The Awakener is Helen Weaver's long awaited memoir of her
adventures with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, and
other wild characters from the New York City of the fifties and
sixties. The sheltered but rebellious daughter of bookish
Midwestern parents, Weaver survived a repressive upbringing in
the wealthy suburbs of sdale and an early divorce to land in
Greenwich Village just in time for the birth of rock 'n' rolland
the counterculture movement known as the Beat Generation. Shortly
after her arrival Kerouac, Ginsberg, and companyold friends of
her roommatearrive on their doorstep after a non-stop drive from
Mexico. Weaver and Kerouac fall in love on , and Kerouac
moves in.
"
[Weaver] paints a romantic picture of Greenwich Village in the
1950s and '60s, when she worked in publishing and hung out with
Allen Ginsberg and the poet Richard Howard and was wild and
loose, getting high and falling into bed almost immediately with
her crushes, including Lenny Bruce
Her descriptions of the
Village are evocative, recalling a time when she wore 'long
skirts, Capezio ballet shoes and black stockings,' and used to
'sit in the Bagatelle and have sweet vermouth on the rocks with a
twist of lemon.' Early on, she quotes Pasternak: 'You in others:
this is your soul.' Kerouac's soul lives on through many
peopleJoyce Johnson, for onebut few have been as adept as
Weaver at capturing both him and the New York bohemia of the
time. He was lucky to have met her."Tara McKelvey, The New York
Times Book Review
There is a tendency for memoirs written by women about The Great
Man to be self-abnegating exercises in a kind of inverted
narcissismthe author seeking to prove her worth as muse, as
consort, as chosen one. Not so with Helen Weaver’s beautiful,
plainspoken elegy for her time spent with Jack Kerouac, who
suddenly appeared at her door in the West Village one white,
frosty morning with Allen Ginsberg, who knew Weaver’s roommate,
in tow."New York Post
"Helen Weaver’s book was a revelation to me!
This is the most
graphic, honest, shameless, and moving documentary of what the
newly liberated women in cities got up tohow they lived, loved,
and created. Who knew? It is time they did! And here’s
how."Carolyn Cassady
"Weaver recreates the excitement of a time when things were
radically changing and shows us what it was like living with an
eccentric genius at the turning point of his life. Eventually she
asks Jack to leave but they remain friends, and over the years
her respect for his writing grows even as Kerouac's reputation
undergoes a gradual transition from enfant terrible to American
icon. She comes to realize that by writing On the Road he woke
America upalong with herfrom the long dream of the fifties. And
the Buddhist philosophy that once struck her as Jack's excuse for
doing whatever he liked because 'nothing is real, it's all a
dream' eventually becomes her own."
"Helen Weaver's memoir is a riveting account of her love affair
and friendship with Jack Kerouac. She is both clear-eyed and
passionate about him, and writes with truly amazing grace."Ann
Charters
Helen Weaver has translated over fifty books from the French of
which one, Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux ) was a Finalist for the National Book Award in
translation in 1976. She is co-author and general editor of the
Larousse Enyclopedia of Astrology and author of The Daisy Sutra,
a book on animal communication. She lives in Kingston, New York.
- Used Book in Good Condition.