“Sex & Rage”: Eve Babitz: The Dear Friends

Eve Babitz’s career begins with a calculated scandal. On the occasion of a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, which was curated by her then lover Walter Hopps, the 20-year-old had Time photographer Julian Wasser photograph her naked while playing chess with the aging artist. The photo “Duchamp Playing Chess with a Nude (Eve Babitz)” soon achieved world fame. At first you can’t see her face, but you can see it in further pictures from the session. That’s what you had to do as an ambitious, talented woman in the early 1960s to get your foot in the door on the US art scene.

The fact that later, when she has already had a career of her own as a writer, people still try to laugh at her as some kind of noble groupie and pay at least as much attention to her many affairs as her actual work has to do with this beginning. But also because she doesn’t shy away from deliberate indiscretion and is open about her relationships with celebrities like Harrison Ford, Steve Martin, Ed Ruscha and Jim Morrison.

Eve Babitz knows from the start how to present herself and uses this talent. She worked as a cover artist for Ahmet Ertegün’s Atlantic label and designed record sleeves for the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but then primarily celebrated success with her autobiographical stories and reports in “Rolling Stone” and “Esquire”. People even compare her to Joan Didion, but let’s not overdo it. Her work has been rediscovered in the USA for a few years because Babitz is seen as a female role model who was able to assert herself with calculation and cheek in the misogynistic US cultural scene of those years.

She plays along and doesn’t regret anything, which is also evident in “Sex & Rage”, her roman à clef about the 1960s.

Her work is being rediscovered in the USA because Babitz is seen as a female role model who was able to assert herself with calculation and cheek in the misogynistic US cultural scene of those years.

Babitz’s alter ego Jacaranda Leven is a phenotypical Californian surfer girl of the late 60s. But she also comes from a well-off artistic family – Igor Stravinsky is coming for her 16th birthday and her godmother is a former Hollywood diva. This mixture of crisp, tanned pragmatism and aesthetic refinement makes them interesting for the West Coast rock scene, and later also for the crazy US jet set. “A true Angeleno, raised on the edge of the United States, feet in the sea and head in the crashing waves, with a bookshelf whose contents connected her with the rest of the world… The idea of ​​’sin’ was foreign to her, manners as well. She was the way she was because the Levens had let her read everything, and she knew her way around Los Angeles like a Bedouin in her own five thousand square kilometers of trackless wasteland,” Babitz writes.

The super rich let Jacaranda play, and for a few years she devotes everything she has to this game. However, her “dear friends” resent her for not dying of an overdose like her many predecessors, but instead developing an interest in writing, bored by the ritualized ostentation and routine sarcasm among themselves. They strongly advise against it, and this book shows pretty exactly what they had to fear – a detailed inside view of their sociotope, which has no moral scruples and is almost paralyzed by its forced over-staging.

Nevertheless, this book lacks any bitterness. On the contrary, Babitz once again excavates her entire youthful enthusiasm for a lifestyle that seeks to transform her own existence like a work of art. And even if she knows that she got away with it again, that her hedonistic lifestyle and, above all, her enjoyment of all sorts of marching powders, mood-boosters and brightly colored bubble sucks could have come to a bad end – the slightly nostalgic melancholy about the fact that wild days are irretrievably over, also shines through here.

The second half of the book is devoted to her short time in New York, where she finally stops drinking and begins to pursue her writing career. While Los Angeles embodies fun, New York is synonymous with business. Here she meets with her agent, speaks to magazine editors and, with her editor, tackles her first book publication, a collection of her magazine stories, which in real life was called “Eve’s Hollywood” (1974). She sketches a very vivid picture of the East Coast egghead scene, whose seriousness and intellectuality instill fear in her until she looks behind this facade.

“Sex & Rage” is Babitz’s own story, which is also aesthetically manifested in her unbridled willingness to provide information. She always tells a little more than is necessary for the story, simply because that’s how everything happened. The factual takes up its space and that makes this autofictional prose all the more true.

Eve Babitz: »Sex & Rage«. S. Fischer Verlag, 269 S., geb., 24€.

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