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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968) - April 2022
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I'm planning on making a start today.
I'm in. I absolutely loved the title essay and four or five others.
I just picked this up so will be joining too. The preface is very intriguing! Something about her tone that I love.
A couple of comments on the first essay, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.I liked how this touched on the California dream that drew people to the area, and how that dream is juxtaposed with the isolation and insularity of the desert area of San Bernardino where this takes place. I also thought the trial was interesting, including some negative comments about her basically acting above her station, which sounded like they belonged a century earlier.
And I found this interesting recent essay by the subject's daughter!
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story...
Wonderful essay. Didion was honest and classy.
Not sure if I will re-read this or not. I just finished it last year. I could be tempted to read the beginning part again since I read that part in 2017 or something.I really enjoyed the book.
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More later...
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As things stand I am not going to read this book
I was disappointed by The Year of Magical Thinking (non fiction) however was mightily impressed by Play It As It Lays (fiction)
I'm not tempted by more of her non-fiction but may yet get swayed towards trying more non-fiction, depending on the tenor of this discussion
The Haight Ashbury piece sounds like it might tick a few of my boxes but I'm not sure I will be sympathetic towards her angle or perspective. Tricky huh?
Either way, I am really looking forward to all your comments and reactions
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Can one of our American or Canadian friends explain about The Saturday Evening Post? Didion defends publishing there when readers ask how she can reconcile that with her conscience. Presumably it was a right wing publication?
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This is what Wikipedia says about the politics of The Saturday Evening Post...
After the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Post columnist Garet Garrett became a vocal critic of the New Deal. Garrett accused the Roosevelt Administration of initiating socialist strategies. After editor George Lorimer died, Garrett became editorial writer-in-chief and criticized the Roosevelt Administration's support of the United Kingdom and efforts to prepare to enter what became the Second World War and allegedly showed some support for Adolf Hitler in some of his editorials. Garrett's positions aroused controversy and may have cost the Post readers and advertisers in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and The Holocaust
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Finished the first essay and loved it! And thanks, Kathleen, for posting the link to that piece by Lucille's daughter.
I'd never heard of Lucille Miller but had been thinking that the story reminded me of The Postman Always Rings Twice even before Didion mentions Cain. That's a book that seemed to me to be about the failures of the 'American Dream' too, as well as the weird coincidence of plot. Links back to The Great Gatsby, too. And in the way Lucille is treated in court as a woman who doesn't know her own place, interesting connection to Play It As It Lays.
But even if the story itself hadn't been fascinating, Didion's prose is just fabulous: 'There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows'.
There's a sort of cool detachment in the way she writes, perceptive and observational, that I love. But more creative that pure journalism, such as the quotation above.
Roman Clodia wrote: "There's a sort of cool detachment in the way she writes, perceptive and observational, that I love. But more creative that pure journalism, such as the quotation above."Cool detachment--yes! This is what I love as well, and am finding this prose much more creative as you say than so many other essays I read.
Perhaps that's why any hint of her political views isn't bothering me. But I do think she was of her time. The conservative movement in the states made a huge shift at that time, and I believe she shifted with it, from Republican to Democrat (as did Hillary Clinton, if I remember right).
I didn't enjoy the second essay, but then I can't stomach John Wayne. "Where the Kissing Never Stops" sheds some interesting light on Joan Baez, though.
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It looks like I'm coming to this collection with the least knowledge of anyone here! I've never seen a John Wayne film and wouldn't recognise a photo of him - and know the name Joan Baez, but nothing else about her. I even had to google Haight-Ashbury - so quite an education for me :)
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"I'm coming to this collection with the least knowledge of anyone here! I've never seen a John Wayne film"
Mind blown!
"I even had to google Haight-Ashbury"
Mind blown! x 2
Which decade were you born in RC?
I think of the Saturday Evening Post as more Middle American than extreme right wing. It was Republican at a time when the Republican Party was more Babbitt than Reagan/Trump, more Eisenhower than Nixon.I didn't know about the pro-German stance, but much of America, and particularly the Midwest and the Republican Party, were opposed to involvement in the Second World War until Pearl Harbor.
It was also well known as a literary magazine and paid very well for short stories. Here's another quote from the Wikipedia article on that point.
The Post published stories and essays by H. E. Bates, Ray Bradbury, Kay Boyle, Agatha Christie, Brian Cleeve, Eleanor Franklin Egan, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Ernest Haycox, Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Gallico, Normand Poirier, Hammond Innes, Louis L'Amour, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph C. Lincoln, John P. Marquand, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Sax Rohmer, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Rex Stout, Rob Wagner, Edith Wharton, and P.G. Wodehouse.
Poetry published came from poets including: Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Hannah Kahn.
Jack London's best-known novel The Call of the Wild was first published, in serialized form, in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903.
I didn't care for the John Wayne essay either -- I have no interest in the man -- but I liked the essay about Joan Baez and her followers. It seemed spot on to me. She could have been writing about Gwyneth Paltrow.I love the style of writing.
Ben wrote: "I didn't care for the John Wayne essay either -- I have no interest in the man -- but I liked the essay about Joan Baez and her followers. It seemed spot on to me. She could have been writing about..."It does seem spot on, like in just a few paragraphs, she captured that whole movement. I get the feeling she had a knack for zeroing in on the exact item to report on, but from the Preface, it sounds like it was far from an easy process!
"...there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic."
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1980s. But I'm rubbish with films - always got my nose in a book, obvs.
I googled Baez and fear that Sid, if he reads this, would be horrified!
Haha, Gwynnie Paltrow! Didion is equally merciless with the opponents who have to stand on a table to see the school.
Completely agree with Ben - the writing style is just my thing.
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What did everyone think of Didion's assertion about American heroes and money? "...that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy."
Doesn't it sound exactly like the ethos of the current Silicon Valley plutocrats -- Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc.?
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"1980s. But I'm rubbish with films - always got my nose in a book, obvs"
Thanks - that probably explains it
I was born in the early 1960s and, trust me, you couldn't escape John Wayne films in the 1960s and 70s, even with just three TV channels. He was a staple, as were impressions of him.
Haight Ashbury is more understandable, you'd only really know about the area if you'd taken an interest in the counterculture
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I don't know enough to have an opinion... but are those not still different forms of power and possessions?
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It's undoubtedly slanted in terms of who Didion chooses to follow, not activists and campaigners but some of the people who are maybe likely to slip between the cracks at any point in history?
But it does play to a reactionary readership - even though none of us, whatever our politics, would likely condone the idea of such young kids being given drugs by their parents.
It certainly punctures the romantic idealisation of the flower children
Roman Clodia wrote: "I googled Baez and fear that Sid, if he reads this, would be horrified!"I did read it and I'm well past the stage of being horrified by the state of your musical knowledge, RC. Sad resignation would be nearer the mark. 😉
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Although there is a naivety, if not innocence, in some of the portraits - not all.
I was struck by that para (don't have the book by my side) where she says that the people she's talking to don't have the ability to think for themselves and are simply falling into easy social clichés of that period.
Is she being disingenuous in herding all kinds of people together into one homogenous group? She seems to be exploring, in this essay, a specific group of social dropouts built around drugs. But what about the anti Vietnam war campaigners, the civil rights activists, feminists? They may overlap to some extent but they seem to me to be different from the rather passive/hopeless group she introduces us to. Or am I misunderstanding the period? This was published in 1967, I seem to recall.
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Hehehe! Is there something by Baez that I'd recognise?
Roman Clodia wrote: "I've just finished the Slouching to Bethlehem essay, and it's different from what I expected from the preface. It's far less political in some ways and is perhaps more about 'class' (that seems a c..."I remember being a bit appalled at the young kids being given drugs. And wondering what did they think they were doing.
John Wayne can be looked at in multiple ways. I just enjoyed most of his movies and tried my best to ignore his politics. After a certain point that almost became impossible.
I think Howard Hughes became almost insane, when he was living in that hotel in Vegas. No one could see him but his Mormons. No one could talk to him. He'd always been a bit of a nut but at some point he just went off the deep end.
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Ok, I admit I was at first mixing up Howard Hughes with Hugh Hefner so thank heavens for Google, eh? :))
Roman Clodia wrote: "Ben wrote: "It certainly punctures the romantic idealisation of the flower children"Although there is a naivety, if not innocence, in some of the portraits - not all.
I was struck by that para ..."
Hippies in the Haight (and like communities in most of the major cities) had mostly given up - listening more to Timothy Leary - "turn on, tune in, drop out" - than anyone else.
Civil rights activism was dying down and anti-VietNam sentiments had begun surging in '66-68. I think the feminists didn't gear up for a couple of years, early '70s maybe.
Had to wait for Nixon's election in '68 for a lot of the anger to bubble up.
As a memory, it all just kind of blurs together. At least for me. They were my teen-age years. My brother was drafted in '66 and we just kept hoping that he wouldn't be sent there. He wasn't. He served out the war in DC, defending public buildings like the Pentagon. Not that he wouldn't rather have been on the other side - as a protestor.
Roman Clodia wrote: "Sid wrote: "I did read it and I'm well past the stage of being horrified by the state of your musical knowledge, RC"Hehehe! Is there something by Baez that I'd recognise?"
She was at Woodstock. Big songs - Amazing Grace, We Shall Overcome, Forever Young - a previous girlfriend of Bob Dylan.
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"It certainly punctures the romantic idealisation of the flower children"
That romantic idealism died pretty quickly - especially round Haight Ashbury.
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Loving your stories, Jan, from someone who was there.
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Roman Clodia wrote: "Weird coincidence: another book I'm reading just had a quote from the same Yeats poem (The Second Coming) from which this title is taken, which Didion mentions in the preface: 'Things fall apart; t..."And this song by the excellent Eliza Gilkyson came up on my shuffled mp3 player yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlhnO...
Roman Clodia wrote: "Sid wrote: "I did read it and I'm well past the stage of being horrified by the state of your musical knowledge, RC"Hehehe! Is there something by Baez that I'd recognise?"
Possibly not; she never had a monster hit, but she was just there making good records - a lot of them Dylan covers. She was talented, committed, beautiful and had a lovely voice. This is one of hers that I remember strongly, singing Joe Hill at Woodstock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-JW4...
(I wasn't there, sadly - I just saw the film like every other aspiring hippy at the time.)
Or this, a cover of The Band's classic The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. I prefer the original, but this is good, too, and is another which gives a decent idea of Baez's work around that time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wanJQ...
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...
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A perfect summary, Sid. I haven't read the Joan Baez article yet, but am also a lifelong fan, although I was too young to have followed her in the 60s - I had some of her albums in the 1970s and listened to them endlessly. I've also seen her on stage twice, once in London and once when she performed in Ipswich, in more recent years.
I really like her early 60s albums of folk songs, with songs like Mary Hamilton, The Trees they Do Grow High and many more.
Nigeyb wrote: "Ben wrote: "It certainly punctures the romantic idealisation of the flower children"
That romantic idealism died pretty quickly - especially round Haight Ashbury."
Not so sure. But this video of "San Francisco" gives a good portrayal of that idealisation.
https://youtu.be/P57vbIZfYGw
Sid wrote: "Roman Clodia wrote: "Sid wrote: "I did read it and I'm well past the stage of being horrified by the state of your musical knowledge, RC"Hehehe! Is there something by Baez that I'd recognise?"
I'd add to the list of Joan Baez songs "Diamonds and Rust", her view in song of her romance with Bob Dylan and their folk days together.
https://youtu.be/2MSwBM_CbyY
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"Not so sure. But this video of "San Francisco" gives a good portrayal of that idealisation"
Yes - Scott Mackenzie is part of the myth making. "San Francisco" was released in May 1967. By the Spring of 1968, Charles Manson and the family were regulars at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic who received funding from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of drugs like LSD and methamphetamine on the counterculture movement in Haight Ashbury. So, in essence, Manson and his followers were getting free drugs and recruiting in the area (all paid for by the US taxpayer). This is just one example of the very dark underbelly of the whole flower power era in San Francisco.
If you're interested in this stuff then check out Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. My review here...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Suffice to say, and so far as I can make out having read a few accounts of the era, you didn't need to be much of a journalist to realise Haight Ashbury was a very dark and unsavoury place almost from the off, with damaged and vulnerable young people getting hurt and exploited.
Fair point. At that point in my life I was more aware of Scott MacKenzie's music than Charles Manson's murderous cult.
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Ooh, I like that! Some of her covers are good (e.g. Let It Be) but this is the most compelling. I'm a bit surprised that having recently discovered Joni Mitchell and Marianne Faithful that I didn't come across Baez. Some of her songs are a bit too folksy for me though.
Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe between the Wars (other topics)A Moveable Feast (other topics)
A Moveable Feast (other topics)
The White Album (other topics)
The Year of Magical Thinking (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Joseph Roth (other topics)Bob Greene (other topics)
The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
The discussion will officially start in April but this thread is open for comments and chat from now.