Slouching Towards Fiction

It only took over 50 years, but I finally got around to reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem--Joan Didion's iconic essay.

Not sure why I didn't read it earlier.

It's a classic of New Journalism, a style of non-fiction where the writers put themselves at the center of the story. And adopt this annoyingly patronizing attitude, like they're smart and everyone else is stupid. 

Guess you can tell I'm not a big fan of the style, which may explain why I took so long to read Slouching.

Having finished it, I strongly suspect Didion has committed one of the cardinal sins of journalism, new or old, in that she...

Well, let's start at the top.

First published in 1967 in The Saturday Evening Post, the story covers Didion’s time hanging around Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood in San Francisco, where the hippies used to live.

The title comes from The Second Coming, a poem by W.B.Yates, which portends an approaching apocalypse dooming civilization and opens with the following lines...

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall a part; the center cannot hold...”

Didion opens her essay by declaring, "the center was not holding."

She goes on to describe her interactions with a mostly unidentified bunch of dim-witted, drugged-out, hippies, spouting nonsense as they descend on San Francisco from all over the country.

By and large, they come across as harmless to anyone other than themselves. But in the final pages, Didion takes a dark turn.

She chides readers not to view the hippies as lame-brained comic characters. Instead, we should think of them as representing a dangerous fringe, growing in numbers, that will one day "lend itself to authoritarianism."

And to prove her point, she describes an horrific scene of a five-year old, she calls Susan, tripping on LSD.

No, it’s worse than that. According to Didion, Susan's unnamed mother fed her, Susan, the acid that's frying her brain.

A young Joan Didion, hanging with the hippies…

The essay closes with an ominous riff, which I feel compelled to quote in its entirety, as it's regarded as one of the most memorable passages in journalism. So here goes…

“When I finally find Otto, he says, ‘I got something at my place that'll blow your mind,’ and when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she's wearing white lipstick.

"’Five years old,’ Otto says. ‘On acid.’

“The five-year-old's name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes Coca-Cola, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.

“I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.

"’She means do the other kids in your class turn on get stoned,’ says the friend of her mother's who brought her to Otto's.

"’Only Sally and Anne,’ Susan says.

"’What about Lia?’ her mother's friend prompts.

"’Lia,"’Susan says, ‘is not in High Kindergarten.’”

I happened to be sitting on a beach when I read that passage. And when I finished, I closed the book and looked out over the waves into the horizon, half expecting to see a falcon flying in circles.

And I thought...wow, good thing Didion found a kid so cogent and articulate, even while tripping on acid. Cause that kid gave Didion exactly what she needed to finish her essay with a bang.

And without that kid, Didion would have been wondering, like so many journalists before and after, how the hell do I end this thing that I’ve started? Help!!!

And then it hit me with a bang bigger than the one with which Didion ended her essay...

I don't believe it. I don't believe any of that last scene happened. At least the five-year-old tripping on acid part. Which is the part that matters most.

Think about it. The kid, as quoted by Didion, is remarkably articulate. Able to precisely recall the names of players in the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Able to add nice touches like the bicycle she wants for Christmas, and her trip to the beach, and her love for ice cream. And the names of the other kid in “High Kindergarten.” And so on.

Even though she's tripping on acid.

As someone who took acid one time many years ago, I can tell you that there's no way I could have so effortlessly carried on a conversation while tripping. And I was almost 19 when I dropped that tab. Scared me so much I vowed to never drop another. 

But a five-year-old? If you regularly feed acid and peyote to a five-year-old for over a year, they won’t be exchanging amiable chatter with a stranger. No way. You will fry their brain. They will be comatose. If not dead. 

Don't get me wrong. It’s not that I doubt there are parents in the world so cruel as to feed drugs to their five-year-olds. The world’s filled with hideous people who’ve done worse things to their children.

I just don't believe that Susan's mother--whoever she is, and Didion never names her—fed acid to Susan. Or if Susan exists at all, as opposed to being a convenient figment of Didion's fertile imagination.

The scene reminds me of the journalistic scandal involving Janet Cooke, who used to write for the Washington Post. Back in 1981 Cooke won a Pulitzer for Jimmy's World, an expose about an eight-year-old junkie she called Jimmy.

Cooke claimed she saw Jimmy shoot up and described "needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin, brown arms."

When her story came out, there was an outcry from officials in D.C. who demanded to know Jimmy’s identity so they could try to save him before he killed himself.

Eventually, Cooke was forced to admit she made it all up. Blamed it on deadline pressure. She was fired. Had to give back her Pulitzer and got banished from the business. 

As far as I can tell, no one cast doubts about Didion's story. No one demanded she identify the parent who was feeding dangerous drugs to her child. No one demanded Didion lead them to Susan, so they could get her to a safe space.

Talk about things falling apart and the center not holding. This was a report in a prominent national publication written by a highly regarded journalist exposing child abuse and no one did a damn thing about it.

Certainly, not Didion.

When asked what she thought when she met Susan, Didion said, "Let me tell you, it was gold. You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad."

Damn, that's cold-hearted. You witness a five-year-old abused by her mother and do nothing about it except rejoice over having a sock-em ending to your tale? That’s about as center can’t hold as you can get.

Why the double standards for Didion and Cooke? You could write a dissertation on that question. But I think it starts with the fact that there were a lot of people, most of them Black, who wanted to help “Jimmy.”And there was no one who gave a damn about “Susan.” As she was a convenient tool in a larger culture wars that’s still being waged by the Right against the Left.

I'd be more outraged—if I thought the Susan story was true. But again, I don't. Again, I think Didion made it up--though I have no proof one way or another—in order to get the perfect ending. Which she got. A little too perfect, if you ask me. Though nobody is asking me.

No, in the vast rest of the world that is not me, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is cited as one of the greatest essays ever. Still widely taught in journalism classes. Still widely read, even five years after Didion died in 2021. 

So if Didion did made it up, it worked. As lying often does--which is why so many people do it. Even perhaps the best of journalists, who are supposed to be telling the truth.