Book review #54: Natalie

Tragic muse recovered in collage

Natalie: Natalie Jackson – Voices & Fragments, A Biographical Collage by Robert Dumont (Rosace Publications, 2025)

Review by Jonah Raskin, Chief Book Reviewer

VERY LITTLE KNOWN in her own all-too-brief life, she became a legendary figure in the Beat firmament after her death in 1955. Robert LaVigne had painted her portrait. Allen Ginsberg and others had photographed her. When she died, the San Francisco Chronicle identified her as Jane Doe. When the police found her dead and lying on a sidewalk, she only wore a T-shirt and carried no ID.

To this day there's mystery about her last minutes and hours. Her mother claimed her body and took it back to New Jersey. Jack Kerouac wrote about her as Rosie Buchanan in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums.

Now fiction writer Robert Dumont, a graduate of Tulsa University who lives in Brooklyn, NY, has written and published a slender, attractive 62-page booklet titled Natalie which he subtitles Natalie Jackson –Voices & Fragments: A Biographical Collage. Collage is the right way, perhaps the only way, to do Natalie’s fragmented life justice.

A picture of Natalie graces the cover of the booklet. Inside there’s the famous photo of Neal Cassady with her outside a movie theater with a marquee that reads: ‘Marlon Brando: The Wild One, Stranger Wore Gun, Tarzan the Ape Man’. What a triple feature!

For his caption for the photo of the two lovers, Ginsberg wrote, ‘Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson conscious of their roles in Eternity, Market Street San Francisco 1955.’ Ginsberg’s little known ode to Natalie rounds out the volume. ‘Dark death, Soft death/ Black eternal grave/ and rest’, the poet wrote. Everyone including Ginsberg was in love with Natalie.

Dumont’s account is a beautiful love letter to the redhead from New Jersey who worked as a sales girl in a department store during the day and who accompanied the Beats on the road after hours.

Pictured above: Allen Ginsberg’s photograph of Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson

In The Dharma Bums, Ray Smith, the Kerouac character, writes, ‘Poor Rosie – she had been absolutely certain that the world was real and fear was real and now what was real? At least…she’s in heaven, and she knows.’ Always the romantic, he added, ‘If she’d lived and could have come here with me…maybe I’d just make love to her and say nothing.’

Dumont brings Natalie back to life and puts her in the company of the ‘mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.’ That’s Natalie Jackson: exploding like a spider across the stars and mad to be saved.

Editor’s note: Jonah Raskin’s 2021 novel Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955 takes special note of Natalie Jackson’s role in that mid-decade drama, the poetry and the passions. Simon Warner wrote about the book here – ‘Book review #2’ – on September 27th, 2021. Visit here for more on the Natalie Jackson volume