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Bookclub: 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'
Presented by Michael Dirda
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor
Thursday, Jan. 30, 2003; Noon ET

Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World. Washington Post Book World Senior Editor Michael Dirda presented the discussion on this month's selection, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' by Joan Didion.

Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera."

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

Michael Dirda: Welcome to The Washington Post Book World's online book discussion of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, that distinguished journalist/cultural essayist's first and still most famous collection. For the next hour I'll field questions about the essays, bounce ideas back to you, and we'll see what happens. If you find you just can't get enough Dirda today, come back at 2 for my regular weekly discussion of books in general. I've been away for a bit, but now I'm back. At least for the moment.
So let's get started.

Washington, D.C.: Though I have read "Play it as it Lays," and felt it was wonderful, it seems to me like Didion will always be more closely associated/anthologized with her essay work - would it be fair to say her essay work has "overshadowed" her fiction work?

Michael Dirda: I"d say so. As some of you may know, I interviewed Didion in front of an audience last week and that was one of the questions I never quite got round to asking. It would moreover be a sensitive issue. Didion did say that she wanted to be a novelist and only took to journalism as a way of making a living. You may remember that Ingres wanted to be known as a violinist and always rather regretted his renown as a painter. (The French have a saying that a person's secret passion, for which he is not known, is his violon d'Ingres.)
On the other hand, the voice, the tone of Didion's novels is pretty close to that of her nonfiction.

Arlington, Tex.: As a college student, I was first turned on to Didion in an English class, after being forced to read "Goodbye to All That" for a take home final. And, though, her work is taught in English Departments everywhere, I sometimes get the feeling she was much bigger in the 60's/70's - that she may have been a household name, even.

Many younger readers, in my age group, seem less familiar with her works than older readers. Is it fair to say that her status/name recognition have declined as she has gotten older due to her less frequent publication in periodicals? Or, for even some other reason - a decline in reading altogether, due to to the ubiquity of TV and film?

Michael Dirda: The issue of reputation is a tricky one. Certainly among people who read serious journalism or cultural reporting Joan Didion is still a god. But she's been with us long enough now that there is a tendency to take her for granted. The same thing happens with novelists like John Updike. When the man is dead we'll all be sorry that we didn't appreciate having him around more. What do the young read? Why, they read whatever half dozen or so writers that their generation deems hot or representative or cool. Right now that would be Dave Eggers principally, with back up by Jonathan Lethem, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, et al. Back in my college days the names would have been Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Donald Barthelme et al.
The world will sort these things out. What matters for readers though is to fight as much as they can the blinders and limits imposed by their peers and their own time. Read beyond the box.

Lenexa, Kan.: Mr. Dirda: Could you share some of the flavor of the recent Book Club Event for us remote members? In addition to Didion's journalistic and literary remarks, I was wondering if she talked about America's new "unilateral militarism" (so deftly attacked by her in the recent NYRB article).

As an aside, I was pleased to see a manifesto of many of America's finest writers and artists in the same NYRB issue. "Here is our answer" to Bush's "You're either with us or against us."--"Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression." (I sent them my $200.) Sorry if this is too political for the Book Club but Didion's passionate voice in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" would seem to merit it. Thanks.

Michael Dirda: Didion and I mainly discussed her writing, career and views. She is soft-spoken, without much vivaciousness or eloquence, but one senses a woman who cares about words, the world, and is happiest either at her typewriter or gathering material for her essays.
She and I--like many Americans--are appalled by the war-mongering of the Bush administration. I have friends who feel quite otherwise and who are smart, informed and knowledgeable about military/political affairs. But I can't help but feel that Bush and company have acted in bad faith all along; there was never any real interest in making inspections work and nothing short of Saddam abdicating would have been enough. It is appaling that a man who looks so normal should act so fanatically. And one does feel this obsessivness. And frankly, I wish I lived in Lenexa, Kansas and had a nice teaching job at the local community college.

Norfolk, Va.: In general, what do you think of the genre known as ``creative nonfiction''? It's a broad category that includes everything from travel writing to memoir. It's all over the place, too. While upper-end magazines like The New Yorker only publish one short story per issue, they carry many more pieces falling into the nonfiction category. While they're mostly reportage-based, it's true that others are very creative. Why the genre's popularity?

Michael Dirda: Creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction has been popular for 30 or more years. Why? It's easier to read than fiction. A short story or novel demands a certain commitment from a reader, will often be told in a complicated fashion. But literary journalism's intent is to entertain with facts and anecdotes about the quirky and interesting. Certainly it can be very artistic, but voice is the key element for a nonfiction writer. To write a serious work of fiction means to dig deep in yourself, to write nonfiction means to marshal your material in an entertaining way.

Washington D.C.: At last week's Q&A she certainly held to her own description of herself in "Slouching ...": "So inarticulate. ..." I've never seen a writer less inclined to discuss her own work, or even aware she's revered, or good, or smart. Is this an act? I've read interviews with her, and a speech she once gave at Berkeley, where she seemed more self-aware. Were you surprised by her inability to speak at length about her books and writing? That said, I found much to enjoy in what she did manage to say -- especially that she occasionally wonders if she'd been fair to subjects in her early journalistic essays. She was definitely very Didion. Re-reading "Slouching," I'm astonished how modern it still seems.

Michael Dirda: I had heard from a correspondent that she might be a hard interview, that she lacked the performer gene. But I think the discussion went reasonably well. I'm sure it's not an act. Yes, I'm glad I asked that question about fairness--it's something that haunts journalists, but usually afterwards, when the damage has been done.

Laurel, Md: I am compelled by Didion's use of detail piled upon detail, seemingly random, but leading to a final inescapable point. Can you comment on why here style is so effective?

Michael Dirda: Sheer genius. In truth, everything is very artful. As she said in our public conversation "Revision is what I do." Her tone may stay deadpan, but she orchestrates her effects with exquisite care. One senses a kind of clarity too--here is what I saw, what I heard, what happened. You be the final judge. Not least, she's not afraid to risk sentimental effects or flourishes. THink of that graf about John Wayne that ends with her still longing for that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.

Silver Spring, Md.: To see the image of the graveyard and the woman wrenching flowers by a grave makes me wonder how many of these sights we will see if there is a war with Iraq. The author captured the agony in a touching way. Lest we forget.
Not a question; just an observation. Thanks for sending me to the library to get this book.

Michael Dirda: You're welcome. We've seen such sights all through my adult lifetime. It still appals me that in the 21st century we should be suffering religious wars and our nation beled by jingoist imperialists.

Washington, D.C.: I enjoyed the evening with Joan Didion, despite that awful fire alarm fiasco. During your interview, though, Didion seemed awfully awkward, somewhat uncomfortable, and very halting with her getting her thoughts out, which surprised me. (Although she did seem more comfortable by audience questions.) Since then, I've learned that she's often awkward when conducting interviews, and that's in fact one of the reasons people open up to her, to help make HER feel more comfortable while she's interviewing them. Do you know if this is true?

Michael Dirda: Could well be true. She has said that she's such a small, mousy character that people don't pay her much heed and that that helps get her the story. Of course, the mousy is an understatement: In her photographs of the '60s she is quite gorgeous, in a low-key, All American way.

New York, NY: A guiding theme throughout Didion's book is the misguidedness, if not futility of the 60s counterculture movement. Do you think this pessimism speaks to the political climate today? Are these comparable times?

Michael Dirda: How can anyone not be pessimistic in today's political climate? But the one thing true of the '60s is that it was not pessimistic. People were angry and they could be violent, over Vietnam and Civil Rights, but the whole period was pervaded with a sense of hopefulness, a feeling that the world could be changed into a better, happier place. Delusion perhaps, but such was the zeitgeist. As I've written before, quoting Wordsworth, "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven."

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Silver Spring, Md.: Didion writes "So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. . . .
". . . instead I tell what some would call lies. . . . not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. . . .
"How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook."
Didion also expressed this attitude at last week’s Washington Post book club event.

While this may be a legitimate attitude to color Didion’s “social commentary” or mood pieces (and mind you, I am a long-time reader and fan), don’t you think that it should be added as a disclaimer to all pieces that purport to be serious reporting – particularly her political reporting – so as not to confuse her readers into believing that how it felt to her is how it was, empirically?

Michael Dirda: I quoted this same passage and asked her about this. She said, if I recall correctly, that she no longer writes in that fashion, and that her nonfiction is as factually accurate as she can make it. Not that artistry doesn't come into its presentation.

Big Didion fan, Washington, D.C.: One reason Didion is less known is that she almost exclusively writes only for the NY Review of Books, which doesn't go far beyond a particular circle of folks. I was amazed that most of "Slouching ..." ran in places like the Sat. Evening Post, Life, Esquire. Once in a while she writes for the New Yorker. I suppose it's impossible for her to what she does now for a larger audience, but I wonder ... Did she mention anything she's currently working on?

Michael Dirda: She's just finished a book about the myths of California. Claims it is somewhat less smoothly written than most of her stuff.

Bethesda, Md.: It's my understanding John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion are married. Is this so? Both "Harp" and "Play it as it Lays" although one autobiographical and the other not, both seem to be a gritty look at life through pearl colored glasses. Apparently they also collaborated on the screenplay for "Pimento." Care to comment?

Michael Dirda: They are married, they have collaborated on many screenplays, most famously The Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions. What are pearl colored glasses? Same as rose? Certainly Didion conveys, behind the lines, a life of some privilege and ease, despite a hardworking career as a freelance writer. And John Gregory Dunne is the brother of the Hollywood writer/reporter Dominick Dunne.

Minneapolis, Minn.: Thanks for the comment on "Creative Non-fiction".
I've been writing in that style for quite awhile. I entertain and prove how clever and insightful I am. My friends can't get enough of it. But there isn't any soul.

Thanks for the nudge!

-Kal

Michael Dirda: Oh, you can have plenty of soul in nonfiction--my own journalism is pervaded with soul and autobiography. But fiction is deeper, harder and more important.

Lenexa, Kan.: Thanks for nice response. We'd love to have you out here--you'd make a nice neighbor. I was also moved--had underlined--the WWII leis story. Twenty-one years later and still.... Other examples of the writing I especially enjoyed:

"I know something about dread myself, and...the opiates of the people, whether...as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by faith in God or history."

"...the period when there were so many observers on Haight Street from Life and Look and CBS that they were largely observing each other."

"The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others--who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hare, is something people with courage can do without."

"Who could fail to read the sermon in the stones of Newport?...nothing is left but the shadow of the migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long-dead children..."

"New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself."

Michael Dirda: Lovely sentences all, and several I marked myself when I reread. As for moving to Kansas: I await the invitation to take up that endowed professorial chair.

Pittsburgh, Pa.: I did read "Play it as it Lays" some years ago at the advice of a friend and teacher, and I plan to reread it soon. Can you say anything about what makes it an important book in Didion's overall work and how the voice is similar to that of her essays?

Is there any essay that she has written that picks up similar themes to those in this novel in particular or in other novels?

Thank you.

Michael Dirda: Alas, I haven't read Play it as it Lays, behond the first sentence that goes something like "Some people ask why is Iago evil? I never ask." But I've looked around her novels and read in them, recognizing the same sound as in the essays.

Lenexa, Kan.: I liked the Yeats's epigraph and book title. One hears the "Things fall apart; The center cannot hold;" all the time--especially it seems in writings on deconstruction. I always think of Yeats as a giant of lyrical poetry but less as a philosophical thinker as in "The center..." lyric. Ian Hamilton who greatly admired Yeats said in his last interview, "I wouldn't be that interested in Yeats's opinion of my work, whereas I would be interested in Matthew Arnold's." Your thoughts? Thanks.

Michael Dirda: Well, Yeats was an artist, and not at all a theorist or political writer, though he tried (in A Vision) and some of the famous poems like Easter, 1916. I guess he was a self-obsessed self-mythologizer and visionary. Arnold, of course, was a guy with ideas, maybe too many ideas, which is why we hardly read anything more than Dover Beach and Empedocles on Etna and The Scholar Gypsy. He was, one feels, hard-working and intelligent, while Yeats was simply . . . passionate. I mean Yeats undrestanding of POlitics is summed up in the poem of that title, which starts "How can I/ That girl standing there/ My attention fix/ On Roman or on Russian/ or on Spanish politics?"

Bethesda, Md.: Thanks! That's exactly what I meant "A life of some ease and priviledge..." I just kind of find it interesting and that makes her talent all the more remarkable to me.

Michael Dirda: ok

Silver Spring, Md.: Didion writes "So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. . . . instead I tell what some would call lies. . . . not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. . . . "How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook." Didion also expressed this sentiment at last week’s Washington Post book club event. While this may be a legitimate approach for a writer to take to social commentary or mood pieces (and mind you, I am a long-time Didion reader and fan), don’t you think that it should be added as a disclaimer to all pieces that purport to be serious journalistic reporting – particularly her political reporting – so as not to confuse her readers into believing that how it felt to her is how it was, empirically?

Michael Dirda: Oops, I think we already addressed this question.
What intrigues me about Didion--and to some extent Dunne--is just how much money have they made from their writing? I mean, I'd like to be a freelance journalist too, but could I support myself. How did they do it? I suppose movie deals helped a lot. An old friend of mine once said the important things to know about a writer were his sexual orientation, the state of his health and where he got his money.

Lenexa, Kan.: I've read of your own feelings for New York City. Woody Allen talks about how he couldn't live elsewhere. Neil Simon talks of the one-of-a-kind "rush" he gets whenever he comes back. Richard Estes's Manhattanscapes? I especially enjoyed the loss and sorrow (the Dirda "ache") in "Goodbye to All That." (The title ties back nicely to one of the first selections of the Book Club.) Thanks again.

Michael Dirda: Yes, Robert Graves's great World War I memoir. Actually, I get that ache over a number of places where I"ve spent time: my hometown Lorain Ohio (about which readers of my book will learn more), Oberlin College, New York, New Orleans, and even Orlando. But not Washington, not Ithaca. They mean responsibility, work, getting worn out. Houses of Pain.

Michael Dirda: Well, that seems to be it for Didion. Glad you stopped by to listen in or ask a question. Remember: there'll be more--say it ain't so--yes more of Dirda at 2 PM. So in an hour come back for more angst, odd facts and genial musings from your very own bookman in Washington. (Hmmm, remind me to tone this down.) See you later.

washingtonpost.com:

That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion.