Ann Petry's The Street and Diane di Prima's Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years
Did you know I was born in New York? My mom was born in Manhattan and my dad was born in Hoboken, and I was born in a mountain village north of White Plains about thirty years after them. Growing up, my culture was a New York City culture, filled with black-and-white cookies and corned beef sandwiches and that massive blue whale hanging in the Museum of Natural History. Though my family decamped to Pennsylvania by the time I had figured out how to ollie on a skateboard, I still feel tethered to NYC in some emotional or generational way. You think I root for the New York Football Giants, even while living here in Philadelphia, for my health?
I mention this because I want to recommend two great books to you, both New York City-centric, both from an era before my time (but not so far before my time that I am unable to imagine or conceivably relate), both absolute crushers in different yet fanastic ways. Oh, and both probably available from your local library, which I cannot recommend enough. As an obssessive record-owner, I truly savor owning but a scant collection of books, preferring to borrow them (for free! over and over!) from the library a block from my house. I realize you’ve probably heard of libraries before, but I love mine so much that I’m going to keep talking as if you haven’t, sorry!
Anyway, let’s start with Ann Petry’s The Street. This novel follows single mother Lutie Johnson through World War II-era Harlem, as she seeks upward mobility against excruciating odds. Lutie, her young son Bub, and a small cast of neighboring tenants and socially-interested parties are vividly and lovingly described, which only compounds the looming sense of desperation, struggle and hope in the face of hopelessness that hangs low over their heads. Published in 1946, I’ve learned that The Street was the first novel written by a black woman to sell a million copies. It makes sense to me, as Petry’s prose is precise yet easily understood, the sort of thing that even I, a white guy eighty years after the fact, can find richly compelling right up through the devastating emotional climax of the last few pages. Many parallels can be drawn from Lutie Johnson’s struggles to the socially-aware zeitgeist of today, which speaks to the strength and depth of Petry’s writing (as well as the inexcusably low level of progress we’ve since made). Which is to say, it’s a really, really great book. I have to wonder what Ann Petry would make of today’s woke Instagram infographics1, or how my Irish and Czech grandparents, teenagers living in a neighboring borough at the time of The Street, would’ve acted toward Lutie Johnson at the corner market or jazz club2.
Once you’ve finished The Street, and you’re ready to sink into a richly-detailed memoir at least twice its size, please go pick up Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. Hailed as the leading “feminist female poet of the beat generation”, her feminism strikes me the same way that Lydia Lunch’s does: brash and uncompromising and probably occasionally offensive, but with the warmest, truest heart that actually behaves in a manner of the highest integrity, judging people only by their intentions and will. The type of woman who might not take proper care with people’s preferred pronouns or fully grasp today’s range of acknowledged sexualities3, but will literally give you her last hundred dollars while sleeping in a friend’s East Village hallway just because she liked your naked-and-covered-in-paint performance of Othello she happened to stumble upon.
Di Prima’s memoir takes us from her brutal Brooklyn Italian-immigrant upbringing (she was born in 1934) to her freewheeling days (essentially every day of her life after the age of seventeen) in New York City. She’s absolutely fearless in a fear-filled time for any single woman, writing her poetry at a near-constant clip in any place she can, which of course takes her to wonderful, hilarious encounters with William Burroughs, Charlie Parker, Audre Lorde, and a host of other culture-shifting characters. I’m a sucker for any wild memoir, but I mean it when I say that her way with words is on an entirely different level. Every paragraph is a treat, and at 400+ thick pages, there sure are a lot of them. I was fascinated and gutted by her trauma-riddled childhood, and snickering out loud in her joyful descriptions of friends and co-conspirators as a young adult living in communal poverty. I like to consider myself a (gulp) “creative person” too, and her self-assuredness and devotion to her art, in the face of so much struggle and adversity, is sincerely inspirational, as is her ability to be so cheerful and hilarious about it. Plus, I’m a sucker for off-the-wall anecdotes, this scene merely one of probably hundreds the book has to offer:
All kinds of dancing. I once spent the night watching some Portuguese sailors engaged in some kind of male dance ritual that ended with a hop, a small jump, which landed the dancer on one foot, on just the sole of the foot, on top of a wine glass full of wine set on the floor. The object was to accomplish this maneuver without breaking the glass or spilling the wine. And to hold your position atop the glass, balanced on the sole of one foot, your arms in the air.
She’s referring to a basement club where she had also seen Cecil Taylor play sets where he’d stand up and circle his piano, walking across the sawdust-covered floor and playing a few clusters of notes each time he passed the keys. For most of my life, I understood the concept of NYC Cool to have first emerged with Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, but this book has widened that opening window of time significantly for me. Look, now she’s somehow in Italy with Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka on a makeshift stage surrounded by anarchists and fascists trying to grab the microphone, with Russian poets too scared to read (lest they be physically attacked) and Ginsberg unsure if he wanted to debate the issue of letting the Russians read earlier or simply go get high and scrounge up an orgy or two. Di Prima describes these scenes with love and candor, fully aware of how larger-than-life her world is, and with an extreme talent for placing the reader there as well. It’s probably ironic on some level that I’m loving her memoir without ever having read her poetry (similar to someone loving Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries without having heard a note of Mötley Crüe), but you know what? I’ve got her poetry book Loba on inter-library loan request right now, and I cannot wait.
I’m sincerely curious; I really don’t know!
Probably terribly, I’m sad to say.
Then again, she might actually understand them so well and without the need for any outside explanation. Sure, she was born into a world where simply being a lesbian in the United States was a punishable crime, but if there’s one thing this book has taught me it’s to never underestimate Diane di Prima.