{"id":108484,"date":"2017-03-07T13:00:49","date_gmt":"2017-03-07T18:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=108484"},"modified":"2017-03-07T17:42:23","modified_gmt":"2017-03-07T22:42:23","slug":"your-own-private-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/07\/your-own-private-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Own Private Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

How reading Eve Babitz got me through the depths of winter.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Eve Babitz.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The winter after I finished art school and moved to New York, I started telling people I was thinking of having \u201ca California period.\u201d These conversations happened at parties, mostly, in high-ceilinged apartments in Crown Heights stuffy with heat, shoes melting in a salty pile outside the front door; we\u2019d crowd around someone\u2019s open window, smoking and ashing into the succulents, cold air rushing in as quickly as we could exhale. I envisioned a place far away from all this, far from the snowbanks that turned to dirty gray slush and the gloom that pervaded the city at dusk. I wanted Hollywood; I wanted David Hockney. I wanted pools and pool paintings, sparkles and spangled reflections under that hazy golden California light; I wanted to make abstract canvases covered in pink glitter while next to me some turquoise sky stretched off into an Umberto Eco\u2013esque hyperreal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this sort of enduring fantasy of Los Angeles that reminds New Yorkers that there\u2019s still a place that isn\u2019t here<\/em>, though to read writers from either city might give you the impression that there are no other cities in the world. In Los Angeles, this works no matter what decade because there are practically no seasons. \u201cIf you live in L.A., to reckon time is a trick since there are no winters,\u201d writes Eve Babitz, in Eve\u2019s Hollywood<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThere are just earthquakes, parties, and certain people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Embedded in the fast company of Los Angeles of the sixties, Eve\u2019s Hollywood<\/em>\u2014a confessional novel that might also be the best memoir I\u2019ve ever read\u2014is a series of vignettes chronicling Babitz\u2019s haphazard journey from adultish teen to childish adult. She discusses music, literature, earthquakes, trips to Rome (I guess there are other cities besides New York and LA), and the unexpected demands of beauty, with a deft touch on every subject that arises. It\u2019s hard to decide what\u2019s more lovable about the book: the Hollywood gossip and casually name-dropping social milieu her prose still evokes, after forty years, or the tone of the book itself, which feels like one very long brunch conversation with your glamorous older cousin the afternoon following a party she snuck you into. \u201cBut maybe winter won\u2019t ever come,\u201d Babitz admits, \u201cand now what, my darling, will you have to drink?\u201d<\/p>\n

All this sounds as though Babitz is frivolous, which she can be, if you aren\u2019t looking closely. Her territory is mostly parties and matters of the heart, neither of which are particularly interesting subjects if a writer never skims below the doe-eyed froth of first experience\u2014though Babitz also captures that experience with heady accuracy. Of a first love, she writes,<\/p>\n

Cupid let go with a spear dipped in purple prose, not just an arrow, and then he drew another one, so there were two, one conventionally through my heart and the other through my head. They were both about 8 feet long and two inches thick. They were crude.<\/p>\n

I half rose up against the impact and he saw me across the room as he came in alone from the stars and then he disappeared.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eve!<\/em> How could you not feel seen by her prose? She effortlessly captures the brutality of infatuation with a single, visceral image: the crudeness of the spears of love, how they go straight through the head and heart and send one completely reeling.<\/p>\n

But the hardest lovers and the hardest partiers always have the hardiest death drives. My friend Max gave me a copy of Eve\u2019s Hollywood<\/em> and a baseball bat in that weird cold liminal time of early December, when the days were still getting shorter but before the first real snow. And though I picked up Hollywood<\/em> looking for escape, encountering the darkness of her perspective behind the dopiness of her prose was an acute form of recognition that felt especially apt in midwinter. \u201cDeath, to me, has always been the last word in people having fun without you,\u201d Babitz begins one chapter, titled \u201cRosewood Casket,\u201d after a song her mother used to sing as a lullaby. From there, she launches into her own personal theory of heaven, which, she asserts, the Catholics came up with to keep the party going on forever. But if you\u2019re not going to get on the guest list through religion, well, \u201cthe only way to get around any of the above is to be having your own private party going on with you continuously,\u201d she writes. \u201cSo you can change the boundaries of heaven, just so long as you don\u2019t really believe in it or anything that anyone tells you.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I wanted, although at the time I didn\u2019t understand what the thing was because no one ever tells you anything until you already know it, was everything,\u201d Babitz continues. \u201cOr as much as I could get with what I had to work with. I wanted, mainly, a certain kind of song.\u201d She explains:<\/p>\n

Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except for the dazzle. It doesn\u2019t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moments of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water. Without those moments, your own heaven party can die of thirst. They\u2019re like booster shots, they make you stronger. You know it\u2019s worth the twinge of envy when you\u2019ve recovered from the dazzle because the mystery of life fades when death, people having fun without you, is forgotten.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In just a few sentences, Babitz identifies the one truth that every party girl instinctively knows\u2014that heaven is something you must make for yourself because you\u2019re afraid of the party ever ending; that you always want to be a song because you love life too much and it\u2019s best to exist in the most effervescent inch of a moment if you must exist at all. But you love it so much because you also know that one day, death comes\u2014it\u2019s not just for pure love of life itself. And sometimes, maybe often, you try to dazzle yourself hard enough that for a little bit, you forget about death.<\/p>\n

Lately, the passage of a day alone leaves me bruised. There\u2019s simply too much of everything in the world. I feel as thin-skinned as a plum: quick to abrade and quick to bleed. To fight the feeling I\u2019ve found myself living as though the world might end at any moment\u2014perhaps it may\u2014and I\u2019ve found company in fellow party girl Eve Babitz, who understands that joy really only feels like joy because there\u2019s so much around it that isn\u2019t. But unlike some of the cooler party girls who don\u2019t talk about their feelings, Babitz does, effusively. Of the end of an acid trip, she writes: \u201cThe dawn came, the sun rose up in unendurable horizons of peach from which I could not take my eyes. All lay in beauty beneath the round orange sun and sweetness filled the air like a lake feels to a fish.\u201d<\/p>\n

The insouciance of Babitz\u2019s tone, how she plays it fast and loose with grammar (and, she admits, she never actually learned how to spell) perfectly matches the experiences she\u2019s trying to capture. It even makes its way into her mythos of herself: \u201cI got up the next morning with a hangover and a good idea for a story,\u201d she writes, in one vignette. \u201cThe story was written quickly and fell together like a just right deck of cards being shuffled and had the kind of crazy deftness that my other stories had always managed to run away with.\u201d Whether that\u2019s true or not\u2014in the foreword to the New York Review of Books edition<\/a>, Holly Brubach hopes it\u2019s not\u2014it\u2019s perfectly in line with Babitz\u2019s good-natured, perennially of-the-moment love for life. She\u2019s happy to exist within the bounds of experience, to go straight into the song without bothering to arrange a landscape for it to exist in: \u201cThe fear of beauty walked the plank,\u201d Babitz, writes, of her first experience with hallucinogens. \u201cBeauty was all there was.\u201d It seems to me it\u2019s worth remembering this mode of existing.<\/p>\n

In my adulthood, I\u2019ve gone to California at least once a year, even before I first read Babitz, and I\u2019m always disappointed. I\u2019m always myself no matter what kind of hazy light I stand under. Last September, I flew west for a few days, not to hook up with an old boyfriend, necessarily, but not to not spend time with him, either. He and I got an Airbnb for the long weekend, up in the hills with a view of the Hollywood sign, and all we did was bitterly fight and do laps at different times in the pool; the water was so blue it made my mouth hurt if I looked at it too long. There was a giant moon painted on one wall of the living room, and the bed had a mattress made of memory foam, and we hardly touched, and it was cold for Los Angeles\u2014one day, it even rained. Not much, just a little spittle that left patterns on the driveway. It was a disaster.<\/p>\n

But I still keep coming back to LA; I always keep coming back. There\u2019s something in the fantasy that still appeals to me, even if at the bottom of the pool beneath the spangled light lies my own death drive, if that\u2019s all that\u2019s waiting for me on the other side of the mirror. We need fantasies, it\u2019s true, even if they\u2019re just other ways of divining the present. After all, \u201cwithout the compromise of fantasy exchange, real life cannot go on,\u201d Eve writes. \u201cIt\u2019s another of God\u2019s mean tricks\u2014that if it weren\u2019t like that, nobody\u2019d give a fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Larissa Pham is a writer in Brooklyn.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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