Finding Elise Cowen

Telling the long-lost story of the extraordinary female Beat poet

Thank you for the cool stream of air

You make with your grey wings

Six inches away from my pinky finger

Little moth

Death

Behind my eyes I see you

a butterfly of blue light.

— -Elise Cowen, 1950s

Prologue

As Saturday evening approached, on the busy corner of Bleecker and Lafayette, some blocks away from Washington Square Park, a lone figure stood. Beneath her ragged bangs, dark eyes gazed intently from behind black-rimmed spectacles, taking in the chaotic scene before her.

Men in striped shirts sauntered past the row of faded redbrick buildings, underneath the dangling metal signs bearing the name of cleaners, tailors, basement bars and cheap coffeehouses. A few women were standing in front of storefronts, their slender bodies leaning against the rail, their kohl-rimmed eyes staring ahead vacantly. Smoke curled from the cigarettes dangling from their limp fingers.

This girl, Elise Cowen, was normally seen roaming the streets of the Upper West Side in her dark skirts and shapeless sweaters. But on this day, she was primly clad in a sleeveless, full-skirted Beatrice dress. “Red as the side of a brick shithouse,” she described it self-consciously. [1]For once, her straggly dark hair was not pulled back hastily with a rubber band, but fell loose on her shoulders. She was waiting for her date to arrive, a man whom she had met at a party a few weeks back, who had gentle brown eyes, a nervous smile and shared her love for Kafka — A young poet by the name of Allen Ginsberg.

It was the spring of 1953.

***

When measured against the larger course of history, this particular moment could easily be overlooked. And even if it was acknowledged, people today tend to look back upon it with a sense of nostalgic bliss.

Eight years after the end of World War II, consumerism was thriving in America, fuelling not only the economy, but also a set of social values that deemed that television, fancy automobiles, and a suburban home were staples of the “good life.” Just a year before, Mary McCarthy, the editor of the Partisan Review, had trumpeted the “great change” taking place at the heart of American life, in a polemical exchange with the writer Simone de Beauvoir. “Class barriers were disappearing,” McCarthy argued, and “even segregation is diminishing; consumption replaces acquisition as an incentive. The America invoked by De Beauvoir as a country of vast inequalities and dramatic contrasts is rapidly ceasing to exist.” The US seemed en route to become an affluent, middle-class nation, at least on the surface.

But at the same time, it was also a time of great anxiety for Americans. The power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union continued to escalate, while the domestic crusade against Communism bestowed in the government unprecedented power to track down and punish dissidents. Booklets instructing ordinary Americans how to dig bomb shelters in their backyards were suddenly in great demand, and in November, the New York Times published an article titled: “Safety In Bombings Seen Only in Earth”, in which the Federal Civil Defense Administrator, Val Peterson, talks about how America might eventually have to go underground to protect itself from surprise atom or hydrogen bomb attacks by guided missiles.[2]

Fortunately, certain blocs of society weren’t so easily intimidated into conformity. Gangs of young people, sick of the stringent parameters imposed by bourgeois culture and hungry for self-expression, began seeking other ways out. Art, with all its promises of grandeur and immorality, became the new focus for these outcasts and drifters. And sooner or later, many of them found themselves inhabiting the three square miles of alcohol-saturated space between West 14th street and Houston in New York City, which was where Elise stood on that fateful night, waiting for the man who would become one of the most influential and ubiquitous characters in her life.

It was curious, how this meeting went on to shape Elise’s life and legacy. There is no denying that she loved Allen, even though their romantic relationship — if it could be even called that — was short and ill-fated, and soon they would both move on to date other people. Elise would always look to Allen as a beacon, an exemplar as to how one’s life should be led.

She tried to emulate his way of life, Beat poet Leo Skir later wrote. “In some ways, quite consciously her path followed Allen’s. Elise, alone, was trying to follow the Allen-path, no Allen to guide her.”

But ironically, after her death, this devotion turned out to be one of the main things that prevented the world from seeing her as a serious writer as opposed to just another tragic romantic cliché.

***

While she waited, Elise fished in her pocket for a cigarette, put it in her mouth, and struck a match. Her pale complexion was momentarily lit by the tiny flame that burst into being, followed by a stream of white smoke.

Allen arrived minutes later, round-shouldered and slightly awkward as usual. His hair was unkempt and there were deep shadows under his eyes, as if he had stayed up all night reading again. When he smiled, it took up most of his face, and gave him a look of charming naivete. He and Elise walked through the village to the San Remo Café on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal.

By this time, this dingy bar with pressed-tin ceiling, smoke-stained canvas walls and black-and-white tile floors has already achieved legendary status as the hippie headquarters of New York. Writers, poets, painters, philosophers and hustlers from all over the world came there to exchange heady gossip, engage in raucous arguments and reminisce about the golden days in the early twentieth century, when William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O’Neill roamed these very blocks. Billie Holiday’s deep, smoky voice flowed from the juke box by the door.

Allen had been hanging out at the San Remo for a number of years now, and seemed to know everyone sitting at the bar. Coincidentally, the time when he met Elise was also a watershed in his life. This was before his leap to literary fame. He was a 26-year-old Jewish homosexual man with a schizophrenic mother and very little self-esteem. It didn’t help that he was also experiencing hallucinations; He claimed that he heard the voice of William Blake speaking to him in his Harlem apartment.

Three years earlier, he was arrested, along with notorious New York hustler Herbert Huncke and a few of his other friends at the time, after crashing a stolen car. To save his son from prison, Louis Ginsberg struck a deal with the prosecutor that caused Allen to be remanded to New York State Psychiatric Institute for therapy instead, and it was there where his doctors succeeded in convincing him that he needed to be “cured” of homosexuality. This fact and his subsequent affair with Elise caused many writers and biographers refer to Elise as Allen’s experiment or detour into heterosexuality, as if she were nothing but a mistake, an unfortunate blot on Allen Ginsberg’s emblematic, triumphant life.

While Allen greeted his acquaintances, Elise looked around at all the other women in the room, taking in their stylish outfits while they sipped from their martini cups and listened to their male companions laughing rowdily. She knew that, she with her clumsiness, round figure and intellectual obsession, would never be part of this more glamorous crowd. She was something else, a fish out of water.

She had started writing poetry in her early teenage years, and her poems were shocking, to say the very least. Like many of her fellow Beat writers, her work bore the signs of deep depressions and amphetamine-induced highs. But she had an experimental way with words that singled her out from her contemporaries. Not only could she take the most trivial and mundane aspects of daily life and weave them into dramatic stanzas, but her works would often give physical form to complex psychological processes, giving it a post-modern twist. She also questioned women’s domestic roles, which was uncommon in the family-geared culture of the 50s and otherwise unheard of in the male-dominated Beat circle. What she did was considered iconoclastic, even among rebels.

One of her best friends in college, Joyce Johnson, affectionately referred to her as Crazy Jane, a nickname sprung from her eccentricity and stubborn refusal to live accordingly to social expectations. Another Beat poet, Janine Pommy Vega, with whom Elise shared an apartment with for a short time, called her “the smartest person she ever knew.”[3] But it was clear that Elise didn’t see herself that way. She spoke with a low, warm voice and a slight English accent, and was described as remarkably timid and soft-spoken.

Afterwards, she told her friends that she wished she had talked more that night with Allen. She said, because of her quietness, he seemed to think her very deep. But instead of feeling pleased, she was much discomforted by this, since she felt that he was looking for truth in people, and she had no truth to give.[4]

Later that night, the two of them left San Remo and headed eastward to Sagamore, an infamous all-night cafeteria on the Bowery. After a brief stop there, they finally went back to Allen’s apartment on East Seventh Street together, where they made love.

Allen Ginsberg is, of course, famous for his complicated sexual relationships with his friends, both men and women. But Elise was no virgin herself, having slept with at least three different people before this. It is unlikely that this act had meant more to either of them than acknowledgement of what they shared together that night, and they would continue to have sex with each other sporadically throughout the next couple of years, despite never being in any kind of relationship.

There is no telling when and how they parted the next day. There isn’t even record of whether or not they went on a second date. It was clear, however, that they discovered in each other a mutual understanding that led them to stay in close contact for the next decade, and even live in the same apartment for a brief time before parting ways again.

In Joyce Johnson’s memoir Minor Characters, she described how Elise and Allen resembled each other during this period, not only in demeanor but also in their outward appearances. “They could be born into the same family, brother and sister, they looked so much alike. Their broad foreheads, their somewhat heart-shaped faces, the vulnerability at the corners of their mouths, their same darkness.”

To prove this observation, there are two photographs circulating the Internet that show the two of them side by side, probably the two photos of Elise that are mostly widely recognized. The pictures were taken in immediate succession, featuring the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder in a room with a painting hanging overhead. Elise was wearing a demure tight-collared dress with beads on it. Allen had his shirt off and his arm around Elise’s shoulder. Their hands were clasped together. In one of the photos, they were staring into each other’s faces, while in the other, they were gazing upwards in the same direction, at something apparently captivating, their identical black-rimmed glasses reflecting the fluorescent lights.

But despite these common traits, their lives after that day in the Village could not have unfolded in more different directions. In three years’ time, Howl would be published. Its great success transformed Allen from an unknown poet into the pop literary icon of his time. He also met Peter Orlovsky, a young, beautiful artist’s model, while he was staying in San Francisco in 1954, and Peter became his lifelong partner. Elise, on the other hand, fell into poverty, addiction and eventually psychological ruin. Like Ginsberg, she wrote prolifically, but the bulk of her poems, which critics hail as closely resembling the style of Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound, would never see the light of day.

On the Naropa Institute tribute to Ginsberg in 1994, a woman in the audience asked the panel: “Why were there so few women among the Beat writers”? And Gregory Corso answered: “In the 1950s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your family had you locked up.”[5] This ominous quote speaks to a large part of Elise’s tormenting experience growing up, and the reason why most people today have yet to hear her name .

Instead of publishing her manuscripts, Elise’s parents had them burned after her death. They found the insinuations about bisexuality and drug use in her writing particularly scandalous, and were eager to erase all evidence of their daughter’s unscrupulous behavior.

Instead of being viewed as a literary prodigy, Elise was seen as a disgrace. Something to be buried and forgotten. Thus, for decades, her name remained in obscurity, known only to the few Beat scholars as the mad woman who once dated Allen Ginsberg but was later sidelined by the more famous Peter Orlovsky. It was not until the late 1990s, three decades after her death, did the effort to recover her work truly begin.

Tony Trigilio, a poet and scholar who teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, spent nearly a decade tracking down and editing Elise’s last remaining poems, which, out of pure serendipity, managed to escape the fire. They were preserved in a single notebook — -a three-hole punch binder nine inches long and six inches wide, that was left at the apartment of one of Elise’s close friends, Irving Rosenthal. After Elise’s death, Rosenthal gave the notebook to Leo Skir, who kept it well-guarded for many years but did not publish the contents. Only after a long, difficult process did Trigilio manage to secure a copy of the original manuscript. He also located Elise’s closest living relatives, who were shocked yet pleased to hear that some of her poems still existed.

Finally, in 2014, a book containing the complete collection of poems and fragments by Elise Cowen was published, and with it came the missing piece of puzzle in American literary history — — the relevance of a life that is at once raw, harrowing and a quintessential example of the 1950s female Beat experience.

One

Before the fall of 2016, I, like most people, had never heard of Elise Cowen. She was barely known, and I was never very fond of poetry. Being an English major, I had read poems written by Allen Ginsberg and William Bourroughs in class, and didn’t like them. What I was not expecting, however, was coming across a book of Elise’s poems while wandering through the stacks at Butler Library while I first started as a graduate student at Columbia University. It was a thin, relatively new book, compared to the bulky, dusty volumes that dominated the shelves. I took it off its shelf.

Later, I would learn that Elise had once worked in the Butler stacks herself, half a century ago, in order to earn $7.5o a week to pay her rent, at the teensy little apartment on 108th street where she lived after moving out of her parents’ house. After I found out this out, every time I walked through the silent, labyrinthine halls, pacing between the dimly-lit shelves, I had the strange feeling that she was nearby, and that, any second, she would turn the corner, and we’d come face to face. She would be wearing those stupid glasses of course, with her dirty hair ungraciously scraped back with a rubber band, and give me that maddeningly defiant look.

I took her poems with me to bed at night.

Sing into the hardness of the heart of the future

Great splits of breaking hearts

Clacking, clicking, coughing typewriters —

Too many cigarettes

Locusts, Locusts

Encephalitis in New Jersey

Blood in our pants floods 42St. in hideous

Heart red brown

Dying, dying, dying

What wilderness small enough for our voice?

Cry into the waste paper basket

DEATH MY LOVER[6]

But months later, when I started researching my project on Elise and returned to the library, the book was gone. Resigned, I went on Amazon and bought my own copy.

The book was edited by a man named Tony Trigilio and published in 2014, with an appendix in the back giving a brief chronology of Elise’s life. Brief, because very little of Elise’s life was known. During her years at Barnard College, she didn’t leave behind any kind of record. She didn’t belong to any school club, or attend interschool activities. The only place I managed to find her name was in the yearbook of 1955, under the heading “camera shy.” There was no photo.

Unlike Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other male beat poets who left behind mountains of documents and photographs, enough for people to write thousand-page biographies, Elise simply vanished into death, which serves as a haunting reminder of her middle name, which essentially means nothing.

***

Elise Nada Cowen was born on July 31, 1933 to Wesley and Frances Cowen of 213 Bennett Avenue in the neighborhood of Washington Heights, New York. Her family was Jewish and wealthy. Her father, Wesley Cowen, worked in the music publishing business. He was a large, mustached man with a booming voice and a fiery temper. Her mother Frances, who was born in England, was a thin, nervous woman with auburn hair. Elise was an only child. They lived in a blonde brick building just across the street from Billings Lawn. The walls of their apartment were painted pinkish brown, with a large, sunken living room that boasted an enormous casement window. Vases of dried flowers decorated the tables, along with a photo of Elise as a small girl.[7]

It seemed that the Cowens had gotten everything they wanted for their blessed middle-aged lives. There were galas in town which they attended along with other affluent couples and family trips to Florida during the winter. But above all, they had a beautiful, intelligent daughter who would be the first in the family to go to college.

However, everything changed when Elise reached puberty. Somehow, during this time, she stopped being a “good” girl, leaving her parents confused and dismayed by the change, and they spent the next couple of years warring against each other. Her father was outraged at Elise’s wild and unladylike behavior. He attacked her for her bad grades in college, for her “filthy writing” and for “sleeping around like a little tramp”.

Elise always bit her cheek when she felt nervous, and once, at the dinner table, when Elise told him she did not want to go to Florida on vacation with them, her father shouted across the table at her: “Why don’t you bite your own head off?”[8]

Elise remembered the catastrophic episode that ended her “good days”, and later described the incident in detail to her friend Joyce Johnson. It happened when she was around thirteen years old. On that day, she had invited a group of her friends over to her house. It was her first time using the oven, and when she opened the oven door to check on the brownies, the whole thing exploded in her face, singing her eyebrows and burning off quite a big chunk of her hair. Her hair grew back, eventually, but her widow’s peak was replaced by a jagged line across her forehead, and since then, she said she had always considered herself ugly.[9]

In high school, Elise fell in love with poetry, especially that of T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. She would recite Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: “Pull down thy vanity I say, pull down…” She smoked, and stopped caring about her looks, allowing her appearance to fall into dishevelment. She wanted desperately to get away from her family, from her raging father and weeping mother. The only person who seemed to seem to sympathize with her was her cousin Ellen, who was three years older than her and who later commented that growing up, she felt as if it was the two of them against the family.

When she was sixteen, Elise slept with a boy, the president of the student organization of The Bronx High School of Science where she studied. She was still popular back then, and one of her classmates described them as “the terrific couple.” During the Thanksgiving holidays in1949, she followed the boy to a Hechalutz Hatzair training camp in Poughkeepsie. It was in one of the sleeping bags there that she lost her virginity.

Hechalutz is a Zionist organization whose aim was to train and bring young people to Israel to build the nation. It was first established in the United States in 1905, and by 1950, it already owned eight farms in New York, New Jersey, California and Canada, where young men and women were being trained for agricultural work in Israel.[10]

Elise was no Zionist. But in a great coincidence, she also met Leo Skir in Poughkeepsie, who would become one of her lifelong friends. At the time, Leo happened to be a madrich at the camp — a counselor. It was a cold blustery day, and the two of them were standing together in a drafty room, and wind was whistling through the window pane. Leo had just given the young campers a lecture about the value of work, and all of them had all gone out to the field to gather corn. All except Elise. Leo had stayed inside too because of his bad asthma. He wrote in his notes that he was eating a piece of bread spread with uncolored margarine, while Elise was sitting on a desk near the wall, and they talked. But a few years later, when they met again at the apartment of a mutual friend, Frank Kennedy, he he did not remember talking to her. Elise, whose memory of the occasion was pristine, had to remind him of the conversation.

“Why weren’t you outside working?” Leo had asked her, and she had answered: “I wasn’t ideologically convinced.”[11]

[1] Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983. Print.

[2] “Safety with Bombings Seen Only in Earth”. The New York Times. 5 November 1953, New York ed.: 18

[3] Knight, Brenda, Anne Waldman, and Ann Charters. Women of the beat generation: the writers, artists, and muses at the heart of a revolution. Berkeley: Conari Press, 2000. Print.

[4] Skir, Leo. Elise Cowen: a brief memoir of the fifties. New York: Evergreen Review, Inc., 1967. Print.

[5] Knight, Brenda, Anne Waldman, and Ann Charters. Women of the beat generation: the writers, artists, and muses at the heart of a revolution. Berkeley: Conari Press, 2000. Print.

[6] “Sing into the hardness of the heart of the future.” Cowen, Elise, and Tony Trigilio. Elise Cowen: poems and fragments. Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2014. Print.

[7] Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983. Print.

[8] Skir, Leo. Elise Cowen: a brief memoir of the fifties. New York: Evergreen Review, Inc., 1967. Print.

[9] Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983. Print.

[10] “American Hechalutz Organization Appeals for Training Farms; Opens Convention Today.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 16 February 1950.

[11] Skir, Leo. Elise Cowen: a brief memoir of the fifties. New York: Evergreen Review, Inc., 1967. Print.