American Original | Dave's Place

Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years by Diane di Prima. Penguin Books. 424 pp. $18.00. ****

In this astonishing and inspiring memoir—424 tightly packed pages full of remarkably detailed writing, which covers maybe 30 years of a hugely eventful life—there are several moments that stand out for me. One is when, in the midst of her sophomore year at college, Diane di Prima left home for good.

She’d been raised as a New York child in various parts of the city, ultimately residing in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn that I’m somewhat familiar with, since my son lives nearby. She had a grandmother who was memorable, warm and loving, but her parents were frightened angry people, who circumscribed Diane’s life with strictures and punished her with severe beatings, her father with his fists (for the life of me I can’t understand a parent treating a child that way). School was not a total relief, because in the ethnic mix that is New York, there were kids who made fun of her and beat her up for being Italian. One activity her parents didn’t limit was reading, and Diane did that voraciously. She loved poetry from an early age, and began to write it herself.

She doesn’t mention that she was an all-star at school. So we’re startled—at least I was—to find that when she took the Regents, the tests that determine what high school you can enter in the byzantine system of New York schools, the results were published in the newspaper (!), and di Prima finished first, in all of New York. There was a little more freedom in her life from then on, not only because she travelled elsewhere in Manhattan to go to school, but because she and some other artistic girls, attended classes at various places, pretty much doing what they wanted. She already saw herself as a poet, and when she went to college chose Swarthmore, which seemed suitably intellectual for her and was all right with her parents, who were hoping for some distinguished professional career.

She had other ideas, but was discouraged from the start when the place seemed to focus on academics and not the arts themselves. Her first English professor made vague reference to the fact that, though the students might be interested in writing themselves, in that class they would learn to be critics. She had hooked up with two or three other rebellious women, and early in their sophomore year they’d had enough. They decided to drop out of college, get an apartment in the East Village and set themselves up as artists. We’re talking 1952 or ’53, when you could still find places to live cheaply, so you could pay for them with part-time employment. Her parents blew up at this news, her mother going into hysterics, her father giving her one last beating, but she had already sent a friend out a side door with a suitcase full of belongings. She had set out on her own. She was free.

I was stunned by what she said about being an artist.

“What I do know is that choosing to be an artist: writer, dancer, painter, musician, actor, photographer, sculptor, you name it, choosing to be any of these things in the world I grew up in, the world of the 40’s and early 50’s, was choosing as completely as possible for those times the life of the renunciant. Life of the wandering sadhu, itinerant saint, outside the confines and laws of that particular and peculiar culture.

“. . . In the striving to get-ahead thrust of America 1950, where nothing existed beyond the worlds of the senses, the clearest way to turn from materialism was to turn to the arts.

“To be an outcast, outrider was the calling. Not fame, or publication. Keeping one’s hands clean, not engaging. By staying on the outside we felt they weren’t our wars, our murders, our mistakes.”

The next startling thing she did—this is in the mid-fifties, when the rest of us were watching I Love Lucy and Captain Video—was decide to have a baby. In the bohemian world she occupied, both the aesthetic and the lifestyle were the epitome of cool. You were cool with everything. It was fine to have a number of lovers, it was fine if some were men and some women, it was fine if some were officially committed to other people, but it was still astonishing, in the Beat world she occupied, for an unattached woman to have a baby. She wanted to do that to fulfill herself as a woman. She had never wanted a husband, because her father had been such a burden in her family. She just wanted a child.

It was after she had this first child, a girl named Jeanne, that she had her first true love affair, with a woman named Bonnie. Until then she’d been to bed with a number of people, but hadn’t been intimate. Something about having a child made things different.

“Giving birth for the first time, delving deeper into my own woman-nature, had left me more open than ever for an affair with a woman. I needed someone to mirror back to me some of the softness—and yes, the mystery—I was beginning to discover in myself. And to lead me further, teach me secrets of my own sexuality.

“This of childbirth, of being opened from the inside out, I thought, was how you truly lost your virginity. Torn open so the world could come through. Come through you. Not the semipleasant invasion from a man, excursus from the outside in. That in itself, by itself, was merely invitation. Some kind of beginning. Now I felt the joy, the power, of being OPEN. Something unconquerable and deep about it. Place from which I live. Twice torn.

“And I needed my body honored for what it was. What it had become. What I had learned it could be. . . . It was no longer mine now, a private preserve, but there for the kid to climb on whenever she would. That one fact alone changed me—that I truly did not own my physical self. Changed everything about who I was in the world. What flesh really is. A woman’s secret knowledge.”

Bonnie was a painter of considerable talent; either she would come to Diane’s apartment after working all day, or Diane would go to her place—in an even sketchier neighborhood—to be with her while she painted. Diane for years had lived in a world where, if you could make rent, you had your own place and welcomed other people; if you couldn’t, you crashed with friends. She made money as an artist’s model and a clerk at a bookstore, always had one apartment or another. A young gay dancer friend named Freddie. often crashed with her, and she would use him as a babysitter, or ask a neighbor upstairs to help out. She continued to have an untrammeled life even when she had a child.

As if she wasn’t on the fringes enough—a single mother living in Manhattan who had never been married, and had a lesbian lover—she next fell in love, famously, with a black man, the poet Leroi Jones, who was himself married to a white woman and had two children with her. Until then, having a romance with someone’s husband had been off limits for di Prima, and Jones’ wife Hettie wasn’t thrilled with the idea (though she was accustomed to his sleeping around), but at this point di Prima felt that, if she was being true to her emotions, having this affair was what she should do.

She soon got pregnant, and at Jones’ insistence, had an illegal abortion (she describes that process in detail, all it entailed. It was part of the life of a woman in those days). She later got pregnant again, and decided she wanted to have the child. We’re still in the fifties here, and di Prima has had two out-of-wedlock children, one of them mixed race. Somehow she seemed to be making it all work in this wild lifestyle she led, which also involved substantial use of drugs. The group she lived in believed in that.

“It is hard, in our present era of self-righteousness, to even begin to imagine what drugs and the taking of drugs meant to us in the late 1950s. How special and, indeed, precious it was—what promise it held. Hard to imagine where to begin in the telling of it. . . .

“Consciousness itself was a good. And anything that took us outside—that gave us the dimension of the box we were caught in, an aerial view, as it were—showed us the exact arrangement of the maze we were walking, was a blessing. A small satori.”

I won’t say I agree with all of the choices di Prima made, but I do think she led a remarkable life and led it on her own terms. I admired the way she stayed true to herself and to her life as an artist. If at this point, she made what I think of as a truly stupid decision—she decided to marry an actor named Alan Marlowe, who was primarily gay and proposed marriage more or less as a business alliance—I can understand why she did it. She had two children, and her life was increasingly precarious.

Marlowe had money from commercials he’d made and seemed able to help support her (that wasn’t actually true. She wound up supporting him as much as he supported her). They made this decision on a trip to L.A. when he was looking, fruitlessly, for acting work, and though the last part of this book, while they were married, wasn’t as interesting to me as what came before (they founded various small theaters back in New York, and di Prima devoted herself to that work, and then set up a printing press to help get things into print), their wedding was the highlight of the whole book for me. They had made their way to San Francisco, and found an obscure Buddhist priest named Shunryu Suzuki, who agreed to at least talk to them about their marriage, then to marry them. It would be a fateful meeting for di Prima.

“Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was the first person I ever met for whom I felt immediate and total trust. It was something which I had never expected to experience. Every sense, every brain cell and nerve fiber in me suddenly woke up. I felt alert, and watchful, and euphoric, all at once. . . .

“It was that he was so simply and utterly there, standing in that dim room, looking at us. There was a nakedness about it. No cover-up, no attitude at all. His gaze was flat, and extraordinarily deep. I felt he saw into and through me, and in spite of, or perhaps because of that seeing, he was totally kind.

“I knew then and there, that whatever it was he did, I wanted to do it. So that I could begin to see what he saw. Think like him.”

Di Prima ends her book with a final page that sums up everything she’s done since, for the past thirty years (she seemed to be writing in the early nineties). All of that sounds fascinating, and she ends her book with the sentence, “Maybe I’ll write about some of it sometime.”

I’m hoping she did, and that this writing will find its way into print.