Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,52

“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