Lili Anolik is the kind of writer who needs to fall and fall hard for her subject. It’s a romance, a love affair, and once she commits, she’s like a character in Double Indemnity, headed “straight down the line.” Fortunately, for Anolik, this doesn’t require anything as devious as murder.
She is as tenacious as she is besotted. When Anolik convinced Bruce Handy and his boss, Graydon Carter, to let her write about Eve Babitz in 2014 (“All About Eve—And Then Some”), Babitz was an obscure figure. A what, exactly? A collagist who did some rock album covers? A memoirist-novelist who wrote a handful of books nobody read or remembered? A journalist who kicked around the magazine world for a couple of decades?
A dozen years later, Babitz is part of the literary cannon, due, in no small part to Anolik’s efforts.
If you are new to Eve, you need to read Eve’s Hollywood, and Slow Days, Fast Company, her masterpiece. Also, Lili’s book Didion & Babitz is great fun, and I also loved I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Everything, a collection of Babitz’s magazine work, because I’m a sucker for journalism anthologies. For a sampler, check these out, including the winning 1976 Ms. Magazine essay, “My Life in a 36DD Bra, Or, the All-American Obsession.”
Now comes the final word on Eve: Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were). If you like books of letters—and I sure do—this one’s a beaut.
Again, Anolik’s efforts are appreciated. Babitz left behind boxes of correspondence when she died in 2021, most of it unsent, a fascinating trail of writing, full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Her diligent editor does the reader the favor of making Babitz’s letters presentable. Not fundamentally altered, just cleaned-up. (Eve was forever untidy.) And because nobody knows the arcana of Babitz’s life better than her biographer, Anolik’s footnotes are especially useful and often funny.
Here’s a 1970 letter from Babitz to Jack—As Anolik notes, “the Unidentified Person I agonized over most. I wanted so badly to know who he was. You’ve seen the letter, reader, so you understand why.”
Dear Jack:
I have done a lot of weird things in my life, but going out with a married psychiastrist is the most bizarre to date. I rarely feel ashamed of anything I do for long…but the thrill of a rendezvous with the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t make me think I was walking on a crumbling roof more than you…I know the world is polluted, corrupt, and composed of jagged corners and no more pastoral scenes for us. But you, Tory that you are, should not contribute—you should [stay in] your corner and leave bohemian cunts like me to their own destruction…
I can’t think about you anymore.
Love, Eve
Here is another unsent letter, this one to her aunt Leah Sprinrad, dated October 29, 1963, when Eve was living in London:
Have you heard about the new breakfast cereal for men called “Snatch”? They take one bite and want to eat the whole box.
Did you see Lawrence of Arabia yet? Or Tom Jones? You must see them. You will be eternally grateful to me for recommending them to you. Lawrence of Arabia is the best thing—it’s a perfect marriage of art and money. Peter O’Toole is the most beautiful composition of colors in the world. He’s got golden hair and rosy tan skin and eyes so blue that it looks like the sky is sinning through two holes in his pretty head. And dark eyelashes. Besides, he keeps wandering around in this white silk robe which is pretty suggestive itself.
…Deep in your heart you know he thinks he’s Moses.
Tom Jones is equally fabulous and utterly impossible to describe. If you can, try and be high when you see Lawrence for the first time (I’ve seen it four times and it’s 4 hours long so you can imagine how much I love it.)
This is the kind of book you can pick-up and put-down at leisure. It doesn’t demand you read it in order.
Anolik makes a good case that it’s Babitz’s second masterpiece.
I sure found it good company.
Just like Lili, as you’ll hear in our conversation about all things Eve: Lili’s final, Final word on Babitz—as well as thoughts on Joan Didion, and a couple few things about another favorite, the film critic Pauline Kael. Eve admired Kael, Lili wrote her college thesis on Kael, and I once wrote the critic a letter when she was on leave from The New Yorker in the early ’90s to which she replied—on an index card: “It wasn’t the prospect of reviewing your first movie that laid me so low, although something sure as hell did. Good luck with everything.”
Ah, California gals are the coolest.
[Photographs of Eve Babitz courtesy of her sister, Mirandi Babitz]
