'The Awakener,' by Helen Weaver
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/13/RVLC1ABT18.DTL
Steve Silberman, Special to The Chronicle
Sunday, December 13, 2009
The Awakener
A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties
By Helen Weaver
(City Lights Books; 260 pages; $16.95 paperback)
One Sunday morning in 1956, the doorbell rang in a third-floor walkup
in Greenwich Village. The occupants of the apartment were two bright,
attractive women in their mid-20s, both named Helen. The H's - as
they dubbed themselves - didn't always get along, but they both loved
rocking out to Elvis Presley, sporting oversized men's watches and
giving their neighbors the impression that they were lovers (they weren't).
Their unexpected visitors that day - novelist Jack Kerouac, poet
Allen Ginsberg, and their comrades Peter and Lafcadio Orlovsky -
would sweep them into a whirlwind of experiences that left the young
women transformed, exhilarated and exhausted. Now the surviving H,
Helen Weaver, tells the story of their encounter in a poignant memoir
from City Lights called "The Awakener."
As the primary architects of the literary movement known as the Beat
Generation, Kerouac and Ginsberg were on the very cusp of fame. The
novelist had found modest success with his first book, a sprawling
roman Ŕ clef called "The Town and the City." A few months earlier,
Ginsberg had caused a sensation in San Francisco with the debut of
his poem "Howl," which city officials had branded obscene. The
publication of Kerouac's "On the Road" - the book that would propel
the Beat Generation to international renown - was still a few months away.
At the tender age of 34, however, Kerouac already felt like an old
man. Having written a whole backpack full of manuscripts that were
rejected by one publisher after another (including novels later
hailed as classics, like "Doctor Sax" and "The Subterraneans"), he
despaired at ever seeing most of his life's work in print. To Weaver
- a spunky, well-read, tomboyishly cute refugee from the suburbs -
the blue-eyed French Canadian seemed heroically sensitive and
committed to his art. "Even his smiles were sad," she writes, "and
his laugh when it came was not a full-blown belly laugh, but more of
a wistful, bemused chuckle."
They fell in love at once, plunging into a tempestuous two-month
affair. Recounting their time together in "Desolation Angels,"
Kerouac described his energetic lovemaking with Weaver as "a big
surrealistic drawing by Picasso with this and that reaching for this
and that ... the Garden of Eden and anything goes." After their first
night together, Weaver recalls in her own book, the novelist
consecrated their union by quoting a passage from "The Song of Songs."
"The Awakener's" first chapters are energized by Weaver's personal
liberation at a time when America itself was starting to wake up. She
smokes pot, explores the limits of her sexuality and defends Bill
Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" to high-minded literary pals like
poet Richard Howard. Fans of Anatole Broyard's "Kafka Was the Rage"
will enjoy Weaver's often hilarious sketches of the Village, with its
low-rent pads offering "everything but the kitchen sink."
But the most touching moments in the book take place when Weaver
focuses her keen powers of observation on the soul of her wounded
hero. After a series of crazy scenes, she becomes disillusioned with
Kerouac's homegrown hybrid of guilt-ridden Catholicism and Buddhist
insistence that "It's all a dream." It was as if he'd siphoned off
the worst aspects of both traditions to excuse his own excesses,
particularly his increasing dependence on alcohol. After a fight,
Weaver writes him a heartbroken note that spoke for any number of the
novelist's friends and lovers: "You'll probably go to your grave
insisting that women (I) never want you to Have Fun. If it were only
fun - that state you seek is death, annihilation, the end of your art."
When she finally asks Kerouac to find his own apartment, he promptly
moves in with another young muse, Joyce Johnson, who penned her own
worthy memoir, "Minor Characters." Weaver's note proved prophetic. In
1969, Kerouac died in Florida of internal hemorrhaging caused by
cirrhosis of the liver, the classic drunkard's death.
Weaver's life, however, was just getting under way, with other
revelations and other lovers - including Lenny Bruce - to come. She
became an acclaimed translator of Antonin Artaud's poetry and
co-authored the Larousse Encyclopedia of Astrology. "The fifties were
(Kerouac's) decade," she explains. "The sixties were mine."
But as Weaver crossed the threshold into old age, cared for her
ailing mother and learned of the deaths of friends like Ginsberg and
the other H (Helen Elliott), the wisdom in Kerouac's rants about
suffering, impermanence and the dream-like nature of existence became
more clear. Now 78 and living in Woodstock, she has come to
appreciate the two-fold nature of his role as an awakener in her
life. As a playful and enthusiastic lover, Kerouac helped initiate
her into the richness of existence. And with his own Christianized
version of the dharma, he made her aware of the brevity and
preciousness of our time on Earth.
"I rejected (Kerouac) for the same reason America rejected him,"
Weaver concludes on a bittersweet note. "He interfered with our sleep."
.
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