Dear Joe,
I am extremely grateful for the quote you gave me [for the paperback edition of Slow Days]. They couldn’t believe it at Knopf because, my God, you don’t ever give in, Joe. You’re famous for skirting anything quotable. You might even say that after Catch-22, your greatest genius lies in circumspect dubiousness.
I must say that every single East Coast person so far who’s said anything about [Slow Days] has been loath to say that my life ought to be lived at all, but if anyone’s going to be shameful and callow and shallow enough to actually live it, then I’m actually not that bad a writer [to be] writing about it. It seems as though if only I were writing about, say, a leper colony or a coal mining town, then it’d be O.K. to write about something not in London or New York. Only in London and New York are the people allowed to have money and loll around doing nothing. In L.A., no.
In your little quote you say that I make “even the shoddiest characters interesting and attractive, and even the dreariest of relationships fascinating and exciting.” But, Joe, I don’t think anyone’s shoddy and I think all my relationships are fascinating and exciting and I want you to think so, too. And you say you do, so isn’t that O.K.? I want to know what’s wrong with it. Is it that I don’t find the dreary situations dreary or the shoddy characters shoddy? I find what other people regard as worthwhile dread prisons and what people usually regard as crummy, I sometimes can’t even blink I’m so enchanted. Are my enthusiasms all too shallow for words? Am I on the wrong track so completely that in unison everyone on the East Coast rises up as one and says, “The poor thing’s an idiot but…”?
This person Vicky [Wilson, Eve’s editor at Knopf] sent my book to named Laurie Colwin [the New Yorker short-story writer] said, “I also think someone should give the author a good spanking if this is the sort of life she actually leads. Although if some jerk lived this way, it would strike me as extremely squalid, Miss Babitz makes it sound extremely romantic.” If I can make it sound that way, then maybe [Colwin is] wrong, maybe it’s not extremely squalid. Anyway, what’s squalid? And as for the wonderful Larry McMurtry, he wrote this review in the Washington Post where he’s pissed off I’m not writing right because [of] “lack of characterization, story and theme.” Now, Joe, if I’m doing “lack” of all those things, I mean, what am I writing? And if without those things I’m no good, how on earth, Joe, am I going to get good?
“Only in London and New York are the people allowed to have money and loll around doing nothing. In L.A., no.”
I simply don’t see how to jam all the “old disciplines” into stories I’m telling if they don’t go in when I’m telling the stories. And if the stories turn out undisciplined and loose and squalid yet, by some magical feat are able to make dreary, sordid people look glamorous and fascinating, how do I do that? Because most books I read nowadays have dreary, sordid people who look downright dreary and sordid, and the only fascinating thing about them is how the writer could have stuck to it all that time.
See, I can’t even put my nose to the typewriter unless my creatures slink around in platinum lamé pajamas. That’s probably my trouble. Even I can see it’s a sign of shallowness. Shit. What I want to know is, if I tell everyone about my disease—Huntington’s, that’s the name of it (I’m inheriting it from my grandfather, who gave it to my father, and I can tell I’m going to get it—I’m the image of my father)—and about my grandma dying of cancer next door, and the cat kicking the bucket in my closet, and how horrible it is being in love with a man who supposedly prefers men [Eve’s boyfriend, the artist Paul Ruscha], and how ghastly and terrible it is watching my mother succumb to everyone dying around her and what a show stopper it is every time my sister gets cunt cancer, then do you think people will like me better?
No. They’ll take one look at my tits and think I’ve got it made and am shallow and don’t know what’s what about characterization. I am the character. I keep feeling as though nobody knows about a person like me and that I’m original and that I ought to be explained before anyone lets me out to do book reviews or otherwise prance forth into the public arena. I mean, what if some poor author on the East Coast heard me sneer at how square and musty he or she is, and the poor author took it personal without knowing [about the] promiscuous fox coming in from the beach to toss off the review before returning, once more, to her shallow life.
“See, I can’t even put my nose to the typewriter unless my creatures slink around in platinum lamé pajamas.”
One of the things I’m starting to think about is that “serious” people just don’t think that gossip, the spécialité de ma maison, is serious. I think that’s because it’s always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick, some shallow callow shameful way of grasping situations without being in on the top conferences with the “serious” men, the idea of gossip has always been considered tsk tsk. Only how are people like me—women they’re called—supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room? And anyway, I can’t stand meetings. I’d much rather figure things out from gossip.
I know I’m not a major important serious author who’ll be forever under the B’s at the library. I’m a gossip storyteller who likes L.A. rather than hates it…. I think sometimes that if I were really serious, I’d “master my craft,” but I have this overriding feeling that I’m inventing my craft as I go along and that all the Rules about what writing is, the things you told me on [that] postcard—“character, complication, conflict, crisis, climax and resolution”—are perfect, but what if they aren’t in the story I’m telling? Does that make people want to listen to the story any less? Not the people I’m talking to usually, it doesn’t.
Why can’t my stories be O.K.? I’m not trying to write Oedipus [Rex] or anything, I’m just trying to tell these stories I love and can’t resist. After all, nobody knows about this place or these people [because] all the people writing [said] things are so fucking boring no one can stand listening to them…. I’m all that stands between L.A. and the same old crap forever and ever.
You’re not going to get mad at me, Joe. Please don’t think I’m some kind of bizarre ingrate who doesn’t know which side her bread is buttered on. I do know which side my bread is buttered on. I want more butter, too.
I remember when I first began writing to you 9 million years ago, you told me real grimly that you hated short stories and only liked novels. And the thing is, I can’t even write real short stories. What am I going to do?.... Maybe I’ll have to get so mad, SO MAD at everyone that my next novel is a masterpiece and then I can go back to writing meanderings and people will leave me alone. Maybe I could invent a new form of storytelling and I know just what to call it: spurts.
I love you and yearn for you tragically,
Eve
P.S. Or is everyone just jealous because they’re all freezing and I’m writing about being bored in 110°?
