Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

I picked up this book because a friend recommended it. The Beats had never much interested me except as a movement. I didn't much like the the literature or the adulation that surrounded them. But this is primarily a book about Joyce Johnson and her experience with the Beats. She has a real talent for evoking a specific time and place and giving readers a sense of what it was like to be part of this mileu. She makes going for a cup of coffee in Greenwich Village seem incredibly exciting. This is not the story of a Beat groupie yearning to hang out or sleep with famous men but rather Ms. Johnson's coming of age. The Beats are an important part of that story but not the whole story.

Joyce Johnson's memoir of emerging from an overprotected childhood and landing at the center of the Beat movement in the 1950's is a delight whether you choose to read it for its portrait of Jack Kerouac, for the world that was, or for the inner journey it reveals. It is a fine literary performance. Johnson plays with tense and perspective as if they form a telescopic lens sliding the past out of a fuzzy black and white still photograph into a vivid, colorful present. There is a suspenseful tension to the book from which flows a novelistic structure, never, though, at the expense of truth. Johnson gets down like no one else how it is to carry around that overprotected childhood, to always feel that you could be missing something, that the center has yet to be achieved. Her inner struggle matches the themes of the Beats who are seeking the pure experience of being through their music, their talk, their drugs and alcohol, their lovemaking, their travels and their poetry. She nails the paradox of a quarry that can never sit still, whether it is a person, like Kerouac, or her friend and guide into the Beat world, Elise Cowen, both of whom eventually disappear into their demons. She captures the loss of balance when counterculture is encroached upon by the mainstream. She manages to convey all this without telling, just through showing the events of her life. Johnson is wry but never bitter, she takes full responsibility for her own choices and actions. This is a book that invites the reader to share the wonder that this was all, indeed, real.

Wow. This book did more for me than I expected it to. I picked it up for the same reason many others probalby did - because of my interest in Kerouac. But Johnson is not telling his story, she is telling hers. And, despite obvious difficulties and social aspects that let us know it is the fifties, it is really a timeless story, something that can be identified with today. She has put into words what every female person who feels like they don't quite belong in the society in which they grew up has difficulties articulating. I found myself talking to the book - "Yes, that's IT! Exactly." I read this book twice this month. Her unique and fresh writing style should not be overlooked either. She wrote this book at a good time in her life as well, it is reflective and filled with the insight and intelligence of years and experience.

I have also read this book four or five times, and I have owned it in all of its printings. Then I give a copy to a friend and start the search again! Reading this book and Hettie Jones' How I Became Hettie Jones remind me that the problems women face-- being taken seriously by male writers and critics, balancing family and societal expectations against the need to be creatively free-- are not new. I could not recommend this book more highly.

As a long-time reader of Beat literature, and as a man, I must say that Joyce Johnson's take on those heady, wine soaked days of poetry and madness is absolutely as good and as necessary as anything Kerouac or Ginsberg or any of the more famous (male) crew ever wrote. For my money it's right up there with On the Road.I guess I've read this book three or four times now and it never gets old.I also recommend Ms. Johnson's novel, In the Night Cafe, another skillful invocation of the Beat period.