In the early 20th century, the Irish modernist poet W.B. Yeats believed the end of the world had arrived. So he wrote his most famous poem called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”. In it he described the coming of the Antichrist, a repulsive monster that would unleash chaos and mass confusion as society collapsed, leaving everything in ruins. You don’t have to be a mystical Christian like Yeats to feel the abject terror in the poem. You wouldn’t want to be anyways since Yeats’ answer to what he saw as a collapse of civilization was to support fascism. Yeats’s point of view isn’t a whole lot different from what we see in 21st century America. If Yeats were here today he would be a white Christian nationalist and most likely a MAGA supporter. But that’s not the point here. What is important is that Joan Didion opens her essay collection, called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with the W.B. Yeats poem. Like the Irish poet, she believed the chaos and confusion of her time would unleash a tidal wave of insanity into the world.
The essays in this book were originally written as magazine articles. Joan Didion in the 1960s was part of the New Journalism movement that included such now-famous upstarts as Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson on the liberal left and Tom Wolfe and Didion on the conservative right. Before the 1960s, journalism was always presented as being objective without any trace of the writer’s attitude in the writing. This, of course, was a lie and an illusion as journalism had typically been written as propaganda. The New Journalists were more honest. They didn’t pretend to be objective. They made their own opinions and perceptions part of the writing and they didn’t hesitate to make that clear. The New Journalists were part of the story and they weren’t shy about saying so. Now in the 21st century, journalism is almost nothing but opinion, but both mainstream media and podcasters on the left and right are now presenting opinion and ideology as fact and absolute truth. Fact-based journalism has receded into the distant past. But that’s another matter altogether. The matter here is that Didion’s first collection of magazine articles is a relic from the moment when New Journalism was a fresh and pioneering new style of media communication.
Yes, it’s a relic or an artifact, if you will. The collection opens with some underwhelming essays. The first is about murder and adultery in a quiet California suburb. This is followed by a time Didion hung out with John Wayne on a movie set in Mexico. She waxes poetic about how great he is while he babbles about nothing important or interesting. Then there is a piece about a conservative think tank that doesn’t do much thinking. These are all trivial works of journalism and I couldn’t care less about any of them.
It picks up a bit in an article about Carmel, California where the folk singer Joan Baez has opened a meditation center for hippies. The conservatives in the town want to kick them out but can’t scheme up a good enough reason to do it legally. There certainly can’t be any noise complaints since the hippies spend most of their time there meditating silently and peacefully. Their big crime is being different. Didion obviously isn’t one of the hippies, but she definitely takes their side when the cranky conservatives hold town meeting about the problem that really isn’t a problem. It’s a more exciting essay, but nothing so great.
This brings us to the titular essay. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is all about the counter culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene around the time of the Summer of Love. In her characteristic style, Didion writes about what the people do without so much concern for why they do it. Most of this involves her hanging out with young hippies while they do drugs and listen to music. The hippies inhabit communal living spaces in houses and a warehouse. If you’ve spent any time in the drug scene, you’ll know the kind of places she writes about. She is friendly with them, even non-judgmental and without an air of condescension. But some hippies around the Haight-Ashbury scene are suspicious of her and refuse to talk.
While all of this mostly looks harmless enough, the essay does show a growing awareness of darker elements creeping in. Hard drugs show up more and more often. Sleazy people are coming in and preying on runaway teenagers. The essay ends with performance artists walking around in blackface and drugs being given to little kids. Without directly referencing the Yeats poem, it is easy to see what Didion is implying about the future of America.
This is actually a very superficial portrayal of the hippy counter culture. It was a complex and multi-layered social movement that resulted from a wide range of issues and attracted people from a multitude of backgrounds. There was far more to it than a bunch of lazy kids who dropped out and sat around doing drugs because they couldn’t handle the responsibilities of life. Certainly some of them made bad decisions, but not all of them permanently ruined their lives. Most of them weren’t the types of people who would give LSD to a four year old child. The hippies didn’t usher in Armageddon. Instead they brought some much needed social and cultural changes to the American landscape and beyond, some of which are changes that the conservatives of today are directly benefiting from. The media would have you think that the Manson murders and the Altamont concert proved the hippy dream had failed. It’s more accurate to say that the vast majority of hippies simply grew older and moved on to other things, taking some of the new values along with them. That isn’t giving up or selling out. It’s maturing. It’s a process that is as much biological as it is cultural. But you can’t deduce any of this from Joan Didion’s writing because she takes a black box approach to journalism. Her concern is with what people do, not why they do it. That surface level approach leaves most of the story out.
The remaining two sections have personal statements about Joan Didion herself. One of the more memorable ones, “On Morality”, relates back to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” without mentioning it. She addresses the issue of morality being a practice of community values, a kind of roadmap for conduct within that society. But then what happens when individuals are outside the boundaries of that society? They have to adapt and possibly reinvent rules or morality in order to survive. Didion brings the Donner Party into the discussion. Those were the 19th century pioneers who got trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains during a snowstorm and resorted to cannibalism for survival. The point of this is that their ordinary moral codes had to be suspended when they were forced into a situation outside the boundaries of ordinary living. Survival would have been impossible if the Donner Party had strictly adhered to a moral doctrine that didn’t apply in their unusual situation. This brief essay, which I think is the best one in this anthology, can retroactively be applied to her essay about the hippy counter culture. Like it or not, young people embrace new ideas and those who are too inflexible to adapt to an ever changing world are the ones who suffer for it the most. Joan Didion is explaining moral relativity and how it functions. This is quite interesting considering her conservative political views. I tend to think of her as a moderate Republican, if not an actual Democrat, who supported a party that didn’t align with her values.
The Donner Party comes up in other essays. Didion identifies with them because she descends from an ancestral line of pioneers who settled in the Sacramento Valley of California. Those settlers, once they stopped on the West Coast, were faced with a new situation requiring a new set of standards and lifestyle. While they didn’t have to resort to cannibalism like the Donner Party, they were faced with a similar void of morality making it necessary to adapt and build up society from scratch. Applying this principle to her other essays and novels, it can be deduced that California is still in a state of formation. This might account for the shallowness and lack of soul that characterize the Californians in her writing. Didion extends this idea in her essay about white Americans who settle in Hawaii, specifically mentioning the real families she portrays in her novel Democracy.
I have to admit, after finishing Slouching Towards Bethlehem I couldn’t remember most of what I had read. Joan Didion’s writing just didn’t stick in my mind. Possibly that’s because this is a collection of magazine articles. Magazines are full pf ephemera and tend to be little more than literary fluff. They are written for people riding the subway or waiting in a dentist’s office waiting room. New Journalism or not, these articles are surface level reportage, mostly of things that aren’t that interesting to begin with. Joan Didion never does a deep dive into anything here. I get a lot more out of her novels. This book is a museum piece. I think it has value as an artifact exemplifying the style known as New Journalism from the 1960s, but on its own it doesn’t carry much weight.
No comments:
Post a Comment