“Desire something enormous, the road of life being what it is.” — Eve Babitz

In praise of the swashbuckling romantic woman

Joan Didion’s California is a very different California from Eve Babitz’s. Joan Didion’s California starts in Sacramento, pioneer stock, covered wagons, orange groves … and then later, it’s lonely foggy Malibu threatened by wild fires, and the dissociated dreamscape of San Francisco in the Summer of Love. Didion had a long sojourn in New York, which she covered in her famous essay “Goodbye to All That”. Eve Babitz went to New York too, but could only stick it out for a year. She didn’t understand other places, she couldn’t find their rhythms and moods. In Babitz’s creative responsive imagination, Los Angeles and Hollywood are the only places that exist in the vast sprawl of a state. Babitz’s California is Los Angeles as small town. It’s music clubs, LSD parties, hot guys with swimming pools, girls driving hot rods carrying switchblades, the crazy swirl of youth and sex and freedom. Babitz’s father was of Russian Jewish descent, and a studio musician at 20th Century Fox. Because of the work he did, the Babitz house was filled with artists, musicians. It was not a “tony” upbringing. It was artistic. One can see why Babitz thought living as an artist - or, to be accurate, living life as though it is a work of art in progress - seemed like a valid path. Her high school guidance counselor asked teenage Eve what she wanted to do with her life. Teenage Eve answered, “Be an adventuress.” She achieved it, and much more.