Adrien Begrand
Recollections of my Life as a Woman: The New York Years
Viking Press
496 pages
ISBN: 0-670-85166-3It has taken a very long time for the female contingent of the Beat Generation to get their due. In the past decade, anthologies like The Portable Beat Reader, Women Of The Beat Generation, and A Different Beat, as well as excellent memoirs like Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and Door Wide Open, and Hettie Jones's How I Became Hettie Jones at long last showed how big an impact the Beat women had on their art. The release of Diane Di Prima's new memoir provides us with yet another important account of an important literary period seen through the eyes of a woman.
In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Di Prima extensively revisits her first thirty years on this planet, thirty of the most jarring, illuminating, complicated, and above all, intense years anyone could ever experience. This isn't merely a shallow collection of tales of how she hung out with Kerouac and Ginsberg; in fact, both icons are mentioned a couple of times in passing only. No, this story is Di Prima's only, her looking back on the role of the female artist in the Fifties and Sixties, and a whole lot of soul-searching as well.
Early on she writes, "I write this book to try to understand what messages I got about being a woman. What that is. How to do it. Or get through it. Or bear it. Or sparkle like ice underfoot." Through to her teen years, Di Prima's view of men ("I held men for the most part in contempt and dread") was due mainly to her strained relationship with her abusive father, and although she went on to have many male friends and lovers, it was something she never completely got over. She resented the subjugated life her mother accepted and ached for a way to escape that life that she was certain had been mapped out for her well in advance.
Art was what liberated her, but doing such a thing in a period that encouraged conformity and the subservient role of women had a high price. As Di Prima put it:
Choosing to be an artist…was choosing as completely and possible for those times the life of the renunciant. Life of the wandering sadhu, itinerant saint, outside the confines and laws of that particular and peculiar culture…To be artist: outcast, outrider, and explorer. Pushing the bounds of the mind, of imagination. Of the humanly possible, the shape of a human life. "Continual allegory". Of a woman's life, pushing the limits.
She would find her real family in the community of artists that lived in Greenwich Village, and would not only write poetry, but dance, write plays, model, and help form the New York Poet's Theater.
It's interesting to note that Di Prima rarely mentions specific poems she wrote. In her memoir, her poetic output takes a back seat to her life's story, but her recollection of the abortion of the child she and Le Roi Jones had conceived chillingly tells the story behind her early masterpiece poem 'Brass Furnace Going Out', how she wrote the poem immediately after returning home following the procedure. It's a harrowing story, how her intense love for Jones painted her in a corner to the point where she had a rare moment of weakness:
I felt that if I loved him, it was incumbent on me to have an abortion no matter what I was feeling. To show the extent of my love by doing what I felt in fact was wrong. To commit what for me was tantamount to a crime, simply because the man I loved willed it so. And I would take the blame, the consequences, the blood on my hands. And not say anything about it.
Of all of Di Prima's well-known peers, Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) has one of the more prominent roles in the book, and although she recalls her long affair with the then-married Jones with fondness (she did give birth to their daughter), Jones still comes across as a selfish, chauvenist to the point of cliché, Typical Male Artist. He's not the only guy to take one on the chin; Di Prima briefly lashes out (rightfully so) at Donald Allen for leaving her out of the influential New American Poetry anthology as well as Robert Creeley, who, according to Di Prima, spread some false information about a tryst between her, Ginsberg, and Kerouac, which was made famous in her fictionalized account Memoirs Of A Beatnik. In a deliciously snarky moment, she sarcastically describes "the eternal beat Orgy that will live forever in the minds of all guys who were around for the second half of the twentieth century."
Throughout all the adventures she describes in the book, from her friendships with peers like Hubert Selby and Frank O'Hara, to the life and death of her tragic friend Freddie Herko, to her ultimately doomed relationship with Le Roi Jones, to her uncharacteristic, bizarre 'contractual marriage' to Alan Marlowe (a manipulative man who, it seems, she really disliked, but apparently not enough to pass up marriage), Di Prima looks back on the first thirty years of her crazy life with aplomb, some regret, and a good deal of warm-hearted humour, all with the true voice of a poet of the highest order. At times her prose resonates, pulses as well as her best poetry:
This is more than the poems, is the shape of a Life. Mine. Life lived in the Vision of art to be achieved. Lived in possiblility. Rise to it. Yes. No reason it should not be me. Myself as I stand here. Take up the challenge. The knowing: no matter what I will be a poet. Be great, whatever that means. Fulfill the dream.
Her final-page epilogue is so typically, casually humourous that you grin in amazement, hoping she'll put out a second memoir as soon as possible.To use a favourite word of Di Prima's that is peppered throughout Recollections Of My Life As A Woman like a mantra, this book is pure magick.
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