Beat Feminisms

Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism

Polina Mackay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000509885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para escritoras

This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers' feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender, interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.

1 Female Subjectivities in Beat Textuality by Male Authors

DOI: 10.4324/9781315744438-1

The first step in a study of the work of women of the Beat Generation should surely be an examination of the depiction of women in works by iconic Beat texts, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959). Collectively, they offer narratives of gender that are relevant to women of the Beat Generation as they perpetuate certain mythologies of masculinity and femininity that female Beats had to confront in their own works.

Helen McNeil writes that gender in the Beat movement needs to be seen as an “archaeology,” as “a synchronic study which places content, context and discursive terminology equal to any unity of genre, author or movement” (179). Depictions of men and women in Beat texts written during the group’s heyday, then, are reflections of the wider culture and can be traced to the understandings of gender in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus a snapshot of the culture of the time, as McNeil does (178–199), reveals that Ginsberg’s idea of the “boy gang,” Kerouac’s narratives of male bonding, or Burroughs’ monopolizing male identities that exclude women are consistent with existing prevailing models of masculinity and femininity at the time. However, even as reflections of a wider (normative) culture, Beat representations of gendered identities feed into models of rebellion in modern and contemporary culture. As Barbara Ehrenreich has shown in her analysis of media narratives of the Beats in the 1950s, even the negative coverage created an image of the Beats as “mad to live:” “Men looked to the Beats for a vision of themselves and, even after the imagined viewers had been discredited, the vision remained compelling” (64).

The media hype around Beat rebellion speaks to the kind of sensationalism that has always followed the Beats: from Kerouac’s boasting of writing On the Road in just three weeks¹ to Burroughs’ killing of his wife in a drunkard game in 1951 and getting away with it. This chapter argues that depictions of men and women in works by male Beat writers need to be seen within this wider context of sensationalist narratives of gender in Beat textuality. Further, I argue, iconic authors such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, who collectively make up the bulk of the Beat legacy for the wider public, have used the hype to advance self-serving mythologies about masculinity and femininity. In order to chart the extent to which these mythologies have permeated the legacy of the Beat Generation, I explore depictions of Joan Vollmer in iconic Beat texts as illustration of the ways in which men write female subjectivity in Beat discourses.

(Not)Telling a Dead Woman's Story: Τhe Case of Joan Vollmer

I was reminded of how much of an impact the figure of Joan Vollmer and her story have had in Beat studies at a creative homage to her at an academic conference in Paris in 2009 to celebrate 50 years from the first publication of Naked Lunch.² In addition to academic lectures and panels on Naked Lunch, the conference also hosted a performance by British poet Ian MacFadyen of his book-length poem about Burroughs’ wife entitled Point of No Return (2009). The poem is a retelling in verse of Vollmer’s life and death, offering an interesting proposition by changing the emphasis from the impact of her death on Burroughs’ work to her story instead. The poet highlights this shift in perspective by offering several instances where Vollmer is made to speak for herself, as when she reflects on her status in Beat/Burroughs studies as “a case in history, a piece of pathology/a captivating story of decadence and infamy” (Point of No Return, 13). Much of the fascination with the life and death of Vollmer and the impact this may have had on Burroughs’ life and writing has been perpetuated endlessly by the Beat writer’s many biographers. Over the years, these investigators have tried to decipher how much her tragic death may have influenced the author (e.g. Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs, 147–250), while literary critics have attempted to analyse her presence/absence as a trope in his texts (e.g. Jorge García-Robles, 100–135; Aaron Nyerges, 158–171).

Burroughs met Joan Vollmer in the 1940s in New York when her apartment was a meeting point for many Beat writers and friends, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and Herbert Huncke. Vollmer was addicted to Benzedrine at the time and became prone to psychotic breakdowns. Her son, William S. Burroughs, Jr (also known as Billy Burroughs), portrays her in his autobiographical novel, Kentucky Ham (1973), as a self-destructive addict who behaved recklessly. Neal Cassady offers a similar picture of her in his description of his visit of the Burroughs’ in New Orleans in the late 1940s. He writes to Ginsberg that

Joan is brittle, blasé brittleness is her forte. With sharpened laughs and dainty oblique statements she fashions the topic at hand. You know these things, I need not elaborate. But, you ask for an angle, well, Julie’s [Joan’s daughter] hair is matted with dirt I am told; oh fuck it, normal disintegration of continued habit patterns (child raising here) has Joan laboring in a bastardized world wherein the supply of Benzedrine completely conditions her reaction to everyday life. (Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944–1967, 117)

In the early 1950s, she and Burroughs moved to Mexico City where she would stay with the children as he travelled around South America in search of yage (ayahuasca), the drug that Burroughs saw as inducing the ultimate high.

Given Vollmer’s struggles with addiction, her story and untimely death seems like the last act in a long tragedy. On September 6, 1951, a few days after Burroughs returned from his South American trip, he accidentally shot and killed his wife as they were apparently playing a game at a party in Mexico City. With so many witnesses at the party and with Burroughs’ eventual admission to the killing, it should have been a straightforward case for the police leading to Burroughs’ conviction. However, to this day, the events on the night remain unclear. Burroughs first admitted to Mexican police that he was “playing William Tell” when he accidentally shot his wife in the head but denied the statement a day later. In an interview in 1965, he claimed to have been trying to show a gun to a potential buyer when it went off and hit Vollmer:

And I had that terrible accident with Joan Vollmer, my wife. I had a revolver that I was planning to sell to a friend. I was checking it over and it went off—killed her. A rumor started that I was trying to shoot a glass of champagne from her head William Tell style. Absurd and false. (Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews, 76).

The people who were at the party gave varying accounts of what happened: Lewis Marker told Ted Morgan, one of Burroughs’ first biographers, that the author said “he was going to do his William Tell Act” (Morgan, 195) before his wife put the glass on her head; another eyewitness, Eddie Woods, told Morgan that he did not remember anything about such an act (Morgan, 196). Burroughs himself told Morgan in the early 1980s: “I said to Joan, ‘I guess it’s about time for our William Tell act.’ She took her highball glass and balanced it on top of her head. […]. I fired one shot, aiming at the glass” (Morgan, 194). Obviously, these different versions (with Burroughs himself creating at least two) offer a mixture of reality and fantasy to the story.³

Burroughs’ time in South America, and particularly his quest for yage, is recorded in Queer, written between 1951 and 1953 but not published until 1985. The book is now seen as a significant contribution to Burroughs’ oeuvre as it serves as a precursor of the techniques Burroughs would develop fully later in such novels as Naked Lunch (Harris, “Editor’s Introduction,” ix–xiv). As Bradway has suggested, the novel also feeds into the wider history of queer literature in recent American fiction (1–49). Surprisingly, the narrative excludes Vollmer, despite its biographical focus and the proximity of the action to her death. Oliver Harris has pointed out helpfully that “it is simply not the case that Joan’s death is ‘carefully avoided’ in Queer: in terms of its fictionalization of autobiographical events, the shooting falls outside the narrative chronology” (xii). However, Vollmer’s exclusion has loomed large over the text, largely due to Burroughs’ mention of her death in the 1985 introduction of the first edition of the book (Queer, 18). In terms of the impact of her death on the reception of the text, her exclusion adds to the mythologization of a woman by omission, whereby the gap in the text fills in the blanks in her story.

Burroughs would continue to add to the expanding myth of Vollmer sporadically from the early 1980s all the way to his death. In a journal entry on December 2, 1996 (only eight months before his death), he writes: “Tell any feminist I shot Joan in a state of possession, and she will scream: ‘Nonsense! No such thing. HE did it’” (Last Words, 17). Grauerholz reads this admission as the moment we see Burroughs “prosecuting himself, defending himself, and finally, convicting himself” (69). But this comment does not imply admission of responsibility—far from it. Burroughs here shifts the focus on a rather different issue, which is the idea that his reasoning for accidentally killing his wife would not be accepted by feminists (Queer, 18). He describes their hypothetical reaction using emotive language, evident in the use of exclamation marks and words such as “scream.” This kind of language is used here to imply that women’s critique of men is determined by their emotions rather than reason. Obviously, this is straightforward sexism and not an admission of responsibility.

Burroughs’ comments about Vollmer and his overall treatment of her memory are part of a wider pattern of misogynistic attitudes he expressed even more clearly in a few essays from the late 1960s (Wermer-Colan and Hawkings, 21). What is more, Burroughs’ emotive language reveals a systematic attempt to sensationalize Vollmer’s death. It is precisely as a sensationalist piece of Beat history that Vollmer’s brief life and tragic death would be passed on to other Beats and later generations of writers. MacFadyen’s verse drama, Point of No Return, written over 50 years after Vollmer’s death, captures the endless fascination with her story when it states in the introductory note that it is written “in the hope that a number of different women performers and singers would interpret the role of Joan Burroughs […]—a palimpsest moving through cultures and through time” (1). The poem/performance is largely appropriative, in the sense that it recycles already known information about Vollmer, mainly drawn from Grauerholz’s “The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened?” (2002) and Jorge Garcia-Robles’ La Bala Perdida: William S. Burroughs en México (1995). However, the author creates a new frame for Vollmer’s story as he introduces ironic distance in the poem between Vollmer as the speaker and Vollmer as the poem’s topic. The piece acknowledges this disparity by having Vollmer end her soliloquy with “fascination is my curse, I want it over” […] Forget about me” (Point of No Return, 14). Of course the poem itself undermines this argument to forget as it perpetuates the myths and narratives surrounding the figure of Vollmer not just in the words of the piece itself but also in its subtitle, which is To the Memory of Joan Burroughs. These ironic reversals in the treatment of Vollmer—as both subject and object of fascination, as a woman whose story is both told and untold in the pages of Beat texts, or as a figure who is realized both as a gap and as a symbol of Beat textuality—serve as a good introduction to the way in which iconic male Beat authors write female subjectivity in their works.

Burroughs: Writing Women/Erasing Women

Burroughs’ work strives to erase female subjectivity in order to make room for the emergence of an exclusively male authorial self. To understand the inner workings and structure of this erasure, I will further trace the presence/absence of the figure of Joan Vollmer in Burroughs. Burroughs’ treatment of Vollmer illustrates a significant feature of his work: in Burroughs, the male voice emerges when female presence is written out.

In his analysis of modes of masculinity in contemporary American culture, David Savran writes of Burroughs as an author who “has constructed a fictive self much more self-consciously than his associates” (85). Nowhere in Burroughs’ oeuvre is this fictive self more visible than in his introduction to his novel, Queer, written some 35 years after the book. Intended as an introduction to explicate some of the events near the time of the writing of the book in the early 1950s, including Vollmer’s accidental shooting, Burroughs’ accompanying piece for the first publication of Queer in fact does a good job of obscuring further the boundary between reality and fiction. He introduces the idea of another consciousness present in his mind at the moment of the shooting, writing that he shot his wife as if he was possessed. He claims,

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered [sic] me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out. (Queer, 18)

As Oliver Harris argues, “As a traumatic report of the real, his revelation also had the perverse effect of framing the text with such a sensational context that is all but obscured both the fiction itself and any other reality behind it” (“Editor’s Introduction,” xii). Putting the effect of these conflations aside, Burroughs’ introduction determines Queer as, to use Harris’ words, the book “best known for a death it does not even describe” (“Editor’s Introduction,” x). But Burroughs’ explanation remains relevant because it explains away Vollmer’s shooting in terms of the biography that shapes the writer’s mind and determines their authorial intentions. In short, writing about Vollmer’s death as a catalytic event narrativizes the presumed trauma in the writer’s life and turns it into a literary trope. In this context, it makes sense that Burroughs’ introduction is potentially more fiction than reality and, at the very least, that it brings into the spotlight the grey and murky areas created in textualities that write the life into the work.

Burroughs’ introduction in Queer constructs the narrative of the traumatic event in the writer’s past that brings him into contact with his inner demons, after which point his life is a struggle to tame these demons, a process he has put down on paper for everyone to see. This narrative fits into a well-established literary tradition, which is the literature of addiction. In Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), for instance, the narrator often refers to the struggle of overcoming his physical and mental disintegration, as well as to the alien, ghostly presences that seem to have taken over the mind of the addict-speaker:

Then came […] trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad: darkness and lights: tempest and human faces: and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me. (113)

The difference between De Quincey’s image of a mind being taken over by hallucinations and Burroughs’ labelling of the effect of a traumatic experience as being possessed by the Ugly Spirit is context. De Quincey’s account serves to enrich the addict’s narrative by showing how his sense of reality is destabilized by visions and the mind’s interpretation of these. In Burroughs’ case, the possession of the author’s mind by another consciousness becomes a rhetorical argument against a prosecutor. As opposed to helping the reader make sense of the effect of Vollmer’s death on Burroughs, it further obscures the historical record of the incident.⁴

Contrary to the introduction to Queer, which suggests that Vollmer is central to his work, Burroughs never openly refers to her death in his fiction, though there are a small number of passing tangential references, scattered throughout his oeuvre. One instance occurs towards the beginning of Naked Lunch at the end of the first section, where the narrator describes a vision of a character called Jane induced by smoking drugs. He writes,

I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming, “I got the fear!” and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant—mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters—and waited for the bus to town.

A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead. (Naked Lunch, 30)

As a hallucination or a vision, Jane’s brief appearance in the text and her swift disappearance a few words later, serves the purpose of destabilizing of what is already a warped narrative, which has no central plot apart from the addict-hustler’s—William Lee—increasingly desperate attempts to score drugs and the narrator’s extended expositions on such subjects as government control, capitalism or alien viruses. The disorder is part of the unreality of the novel. Writing of Naked Lunch’s material history, Harris maps Burroughs’ resistance to Ginsberg’s attempts at introducing some chronological order to the pages that make up the novel, and points out that “[Ginsberg’s] plan would have naturalized Burroughs’ materials, making its unbound energies and its radical diversity strictly accountable in terms of the author’s autobiographical identity as the point of origin and responsibility” (William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, 241). Indeed Naked Lunch is more of an “anti-novel” than a novel, in that it resists “novelistic unities” (Harris, Fascination, 242, 241). The extract in which Jane appears is typical of the novel’s disunity, starting by introducing the uncertainty surrounding Lee’s geographic position (he was “in Cuernavaca or was it Taxco?”), which is underscored by Jane’s subsequent “disappear[ance] into a cloud of tea smoke”...