Beat it

Author Lynnette Lounsbury makes a place for women in the beat generation

The first real book I ever read was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. I read it simply because, in the stubborn way of a 12-year-old, I wanted to read the longest book in the library. I was too young to understand some of the more controversial nuances of the representations of slavery, but I was not too young to know that Scarlett was a literary character of rarity. A smart, ruthless, ambitious and passionate woman who loved men but didn’t need them. I was in heaven.

The next time I fell in love with a book, it was for the work itself. I was 16 when I read On the Road. I fell for the words. The images. The energy in them. Jack Kerouac wrote the text in three weeks, on a continuous reel of paper, single spaced to save time. That energy is in the text—it grabs you and drags you along with it.

I read more Kerouac, The Dharma Bums my favourite, then Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs. I loved the beat generation and the men in it. I loved how they shared themselves with each other and their readers, generously. But I always had, and still have, the sneaking and sinking suspicion there would have been no place for me in that world.

It is quite a conflicted place to be—looking into a world you love and realising there isn’t really any space for you in it. It’s hard to be content in a place where you sense you aren’t respected, liked or loved. As a writer, I solved my dilemma by writing my own beatnik fiction, We Ate the Road Like VulturesLynnette Lounsbury

There were no Scarlett O’Haras in the beat world. There were women, certainly, but they felt like cardboard cut-outs, something to move around, admire, shift gently out of the way when necessary. In fact, the only women Kerouac and Ginsberg seemed to genuinely respect were their mothers.

I looked. I looked hard. I read female beat writers Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker and Hettie Jones, and they felt more like watchers than participants; muses perhaps, facilitators maybe, but not respected equals. These talented women, some of whom wrote incredible and revolutionary prose, were “the wives,” barely acknowledged by their male peers. They wrote about their identities in relation to the men around them and I wanted more than that. I wanted them to write women. I found the beat women as outsiders in offside compendiums, as afterthoughts and even instigators, but rarely as the orchestrators and creators of their own place in literature.

It is quite a conflicted place to be—looking into a world you love and realising there isn’t really any space for you in it. It’s hard to be content in a place where you sense you aren’t respected, liked or loved. As a writer, I solved my dilemma by writing my own beatnik fiction, We Ate the Road Like Vultures, and writing myself into the world. I realise Kerouac may well have been indifferent to my writing, but I have had to make my peace with that—and I’ve inserted myself in a way that works for me, with a female character that embodies the devil-may-care attitude of the beat way, but with that unique and innate wildness that women have. My beatnik O’Hara.

But I imagine it isn’t as easy for readers who aren’t writers. The literary world has evolved to be more inclusive—both in terms of the writers and the characters—but is it completely possible to fall in love with a world in which you cannot find a place for yourself? Every reader deserves to find themselves in fascinating and difficult characters, in genres they identify with. Reading should not just be standing outside a window looking in.