Book review #1: Chelsea Girls
Rock and the Beat Generation considers books, new and not so new, as we assess titles that touch upon that intriguing terrain where prose and poetry and the many worlds of popular music convene
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles (Serpent’s Tail, 2016, originally published in 1994)
CHELSEA girls: such an evocative phrase which brings to mind Warhol, the Velvets, certainly Nico, a legendary bohemian hotel, even Joni Mitchell’s ‘Chelsea Morning’ and, for English readers at least, the style, the elan, the pizzazz, of those West End women whom the Pet Shop Boys celebrated in their own impeccable manner.
Yet Eileen Myles’ collection of stories of the same title slices through a set of different undercurrents, different underbellies, different times and places. Many of the tales occur in early 1960s Massachusetts; more still are located in a New York City some time after Lou Reed and his band have gone their separate ways.
In fact, while ‘Chelsea Girls’ is the closing episode in this neurotic and edgy cavalcade of picaresque memoir and everyday madness – and does actually take place in the very hotel which became the epicentre of Manhattan’s twilight crowd – the book overall, to its credit, includes very little self-conscious namedropping or place naming.
Myles could have done much more in that respect: she became a well-recognised post-Beat poet and an active member of the Bowery bunch from the mid-1970s. She read alongside Allen Ginsberg at the autumn 1978 benefits at CBGBs, as musicians, writers and other performers attempted to raise money for the St Mark’s Poetry Project after its historic home suffered a terrible fire that summer.
The three nights of fundraising featured appearances by Elvis Costello, John Cale and Lou Reed in their solo capacities and Richard Hell, with his band of the time, the Voidoids. Both Reed and Hell had poetic aspirations themselves, of course, signalling the synergy between the writers and the musicmakers. Other out-and-out poets taking part included John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan, while the great Kathy Acker – later to collaborate with British band the Mekons – also participated.
A little further down the line too, Eileen Myles would become director of the restored Poetry Project, in 1984, following in the footsteps of Anne Waldman, that magnificent landbridge between the Beats of the 1950s and the punks of the 1970s, who had fulfilled that very role in the first decade or so of the groundbreaking St Mark’s literary venture.
While Myles lived a volatile and uncertain life among the city’s scrambling, scrabbling Lower East Side gutter radicals, this reissued volume, which includes a new introduction by the author, is by no means a rock’n’roll recollection. While it roisters with the best, its actual musical references are few and far between: a mention of Presley here, a passing nod to Coltrane and the Doors there, a half-remembered jukebox song, the occasional visit to a live gig in the heartland of the vibrant new wave.
But the book has, for sure, a rock attitude, a beat, a pulse, a visceral throb, a devil-may-care determination to push its central character – always surely Myles herself in loosely autobiographical clothes – to the limits, in love, in sex and cigarettes, in drink and in drugs, incidents framed in no-holds-barred short stories, some very brief indeed.
The narrative is built on a wired and staccato monologue, stretching from the growing-up years in Boston and environs – tense family politics, sexual experimentation and a quest for identity – then embarking on a fully blown lesbian assault course via the polymorphous rollercoaster that was Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s an honest, if often bleak, rite of passage: scratched snapshots of teenage then adult existence rapidly clicked on a disposable camera of the mind. The result? Mostly monochrome, sometimes noir, clips hastily spliced together on the late twentieth-century page, mind frames quite crudely translated into sentences and paragraphs, assembled on note-paper frenetically and somewhat erratically.
The syntax of the prose is shuddering, stuttering and jagged: it’s the rat-a-tat-tat of a typewriter mind with its own metatext: as Myles sculpts her candid outpourings, she is also a rising poet, a Patti Smith contemporary, an emerging St Mark’s versifier clambering up the shaky ladder of a scene headed by Ginsberg and Waldman, who try to carve opportunities for a speeding typhoon of fresh voices.
The quality might be uneven, but the first-person energy and emotional power of Chelsea Girls is indisputable: a tender and dark portrait of an alcoholic father; a visit to photographic star Robert Mapplethorpe to have her picture taken (a 1980 image which adorns the cover of this paperback); a creepy telephone invitation to engage with the sex industry; a teen beach house party that leads to a cold and callous rape for the narrator.
There are just a few fragments of Myles’ poetry integrated into a handful of the adventures she relates, stanzas very much in that post-1960s, New York School manner: domestic sketches run through with a hefty dose of candour and a sharp spike of frustration. Her capsule compositions also taste of bitter uncertainty yet her confessional approach, more dirty realism than street romanticism, has a compelling authenticity: felt life in Downtown from new wave to no wave.
Great review! I started reading Myles’ book a couple of weeks ago, and despite it being quite interesting, I left it for another book, for now.. I think I was missing the contextualisation that you so wittingly provided here. TYvM
Such an evocative and well-crafted review!