Joyce Johnson was part of the extraordinary circle that included Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi and Hettie Jones, Gregory Corso, Robert Frank, Willem de Kooning and Frank Kline, and was witness to the art and lives of these artists who formed the Beats, a movement that has now gained almost mythical resonance. She was living with Jack Kerouac when "On the Road" - his novel that seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the Beats - was first published, turning him into a celebrity. Johnson's book is a personal memoir and a summation of the ...
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Joyce Johnson was part of the extraordinary circle that included Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi and Hettie Jones, Gregory Corso, Robert Frank, Willem de Kooning and Frank Kline, and was witness to the art and lives of these artists who formed the Beats, a movement that has now gained almost mythical resonance. She was living with Jack Kerouac when "On the Road" - his novel that seemed to encapsulate the spirit of the Beats - was first published, turning him into a celebrity. Johnson's book is a personal memoir and a summation of the times, a story of adolescent rebellion and a desire to choose a different life. She shows how the Beat women, in deciding to break the rules and leave home as unmarried young women in the 1950s, discovered the risks and the heady excitement of trying to live as freely as the rebels they loved. First published in the US in 1983, "Minor Characters" is an intelligent, insightful and sympathetic portrayal of the individuals who defined the 'Beat Generation' and a personal reflection on the hardship and elation of liberation.
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After reading a review of Joyce Johnson's biography of Jack Kerouac, "The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac", I read the book, together with "Minor Characters", Johnson's 1983 memoir of her relationship with Kerouac years earlier. Upon its publication, "Minor Characters" won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Johnson (b. 1935) has written three novels and other works of nonfiction in addition to the Kerouac biography and "Minor Characters."
Born Joyce Glassman, Johnson had an on-again, off-again love affair with Kerouac between 1957 -- 1959. When the relationship began, Glassman 21, had attended Barnard for four years, beginning when she was 16 but failed to graduate. She was working as a secretary for a publisher and writing her first novel, for which she had received a $500 advance. Kerouac, 34, had published one novel, "The Town and the City" and had written several other books, including "On the Road" which had not found publishers. He had already knocked around a great deal, with two failed marriages, stints in the Merchant Marine, and travels across the country that "On the Road" would make famous. He had the problems with alcohol and drugs that would get worse with time.
When she wrote "Minor Characters, Johnson looked back upon her younger life with a sense of wisdom, detachment, and loss, as she endeavors to understand her life and the "Beat" era. The tone is wistful, sad, thoughtful, sometimes ironic, but unapologetic. Concluding her memoir,Johnson writes, "I'm a forty-seven-year-old woman with a permanent sense of impermanence. If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it till you got it right."
The book begins in 1945 when the Glassman family had moved to New York City. Joyce Glassman's parents were Jewish immigrants of modest means. Her parents had high ambitions for their daughter, with her mother urging Joyce to pursue a career as a composer, to study, and to defer involvement with young men. As an adolescent, Glassman developed a double life, sneaking away from homes during the evening to attend radical and cultural gatherings in Greenwich Village. Looking back on these years, Johnson describes herself as in search of "Real Life", which she proceeds to define with candor:
"Real Life was sexual. Or rather it often seemed to take the form of sex. This was the area of ultimate adventure, where you would dare or not dare. It was much less a question of desire. sex was like a forbidden castle whose name could not even be spoken around the house, so feared was its power. Only with the utmost vigilance could you avoid being sucked into its magnetic field. The alternative was to break into the castle and take its power for yourself."
The book alternates passages describing young Joyce Glassman's own life, with the parallel lives of the individuals who became formative of the Beats, including Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and more. Glassman's story and Kerouac's delve together when Allen Ginsberg arranges a blind date, months before Kerouac achieves the fame which hastens his demise with the publication of "On the Road".
Johnson's book offers a beautifully described sense of place of New York City Bohemia in the years following WW II through about 1960. She describes the East Side and Greenwich Village, the bars, cafeterias, streets, and tenements where young people breaking away tried to live. The portrayals of Kerouac and his books, and of people such as Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Neal Cassady, LeRoi Jones are highly perceptive. Johnson emphasizes the women who became part of the Beat movement and their frequently unhappy lives. They were often shabbily treated. The title "Minor Characters" is sometimes thought to refer to the Beat women. I think it refers to the Beats as a whole. Centered around Kerouac, they were a group who seemed marginal and "minor" at the time but proved to have cultural influence.
For the most part, Johnson resists reading cultural developments from the late 1960's and 1970's into her memoir. She seems less than fully comfortable with these developments as she remembers her life and her largely unrequited love for Jack Kerouac.
For the shock value it had at the time, there is a near universal character in the story of young people and Bohemia. Johnson comes to understand her parents and their hopes for her. The Beat movement was a product of youthful skepticism and rejection of received standards of conformity. I am not sure if a Bohemia could thrive today because of the lack of standards on which young creative individuals could push back.
"Minor Characters" is a sadly lyrical book that helped me understand Joyce Glassman, Kerouac, the Beats, and the culture in which they were formed.
