Joan Didion could deal with hippies. She could deal with addicts and officers of the law. But she couldn’t deal with the deadline set by The Saturday Evening Post.
The paper had partnered Didion with the photojournalist Ted Streshinsky – and sent the pair of them into Haight-Ashbury.
Their assignment was to gather an impression of the hippie movement of 1967. Didion gathered several.
Then September approached and it was back to the typewriter for Didion. She had to figure out what all her notes and memories added up to.
What was the significance of all those groupies and runaways and bare-footed children?
Didion had some half-formed ideas. But that’s all she had: musings on atomisation. Meanwhile, The Post had a deadline.
So she arranged her loose impressions and even looser theories into a verbal montage. The paper simply had to go to print.
In her cover story, readers caught snippets of conversation from street corners and flophouses. They joined Didion for tense car rides and psychedelic concerts. They stopped to read signs and lyrics and spiritual chants. And it worked.
Didion’s piece of writing worked. When upstanding Americans opened The Saturday Evening Post, it filled their sitting rooms with the fug of San Francisco. Quotes and extracts transplanted a scene into columns of justified type.
The article became a template for a new kind of journalism. Publishers urged Didion to turn it into a book, and she did — kind of.
The book features the hippie article (‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’) as one essay among many.
It’s still my favourite. I love the way she punctuates that piece with transcriptions from her radio or found political flyers. There’s no getting over that montage effect… It still feels immediate — fresh.
The piece stands out enough to be the titular essay in the book, but it’s also at home in the collection.
Together, Didion’s essays form a larger montage: mood music from a failing America. The tunes are familiar, still.
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.
