A year or so ago, I wrote to NYRB Classics, asking them if I could send one of their authors a fan letter. This is not typical for me: if there’s a writer I like, I’ll buy their books, give them a follow online, maybe even write a review of two. But fan letters? I’ve only ever been moved to do that once before, when I sent Graham Lock a letter telling him how much I loved Forces In Motion. (It helped that we had a friend in common).
But I never did write that letter, and on December 17, 2021, it became clear I never would: that day Eve Babitz died in Los Angeles.
In one of her books, Babitz name-drops Max Beerbohm, and like him, maybe she’s fated to be among the minor writers of her generation. She never achieved the fame of Joan Didion, never got the documentary treatment and for years, her work was out-of-print and hard to come by. But in the past decade, NYRB Classics reissued two of her books (Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company) as well as an anthology of her essays and reportage, I Used To Be Charming, which introduced her to a new audience, one that includes me.
I can’t remember who tipped me off to Babitz, but she quickly became a favourite of mine. Partly it’s the milieu: she came of age in Hollywood in the mid-60s and her first two books cover the LA scene for the next decade. Partly it’s the stories she tells: the light, breezy gossip about people, like when she introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dali. I think Molly Lambert describes her best: “Cool beyond belief but friendly and unintimidating.”
But mostly, it’s the prose. Babitz is wonderful at the way she sets a scene, in the way she describes a person, and in how easy she makes it all look. She writes in a low key, understated style, using short, simple sentences. But with a careful turn of phrase or well-paced quote, she makes everything come alive. Suddenly you’re there, be it in Barney’s Beanery, the Chateau Marmont or out in Palm Springs. For example, here’s a nice taste from Slow Days…:
“But now it hadn’t rained in so long that coming into LA in that dense quicksand traffic made all the green water in Laguna subside into quicksand smog. Laguna with it’s emerald bay could have been a figment of a dream for all the thirst for heaven it slaked.” (pg 84)
LA, LA. As Neil Young once sang, uptight city in the smog. A place where dreams are made and where people seem to drift in and out of, hoping to get caught in the star-making machinery. Babitz basically spent her life there, rubbing shoulders with people and writing books. I think Slow Days is the real keeper of the bunch, a loose collection of intertwining stories, a sort of fictionalised memoir of the mid 70s.
It’s short, running to a slim 162 pages, but there’s no fat, not a word wasted. She goes up for a spell to a farm in the Central Valley where they grow grapes and spends a weekend in Palm Springs where she eats bad takeout and reads Virginia Woolf. She gets hassled by the Santa Ana winds (“Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion both regard the Santa Anas as some powerful evil,” she writes, “and I know what they mean…”), takes in a baseball game and goes out with an actor who’s pissed off over an upcoming storyline. A few names pop up over and over, usually friends or friends-of-friends, and it’s like we’re getting to spend a week in her world.
It’s a nice place to visit, with expansive sunsets, fast cars and lots of drugs. Cocaine pops up everywhere, and although it’s a drug that turns the most modest of people into assholes, somehow Babitz keeps her charm. She’s blase, keeping the trappings of Hollywood at an arm’s length, but fun to be around, calling people bores and giving you inside scoop on her friends. When she goes to a Dodgers game, she gets excited and her enthusiasm is contagious; when the heat finally breaks and it starts to rain, we feel the relief.
“I did not become famous, but I got near enough to smell the stench of success,” writes Babitz. And maybe that’s it exactly. After an accident that left her with burns all over her body, Babitz became something of a recluse, rarely granting interviews or publishing (I Used To Be Charming doesn’t include anything past 1997, with the exception of the title essay). But, in the years before her death, she maybe came as close to being famous as she ever did, with a biography published in 2019, and rumours of a Hulu original series based on her books.
Like Beerbohm, maybe it’s for the best that Babitz never reached the same level of fame as Didion did. Indeed, Didion died just a few days after Babitz, all but overshadowing her in literary circles. It makes her more of a secret, someone to be passed along with a hushed whisper among like-minded people. It’s almost like a password to get into a cool club, the kind of club that she’d have known about before you did, but maybe if you were lucky enough, she’d invite you along. And even now, after her passing, she still does with her books. I can’t recommend them enough.