DIDION & BABITZ

Lili Anolik's bio-capture of two LA documentarians

The first time I read both of these writers, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, the freshness drew me closer; their voices are singular. While they worked through modernism, they had vivid love lives, and the complexity of their friendship lands them in welcome territory here at The Late Romantics. The writer, Lili Anolik, is working to unpack their frenemy status while inevitably comparing their contributions. If you are new to these names, these are two journalists chronicling the ‘60s and ‘70s milieu of California, primarily, and NYC, among other locations.

Joan and Eve are unique voices if influenced—Joan by Ernest Hemingway and George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans; Eve by Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf—but their work remains remarkably independent. And while I do love Joan in all her chilly brilliance, I’m an Eve enthusiast above all. Eve was a stacked party girl and therefore was taken less seriously; still, at her strongest, Eve’s writing considers social placemaking and combines astute observations with throwaways, capturing California not as despairing but as gorgeous, a new world with its canned sunshine and thirst for beauty.

Eve is messier than Joan, allowing some real marvels of observation and acidic wit to slide through. Didion is the definition of polished and takes an apocalyptic stance; she’s not funny in the traditional sense, but you can catch her subtle irony, and she doesn’t care about offering you relief. Her “glimmers” such as “the smell of jasmine and the pool of blue jacaranda petals” are beautiful in fact; she doesn’t wish us to linger there, already moving on to peril. Her writing is exquisite, but certainly, these women were divided in how they delivered the burgeoning scene.

I love the “unsent letters” chapter on a bittersweet level, as our emails of today will not need to be handled with plastic gloves at the Huntington Library, should we become famous. All the handwriting and energy of paper and ink being lost to emails is a sweeping loss. I find an emotional tether to a handwritten card or note that unites one with that person through their inky loops and dots. I am by no means a hoarder, but I find it very hard to throw away something with a loved one’s handwriting; it feels cruel, so I often pack notes in boxes to find later. It’s not as if I receive many of them anyway. I adore the friends who keep up the postal dispatch with me.

Here’s an excerpt from some words by Janet Malcolm on the matter that Lili uses to display the point:

“The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the not sending is remarkable (we often make drafts of letters and discard them), but the gesture of keeping the message we have no intention of sending is…We are not relinquishing our idea or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy (as we do when we tear up a letter); on the contrary, we are giving it an extra vote of confidence. We are, in effect, saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee, who may not grasp its words, so we “send” it to his equivalent in fantasy, on whom we can absolutely count for an understanding and appreciative reading.”

This book is going to be best appreciated by fans. I won’t review it in the usual way as it’s so heavily bio; one must read their work first and decide if you want to fall into the rabbit hole of their troubled soulmates-of-the-arts status. Didion and Babitz are well-researched, structured, and composed figures, but a reader may be adrift without knowing the distinction between these two; their differences matter. So, if you’re starting anew with one or both, I’d pick up Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion and Slow Times, Fast Company by Eve Babitz.

Some key highlights were learning about Didion’s first love, Noel Parmentel, and Babitz's connection to so many wonderful artists: Ruscha, Duchamp, and Cornell. I was rather moved to be reminded of Joseph Cornell’s shadowbox for Marilyn Monroe (The Nearest Star, an Allegory of Time), which consists of driftwood, a gold ring with a chain, a postage stamp, glass, and a constellation chart. This work has always circled private collections, so I’ve never seen it beyond the digital, but how apt it speaks to Marilyn, sure, but all of these uncapturable women navigating LA.

In the end, what compels and drives this book are the letters between the women. Those delivered and those held back articulate what they could never say over cocktails in the Malibu Colony or Franklin Avenue scene of the ‘70s as they maneuvered their careers. The letters held back are bitter and exacting. The letters sent are hyper-present and effusive with respect. Maybe they were wise enough to recognize the greatness of each other, but they struggled against the scrutiny of who said it better.