Eve Babitz Was Hot and Sometimes So Am I
Two years on celluloid—alright, alright, alright. I should go back to bed and read a romance, polish it off by three am. You can only squeeze so many pages out of me a day. I looked up who Eve Babitz wrote those little dedications to in Slow Days Fast Company but no such luck. It’s “Shawn” based on the contents of the essays and minor pieces put together, but there has to date been no “Shawn” documented in her robust dossier of ex-lovers so I can only guess that he was either a ghost or it’s a pseudonym of somebody a little famous (maybe Ed or the other Ruscha brother). I can’t decide which explanation I like better. The only people I can definitely rule out are Jim Morrison, Dennis Quaid, and Harrison Ford. Morrison because he was already dead, Quaid because she didn’t like him all that much, and Ford because he was famous by then and Eve seemed to only be drawn to people who were talented but not famous yet. Not a star-fucker, but someone who genuinely saw the times before they happened; she could sense talented people like a bloodhound on a fox hunt.
People like comparing Eve Babitz to Joan Didion because they are both women who wrote non-fiction in California at roughly the same time, but beyond a cursory glance, I just don’t see the similarity. At heart, Joan Didion is a journalist. Eve had no interest in facts, only the emotional truth. She is a writer in the American tradition which is to say an active participant. Eve writes about herself as the sun and the LA coke-snorting characters as the various planets which orbit her stratosphere. Didion hones in on the planets, the context, and the texture of American stories. She’s present in her stories but from the strict role of observer. In her silence, you feel her gravity rather than see it. She imposes herself in the scene, but by some trick of the light, she manages to stay just out of frame. When she reveals any part of herself, you’re left with more questions than answers.
I’ll put it this way: in 1960-something, Joan Didion interviewed Jim Morrison but Eve fucked him.
Eve’s writing invites intimacy, encouraging the reader to partake in the valium in “Bad Day at Palm Springs” or her hatred for San Francisco. Didion writes about her life but in a detached, clinical sort of way. Like how you’d write about somebody else. But Eve is always Eve, spilling out her life before us like I imagine she might if you drank together and telephoned the morning after to pore over the previous night’s events. She tells us stories so embarrassingly personal they must be true. Eve (even as I write about her, Eve is Eve, not Eve Babitz, and certainly not just “Babitz,” but Joan Didion is only ever Joan Didion, or at the very least “Didion”) is your friendly tour guide, a comrade through the treacherous, slumping, chill-out/get-wrecked paradox that is Los Angeles.
Joan Didion is your imperious dinner guest who, by her own admission, is “physically small” yet possessing an undeniable gravity. The one which only that elite class of people—the watchers—seem to contain. You notice her because she has and probably always will be beautiful in that no-makeup, clean hair smoking kind of way, but also to see if she’s watching you, also taking notice. I don’t think I’m interesting or un-selfconscious enough, but if I were, I don’t think she would like me. I smoke, but I talk too much.
I can’t write about anything that’s not about me. Even now, while dissecting the works of two brilliant writers, I insert myself. As if I were even remotely in their class—which I’m not. It’s why I periodically inject my life with chaos. I fear with my nine-to-five and overall chilled-out existence I’ll run out of things to write about. Sorry, I’m being vague. I just mean every once in a while I’m compelled to lose control, turn down dark corners, go walking and allow myself to be followed. Just to stay the kind of person for whom Things Happen To.
Out here, the salt air and smudgy sunsets have a way of lulling you into dumb contentment. I am afraid there will be nothing left to write about if I don’t get heartbroken. Disappointed, anxious, of course. But heartbreak doesn’t exist for me; when the sky crumbled years ago; the rest of your life is dedicated to tending to the wounds. That being said, the past few years have been suspiciously happy; I wouldn’t put it past the Gods to fuck me over. In writing this down, I tempt them.
But I want to be successful. I would like to be brilliant. And it’s impossible to be brilliant for very long if you’re constantly putting your body in mortal danger. There’s the matter of Eve’s brilliance: no matter how excellent her work is, she hasn’t written anything of note after 1999, and her best was always in the 70s. Nobody felt the LA 80s hangover more than The Participant. Laurel Canyon and CSNY and The Doors and Mama Cass scorched through LA for a decade, Eve for even longer, but things burn up and burn out. For Eve, it was literal, when her dress caught fire in 1997 and she was left with third-degree burns. Harrison Ford, Ed Ruscha, Steve Martin, and Dennis Quaid donated $50,000 each to her medical fund. There was a slew of think pieces in 2017 on the resurgence of appreciation for her work as American Millenials discovered her work for the first time, but her “Comeback” was inevitable. Nobody ever forgot Eve Babitz.
Famously she wrote about herself: 'I looked like Brigitte Bardot, and I was Stravinsky's goddaughter.' The public loves women who write when they are beautiful, white, thin, and born into American Royalty. They remember her youth, her indelible “cool.” Being rich and beautiful is enough material for a lifetime. No pretty girl with half a mind is ever uninteresting. Who could ever forget Sylvia Plath with her red lips and half-pinned curls?
No modern writer has ever tapped into my preoccupation with beauty as a vital ingredient to a woman’s legacy except Kate Zambreno. I think of Green Girl, her grossly underrated novel dissecting the Ingenue in our age of digital consumption of everything, but especially women’s bodies. A body today is art, social activism, and monetary commodity all in one. Virginia Woolf didn’t need to be pretty in part because she just was that good and because author photographs didn’t really exist, so neither did the modern celebrity. I am drawn to Eve Babitz and Joan Didion and Kathy Acker because they, like me, are pretty white girls who write. They are the blueprint for Chelsea Hodson. I read her essays about Sugar Daddies and her time as a model and wish I was pretty enough to make money off my looks.
As a writer, people can believe I am beautiful because I say it is so. You have to be attractive enough for those who read your work and Google Image you after to not be surprised but beyond that, I can be as homely and plain as I please.
Looks are power, but nothing is more powerful than language. It doesn’t matter if you’re Bella Hadid if you can’t write well.
I tug my craft through the trenches, through mud and shit wondering when all this will get a little easier. And even as I fear running out of things to say once I’ve spent all my pain and good ideas, I’m equally afraid of burning out. Instead of limping along, I could stop dead in my tracks, get lost down roads of substance, and the lure of an Interesting Life. Or I could give it up completely one day, become who I swore I’d never be. Chelsea Hodson wrote in Tonight I’m Someone Else, “When you’re young, everyone’s an artist. But it’s a game of endurance, a fight against addiction, children, comfort, stasis, health insurance, home ownership. People drop off one by one. No one ever tells you that.”
Despite all my efforts, careful work on my craft, it is very possible that I will work until I die, write forever but it still might not enough. Like my prettiness, I work for scraps of brilliance like a fight dog for food. Everybody works, I know, and ease only comes with practice, but when I write about the great women I implicitly aspire to be, it feels like a pipe dream. In my heart, I know I’m a fraud. Atop a metal watchtower, I am waiting for the sky to reinvent itself, praying for lightning to strike.