I even got, from a bohemian with his dentures out in whose little room I spent a pleasant hour, a mumbled account and an unpublished photocopy of a letter a friend sent him about the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that became famous because there Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” aloud for the first time. The drama of that breakthrough for one poet overshadowed the proto-environmental poetry that Michael McClure and Gary Snyder read that night. The accounts generally said little about the location as well, an artist’s co-op gallery where Hedrick was a principal, as well as the instigator of the reading. It was a delightful document that let me see how the event had felt to a participant before it and the official Beats at it got mythologized.
Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together—or tearing some piece of it apart to find what’s hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions—and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. The process can be incandescent with excitement, whether from finding some unexpected scrap of information or from recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble. Something you didn’t know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try to write it down.
In a way, this has been my life’s work, the pursuit of patterns and the work of reconnecting what has been fractured, often fractured by categories that break a subject, a history, a meaning into subcompartments from which the whole cannot be seen. While there’s a kind of expertise that comes from microscopic focus, I would often pursue the patterns that reveal themselves across broad areas of space or time or culture or categories. The art of picking out constellations in the night sky has cropped up again and again as a metaphor for this work.
This was true to a degree of the subject of this first book, whose story had been largely missed by the linear narratives of art history, film history, and literary history. The relationship between film, poetry, and visual art, between drugs, esoteric and non-Western philosophies, political dissent, and queer culture, between members of a funky coterie that could be described as avant-garde were it not also catalytic in a counterculture, was what mattered. My artists weren’t very well documented beyond those oral history interviews, and they weren’t very visible, though most of them—particularly DeFeo and Conner—got a lot more attention afterward.
The artists’ own works were often a kind of collage, literally: of the six artists central to the book, Jess, Berman, George Herms, and Bruce Conner were known primarily for their collages and three-dimensional assemblages. Jay DeFeo was, like Wally Hedrick, primarily a painter, and one whose work often featured a powerful solitary form, but she too ventured into collage on many occasions, mixing painting and photography and found material. Collage makes something new without hiding the traces of the old, makes a new whole out of scraps without erasing the scrappiness, emerges from an idea of creation not as making something out of nothing, like God on the first day or painters and novelists, but as making something else out of a world already exploding with images, ideas, wreckage and ruin, artifacts, shards, and remnants.
Collage is literally a border art, an art of what happens when two things confront each other or spill onto each other, what conversations arise from the conjunction of difference, and how differences can feed a new whole. For these artists it was also a poverty art, one of scrounged materials from the Victorian houses being knocked down in the black neighborhood around them, the detritus of thrift stores, scraps from magazines. Conner even made his first films out of found footage because he couldn’t afford a camera, and then settled into this recontextualizing as his chosen genre, or mixed found and new footage to make films influential for their inventive editing and pacing.
Putting together this picture of my part of the world as it existed not long before I arrived in it was a paradise of ideas and pattern recognition, perhaps more so because it was the first time I had done so on such a scale. That I was getting to know the past of my own city and region meant that places I had passed through were acquiring new layers of meaning. I was writing about the world up to the point when I had been born into it, and it was foundational work for moving forward in that world. I was writing a cultural history that gave my own part of the world significance and possibility I had not seen before. I was becoming an expert on a subject, and that too had its rewards.
Diving Into the Wreck
1
When I wrote that book, I conducted a number of interviews with straight male subjects who thought I might be a groupie of sorts, and demonstrating a deep knowledge of their milieu was one way to dispel some of that: I’m not excited to meet you, I’m excited to reconstruct how it all came together in 1957, and I have most of the pieces but would like to ask you a few things. I remember one of them inviting me to sit on the sofa with him, and putting my tape recorder between us as a tiny barrier; another who seemed frisky with anticipation of some sort of frolic we might engage in; and years of sexual harassment from Bruce Conner, who I tried to keep at bay in part by addressing him as Uncle Bruce and his wife as Aunt Jean, a reminder of, among other things, our age gap. The conduct of the frisky artist seemed to come from something very familiar to me, a sense that since young women are nobody, nothing you do with them is on the record, which was disconcerting to run into while I was making the record of his life and achievements.
As part of my research, I paid to have several short films screened for me at the Pacific Film Archive and Canyon Cinema, but there was one I didn’t see at the time but had read about often in the literature. Works of art you have only read or heard about take on their own dimensions, and often such a work takes on a life in your imagination before you see the real thing. My imaginary film of joyous liberation withered when I finally saw Pull My Daisy. Codirected by the painter Alfred Leslie and the photographer Robert Frank, it had a voice-over by Jack Kerouac.
The film begins with a woman opening the drapes and picking up after her husband: “Early morning in the universe. The wife is getting up, opening up the windows. She’s a painter and her husband’s a railroad brakeman. . . .” She never acquires a name, never paints, but is only the wife, the one who gets the kid breakfast and dispatches him to school, tends the house, and represents all the things the men are escaping or avoiding and definitely disdaining. She doesn’t seem to be there when the overcoat-clad Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Ginsberg’s lover Peter Orlovsky burst into the flat and begin drinking and partying. The men come and go with booze and cigarettes, smitten with themselves and their notion of themselves as winsome. Ginsberg rolls on the floor like a puppy at one point, another of them cuddles a jug of wine like a teddy bear, Kerouac’s voice-over says, “Let’s play cowboys,” and they riff on what kinds of cowboys they are.
The central drama unfolds in the evening, when a bishop invited by the wife arrives with his mother and his own wife. He’s a young man in a flashy white suit, and we never find out what he’s the bishop of, though clearly he’s supposed to represent all things orthodox. The gang of poets are rude to him, confident that their rudeness is another mark of their liberation. But the bishop’s stodgy mother is played by Alice Neel, the painter whose work—mostly portraits and nudes—even in the 1930s was fearlessly original and transgressive. The brakeman/husband’s diligent, shrewish wife is played by the starkly gorgeous Delphine Seyrig, who went on to become a major film star and then a major voice for feminism in France.
So two great women artists, one in her prime, one at her start, play dreary, nameless nobodies and appendages: literally a wife, a mother. (The railroad brakeman, whose name—Milo—is often invoked, is played by the painter Larry Rivers.) When the Beat poets, who are referred to by their real names, interrupt Neel’s organ playing with jazz we’re meant to understand that she too represents convention and they improvisation and the cool stuff. And then all the men, except the bishop who had departed earlier with his family, go out into the night to play, and
the wife stays home with the dishes and the kid. I’d always heard of it as a celebration of liberation, but you could only read it that way if you imagine that you’re one of the poets, not one of the women. If you’re one of the women, you’ve just been told you’re no one, except a mantrap a bitch and a baggage.
How do you make art when the art that’s all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes? What do you do with culture heroes who have had beneficial effects but not for you or people like you, whether it’s personal malice or categorical scorn? The Beats loomed over my generation, or codified versions of them did. My formative years had been peppered with men who wanted to be Kerouac, and who saw that job as the pursuit of freedom, and saw freedom as freedom from obligation and commitment, and, when it came to art, stream-of-consciousness spontaneity, art freed up from composition and plan. There were so many of them, including the handsome, sweet one I went to my first Nevada Test Site antinuclear action with in 1988 and the arrogant indigent college acquaintance who several years earlier had crashed with me and my gay roommate, devouring the contents of the refrigerator and scribbling condemnations of us in the journal he left lying open.
I did like some things about Kerouac’s prose style, just not the gender politics of the three men who were most often meant when people talked about the Beats. Those politics had contaminated Kerouac’s On the Road for me when I was a teenager. I got as far as the protagonist’s encounter with Terry—“the cutest little Mexican girl” who he later calls “a dumb little Mexican wench” with “a simple and funny little mind.” And then the protagonist—a lightly fictionalized Kerouac—takes off and leaves her. As in the film, a woman is a stationary object, a man is a pilgrim and a heroic wanderer. He’s Odysseus; she’s Penelope, but Homer took an interest in the gallant struggle of the woman who stayed home. It seemed to me that I would never be the footloose protagonist, that I was closer to the young Latina on the California farm who gets left behind, and halfway through I put the novel down. The book was going to go on without people like me, and I was going to go on without it.
Years before I took on the Beats as a subject, I’d had an even more intense sense of erasure at the opening for an exhibition of Ginsberg’s photographs. The walls were hung with dozens of inscribed black-and-white prints of his male friends in various places, having adventures, having each other, having the world as their oyster, and then a print or two of Peter Orlovsky’s mentally ill mother and sister sitting on the edge of a bed, sad, stranded, hopeless. They were, as I remember it, the only women in the show. As in On the Road and Pull My Daisy, they were immobilized objects in a context where freedom and mobility were equated.
I became silently furious, back in the day when I had no clear feminist ideas, just swirling inchoate feelings of indignation and insubordination. A great urge to disrupt the event overtook me; I wanted to shout and to shout that I was not disrupting it because a woman is no one, to shout that since I did not exist my shouting did not exist either and could not be objectionable. I was, in that room, that time, clear and angry about my nonexistence that was otherwise mostly just a brooding anxiety somewhere below the surface. But I remained silent; contributing to the sense of women as burdensome, crazy, angry, intrusive, unfit was not going to help.
Often a phenomenon that appears revolutionary because of some new feature can be seen as drearily conventional because of others that stood out less at the time. The men considered the principal Beats were opening up space to be queer or bisexual, to experiment with drugs and consciousness and non-Western spiritual practices and philosophies, to try to find white literary equivalents to the great experiments of black jazz musicians then, to make of improvisation and the American vernacular and pop culture something truly of this time and place, not a dressed-up deference to Europe.
Also, most of them despised women, and in this respect they were entirely of their time and place, the woman-hating American 1950s, whose mainstream literary lions were dubbed a few years back the Midcentury Misogynists. Watching Pull My Daisy one more time made me go back to Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel. The American canon was, in his reading, men’s literature, and though he disparaged most of the men he considered, he disparaged women by not considering them. He noted that the overarching theme of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick and some of James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier novels was the love between a white and a nonwhite man and that this literature took place in the wide-open American spaces where men were free to roam and women were absent. “As boys’ books we should expect them shyly, guiltlessly as it were, to proffer a chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience—and this is spectacularly the case.” A little less chaste in the Beats, but no less boyish.
And later on he notes of the women in these books, “Only in death can they be joined in an embrace as pure as that of males. The only good woman is a dead woman!” I didn’t shout that day, but I did have my revenge on another one of the holy trinity of the Beats one February evening in my early twenties. I had just begun to publish, so it must have been early 1984, and the woman who was my editor at a little music and culture magazine told me that Survival Research Labs, a punk performance trio of men who made menacing dystopian machines that moved and spun and lurched at the audience and self-destructed with flames and explosions, was hosting a birthday party for William Burroughs. Then she told me (though I don’t know if it’s true) that a noted woman artist had cut her hair off and made herself androgynous so that she could work with him and that everyone at the party would—as at pretty much all punk parties in that era—don the tough-guy drag of dark jeans and leather jackets and women would play down their gender and everyone would stand around looking angsty and rugged.
That spring Luc Sante’s scathing essay on Burroughs in the New York Review of Books made a deep impression on me. He quoted Burroughs as saying to an interviewer, “In the words of one of a great misogynist’s plain Mr. Jones, in Conrad’s Victory: ‘Women are a perfect curse.’ I think they were a basic mistake, and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error.” Sante wrote, “He associates women with the most repressive aspects of Western culture, and he has no sexual need for them; q.e.d., they are superfluous and impedimental. When the tricky problem of reproduction is eventually solved, women will simply be wished away.” Burroughs had also shot dead Joan Vollmer, his wife, on September 6, 1951, and though there are conflicting versions of how and why he asked her to put a glass on her head for him so he could “play William Tell,” what’s clear is that he pointed a gun at her and shot her through the forehead and she died.
A young man I spent time with in my twenties, my boyfriend’s younger brother’s best friend, was more enamored of Burroughs than anyone else I knew, though a lot of people I knew revered the old writer back in the day when he was seen as one of the godfathers of punk culture. The young man was gay, cut off from his Texas family, trying to find his way, a talented musician, but a devotee of the idea of the derangement of the senses through drugs as the royal road to artistic genius. That derangement came up from Arthur Rimbaud a century before and evolved into another fixture of counterculture, the idea that you got to your creative self by getting fucked up, that some genius is lurking behind the inhibitions and you just have to let the genius out to do its thing without plan or discipline or structure.
Burroughs was seen by some of the young people around me as exemplary of all this, and he had spent a lot of time taking a lot of drugs, buffered by a family allowance and an apparently iron constitution. The young man I knew had neither. I remember with affection one evening with him when he was hallucinating and wielding colored markers, trying to draw on paper (and album covers) and scrawling directly on the floor of my apartment. Then it’s with sadness that I remember him becoming more and more of a meth addict, and then a homeless person walking barefoot in dirty jeans on Market Street unable to recognize me. He was cared for by a kind older man
for a while, and then I heard he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, a sweet and talented young soul, dead of many things, including the prevailing mythology.
My editor and I went to the party at the Survival Research Labs industrial space under a freeway overpass in chiffon dresses. She was full figured, with long blond hair, and wore something beautiful and flowing with lots of cleavage; I wore what I thought of as my dead ballerina outfit. It had probably been a child’s dress and then moldered for years in some basement before I found it in a thrift store. It had a tiny bodice with rows of yellowed lace, strapless, though I’d improvised a strap out of one of the half-torn-off rows of lace, and a full, calf-length skirt made of shredding petals of gauzy fabric that hung down in points.
I’ve often found that I want to live up to my outfit, and a festive outfit produces a festive spirit, and so she and I went shouting with laughter, flirting and weaving and waving our arms and wafting perfume and smiling lipstick smiles and looking around freely with our painted eyes among the people who were standing about being so deadpan they seemed to have turned to stone. The man accompanying Burroughs was taking photographs and he wanted to photograph us with the guest of honor and there was a moment when at his urging she and I came at Burroughs from either side and he shrank into his already withered self in what appeared to be horror. I’ve always described him as looking like a slug between two saltshakers in that moment. It was very satisfying, and then we moved on.
2
Writing is an art; publishing is a business, and in starting my first book I was launching myself on a series of adventures with small and large publishers. The writing was me alone in a room with ideas, sources, and the English language, which went well, overall. The publishing was me negotiating with organizations that always had more people and more power and sometimes acted as my advocate and collaborator and sometimes as my adversary.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 12
