«Memoirs of a Beatnik» is Diane di Prima’s book of short fictions published by Olympia Press – Traveler’s Companion in 1969. It is interesting to notice that it was published in the times when young people travelled East and West all over the globe. Nowadays people travel very differently and nobody writes books such as this one. Her book in fourteen chapters should be praised for its honesty and beauty. Another interesting note: she does not make a gender distinction here, «Memoirs of a Beatnik» could’ve been written by a man or a woman as it simply bears the titles of the months in di Prima’s life.
February (1,2,3) begins with the feeling of waking up «in one of many strange apartments – this one was in West Village». She describes the man lying next to her as «the creature beside me» which stands for the Beatnik casualness explained in a very few words. This is her first testimony to the traditional Beat promiscuity in which she gives one of the first open descriptions of getting sexual pleasure in the 20th century literature. Yes, D.H. Lawrence was that open too, but his was a male gaze. The way Robert. A. Wilson described the book on the cover was that it was the work of fiction of an «overwhelming honesty», but I never figured it out why the adjective «overwhelming» would be an issue – you either had honesty or you didn’t in any given age or epoch.
«There are many kinds of kisses as there are people on the earth, as there are permutations and combinations of those people. Not two people kiss alike – no two people fuck alike – but somehow the kiss is even more personal, more individualized than the fuck».
Her book was not only the most «accurate… and moving account of the Beat period» but it also has been a unique gem of literary criticism and the critique of her epoch: «Gayness can no longer be used to hold the world at bay, put down the society around you, signal your isolation and help you stand clear.
It is no longer a component of black magic: Cocteau, Genet, or Kenneth Anger.» However, the most faithful testimony of that era and her life in it was not given in the fourteen chapters of her book but in her «Afterword:Writing Memoirs» in which di Prima sums her experience as a Beatnik girl with an incredible ease. Perhaps only Herbert Huncke was that casual in life but at the same time precise in describing it in his own writing.
Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, a second generation American of Italian descent. She began writing at the age of seven, and made the decision to live her life as a poet at the age of fourteen. She lived in New York for many years where she was known as the most important woman writer of the Beat movement.
She remembers that period as «I would go from my morning meditation and microbiotic cats to the typewriter, and sit indeed in the bay window I had requested from the Gods, turning out pages of reminiscences, whilst Black and White Panthers, Hells Angels, parrots, rock bands, assorted Chinese and American Indian dealers and babes without diapers wandered in and out of the room…»
Maurice Girodins bought her first novels in San Francisco and he was constantly asking her to write more porn so that he could sell them. In her Afterword she clearly states without any pathos or sentiment the fact that she was feeding an army of people, «by-standing» poets and friends any time she would get a government grant for writing, generous person that she was.
She simply says «Clearly… the twenty-odd large and assorted small humans who graced the halls, balconies and bannisters of my pad had to eat». Here, she has not only written her memoirs but was also teaching us what a (Beat?) writer should look like. Human, humanistic and positive in her outlook. The short Afterword is written like a poem, almost like a haiku in its form as it has that catching ability to penetrate your heart being equally essential and informative. We get a glimpse here of her former husband, of the troubled times she lived with him, and we get a taste of her life with the FBI who started following her. However, both in the book and its Afterward, the poet deals with the delicate subjects such as incest, homosexuality, racism which goes in both directions (when she was shooting a film with her black friends someone declared «some white pussy sure does smell foul».)
The book reads like one long poem, it is «genre batârd» as the French call this particular brand of poet’s fiction, it is Diane Di Prima’s long poem in prose.
It lives between East Coast and West Coast, or rather at their shores, and it bears testimonies of these two different worlds and mentalities as I myself have also experienced them just a while ago. Di Prima’s mourning over the rent deposit truly belongs to the East Coast, more precisely to New York City, together with those specific «gender-bender» attitudes which have always belonged to Berlin and New York. So, in the end, if someone had asked me why I chose to speak of di Prima’s Memoirs, of this unique woman and a poet, fluttering mostly through her memories to finally disappear from them all – I would say because her prose reads like her poetry: «I was quiet, but Luke, I was sure, could hear me thinking, with that telepathy people develop when they are continually at the mercy of others.
I glanced sidelong at him… I wanted to touch those long, skinny, dirty fingers – beautifully articulate hands with the mercilessly bitten nails. A pang of desire shot like lightning through my groin…» Only a rare poet could picture a scene like that one. Thus, next to her Memoirs stood her «Selected Poems 1956–1976» but I did not plunge into these this time around as I normally would. Diane’s life was one huge, long poem from which all her other poems had sprung. Hers was a rather hard life but the poem or that one entitled «Memoirs of a Beatnik» was sprinkled with all those light specks and joyful colors which bring humor and inner light to everyone’s existence. It was a hard life but «the reader did not freak out» at reading her account of it, so to speak in the popular street jargon of the day. Her fiction has the fullest stock of interesting characters that my eye has ever encountered in any sort of fiction and this treasure is so specific that even her poems could not boast to have it. Yes, I do not know why but I’ve felt an urge to tell you something about the neglected side of Diane’s writing and that is her powerful fiction, my look at it was thrown aside or snatched from behind her beautiful, seamless verse.
However, it’s worth noticing that the last chapter of the book still keeps the mystery of di Prima’s life to itself! Unlike the thirteen preceding chapters which expose mainly the poet’s sex adventures or episodes to us, the last one hides one whole truth of her life which she did not readily discuss in public. It hides the respective stories about Communism in the United States of Americas, the Hoover years, witch-hunts and the FBI interrogations which happened to the poets and which she obviously tried to forget or not talk about.