Eve Babitz and the desire for hedonism

Last fall, a good friend of mine referred me to the books and life of Eve Babitz, perhaps inadvertently due to our similarities (blonde, well-endowed writers). Babitz was an artist, a writer and an icon, often notorious for the famous men with which she had affairs. While she may have been known, but not quite famous, for her glamorous, promiscuous, party girl lifestyle, Babitz had a late-in-life rise to widespread fame for her books, one that can be properly attributed to Vanity Fair writer Lili Anolik. 

Anolik wrote a profile on Babitz in 2014. Babitz, after an accident involving a long gauze skirt and a dropped cigarette that left more than half of her body covered in third degree burns, had transformed into a recluse. Yet Anolik’s profile brought Babitz’s books about glamorous 1960s Los Angeles back to life, into mainstream publication and distribution. People loved her books for one reason or another; my wild guess being that it’s likely due to the deep feelings of nostalgia we feel for a simpler time — one not so dominated by pervasive 24 hour news cycles, endless attractive people on our screens and gloom and despair.  

However, the books we now regard with awe were scrutinized at the time of publishing. Babitz’s books were out of print, scorned for their details of an unapologetic life of absolute hedonism, and Babitz written off as a party girl, not to be taken seriously in the literary profession. Babitz recognized the way she lived her life. Yet, she cared not to do anything that wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do. She lived her life for herself and herself only and refused to let anyone get in her way. 

Solace can be found with a writer like Joan Didion, whose writings properly analyze many phenomena that dredged and continue to drag down society. However, escapism can be found through Eve Babitz, someone who brings about the party and lives only to have a good time.

This was something even Babitz recognized at the time, with an acknowledgment in her eight-page-long list of dedications at the beginning of Eve’s Hollywood to fellow Los Angeles writer Didion: “ to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not.” Babitz chronicled the parties, ones she often was the center of. She wrote earnestly yet lovingly of the hedonist Los Angeles lifestyle of the ‘60s and ‘70s, knowledgeable of her writing power and prowess, no matter how many no’s or criticisms she received. 

Over winter break, I began reading “Naked Lunch,” William S. Burrough’s critically acclaimed novel following the life of a heroin junkie told in a series of vignettes. I refrained from finishing it due to the non-linear plot that drove me near insane. However, a line that stuck with me was “pleasure is relief from tension.” The line was used to contextualize heroin as removing all pleasure, tension or sensation of anything. 

This line rings true, in everything from sexual release to a massage rubbing a knot in one’s back to eating a delicious meal. Even day-to-day, minute pleasures are the result of a dissolution of tensions. It seems that we walk around with so much built up tension, anxiety and stress, that we deny ourselves the ability of pleasure, of release. We convince ourselves so deeply of our discomfort and unease with ourselves and the world that sometimes we feel empty without it. 

Confidence is barraged with jealous daggers, the good life with envy and jealousy. Yet we are completely rapt as a society with hedonism, with figures from Eve Babitz to the Kardashians to rising influencer Alix Earle, who perform lives of exorbitant and pleasurable activities. Yet when it comes down to ourselves, there is too often a sense of guilt for taking time to enjoy things. 

For an individualistic society we strangely don’t often prioritize ourselves in the way that Babitz does. Self-indulgence is only a problem when it is at the risk of others. Let’s stop pretending it’s such a terrible thing to eat a platter of animal style fries, to indulge in materialistic desires, and to overindulge in substances from time to time — to give in to guilty pleasures of any and every kind. 

Hedonism is alive and well, for those who allow themselves to indulge in behaviors of excess and pure euphoria. Yet we as a society have deemed it, at worst, degenerate, and at best, unattainable. However, we all perhaps could be a little better if we allowed ourselves little pleasures, to release tension bit by bit. Our framing of the world and the way we choose to see it has massive implications and controls the amount of joy we can find in our lives. If we lead with love, care and compassion, shouldn’t we all be allowed to have a good time?