Didion - Collected Essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, After Henry

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

CONTENTS

About the Author

Joan Didion is the author of five novels, ten works of nonfiction, and a play. Her books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It as It Lays, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking, and, most recently, South and West: From a Notebook. Born in Sacramento, California, she lives in New York City.

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Also by Joan Didion

Blue Nights

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live

The Year of Magical Thinking

Where I Was From

Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11

Political Fictions

The Last Thing He Wanted

After Henry

Miami

Democracy

Salvador

The White Album

A Book of Common Prayer

Play It As It Lays

Run River

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SLOUCHING
TOWARDS
BETHLEHEM

Essays

for quintana

Acknowledgments

Where the Kissing Never Stops appeared first in The New York Times Magazine under the title Just Folks at a School for Non-Violence. On Keeping a Notebook and Notes from a Native Daughter appeared first in Holiday. I Cant Get That Monster out of My Mind and On Morality first appeared in The American Scholar, the latter under the title The Insidious Ethic of Conscience. On Self-Respect and Guaymas, Sonora appeared first in Vogue. Los Angeles Notebook includes a section which was published as The Santa Ana in The Saturday Evening Post. All the other essays appeared originally in The Saturday Evening Post, several under different titles: Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream was published as How Can I Tell Them Theres Nothing Left; 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38, was published as The Howard Hughes Underground; Letter from Paradise, 21 19 N., 157 52 W. was called Hawaii: Taps Over Pearl Harbor; Goodbye to All That was called Farewell to the Enchanted City.

The author is grateful to all these publications for permission to reprint the various essays.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats

I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant.

Miss Peggy Lee

A Preface:

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, that 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 suggest 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 fads dead now, fini, kaput. I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by 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 a feedback so universally beside the point.