Glenn Zucman

To Joseph Heller

From: Eve Babitz, Los Angeles

To: Joseph Heller, New York

1977

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 loathe to say that my life ought to be lived at all, but if anyone’s going to be shameful enough to actually live it, then I’m 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’s 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 sent my book to named Laurie Colwin [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 Laurie 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 because 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? 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 seem 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 [characters] 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 impending 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 how horrible it is being in love with a man who supposedly prefers men and how ghastly 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. (Joe, I mean, you’ve seen me and know I simply can’t complain, it wouldn’t be fair, stacked the way I am.) 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.

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. 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. 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 in the V.I.P. room? And anyway, I can’t stand meetings. I’d much rather figure things out from gossip.

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 in 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, because 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? I am not NOT going to copy out Ernest Hemingway novels by hand to “learn” how to write novels. (Am I?) 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.

Eve

P.S. Sitting around watching my father die of what I’m going to die of is a hell of a strain on my shallow nature.