Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The Center Cannot Hold

Joan Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968, and the title essay — her report from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the summer of 1967 — is one of the most cited pieces of American literary journalism of the twentieth century. Didion spent weeks in the Haight interviewing runaways, dealers, commune members, and the aimless young who had converged on California’s experiment in collective freedom, and what she found unsettled her profoundly: not a new society being born but a society coming apart, its youngest members incapable of coherent thought or sustained purpose, their parents having failed to transmit the values and structures that make a self possible.

The title comes from Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Didion is not using it hopefully. Her Haight is a place where the center has already failed — where five-year-olds are given LSD and teenagers conduct their emotional lives with the attention spans of infants, where the absence of authority has produced not freedom but a void. The essay is a diagnosis, not a celebration, and it was received with hostility by many who had expected a sympathetic portrait of the counterculture.

California as Metaphor and Place

The other essays in the collection establish the California context that makes the Haight piece intelligible. Didion grew up in Sacramento, in a family whose roots in California went back generations, and she writes about the state as only a native can — with simultaneous love, intimacy, and clear-eyed recognition of its pathologies. The California she describes is not the postcard version but the place at the end of the American westward movement, where there is nowhere further to go and the myths that powered the journey have no further use.

Several of the personal essays — including the celebrated “On Self-Respect” — develop her moral vocabulary: the belief that character is constituted through accepting responsibility for one’s choices, that the self is not given but constructed, and that the sixties’ project of dissolving all obligation was not liberation but destruction.

A Style That Changed American Prose

Didion’s prose in these essays set the terms for a generation of American nonfiction writing. The short sentences, the fragments used for emphasis, the way she drops a specific detail that contains an entire world — these became a style that countless writers have studied and imitated without quite reproducing. Reading these essays now, fifty years on, is to encounter a writer at the peak of her powers making the work look entirely effortless.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — The collection that established Didion’s voice and her cultural authority — essential for anyone who wants to understand American letters in the second half of the twentieth century.