The Elusive Poet

— The search for Elise Cowen. Part I

I’ve always found myself attracted to the beautiful, the melancholy and the bizarre, and Beat Poet Elise Cowen was all of the above.

She is the lost woman among the Beat poets, dead by her own hand at 28, most of her work burned by neighbors as a favor to her parents shortly after her death. But if you have ever read any book about the beat poets, you’ve probably seen her name somewhere in it. In the history of the Beats, her shadow is everywhere — in the accounts of her close friend Joyce Johnson and Leo Skir, squeezed into the margins of scholarly articles and sneaked into footnotes. But as for herself, except for the small stash of poems that were rescued from the fire and published posthumously, it was as if she never existed, even though she was once at the heart of the literary circle that embodied and transformed American literature.

Somebody once told me that there were two types of geniuses, those who were like mountains, standing high for all to see, and those who were like obscure valleys, vast and profound, full of hidden gems. I’m sure that Elise was the second type. She was the wacky girl in class you never spoke to, partly out of pity, and partly because you knew from a glance that she knew much more than you did. And plain though she was, she had an aura of silent defiance that took people’s breaths away.

Determined to tell Elise’s story, I spent my free time over the last few weeks reading everything about her that I can get my hands on, which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t. You see, when people like Allen Ginsberg die, they leave behind mountains of documents and photographs, enough for people to write a thousand-page biography. So much that it feels like they’re never really gone. His face is everywhere, with his signature bald head, thick beard, black-rimmed glasses and sheepish smile. But people like Elise Cowen — — it was like trying to catch the wind.

The first real first-hand evidence I found was in the Barnard College online archives, where her name appeared in the yearbook of 1955, under the heading “camera shy.” There was no photo.

Feeling nervous, the next day, after grabbing my morning coffee, I headed to the Columbia University archives, where I started looking through the papers of Allen Ginsberg. It was at-once both stimulating and frustrating experience, and almost immediately after I sat down, I found myself hopelessly regretting that I hadn’t started earlier. “How am I ever going to read all of this?” I thought dazedly.

Over the next three hours, I sifted through six boxes full of journals, manuscripts, sketches and letters typed on carbon paper. Once or twice, I found myself staring at half-a-century old drawings of naked men having sex.

But again, Elise was conspicuously missing. Ginsberg’s correspondents were almost exclusively men, even during the years where he and Elise lived under the same roof, and she spent her days ironing clothes and doing the dishes for the boys’ club. There were only two occasions where he mentioned her name. The first time, he was writing to William Boroughs in 1958, and said that he had borrowed some money from Elise.

The second time was when he found out that she was dead. In the spring of 1962, Ginsberg was in Calcutta with Peter Orlovsky, and Corso wrote to him saying that Elise had jumped out of her parents’ living room window. In his reply, Ginsberg said that he regretted how he always kept his distance from Elise, even though they lived in close quarters, because he always thought he could smell death in her hair, and it repelled him.

By the time I saw this, I wanted to slap Ginsberg across his bearded face.

But I did find the original manuscript of Kaddish, which Elise typed up for Ginsberg. And as I touched it, I felt a kind of weird, tingling sensation in my fingers, knowing that Elise had once held the same piece of paper in her hands. I could almost see her then, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, with her lanky black hair swept back unceremoniously, typing furiously, smoke curling up from the cigarette dangling from her mouth.

I was nearly about to give up and call it a day, when I spotted Herbert Huncke’s papers in the archives catalog. In my mind, I’ve always imagined Huncke and Elise as acquaintances rather than friends — even though Elise was once roommates with Huncke’s girlfriend, Janine Pommy Vega — because Elise and Huncke were more than twenty years apart, and Huncke was more of a petty criminal than a poet. But just out of curiosity, I started to scan through the pages, and to my surprise, I found Elise’s name everywhere. When Huncke was locked up in an upstate prison, he corresponded regularly with an editor from the Chicago Tribune, and in his letters, he often mentioned Elise. He said she was a beautiful person, and that he loved her dearly. They both liked Kafka. In a note to Elise, Huncke asked her to send him some fresh clothes and take care of the cat. Yes, it turns out they even shared the same cat for a while, a stray named Blackie. Huncke also mentioned a handful of people who were stricken by Elise’s untimely death, including the poet Irving Rosenthal.

I left the library that day, feeling an odd sense of comfort. Elise was not alone. And even though the man around whom she orbited was a scumbag, her presence was felt strongly by a circle of close friends, and that was quite enough. And I have more digging to do. Thank God.