Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Books Classics)

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had already begun. “Predictably, and now a bit tiresomely,” a Kirkus review observed, the novel was about California, and “ Babitz’s L.A. weltschmerz has gotten rather clotty and overdone.” And still, Jacaranda was a few a b Nelson, Steffie, L.A. Woman The Los Angeles Review of Books, December 18, 2011 Nelson, Steffie (December 18, 2011). "L.A. Woman". Archived from the original on January 22, 2013 . Retrieved May 1, 2012. As Steve Martin, then a young banjo-playing comic and Troubadour regular, explained, “Nobody was famous yet. Eve knew who the talented ones were.” Eve was assured in her taste, no question. She knew what she liked and why. Her account of her affair with Jim Morrison is simultaneously gaga and coolheaded. She would write, “Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes.” If she venerated him as a love object, though, she rejected him as an artist: “[Jim’s] voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash.” Eve might have been a hopeless romantic but she was also nobody’s fool.

Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles. . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I’m there. Babitz skips around time with ease and writes with the airy, knowing offhandedness of Renata Adler’s Jen Fain, except she eschews Manhattan sophistication in favor of a Hollywood unpretentiousness.But I think that, first of all, Eve is a very funny writer. There’s a darkness there, too, a harshness and an equivalence that I’m sure is probably resonating. But I also feel like we’re in a moment that looks like a hard and definite thing — that everyone feels a certain way — but really there’s a haziness and an ambiguity and counter-feelings to what’s getting exalted at the moment. There’s an endless dialectic going on in the world, and somehow Eve has tapped into that, right now. Babitz lived for a year in New York and for a few months in Rome, but Los Angeles was her home and inspiration, a playground for self-invention, a “gigantic, sprawling ongoing studio”. In her essay Daughters of the Wasteland, she remembered her disbelief that others could find Los Angeles empty and unlivable. Eve is easy to dismiss because she doesn’t wear her seriousness on her sleeve. Her concerns are the seating arrangements at dinner parties, love affairs on the skids. She offers up information commonly known as gossip. Girl stuff, basically. (By that standard, of course, Proust was writing girl stuff, too.) But her casualness has depth, an aesthetic resonance. She achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe.

I never talked to her explicitly about the #MeToo moment, but she’s aware that she’s catching on in this way that she never did in her career. The way I interpret how she’s reacting to what’s going on now is a mixture of disinterest and dismay. I think she would have loved all this when she was younger, and she’s so gratified by it now, but I think it’s bewildering to her. She said something funny when I talked about all these women being into her; she said, “My whole life, I always got attention from men, and now it’s girls who like me,” and she couldn’t believe it. Babitz lived for a year in New York and for a few months in Rome, but Los Angeles was her home and inspiration, a playground for self-invention, a “gigantic, sprawling ongoing studio.” In her essay “Daughters of the Wasteland,” she remembered her disbelief that others could find Los Angeles empty and unlivable.I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard Los Angeles described as a ‘wasteland’ or ‘seven suburbs in search of a city’ or any of the other curious remarks uttered by people. It was never like that for us growing up here… ‘Wasteland’ is a word I don’t understand anyway because physically, surely, they couldn’t have thought it was a wasteland – it has all these citrus trees and flowers growing everywhere. I know they meant ‘culturally.’ But it wasn’t. Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it’s a ‘wasteland’ and other helpful descriptions…”