Literary Hub Reads Memoirs of a Beatnik

At Literary Hub, Danielle Dumaine thinks (and writes) about sex and memoir while reading Diane di Prima's pivotal Memoirs of a Beatnik. The book, published in 1969 by French Publisher Olympia Press "blurred the lines between fiction and life, art and pornography, and history and fantasy," Dumaine writes. Let's start there:

Memoirs was initially published in 1969, a full decade and a half past the events it describes. By that time di Prima was no stranger to either the publishing of sexually explicit texts or its attendant backlash. In 1961, The Floating Bear, the literary magazine she edited with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was seized for obscene content and Jones was arrested, the first of many such encounters for both writers. Jones eventually moved beyond the haunts of the Village for Harlem and the Black Arts Movement, while di Prima traveled deeper into the world of the Beats, a loose grouping of friends and writers who mixed jazz aesthetics, poverty-chic, and bohemian ennui in the years between the second World War and the rise of the 1960s counterculture. By 1969, she was regarded as one of the best—and only—women writers of the Beats, having published several poetry collections and works of translation, and had been featured in numerous literary journals. She moved to San Francisco that year after over a decade in New York City and a brief stint at Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook, New York.

Maurice Giordias, the man behind Olympia Press, approached Di Prima to write Memoirs of a Beatnik after she anonymously penned several pornographic scenes for other Olympia Press novels. Memoirs was to be one of the few books published by Olympia’s short-lived New York City office. The novel provided readers with glimpses of Beat luminaries Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, but the bulk of the storytelling takes place before di Prima discovered the new literary movement. Instead, it opens around 1954, the year that a 19-year-old di Prima left Swarthmore College to live in New York City with two female classmates. It opens the morning after the narrator “makes it” for the first time and then transitions quickly into a series of sexual encounters: first with the man she has gone home with, and then his roommate.

The rest of the novel spans a year divided between New York City, a college friend’s family home in Darien, a brief stay on a farm upstate, and finally back to the city, where it closes with the narrator becoming pregnant—happily—with her favorite lover. Throughout, she either participates in or witnesses several orgies, rape, incest, sex with women, and sex with men; she works as a model for several pornographers and is paid to participate in a staged sexual affair for a divorce case.

Read on at Literary Hub.