1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats.[1] The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006).
Collection's origins
According to Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, the book came about this way: "In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion [was ...] engaged to write a regular column for The Saturday Evening Post. [...] At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she'd churned out while a junior editor at Vogue), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was Slouching Towards Bethlehem."[2]
Title essay
The title essay describes Didion's impressions of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood's heyday as a countercultural center. In contrast to the more utopian image of the milieu promoted by counterculture sympathizers then and now, Didion offers a rather grim portrayal of the goings-on, including an encounter with a pre-school-age child who was given LSD by her parents.
One critic describes the essay as "a devastating depiction of the aimless lives of the disaffected and incoherent young," with Didion positioned as "a cool observer but not a hardhearted one."[3] Another scholar writes that the essay's form mirrors its content; the fragmented structure resonates with the essay's theme of societal fragmentation.[4] In a 2011 interview, Didion discussed her technique of centering herself and her perspective in her non-fiction works like "Slouching Towards Bethlehem": "I thought it was important always for the reader, for me to place myself in the piece so that the reader knew where I was, the reader knew who was talking...At the time I started doing these pieces it was not considered a good thing for writers to put themselves front and center, but I had this strong feeling you had to place yourself there and tell the reader who that was at the other end of the voice."[5]
Didion originally wrote the piece as an assignment for The Saturday Evening Post in 1967.[6][7]
In her preface to the book, Didion writes, "I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."[8]
Reception
The book was immediately favorably received; its popularity continued to grow and become a "phenomenon" with a devoted readership in subsequent years.[9]
In The New York Times Book Review, novelist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield wrote, "Didion's first collection of nonfiction writing, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, brings together some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years. Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of 'art,' perhaps it is possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call 'mere journalism,' but as a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country."[10]
