Slow Days, Fast Company

Slow Days, Fast Company is a 1974 memoir by Eve Babitz. A 1960s and 1970s-era “it girl” who ran in the trendiest Los Angeles circles of the day, Babitz was at the time, and is perhaps even today, best known for a photo taken by Julian Wasser in which she, nude and only twenty years old, plays chess with a fully-clothed and very studious-looking Marchel Duchamp (1963). She was also known for having Igor Stravinsky as a godfather, and several famous paramours, including Jim Morrison. Nevertheless, Babitz was no mere muse and was certainly more than a groupie. She was, in fact, an accomplished writer, cultivating one of the most distinctive voices of the day. Her writing immediately attracted a cult following, maintaining one to this day. A review by the LA Review of Books noted, “In a 1977 article in the Los Angeles Times, when Babitz was asked if her characters in this book are real or not, she said, 'I sort of stick people together. They’re not any one person. Then I run ’em through my glamor machine.'” In Slow Days, Fast Company, Babitz early on describes her semi-autobiographical approach to her literary endeavor: “Perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company.”

Slow Days, Fast Company is organized as a loose series of sketches. The thread that ties them together is Babitz herself, who often can be found openly contemplating herself. Her concern with her own magnetic appeal comes across less as vanity, however, than simple self-awareness – in her first book, Eve's Hollywood, she is frank: “I looked like Brigitte Bardot and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter.” Babitz is aware both that her beauty and connections have given her a pass into a social realm inaccessible to most people, and simultaneously condemned her to inhabit a certain stereotype in the eyes of many onlookers. “I wasn’t as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?’ I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants, I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.’''

Babitz hadn't grown up wealthy. Her parents owned a small bungalow home on Bronson Avenue. Her father, Sol Babitz, was a classical violinist and a renowned musicologist, the recipient of Ford and Fulbright grants, and friends with, besides Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Thomas Mann. Her mother, Mae, of Cajun descent, was an artist from Texas who is best known for her delicate sketches of now long-demolished stretches of Victorian architecture that once populated Los Angeles.



However, the most memorable parts of Babitz's memoir concern her adult life. In “Bakersfield,” for example, Babitz writes of Frank, an American student in London who introduces an article of hers to his English friends, explaining to them (and later relating to her) that it “explained California much better than he could.” The two begin a mail correspondence, and Babitz finds herself intrigued by this young man who seems to understand her so well despite being from the work-a-day, glamorless town of Bakersfield – a place to which, inexplicably, he plans to return once he concludes his studies. That is exactly what he does, and Babitz drives out from LA to meet him. She spends the weekend with him at his father's ranch, which occasions various observations about the contrast between Bakersfield life and life in LA. In Bakersfield, there is no diet cola, no trendy shoes, and the women are all worn down, uninterested, and uninvolved in anything “beyond their children or their particular geography.” Frank brings her grapes, and Babitz asks if they were picked by union members. They were plucked by Teamsters, he assures her. “My immediate hunch was that the Teamsters management stepped in, after [Cesar] Chavez did all the work, and skimmed off the cream. Chavez, after all, was the first man to be able to organize farm labor and it didn’t seem fair. (Maybe the Teamsters seemed more American to the farmworkers than Chavez did with his Gandhian fasts and no money. Maybe if he’d got himself a nice house with a pool and air conditioning, they would have stayed with him…If I were a unionized farm laborer and paying dues, I’d like to know that my leader was every bit as scary as the boss and not some vulnerable saint).” Passages like this epitomize Babitz's ability to hide penetrating critique within elegantly nonchalant prose.

Today, Babitz's Slow Days, Fast Company is considered a minor classic. It is very much a work of its era, capturing the feel and many important figures of a narrow, but influential slice of Americana – and in a voice that seems uniquely suited to telling the story at hand. It is notable for how openly it blurs the lines between fiction and autobiography; a rhetorical strategy that, too, seems appropriate for a book that concerns itself explicitly with a city possessed and obsessed by artists, musicians, and storytellers.