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The Book:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
By Joan Didion
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First Published in 1968
The Talk:
If I had to describe Joan Didion’s essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem in two words it would be: California Noir.
No matter what subject Didion writes about, her eye is always drawn to the macabre—the “true crime” aspect of modern American life, the idea that underneath any polished surface is some kind of deeper corruption.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. was high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
I don’t think it’s even too far off to read her as a kind of cultural private eye. Her half-obscured persona in her essays (what typifies her as a “New Journalist”) is that of a lurker, who spends her time wandering around, observing, asking questions, collecting facts, and trying to make sense of what went wrong in culture, in society.
There’s a kind of cynicism in her work.
“Lucille wanted to see the world,” her father would say in retrospect, “and I guess she found out.”
And yet cynicism can also be a kind of burnt-out moralism. The cynic stands in lonely judgement of the place and time in which they live, calling out the hypocrisy and superficiality of it all. The cynic is an outsider, an observer, of a world they both fully comprehend and feel alienated from.
What makes Didion a fascinating writer is that this noir-ish sensibility was, in a lot of ways, at odds with her times. The peak era for literary noir was the 1920s and 30s; for film it was the 1940s. Slouching Towards Bethlehem collects essays she wrote during the 1960s—an era that wasn’t black and white film but color TV. It was psychedelic and groovy. It was an era defined by commercial jet airliners, a booming aerospace industry, and The Jetsons.
And it’s this friction, I think, between Didion and her times, that helps explain what makes her style and perspective so compelling.
Joan the Traditionalist
Although Didion chronicled the Baby Boomer generation, Didion was born in 1934. She was a member of the Silent Generation, often called the Traditionalists, children born during the Great Depression who had their childhoods disrupted by America’s entry into World War II. (Notably, President Biden is the only president we’ve had from the Silent Generation.)
Pearl Harbor was the cataclysm that defined how Didion’s generation saw the world. As she writes in her essay “Letter from Paradise, 20° 19’ N., 157° 52’ W.” about visiting Hawaii:
There was, to begin with, the Hawaii first shown to me in an atlas on December 7, 1941, the pastel pinpoints that meant war and my father going away and makeshift Christmases in rented rooms near Air Corps bases and nothing the same ever again.
She was seven years old. Later in the essay, after she cries at the site of the Utah fifty feet underwater, she writes:
A few days ago someone just four years younger than I am told me that he did not see why a sunken ship 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 was in her 30s during the 60s. The median age of the country at the time was 28, which made Didion “old.” (Today the median age in America is 39 and rising.) It wasn’t just a country of “flower children”—it was a country of children, period.
Didion knew the hard edge of economic want and the collective sacrifices of the War. Those born the 1950s knew nothing of that, and they were entering American society during a boom of middle class prosperity. (1960s levels of economic growth would be considered miraculous today.)
I think it’s from this vantage that Didion looks at her times, particularly at the children and teenagers of her time. In her mind, they aren’t serious people. Joan Baez is not a serious person. The student communists are not serious. Hollywood is not serious. Middle class taste and its pursuit of money and consumption is not serious. Hippies tripping on acid in the parks of San Francisco are not serious.
What is serious for Didion? Death. Crime. Prison. War. Pearl Harbor. John Wayne.
Didion is particularly attracted to hard things, dry things. The desert of the Southwest is the kind of bedrock reality that Didion believes in most of all—the hard but sublime fact that blinds you, burns you, makes you miserable, threatens to kill you or drive you mad, but never lies to you, never dissimulates.
The center cannot hold
There’s one other thing that Didion takes seriously in this collection of essays: The innocence of children. When Didion weeps at the war graves in Hawaii, she notes that one of the soldiers buried there was sixteen years old. Her famous essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” ends with her watching a kindergartner sitting on a living room floor, tripping on acid.
My favorite paragraph of the book, which captures everything Didion does so well, comes from her essay on the Las Vegas wedding industry, “Marrying Absurd.”
It is the ideal topic for her: Something once serious now done completely unseriously, a traditional institution of promise, commitment, and duty, a communal rite, now commercialized and turned into a farce.
I sat next to one such wedding party in a Strip restaurant the last time I was in Las Vegas. The marriage had just taken place; the bride still wore her dress, the mother her corsage. A bored waiter poured out a few swallows of pink champagne (“on the house”) for everyone but the bride, who was too young to be served. “You’ll need something with more kick than that,” the bride’s father said with heavy jocularity to his new son-in-law; the ritual jokes about the wedding night had a certain Panglossian character, since the bride was clearly several months pregnant. Another round of pink champagne, this time not on the house, and the bride began to cry. “It was just as nice,” she sobbed, “as I hoped and dreamed it would be.”
Within a single paragraph, we know all the people, their economic status, their values, the whole story. The subtext reveals these people as utterly pathetic. The tone is cool, aloof, yet biting in its objectivity. And yet at the center we see a likely teenage girl, completely surrounded, in every way.
For Didion, the “center cannot hold” because the children have lost their way, they have not received the social training they should’ve received from their families.
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 society together.
Promises, commitments, duties, loyalties, community—these give life its seriousness. And the Baby Boomer generation had lost those social bonds. They were not released from these bonds to something better, in Didion’s eyes, but simply to chaos.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Related:
Loneliness is the price we pay for modern life
Why we feel powerless and all our options seem dumb
One of Last Survivors of Pearl Harbor Attack Dies at 102 (NYTimes)
Excellent review; i've recently taken to reading a lot of her work and I think you've really captured what makes her work unique well. Wonder if there any modern writers who'll be thought about in a similar vein.
Great essay!
I liked, "And yet cynicism can also be a kind of burnt-out moralism. The cynic stands in lonely judgement of the place and time in which they live, calling out the hypocrisy and superficiality of it all. The cynic is an outsider, an observer, of a world they both fully comprehend and feel alienated from."
Great thought!