• Jerry Yulsman
  • Johnson and Kerouac, ca. 1957

I received one of my most important lessons about feminism when I was about 16 and attempted to read On the Road. I think I got as far as Montana, where Sal and Dean hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck and gaze up at the stars. I liked that part, but shortly after, I fell asleep and didn’t bother picking it up again. I thought Sal and Dean were boring and the bebop language was annoying, but most of all, what bothered me was that there were no women. Well, there were women, but they barely existed, only for a few pages, as long as it took for the men to spend the night in their beds.

I read Minor Characters for the first time a few years back, but last weekend after I saw a confusing new play called I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation that was allegedly based on it, I realized I remembered almost nothing besides the obvious part, that Johnson, then known as Joyce Glassman, had had an affair with Kerouac around the period On the Road was first published, in 1957. It also left me with the impression that the Beat women got a raw deal and that Joyce was pretty awesome for eventually calling Jack on his bullshit and, by writing the book, insisting on her right to be a person, not just a minor character in a man’s story.

They experiment with poetry. They become entangled with a community of writers and poets that hang out in their professor Alex Greer’s apartment. They move into their own places, a sign in those days of a girl who was up to no good. They experiment with sex and endure abortions; Elise’s is “psychiatric,” while Joyce’s is flat-out illegal. This is all much harder on Elise than it is on Joyce; she attempts suicide and spends some time in a psychiatric hospital.

Because Kerouac was a genius, he always had people to freeload off of for food and a place to stay. Because Johnson was a 21-year-old woman, albeit one with a publishing contract, she had to earn her own living. At one point, she considers becoming the “old lady” of one of the artists who hangs out around the Cedar Bar, the way her friend Hetty Jones was the “old lady” to the poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka).

Johnson never became mythic. But she wrote a great book. She’s still not as well-known as the male members of the Beat generation, even those who never published anything. I wish she were. I wish the book did not need the hook that Johnson fucked Kerouac to be considered interesting. (Lots of women did that.) I wish the world has changed more.