Been grazing back and forth between Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Steinbeck’s America and Americans, and Women of the Beat Generation (ed. Brenda Knight).
Both Miller (writing during World War II) and Steinbeck (writing about 20 years later) seem to have a decent enough grasp on the shortcomings and paradoxes of Americans and American society. But of course, Miller is violently livid, and Steinbeck vaguely romantic and sentimental. He even sentimentalizes the causes, the roots of our most innate problems. Really, both are getting tiring.
So I’m also retreating periodically to Knight’s anthology of biographical sketches and work by what she calls “writers, artists and muses.” The only one I’m really taken with so far is Joan Vollmer. She wasn’t even a writer, but she basically started the first Beat salon in her apartment in the 1940s. Oh, and she got William S. Burroughs writing — all she had to do was lose at Drunken William Tell. Had she lived longer she probably would have written at least a memoir, and I may have had a totally different image of her, since the writings I’ve read so far from Carolyn Cassady and Edie Parker Kerouac are, well, boring. Dry and humorless. To read what Edie wrote about Jack is to get the feeling he hung around her just for fun at her air-headed expense. To read Carolyn Cassady’s recollections is to remind myself how much I don’t want to end up like her — struggling to keep up a stable relationship with a man who just wasn’t built for them.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I guess I’m in a harsh mood. The thing I’m realizing is that the moment of truth or the crossroads or whatever you want to call it wasn’t buying the ticket and saying goodbye. It’s this. Being here and having things be shitty and weird, knowing that they’re going to have to stay shitty and weird for a bit before they get any better. I didn’t feel like I really had any choice in leaving, and I still don’t. All the difficult decisions are the ones I’m making now. That I’ve been making since I got here.
It’s a lot of new people, and figuring out when to move closer and when to pull away. It’s old people in painful and bewildering new situations. It’s staying up all night with ghosts of people I miss like hell and don’t dare speak to. And of the ones I do speak to, I don’t dare tell them. It’s remembering that as this whole thing was taking shape someone I admire and respect called me courageous. And it’s wondering.
