Hello, “Goodbye”: On the Relevancy of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”

New York in the 1960's. Source berlincheesecake.blogspot.com

          When I left New York after four years spent in the shadow of the city, I was unable to find the words to explain why I felt the urgent need to escape. At the time, all of my friends were moving into the hipster-haven of Williamsburg, Brooklyn and spoke about New York City as the only sensible place in the entire world in which to live. “Everything is here,” one of them told me, and I couldn’t disagree. After all, it wasn’t long ago that I had arrived in Yonkers from Michigan, where life seemed small and provincial in contrast to the big world of the Big Apple. I had refused to apply to college anywhere outside of New York City’s tri-state area, confident that the city was the best and only option for an aspiring writer looking to learn the world. Over those four years, I spent weekends on Canal Street, in SoHo, DUMBO and the museum district; I spent summers living on Christopher Street in the West Village. Everything seemed to be there, in New York. Yet, by May of my last year in college, I was packing my bags for Georgia, bound for a life that promised to be the exact opposite of what was there in the city. My friends acted like I had chosen to move to a third-world country. “What the hell are you going to do out there?” a friend worriedly asked me. “Become a peanut farmer?” The truth was that I had no idea what I was going to do in Georgia, but I knew I couldn’t stay in New York—I just didn’t know how to explain why. But, in 1967, Joan Didion did.

            Isn’t it thrilling to find a piece of writing that captures so perfectly an experience or emotion with which you are so familiar? Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” is that kind of essay for me, though her prose and analysis is surely more elegant than mine might ever be. What was surprising to me was that, while my experience emerged from the early years of the 21^st century, Didion wrote her essay in 1967, exactly 40 years before I made my exodus South. A lot of things happened in and around New York City in those 40 years—from a rise in population of over 280,000 people, to the substitution of the iconic if bulky medallion cabs for Crown Vics, to the rise and fall of the World Trade Center towers—yet still, Didion’s experience seemed to speak directly to my own with few obvious exceptions. In my mind, this connection illustrates how and why “Goodbye to All That” has such staying power. The author is writing not about a time in New York or in her own life, but rather she was defining the entity New York has become within the collective consciousness of young Americans growing up in small towns. It is about the emotion connected to a location—and, as far as I know, emotion does not expire with a new decade. 

Source: nnbd.com

In this piece, Didion doesn’t write about what New York was as a place, she writes about what the city felt like to her. She helps to open her experience to her readers by repeatedly using the pronouns “us” and “we”: “I suppose a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens.” In doing so in 1967, she acknowledged and asserted the universality of her experience within her generation; now, two generations later, this tactic succeeds at the same goal. Yet, though accepting that she is not alone in her interpretations of New York, she concentrates most of her prose around her own personal sentiments and life events in a way that is so precise and so impassioned that it is easy for a reader to empathize with the humanity of her experience, rather than the mere specifics. Reading this essay, I am reminded of the importance of writing beyond just a time in history and instead turning nonfiction prose towards deeper, more universal concepts about meaning and emotion. After all, isn’t that precisely why Shakespeare remains so popular, because he was able to capture human emotions that remain as authentic today as they did first performed on the dirty stage of the Globe?

Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” was first published in The Saturday Evening Post under the title “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” It was published within her 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I am a little ashamed to say that, despite that Slouching sits on my bookshelf while I write, and despite the fact I have read most of its essays, I have never before read “Goodbye to All That.” In reading the essay on its own through Byliner, it was removed from the context of Didion’s previous work and was allowed to stand on its own. It wasn’t bookended by other essays that are far more illustrative of the time in which the author wrote, nor influenced by other cultural or personal assessments she made throughout her volume. It made me feel like I was given an opportunity to read it as it was first published, in a magazine, stuck amidst nonrelated text, insisting to be taken on its own. Beyond the fact that Byliner and sites like it have the ability to turn the spotlight on classic though potentially forgotten works, it seems to permit and encourage the kind of reading experience that I had here, where the essay stands alone and for itself. But it isn’t as if we are reading such resurrected works within a vacuum. Once I finished “Goodbye to All That,” I returned to Byliner to peruse the other Didion works they had on file—works that spanned from the early ‘60s to 2008. Some of these pieces were hard-to-obtain magazine exclusives; others had been published within her many volumes of essays. Either way, viewing her work throughout the different stages of her career allowed me to explore “Goodbye” also as a cog in the workings of the author’s long and prolific career. In my mind, that is the greatest benefit Byliner and other sites maintaining classic works offer to modern readers: the ability to read a work both and separately as an isolated essay standing on its own, and as a piece that speaks to the larger assemblage of an author’s career.