Few things make me shake my head with greater incredulity that when someone says something to the effect that the market rewards those who most deserve it (for their obvious talent, for their skill at competition, for their meeting of a demand, etc.). That kind of blind belief that the cream magically and meritocratically rises to the top is frustrating in any context, including an aesthetic one. Historically and currently, the literary field is crowded with figures who are nowhere near as recognized and read as their work would seem to merit.
One such author whose work I’ve fallen into a deep fascination with over the past year and a half is the Los Angeles-based prose writer Eve Babitz, whose debut memoir-in-essays, “Eve’s Hollywood,” came out in 1974, when she was 31. It is full, as she puts it, of moments “of perfume where everything (is) gone except for the dazzle.” Everything I’ve read of hers — from that book to her autobiographical story collection “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and LA: Tales” to the autobiographical novel “Sex and Rage” — has been dazzling (even though it hasn’t always been easy to track down, but more on that later).
As her titles indicate, Babitz mixes high culture and low life with brainy-sexy ease. Her tone is unfailingly sophisticated, ironic, intelligent, and above all fun and funny and saturated with joie de vivre even when the material itself gets dark, which is often. There’s plenty of drugs, out-of-control parties, cruel men and bad sex alongside the free love and surfing and taquitos and loving portraits of her family and her irascible cat.
She’s a genius prose stylist with a glamorous, gossipy and winsome voice. But while she’s having a bit of a revival at the moment, thanks to a Vanity Fair piece by Lili Anolik that came out in February 2014, and the New York Review Books’ reissue of “Eve’s Hollywood” in October, she still seems criminally underrated.
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At DePaul University, where I teach, practically all of my savvy English and Creative Writing students know, admire and imitate Joan Didion. As well they should. But to a person, none has ever heard of Babitz. For that matter, most people I know have never read her (though they might be getting sick of my constantly encouraging them to do so). And if Didion is a rare example of someone whose reputation does seem commensurate with her astonishing skill (anecdotal support for those “the market sorts itself out” types), then Babitz is a tally mark for my side, which says that good stuff often sinks unjustly out of sight.
If heavenly Joan Didion is, in some sense, the moon of the West Coast-inflected prose writing world, cool and wry, dry and fashionably detached, then Babitz is the sun, hot and bright, excessive and hilarious, and they both write about California — and most things, really — incredibly well.
Sadly, unlike Didion, many of Babitz’s seven books have been languishing out of print for years, though if you’re lucky you can find them in your local library or scoop them up used. (Also sadly, in 1997, Babitz was injured when she was smoking and ash fell onto her skirt, catching fire and causing third-degree burns over half her body; since then, she’s become a semi-recluse.) Fortunately, 2015 is a decent year for getting into her work, since you can get “Eve’s Hollywood” as well as her 1982 novel “L.A. Woman,” which Simon and Schuster reissued in October as well.
If you do get a hold of them, in addition to taking the so-called market into your own hands, you’ll have the pleasure of hearing her tales of bohemian Southern California in the 1960s and ’70s among artists, rock stars, movie producers, starlets, jetsetters and millionaires.
As voluptuous and chaotic as their milieus often are, these books are not without discernment and critique. With their beautiful structures and sterling syntax, they are books by someone who clearly loves life and who knows how to convey both the life and the love.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of the novel “O, Democracy!”
Eve’s Hollywood
New York Review of Books Classics, 352 pages, $17.95
L.A. Woman
Simon & Schuster, 160 pages, $14.99