Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)
The first nonfiction work by the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its initial publication in 1968, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties. More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Didion's focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Dan Wakefield wrote in The New York Times Book Review, " In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand... [She] makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful."
Je n'avais jamais entendu parler de Joan Didion avant de lire Writing English as a Second Language de William Zinsser, allocution aux étudiants étrangers de l'école de journalisme de l'université de Columbia.
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-second-language/
L'extrait de Slouching Towards Bethlehem qu'il présentait m'avait semblé intéressant et j'ai eu envie de lire le livre. J'avoue que je n'ai pas tout aimé : les essais sur Haight-Ashbury (Slouching Towards Bethlehem justement) et sur New York (Goodbye to all that) sont par moments déprimants (apparemment, il est trop tard pour aller vivre à New York). En revanche, j'ai beaucoup aimé Where the Kissing Never Stops (starring Joan Baez), Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) (même si un texte sur un communiste est sans surprise), 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38 (je vais peut-être enfin lire le livre sur Howard Hughes que j'ai acheté il y a des décennies). Mais c'est bien l'Amérique des années 60.
Ma sœur et moi regardions la carte de Rhode Island dans l'atlas des Etats-Unis et je lui disais que j'aimerais beaucoup aller à Newport. Juste après je reprends ma lecture et je trouve The Seacoast of Despair où Newport est décrit de manière assez lugubre.
"Happiness" is, after all, a consumption ethic, and Newport is the monument of a society in which production was seen as the moral point, the reward if not exactly the end, of the economic process. The place is devoid of the pleasure principle. To have had the money to build "The Breakers" or "Marble House" or "Ochre Court" and to choose to build at Newport is in itself a denial of possibilities; the island is physically ugly, mean without the saving grace of extreme severity, a landscape less to be enjoyed than dominated.