The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 14 August 2001
by Joyce Johnson
During a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg, a young woman coming of age in the early 1950s meets up with Jack Kerouac in a Howard Johnson's diner and buys him a couple of hot dogs and coffee. Thus begins a tumultuous two years during which Joyce Johnson falls in love with a troubled author, and the great Beat classic, On the Road gets published. The Beat Generation was going strong long before Johnson met Kerouac, and before his book made the term famous (though it was San Francisco's Herb Caen who coined "beatnik"). This book is her very personal recounting of her life up to and including her affair with Kerouac. Johnson grew up in, and broke free of, some staid cultural mores to explore her own potential and plunge into the freeing world of the Beats in New York City. Life was exciting for her and many others, and she met many of the men who drove that movement; Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Peter Orlovsky, and others. And she knew many of the women who themselves were tied to these men. That the movement was driven by men and their yearning to be free is a major theme in this book. The men are loved by women, but don't want to be tied down to them. There is a childish streak in this masculine poetic drive for freedom, and there is a sickness. The book is laced with suicides, with Jack's own obsessive ties to his aging mother, and his alcoholic struggles with newfound fame. Johnson struggles with her own dreams of writing, and domestic happiness with Jack, but eventually realizes the hopelessness of staying with a drunk little boy. While Kerouac himself was often insightful and penetrating in his writing, Joyce Johnson's perspective on a heady time in all their lives is refreshingly down-to-earth, and reveals much about the subordinate position of women in the 50s, even among revolutionaries.