A Beat Memoir

Johnson constructs this bitter-sweet and lyrical memoir from her relationship with aspiring Beat writer Kerouac in 1957. Johnson re-creates her memoir from the confessional perspective she wishes to be heard, and she mentions Robert Lowell to emphasise this confessional element .The author “is behind the text, controlling its meaning,” using “intentionality” (Anderson, 1988, p2). Also Johnson uses her text as catharsis and as “self-defence” in response to Kerouac’s writings. (Lee, 2000, p.98) to reclaim the power she had relinquished to Kerouac.

Johnson selects a bleak passage from Kerouac’s novel Bleak Angels, to illustrate his “woman hatred”: “For that lumpy roll flesh with the juicy hole I’d sit through eternities of horror in gray rooms ...” (p.133). Johnson wants her “revenge on history” (Gusdorf, in Onley, 1980, p.36), to retrospectively break a “silence that I finally wish to give up.” (p.262). The simple phrase, “the poems Hettie kept mute.” (p.262) links the silence of Glassman to the wider literary world where women have been excluded from the male canon.

Johnson is writing in 1983 from the position of an experienced feminist, psychologically analysing how her relationship with Kerouac stifled her identity and how women adopt consensualised exploitation when they believe in “the curative powers of love as the English believe in tea ...” (p.128). The author uses the first person and the present tense for this recollection adding immediacy, as if now realising that “He could somehow cancel you out.” (p.128). Glassman mistakenly imagined she could cure Kerouac of his “blue, bruised eye” melancholy (p.128).

In this memoir Johnson appears to privilege Kerouac, presenting him first, but this is so his personality can be analysed alongside Glassman’s and found to be wanting. Johnson as author uses Kerouac (as he appears to have used her) to work through her psychological issues from 1957 and 1983.

Johnson does more than tell, she uses double subjectivity to let the reader understand the two Joyces, the naive one who “put on a lot of eye shadow” (p.127) to attract Kerouac, and the ‘other’ older woman who is “wondering all the same if it was true” (p.131), as the reader may be. Johnson demonstrates the “crucial link between author, narrator and protagonist,” (Lejeune in Anderson, p2). All three co-exist in the text, but none can be the real Johnson because, as Mandel argues, autobiography “pretends to be the whole life of the author” but “is a construction” (1980, p.