Murphy's lore: 'Acid and orgasms'

60 years later, Cassady lover speaks up

Few individuals have chased the comet’s tail of the Beat Generation more vigorously, more assiduously, more enthusiastically, than the livewire Canadian author and performer, raconteur of the road and good time tripster, BRIAN HASSETT.

The flying sparks generated by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and their clan – from Corso to Cassady, Kesey and beyond – have been kept alight in this writer’s three volumes of vivid autobiography: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac, How the Beats Begat the Pranksters and On the Road with Cassadys & Furthur Visions.

Who better then to address the subject of Anne Murphy, lover of Neal Cassady as he moved from Beat hero to Merry Prankster driver and esteemed hippie figurehead, whose life story, Tripping with a Viper: The True Story Of Neal Cassady & Anne Murphy by Anne-Marie Maxwell, has just been released in print?

In this extended account, re-published with permission from Brianland, Hassett’s own website, a long-running and colourful commentary on that literary community, its countercultural heirs and plenty more, the tale of Murphy, still alive at 92, is truly told…

By Brian Hassett

BEAT & PRANKSTER fans rejoice!

A new firsthand memoir has just been released of life with one of the Mount Rushmores of both the Beat Generation & the Merry Pranksters. That doesn’t happen very often, and there aren’t many options left.

Anne Murphy (who later reverted back to her birth name Anne Marie Maxwell) was Neal Cassady’s primary girlfriend from roughly January 1962 – 18 months after he got out of San Quentin – through the end of his life (February 4th, 1968). Although they spent a lot of time with Allen Ginsberg, and met Jack Kerouac in Northport in 1963 (and she remains one of the last living people who actually met Kerouac), these years were most notable for Neal teaming up with Ken Kesey, hanging with both the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead, and being part of the Acid Tests, which Anne describes as ‘one gigantic continuous high’.  She called Neal ‘the psychedelic rapster’, and they were so involved they are actually listed in the program for the historic Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco in January 1966.

Those of us inspired by those formative psychedelic years can still look forward to George Walker and Mountain Girl‘s memoirs – both of whom are great writers with vivid memories – but neither spent as much time with the person so central to the counterculture movements of both the 1950s and ’60s.

I first read this manuscript when I was living with Carolyn Cassady in England in 2012 and was riveted and jaw-dropped by its frankness and honesty.

Many appreciators of the Beat writers salivate over every new publication of their raw notebooks;  and those inclined towards the Acid Tests enjoy an imperfect looseness in their art. This book, as published, by happenstance and good fortune, is a beautifully raw creation – perfectly reflecting the times, artists and artistry it brings to life.

Originally written in the 1990s, author Anne tried to get it published on & off ever since – and readers can be grateful it didn’t get picked up by one of the big publishing houses because they would have cleaned it up and sanitized it. This is not air-brushed history – this is gushing confessional herstory.

Fortunately there’s a devoted cadre of Beat scholars seeing to it that this foundational work is being preserved and brought to new audiences. Jerry Cimino and Brandon Loberg at The Beat Museum have been doing God’s work for decades sharing all things Beat with ever-evolving new generations. David Wills has been publishing scores of important books and magazines through his Beatdom imprint. Peter Hale updates the world on Allen Ginsberg’s connections to contemporary culture in weekly dispatches. Charles Shuttleworth put years of work into bringing Kerouac’s Desolation Angels notebooks to life. And Daniel Yaryan has been staging live shows and printing books and magazines under his “Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts” banner since 2008.

Luckily for all of us, Daniel developed a relationship with the effervescent Anne, who’s still alive at 92, and still living in central California where all these adventures took place.

Here’s where it gets really serendipitous: by the early 2000s, when Anne made another push to get the book published, she realized she’d lost the floppy disk that the manuscript was written on. All that existed were print-outs, a copy of which I read at Carolyn’s. If somebody other than Daniel had published it, they would have retyped it, cleaned up all the little typos and sold it as a regular book. But this Daniel guy has a real visual sense, praise the Lord! So, when he set about fulfilling Anne’s decades-long dream of having her memoir published, not only did he not retype it, but he printed the actual manuscript! And not just any copy, he chose the one with Carolyn’s suggestions in the margins!

Then on top of that, just as Neal’s wife was a visual artist, so too was Anne!  The book includes a bunch of her sketches of her famous squeeze as well as a portrait of Carolyn. Plus, the visual artist publisher created a bunch of collages and added photos reflecting and illuminating the subject matter. The love poured into this publication is obvious on every page – a beautifully laid out memoir-meets-scrapbook of prosaic and visual delights. He calls them ‘graphic intensifiers’.

Thus – harmonic to both the Beat and Prankster spirit, this book is a swirling collage of images and stories reminiscent of Kesey’s Jail Journal or Garage Sale or Arthur & Kit Knight’s invaluable Beat books – and like them is printed in the same large 8½ x 11 format.

And then there’s the sex…

Neal Cassady was best known for his prowess in three things – words, women and wheels. His words have been published in the Joan Anderson Letter, the Neal Cassady Collected Letters, and The First Third (which Anne helped type up). And there’s plenty of descriptions of him driving. But there’s never been a firsthand account of him driving a woman wild. Jack’s, Carolyn’s and the Kesey/Babbs Spit in the Ocean Cassady books were all pretty PG.  The sex is always implied … not described.  Until now.

After reading the first hundred pages about her unabashed passion for passion, she starts to describe the famous Hell’s Angels party at Kesey’s place in La Honda.  For those who’ve read Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and/or Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test there’s a memorable scene describing a Hell’s Angels gangbang in a back cabin at Kesey’s that night. As soon as I read the first sentence about her being there, I was like – ‘No! … don’t tell me!! . . .’ And sure enough – it was Anne!

The renown astrologer and sexology author Gavin Arthur, who was close friends with both the Cassady family and Anne, diagnosed her as ‘hyper-hetero’ and ‘a promiscuous nymphomaniac’ – something Anne not only doesn’t dispute but celebrates. She writes at one point, ‘I lived for acid and orgasms.’

Wolfe & Thompson are two of the most acclaimed authors of last half-century, but now, finally, the world can read about the event they both described … from the woman’s perspective!

And that connects to one of the best aspects of this book – that it’s honest and open and raw – and from a woman’s point of view!

For a literary movement once thought to be the province of men, Anne’s antics can now be properly placed on the ever-expanding Beat Women’s shelf along with Carolyn’s Off the Road, Edie Kerouac’s You’ll Be Okay, Joyce Johnson’s award-winning Minor Characters, the Lu Anne Henderson interview book One and Only, Jack’s wife Joan Haverty’s Nobody’s Wife, Helen Weaver’s The Awakener, Diane Di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, and of course How I Became Hettie Jones. 

And Anne couldn’t be happier!

And speaking of happy & healthy women, running through this whole book from the first words of the opening ‘Acknowledgments’ to the final ‘Afterword’, Carolyn Cassady is a gracious, forgiving, empathetic, kind and wise mother figure to her husband’s girlfriend. Not only during the relationship, but over all the many decades afterwards, Carolyn remained a supportive friend to Anne, including helping her with this very book.

These were the two women who had the longest-running relationships in Neal’s life, and they both knew they were in love with a cad. Both their books both praise and demythologize Neal.

I once asked Carolyn if she was ever in love with a man the way she was with Neal, and in her late 80s it was an instant and emphatic ‘no’. And decades after his passing, Anne reflects, ‘I never met another human being with Neal’s charisma and power.’

Besides inclusion on the Beat Women’s shelf, this book can now forever join On the Road, Visions of Cody and the Kesey/Babbs Spit in the Ocean Cassady issue as the most vivid firsthand portraits of an enigma who found himself driving Kerouac’s car and Kesey’s bus into the pages of history … and women into the throes of ecstasy.

Editor’s note: Tripping with a Viper: The True Story Of Neal Cassady & Anne Murphy by Anne-Marie Maxwell can be ordered from the publishers Sparring Artists

See also: ‘How bard of the Beat put pen to paper to produce Jack-inspired classic’, March 10th, 2023; ‘Beat Soundtrack #15: Brian Hassett’, April 9th, 2022