem comprises essays - some more political, some more personal - that were written by Didion between 1961 and 1968. As stated in the acknowledgments, many of the essays included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem appeared first in publications such as The New York Times Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, and pieces such as Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, the first essay in the book, do indeed have an air of investigative journalism about them. Others, namely Notes from a Native Daughter, are more autobiographical, with Didion calling upon her childhood spent in California to further illustrate her ideas and observations. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is divided into three sections: I. Life Styles in the Golden Land; II. Personals; III. Seven Places of the Mind. The first part focuses on Didion’s native California and is redolent with descriptions of the incendiary Santa Ana winds and the dead-summer heat in Death Valley; other essays therein focus on luminaries such as John Wayne and Joan Baez and their apposite lives in the Golden State. Part two, the shortest, includes more personal essays of Didion’s and razor-sharp musings on self-respect and morality. The third and final part of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is rather more abstract and diverse, ending with a piece entitled Goodbye to All That which - far from having anything at all to do with Robert Graves - provides an insight into Didion’s decision to leave her adopted home of Manhattan and return to California.
I loved Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It is one of a great many books that I have been meaning to read since the dawn of time, primarily because its true-to-life depiction of California ought to be of great assistance in redrafting my debut novel, which is set in NoCal. And, given that I live nowhere near California and have visited only once, I need all the intel I can get! As a California native Didion is an invaluable authority: instead of perpetuating myths of bikinis and Daisy Dukes (I’m looking at you, Katy Perry), Didion paints her home state in all its rugged, un-manicured glory. She talks at length of ‘a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and wheels through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.' Now is that hard-hitting prose or isn’t it? I can certainly see where Bret Easton Ellis got a lot of his ideas for Less Than Zero, particularly regarding imagery and the portrayal of Los Angeles and its untamed periphery. If asked I would have to say that Where the Kissing Never Stops and the titular Slouching Towards Bethlehem are my two favourite pieces, simply because they offer a peek into a past (i.e. the 1960s) that I arrived too late to be a part of. Richly detailed and endlessly surprising, I recommend these two California-centric works above all.
To conclude, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is one of those landmark works of literature that I am now kicking myself over not having read earlier. The more I discover of Didion’s intimidating body of work the more my admiration for her deepens; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem the depth of her insight and the sheer breadth of her knowledge are, as one reviewer so succinctly puts it, startling. She reserves judgement of her real-life heroes and villains, offering them neither pity nor scorn, and her prose is quintessentially Didion: considered, precise, never flouncy or melodramatic. This really is an indispensable work of nonfiction and, even if you are not usually drawn to essays, I urge you to read it.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in July 2012.