Abstract
This chapter counters the popular tendency to position Beat-associated women involved with the same Beat men as necessary rivals who also easily fit into stereotypes of women already available within the Beat mythos (as either mothers, chicks, lovers, or whores). My aim is not to unearth evidence which proves definitively a friendship between these women, but rather to complicate what real-life relationships between women positioned as rivals might look like through literary representation, and to consider what other kinds of intimacies can exist between women beyond straightforward friendship or straightforward rivalry. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on how women involved with Neal Cassady formed bonds with one another despite their positions as sexual and romantic rivals. This chapter engages primarily with Carolyn Cassady’s memoir Off the Road—in which she represents relationships between, among others, herself and Luanne Henderson, Anne Murphy (Maxwell), and Diana Hansen—in order to theorize alternative ways of thinking about relationships between Beat-associated women who were primarily connected to one another through men. I ultimately contend that, in addition to chronicling the twenty-year period she spent with Beat men, Cassady’s memoir also productively explores the complex relationships with the women she was linked to through those men.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this essay I stylize Henderson’s first name as “Lu Anne,” but follow other stylizations (“LuAnne”) when quoting directly from other sources.
- 2.
Lionel Rolfe, “The truth about ‘On the Road.’”
- 3.
This rival discourse is also echoed in the film adaption of Cassady’s first memoir, Heat Beat (book, 1976; film, 1980). Cassady and her family members have been vocal about their disappointment in the film’s portrayal of the events of her memoir. See Cassady, “Heart Beef,” 14–16 and John Cassady, “The John Cassady Interview.”
- 4.
Santos, “A Daughter’s Recollection,” 232.
- 5.
Kerouac, On the Road, 164.
- 6.
Plummer, The Holy Goof, 44.
- 7.
Cassady, Heat Beat, 21.
- 8.
In Women Writers of the Beat Era (2018), Mary Paniccia Carden elaborates on the terms used to identify Beat-associated women and the contested nature and gender politics of the label “Beat women writers,” in particular highlighting the grudging necessity to use the qualifier “women” because “Beat” is already assumed male (xiii-xv). Following Carden’s lead, I too primarily use the term Beat-associated women in this essay.
- 9.
Beat-associated women memoirists have used the genre to mark the importance of female friendships amidst the Beat movement. One notable example is Joyce Johnson’s memoir Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming-of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac (1983). For Johnson, marking female friendships signals the importance of personal and literary friendships between Beat-associated women writers (like her own with Hettie Jones and Elise Cowen) as well as the importance of female-female bonds to the cultural history of the Beats (like Edie Parker-Kerouac and Joan Vollmer (Burroughs), whose shared apartments served as an early Beat meeting place and whom Johnson credits with introducing Beat men to one another).
- 10.
Sedgwick, Between Men, 24–25.
- 11.
Savran, Taking it Like a Man, 71.
- 12.
Irigaray, 172.
- 13.
Irigaray, 196.
- 14.
Irigaray, 164.
- 15.
Irigaray, 196.
- 16.
Wallace, Sisters and Rivals, 68–74.
- 17.
Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, 72.
- 18.
Castle,73.
- 19.
Castle, 72.
- 20.
Castle, 72.
- 21.
For a discussion of the autobiographical “I’s,” see Smith and Watson, 71–79.
- 22.
Carden, Women Writers of the Beat Era, 3.
- 23.
Nancy M. Grace, “Snapshots, Sand Paintings…”, 141.
- 24.
Such can be gleaned from the subtitles of most Beat-associated women memoirs, most of which mark the memoirist’s relationality to one or more Beat men.
- 25.
Grace, 143.
- 26.
Grace, 143.
- 27.
Grace, 143.
- 28.
Smith and Watson. Reading Autobiography, 34.
- 29.
Smith and Watson, 36.
- 30.
Nicosia and Santos, One and Only, 27.
- 31.
Here I am thinking of memoirs by Kerouac’s first wife Edie Parker-Kerouac, You’ll Be Okay: My Life with Jack Kerouac (2007) and by his second wife Joan Haverty Kerouac, Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of Beats (2000), in addition to Cassady’s Heart Beat, which are all primarily focused on each memoirist’s relationship to Beat men.
- 32.
In addition to Nicosia’s One and Only, Tom Christopher’s self-published biographies of Neal Cassady give perspective on Lu Anne Henderson’s life through transcribed interviews and correspondence with Henderson. See Tom Christopher, Neal Cassady Volume Two 1941–1946 (1998).
- 33.
Cassady, Off the Road, 6. (Hereafter cited parenthetically).
- 34.
Eichenbaum and Orbach, Between Women, 10.
- 35.
Eichenbaum and Orbach, 11.
- 36.
Wolfe describes the incident in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968) and Thompson provides a darker take of the event in Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967) and in his audio recordings, although neither author mentions Murphy by name (although Thompson describes her as Neal Cassady’s wife in his audio tapes). Murphy describes the incident in her own words in “Meat and Metaphysics” (63).
- 37.
Andrew Grant Jackson, 1965, 242.
- 38.
Ginsberg to Hunkie, San Francisco, December 5, 1965, 316.
- 39.
Written correspondence between Beat men was highly influential to the Beat literary movement and in facilitating friendship bonds. See Oliver Harris, “Cold War Correspondences: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady and the Political Economy of Beat Letters” and Ricard Lingeman’s “Three for the Road.”
- 40.
Descriptions of Murphy’s (Maxwell’s) life and relationships in her own words can be found in her unpublished memoir “Affair with a Viper: The Unexpurgated, True Story of Neal Cassady & Anne Murphy.” A small excerpt from the manuscript, “Superslut and the Psychedelic Cocksman,” appears in the magazine Fool (2000). Murphy (Maxwell) also expands on her real-life friendship with Carolyn Cassady in an interview for Beat Scene: 42 (2003). In fact, Murphy goes out of her way to mention Cassady in the interview.
- 41.
Hansen to Neal Cassady, North Tarrytown NY, October 3, 1950, 162–163.
- 42.
Ginsberg to Kerouac, NJ, or Cape Cod, MA, July 8, 1950, 59–60.
- 43.
Savran, 78.
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Lorig, J. (2023). Beat-Associated Women and Female Relationships in Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road. In: Branham, K., Reames, K.L. (eds) Navigating Women’s Friendships in American Literature and Culture. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08003-6_13
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