It is the impoverished soul who has yet to encounter the unbridled bliss that is Eve Babitz’s prose. I’ve written about her several times, but I seem to be on a Babitz kick this summer (when am I not?), and my proselytizing propensities are in full whack.
There. I said it. I am enamored with Babitz’s writing, and this lust just won’t go away. Last month I reread her infamous 1972 semi-fictionalized memoir “Eve’s Hollywood” and that kick-started my crush on her hip, shaggy, archly observant wordsmithery.
Babitz was Joan Didion with a jolt of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and, crucially, a sense of humor. She’s the cool Didion, the one who laid Jim Morrison, among a murderers’ row of L.A. badasses — “she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles” — and swanked her way through the megalopolis’ mega-scenes with abundant beauty and ample talent (she was also an accomplished artist).
Her memoirs and novels depict “a glamorous and unapologetically wild world.” And a privileged one, too. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. She was romantically entwined with Steve Martin and Harrison Ford. Reader, you are forgiven for getting a wee jealous about her oversaturated life. Me, I wilt.
And it’s this bounty that keeps you reading, carried as it is with earthy writing whose low-slung easiness pops at every turn with a hilarious throwaway detail. “She was a phenomenal writer,” declared LitHub, “the kind people hate the most, the kind that doesn’t have to toil or sweat to turn out something that’s not only decent but often extraordinary. Eve was not a great writer in spite of her unseriousness but because of it.”
Some summers ago, I compiled a blog entry entirely of quotes from Babitz’s fizzy, funny novel “Sex and Rage.” A few brief samples, a sliver of what the book, as slim as it is, contains:
“In the hurricane, the waves were fifteen feet high and roared like lions and volcanoes.”
“He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes. Anyone would have liked being hugged by him.”
“She felt as though she’d been in front of a firing squad that had changed its mind.”
Her work is so much more than this. I’d have to transcribe whole pages to do it justice. It’s wily, droll, dry but juicy, real and loaded. And you will laugh.
Four years ago, I wrote about this book: “Babitz’s raffish auto-fiction, whose subtitle, ‘Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time,’ is a brazen come-on. It’s so saucy, such unfiltered fun, and the writing so ablaze, resisting it would be dumb self-denial.”
In 2018, I read the Babitz novel “L.A. Woman,” and wrote, “Soaked in sunsets and squalor, glamor and grit, ‘LA. Woman’ traces the squiggly trajectory of a young Jim Morrison groupie through the titular city with a constant stream of poetics and epiphany. It’s funny and mean. It’s about Los Angeles. And life. I gobbled it up in a gulp, like a gumdrop.”
So, yeah, I dig Eve. Without being her proxy pitchman — Babitz died in 2021, age 78 — I recommend these books: “Eve’s Hollywood,” “Sex and Rage” and “I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz.” Take a bite.
Or don’t. Remain unenlightened. I don’t care. And Eve, that snarky libertine, certainly wouldn’t either. She’d shrug, chuckle a plume of smoke, then carry on waxing rhapsodic about her capacious life in her crazy city, not a care in the world.
GNASHING. 