Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion
Last month The Atlantic published the controversial article, "The Autumn of Joan Didion," an account of the writer through the critical eye of Caitlin Flanagan, daughter of a UC Berkeley English professor who hosted a dinner party in honor of Didion when Flanagan was a teenager. Google the article, and you'll see the visual wake of it; and with this review, the thing is still alive because it prompted me to return to Slouching Towards Bethlehem with a new eye.
Albeit my appreciation for Joan Didion feels a bit like I'm a few hours late to prom (my first JD memoir was A Year of Magical Thinking), I admit the cover-to-cover assessment of STB has more to do with critiquing Flanagan's flippant, sweeping dismissal of Didion. Weeks after having read "Autumn," I feel the urge to go back to it and judge whether or not Flanagan was perhaps writing ironically. Is this how my students feel after reading "A Modest Proposal"? Puzzled? Tricked?
I'll go into the details, I promise, but let me say from the get go that Flanagan's appraisal felt personal because it was about Didion being a woman, a mother, and a writer. What does it say that Didion is criticized for "getting old"? What does it say that an implicit premise of the article is that parenting is the sole domain of the mother (at one point Flanagan jabs that Didion neglected her daughter to write, ultimately leading to Didion's daughter's mental problems and eventual suicide)?
Lest this review be about Flanagan and not Didion, I'll bracket that discussion off for my next post, a review of Flanagan's full length treatment of gender roles (what some are calling "neo-essentialist"), Girlland.
1. Read more of the the critical work of T. S. Eliot. This new critic will remind you that "fresh" is an adjective that should be reserved for food, not language.
2. Take a look at Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. Especially the chapter on clinamen. Remind you of anyone?
3. Remember that Carl Jung warned us that what we criticize in others is the thing we hate about ourselves. I would hazard a guess that you, a writer and mother, harbor deep ambivalence about those dual/duel roles in your life. And as a woman coming to terms with age, isn't there a fear that your work will be dismissed because you're not cool anymore? We all get old. Get over it.
Okay. Now that I got that out of my system--Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Notable quotes illustrating Didion's Stegner-like mastery of the sentence:
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History. (63)
Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. (71)
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. (133)
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes one-self. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind of the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
Topics of interest: Howard Hughes, John Wayne, Joan Baez, California, Alcatraz, the soul, depression, love and the work of the writer.
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