notes on Slow Days, Fast Company
the eternal scene
While we were in LA for Christmas I had a desire to read “about California” and have read Slow Days, Fast Company in bits and starts since then. I had a similar desire in the months before moving to California and so read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which gave me a strong mythology of place that did not quite live up to the dirt town where we now live, but was, of course, a great introduction to Joan Didion. It is funny that post-Didion is the context in which I now read Eve Babitz: not only because my introduction to Babitz was various tweets mocking or praising Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz1, but because it seems fitting to move to California with an ideal built in Didion’s perfect, zipped-in prose and to realize the living in it is much more Babitz’s sprawl.
This is a bit overstated, I guess, as I have still not really seen California — but the vibe is true, the vibe as the point still stands. I have not made it to real, actual LA (I got sick over the Christmas trip), but my husband and I have done quite a lot of driving between dirt town in the middle of nowhere and the surroundings — Bakersfield, Temecula, Santa Clarita, Lancaster — which is really, arguably, the true American experience of seeing a state: driving and driving and driving through it. Eve Babitz’s recounting of LA proper feels true, a logical extrapolation of the gold hills/green shrubs rushed past the car window into what LA might be like, situated in the middle of all this. Low hanging and disillusioned miracle city, still self-possessed, still obviously beautiful. Eve Babitz, as is her gift, writes about this well: she makes place into place.
What fascinates me, beyond this, is the clumsiness of the book.2 Babitz tries to end her chapters on deep, sudden insight, meant to invoke the same feeling as the turn or the last line of a poem, but she often fumbles. In going back through the book, to pull quotes and prove this, I realized that these last lines of each chapter, while deflated in context, are great as one-liners. Ironically, here is another of Babitz’s gifts: it is no easy thing to be so effortlessly quotable. In lieu of reprinting each chapter and marking the place I felt the emotion of the writing fall through, I will have to chalk this complaint up to Subjective, Non-Defensible Opinion (ugh). But to attempt to show just a little of what I mean, here are a few of the endings that stumble a bit, both in-context and quoted as follows.
The ending of “Sirroco”: “Just think, if we didn’t have the Santa Anas, how straight we all would be. Like the patterns of those searchlights outside the Blue Champagne.”
And the last lines of “Dodger Stadium”: “I felt The Last American’s hand reach under the table and come to rest someplace just above my knee, and I suddenly thought how fortunate it was that I hadn’t had my car washed that afternoon.”
Compare this to the last lines of “Slow Days,” which function as a sort of thesis for the book and are so good the comparison is not really fair:
“I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel. I can’t keep everything in my lap, or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company.”
Or even the ending of “Bad Day at Palm Springs”: “The hard granite facts have already melted into the story I wanted to tell you about the desert and the hot nights and sexy pools; for Shawn the whiteness of the bones has already become romance.”
There is a drama and grounding here, as with the ending of “Slow Days,” that feels earned. The endings of “Sirroco” and “Dodger Stadium,” conversely, are meant to be a mischievous wink which still hits and recedes with the same gravitas, but the lightness breaks concentration: the joke does not hit, and neither does the intended intensity of emotion.
The middle parts of chapters are much better. You get great lines of prose:
“I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about”.
Babitz keeps a dreamy, expansive atmosphere, sort of as if you are reading the book in the bath, already half-drunk. Her descriptions favor colors; things are always intensely green or blue or yellow, but this also feels true — California has landscape in technicolor, the simple descriptors are primary and effective.
The chapter about Bakersfield was depressing to read — orange groves and vineyards and fat grapes, and even with the asides of “who would want to live in Bakersfield?” (fair), it is a picture of a far prettier California country town than I’ve been able to see, and one which might not exist anymore. The final chapter was my least favorite, its attempt at a psychological portrait marred by a clumsy framing device (and I think Babitz is better at describing “people as fixtures of place” than “people as character”). There is a good note about the people who try to leave Hollywood and the way they are drained away: “Mary had tried to get out, to join the mortals, to change her name. It robbed her of her style; she became, as Pamela intimated, invisible.” And I liked the chapter “Dodger Stadium,” story of Eve’s baseball game date with the aptly nicknamed “The Last American Man.”
Slow Days, Fast Company was apparently written as a flirt for a man who Eve liked and who perhaps didn’t like her back enough — hence the gambit of a book to lure him in. A funny kind of flirt, given the book’s detailing of Eve’s many affairs, with men and women, and with more affairs implied beyond those written about. If Babitz is not sleeping with her subject, she is trying to — nicely, almost sleepily — fuck them via prose: “She reminded me of a tulip, almost, the way she bent forward at the waist to hand me a lighted joint.” Babitz’s obituary in The New York Times was entitled “A Hedonist with a Notebook.” I bought a copy of Eve’s Hollywood, but haven’t yet read it; even so, with just Slow Days, Fast Company to go from, I can’t really argue with this framing. Slow Days, Fast Company is wonderful, sprawling sentiment, but its edge is all sex.
Here Babitz is the archetypal “literary it girl” of which we have many modern variations. There is a lot of condensing I am doing, of course, in throwing together internet egirls with published authors, but again, there is the same vibe here — self-assured auto-fiction nicely tied up with, or even enlivened by, irl whoring around. It’s almost like (this feels mean to say) spilling your guts out, online or in published book, is a thematic predecessor to spilling your, uh, self out in the scene. LA in the 70s, New York now, whatever. Babitz writes specificity of place but the scene is universal, ephemeral — it’s colored by and made up of specifics, of course, but writing about it or reading about it (as next-best replacement for being in it), is eternal. This is why Eve Babitz hits — she’s secondhand smoke, sure, but the high is better than no high at all.
Matthew Specktor, in his introduction to Slow Days, Fast Company, is derisive of American literary stodginess, our “drab and crippling Protestantism” that keeps Babitz reduced to just this — “a party girl spattered with genius instead of…an actual genius who just happened to, y’know, like to party” — but this misses the point completely. There is no thrill in lost innocence if losing it is of no consequence. The voyeurism inherent in Babitz’s work — that we, inheritors of drab American moralism, are leaning over the shoulders of a sex goddess and watching her (tastefully, off the page) fuck Harrison Ford and Jim Morrison and co., amidst the L.A. of “rising flurries of sudden blind meaning” — is the appeal; there is no need to falsely dress up Babtiz as a scholastic when she is best as a scene girl.
Spectkor might counter with Babitz’s range of literary allusions (she name drops often, usually as shorthand for descriptions: “Venice that summer looked like a Hopper painting” or “some inconceivable, uncozy, anti-Dickens ode to white, chrome, and inch-thick glass”), but to me, this reads more as insecurity on Babitz’s part than as organic interest in having her work in conversation with her predecessors. Babtiz is well-read, there is no doubt about that. But she seems doubtful that you, skeptical reader, will believe that she is well-read — hence the many references to keep herself as “intellectual” along with the hedonism.
I am armchair psychologizing a bit, I realize. I might self-counter that Babitz also has an enviable laissez-faire about the author/character of herself: auto-fiction makes it easy to be self-involved (it is what it says on the tin), and someone who seems to be so lightly self-possessed and to only drop herself into her stories, as if she is there on happenstance, might not care at all what the public thinks of her literariness. Whatever, clearly Spektor cares — he does not understand the draw of the “literary it girl.” She is always well-read, of course she is! We prudish readers believe her and scorn her and want to crawl inside her skin and be her and that’s why she sells.
Which I feel — pretty unfairly, for never having read it — derisive of, given my experience with listening to part of Anolik’s earlier Hollywood’s Eve. Anolik’s slavish worship of Eve Babitz is openly acknowledged and is almost the point of her book, but even so, it feels parasitic and off putting. Her continual self-insertion grows tedious, especially when it only serves to places her in direct competition with her more interesting subject. But then again, I only listened to chapter four-ish before giving up; maybe it grows on you.
Editing this piece, and at this sentence, the nerves hit: it is always awkward to “review” a justifiably famous book given the inevitable break of talent between yourself as reviewer (clumsy, amateur, etc.) and the author (who is…of course…the author of this famous book). At the same time, I find it pretty dull to read published sycophancy (i.e., Lili Anolik). Please take the above as intended — thoughts on, notes on — and disagree with me accordingly.