The Beat Century — post 1 of 100. Diane di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969).
Commissioned as pornography by Olympia Press and written for money to feed a household, di Prima’s 1969 book is the Beat memoir that admits it is lying, and is stranger and more honest for it.
There is a temptation to treat Memoirs of a Beatnik as a straightforward account of bohemian New York in the middle 1950s, and the temptation should be resisted, because its author spent decades telling anyone who asked that it is not one. Published by Olympia Press in 1969, the book arrives with a provenance that most memoirs would bury and that di Prima put on the table: it was written to order, for money, as erotica, for a publisher who kept sending the pages back with a demand for more sex. Everything interesting about the book proceeds from that fact.
This is not a disqualification. It is the book’s subject. Memoirs of a Beatnik is a document about what a young woman poet had to sell, and to whom, in order to keep writing at all — and it is unusual among Beat books in being frank about the transaction rather than romanticising it.
Written to Order for Maurice Girodias
Maurice Girodias ran Olympia Press in Paris, the house that published Lolita, Naked Lunch, and a large quantity of frank commercial pornography, often by serious writers who needed rent. Girodias approached di Prima after she had already written pornographic passages anonymously for other Olympia titles. She took the commission because she needed money quickly and had a household to support — the communal arrangement that surrounded her in those years was not a metaphor, and people in it ate.
The editorial process was exactly as blunt as the commission. Drafts came back annotated with the instruction “MORE SEX.” To satisfy it, di Prima compressed what had actually been roughly five years of her life into a single narrative year and expanded the erotic content to fill the space. The book’s structure — its breathless density, its improbable frequency of encounter — is not a stylistic choice about the period. It is a word-count problem being solved.
“Except for the Sex Parts”
Di Prima’s own gloss on the book’s accuracy has become the standard epigraph for any discussion of it: it is mostly accurate, she said, except for the sex parts. That single clause reorganises the entire reading experience. The apartments, the cold, the jobs, the hunger, the specific texture of being a young woman in downtown Manhattan before the word beatnik had been coined by a newspaper columnist — those can be trusted. The orgies cannot.
In a note added to later editions, di Prima described the practical comedy of manufacturing the invented material, wandering the house looking for someone to lie down so she could check whether a position she had just written was physically possible. It is a wonderfully deflating image, and it is the correct frame for the book: a working writer at a desk, solving a technical problem, being paid by a pornographer in Paris.
What Survives the Commission
The book would be a curiosity if the fabricated material were all there was. It is not. Between the commissioned scenes, di Prima wrote passages of genuine social observation about a milieu that almost nobody else was documenting from the inside — the economics of it, the improvisation, the specific arrangements by which people without money kept a room and a typewriter. The book blurs, as one account of it puts it, the lines between fiction and life, art and pornography, history and fantasy, and it does so knowingly rather than by failure of craft.
There is also the question of appetite. Di Prima wrote a young woman who wanted things — sex, work, company, movement — without arranging for her to be punished or redeemed for it. Whatever the commercial pressure that produced the pages, that posture was not standard issue in 1969, and it is a large part of why the book kept finding readers after the market it was written for disappeared.
The Memoir She Wrote When Nobody Was Paying Her To
The essential companion is Recollections of My Life as a Woman, published by Viking in 2001, more than thirty years later. That is di Prima’s actual memoir — unhurried, uncommissioned, unconstrained by an editor demanding more sex — and reading the two together is the most useful thing anyone can do with either. The later book supplies what the earlier one had no room for: the poetry, the politics, the long apprenticeship, the cost.
It also settles the credit question that hangs over most Beat women’s writing. Di Prima was not a girlfriend who later wrote a book. She was a working poet with a substantial body of work and a career as an editor and publisher, and Memoirs of a Beatnik is a small, strange, deliberately compromised item within it rather than the thing she is for.
The Book’s Long Second Life
Olympia Press did not survive its founder’s legal troubles, and the market Memoirs of a Beatnik was manufactured for — mail-order erotica sold to English-speaking readers from Paris — collapsed within a few years of the book’s appearance. That the book outlived the market is entirely a function of who wrote it. Reprints followed under other imprints, and the title has stayed continuously available for over half a century, which is more than can be said for most of the Traveller’s Companion list.
What kept it in print was the readership that arrived long after the commission: readers coming to di Prima as a poet and finding this odd artefact in the bibliography. That audience reads it against the grain of its own genre, mining it for the social detail rather than the sex, which is precisely backwards from the intended use and produces a more interesting book.
How to Read It Now
The honest recommendation is that Memoirs of a Beatnik should not be anyone’s first Beat book, and should certainly not be anyone’s source for what happened. Read as history it is unreliable by design, and readers who come to it for the Kerouac and Ginsberg cameos are reading a book that was assembled to sell to people looking for something else entirely.
Read as what it is — a poet’s paid job of work, executed with more intelligence than the assignment required — it becomes one of the more revealing objects the period produced. It shows the machinery underneath the legend: who got commissioned for what, what a woman’s manuscript was worth and in which market, and what a serious writer will do to stay solvent. The Beat men left behind myths of spontaneous composition. Di Prima left behind an invoice.
It is mostly accurate, except for the sex parts.
Diane di Prima, on Memoirs of a Beatnik
Where to go next
Pair it with di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001), the memoir she wrote on her own terms, and with Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters for the same years from another woman’s desk.
Next: Jack Kerouac, On the Road. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Sex, Memoir, and the Women of the Beat Generation — Literary Hub
- Literary Hub Reads Memoirs of a Beatnik — Poetry Foundation
- Women Writers of the Beat Era — University of Virginia Press
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
