Didion and Babitz and Literary Catfights

Will I ever stop writing about Joan Didion?

Joan Didion ruined my life.

Like most significant love affairs, my infatuation came on slowly. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and, except for the titular essay and the eternally fabulous “Goodbye To All That,” admired the collection with the tepid attitude in which we regard a painting of acclaimed technical skill that nevertheless fails to move. In December of 2021, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz died within the same week and my normally unliterary Instagram feed was flooded with quotes and tributes to both writers, though a significantly higher preponderance was allotted to the former. The following summer I picked up The White Album and from that first sentence, “We tell ourselves stories to live…” I was hooked. In short order, I read Play As It Lays and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and my infatuation, my devotion only grew. Here was a writer compelled to confront disorder—whether the disorder dwelled in the streets of Haight Ashbury or the labyrinthine paths of her mind—with peerless intelligence and style. It was the first time I understood the form of a sentence had a perfection of its own. After drinking from the clean well of her sentences how could I then gaze upon my decidedly unruly prose, less Alpine spring and more freshwater creek in which twigs drifted by the occasional scrap of plastic, without flinching?

For several months, I tried to write in Didion’s style. My sentences turned shorter and aimed for emotional detachment. Cleaner, they were denuded of the brilliance that separates Didion from her league of imitators. George Saunders has an excellent quote that addresses the young writer’s disillusionment. “It was if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across the meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a barbie doll…small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.” The old master Saunders is referring to is Hemingway which is all too fitting given Didion famously taught herself to write by typing up Hemingway’s sentences and that Didion now exerts a similar hold over the young writer, usually female, that Hemmingway exerts over the young writer, usually male. In my account of my infatuation, I have thus far avoided detailing the persona of Didion which so often eclipses the writing of Didion. However, I must confess, I fell in love with the persona of Didion too. In my college dorm room, I hung the infamous photo of her beside the Stingray in pride of place above my dresser. I wanted to be that icy, that cool, but, that persona is not for me. Not in the least because I am too enamored with pasta and sangria for any dress of mine to hang from a body like Didion’s. Not in the least because I am too much a child of the twenty-first century to soberly smoke a cigarette without picturing reproduced photos of polluted lungs.

I gave up on the persona of Didion without a fight, without hostility. Like Babitz, I’m grateful to Didion for being who I’m not and I know her writing and her persona paved the way for young writers like me to look to her as a model instead of Hemmingway. I can understand the hostility a writer might bear towards the persona. It is natural for a novice to resent “Saint Joan,” and in our current era of over-sharing it is understandable to resent a writer who guards her persona so carefully. Lili Anolik makes no bones of dispensing with an agenda. The flap of Didion and Babitz claims “Joan Didion, revealed at last…” and the slew of promotional content for the book has included headlines like “Inside the Secret Life of Joan Didion” and “Literary Assassin.” Anolik wanted her publisher, Scribner, to include a Babitz quote on the book jacket, “Lili, you did it, you killed Joan Didion. I’m so happy somebody killed her at last and it didn’t have to be me.” Scribner went with a different Babitz quote: “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan…” Not only is this quote more compelling, but it is also the linchpin of Anolik’s theory of the parallel relationship between the two writers, a quote Anolik returns to again and again until the reader is tempted to bang their head against the wall lest they be reminded of Joan Didion’s height again.

Anolik, to her credit, is forthright about her partisanship. In the aforementioned Vulture article, Anolik admits Didion and Babitz is “biased against Didion to an outrageous degree, and the book was, behind its admiring posture toward her, violent toward her” which takes some of the edge off when Anolik writes, “Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona—part princess, part wet blanket—tough going.” In other words, Anolik is #TeamEve. And, as much as I’m more naturally inclined to #TeamJoan, I’m glad Anolik is Team Eve; without her rabid efforts to advocate for Babitz, Babitz’s work might not have received the reappraisal it so rightly deserves. The reading public is better off thanks to the efforts of Anolik, Babitz super-fan, but her insistence on elevating Babitz to Didion’s stature, to casting down the immortal Didion from the literary Mount Olympus, diminishes both women and tarnishes the mantle of Anolik, the critic.

Many of the book’s flaws can be traced to Anolik’s original critical sin: that for two powerful women to be in conversation with each other they must, at some level, be opposed to each other. Anolik concludes the book by claiming, “Joan and Eve are the two halves of American womanhood, representing forces that are, on the surface, in conflict yet secretly aligned—the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yin and yang.” There’s a satisfying neatness to this conclusion, very English term paper. However, my alarms fire at the invocation of so many binaries: lazy analysis this way comes. Binaries are most useful for promotional copy (see: Team Edward and Team Jacob), but fail when forced to conform to the complexities of real people, especially real women. Anolik’s project reminded me of a 2015 viral essay, “Being Winona In A World Made For Gwyneths,” that, in a particularly low point for 21st-century feminism, attempted to locate oppression in identifying with perennial cool girl Winona Ryder as opposed to chief almond mom Gwyneth Paltrow. The obvious problem with proposing any two women as representing the halves of American womanhood is that “American womanhood,” an odious term, is not comprised of halves, thirds, or even fourths. There are infinite slices of pie! The other problem is that a binary, especially between two women, usually picks a favorite.

To support her favorite, Anolik’s binary obsession lends her to lazy metaphor. In describing Didion and Babitz’s respective relationships with a bit player Anolik writes, “Eve was getting eaten alive by him. Joan had her teeth sunk deep in his throat, was drinking, drinking, drinking with glassy-eyed, sweet-sucking bliss.” That this metaphor is a slight to Joan is self-evident; it is also a slight to Eve. By labeling Eve as a victim Anolik infantilizes her. Throughout the book, Anolik repeatedly Eve claims as an “innocent,” and “a lewd angel,” adjectives she intends as exhibits in her Babitz defense but also stink of condescension. Anolik is invested in the project of Eve’s victimization comparing her to Henry James’ Isabel Archer, “a victim who actively participated in her own victimization. That she was rushing headlong into a web spun by people more sophisticated, more worldly, more wicked than she didn’t occur to her until it was too late. She was ensnared.” Like her false binaries, Anolik’s Babitz victimization is not without an agenda. If Babitz is a victim, an innocent, then she needs a rescuer.

Any guesses on her savior?

Anolik’s interest is confined to Babitz’s heyday in the 60s and 70s; the 21^st century Eve is a living ghost and Anolik compares her apartment to “the underworld” where she’s “being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads… my task is to rescue her from that monster, return her to life aboveground.”

And because Anolik’s schema is premised on binaries she must diminish Didion to rescue Babitz. Remember, for Babitz to be the victim Didion must be the vampire. Anolik’s chief critique of Joan, how she promised to reveal her “at last,” is an autopsy of her romantic life. That this method of critique largely ignores the most legitimate and interesting avenue for examination—Didion’s massive writing oeuvre—is one failing that in pursuit of her narrative, Anolik is lazy and gullible is another. Legendary journalist Janet Malcolm who famously wrote “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” was even more contemptuous of the biographer who “is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away... [in biography] the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.” In Didion and Babitz, Anolik expresses her admiration for Malcolm, particularly Malcom’s large-scale critique of the biography industry in The Silent Women: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, leaving Anolik’s readers to wonder why Anolik waylaid the discernment that is the non-fiction writer’s most basic prerequisite.

Anolik nicely lays out the relationship timeline between Didion and her first boyfriend, the writer Noel Parmentel Jr. While detailed in Tracey Daugherty’s Joan Didion biography, the material feels fresh as it has thus far been curiously absent from the myth of Joan Didion. I respect Didion’s impressive campaign to exclude Parmentel from her mythos. And why shouldn’t she? Parmentel is a minor writer who will go down in the literary canon as the guy who made a monumental 20th-century writer briefly go weepy. Though he didn’t marry her, though he broke her heart, in every way that matters to two writers, she won. She is infamous, immortal; she’s Joan and he’s just Ken, a footnote in her victory lap. This is interesting biographical material. However, Anolik falters by taking Parmentel too much at his word. Since Joan is dead Anolik is left to source her primary accounting of the relationship from a man who claims, “Without me, there might have never been a Joan Didion. I invented Joan Didion.” It’s alright to include the quote—for the enterprising writer it would almost be irresponsible not to include the quote— but Anolik fails to probe Parmentel’s obvious self-interest. Throughout the book, she returns to Parmentel as an authority on the relationship between Didion and her husband, which he claims he arranged like Didion was a fifteenth-century bride. That first sin, ignoring Parmentel’s stake in the narrative, leads to other sins. Anolik buys into the notion that Didion only loved Parmentel, leading to outrageous speculation phrased as fact like, “there was something irresistible about the idea of giving herself to a man she didn’t love because the man she did love told her to,” and facile literary analysis like, “up until A Book of Common Prayer, Parmentel, not Dunne, had been Joan’s true husband. That he was the first man she’d given herself to sexually made him, by her logic—the logic of the unconscious, of dreams, and therefore irrefutable—her true husband.”

Again, I don’t object to the premise of the theory. I know firsthand how common it is for brilliant women to use writing to revenge themselves on mediocre dudes, what I object to is the reporter’s complacency in accepting this narrative of Didion—the heartbreak girl, Mouse turned Mona Lisa—as absolute. Didion recognized the brutality of her profession in the introduction to Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “writers are always selling somebody out.” How can the reader trust a woman presuming to write on Joan Didion who fails to internalize that essential lesson? Near the end of the book, Anolik writes, “I accepted family lore unquestioningly. (Why would I question it? I had no reason to.)” Why question lore? Why write at all?

At the midpoint of this essay, I asked myself the same thing. Why devote over 2,000 words to a book nobody reading this post has likely read, and whose subjects, Didion and Babitz, maybe three people reading this post are familiar with? The tradition of middling writers wading into the lives of great writers in the hopes of buying a ticket to posterity might not be august but, as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sylvia Plath can tell you, it is long-standing. Why return to this Word document when I could be, should be, looking at apartments, shopping for Christmas presents, or working on my own stories? Why? A thread of anger dwells in the type of this essay, an anger that runs deeper than the offenses of an opportunistic writer, or, to use Anolik’s parlance, a starfucker; it was this anger that I couldn’t ignore.

Anger’s as good of a reason to write as any. Fitzgerald or Plath could tell you that too.

Anolik warns in her foreword that she intends to focus on the ruthless aspects of Didion’s success, goading, “Reader: don’t be a baby.” I am not offended by the depiction of Didion’s pitiless ambition. Like Anolik, I like her cold, I like her ambitious. And it wasn’t Anolik’s naked preference for gossip over substantive analysis that angered me. Despite my grievances, I enjoyed reading this book the way I enjoy rewatching Gossip Girl or reading tabloids on the plane, except better because Anolik’s gossip is about writers and the 60’s—the bygone era when writers passed for celebrities.

To understand my anger, I returned to a quote Anolik sources from David Thomson (who?), “You can feel in Joan’s work a longing for a man who is strong in thought as well as action... I always felt she was writing to impress him, to impress that man.”

To take down Didion Anolik must diminish her, and she accomplishes her task by subordinating her to Parmentel. Didion no longer has a voice to defend herself. Anolik assembles an impressive cast of the era’s remaining players that are overwhelmingly male and so inclined to certain biases. Why would I question it? I had no reason to. How about “question everything. Learn something.” Despite Anolik’s preferences, Didion is the big name of the book. When women were still unable to get a credit card in their own name, a shy girl from Sacramento outclassed the male writers of her generation to become a legend, her name forever a byword for peerless prose. How comforting for those lesser writers to reassure themselves she was under Parmentel’s shoe, to make her small. Only in shrinking Didion, Anolik shrinks herself.

Joan Didion was not a feminist. The piece of hers that is most subject to modern criticism, “The Women’s Movement,” is not only ungenerous but unnuanced. She made a point of citing Hemingway as her inspiration. Contrary to Babitz, Didion avoided sex in her work and persona. At every turn, Didion tried to stake out her authority as a writer, not a woman writer. And it worked. Babitz’s feminist sympathies align her more with today’s female writers than Didion’s Goldwater sensibilities, but Didion’s masculinist commitment to success enabled the rise of countless woman writers who openly identify as feminists. I don’t know if I see Anolik writing about a book about the rivalry between two literary women without Didion. So, it’s especially galling to watch Anolik put Didion and Babitz down to curry favor with the same old literary boy’s club Didion and Babitz had to outwit.

Both women deserve a better biographer.