Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

”My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally 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.”



One of the cornerstones of friendship is developing some level of trust. It might be possible to be friends with Joan Didion, but the very thing that makes her a wonderful dinner companion, her wonderful insights into the human condition, will also be the very thing that will make it difficult to develop an intimacy like one should with a best friend. She talks about this difficulty in one of the essays in this collection. “‘The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people,’ she said. ‘The hardest is with one.’”

She was asked to write an essay about John Wayne, and she wrote this fantastic scene of having dinner with him. I didn’t know what to expect. Was she going to fall in bed with him? Was she going to cut Wayne up into little pieces? Love him or hate him, the man was always consistently himself. The Duke always had to be the Duke. There was no down time from being the American icon of western films. I enjoyed this very Didion observation that she makes about Wayne: ”For a while it was only a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s.”Wayne was renowned for getting everyone at his table drunk, and Didion was no exception.

These essays focus almost exclusively on California. Though, I wouldn’t call this collection an ode to her home state. Let’s just say the Bureau of Tourism for California didn’t choose to use any of her unflinching observations about the state. Her family has deep roots in California. They were early pioneers who invested in land and did very well. She realized this upbringing gave her a different perspective of life. ”I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.”

I will admit I have put off reading Joan Didion because I thought her essays might prove dated. From the very first essay I was disabused of that notion. These pieces are all from the 1960s and, nearly without exception, are as relevant today as they were when they were written. Couldn’t this comment be as insightful about our current situation as it was in the 1960s? ”Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”

I was expecting elegant writing, and certainly I got that, but what surprised me was the muscular nature of her prose. She hits you in the stomach, follows that with an uppercut, and she may not even let you get off the canvas before she hits you again. She might be small, but she is certainly scrappy. Her writing is as tight and crisp as a tuned piano wire. After I finished the book, I read that she had spent hours typing Hemingway’s prose into her typewriter to try and capture some of his style. This Hemingway connection runs counter to my perception of Didion, but maybe it is just an example of how difficult it is to wrap your arms around her and say this is Joan Didion. She would slide away from you and reemerge across the room in dark glasses with a smoldering cigarette trapped between her fingers, uplifted in the air, the smoke forming a question mark. Can you ever really know someone like Joan Didion? She is quiet. She is unassuming. She lets people talk, and when they mention something of interest to her, can’t you just hear her softly saying...tell me why you believe that?

These essays were trending subjects in the 1960s, but now they have, with infinite grace, metamorphosed into historical record. For those who follow my reviews, I can assure you there will be more Joan Didion in my reading queue over the coming months.

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