Book review #2: Beat Blues
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
Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955 by Jonah Raskin (Coolgrove Press, 2021)
THERE ARE, we might argue, three great tragic heroines in the Beat Generation’s history. In a mid-twentieth century literary world where men are the controlling beasts, some female figures leave their mark – but not necessarily through their published work. In fact, their fingerprints on that scene are actually bloodied.
One is Joan Vollmer, the common law wife of William Burroughs, who is struck down by a bullet fired by her partner in a bar-room William Tell act and is brutally, if accidentally, dispatched. Another is poet Elise Cowen, a girlfriend of Allen Ginsberg, who commits suicide because her family refuse to allow her to engage with this subversive community. Each of these women has experiences shaped by the homosexual allegiances of their lovers.
Natalie Jackson, who completes this rarely acknowledged triumvirate, is now the subject of reconsideration, one of the leading players in a novel which imaginatively conceives the middle 1950s city of San Francisco as a setting for characters real and devised to mingle against the background of an America in dramatic social and cultural flux.
Jackson – I will mention no more than signs of mental instability and bandaged wrists – is a free spirit when women remain bound firmly by the straps of patriarchal conformity. Even the menfolk find it hard to strain at society’s leash; for the female outsider brooding desire to express difference is virtually forbidden. If she does, it will end badly.
There are just the smallest hints in this book that Natalie Jackson might have had a creative voice to feed into this homosocial cabal. But her fame, such as it is, rests not on prose or poetry but on her attempts to join the artistic resistance which were largely resisted.
Instead, she was a useful sexual conspirator – she was happy to share her body freely, a liberated sex partner, some might say exhibitionist – but ultimately not a successful applicant to this particular boys’ club. Sensitive and neurotically elegant, enigmatic and deeply insecure, perhaps her fate was all too predictable.
Yet Beat Blues is not a biography of Jackson. Its principal figure is in fact the fabricated Norman de Haan, a New Yorker with Dutch family links, deep and dark, to the times of the plantation, who leaves Manhattan for a job in City Lights bookstore, a Bay Area focus of the new literature as retailer and publisher.
But, while de Haan’s blossoming relationship with shop proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the wider circle of radical scribes – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Bob Kaufmann – gravitating towards the city is the interesting stuff at the heart of the story, Raskin aims bigger and bolder than mere Beat hagiography.
The fact that 1955 sits pretty much at the fulcrum between the end of a Euro-Pacific war and the beginning of an Indo-Chinese one – and de Haan is ultimately involved in both – is a fascinating historical hook, developed here with invention and energy by the writer.
And if the earthquake of ‘Howl’ is looming – Ginsberg is writing it and will debut the epic poem live in the autumn of this very year – there are other tectonic plates crunching in the American heartland: lynchings in Money, Mississippi, with the savage killing of young Emmett Till, bus strikes imminent in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks’ defiance.
Plus there is a significant musical transition gaining momentum. De Haan, who longs to court Jackson but is forced to play gooseberry to a rampantly adulterous Neal Cassady, is a huge jazz fan – Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday – but his would-be girlfriend is turning on to the new rock’n’roll – Presley, Haley and Little Richard.
Add to this volatile and potentially explosive mix that de Haan is living in the Fillmore, San Fran’s coloured district, with a black family and their gay son and you cannot argue that Raskin has missed many simmering flashpoints as he concocts his multi-layered plot, with the rumble of the Civil Rights campaign further tilted by the hubble of Cold War sniping.
Ultimately though, does this carefully wrought faction work? Some scenes are beautifully forged – de Haan’s bus journey across the continent with a diverse cast, the cut and thrust of staff and customers at City Lights and the Lester Young show at Frisco’s Blackhawk club, for example.
There’s another neat – and informative – conjunction when Kerouac attends a screening, with Norman and Natalie, of the just-released Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean only recently dead. I did not know that the late actor had inspired Dean Moriarty’s name in On the Road and that Sal Mineo, his movie co-star, had been the source for Sal Paradise.
Yet there are pivotal scenes where this reader felt as if he was immersing in hallucination rather than witnessing fully-formed and plausible set-pieces. The important moment when de Haan first encounters Kerouac and Ginsberg, Cassady and Jackson, at Robert LaVigne’s imposing Victorian house in the city feels like a heightened encounter, like an acid trip before LSD, a dream rather than a reality.
However, if you are intrigued by this radical world at a seminal crossroads – and I am – it is hard not to be drawn into the events that enmesh and erupt around poetry and race, politics and music. And even the early Disneyland extraordinarily makes a cameo appearance in a novel which delivers a generally convincing and frequently gripping historical reincarnation.
Note: Beat Blues is published in November. Visit: https://coolgrove.com/books/beat-blues/
Jonah Raskin was interviewed by Rock and the Beat Generation, ‘Blues and Beats, fact and fiction’, on August 3rd, 2021