Muses of a Revolution

The Lady is a humble thing

Made of death and water

The fashion is to dress it plain

And use the mind for border

--Elise Cowen, 1933-1962

Like grainy Cinerama, stretching out over the hood of a convertible, the road spreads like spilled ink. It’s an easterly view of Melrose Avenue, at Doheny, just as it forks off into Santa Monica Boulevard, a.k.a. Route 66--the Mother Road.

Just left of the photograph’s center perch twin placards--Standard chevrons arching, flagging plentiful fuel islands. Above those, hidden amid a tangle of power lines and storm clouds, rises a billboard displaying a woman. In evening dress, button earrings, hair swept into elegant updo, she cradles a serving dish and stares confidently toward eastward-traveling drivers: “Smart women cook with Gas. . . .”

This photograph, “Double Standard,” was made in 1961 by actor-cum-photographer Dennis Hopper. Its message is busy, double-edged: a paean to car culture and motion, a commentary on disparity. In this context--the “Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965” exhibit at San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Memorial Museum until Dec. 29--it points up the bifurcated nature of counterculture: the lives on and off the road.

Much like the De Young show--which seeks to expand the Beat context, from antecedents and influences (bebop to black slang)--Brenda Knight’s new book, “Women of the Beat Generation” (Conari Press), fleshes out the image of the women beyond bangs and black tights. Recognizes their perspectives and contributions at last.

Anyone familiar with the Beat canon knows this: “Kicks and chicks” connect the dots from ocean to gulf to river to other ocean. Like points on the map in Nat Cole’s jubilant “Route 66,” Beat men built elaborate pedestals only to upset them, taking to the ribbon of asphalt again. The Lee Anns, Marylous, Camilles, Mardous, Tristessas of Kerouac’s most famous disclosures hover like perfumed ghosts on the page.

That said, any woman with even a passing fascination with the Beats has found herself in the cramped position of explaining the passion. Why rhapsodize about a movement that excluded women, treated them as (at best) passive muse or (at worst) mere trifle?

Those questions only scratch the surface. A recent San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival panel, “Women of the Beat,” delved deeper. Writer Joanne McClure leaned into her microphone, puffed out this message to the cross-generational assembly: “Just because you were married to a male chauvinist didn’t mean that you were downtrodden.”

Hopper’s photograph, McClure’s rapier words--such commentary, whether stitched in art or part of fluid discourse, illuminates the contradictions within counterculture. For all its freewheeling rejection of norms, heckling of majority culture, the Beat generation was fraught with its own brand of sexism, racism, elitism, cronyism--but that didn’t stop those pushed to the margins from arranging their thoughts on page.

*

Every few years the digs begin anew, a living archeology: A gritty city memoir here, a slick-packaged anthology there, from music to fashion, America’s fascination with ‘50s bohemianism seldom dies; it transmogrifies.

“With all the retrospectives, it became mythological,” says Joyce Johnson, author of the novel “In the Night Cafe” (Dutton, 1989) and her own evocation of an era, “Minor Characters” (Houghton Mifflin, 1983). “I want to feel for me that it’s not a myth. I want to be aware of the reality of it.”

With that in mind, in recent times these explorations have moved beyond fond-glimpse nostalgia. These excavations of Beat culture are more about repositioning--broadening the focus, understanding not just the players but the environment that produced them.

At the time, what Beat was was a noisy protracted argument, a literary-artistic social force going after Middle America’s thin skin at mid-century. The Beats took on big issues with big voices: “Mainstream neutralizes by co-opting,” says De Young curator Timothy Burgard, pointing to a string of cartoonish icons used as media shorthand, which quickly turned cliche: goatees, berets, bongos and Maynard G. Krebs. “The media and market forces have promoted an image of Beats that is simplified to reduce and diminish it.”

Defanged by pop culture, sanitized of its issues--the bomb, McCarthyism, censorship, conformity--this codification-turned-romanticization stripped away substance and left only symbols. Ironically, Knight writes, “Because the women, to a certain degree, have been ignored and marginalized, they represent the precious little of that which remains truly Beat.”

*

Knight opens up a universe that for so long has orbited tightly around the Holy Beat Trinity--Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs--and those males who radiated outward from it. After all, she points out, it was a woman, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs--the “midwife of the Beat generation”--who transformed her New York living room into a salon, convening a generation.

Knight reconvenes the women who have been airbrushed from record (Joyce Johnson out of a Kerouac snapshot used for a Gap ad some seasons back) or eclipsed in free speech and censorship debates (Lenore Kandel defending her “holy erotica” in “The Love Book” in 1965).

Through biography and a taste of their work--mostly poetry and memoir--Knight began to sketch an impressionistic profile of the women--such as Diane DiPrima, Elise Cowen, ruth weiss--who struck out on their own for some of the same reasons as the men: wanting to be a part of something that was going to erupt.

“We were going forward,” says Hettie Jones, “toward something new.”

“Beat Women,” however, may be a misnomer--too easy a catchall. None of these women would necessarily define themselves as such--since their lives and careers didn’t stop with the rise of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters ushering in a new bohemia.

“Life was messier than that,” cracks Jones, former wife of writer Amiri Baraka (nee LeRoi Jones), who good-humoredly has been calling the women’s traveling ensemble “the first wives club.”

“Though the Beat [men] were truly of their generation,” says curator Burgard, “there were many issues that [the women] perceived to be larger issues of humanity--like staring in the face of the bomb. That doesn’t diminish the importance of gender issues, but if you took yourself seriously, you were taken seriously.”

*

What these women share is a moment in history and a desire to be heard and defined on their own terms. They came out of the movement, framed by the times, for better or worse.

“To be present at that time as a woman took more moxie than a guy,” says poet Janine Pommy Vega, author of “Drunk on a Glacier and Catching Flies” (Tooth of Time, 1988) and the upcoming “Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents” (City Lights). “You had to go in the face of mores. . . . When guys were ‘sowing their wild oats,’ we were ‘being promiscuous.’ But what I was really exploring was consciousness . . . the desire to dig deeper and live freer.”

Knight trains her eye on what these women were hiding under their beds, writing in their journals or simply making notes of in their head. And though several of these women are more prominently known as crafters of elegant memoirs, their role was significantly more than simply bearing sober witness or loving the men who were, as Neal Cassady once described himself, a “whiff and a dream.” Many of them provide the family emotional girding, the rail to guide their collective dreams.

Eileen Kaufman bought the penniless-at-the-moment bard Bob Kaufman a coffee in the middle of the night and at once fell in love and gave up her career as a journalist to “sit at the feet of genius.” Carolyn Cassady (author of “Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg” [Morrow, 1990]), made a home for the quicksilver Neal and tried to “love him more . . . in a quite different way.”

Improvising was key: “Those of us who flew out the door had no usable models for what we were doing,” Johnson writes. “We did not want to be our mothers or our spinster schoolteachers or the hard-boiled career woman depicted on screen. . . . So, naturally we fell in love with men who were rebels . . . believing they would take us along on their journeys and adventures. We did not expect to be rebels all by ourselves.”

With a vague taste for something more, they approached road life like men, but as women were weighted with complications not factored into the Dean Moriarty-Sal Paradise paradigm: Further.

“[On] the bus ride to Mexico,” writes Brenda Frazer, “I am constantly with the baby on my lap, brokenhearted at every spell of crying the frustration of not being a good mother really trying to groove, trying to groove under the circumstances and in spite of it.”

For many, the dual life took its toll. “They became exiles and disowned,” Knight says, “like Hettie Jones never repairing that rift with her family, or Elise Cowen jumping through a closed window to her death.”

To be sure, there were casualties among the men as well, from drugs, fast-spent lives, cavalier choices abruptly truncating lives. “But not in my experience as legion [as the women],” writes Anne Waldman, who saw colleagues, acquaintances and confidants “being dominated by relationships, letting our own talents lag . . . interesting, creative women who became junkies for their boyfriends, who concealed their poetry and artistic aspirations, who slept around to be popular, who had serious eating disorders.”

“The fact that we’re here,” Vega says, “proves our struggles were just as profound, maybe more difficult. We were not published, we were not accepted, and what we were writing was not openly public.”

It was up to the women--in the ashes of a marriage, the ruins of expectation--to remain focused, single-minded, to redefine self, to take up the task of being patron, muse, supporter for themselves and, oftentimes, a roomful of children as well.

These women, “out there with verbal poetic pickaxes,” says Knight, found that the key wasn’t to be found in perpetually hurtling forward. Says Carolyn Cassady, “I’m all for freedom, but not when it becomes chaos. You find freedom in yourself.”

Romanticism scraped away, says Johnson: “I think our lives show how difficult, complicated and also worthwhile stepping out on your own is, and how living that life, you need a lot of strength in order to survive. And each generation has to do it over in their own way.”

With one salient difference, adds Hettie Jones.

“We didn’t have to pass on the baggage of our generation. We were able to give our daughters a positive way to be without spending so much time fighting--fighting the family first before they went out to fight the world.”

So writes Jones in poetic postscript:

And so young women

Here’s the dilemma

Itself the solution

I have always been at

The same time

woman enough to be moved to tears

and man enough to drive my

car in any direction.