Back to the past.
Slow Days made more of an impression than Eve’s Hollywood. Knopf put money, muscle, and hoopla behind it, taking out half-page ads in major American newspapers. Clearly the publishing house believed in it. As did Eve. “I thought what Knopf thought—that it would sell a million copies.” (This is the book of hers around which hopes of bestsellerdom hovered.) That didn’t happen. “Nobody read Slow Days either. Well, Jackie Kennedy read it. She loved it. She gave people copies of it before they went to L.A. That’s what she did with X, my AA friend.”I
Still, Slow Days was widely reviewed, including twice in the New York Times. The second review, by critic Mel Watkins, was near glowing and twigged to Eve perfectly: “Eve Babitz is philosopher, quidnunc and wit here, and the amalgam makes for a collection that is light enough not only to entertain and flaunt the West Coast glitter but also insightful enough to reveal its somber underside.” The damage, however, was done by the first. Novelist Julia Whedon surveyed and dismissed Eve in three short paragraphs. In her closing, Whedon wrote, “I discern in [Babitz] the soul of a columnist, the flair of a caption writer, the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia.”
In any case, by the time Slow Days was released, Eve was already at work on her third book.
Sex and Rage (Knopf, 1979) was about the same thing Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days were about: Eve and Los Angeles. Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days are both autobiography, and yet I’m drawn to them as literature. Sex and Rage is also autobiography, and I’m drawn to it only as that. By which I mean, I’m interested in it because it gives me insight into the context and mind-set that led to the creation of the works that actually interest me—Eve’s Hollywood and, more particularly, Slow Days. In plain English, I don’t like Sex and Rage and regard it, in spite of its killer title, as a failure.
On the one hand, so what? If a writer takes risks, doesn’t just concoct a formula, follow it again and again, he or she is sure to produce an uneven book or two. You can’t knock it out of the park every time is what it comes down to. And it isn’t that Eve whiffed with Sex and Rage that’s noteworthy or compelling, it’s why she whiffed. Because what’s changed isn’t her style. No, her prose has its usual dash and luster. (Of the Harrison Ford character: “His mouth looked as though he’d just been hit with the news that he had a week to live and he didn’t care.”) Nor is it her content, similar, as I said, to that of Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days. It’s her form.
I’ve already quoted that wonderfully self-aware line of hers from Slow Days: “I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel.” Yet that’s precisely the task she’s forced herself to perform here. She’s abandoned indirection and disorder, arguably the making of Slow Days, that willingness to forgo the tidy linear narrative, instead presenting life in all its unruly complexity; to be oblique, elusive, elliptical; to tell a story that “turn[s] around in the middle or get[s] lost.” Sex and Rage is, contrastingly, structured as a classic three-act setup-conflict-resolution bildungsroman—L.A. girl artist falls in with a fast crowd, suffers heartache and disillusionment, reinvents herself as a writer—and it’s the structure that does the book in. The wild, heedless energy, which ran amuck every so often in Eve’s Hollywood, was perfectly channeled and commanded in Slow Days, is constrained in Sex and Rage, bound and gagged.
The expressive potential, too. Eve is no longer Eve. Eve is Eve posing as Eve. Eve is a character named Eve. Well, technically Jacaranda. “[Jacaranda] was a rare enough thing—a native-born Angeleno grown up at the edge of America with her feet in the ocean and her head in the breaking waves, with a bookcase full of the kind of reading matter that put her in touch with the rest of the world.” (It’s like she’s describing a talking dog!) Eve has, in short, novelized herself—her background, her experiences, her thoughts, the way she looks and talks and moves—and, consequently, both vulgarized and trivialized herself.
What’s more, she now does consciously what she once did unwittingly. Spontaneity has become premeditated, and, poof, the magic is gone. The most striking example of this occurs when Eve-Jacaranda enters the living space of Max, the Earl McGrath character, and is looking around:
There was art all over the walls. Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, a David Hockney swimming pool, and a huge pornographic watercolor by John Altoon. In the front to the right, where people came in, was a carefully framed photograph by Julian Wasser of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked girl. The contrast between Duchamp’s dried-out ancient little person and the large young girl’s Rubenesque flesh was not (unlike chess) at all subtle. This photograph was the only thing on Max’s wall that people actually looked at; even Altoon’s pornography was a little too tasteful to arouse real interest.
“You’ve got a print of this,” she said, her voice filled with hurt surprise. She’d never imagined that anyone might own a print and not have to tear it out of an art magazine as she had had to do.
“You know this photograph?” Max asked.
“Well, I mean . . .” (She’d have to be an idiot to spend all her time around artists and not know this photograph.)
So Eve the character is examining and then commenting on a work featuring Eve the person. The scene is coy, contrived, mannered, too cute by half—is, in other words, everything that the photograph could have been but wasn’t. (It’s as if the Eve in the photograph turned to the camera, peeked out from behind her hair, and winked obscenely at the viewer.) Art has been replaced by artifice, mystery by mystique, and all is lost.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that Eve isn’t a natural novelist, and I’m not going to suggest otherwise. And neither, by the way, is Eve. “Writing a novel was my idea, but I didn’t really want to do it. I preferred short stories, short essays—whatever you want to call them. Nobody told me I had to write a novel. Vicky didn’t tell me, nobody at Knopf told me. They didn’t have to tell me. I just knew. If you were a serious writer, then a novel is what you wrote.” And it was. The novel, in America, at the time Eve started to write, in 1961, the year of “Travel Broadens,” was considered not just a vocational calling but a spiritual. Tom Wolfe: “It’s hard to explain what an American dream writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon.”
The problem is with Eve’s novel in particular. Sex and Rage flat-out doesn’t come off. The problem, however, is also with the novel in general. Only the worst kind of blowhard engages in that the-death-knell-ringeth-for-the-novel talk, yet here I go. The novel as the dominant—nay, supreme—medium of literary expression is doomed, sunk, toast, and has been for decades. It goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway: good novels, some better than good, continue to get written year after year. I’ll say this, too: Jane Austen’s description of the novel as a “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” is as true now as it was in 1817. And, to top it off, this: I spent the second half of my twenties, the first half of my thirties, trying to write a novel. The idea of writing a novel still, to this day, makes me go moody and tender and wistful. Doesn’t matter. And the reason it doesn’t matter is because it fails to change the fact that the novel’s historical moment has passed, that cultural centrality has given way to cultural marginality. We want to believe that the art forms of our time are the art forms of all times, and it simply isn’t so. Just think, five hundred years ago lyric poetry was the hot thing, what all the pale-faced, dreamy-eyed young men were doing.
The wind went out of the novel’s sails with the advent of women’s equality and the Pill and the no-fault divorce, the point at which the marriage plot, the novel’s greatest plot, lost its tension and urgency. Wait, I want to withdraw that statement—it’s extreme, off its rocker—or at least modify it so it’s less extreme, less off its rocker: a wind went out of the novel’s sails with the advent of women’s equality and the Pill and the no-fault divorce, the point at which the marriage plot, among the novel’s greatest plots, certainly in novels by women—Austen, Eliot—or featuring women characters—Madame Bovary, Portrait of a Lady—lost its tension and urgency. (If Charles Bovary had, on his and Emma’s wedding night, whipped out his doctor’s pad, written her a prescription for Enovid, told her he was cool with an open relationship, wouldn’t sexual tragedy have been averted? Why scarf arsenic when what happens in Rouen stays in Rouen? And if prenups had existed in 1881, would Gilbert Osmond have come sniffing around Isabel Archer in the first place? Probably not.)
And the possibilities of any form are finite; they get exhausted. What was there left to do with the novel after James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were through with it? For a while, writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos found something. They wrote books that were less interior, more exterior, that were, in effect, more like their new rival, the one that had sprung up out of nowhere and whose dust they were already eating: the movies. By midcentury, though, those limits, too, were being reached. Plus, there was the fractured nature of modern life, the manic pace, the near-constant interruptions. The novel—meditative, leisurely, requiring long stretches of concentration—couldn’t answer the needs of the reader as it once did.
So where to go from there? Where to go if fiction, if story, seemed not like a link between our inner selves and the outer world, but like a falsehood or trick? Why, to fact, of course, otherwise known as nonfiction, where story wasn’t story at all, it was a thing that actually happened. Which is the place it’s been since Norman Mailer, in 1960, in the pages of Esquire magazine, wrote the following line: “I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that was one of the great lies of all time.” New Journalism and the personal essay (not quite interchangeable, but close) had arrived. On the heels of Mailer were Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Michael Herr. And Eve Babitz. Moreover, New Journalism/the personal essay was a supple and wily beast, could assume many guises. Truman Capote wrote New Journalism/personal essay in the form of true-crime reportage; Pauline Kael in the form of movie reviews; Janet Malcolm, slightly later, in the form of exposés on journalism itself.
Fiction has always treated real people and true events as raw material and fair game. Engaged in what the impish and perverse Malcolm called “Promethean theft, of transgression in the service of creativity, of stealing as the foundation of making.” Used nonfiction for its own ends, in essence. With New Journalism, the using would be the other way around. Now nonfiction would avail itself of fiction’s techniques: the reporter would become a character in the story he was reporting on; the reporting of the story would become part of the story itself; the old unobtrusive no-style style was out, a stylish style, whistles and bells, in; subjectivity would, as Mailer decreed, reign supreme; dialogue would play a crucial role, livening up the narrative, goosing it along; and details and timelines would be elided and condensed to avoid redundancies or losses of momentum. The short writings, often appearing initially in magazines, would read like short stories, and the collections like short-story collections (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, for example), the extended writings like novels (Dispatches, for example). And even if the extended writing read like a novel and was categorized as a novel, as was the case with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was still New Journalism. Nobody believed Raoul Duke was a figment of Hunter S. Thompson’s imagination. Raoul Duke was Hunter S. Thompson hiding in plain sight.
And now for a final twist: the New Journalism short writing was the new short story, and the New Journalism extended writing was the new novel. Fiction has, as I said, traditionally ripped off fact. Yet facts are inanimate. Imagination, in both fiction and nonfiction, is what sparks them, brings them to life. Nonfiction, therefore, is doing the same job as the form considered its antithesis. The novel didn’t die, it just found a different host to inhabit.
The novel is dead, long live the novel.
If New Journalism was actually the same ol’ same ol’, though, it was repackaged cleverly enough to seem new. And the writers beginning their careers in the sixties and seventies, the ones for whom it was the Great American Novel or bust, must’ve needed desperately to believe it was new. With the novel, the pressure for them to measure up, not just to the giants from their own country but from Europe, too, and not just to present-day giants but to giants going back centuries, would have been more than daunting, would’ve been crushing. They were defeated before they’d uncapped their pens. With New Journalism, in contrast, the pressure was off—why, journalism wasn’t an art, was barely even a profession—and there wasn’t any tradition to follow. It was the Wild West. No laws or rules, all danger and opportunity. They could make it up as they went along. Which is doubtless the reason that so much of the writing was fresh and inventive and outrageous. Yippee-ki-yay.
I. X, a lawyer-turned-actor-turned-back-to-lawyer, takes the Anonymous part of Alcoholics Anonymous seriously and prefers not to be named.