Book Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)

Cover of the 2008 paperback reissue of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion, 1968.

People either love Joan Didion or they can’t stand her. She inspires passionate fandom and vituperative criticism. She’s a writer who’s been on my radar for a long time, and with my interest in Tom Wolfe and New Journalism, I figured it was finally time for me to start reading some of her work.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was Didion’s first collection of non-fiction. Published in 1968, it’s become one of the seminal collections of New Journalism. The book is separated into three sections: “Life Styles in the Golden Land,” “Personals,” and “Seven Places of the Mind.” I found the first section the most interesting, because it features the most actual reporting from Didion.

The first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” tells the complicated and bizarre story of Lucille Miller, a housewife who was convicted of murdering her husband by setting their Volkswagen Beetle on fire—with her husband still inside of it. It seems like a fairly complicated way to try to murder someone, and the story gets more twisted, as Lucille was having an affair with a married man, whose wife had recently died under, ahem, mysterious circumstances. Adding another layer to the case, Lucille’s husband was a depressed, suicidal dentist. The essay is a fascinating piece that is highly evocative of the landscape of the California desert.

“John Wayne: A Love Song” is an interesting essay, written from the set of the 1965 movie The Sons of Katie Elder, Wayne’s first movie after battling lung cancer. Didion writes of the Duke: “When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.” (p.30) Of course, John Wayne always spoke with authority, but it had never crossed my mind that his authority carried a sexual overtone. I suppose Wayne’s heterosexuality was just so obviously worn on his sleeve—he was the ultimate on screen embodiment of masculinity for several generations.

I found the strongest piece in the book to be the title essay, a look at the hippies of San Francisco during the beginning of the summer of 1967, the so-called “Summer of Love.” The essay is an interesting companion to Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his study of Ken Kesey and the whole wild scene happening around him and his followers in San Francisco.

A man named Steve has a fantastic insight in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” He tells Didion, “There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it’s going to happen. Here you know it’s not going to.” Didion then asks Steve what it is that’s supposed to happen. He replies, “I don’t know. Something. Anything.” (p.98) Steve’s observation is strikingly similar to the conclusion of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which the Merry Pranksters chant “We blew it!” over and over again. The quest has failed, and all of these grand hippie experiments have not produced the desired revolution in human relationships that they sought.

There’s also a short piece on Las Vegas weddings, featuring Didion’s observation: “Almost everyone notes that there is no ‘time’ in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future…neither is there any logical sense of where one is.” (p.80) That still rings true for Las Vegas today.

Section I also features an interesting essay examining society’s fascination with Howard Hughes, and the myriad stories and rumors he engendered. There’s also a piece about the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, a school started by the folksinger and activist Joan Baez.

The more personal pieces in Section II were less interesting to me. Some of them are simply too short to go into their topics in detail. I’m really not that interested in reading Joan Didion’s thoughts “On Morality” in 1,000 words. The setting and introduction of “On Morality” is more interesting than any conclusions Didion ultimately comes to in the essay:

“As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119 degrees. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back.” (p.157)

I found that scene setting of more interest than Didion’s declaration later in the essay: “You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ what is ‘good’ and what ‘evil.’” (p.162)

Didion’s 1964 essay on the movies, “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind” was a frustrating read for me. Didion is dismissive of John Frankenheimer’s 1964 Cold War thriller Seven Days in May. The plot of Seven Days in May hinges upon a right-wing general (Burt Lancaster) attempting to stage a military coup to take over the United States government from a liberal President (Frederic March) who has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Didion writes that Seven Days in May “appeared to be a fantasy in the most clinical sense of that word.” (p.153) John F. Kennedy, President at the time Seven Days in May was made, didn’t find it to be a fantasy. Kennedy had earned the ire of the more right-wing military commanders due to his refusal to use the full force of the U.S. military during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1963, Kennedy was also extending something of an olive branch to the Soviet Union, calling for a nuclear test ban treaty in his speech at American University on June 10, 1963.

When JFK’s friend Red Fay asked Kennedy if he thought the events depicted in the novel Seven Days in May could ever actually happen in the United States, Kennedy had an interesting response.

“It’s possible. But the conditions would have to be just right. If the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation and only God knows just what segment of Democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment. Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs it could happen. It won’t happen on my watch.” (The Pleasure of His Company, by Red Fay)

Didion is also dismissive of another Cold War classic from 1964: “Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which did have a little style, was scarcely a picture of relentless originality; rarely have we seen so much made over so little.” (p.154-5) Regardless of whether you like Dr. Strangelove, I think most people would have to admit that it’s original. It’s a comedy about nuclear war and the end of the world, hardly a topic that was often addressed in the movies. Didion doesn’t even mention the brilliance of Peter Sellers playing three roles: Group Captain Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and of course, the titular German scientist.

The essays in Section III are a bit of a mix of the first two sections: personal essays combined with reporting. They cover a variety of subjects: Sacramento, Pearl Harbor, Alcatraz—just after it had closed as a prison and before it became a tourist attraction—the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, and making it through your twenties. 

My favorite line in “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s essay about her life in her twenties is this: “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” (p.226) That’s a brilliant summary of the intense self-absorption most of us go through during our early twenties. 

I enjoyed Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Didion is an excellent writer. I suspect part of the dividing line about her writing is the degree to which she intrudes as an author into the narrative. You might think Didion intrudes unnecessarily into the narrative, or you might find it really interesting to read about her own thoughts and feelings. I go back and forth with it, sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes I found it frustrating and distracting. Didion consistently uses first person in her essays and reporting, whereas Tom Wolfe was loath to insert himself into his own reporting, even going so far as to invent euphemisms to refer to himself in his own writing without resorting to using first person. Wolfe wrote: 

“Sometimes I would put myself into the story and make sport of me. I would be ‘the man in the brown Borsalino hat,’ a large fuzzy Italian fedora I wore at the time, or ‘the man in the Big Lunch tie.’ I would write about myself in the third person, usually as a puzzled onlooker or someone who was in the way, which was often the case…anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17)

Of course, there’s nothing about Didion’s writing that is reminiscent of an announcer at a tennis match. She’s more like a friend whispering witty asides to you as you both watch the action transpiring.