Is Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (but Some Were) Eve Babitz’s “most consequential work”? Lili Anolik, who edited this posthumous collection of mostly unmailed correspondence, suggests it is. In her introduction, Anolik—whose 2019 biography, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A., has played a significant part in Babitz’s ongoing revival—calls it “Eve’s second masterpiece.” She continues, “It’s a West Coast, late twentieth-century Room of One’s Own, a feminist cri de coeur. It’s every bit as candid, every bit as lucid, every bit as brutal, every bit as delicate as Virginia Woolf’s celebrated manifesto.”
I’m not sure I agree.
It’s not that Anolik is incorrect in her description, but I might suggest a more fitting analogue to be Woolf’s diaries, which Babitz invokes more than once. In fact, my favorite section of Too L.A. involves not letters at all but instead a journal, kept between September 1969 and July 1970 and initiated, the author admits, under Woolf’s influence. “This is the second diary I’ve started in a month,” Babitz begins. “I [started] this because I read Virginia Woolf’s diary and, undaunted, decided, what the hell?” That’s a terrific angle of approach, not least because it encapsulates everything that makes Babitz so vivid and engaging: her sense of presence, her offhanded guilelessness, and her willingness to go toe-to-toe—or sentence-to-sentence—with anyone. Throughout these pages, she writes (and sometimes even sends) missives to, among others, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, and Joseph Cornell. It should come as no surprise that she also sleeps with many of those addressed.
And yet, as novelist Matthew Specktor argues in his introduction to the 2016 reissue of Slow Days, Fast Company—originally published in 1977 and, as Anolik and I agree, Babitz’s first masterpiece—“to start laying out the names of [her] paramours is to begin building the wall that obscures our view of her work.” What Specktor means is that if the author’s books “are nothing if not gossipy,” such gossip is insufficient. It reduces Babitz to a type, a butterfly, the woman who knew everyone, as it were. It leaves her stranded on the surface of her life. That’s too easy, too convenient. It’s why I’m more drawn to the journal, in many ways, than to the letters that surround it. The journal, as journals must, can’t help but trace a larger arc.
“A diary isn’t a letter, of course,” Anolik acknowledges, “except that it’s a letter in disguise. Or, rather, it’s a collection of letters in disguise, each diary entry being a letter written to yourself.” Or maybe it’s the other way around. If, in other words, Anolik’s contention that “the short essay was Eve’s métier but only because the short essay was the personal letter—Eve’s true true métier—in disguise” is not inaccurate, there is also more at work. The acuity of what let’s call the author’s public writing arises from her ability to take personal material and refract it, somehow, through a wider and more kaleidoscopic lens. I think of the opening sentence of Slow Days, Fast Company: “This is a love story and I apologize; it was inadvertent.” That inadvertence is less confession than device. Like the letters, the book can drift or appear to do so. That drifting, however, is part of the point.
Letters carry a different valence. They need to be considered in a different light. This is especially the case, I think, with those that remain unsent. What is a letter, after all, but an intimate communication? It has been composed for an audience of one. To read a book of letters, then, is to eavesdrop. But if, like so much of Too L.A., the letters have not been shared with their intended recipients, where does that leave us? More in the realm of the notebook, of the workbook, of the raw material of art. “Reading these letters,” Anolik observes, “you’ll come across passages that will reappear, in only slightly altered form, in her published writing.… And there’s something exciting about finding the seed—the sketch, the anecdote, the fleeting impression—from which stories and books will sprout.”
That’s why, for me, the journals are compelling—because they are written by Babitz for Babitz alone. It may seem paradoxical, but this is also how it is to write a book. We sit in a room and tell ourselves stories first. Only later do we consider audience. Take the entry from January 7, 1970, in which Babitz encounters a young man with a broken rib. “Yesterday,” she writes, “I went to Echo Park and took 4 rolls of film of the palm trees. A guy came up to me while I was doing it. He looked exactly like one of those Midwestern murderers. He was about 28 and had curly clean auburn hair and one of those vitamin deficient faces—thin and unhappy and containing bravado.” Thin and unhappy and containing bravado. An entire personality is contained in those six words. It is, perhaps, why this young man makes Babitz unhappy. She begs him to seek treatment, but he will not leave her alone.
“Listen,” she demands at last, in exasperation. “Please go to a doctor. I can’t stand to have you near me.” It is only afterward, once Babitz has had the space to reflect on the experience, that she turns that vexation back upon herself. “Oh, how horrible I am,” she laments. “When I see what I did, written in black and white, I just could die. I’m no better than all the people I despise because they don’t care about anything. Oh, what a grim pig I am indeed.”
This is not to suggest that such intimacy is absent from the letters. Most notable is a 1977 note to Heller, a brilliant bit of indirection that begins by thanking him for blurbing Slow Days, Fast Company before veering into something more like self-defense. Previous letters have already traced the arc of their relationship, in which Heller’s offers of assistance are tempered by all that he expects, and receives, in return. The letter, then, is the last bit of fuse in a 13-year slow burn, and Babitz has a lot to say. “I know I’m not a major important serious author who’ll be forever under the B’s at the library,” she writes. “I’m a gossip story teller who likes L.A. rather than hates it, and my personality and many charms have brooked impossible roadblocks because they aren’t impossible—or at least they don’t look that way to me.”
There it is again, that word gossip. But how can gossip exist if it isn’t shared? That, for me, remains the essential challenge at the heart of Too L.A., which is, as such collections often are, something of a mixed bag, bound by its status as a book of sketches and snapshots, without the cohesion of Babitz’s most fully rendered work.•
TOO L.A.: LETTERS NEVER SENT (BUT SOME WERE), BY EVE BABITZ, EDITED BY LILI ANOLIK
