This is another piece in the series “The romance of being number 2.” I have wanted to write about Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac for a while, and today I rewrote a piece that was originally published in the Village Voice 40 years ago. It seems as relevant to now as if I’d written it yesterday. The continued relevance to women’s lives is a sad thing to me, but that’s because I have no concept of how ideas work in society. I snap my fingers and it’s like, what, you don’t all see the way I see? Pay no attention to me.
I want to mention Richard and I have decided to host another Zoom gathering to talk about writing craft on a date to be announced in July. All paid subscribers will be welcome to attend. It will be on a Saturday afternoon, and I will let you know the date soon. After this next gathering, we’ll organize groups of 15 for Zoom write-together and read-together sessions. These will last 90 minutes. We’ll all write to a prompt in real time, then resume to read in slam fashion. It’s basically our format for workshops, and these will be available to paid subscribers. Hop in with a paid subscription, if this is a good time for you.
There are three buttons at the bottom of each post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” I love hearing from you, and your responses are definitely attracting subscribers. There are close to 5000 now. Huge thanks, and love.
Minor Characters
For about two years, beginning in 1957, Joyce Johnson, who was then Joyce Glassman, has an on-again-off-again affair with Jack Kerouac. She was 21 when they met, a Jewish girl from a bourgeois family, who’d treaded water at Barnard College. Allen Ginsberg, whom she’d met through a friend, had given Kerouac her number, and one night, out of the blue, he called from a Howard Johnson’s. She paid for his hot dog and beans. When he asked to spend the night at her apartment, she said, “If you wish,” although he warned her he didn’t like blondes. “Well then,” she said, “I’ll have to dye my hair.”
Jack Kerouac, at 34, still belonged to the legendary boy-gang who had attended Columbia College in the ‘40s and had determined to live wild and write it down. Other members included Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Lucien Carr. In 1944, Lucien Carr, using a boy-scout knife, murdered David Kammerer, a friend of Burroughs, in Riverside Park. Kammerer professed his love, then asked to be killed after Carr’s rejection, and Carr obliged. Since college, Kerouac had been wandering around, writing, and sleeping with dark women he considered mysterious and called fellaheens. He became famous in September ’57, a few months after Joyce Glassman met him, when Gilbert Millstein wrote in the New York Times that On the Road would be “the testament of the Beat Generation.”
Minor Characters was published in 1983, when Johnson was 47. After her affair with Kerouac, she went on to write eight books of fiction and nonfiction. She was an editor at Dial Press, and she had a son. In the span of her life, Kerouac is a minor character, as she was in his life. Except not in Johnson’s mind, where he was big when he entered and where he stayed big.
Minor Characters is a vigorous, stimulating meditation on why Joyce Glassman wanted Jack Kerouac, wanted him, in her early twenties, more than anything else in the world. At 13, dying for something strong and sharp to happen to her, she began roaming Greenwich Village and hit on sex as a way into life. It was 1949, and armies of Lady Chatterleys and D. H. Lawrences were converging there to transform sex from a sin or a biological function into a test of character. In the Waldorf Cafeteria, a girl could nurse a cheese sandwich for hours, inhaling the aroma of greasy potatoes, and overhear conversations peppered with the names Kierkegaard and Sartre. Joyce could figure out that if you mixed together scruffy leather sandals, skinniness, guitars, dangling earrings, thin clothes, and rootless wildness, they added up to sex.
A grizzled coal minor approached her at a party one night, squeezed her hip, and announced: “Someday you will be a woman.” She writes, “To be seen as a woman, at least a future one, I couldn’t get over it for week.” Something was finally happening to her that qualified as experience. It was so exciting, she didn’t stop to consider whether women who fucked around felt any better about their lives than their mothers did, married to accountants.
Joyce felt her “life as a woman” beginning when her philosophy professor, a man with marriage and dissertation troubles, invited her to his bed. She could see from his angst-ruffled forehead and the purposeful clutter of his apartment that he was just too cool for her and would break her heart. He did, brushing her off with the line: “Promise me you’ll get therapy.”
God, I love this strand of dried spaghetti, stuck to the wall. God, I love this guy, frozen forever in the accident of being himself and also a universe of oily snakes with a prescription for how women should live, signed by Freud.
Next stop on the stations of the Joyce is the Cedar Tavern. It’s a boys’ party, she knows, and it still seems to her the only party in town. The male artists and intellectuals rant on rapturously about what a man is, the sexiest subject of their lives, Johnson recalls, conjuring Fee Dawson, “the memorialist of a hundred small occasions when in the ripening atmosphere of some midnight or endless beery afternoon came the moment when the absolutely right and perfect, irreducibly masculine thing was said or demonstrated unforgettably—an illumination worth waiting for. ‘You see, don’t you?’ Exhausted, he sways on his bar stool as he tries to convey it, nearly tearful, brown cowlicks falling over his forehead.”
Through most of Joyce’s relationship with Kerouac, he was in Europe, California, or somewhere else. He kept her at arm’s length, unless he needed a place to crash, or a loan, or someone to call this friend, or get that book, or mail this clipping, or talk to that editor. They were never together more than a few weeks at a time and usually less than that. When he came to New York, they had unmemorable sex. All told, there were fewer episodes than it takes ten fingers to count.
Johnson wanted to quote from Kerouac’s letters to her in Minor Characters but was denied permission by his widow, Stella Kerouac. Stella sold the originals and used the money to buy a country house. Johnson didn’t read her letters to Kerouac until 1998, when copies were sent to her before the publication of Kerouac’s correspondence. John Sampas, of the Kerouac estate, suggested that Johnson publish the two sets of letters in a book. Johnson did in Door Wide Open, Jack Kerouac & Joyce Johnson, A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 (2000).
Most of her letters are far more engaging than his, not only because she cares more about their relationship but because we see a fledgling talent at work. A few months after meeting Kerouac and entirely on her own steam, she lands a contract with Random House for her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, published when she was 26. Being seen by Kerouac lights her up, and she runs with the feeling. Her early letters, written with the emotional candor and wry speculation that will mark her best sentences, are crammed with the discovery of streets of the Lower East Side, meetings with the painter Franz Klein and the photographer Robert Frank, hearing John Coltrane play live.
Jack, with his bruised prettiness, is so large in her head, she doesn’t need him around to be in love. What doesn’t work is Johnson’s insistence we see the two of them engaged in a great romance—as if he has to have loved her, even a little, to justify the amount of time she’s spent on him in print. There’s a subject in this much-ado-about-too-little thing she’s got going. Everyone knows the crazy presence of an alluring absence. Johnson doesn’t explore this as a subject. She doesn’t see it.
She writes, “It would be a mistake for the reader to put too much emphasis upon what Jack Kerouac withheld from me and to forget what he’d had to give. He’d written to a very young woman as an equal, someone strong enough to take the truth. He’d generously recognized the writer in her and he’d never boxed her in.”
You can say that again. He goes to Tangiers, and as she’s about to meet him, he skitters off to California. She throws her life and career up in the air to join him there, but he leaves again for Mexico. Over and over this happens, and she accepts the terms. He seldom expresses tender feeling for her. Far more often, with guilt and anxiety, he tries to dampen her expectations and derail her plans to meet him.
His notes are painful to read. Even more are her responses to him, filled with “sweetie” and “baby” endearments and sentiments to the effect that he should do what he wants and of course she understands. No matter what, she repeats, her door is wide open.
His letters are mostly impersonal, like diary entries he lets her share. Or complaints about the way publishers treat his manuscripts, cutting chunks and rerouting the flow of his sentences. He’s scared for his writing after Ginsberg’s Howl is tried for obscenity. Mostly he sounds boyish and scattered. He refers to his books as “great,” compares himself to Shakespeare, boasts that a play he’s writing will be “the funniest comedy in the history of American theater.” Sometimes he just sends lists of chores for her to do, referring to her as “my little secretary.”
She writes, “He could behave unforgivably, yet you would ultimately have to forgive him.” Why? Because he was a famous writer? Can anyone have that much power without it curdling into contempt?
She describes a visit to him in Northport, Long Island, where he’s living with his mother. She’s begged to come, and he hasn’t been able to say no. He refuses to pick her up at the train station and is drunk by the time she arrives. At a point in the afternoon, young girls drive up and sweep him off to a party. Months later, at a dinner with friends, he flirts with another woman, and she walks away. He spits after her, “Unrequited love’s a bore.”
Johnson explains her action to the reader with the excuse, It was the times—a woman didn’t give up on her man, a woman believed love could change him. Er, no. Even in the 1950s there were men who returned love and women who knew when to jump off the kick-me train. Johnson doesn’t comment on why her letters grow dull, as more and more she’s turned into a mommy, wiping drunken drool from Jack’s mouth. She keeps pressing the reader—You see the love, don’t you? You see it?
One of the interesting things about Minor Characters is that Kerouac doesn’t really matter to the book’s importance. He’s a ghost in the memoir as he was in Johnson’s life. What mattered when it was published, and may matter even more now, is the way Johnson enters the consciousness of her time that didn’t yet have a name. It will be called feminism. The word feminism is coming because it will apply to society as a whole and not just the emotional states of individual women. Johnson shows what that consciousness looked like, what it tasted like, smelled like, sounded like, felt like. The writing comes alive when she looks at women, not men.
When Joyce Glassman lands a contract for her first book, it seems unlikely the woman we’re shown in Minor Characters will ever be able to complete such a work. Stronger than her creative longing—choking this longing—is a certainty she cannot enter the life that matters by her own efforts. Not even the book advance substantially weakens the hold of this conviction. If she can attach herself to an active, creative man, she believes, then she can smell the life that matters and watch it with fascination from the sidelines. She imagines this will satisfy her, and she learns it does not. This is what she writes her memoir to confess. She learns that cheering from the sidelines is the great, faked orgasm of a whole life that’s a faked orgasm.
She sees that Kerouac is more functional as a model, a writer serious about his work, than he is as a lover. She begins to feel small shifts inside her. She’s standing on Madison Avenue, right after signing her book contract. She’s trying to take in her accomplishment, when she realizes she can’t take it in, but rather has “the distinct feeling of not quite possessing it or coming by it entirely honestly.” She doesn’t write when Kerouac is around, she notes with uneasiness, and on the chance of seeing him in California, she forfeits a plummy editing job. She makes this decision, but something inside her squirms.
She has another flash while spending time with Mary Frank, the wife of photographer Robert Frank, a friend of Kerouac’s. Partly, Mary Frank plays textbook artist’s wife: bustling her wild-haired kids around, setting tables of beautiful food, slipping into a sequined dress after a few glasses of wine. But Mary shows she would rather be chiseling away at her sculptures than doing any of these things. She’s the first woman Joyce meets “as fierce about her work as a man.”
Johnson tells the reader about earlier stirrings, too, a moment in 1955, for example, when Bonjour Tristesse is published, and she’s suddenly filled with envy, because Françoise Sagan, a woman slightly older than she is, revels in her acclaim, drives fast cars, and conducts interviews in cafés like “young male writers were supposed to.” Eventually, Joyce disputes even Kerouac, who insists she wants babies more than she wants to be a writer. He’s certain he knows her, knows women. She isn’t sure what she wants, but she protests.
Part of Johnson’s design in Minor Characters is to show how feminism focused her memory and sharpened her wit in the writing of this book. Bohemians talked about overthrowing domesticity, but still, somehow, women wound up washing the dishes and taking the kids to school. The beats loved freedom, but since all mothers were cops and all women were destined to be mothers, women were more or less assigned the role of busting freedom. In the bohemian sexual idyl Johnson depicts, everyone was supposed to fuck for the sake of pleasure, alone. At the same time, men had sex while women were sex. So, for women, there could be no such thing as pleasure alone, since sex was their function. Risk and destruction were glamorous, but while men conquered danger and survived, women often became famous for ending up dead.
Johnson’s outrage on behalf of these wasted lives is the strongest element in her book. She evokes her predecessors, the ‘40s tough-girls who tended to crash land. Edie Parker, who once shared her mattress and chili with Jack Kerouac, threatened to expose Allen Ginsberg as a homosexual if he didn’t help her recover her man. Natalie Jackson, another Kerouac girlfriend, jumped from a window one night after he failed to convince her that life was “just an illusion.” And witty Joan Vollmer fell for Burroughs, the most serious outlaw in the Columbia pack (while still an undergraduate, he bought a submachine gun and became a dealer in morphine syrettes). Joan married Burroughs in 1945, grew marijuana with him in Texas, and in 1951, on crazy impulse, put a glass on her head in a Mexico City bar and challenged her husband to blast it to smithereens with his .38. His aim, as Johnson puts it, “was off that night.”
Elise Cowan was Joyce Glassman’s dearest friend for 10 years, the secret sharer, ceaselessly interesting and sympathetic to Joyce. They met at Barnard. Joyce identified a comrade in the anticollegiate growl of Elise’s drab sweaters and bad complexion. Elise was smarter about her sorrow than anyone Joyce had met; her middle name was Nada; “literally it means nothingness,” she told Joyce, explaining the sort of people she came from.
Elise was the first woman Joyce knew to drop out of school, the first one to hook up with the beats. On an odd date, she slept with Allen Ginsberg and was over the moon. Ginsberg became what Kerouac was to Joyce, but there wasn’t any more sex, only Elise striving to be near his adventures. She cut off her hair and became a lesbian. Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Peter’s brother Lafcadio, lived for periods with Elise and her lover, amid a collage of dirty plates and grayed sheets. Elise was the first one to get fired from her job for being a lesbian and to have the cops brought down on her when, incensed, she refused to leave the office. And Elise was the first first one close to Joyce to exist on the California edge, eating one meal a day, sounding stoned beyond recognition on the phone, not eating at all sometimes, and sometimes turning tricks. She jumped out of a window and killed herself at 28.
Elise Cowen, not Kerouac, is Johnson’s compass, she says, and Elise’s restless arrow shoots through the prose. Feminism shows Johnson the dead-endedness for women of her time. But to Johnson, feminism tastes like medicine. It doesn’t give her a fix. She has her own life, yes, but it doesn’t make her that happy to have it. She’s divided, a ‘50s heart beating in an ‘80s head. She spends most of the 262 pages of her book kicking the past to the curb, then suddenly, tickled by God knows what, she’s rummaging in the gutter for stuff that maybe doesn’t look so bad.
“I hate Jack’s woman-hatred,” she writes, discussing Desolation Angels, and her usually ironic voice starts quavering: “hate it, mourn it, understand, and finally forgive.” Why forgive? Forgiving woman-hate is a little like preparing to love it again, no?
In the book’s final image, Johnson returns to the Cedar Tavern. Earlier, she’s captured the posturing with acid and affection. This time around, the place is coated with a Rembrandt glaze: “I see the girl Joyce Glassman, twenty-two, with hair hanging down below her shoulders, all in black like Masha in The Seagull—black stockings, black skirt, black sweater—but unlike Masha, she’s not in mourning for her life. How could she have been, with her seat at the table in the exact center of the universe, the midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in America that’s alive? As a female, she’s not quite part of this convergence. A fact she ignores, sitting by in her excitement as the voices of the men, always the men, passionately rise and fall and their beer glasses collect and the smoke of their cigarettes rises toward the ceiling and the dead culture is surely being wakened. Merely being there, she tells herself, is enough.
“What I refuse to relinquish is her expectancy.
“It’s only her silence that I wish finally to give up—and Elise’s silence . . . . I’m a forty-seven-year-old woman with a permanent sense of impermanence. If time were like a passage of music, you would keep going back to it till you got it right.”
Johnson can sit at this table till doomsday, expectancy intact, but these men will never listen to a word she says. Part of what makes these men these men is surrounding themselves with women who stay silent. This table may be at the center of the universe, but Joyce’s place is in the Siberia of the universe. The Cedar Tavern is the “dead culture,” but maddeningly and poignantly—I feel for Johnson’s caughtness in this old love—she retreats from the remade world, even though it has welcomed her to speak. There is no grafting Joyce Johnson back onto this scene, even if she wishes to go there, because as soon as she opens her mouth, the whole thing disappears.
I want to tell you a little story about the difference of ten years. I mean the difference between Joyce Glassman’s experience at Barnard and mine.
In 1953, Joyce Glassman walks into a writing course and meets a tall, bearded man, who greets his students with an undisguised look of disappointment. He is telling them he thinks he should be at Harvard and that his time teaching them is a waste of his talents. He blames them for his not being at Harvard, so he asks how many of them want to be writers, knowing they all do. He casts an icy gaze at the hands flapping in the air and says, “Well, I’m sorry to see this. Very sorry. Because first of all, if you were going to be writers, you wouldn’t be enrolled in this class. You couldn’t even be enrolled in school. You’d be hopping freight trains, riding through America.”
In 1965, when I walk into a writing class at Barnard, I meet Kate Millett, and it’s apparent on her face, as she takes in our crew of leftover beats, proto-hippies with half-moon glasses, Connie College-girls, even debs with Guccis and tortoise-shell headbands, it’s clear from her face she loves us. Millett sits behind her desk with her inevitable bun and industrial strength brown skirts. She spreads enough notes on the desk to fill five lectures and starts riddling us with commentary and questions in that peculiar fake British accent she devised after two years at Oxford—“Baykitt,” she says, meaning Beckett.
She teaches us Genet, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, Leroi Jones. “What? You don’t know who Ugolino is from Canto XXXIII of Inferno? You poor benighted child,” she says with a laugh and looks heavenward. I don’t care if I understand her references. She’s thrillingly full of her own thoughts.
Weekly conferences last an hour. On one essay I have saved—about Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as applied to Othello—ah, English assignments!—I write: “Death is the discovery of the great wound and the horrible discovery of the opposite sex: the female feels as if she has lost something, the male as if he is going to lose something.” Kate, on the hunt for the source of this borrowed thunder, engraves in the margin, “Your Greek professor’s Freudian theories?”
Kate arrived at Barnard, smelling of downtown and Bohemia. “I’m really a sculptor,” she liked to say. Like Joyce Glassman, Kate fell in love with the beat rebellion against straightness. She hung out at Max’s Kansas City and the Cedar Tavern and formed her own deep attachment to the excited, boozy moderns. She probably didn’t want to sleep with the men, but she wanted them to see her and hear her. Eventually, she knew, she’d never have a place in their world, and she took it to heart.
I was riveted by her, but Kate was not a Kerouac in my life, because she wasn’t a figure of fantasy. She was female and out there making a remarkable life. After a while, I saw she liked my mind. Her beautiful mind liked my mind. It was a kiss on the forehead. “Go, kid,” she said, without ever saying it, because actually, she was rather shy and formal. I don’t think I’d ever believed anyone’s encouragement before, but somehow I trusted this woman when she told me I had power.
“Part of what makes these men these men is surrounding themselves with women who stay silent.” Provocative quote and piece. I remember being struck by how peripheral women seemed when I read On the Road. I’m glad to learn more about Joyce Glassman and the other women. Now I’d like to read Minor Characters.
oh gosh, as soon as i opened up this one and saw joyce johnson, i thought, "this car crash—can't wait." and boy you delivered. cringingly, humorously, but not without compassion. you are so right, in describing the men's table at cedar tavern, how that dynamic still plays out today. sadly. but how lucky you were to have studied with kate, to have let her see your beautiful mind. i love that the last word of this post is "power."