Although few people recognized it at the time, in Eve Babitz’s writings in the 1970s, she spoke of a feminist who operated incognito. The daughter of an artist and activist who championed architectural heritage and a classical violinist who worked for 20th Century Fox, Eve grew up amid the Los Angeles social scene. A city subject to the promises and disappointments of Hollywood, where beauty trumps all other considerations. A place where the rules are written by men who project fantasies of eroticism and well-being, and where women develop private strategies to avoid being disowned by a voracious system.
Babitz wrote about this sort of thing with no other intention than to report what was happening around him, but by recording what he saw and felt, he was also exposing a source of unhappiness. He was not active. She was not a feminist standard-bearer and, thanks to this, she was able to infiltrate film sets, parties, mansions with these swimming pools which, according to her, were the perpetual theater of corruption. And when I left there, I wrote. She wrote about what she experienced and projected it through the eyes of a young Californian who knows that if she gains another pound, she will lose her charm like Cinderella after midnight. This is Eve Babitz, protecting herself with her skepticism from the threats of love, defending herself with her writing. Read a paperback edition of Virginia Woolf while waiting for yet another unexpected meeting to arrive.
“Janis Joplin always wondered when her prince would arrive, and the wait was so boring that it bought the total calm of the heroine’s smooth, white, clear, smiling lake.” This is what Babitz says in Heroinone of the chronicles-stories which are part of Slow days, bad company. The world, the flesh and Los Angeles, second work by the author arrived in Spain and published by Colectivo Bruxista with a translation by Ana Guerra and a prologue by María Bastarós. At many points, Babitz used words like a scalpel to reveal what lies hidden in a false paradise where winter doesn’t exist called Los Angeles.
One of these realities is drugs, and in particular heroin, of which she speaks thus: “Having something that kills the pain and is illegal is too tempting when you suddenly have everything except the prince, especially if you’re American. » In the middle of the last decade, Babitz was discovered by a new generation of readers, who this time were able to appreciate the depth of her columns. Until then, Babitz had been considered a sort of pop (that is, superficial) version of the other great American West Coast columnist, Joan Didion.
However, it was Didion herself who pushed Babitz, who was then working as a designer at Atlantic and doing covers for The Byrds, Linda Ronstadt and Buffalo Springfield, to publish her first article in rolling stone. Lili Anolik, biographer and therefore indirectly responsible for the revitalization of Babitz’s work, will publish a book in November on the personal and professional relationship between the two writers. In 2021, a degenerative disease ends Babitz’s life and also the possibility that he can savor this sweet revenge.
Slow days, bad company, Originally published in 1977, it was his second literary work. Three years earlier, he had launched another hybrid of memoir and fiction with The other Hollywood (published in Spain by Random House in 2018). After reading her debut, literary agent Erica Spellman-Silverman contacted her and suggested she pursue her literary career. The first thing Babitz told her when they met was that she didn’t know why they had met because, although she had written a book, she didn’t feel like a writer. “Well, I’m afraid that’s what you are,” Spellman-Silverman replied.
I wasn’t smart. There is the ingenuity and simplicity with which she captures some of her visions (the adjectives she chooses to describe the heroine in the aforementioned paragraph; or this: “she was an actress, and like all actresses, she n ‘was real only when she pretended’); There are also scenes that give those who read them the feeling of having managed to slip into the scene being narrated: “Rain is freedom; It’s always been like this in Los Angeles. It is freeing yourself from the toxic cloud and the uninterrupted, sad and hateful monotony; It’s the freedom to look out the window and think of London and the little violets, of Paris and the cobblestones. After that meeting, Spellman-Silverman dedicated himself to calling Babitz daily to keep him writing. A year later, the agent received a packet of pages filled with stories that shaped Slow days, bad company.
For years, Babitz was talked about as the woman who had affairs with Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, Steve Martin and Ed and Paul Ruscha. His sentimental resume was placed on the same level as his work. Even if they continue to insist on it, what takes precedence now is their talent. To paraphrase Anaïs Nin, Babitz was a spy in the house of love. She spoke to us about the marks left by relationships with men, but also those left by contact with other women who must survive in an environment which only ceases to be hostile if a certain power is held.
Slow days, bad company It is constructed with the reflections of romantic experiences that continually run through this gigantic scene that encompasses both endless deserts and dazzlingly reflective beaches. The ups and downs of love and desire aboard large convertible cars, experienced in restaurants where they serve the most original cocktails, always alongside men who never stop offering what we expect from them. “It’s a love story and I apologize for that; “It was something unintentional,” Babitz apologizes at the beginning of the book. It is not clear whether the object of this love is one of these lovers or the city of Los Angeles, the main protagonist of this series of stories told with talent, passion, humor and melancholy.
