Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,53

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.