Breaking the Rule of Cool Nancy M. Grace and Ronna C. Johnson University Press of Mississippi ISBN 1-57806-654-9 paper, 224 pages $20 (US)

As everyone suffering from a serious book addiction will confirm, our innate inability to say “No!” to tempting books puts us at much greater risk of earthquake injury than non-readers. The most obvious danger comes from the unsecured bookcases lining each and every wall.

But an unmonitored book cairn offers yet another threat: each new acquisition follows swiftly on the others until, before you know it, your bedside stack of unread books needs a pair of flying book-buttresses for stability. Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Nancy Grace and Ronna Johnson) has been sitting in my own unsteady bedside stack for more months than I’d like to admit, gradually making its way back to the top stratum.

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was an important book for me at a certain stage in my past. I became quite evangelical about it during my first solo trip to Europe in 1980, and imagined a return pilgrimage where I would sow copies of it to fellow hostellers from France to Greece: a kind of Johnny Appleseed of books. After returning home I bought a hardcover copy as a thank-you to George Whitman: an addition to the reading library at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, where George had allowed me to stay for several magical weeks of my wandering. Not surprisingly the book did not last long on those shelves, with so many itinerant book-starved browsers passing through; I’ve often wondered where that copy might have migrated to in the intervening years.

What I am leading to is this: in the throes of my Beat enthusiasm I could not imagine that anyone would fail to share my fervor about Jack Kerouac and the gang; it was a surprise and a disappointment to me when a female friend reported that she’d found On the Road to be misogynist. As of course it was. The female characters are faint shadows of their male counterparts, often abandoned without much afterthought whenever the open road beckons once again. You can argue that this was typical of the times: the conservative 1950s in America. But since that was exactly what the Beats were rebelling against, I wish (with hindsight) that they’d challenged the 1950s gender roles as well.

Breaking the Rule of Cool (from the University Press of Mississippi) is a welcome addition to the small body of work which gives voice to those who have too long been relegated to the role of anonymous secondary characters in the work of the big Beat troika (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs). While the book suffers from some careless proofreading (Virginia Woolf is repeatedly “Woolfe”, as an example) and is lumbered with a pair of overly-academic essays to start it off, the interviews themselves are fascinating.

Ronna Johnson: Do you think of those writers as precursors to feminism?
Ann Charters: No, no, I really don’t. It’s because the ones who were precursors to feminism just wouldn’t have been attracted to these guys.

The authors identify three “generations” of Beat and Beat-influenced female writers, the first generation represented by ruth weiss, the second by Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Ann Charters, Joanne Kyger, and Bonnie Bremser, and the third by Janine Pommy Vega and Anne Waldman. There are omissions: archival interviews (if such exist) from Lenore Kandel and Edie Kerouac-Parker would have been excellent additions, and surely our own Sheri-D Wilson deserves to be included.

But this is nit-picking. If you’re seriously interested in the Beats then you’ll want to add this volume to your library, alongside Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation, Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman and a few key others.