Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters, the Beat-era memoir from the most eloquent and prolific of Jack Kerouac's ex-girlfriends, goes a long way toward explaining why women remained largely invisible within the literary and cultural movement that made heroes of Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Gregory Corso. Johnson's new memoir, Missing Men, which covers generations on either side of the Beat movement, explains another absence, that of fathers from the lives of those she loved: her mother (whose father, a poet, committed suicide when she was six), her first husband, the painter Jim Johnson (who was raised by a mother who hated him), and her second husband, the painter Peter Pinchbeck (who also had almost no relationship with his father). The book looks at the contours of that empty place at the head of the table. Nerve spoke with Johnson about sexual mores, her famous ex, and why her 1956 backalley abortion is a vital cautionary tale in this election year. — Ada Calhoun

Was sex a way for women to fit into the male-dominated Beat world?
No, you could just hang out and not have sex. But you wanted a good relationship with someone, with the kind of man you admired. Most of the same issues come up now. Interestingly enough, I think my first husband had a very progressive idea of marriage. While I was working, he tried to share in the household responsibilities and was concerned with my happiness and my career and my writing. And of course with Kerouac it was a part of our relationship that I was also a writer. He took it seriously and encouraged me. He urged me to live the way he did, to go on the road, not be tied down. "Be like me," he said. Of course, I couldn't.

Jim and Joyce Johnson on their wedding day.

Do you regret that you didn't?
Well, you know, the only woman he ever took on the road was his mother! (laughter). I almost met him in Mexico City but by the time I was ready, he was gone. That would have been an experience. Maybe not a happy one, but I wanted to have experiences. I also wanted emotional security. I wanted everything. (laughter). I think what a lot of feminists didn't understand about my generation was how different we were from women who came ten years later. We were really a transitional generation. We were just beginning to try out new ways of being. In other words, unlike the hippies who came ten years later, you couldn't embrace free love without also worrying about uncool things like your kids.
We were living so much against the current of society that it took all of our energy just to do as much as we did: to support ourselves, to have relationships with these wild guys. There was no room in all that for us to transform the male-female relationship. Everything else was such a struggle. Women of the late 60s and of the late 50s were so different. Hettie Jones [wife of LeRoi Jones, a.k.a. Amiri Baraka] and I were very different from Diane DiPrima [who wrote the scandalous Memoirs of a Beatnik], who wanted all these children but had no way to take care of them. We felt very responsible.
Still, as a woman in the Beat era, you had to be the cool girl, right?
Yes, at that time, you had to be cool. Even when you were furious and miserable. The whole ethos of the scene was to be cool, not be a killjoy or make demands. But when I started to have children … In my second marriage, everything came to a head. I was a working mother with more than a full-time job. I was an editor [under E.L. Doctorow]. I had a small child and we had very little money and my husband was an abstract painter. Everything was on me. I badly needed some rest and help, something. I think with that role reversal, many men — including Peter Pinchbeck, my second husband — acted super macho because they were embarrassed by it. Instead of trying to be helpful, they acted as though it was all their due. And then of course it was really boring to have a wife who was so tired, so he began to be out every night at various bars. It became intolerable. I left when our son, Daniel, was five years old. It's amazing to look at how much things have changed and how much they haven't. A lot of women still feel they have to make that bargain where they say to their husbands, "If you let me have a baby, you don't have to do anything."
It's a really bad bargain. It also deprives men of the opportunity to be fathers. On the other hand, since the Women's Movement, I think now there are many men, who, however troubled their relationships are with their women, have become devoted fathers. Can you talk about the title, Missing Men?
The impetus for the book was one day I started thinking about what a huge impact the fatherlessness of various people has had upon my life. The fact that my mother lost her father [to suicide]. The fact that the two men I married had no relationships with their fathers at all and that all these absences in people's lives had all this fallout – on the people they married, on their children, down through generations. That was what I wanted to write: a thematic memoir like Nabakov's Speak Memory.

Johnson's grandfather, who committed suicide in 1908.

What are other symptoms of the missing father?
It's hard to have intimate relationships, you feel a distance, you have no model of how to relate to your own children. Peter lost his two children when he left his first marriage. That was devastating. You also didn't see much of your father when you were a child actor, appearing on Broadway in I Remember Mama.
My mother grew up in difficult circumstances because her family had immigrated from Poland. And the family was ashamed of the suicide. They changed their names and told lies to cover it up, even to me. And stayed socially isolted. My mother didn't seem to know how to form relationships outside of the family. She wanted to hang on to me for dear life and by the time I was twelve, thirteen, I knew I had to get away. She also had a disappointing life – she wanted to be a concert pianist – so she wanted to live through me.
Didn't she avoid the stage because of how coarse the other chorus girls were?
Yes, she was terrified of sexual things. She never even told me about menstruation. One day she appeared in my school when I was around twelve. I was told I had to go to the principal's office and there was my mother very nervous with Kotex saying, "Don't worry about this, it's just the body's way of getting rid of bad blood. It will happen to you every month for the rest of your life. Don't tell anyone." She didn't want to be corrupted, but you did. So you ran away to the Village to have all these wonderful affairs.
Wonderful and not so wonderful! (laughter). It was definitely a way to rebel against her. And I also was determined to live in a way that didn't resemble her life. By the time I was thirteen, she really had lost me. Were you shocked by what you found in the Village?
No, I was drawn to and fascinated by it. When I was thirteen, I started going and hanging out on the periphery of things, mostly in Washington Square. It seemed so unrestrained, open. There was something there that I wanted. There are so many famous people in this book – you're in plays with Marlon Brando and Elaine Stritch, you're friendly with Allan Ginsberg, de Kooning and Franz Kline — how do you negotiate that role of not being as famous as they are, but not being a fan either?
They were just people I knew. I saw them at their best and sometimes at their worst. I never had any great awe of fame. I've also seen how destructive it is for people, how it creates an artificiality about relationships that leaves them isolated. It's a hard thing for people to experience and come out of in a positive way. It helped destroy Kerouac, right?
He was one of the first writers to get that huge media treatment – television had really just come into being. He got the full media treatment, which was nothing he was at all prepared for. The only thing comparable at the time was Dylan Thomas' trips to America. He was filling huge halls across America and being mobbed by enthusiastic fans. Of course, it didn't end up too well for him, either. How do you feel about all the Beat nostalgia out there?
I'm deeply weary of it. It also saddens me because at the time of the Beats, the idea was to create something new, invent something transformative. We were not a copycat subculture. But it's been degraded in all this copycatting.

Johnson's second husband, artist Peter Pinchbeck.

Can you talk some about the debauchery of the era?
Oh boy! (laughter). I'm an old lady. You know, I never really thought of it as debauchery. We were living in ways that people were not living then, but that are now accepted. For example, young men and women were living together without benefit of marriage. That was a huge deal. Also, it was an enormous thing for a woman to be living on her own and supporting herself and having a freewheeling sex life. And in those days, if you were having sex without being married, you were a bad woman, a scarlet woman. And of course the situation was more risky for women because this was before the Pill and people were getting pregnant right and left and abortion wasn't legal.

In the book you mention having an abortion in 1956.
Yes. First of all, you did not go to your gynecologist or the Margaret Sanger Clinic. There were these doctors who would perform it secretly. You had to ask around, carefully, until you found out where to find one of these people. A lot of women went to a Dr. Spence down in Pennsylvania. He was a good-hearted, generous doctor who wouldn't overcharge people. The going rate at the time for an abortion in New York was $500. Cash. It was an unimaginable amount of money for women in my circumstances, twenty years old and making $50 a week. A friend of mine knew a girl who'd gone to a doctor in Canarsie. And the way you got there was this weird guy who worked at the BBD&O advertising agency would take you. His hobby was escorting girls out to the abortionist. He got some kind of kick from this.

Wow.
Yes, and then he would say, "Don't you want to come to my house in Fire Island to recuperate?" and you were strongly advised not to take him up on the offer. So I called this fellow and we had a drinks date, totally bizarre and scary, and he said, "Okay, meet me at Union Square on such-and-such a day and I'll take you." He didn't even tell me the doctor's name. So on the appointed day I met him and realized he was carrying a whole pile of New Yorkers to read during the operation. And we went out to this private house in Canarsie and I remember I didn't know if I'd come back alive. The place didn't look too great. I was trying to read the Latin on the diplomas. And the doctor comes out and he looks more like a butcher than an abortionist. He was a rough guy and spoke to me in a very disagreeable manner. He took me down to this room he had in the basement and he wouldn't even let me take off my shoes. Why not?
Lest there come a knock on the door and I had to run for it. And afterwards, he said, "Don't ever let me see you back here again!" I had to lie on the table and while I was lying there I had to hand him the cash – not before or after. It was a whole weird thing. And the guy made the Fire Island invitation and I said, "No, I'm just going to cool it at my apartment." Interestingly enough, about two months later, a woman friend of mine became pregnant and she knew I'd had an abortion and I remembered where it was and we just went out there and appeared in his waiting room and he freaked. He was startled that I dared to come back. But he gave her an appointment. A lot of things have improved for women. Of course, I guess they'd like to roll things back to the old system.
It could happen.
It could, with four more years of Bush. I've never had the slightest shame about telling people I had an abortion. It was the only thing I could do. I had no resources. I couldn't have taken care of a child. I couldn't have endured having one and giving it up. Later on, at thirty, I became pregnant and I could do it and I did.


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