Melancholia, U.S.A.

SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM by Joan Di'dion. 238 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Most good journalists sooner or later find a beat that pleases them above all others. Joan Didion's territory is a bleak and joyless neverland located somewhere between Despond and Nostalgia. Under her melancholy eye, even the most familiar people and places take on an air of tragedy. Things seem to be falling apart, and the atmosphere is mournfully laden with unrealized dreams and memories of lost innocence.

Journalist Didion, 33, a former Vogue editor and now a Saturday Evening Post columnist, wrote these 20 essays and articles for a variety of magazines between 1961 and 1967. Most of the subject matter is conventional, perhaps even overworked. Yet it approaches art, not merely because Author Didion has an unforgetting reporter's ear, nor simply because she can hit human vagaries with the quick, poisonous aim of an aroused rattlesnake.

What most captivates the reader is the fascination of discovering how her brittle sensibilities and flamboyant neuroses react to events. Her meticulous eyewitness account of the scruffy San Francisco hippie subculture becomes all the more engrossing for the mingled feelings of anger, pain and horror that the entire experience caused her. Miss Didion suffers constantly, but compellingly and magically. With testiness, she reports on the vulgarity of Las Vegas weddings. With sad humor, she tells of a visit to Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. With annoyance, she relates the legends surrounding Howard Hughes. With nostalgia, she describes a visit with John Wayne: how, as a round-eyed California schoolgirl, she yearned for some young man to promise, as Wayne had promised a heroine in a movie, to build her a home "at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow."

Many young men (and older ones too) reading her sentimental, compassionate and appealing passages would be willing to do just that.

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