L.A. Woman

In one of her books, first published in the early 1970's, and reissued in 2015, Eve Babitz, the inspiration for The Doors' song L.A. Woman, wrote a short piece about relationships that explains away perfectly all the paradoxes of love. It is called The Fantasy.

Her genius was to put into words what is felt below the words, by circling the emotions at the right distance, in a way opposite to those who explain or who describe. She was apparently considered a "lightweight" by some literary types, but after a recent biographical retrospective piece in the New Yorker followed by a biography, she was "rediscovered" for what she is, a special and true voice.

She is an insider with no illusions, a perceptive, articulate and very canny chronicler of a place that is so sprawling in its excesses that even fiction cannot quite grasp it. I am thinking of satires like Eric Idle's novel on writers in Hollywood, or Robert Altman's The Player, or Nathaniel West's and Joan Didion's works. They are are a bit lacking in that they cannot grasp the extent of the madness that tell-all fictional reportage can. Straight reportage is limited, because of legal and commercial reasons. Chandler came close in a very artificial way that is opposite to Babitz in its prudery, one that revels in the prurience and excess with unconscious envy disguised as impossible moral rectitude. Chandler's fantasies are so extreme that they almost grasp the impossible craziness of southern California.

Babitz transcends all this because she is committed to truth for survival. She is holding on to the stories she tells for dear life. They are her life. They have been described as charming, but I would call them "gonzo" in a way that no other gonzo writer has managed. The humour and wildness are there, but there is a sadness that hides the vulnerability, a denial of the possibility of damage that is courageous and beautiful, and a lack of distance in the end that allows the reader to draw the full picture. Who other than a full out gonzo would pose nude playing chess with Duchamp at the time of his L.A. retrospective, just to piss off a boyfriend.

Look her up to understand why despite knowing that Hollywood was the best place to make movies, Kubrick decided to move to England, saying L.A. had an  undercurrent of low-level malevolence. She had a personal integrity that drove her to tell and to live a human truth in L.A., but L.A. got the upper hand.