by Simon Warner
The second wave of feminism, which began in the late 1960s, occurred after the publication of Kerouac’s, Ginsberg’s and Burroughs’ most influential books. Although in her pioneering Sexual Politics (1970) Kate Millet had challenged Norman Mailer’s misogynistic portrayal of women (Mailer was then often associated with the Beats), it took at least twenty years of feminist literary criticism before attention began to be paid to the complex role played by Beat women as writers themselves. When Beat writing first appeared, it was attacked acrimoniously by critics in both the popular press and conventional intellectual journals, who were appalled by the social and stylistic challenges of Beat poets and novelists. The more recent attacks by feminist critics claiming that Beat males didn’t support Beat women have been similarly heated. It is now widely acknowledged that many of the Beat males were no more sensitive to the needs of the intellectual women in their midst than many other males of their generation were to the needs of the women they worked and lived with.2
In this section, I want to both examine the place of Beat women participants in this cultural revolution – how they were largely ignored at the time but have since enjoyed something of a latterday revival – but also to extrapolate their efforts to gauge how far their influence sowed the seeds of later creative assertions by members of the so-called ‘second sex’.3 And I particularly wish to expand the canvas of consideration by thinking to what extent those female novelists, memoirists and poets helped to shape an environment in which women musicians and songwriters of subsequent decades may have been inspired by their lower profile sisters of the 1950s and early 1960s. To what extent can we pinpoint a legacy – how have subsequent players on the rock ’n’ roll stage taken intellectually, artistically and sartorially from their female Beat forebears; how have their lives, their style, their politics or, indeed, their sexual politics been shaped by the shadow cast by a previous generation of women who broke the mode of expectation and ploughed an unconventional furrow, even if their statements and achievements were buried in a long drift of amnesia, to be uncovered some time down the line. In essence, I hope to identify some later artists who seem to keep alive the flame of female Beatdom in the later years of the twentieth century and even into the post-Millennial phase. First though, some reflections on women who were around during that original era but whose abilities or contributions were only belatedly exposed to a wider readership.
Joyce Johnson was, for a time, a girl-friend to Kerouac. She was his partner on the day the first editions of the New York Times hit the news-stands heralding the arrival of his novel On the Road in September 1957. Thirty years on, in Minor Characters (1987), Johnson told the story of their relationship. It was acclaimed as an important record of a crucial moment in the writer’s life – long-sought fame realised and the beginning of his all too speedy decline – but also of how she felt about her role on the fringes of the bohemian boys’ club. As interestingly, Johnson was someone who went on to publish herself – she had novels before Minor Characters emerged – and a rather more recent memoir, 2004’s Missing Men, re-visits other episodes in her past. It only fleetingly refers to Kerouac in its near-300 pages but is a sensitive and insightful reflection of an intriguing life: early years as a Broadway child understudy in which she lived out her mother’s, rarely her own, dreams and later as the wife of two painters who struggled and strove without ever making a breakthrough. Missing Men is not only a slice through a rich seam of twentieth century life – her family had been East European, Jewish émigrés to America – but also an individual account of a woman of ability having to pander, until her later years, to the ambitions, and generally frustrated ones at that, of men who found it hard to accommodate her as an equal partner. The machismo mood of the these post-Abstract Expressionists, while barely misogynist, left her feeling, eventually, as if the solo course was the only way she could be a fulfilled writer in his her own right.
Another more recent addition to this expanding, if esoteric, archive, not issued until 2008, appears from a different angle, another perspective: a sister who saw her elder brother rise to the ranks, initially as a friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg and then as the first in the group to publish a novel fictionalising the new Manhattan scene at the end of the 1940s. John Clellon Holmes’ Go (1952), although it actually comes after Kerouac’s published debut, is still usually cited as the first Beat novel and is a convincing, and rather undeservedly sidelined, outline of the febrile world in which visions of a new world were plotted on the subway, on bridges, at all-night parties and in downtown bars, and with the principal architects of this artistic mêlée all present, if disguised, in the text. Holmes’ junior sibling Elizabeth Von Vogt was a teenager during the time her story unfolds. 681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947–1954 revolves around an apartment that becomes the occasional haunt of Kerouac and Cassady and the place where brother John shares his wit and wisdom and, most importantly, his knowledge of jazz with his kid sibling.
Von Vogt is not a writer in the sense that Johnson is: there is only occasionally art in her telling of these days. But the material is of sufficient moment to justify its recounting. What is fascinating is that this young woman, in her tender mid-teens, is living a relatively unfettered life in the most exciting city on earth – attending jazz gigs galore, making friends and lovers with both boys and older, more worldly, men returning to study under the GI Bill, and meeting the nascent Beats in cafés, in lofts and basements around the island. In one memorable moment, she comes across Herbert Huncke, junkie and thief and gutter guru to all of her brother’s pals, at a dubious party, fuelled by wine and harder stuff, before John whisks her from the half-light of degradation to the safety of her mid-town home. She wanders on the edges of this twilight land, a bright post-pubescent, protected by a circle of brilliant college drop-outs, Village geniuses, white Negroes, who long for a dangerous draught of nocturnal spirit.
Both Johnson and Van Vogt are determinedly independent forces in the autobiographies they map out. Yet each is quite clearly bound by the contemporary rules and expectations that confront them. They see Kerouac and company, running wild, running free, while they have their moralising, quite sanctimonious, mothers, keen to guide their daughters to some kind of formal path – marriage, mortgage, children – before it’s all too late. Ironically, it was Kerouac, particularly, who soon found himself increasingly drawn to the maternal home, the umbilical cord tugging him back. As the 1960s unfolded, as women stood up for their rights and opened the gates of opportunity to the successors of Johnson and Van Vogt, the individual dubbed the King of the Beats was pickling his liver in his mother’s sitting room, railing against the progressive activists who battled for change and drinking himself finally into oblivion in the autumn before the decade concluded.
But let us think now of a range of other women who were also attached to or associated with, in various fashions, this predominantly phallocentric literary scene. Di Prima we have mentioned, a poet who would publish from the later 1950s, share relationships with significant Beat writers – like Leroi Jones – and have a number of offspring along her picaresque way. But she also produced a significant body of work despite the domestic calls that she addressed, generally as a solo parent. Carolyn Cassady would largely tolerate the wild infidelities of husband Neal, even embark on her own brief relationship with Kerouac in the early 1950s with Cassady’s tacit encouragement, and then, eventually, produce an account of those years in Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (1990) somewhat later. Hettie Jones was wife to Leroi Jones – later self-identified as Amiri Baraka – and an active editor and publisher in the poetry journal world that would promote the new wave of writers, generally male but occasionally female, too.
Two of Kerouac’s wives, Edie Parker and Joan Haverty, would, in time, pen autobiographical accounts of their part in the writer’s life; so would another girlfriend Helen Weaver.4 Elise Cowen would court Ginsberg at a time when he was still caught between
the pull of homosexual inclination and the possibility that he may find stability in a heterosexual guise. That girlfriend would write poetry, too, and then commit suicide after the pressures her family placed upon her to conform and reject the Beat orbit. After she died, her parents destroyed virtually all her written verse. Another fascinating freewheeler was ruth weiss, a young Jewish escapee from Nazi terror in the Austria of the 1930s, who rejected her Teutonic roots in powerful, emblematic fashion, abandoning the capital letters that mark all nouns in the German tongue, a rejection of the dark shadows of the past and an assertive expression of a self-determining future once she arrived in the US.
Other women writers should be included in this listing. Bonnie Bremser, a wife to Beat poet Ray Bremser, suffered harder conditions than most in a situation where her jailbird partner’s violence and the spectre of drugs were constantly present. But she still published work. Lenore Kandel was a woman who carried the Beat impulse forward to the flower power era of her home city of San Francisco and particularly in her poetry volume The Love Book (1966), and Janine Pommy Vega. Joanne Kyger and Joanna McClure are others who deserve mentions. Furthermore, Anne Waldman, Ann Charters and Jan Kerouac are potent examples of younger women who for a variety of reasons – as friends, academics and family members – kept the Beat spirit alive, all important links in this historic chain, whose poetry, biography and prose preserved the potency of the 1950s literary line for post-1970 generations.
Waldman as Ginsberg associate and director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York City’s Lower East Side from 19685 would enable young talents like Jim Carroll and Patti Smith to bring their post-Beat verse to the stage of that remarkable seventeenth-century church. She would also maintain her own, significant identity as poet and become one of the founding forces of Ginsberg’s Buddhist-inspired Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. Charters was very important. A young university researcher when the mid-1950s surge occurred, she met Kerouac in his fading years, created his first bibliographic account and then produced his first biography, simply entitled Kerouac, four years after his passing, in 1973. Jan Kerouac’s links to this arc are more tortured, more traumatic, yet still intriguing. Rejected for a decade and a half as his daughter, father Jack would eventually meet and acknowledge his offspring. In time, she would publish herself, Beat-like trials and trails captured in Baby Driver (1981) and Trainsong (1988). Ultimately she would be caught up the struggle for the Kerouac estate, as another biographer of the older writer, Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe (1983), supported her in her legal arguments with the Sampas family, a member of which, Stella, had become Kerouac’s third and final wife in 1966. Jan’s early death from kidney disease in 1996 was a desperate tragedy but it did not end the often bitter dispute; the battle for the inherited rights has continued for decades.
Apart from the writers we have mentioned, other women featured large in the lives of the Beat Generation menfolk. Kerouac’s mother Gabrielle, the woman he called Mémère and the person to whom he ran for cover and comfort and cash when his personal or financial resources were running on empty, would outlive her son, surviving until 1972. Without that maternal force – a figure represented as his aunt in his most famous tale On the Road – it is hard to see how Kerouac would have written all he did, even lasted as long as he did, even though his death at the age of 47 was premature in any terms. His many years of penury when his writing was earning him close to nothing, his hard-living, hard-travelling times were frequently softened by his mother’s hearth, her apparently unconditional love, even when this Catholic matriarch disapproved of much of what he did, and despised many of those with whom he congregated. We should also highlight Ginsberg’s bond to his mother Naomi, too, a woman who stood well outside the bounds of convention herself as a 1930s Communist and naturist but whose life crumbled after the war when her uncertain mental health led to her long-term incarceration in an asylum. Her death in 1956 became the prompt for ‘Kaddish’, the poet’s most revered work after ‘Howl’. The title was drawn from the Jewish mourning prayer and was a powerfully sustained poetic mantra to his departed parent. Burroughs had a generally negative view of women – his dogged brand of homosexuality meant he regarded them as threats rather than complements to his life – yet, from 1946, he spent a number of years in a common law partnership with Joan Vollmer before he accidentally killed her with a gun-shot in 1951. For all the horrors of that William Tell-like shooting – Burroughs aimed a gun to dislodge a spirit glass from the top of her head but the echoes of the historical crossbow and the apple were unavoidable, even if the outcomes were quite different – it has to be said that remorse the would-be writer felt was so deep that it triggered a reaction in his mind, in his soul, so profound that he felt forced to use story-telling as a way out of his deep and lasting disturbance at this apparently drunken folly.
For Cassady, too, women were his constant quarry – the teenage LuAnne Henderson, who became his bride in 1945 three years before he wed Carolyn, was just one of many, many dozens, perhaps several hundreds, who partnered him, slept with him, even, on occasion, married him bigamously. He was, in short, during his 41 years of hyper-frenetic life, obsessed with girls, women and sex. Which is not to say that in the homosocial ring that formed the fulcrum of the Beat caucus, that Cassady, like all the other principals, was not interested in sexual encounters with men, too. The network of liaison and tension that crisscrossed this fraternal gathering was one of the enduring features and fractures marking their various and multiple connections and collusions, interpersonal and intellectual interplay, over half a century. It might be asserted that there were a number of things that kept thinking, creative women at arm’s length from this core crew – the ongoing sexual hunger that Cassady and Kerouac had, too, for fleeting and rapidly forgotten satisfactions in the bedroom; the homosexual energies that drove Ginsberg and Burroughs; and that complicated intersection where mainstream heterosexuality was impinged upon by the calls of homosexual and bi-sexual attraction and engagement. In this circle most of the games, most of the options, were explored at certain times and often to the disadvantage of stable relationships with female associates.
But let us return to that notion of Beat women and the legacy they may have handed down to succeeding generations and, specifically, to subsequent female musical singer-composer-performers, particularly, during the final third of the last century. This provides a problem that is difficult to address and disentangle without a certain degree of speculation. For, while male musicians from the mid-1960s, as this book firmly asserts, displayed the influence and impact of the Beat writers on their lives and work, there is no simple gender symmetry here: we cannot begin to claim that Beat women had a similar effect on female singers and songwriters because most of the written work those novelists and poets had produced in the 1950s would lie largely undiscovered and unheralded until several decades later. One thing we might propose, however, is that the themes in male Beat literature – travel, independence, artistic experiment, sexual adventure – did affect forward- and free-thinking women musicians, too. Couple those thoughts to the swelling tide of feminist ideas that would prosper just before and after 1970 and we can conceive of a climate, an environment, in which it was more possible for female artists to shape autonomous creative careers. We might see those women who picked up guitars, sang on stages or entered the male preserve of the recording student as equivalent to the Beat women who tried to share their art in the earlier era. However while the 1950s saw manhood – in the shape of Kerouac and Ginsberg, Cassady and Burroughs, for instance – utterly overshadow female ability and industry, within a decade and a half, while men like Dylan and Lennon may well have continued to lead the way, the door had been left sufficiently ajar for women singer-songwriters to creep through and also share some of the spotlight. There had been creative women in both periods; the difference for those who came later was that the social chains on the woman as homebound domestic had bee
n considerably loosened and there were actual opportunities for expression and exposure, if the female singer had the talent and determination to carve out a niche.
Still, those brave women who counted themselves a part of the Beat revolution – even if the men who drank in cafés and bars alongside them undervalued their presence and the broader blocs of mainstream society saw them, perhaps, as immoral jezebels chasing the idle and unwashed – must be regarded as trend-setters. They may be considered harbingers, or at least early adopters, of a later rebellion which eventually recognised that women did not have to be chained to the kitchen sink and household chores and could be a great deal more than that: achievers in society, in the professions and the arts, on a par with their male counterparts. As Brenda Knight, whose celebrated collection of the writings of Beat women came out in 1996, shining a torch almost anew on this mostly buried, or at best obscured, archive, remarks:
Women of the fifties in particular were supposed to conform like Jell-O to a mould. There was only one option: to be a housewife and mother. For the women profiled here, being Beat was far more attractive than staying chained to a brand-new kitchen appliance. For the most part, the liberal arts educations these young women were given created a natural predilection for art and poetry, for living a life of creativity instead of confining it to the occasional hour at the symphony. Nothing could be more romantic than joining this chorus of individuality and freedom, leaving behind boredom, safety and conformity.6
The quiet, frequently anonymous, gestures of the women of the 1950s, barely acknowledged at the time by male Beat protagonists and critically regarded by sanctimonious and illiberal commentators outside the scene, would form a base, a potential platform, a Trojan horse, for more strident feminist voices to crack the glass ceiling within a decade or so. Anne Waldman provides a pertinent foreword to Knight’s anthology, describing it as ‘a kind of resurrection […] a necessary reckoning’. She comments: ‘This book is a testament, primarily, to the lives of these women, lest they be ignored or forgotten. For what comes through the searing often poignant hint or glimpse of an original – often lonely – tangible intellectus – a bright, shining, eager mind. And these very particular “voices” as it were form in unison a stimulating and energetic forcefield of consciousness that manifested at a rich and difficult time in cultural history, spanning half a century.’7