Fitful Glimpses and Spurts

Katie Kadue reviews Lili Anolik’s “Didion & Babitz.”

By Katie KadueNovember 12, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Literary Criticism

• Gender & Sexuality

• Biography & Autobiography

IN APRIL, an editor at Scribner, publisher of Lili Anolik’s new book Didion & Babitz, tweeted a photo of a box of galleys with the caption, “Literary It Girls™ get ready.” Responses ranged from excitement (“Inject this straight into my veins!!!”) to excitement tempered with self-deprecation (“big day for annoying and insufferable people [me]”) to unmitigated disdain. Disdain at the idea of pairing such different writers as Joan Didion and Eve Babitz on the basis of their shared gender, social scenes, sometime subject matter (Los Angeles, women), and death month (December 2021); disdain at the idea, even in jest, of reducing two complex women to a brand; disdain at the idea, all too real, that a woman who writes needs to commodify herself as a brand in order to be read. An online consensus emerged that both women, especially Didion, would have hated this playful promotional post.

But of course, both Babitz and Didion, like all writers who sell books with their names on the covers, are brands. And both, like most successful writers, built those brands not through the sheer undeniable force of their talent but through social networking avant le tweet. The two first met in 1967 on what Anolik calls “the Franklin Avenue scene” (Babitz: “I have always loved scenes”), where the Hollywood house Didion shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, served as party central. Didion’s career took off with a positive review in The New York Times by her friend Dan Wakefield (who at one point dated Babitz); Babitz’s took off because of Didion, who worked a connection at Rolling Stone. And for both Didion and Babitz, as for the Instagram influencers of today, the persona was the product. Babitz, “incapable of invention” according to Anolik, was never not telling her life story (“Everything I wrote was memoir or essay or whatever you want to call it”). Didion has come to represent not a particular writing style but Style™, to the point that some have accused her of lacking substance. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, in a famous takedown that made her own name, accused Didion of using rhetorical tricks to distract from the fact that her writing, as Norman Mailer once said of her social presence, was nothing but an advertisement for Joan Didion; she could never take her subjects on their own terms, because “her subject is always herself.”

From posing with a cigarette and a Corvette in her thirties to posing in sunglasses for Céline at age 80, Didion was intimately involved in the cultivation and circulation of her image. Babitz, who was all but forgotten by her seventies and never modeled high-fashion accessories, nonetheless became a fashionable accessory herself: since the mid-2010s, It girls literary and otherwise, from Jia Tolentino to Kendall Jenner, have appeared in selfies with her books and on panels celebrating her career. The photographer of the Corvette compositions, Julian Wasser, told Anolik of that 1968 shoot: “With a girl like Joan Didion, you just don’t tell her what to do.” When Anolik asked him about another iconic photo he took, of Babitz naked across a chessboard from Marcel Duchamp a few years earlier, he replied: “She was a piece of ass.” (That natural sex appeal, though, was cultivated: according to her cousin Laurie Pepper, the young Babitz “put herself in training” to be beguiling; she would study anyone seductive and learn to imitate her voice and smile and laugh.) Anolik takes these photos as emblematic of each writer’s enduring image:

In Wasser’s photos of Joan and the Corvette, Joan’s face is the focus. In Wasser’s photo of Eve and Duchamp, Eve doesn’t have a face, her face effaced, obscured by her hair. She’s just a body, and that body is the antithesis of Joan’s—an explosion of voluptuous flesh, and helplessly carnal.

This “antithesis” is the thesis of Didion & Babitz, which reduces the two writers not so much to brands as to types, two girls fat and thin. The book’s conceit is that Apollonian Joan and Dionysian Eve are “a single woman split in two”; that when Babitz acknowledged “the Didion-Dunnes,” among many others in the lengthy dedication to Eve’s Hollywood (1974), “for having to be who I’m not,” she meant it literally (but just about Didion); that “Joan Didion without Eve Babitz is the sun without the moon”; that “Joan and Eve are the two halves of American womanhood, representing forces that are, on the surface, in conflict yet secretly aligned—the id and the superego, light and dark, sex and death,” each the “soul mate” of the other. It’s a more romantic picture of duality than the one offered by their mutual photographer. Anolik amends Wasser’s asinine dismissal of Babitz and recasts what some, including Anolik herself, have seen as a rivalry into a tragic but edifying love story. But it might be more accurate to say that Didion and Babitz were just frenemies, frequenters of the same circles who cautiously circled around each other and eventually had a final falling-out. No matter how many dichotomies Anolik piles up, it doesn’t add up to much, much less all of “American womanhood.”

Anolik needs to commit to the binary bit to justify the book’s existence. Her fascination with Babitz—which began with a fleeting epigraphic encounter in 2010 that, after a persistent courtship of the by then largely reclusive writer, grew into a friendship—is largely responsible for the relaunching of the Babitz brand. Anolik’s 2014 Vanity Fair article led to the reissuing of Babitz’s books as well as the 2019 publication by NYRB Classics of I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz, a collection of her magazine articles. In Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019), which became a bible for Babitzistas (“It used to be only men who liked me, now it’s only girls,” Babitz reflected on her renaissance), Anolik covered most of Babitz’s biography; passages from that book are copied here verbatim. What’s new, of course, is the other woman.

After Babitz’s death, Anolik discovered among Babitz’s papers at the Huntington Library a box of unmailed letters, including a remarkable one addressed to “Dear Joan”—“that Joan, the Joan. Joan Didion.” In the letter, the centerpiece of this book, Babitz’s ambivalence toward Didion is on full display. She castigates her friend for dismissing Virginia Woolf as a “woman’s novelist” and for her condescension toward feminism, for “putting up the preserves and down the women’s movement,” for simultaneously separating herself from her sex and playing the role of docile, dutiful wife. She accuses her of playing up her childlike thinness so as not to threaten her less famous writer husband (“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”), of being a “journalist” (derogatory), of playing it safe by “writing accurate prose” and keeping “vulgar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art” at bay.

Anolik narrates her archival discovery in prose purpled by melodramatic tics: “Excitement rose in my throat like bile”; “the recriminations and resentments hurled like thunderbolts”; “All I could do was breathe rapidly, shallowly, skimming off the top of my lungs.” “[A]fter reading this letter,” Anolik tells us, “I realized that I didn’t know Eve at all. Or, more accurately, that I knew the wrong Eve.” But what exactly is in the letter that could cause such a severe reaction? Anolik later acknowledges that she was well aware of Babitz’s feelings on the matter. When she published an article in 2016 about Didion’s L.A. years, she got a call from an ebullient Babitz: “Lili, you did it, you killed Joan Didion. I’m so happy somebody killed her at last and it didn’t have to be me.” This homicidal glee is different in tone from the cutting commentary in the letter, but the upshot seems the same: something about Didion’s carefully managed brand deeply frustrated Babitz and caused her to express the kinds of feelings someone with a less carefully managed brand is liable to express.

“To be clear,” Anolik cuts in, “I did not kill Joan Didion. I could not kill Joan Didion. No one could. She’s too good.” But she’s happy to kill what Didion buzz she can. While repeating platitudinous praise about Didion’s writing (“her sentences were every bit as taut, every bit as spare, as her figure,” “as cold and clear and clean as spring water”), she mercilessly mocks Didion for her cynical self-fashioning—particularly her late-career self-canonization, through memoirs about grieving her husband and daughter, as “Saint Joan.” If The Year of Magical Thinking “isn’t art, if it’s a career move and a public-relations gambit and a ‘that’s showbiz,’” Anolik quips of the book Didion wrote after Dunne’s death, “then I applaud it (while still refusing to forgive it).” Meanwhile, Anolik is quite harsh toward some of Babitz’s writing—she judges more than one of her books a “mistake”—while ultimately siding with her on a personal level. Didion is the good writer and bad person, Babitz the uneven writer and difficult but sympathetic person. In the preface, Anolik promises to reveal the real Joan Didion, heretofore only available in “fitful glimpses” (Didion’s phrase), by looking at her “through a glass darkly. Eve Babitz is that glass.” The resulting image is dim indeed.

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One way to describe Anolik’s approach to her material is that she’s borrowing from Babitz’s first artistic medium: collage. (Her collages grace the covers of albums by, among others, Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds.) Quotations from various sources form quilted patchworks that texture particular periods of both women’s lives. One speed-run chapter collating bits and pieces from a long biographical stretch is called “Montage.” Twinned passages punctuate the book, either as epigraphs or paired by parataxis within paragraphs, in textual echoes of the photographic diptych on the cover. I almost wished the whole book were composed of epigraphs, like the opening coupling of Babitz, long-winded about gossip and how women are essentially gossips, with Didion, taciturn and aphoristic about how women don’t have to do women’s things, or, later, Didion cryptically ominous about how the blowing of the Santa Ana winds “shows us how close to the edge we are” (“To the edge of what?” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison asked) with Babitz fondly reminiscing about her and her sister’s fairy-tale wonder at the weather.

At her best, Anolik channels the collagist sensibility that Babitz took from the visual to the verbal in her “memoir or essay or whatever you want to call it” works of observational humor, autobiography, and ambient social-scene-setting. Her depiction of Babitz’s salad days is full of sweet and salacious tidbits, a veritable portrait of the artist as a young slut (as Babitz titled an unpublished manuscript). Teenage Eve’s blossoming into a bombshell was enabled by a professional in cosmetic transformation: the makeup artist who aged Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941) gave Babitz her first pair of contact lenses (goodbye glasses, hello sex). Jim Morrison of the Doors, whose 1971 hit “L.A. Woman” was reportedly inspired by his affair with Babitz, refused to sleep with her until she introduced him to her dad, a violinist who hung out with Stravinsky (Babitz’s godfather) and performed on the score of Psycho (1960). According to her sister Mirandi, she would walk around reading, to the point that their mother feared she would walk straight into traffic; she loved “the dirty parts” of Proust.

Anolik joins this assemblage of characters by casting herself as intrepid girl reporter, romantic heroine, and Greek demigod (tasked with rescuing the elderly Babitz from the Hades of her squalid apartment) all rolled into one. Despite this insistent self-mythologizing, she is perhaps the least interesting personality in the book. Her chatty grandiosity, unapologetic embrace of cliché, and elder-millennial cheek aim to charm, but when faced with interjections like “Now, I’m about to make a tricky point, so pay attention, Reader, follow the ball” or “Which is exactly what I’m doing, Reader: letting you decide” or “And yes, Reader—sigh—I realize how deluded I sound, how close to lunacy. But this is Eve Babitz we’re talking about. Eve fucking Babitz,” this Reader was inclined to stop Reading. The attempts at conversational and sometimes conspiratorial intimacy may be inspired by Babitz, whose writing can sound like oral history, like gossip, or like those effervescent exchanges drunk women have with strangers in bar bathrooms—but (as her sister has affirmed) Babitz revised relentlessly: her prose had to be heavily worked over to achieve its lightness, like a soufflé beaten full of air. Anolik’s feels not just unrevised but sometimes even unwritten: ungrammatical notes to self, implicitly bullet-pointed lists, transcriptions of microscopically small talk from interviews.

In another letter Anolik discovered at the Huntington, this one to Joseph Heller, Babitz explains that she may not be cut out for long-form writing (“What am I going to do? I am not NOT going to copy out Ernest Hemingway novels by hand to ‘learn’ how to write novels. [Am I?]”). Instead, Babitz muses, she may “invent a new form of storytelling and I know just what to call it: spurts,” which makes me think she would have killed on Twitter. The writer Molly Lambert has commented that Babitz’s books came back into print at the same time when a lot of young women, Lambert among them, were coming up as writers on the internet, and she emerged, anachronistically, as a model for how to write online. Her breeziness makes her prose sound digitally native, like the voicey, essayistic writing that populated so many early-2010s websites. (This was also around the time that Montaigne came to be called “the first blogger.”) But her spurts are as studied as her seductive smile, her schooled charm. Anolik’s aren’t, and over the 350 pages of Didion & Babitz, even I—someone who, like Anolik, is on “Team Babitz”—longed for taut, spare, cold, clear, clean sentences.