Welcome to Helen Weaver’s Web
I should say, welcome to her new web. The old one, daisysutra.com, crashed in June, 2009 with no survivors. But here you can still read all about my self-published book, The Daisy Sutra: Conversations with my Dog, and even order signed copies.
But my big news is the publication by City Lights Books in November, 2009 of The Awakener: a Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties. The Awakener is an intimate look at my life and times with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, and some other wild characters I met in Greenwich Village in the fifties and sixties. For reactions of Kerouac fans and scholars note the sidebar on the right. To read a couple of excerpts from the book, go to Excerpts.
To buy directly from the publisher at a 30% discount, go to City Lights Catalog.
Even though I’m pushing eighty, The Awakener will actually be the first of my books to be published by a “real” publisher. With all due respect to self-publishers–we work like dogs! –not having to pay the printer is a whole different ball game, and worth celebrating.
When I say “the first of my books,” I’m not counting the fifty or so books I’ve translated from the French. Some of those were big jobs–one even got nominated for the National Book Award –and I’m proud of them; but I can’t say that they were mine, all mine.
But after nineteen years in the works, The Awakener is mine, all mine, and its publication feels very much like a dream.
Jack Kerouac used to tell me, “Nothing is real. It’s all a dream.”
Back in the fifties, I didn’t believe him. I was twenty-five –what did I know?
But now that I’m older, I know that Jack was right.
Welcome to my dream!
Reviews
Firsthand witness to the beat literary movement, Weaver (Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings) pays homage to the man and the writer Jack Kerouac, whom she met and fell in love with in 1956. Befriending Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and comic Lenny Bruce, she makes these iconic counterculture figures tangible and captures New York’s Greenwich Village of the ’50s and ’60s. The memoir reveals the author’s own awakening—from discovering rock and roll through her personal sexual revolution to Buddhism. A lover of words and language, Weaver—immortalized in Kerouac’s Desolation Angels as Ruth Heaper—writes this book “as an act of atonement” to Kerouac: “I rejected him for the same reason America rejected him: he woke us up in the middle of the night in the long dream of the fifties. He interfered with our sleep.” She moves from translator to writer, but states she is “uncertain whether it was the story of my own life or the story of the remarkable people I had known.” Ultimately, it’s both. Photos.
—Publishers Weekly
In the latest in a long line of kiss-and-tell memoirs about Jack Kerouac, Weaver, translator of over fifty books from the French, chronicles her brief love affair with the author against the backdrop of the 1950s in Greenwich Village. She works in publishing, undergoes psychoanalysis, and becomes part of a literary circle that includes Allen Ginsberg, Richard Howard, and Dan Wakefield. Unlike Kerouac, she is swept into the cultural revolution of the 1960s, embracing New Age ideas like Native American spirituality, goddess worship, witchcraft, and astrology. Weaver writes in a clear, straightforward style, candidly discussing her feelings about Kerouac and others, including her roommate Helen Elliott and her rival for Kerouac s affection, Joyce Johnson. Her analysis of Kerouac’s life, work, and reputation is intelligent and on target. In the end, Weaver regrets that her own rejection of Kerouac paralleled that of a literary establishment that only came to appreciate him after his death. Verdict: Readers interested in the role of women in the Beat Generation will enjoy this book alongside earlier works like Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters and Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road.—Library Journal
