Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joan Didion

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Joan Didion, review, social critique

Joan Didion (born in 1934) still has an excellent reputation and her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem has held up as a modern classic of American journalism. Finding it in a Goodwill I took it home, began to read and to my chagrin was very soon bored stiff. Five essays in and all my enthusiasm was gone. I was close to bailing on it and so picked up my notebook to explain my dislike – very soon discovering that it was more interesting to talk about than it was to read. Hence, this review is the first I’ve ever made not to “spread the news” but just to get through the work in question.

Part of the problem is that Joan Didion seemed enormously depressed while at work on these essays. Most of them are very short and while reading I developed this picture in my mind of Didion, brow furrowed, writing slowly and painstakingly, chewing on the inside of her mouth, writing them all as if on commission (though she states only five out of twenty were).

It starts with a bang, hooking you in with Yeats and “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” detailing a tabloid murder trial out in California (the setting for almost every essay). Didion relates the story in an expressly non-partisan fashion and her eye for detail has some rewards – describing the women’s prison: On visitor’s day there are big cars in the parking area, big Buicks and Pontiacs that belong to grandparents and sisters and fathers (not many of them belong to husbands), and some of them have bumper stickers that say “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE.”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is divided into three parts, the first called “Life Styles in the Golden Land” and focusing its gaze upon the political and social life of average Californians. She offers item after item – John Wayne, a communist cell, Howard Hughes – and focuses on the most miniscule and insignificant aspects of them – table talk, behavioural tics, anecdotes. She offers a depressed shoegazer’s view of America and thus every essay is filled with banal, expressionless observation – and price tags. It gets dull before too long, livened up only by a brief report on Vegas marriages and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” itself. The existential despair comes in waves off this little book and nowhere more so than in the title essay, a set of observations on the Haight-Ashbury drug scene that is justly famous: sharp-edged, slightly humorous, and extremely compelling. In it she pans back, zooms out so that the big picture is briefly available before plunging back into claustrophobic conditions.

Of course the activists – not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic – had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

The above paragraph was more horrifying to me than the infamous one about people feeding acid to their kids (scarcely a widespread phenomenon then or now). This is not just a set of reflections on the sixties. Rather there is the feeling that Didion could see what was happening and took the notes, that this book was a line drawn in the sand and to read it now is to see how far America has gone since crossing it. As a social critique all these essays put together are really something, numbing though they are to read.

The “Personals” section is more generally engaging as Didion focuses more on her own self and the result is easy for me to empathize with, especially her essay “On Self-Respect” and its absence, which she writes of with great insight. To do without self-respect…is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

She also contemplates the concepts of home and morality, everywhere showcasing that not a lot has changed since the 60s, tying back to the political essays and social disintegration. I can see why this book made such an impact when all of the issues were cutting-edge and I’m more curious than I’d care to admit to know her thoughts on the modern manifestations of things falling apart.

“Seven Places of the Mind” is the final and best section, all essays dealing with landscape and confirming all my earlier suspicions of the writer’s state at the time. Even Hawaii couldn’t cheer her up. In fact the smallest possible reprieve comes only in her brief description of a visit to Alcatraz – out of commission and peaceful – which is the only essay she seems to have taken a little pleasure in creating: …I tried to imagine the prison as it had been, with the big lights playing over the windows all night long and the guards patrolling the gun galleries and the silverware clattering into a bag as it was checked in after meals, tried dutifully to summon up some distaste, some night terror of the doors locking and the boat pulling away. But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind’s whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke.

The other places include the decaying society of old Sacramento, a trip through the desert to Guaymas, Los Angeles, New York (she perfectly captures the magic of the place) and Newport: Even as the sun dapples the great lawns and the fountains plash all around, there is something in the air that has nothing to do with pleasure and nothing to do with graceful tradition, a sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made, an immediate presence of the pits and the rails and the foundries, of turbines and pork-belly futures.

Nothing pleases Didion, everything troubles her, she speaks of herself in continually negative terms – in short she gives every appearance of having long since succumbed to despair and that at the time of this book she was just coasting on it. Though she sees decay everywhere, in the stagnation of the old ways and the “things fall apart” meme so often invoked, the portrait in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is perhaps even more of her than it is of America and it is so bleak, so minute, so narrow in its focus that I’ve found it at once depressing and dull. I’m not going to deny that Didion has talent and I do have some curiosity about her other works. Her landscape descriptions are really something, particularly of the desert region – arid and oppressive proof that she could have written some killer Southern Gothics (or L.A. Noir) if she’d had a mind to. Look here:

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

Final thoughts? I can’t claim a total dislike of this book – I respected it too much for that. It’s a modern classic and most people seem to enjoy it very much but since all I see are sadness and depression in its pages, I can’t. Perhaps I missed something or read too much into it. I’m very glad I didn’t bail on it, that’s for sure, but I don’t know if I’ll be reading any more of her stuff.

Balthazar – Lawrence Durrell

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Alexandria Quartet, British literature, Lawrence Durrell, literature, review

Here it is, the long-delayed review of Book Two in The Alexandria Quartet. WARNING: There is no possible way of crafting an in-depth review of the book in question without giving away major aspects of the plot and therefore it would be unwise for those who haven’t read the book to proceed any further.

Balthazar, published in 1958, represents a change of angle rather than a direct continuation of the events of Justine. The narrator’s gaze is fixed upon the past once again and so in this novel Durrell sets out to create the story over, divulging new information that entirely changes the history of the narrator’s love affair with Justine.

The novel begins exactly as the last one did, on the lonely Greek island the narrator (later on revealed to go by the name of Darley) now contents himself with, raising Melissa’s child and watching the mail packet go by every week. He claims to have put Alexandria away, sealing it and its figures into a story, the Justine manuscript. Having sent it to Balthazar, it is returned to him stuffed with margin notes, details unknown to Darley and so begins the task of assimilating them. Though set in a series of standardized chapters where Justine drifted elliptically within three parts, Balthazar still has a loose, unmoored quality you’ll recognise from the first book.

The greatest difference between the two novels is therefore the quietly ruminative aspect of Balthazar. In design, Justine coalesced from nothing, growing in intensity until the murderous culmination on the shores of Mareotis; Balthazar, by contrast, meanders through individual setpieces such as a masked ball, Nessim’s visit home or the dysfunctional relationship between Pursewarden and Justine. It fills in gaps in the original narrative and Darley spends much of this novel in the grips of uncertainty – whether deception ever ends, whether honesty is even possible.

There is still drama, passion and incident but the overall feeling upon conclusion is of a much slower and more contemplative story, breaking down the order Darley was so intent to impose upon his past. Questions arise of moral motivation and Balthazar says ‘It is wiser perhaps not to make a judgement.’ Yet Darley observes It is easy for me to criticise now that I see a little further into the truth of her predicament and my own. Thus the twin narrative contrasts the dispassionate and clinical approach of Balthazar with the baffled hurt Darley must now account for all over again. It forms a fascinating companion piece (I could almost describe it as the ghost of Book One) though it does lack something of the oh-so-satisfying ‘dramatic’ design of Justine.

The biggest revealment comes early on when Balthazar announces that Justine was actually in love with Pursewarden and Darley was just a decoy. On the tail of this information, the whole affair becomes even more crushingly futile than it seemed the first time round. To protect Pursewarden from her husband’s potentially dangerous jealousy, Justine involved and needlessly hurt several extraneous people – all for a ploy of no use in view of Pursewarden’s suicide. This helps to expand the lens of a La Rondeian love affair, as Schnitzler’s play was a simple circle and Durrell goes far beyond that in complexity. His cast of lovers are intertwined in a cruelly elaborate lacework and as more intricacies are revealed and the death toll creeps a little bit higher what most astonishes me is Durrell’s continued feat of avoiding the most dire melodrama – by revealing things out of step, by beginning each volume slowly, using careful observance and exquisite language, in all ways offering the reader time to acclimatize.

My lengthy hiatus between volumes led me to newly discover the remarkable deftness with which Durrell portrays the women involved, each rendered with sympathetic exactitude and leaving me stunned with the resonance of lines such as these: Poor fool, she was not spared anything in the long catalogue of self-deceptions which constitute a love-affair. She tried to fall back on other pleasures, to find that none existed. She knew that the heart wearies of monotony, that habit and despair are the bedfellows of love, and she waited patiently, as a very old woman might, for the flesh to outgrow its promptings, to deliver itself from an attachment which she now recognised was not of her seeking. Waited in vain. Each day she plunged deeper. It is a strange balance between sympathy and cynicism which illuminates the whole cast.

I would say that this is in every way an equal accomplishment to the first book and so it is only my own personal preference that views Balthazar as slightly less compelling than Justine. Partly because of the mellow and more philosophical style mentioned above and also due to the lack of Melissa, my favorite character, so neglected and meek that she could have walked out of a Victor Hugo novel. She’s scarcely mentioned and focus is moved elsewhere: To Pursewarden, an enigmatic specimen even after pages of Balthazar’s recollections and, alas, something of a stuffed dummy allowing Durrell to air his views on the art of the writer. I might say that Darley and Arnauti were more than enough on that subject and yet that would be to misunderstand the genre at work here, as Durrell was clearly a 20th Century decadent – with all the delightful annoyances that come with the turf, including a tendency to authorial intrusion.

Other new characters coming to light include Nessim’s simple and unsophisticated brother Narouz, caught in the grips of an unrequited love; Leila, mother of Nessim, a proud and educated Egyptian turned hermit after the disfigurement of smallpox; Toto de Brunel, a most foolish murder victim; Amaril the excessively romantic doctor; John Keats the journalist, always showing up where he’s not wanted… Durrell does not give equal time to all members of the cast (new or old), aiding along a sense of realism as the characters go about their own lives, casually drifting in and out of the narrative as they become more or less important. Also, the extra characters and connections facilitate a sense of conspiracy and the shady world of politics begins to emerge from the text. In Justine the subject was treated as a jest, what with Scobie’s Secret Service. Mountolive is allegedly the political movement of this quartet and if so, then Durrell used Book Two to ease the way from farcical to serious.

Most of the time, Balthazar is a sad and melancholy work of art – so finely drawn it is a joy to read and yet at the same time it brings with it a sense of agony at the suffering so continually expressed by the cast. Darley’s dislike of himself shines through, particularly in the first half of the book, while still reeling at the new light cast by Balthazar. With the certainty of Justine’s love gone, he becomes the more bitterly cynical about the past. Only Pombal remains unscathed and helps (along with Scobie) to provide comic relief. In fact, one thing I’ve never heard said of Durrell or the Quartet is that he’s got a sense of humour on display but he most assuredly does. There is Pombal with his ridiculous trouble with women, growing a moustache to try to ward them off, and Scobie with his salty, slangy storytelling:

He looked archly at me round his pipe and suddenly cheered up. He began one of those delightful rambling monologues – another chapter in the saga he had composed around his oldest friend, the by now mythical Toby Mannering. ‘Toby was once Driven Medical by his excesses – I think I told you. No? Well, he was. Driven Medical.’ He was obviously quoting and with relish. ‘Lord how he used to go it as a young man. Stretched the limit in beating the bounds. Finally he found himself under the Doctor, had to wear an Appliance.’ His voice rose by nearly an octave. ‘He went about in a leopard-skin muff when he had shore leave until the Merchant Navy rose in a body. He was put away for six months. Into a Home. They said, “You’ll have to have Traction” – whatever that is. You could hear him scream all over Tewkesbury, so Toby says. They say they cure you but they don’t. They didn’t him at any rate. After a bit, they sent him back. Couldn’t do anything with him. He was afflicted with Dumb Insolence, they said. Poor Toby!’

Such moments offer relief from the grim heartbreak, philosophical thrashing and disillusionment that are the main themes of the text. To have a little humour balanced so carefully throughout helps to shore up my sense that on completion I will be able to pronounce The Alexandria Quartet one of the greatest accomplishments of 20th Century literature.

Onwards now to Mountolive.