Women Who Write
— The search for Elise Cowen, Part II
In the midst of my research on the life of the lost Beat poet Elise Cowen, I was introduced to a memoir by Anne Roiphe, titled Art and Madness. It was a book about how she, as a female writer, lived in and perceived the culture and literary movement in the 50s. The first time I opened the book, I was charmed by her words. I loved how she would pull off phrases like “masochism in a fancy dress” and “the romantic grease of a dark story” with such ease.
In my mind, there are two types of writers in this world: ones who venture out into the world and returned with their pockets full of extraordinary anecdotes, which they then piece and weave into logical sentences like a taxidermist handling her delicate specimens, and those who stay home, eat an unhealthy amount of Cheetos and make things up. I always thought I was going to be the second kind. But I admire the first with all my heart. It really takes a valiant spirit and special dedication to human kind.
As I started to reconstruct Elise’s life in my own words, I wanted to get a better sense of how she might have felt towards the social milieu that defined her times, and how gender norms influenced her behavior. I saw Anne as a possible means to those ends. My first solid lead. For it was clear to me that she and Elise shared similar experiences. As teenagers, they both hung around the West End Bar on 116th and Broadway. They both befriended and fell in love with famous artists, and they both wrote prolifically and questioned their own identities as a writers. Elise killed herself when she was 28, and her poetry was nearly lost. Anne lived.
I sent Anne an email asking for an interview on Wednesday evening. She replied the next morning at 11:30. I was just hanging my coat up in the locker outside of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library on the sixth floor of Butler Library at Columbia University when my phone buzzed. Since there was no one around, I did a little jig on the spot.
We were to meet at the Community Café on Broadway at 2 o’clock the next day. Only, I arrived 15 minutes early and found it packed with rowdy diners. A real circus. An old lady was sitting on one of the chairs beside the counter. I instantly knew it was her. Even though it had gone from lush brown to wispy white during the intervening decades, she still wore her hair in the same short perm as she did in the pictures of in her book Art and Madness.
“When do people eat their dinners these days? Eight o’clock?” she said with slight exasperation as we walked back into the freezing streets to search for some place more accommodating. There was a French restaurant on the same block, and it was relatively empty. We went inside and took a table in the left corner, facing the window. Anne untied the blue, flower-print kerchief she had wrapped around her neck and ordered a latte. I ordered the same, but she insisted that I also get some food, since we were at a restaurant. So I also got onion soup.
I showed Elise’s poems to Anne, and we talked about suicidal poets, Freudian psychology, the aftermath of World War II, and the role of women in the literary community during the fifties, which Anne described as “handmaidens and typists” to men who were self-proclaimed geniuses. The women wore black tops and blue jeans and hung out at the West End Bar, which was only a block from where we sat now.
“We treated art as if it was a religion,” she said. “But as women, we couldn’t live that life. We wanted those artists to ‘live for us.’ I think it was very special grief.”
It turns out that Anne did not know Elise Cowen, even though they roamed the same literary haunts. Who she did know was Hilma Wolitzer, another writer who’d lived through the fifties and taught at Columbia University some years back. Anne gave me her number, and I called her at once when I got home. When I told her I was writing a book about Elise Cowen, Hilma sounded genuinely intrigued. When she told me she knew Joyce Johnson, Elise’s best friend and author of Minor Characters, my pulse quickened. But when she checked, she found that she no longer had Joyce’s number in her phone book. She said she needed some time to do some detective work and find out which of her friends were still in touch with Joyce, but would get back to me.
I hung up the phone and slumped down on the bed. It all felt surreal to me, to be meeting and talking to all these women who read Rimbaud in the original language and went to dinner with Salvador Dalí. While we talked, both Anne and Hilma kept mentioning books and their authors, and I had them all scribbled down in a corner of my notebook. It figures that if I was going to talk to people with sexy minds, I needed to speak their language. And for that to happen, I needed to spend a lot of time cooped up in the library with dusty old volumes. I felt thrilled. Did I mention that I love the library?
