Of Eve Babitz
Eve Babitz removed the seal of taboo from customary proceedings, and this made of her a kind of Pandora figure. Around her men and women assume their true forms, unveil their true essences in the span of a single gesture, a single quip, antic, defect, quirk. A coefficient of instability was with her always, knocking pretense and dislodging persona from their perch on the ego.
Such things happened wherever she went. Babitz was a harbinger moving with cyclonic power along the California coast—and she was an intuitionist. In her writing fates are inflicted, withstood, accepted; only occasionally merited; and often deemed inevitable, fitting as outcomes for their possessors. Only a thing like this could happen to a person like that, goes the logic of a Babitz anecdote. Divinations, not justifications, are made here.
Actually the whole of the work is anecdotal, so that in prose Babitz is an author of the picaresque. Should there have been a dramatis personae for her books, it would resemble the census of the Golden State itself. Names pass by and are remembered or forgotten: LA and Hollywood are shown to have a high metabolism for drifters and desperate characters, whose remainders, if they endure, do so as gossip on the wind, cautionary tales, urban legends.
Babitz was the latter, and a perennial survivor of hard knocks, bad “vibrations,” harsh times. Unspared their depredations she thus lived to recount them. Yet as the audits and plaudits in her life began their tally, she could not decide what to make of their sum. What could be said to have happened to her? She had had a certain arrangement with her being, had come to a truce with her affairs, received from experience her portion. One thought of her that she might do anything, that indeed just about anything might befall her. Invariably each prophecy came true.
So the works detail the extent of her personal caper, rampage, mayhem, and mania in the midst of a senseless, waning century. Memoir gave open sesame to the grounds of her psychological campus, and reads in her hands like news from the American frontier, where the populace has evidently been moved to unnavigable hysteria. Still: Babitz’s eye looked about, always-already deterritorialized, and took in the grubbiness and all the gilded things, rarely passing on them anything like a verdict. On the contrary: For her, to marvel or to comment was enough—so long as one had the right thing to say, or saw the right things. She herself took in all the best details, was an offhand connoisseur of their selection.
The result of this methodology became her very oeuvre, and in this regard at least she became something like an aphorist. Later her life would acquire the feel of an aphorism itself. (On flânerie, perhaps.) Her motives, her motifs emerge in dense ores of opinion, witticisms—à la Dorothy Parker’s—derived from a scrutiny of abstracts (of the abstract) and soon firmed up into distinct shape: that of the postulate. The manuscripts are all like this, striated by the range of her perception but internally consistent throughout, like something marbled. Obedient to the philosophy of the bon viveur, they are brief, headlong, clever, rash, acute, impulsive—because they are spontaneous, contrived in an instant, impatient with balance, erratic, incautious, inclined toward first impressions, composed of first thoughts, reactions, formulations. Snapping up stimuli, apprehending circumstance: Babitz’s was a way of cataloguing and of aestheticizing the world, much as photography’s is, or else of submitting it to her appraisal.
“Strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure,” writes Sontag (of Barthes). The structure in Babitz is dilapidated, scuzzy. Through her is brought into view the essentially American embassy of attitudes—towards existence. Her itinerate works give their testimony thereby, of her generation’s entrée into the empire of garbled signs, the dominion of baffling discourses and ad hoc ideologies. Such was the context her vocation, commenced as a diagnostic but concluded as a heuristic, an instance by which to learn: See the restive woman obtain new affective underpinnings, try and apply them in the crucible of Civilization, then let them molt away, sloughed off with a shrug.