slouching towards bethlehem essay analysis

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There's a reason Joan Didion's work endures: she changed the way we wrote

The master of the personal essay taught us it’s not enough to ask ‘what happened?’ if you neglect ‘how did it feel?’

W hen Griffin Dunne announced he had the go-ahead to film a documentary about Joan Didion , the great writer (and, as it happens, his aunt), he crowdfunded the money needed in a day. Netflix kicked in with the rest and the result is The Center Will Not Hold, streaming now.

Didion has been the master of holding readers back while appearing – in her prose at least – to let you in. So fans, of which there are many, have been hoping for an unguarded moment – something that unwraps the enigma.

Those moments in the documentary are few and far between. But that a film as slight as this is still a must-watch is testament to Didion’s extraordinary and enduring appeal. New generations discover her as they discover The Catcher in the Rye. She becomes their author. Falling-apart copies of Slouching Towards Bethlehem get passed down the generations. And the thrill of discovery is not just in seeing the 1960s represented through a dark mirror, but in the prose style: long, breathless sentences that chart an inner turmoil combined with an astute eye for the times and what those times might mean.

Didion is a favourite writer of young women. Her instructions for packing (leotards and bourbon and cashmere shawls and … a typewriter) are republished in fashion magazines, and her look (ironic, sunglasses at all times, a scarf tied under her chin) has never really gone out of style. Old photographs of her look achingly chic, and in her later years, she even modelled for Céline .

Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic writes: “ Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Part of Didion’s appeal has always been her “coolness”. That famous picture of her leaning against a Corvette was an Instagram moment decades before Instagram. But beneath this cool exterior, there is the suspicion that she was always a lot frailer than she let on. In The Center Will Not Hold, we see her as physically very frail, but still presenting as the “cool customer” who, as she recounts in The Year of Magical Thinking, didn’t cry at the hospital after her husband died. As film-maker, Dunne is protective of her: we don’t see her crack.

In writing about “serious” matters, Didion never sought to excise fashion or fabric from her prose. She started her writing career at Vogue and her descriptions of political or the personal often break to include descriptions of furnishings or curtains or clothes.

She writes in her essay, Goodbye to All That, about how “all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms”.

The curtains are never just curtains, however – the details always mean something more. Those curtains mark the turning point where the exterior world and inner tumult meet and something must change. Similarly, the dress worn in the trial of Linda Kasabian in The White Album essay is a vehicle to describe Didion’s horror at both the banality and evil at the heart of the Charles Manson murders.

Martin Amis, when reviewing The White Album in the London Review of Books , noted “the volatile, occasionally brilliant, distinctly female contribution to the new New Journalism, diffident and imperious by turns, intimate yet categorical, self-effacingly listless and at the same time often subtly self-serving ... Miss Didion’s writing does not ‘reflect’ her moods so much as dramatise them. ‘How she feels’ has become, for the time being, how it is.”

Amis’s review reflected a long line of disdain from “serious writers” for the personal essay, the practitioners of which are mainly women.

“How she feels” did become “how it is”. The work has lasted, and although there are many imitators – and even more, like the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, are heavily influenced – Didion’s voice remains singular.

It’s her voice that is part of the appeal of her writing – at least for me. Her fragmentary style, particularly in the early collections The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, renders an event closer to a form of poetry than the blunt instrument that is the inverted pyramid of news or even more conversational-style features.

Didion’s style works because of, not in spite of, its fragments. It is closer to how we actually see the world – like the moment you heard big news, and how that moment is compromised of many things: how you felt, where you where, the people you were with, how cold it was outside. In Didion’s world, how we experience news is how we experience the world and that is why the temperature of the air and background music in the bar can seem inseparable from our experience of the event. To shear one off from the other is to only convey a part.

After Didion, it seems incomplete to ask only “what happened” and neglect “how did it feel?” (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s brilliant We Were Eight Years in Power does both to great effect.) Her strongest essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem – an exploration of the dark side of the 1960 – expresses dismay at the disorder of the times, and uses Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, to describe a collapse of common values.

But as disorder burrowed more into Didion’s own life, with the deaths of her husband and daughter, her work and her sentences became even more fragmentary.

Her 2011 book, Blue Nights, is a book of shards – shorn-off sentences, fragments, words, repetitions, images held tight – like talismans that litter the text. Those of us who had fallen in love with the fragmentary, collage-y nature of Didion’s work were left without anything to hold those fragments together or give them shape.

This film picks up the pieces, a bit, and gives a softer, less alarming view of Didion than the one the writer chose to represent herself in her later works. There are things the film doesn’t address – darker topics, such as the deaths of her daughter and husband, and charges that she failed as a parent are left well alone.

Instead, we see Didion dwarfed by her giant refrigerator. We hear her talking about what she used to have for breakfast (always sunglasses-on in the house in the morning, always a cold Coca-Cola from the fridge), we hear about her morning routines with her daughter and husband, and see her now in cashmere and a gold chain – very thin, but very in control, telling us just enough about her life to keep us interested, yet also, perceptibly, holding back.

The Center Cannot Hold is showing now on Netflix

Brigid Delaney is a Guardian columnist

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"Slouching Towards Bethlehem": Joan Didion's Iconic Essay on 1960s Subculture

The 1967 piece on San Francisco hippies is included in the critically-acclaimed collection of the same name.

• Photo Credit: Alchetron

“The center was not holding,” Didion wrote in 1967, opening what is now the iconic essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” In the spring and summer of that year, Didion paid frequent visits to the Haights-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco—a microcosm of the “social hemorrhaging” that was then sweeping the nation. Hippiedom had changed; Americans were experiencing a strange sort of turmoil, most of all Didion herself. Believing that writing had become an “irrelevant act”—how could she possibly explain what was happening in words?—Didion went to the center of the chaos. There, she might be able to understand it, and to come to terms with it. 

Related: On Joan Didion: Her Books, Life, and Legacy  

The 1968 first edition cover of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (left), and the updated 2017 cover (right). 

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On assignment for The Saturday Evening Post , a 32-year-old Didion got up close and personal with the Haight's psychedelic hippies. These were primarily runaways and drug-users (and often both), who had fled overbearing parents or simply wanted to "stick it to the Man" by marching to the beat of their own drum. But their behavior and the “hemorrhaging” Didion describes in her piece can be unsettling: In one passage, she recounts meeting Susan, a tripping 5-year-old girl whose mother frequently dosed her with LSD. In another, she talks about a neglected young boy who nearly sets his house on fire. While shocking, Didion observed these incidents with her signature coolness.

What makes “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” even more fascinating is Didion’s technique—a kind of “new journalism” that creates a sense of menace and immediacy. Didion is never concerned with objectivity, but only with telling the story of the hippie movement as she sees it. She, herself, becomes so wholly immersed in the counterculture that it seems as though she might become a part of it.

Related: Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted Is Coming to Netflix  

“Slouching” was featured in a 1967 edition of The Saturday Evening Post and became the titular essay of her 1968 collection. Despite a steady journalism career and one lackluster novel, Slouching was the work that truly put Didion on the map. 

The collection includes some of her other famous nonfiction pieces, many previously published in magazines. There's her famous Vogue essay “On Self-Respect” and “Goodbye to All That,” a farewell letter to youth and innocence that has become a touchpoint for any New York writer. Many of the other pieces solidified her as a figure of California. Altogether, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , the collection, turned the author into the Joan Didion we know and love today.

Related: The Best Essay Collections to Add to Your TBR List

Click here to read an excerpt of the titular essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem , then download the book.

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

75 pages • 2 hours read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Essay 1

Part 1, Essays 2-3

Part 1, Essays 4-7

Part 1, Essay 8

Part 2, Essays 9-11

Part 2, Essays 12-13

Part 3, Essays 14-15

Part 3, Essays 16-20

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Part 3: “Seven Places of the Mind”

Part 3, essay 16 summary: “rock of ages”.

This essay is a brief sketch of what Alcatraz is like in 1967, four years after its closure as a prison. At the time, there are three people living on Alcatraz Island: John and Marie Hart, who have lived on the island for sixteen years since John was a prison guard, and Bill Doherty, a retired seaman. The two men are hired to keep watch over the grounds. They live an isolated life on the island, largely cut off from San Francisco; a traffic helicopter drops off a newspaper every day, and their only visitors are people brought by Thomas Scott, a General Services Administration official who is trying to sell the land.

Thomas Scott brings Didion to the island, and she tours the abandoned facilities, which were too expensive to keep in use and have no budget for repairs. Didion tries to imagine the inhumane prison conditions, but she likes being at Alcatraz and likes the idea of an abandoned place without human vanity where a few people live a small, quiet life.

Part 3, Essay 17 Summary: “The Seacoast of Despair”

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JOAN DIDION

Slouching towards bethlehem.

January 1, 1968

Publication Date: 

FSG Classics

ABOUT THE BOOK

“In her portraits of people,” The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snows of the Hawaiian artistocracy in a way that makes them neither villanous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful…A rare display of some of the best prose writen today in this country.”

In essay after essay, Didion captures the dislocation of the 1960s, the disorientation of a country shredding itself apart with social change. Her essays not only describe the subject at hand—the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion—but also offer a broader vision of America, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own. 

Purchase the Book

A slant vision that is arresting and unique…didion might be an observer from another planet—one so edgy and alert that she ends up knowing more about our own world than we know about ourselves..

—Anne Tyler

Read an Excerpt

This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there. The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart: 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, tht 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. That was why the piece was important to me. And after it was printed I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece, failed to sugget that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads. Disc jockeys telephoned my house and wanted to discuss (on the air) the incidence of “filth” in the Haight-Ashbury, and acquaintances congratulated me on having finished the piece “just in time,” because “the whole fad’s dead now, fini, kaput .” I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the timeby the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten feedback so universally beside the point.

Almost all of the pieces here were written for magazines during 1965, 1966, and 1967, and most of them, to get that question out of the way at the outset, were “my idea.” I wa asked to go up to the Carmel Valley and report on Joan Baez’s school there; I was asked to go to Hawaii; I think I was asked to write about John Wayne; and I was asked for the short essays on “morality,” by The American Schola r; and on “self-respect,” by Vogue . Thirteen of the twenty pieces were published in The Saturday Evening Post . Quite often people write me from places like Toronto and want to know (demand to know) how I can reconcile my conscience with writing for The Saturday Evening Post ; the answer is quite simple. The Post is extremely receptive to what the writer wants to do, pays enough for hi to be able to do it right, and is meticulous about not changing copy. I lose a nicety of inflection now and then to the Post , but do not count myself compromised. Of course not all of the pieces in this book have to do, in a “subject” sense, with the general breakup, with things falling apart; that is a large and rather presumptuous notion, and many of these pieces are small and personal. But since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.

I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that 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. I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”; the pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true; I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.) What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone’s press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so tempermentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out .