10 Laid-back Islands without Cars
Islands without cars can be the perfect car-free holiday destination, offering a relaxed and laid-back atmosphere. Clear from traffic jams, parking fees or the struggle to find a free parking space these islands can be explored on foot or by bicycle. But with over 500 million cars in this world finding a car-free island is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Furthermore islands in this list should be laid-back (this excludes Venice) and have at least a small population and some facilities (this excludes all uninhabited islands).
10Little Corn Island
Nicaragua, Info & Images
photo: Sean94112
Little Corn Island is the smaller of the two Corn Islands that lie about 70 km east off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The island was originally colonized by the British, and most native islanders have more in common culturally with other English-speaking Caribbean islands than they do with the mainland of Nicaragua. Without roads and motorized vehicles the only option to get around the island is by walking. The surrounding coral reefs make it a popular destination for scuba diving and snorkeling.
9Rottnest Island
Australia, Info & Images
photo: Mark
Rottnest Island is located off the coast of Western Australia near the city of Perth. The island was inhabited by Aboriginal people from approximately 30,000 years ago, until rising sea levels separated the island from the mainland. When the Dutch explored the island in the 17th century the island was uninhabited. Today the island is a popular tourist destination. Activities include swimming, snorkeling, fishing, surfing, diving and cycling round the 11km long island. Cars are not permitted although there are a few tourist busses. Just don’t time your visit with the annual school leavers who come to Rottnest Island en masse.
8Kadavu
Fiji, Info & Images
photo: Seth Bokelman
Kadavu is the fourth largest island in Fiji and has about 10,000 inhabitants. Some of the natural resources of Kadavu include the mountainous jungles and waterfalls, bays fringed by coral reefs and a mangrove forest that provide habitat to a host of wild life and birds, including the Kadavu musk parrot. The untouched and natural state of the island makes it ideal for a remote vacation destination. There are very few roads on Kadavu and the main mode of transportation include boat taxis and ferries.
7Hydra
Greece, Info & Images
photo: StefanosP
Hydra is one of the Saronic Islands of Greece separated from the Peloponnese by narrow strip of water. The island is deservedly one of the most popular day-trip destinations from Athens. The port of Hydra has a scenic location in a deep harbor, with whitewashed houses rising on the hills on both sides from an azure blue sea. Motorized transportation is forbidden on Hydra. The town center is small enough to get around on foot while donkeys, bicycles, and water taxis provide public transportation to the rest of the island.
6Lamu Island
Kenya, Info & Images
photo: Cessna 206
Lamu Island is a part of the Lamu Archipelago of Kenya. Lamu Old Town, the main town on the island, is one of the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlements in East Africa. Built in coral stone and mangrove timber, the town features inner courtyards, verandas, and elaborately carved wooden doors. There are no roads on the island, just alleyways and footpaths, and therefore, there are few motorized vehicles on the island. Residents move about on foot or by boat, and donkeys are used to transport goods and materials.
5Caye Caulker
Belize, Info & Images
photo: originalgrammatique
Caye Caulker is a small coral island off the coast of Belize in the Caribbean Sea and is accessible by high-speed water taxi or small plane. In recent years the island has become a popular destination for backpackers and other tourists for its (relatively) cheap prices, laid-back vibe, and abundance of restaurants and bars. The main mode of transport on the island is simply walking. The paths are well defined, and crossing the island takes about 20 minutes. Bicycles and golf carts can also be rented.
4Perhentian Islands
Malaysia, Info & Images
photo: Viktor Kaposi
The Perhentian Islands lay off the coast of northeastern Malaysia not far from the Thai border. The two main islands are Perhentian Besar (“Big Perhentian”) and Perhentian Kecil (“Small Perhentian”). Both the islands have palm-fringed white sandy beaches and turquoise blue sea. Scuba-diving, snorkeling, and swimming are the most popular tourist activities here. On most beaches, the water is shallow with lots of rays, cuttlefish and parrotfish. Aside from walking, the only means of transport are water taxis.
3La Digue
Seychelles, Info & Images
photo: Olivier Cochard-Labbé
La Digue is one of the smaller islands of the Seychelles. It has a population of about 2,000 people, who mostly live in the west coast village of La Passe, which is linked by ferry to the islands of Praslin and Mahé. A popular way to get around the island is by bicycle. A great cycle excursion is to L’Anse Source D’Argent, one of the world’s top beaches.
2Gili Islands
Indonesia, Info & Images
photo: yeowatzup
Lombok’s most popular tourist destination, the Gili Islands are an archipelago of three small islands: Gili Trawangan, Gili Meno and Gili Air. The islands are very relaxed and laid-back, with countless little beachside cafes still playing reggae and no cars or motorbikes to disturb the peace. Bikes are available for rent and the main tracks are good enough for riding, at least on Gili Trawangan. The islands however are only a few miles in diameter and can just be walked instead.
Note that the name “Gili Islands” is rather redundant as gili simply means “small island” in Sasak and there are many other islands around the coast of Lombok with Gili in their names.
1Ko Phi Phi
Thailand, Info & Images
photo: Hector Hurtado
Ko Phi Phi is a small archipelago in the Krabi Province in Southern Thailand. Ko Phi Phi Don is the largest island of the group, and is the only island with permanent inhabitants while the smaller Ko Phi Phi Leh is very popular as a beach or dive excursion. There are no cars or motorbikes on the island so transport on the island is mostly on foot. Longtail boats can be chartered which take you to beaches on the island that can’t be reached by foot.
EU foreign policy across Arab world faces upheaval
The European Union has long feared popular Islamist revolutions on the Mediterranean, preferring undemocratic stability. But Tunisia’s secular uprising has forced Europe to rethink its support for friendly dictators.
The French government was embarrassed this week. It was forced to admit that it had backed the wrong horse in Tunisia in the violent upheaval that ended with the removal of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Outrage was focussed on Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who publicly offered Ben Ali “the world-renowned know-how of France’s security forces” three days before he fled the country. He was subsequently refused refuge in France before being taken in by Saudi Arabia.
Alliot-Marie’s morally dubious offer outraged not only political opponents, but also members of the French government. French magazine Canard Enchaine quoted Prime Minister Francois Fillon calling his colleague “totally mad,” while President Nicolas Sarkozy grumbled, “These are statements that weakened France’s position.”
Ben Ali used to be a friend to France, now he’s a pariah
Sarkozy has good reason not to be too tough on his foreign minister. On a visit to Tunisia back in 2008, he was full of praise for his host. Europe was led to believe that Ben Ali was a changed man: “Nowadays freedom is expanding in Tunisia,” the diplomatic president said. After all, “How could I visit a country as a friend and then appoint myself as an advisor?”
Alliot-Marie defended her misguided offer afterwards: “Let’s be honest: We were all – politicians, diplomats and researchers, journalists – surprised by the Jasmine Revolution (Tunisia’s uprising – ed.),” she said.
Surprise and confusion
This is certainly true, and Thomas Klau, head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), is inclined to forgive the foreign minister’s statement as a poorly-timed faux pas.
“She’s new to the office, and it was seen by many in Paris as an indication that she hasn’t quite mastered all the skills of a foreign minister,” he told Deutsche Welle.
In fact, Klau points out that Alliot-Marie’s offer merely embodied the position of the Sarkozy government before the revolution. Not just France, but the whole of the EU and the US: “I think the unspoken consensus in the EU was that it was better in the Arab world to have an authoritarian regime than a potentially unstable democracy.”
Other foreign ministers were more skilled at adapting to the rapidly changing situation in Tunisia than their French counterpart, leaving Alliot-Marie out in the cold as the only one who revealed Europe’s anti-democratic bias in Arab states.
Ben Judah, policy fellow in London’s ECFR office, told Deutsche Welle, “We had this belief that supporting moderate, anti-Islamist regimes with trade was actually a guarantor of stability. I think that’s been shown to be absent. What a regime needs to be truly stable is legitimacy, which Ben Ali didn’t have.”
The problem with democracy is that it is messy and difficult to control. “We’ve seen the difficulties that the electoral success of Hezbollah has raised for western politics in the Middle East,” says Klau. “It’s easy to call for free elections, but if these elections deliver a government that is actively hostile to legitimate European interests like security, then that creates a serious problem.”
The new Central America?
Some pundits have compared the EU’s policy in the Arab states to that of the US’s much-maligned foreign policy in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, where democratic movements were suppressed in favor of stable, anti-communist dictators. The EU’s fear of Islamist risings in countries like Tunisia, Libya and Egypt led it to ignore human rights records and sustain bloody and corrupt regimes.
Europe needs to rethink its ideas about what causes instability in the Arab world
But the fall of Ben Ali has changed the game. “This confronts the EU with a new situation,” says Klau. “They will have to develop a new set of answers, because clearly the old line isn’t good enough anymore.”
It is the secular nature of the Tunisian revolution that has taken the EU by surprise. “We expected revolutions in some of these countries, but when it happened, it wasn’t a revolution led by Islamists,” says Judah. “It was led by young, secular, educated men who wanted visas and better job opportunities. We weren’t correctly identifying what were the sources of instability, and what parts of society were disgruntled.”
For all of Tunisia’s status as a package holiday resort for Europeans and its economic growth, the wealth was clearly not reaching the well-educated population. People were desperate for food. “What has toppled this regime is actually the rise in commodity prices,” says Judah. “Commodity prices are soaring right now – the price of bread, oil, coffee and so on. This is actually a far greater danger to the regime’s survival than Islamism. We need to work out a policy that looks at the link between instability and commodity prices.”
Dominos like in Eastern Europe?
But though there are similar situations in Egypt and Libya, the fear that keeps other Middle Eastern dictators awake at night is not so likely to come about. “Politics in the Arab world is local,” says Klau. “Political and economic conditions are very different from one country to the other, so I would be surprised if we saw the kind of domino effect we saw in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the collapse of Soviet control.”
“But on the other hand, Tunisia will certainly serve as an inspiration for others in the region. It won’t be so much a domino effect, but a potential trend that might materialize in some countries and not in others.”
Human rights court slams EU asylum policy as inhumane
In a landmark ruling the European Court for Human Rights has criticized the EU’s asylum policy. It said forcing refugees to apply for asylum in the country of their entry into the EU was inhumane.
The European Court for Human Rights on Friday ruled illegal the deportation of an asylum seeker from Belgium to Greece.
The Afghan national first entered the European Union in Greece but then traveled to Belgium to apply for asylum there. Under current EU regulations, asylum applications must be processed in the country of entry into the 27-nation bloc.
Yet the judges at Europe’s top human rights court said that the appalling conditions in Greek refugee camps were inhumane and humiliating – and most importantly that Belgium was aware of those conditions but still sent the Afghan back.
The court ruling could mean that the European Union will have to rethink its entire asylum policy.
“This is a historic moment for the protection of Human Rights,” Marei Pelzer of rights group ProAsyl told Deutsche Welle.
“The ruling will have fundamental consequences in so far as the EU can not simply pretend that the situation with regards to asylum seekers is the same in all EU member states. And it’s crucial that refugees should not be forced to stay in Greece just because Greece happens to be the country where most of them arrive.”
Almost 90 percent of all illegal border crossings into the EU take place via Greece. The country has repeatedly come under fire for appalling living conditions in its refugee camps.
Human rights groups have long been calling for a more coherent EU policy that would make all member countries responsible for asylum cases in the same way.
Appalling conditions in Greece
Refugees arrive in Greece across the sea or via the border with Turkey
The circumstances and procedures that refugees are exposed to in Greece are the worst in Europe, according to a recent report on asylum seekers by rights group Amnesty International.
The European Commission has also already proposed a reform to the current regulation in an effort to take some of the pressure off countries such as Greece, Italy and Malta, which see the main influx of refugees from outside the EU.
Germany has so far rejected the Commission’s proposals for reform yet rights groups hope that the Strasbourg ruling will have Berlin rethink its position. But Reinhard Grindel, member of parliament for Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democrats insists the solution to the problem in Greece has to be fixed by Athens rather than by watering down EU regulations.
“All EU member states guarantee the international human rights standards,” he told Deutsche Welle. “We do have one problem case, and that’s Greece. However, what this means is not that we have to change EU rules but rather that Athens has to get its house in order.”
“For Germany a change to the current EU regulations would be a catastrophe,” he warned. “It would mean a flood of asylum seekers coming to Germany. And that’s something that everyone who now calls for changes of EU rules has to realize.”
And yet, to a certain extent, Germany has already changed its position. Berlin earlier this week announced that for one year it would stop sending back any refugees to Greece, because of what Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere described as “appalling conditions” for refugees there.
Britain, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have also stopped sending refugees back to Greece.
‘I never met anyone else like Jack Kerouac’
In the 1950s, Joyce Johnson was the girlfriend of the hottest novelist of the beat scene. But she was also an aspiring writer herself, trying to establish her own voice. She tells Laura Barton why she never could go on the road with the man who has overshadowed her life
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- Laura Barton
- The Guardian, Friday 12 October 2007
- Article history
It began at a restaurant counter on Eighth Avenue, on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg, he in a checked shirt, she in a red coat and lots of eyeshadow. Two years later, in 1958, it ended drunkenly, tearfully, outside a restaurant on a New York street corner. What happened in between, in the time that Joyce Johnson spent with Jack Kerouac, has come if not to dominate then certainly to colour Johnson’s life.
Fifty years after the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road, Johnson’s role as the author’s former girlfriend has almost overshadowed her own work. She is herself an accomplished writer who has published three novels: Come and Join the Dance, In the Night Cafe and Bad Connections; two memoirs: Minor Characters and Missing Men; and a collection of her letters to and from Kerouac: Door Wide Open. Her fiction and articles have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine. She has won the National Book Critics award and the O Henry award. And yet her work, like that of many other female artists and writers, has been ushered to the sidelines of the beat movement.
“I’m a 47-year-old woman with a permanent sense of impermanence,” Johnson writes on the final page of Minor Characters, and there is something about her today, now aged 72 and sitting in the pale light of her New York apartment, that is gauzy and impalpable, like a bathroom curtain. Minor Characters is the story of how the young Joyce Glassman (as Johnson was then known) turned her back on her safe, middle-class upbringing, embracing the bohemian culture of New York’s Greenwich Village; it is a story of an extraordinary period in cultural history, and also of friendships, untimely deaths, and illegal abortions in a small white room in Brooklyn. “Being in the middle of this new beat movement, it was the beginning of a big cultural shift,” she says, in a voice that is unexpectedly strong, “and being right there, that was an incredible experience. And Jack was an amazing person. Never met anyone like him.” Whether out of habit, or perhaps out of generosity to the listener, Johnson readily anchors much of her conversation with references to Kerouac.
The day in September 1957 that On the Road was published, Kerouac was staying with Johnson in her narrow-windowed apartment off 68th Street. At midnight, they headed to a newsstand at 66th Street and Broadway, to collect the first copy of the New York Times review, in which the critic Gilbert Millstein would proclaim it “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’, and whose principal avatar he is”.
As much as the review made Kerouac’s reputation as a writer, it also encouraged in him a degree of self-destructive behaviour as he attempted to live up to that role as “principal avatar” of the beats. “Following that [review] most of the attention he got was hostile, humiliating,” Johnson recalls. “It’s very hard to stand up to a barrage like that. Suddenly you become not only famous but notorious. And then to have all these people who expected a much more extroverted character as their leader, than Jack was.”
Kerouac relied increasingly on alcohol to fire him up; the problem was that neither the success nor the liquor helped his writing. He was attempting to write an account of his childhood, entitled Memory Babe. “But he was too demoralised by his experiences following the publication of On the Road, and by the increasing alcohol, to ever complete it,” Johnson says. “It was the first time that it happened to him, that he had to abandon a project. It was very upsetting to him.”
At the time of On the Road’s publication, Johnson had herself just received a handsome advance of $500 for her first novel, Come and Join the Dance. She had resigned from her job at a publishing house to concentrate on her writing, aiming to have the book completed in six months. “As a writer, I would live life to the hilt as my unacceptable self, just as Jack and Allen [Ginsberg] had done,” she had daydreamed while still in her office job. “I would make it my business to write about young women quite different from the ones portrayed on the pages of the New Yorker. I would write about furnished rooms and sex.” However, the sequence of events that followed the publication of On the Road stalled her progress. “It took me several years to finish the novel,” she says, “much longer than anticipated because my life was chaotic, and interrupted by people like Jack.”
For the time they were together, it seems Kerouac leaned heavily on Johnson; both before and after the hurly-burly that proceeded On the Road’s publication, she represented a rare fixed point in his life. “When I met him in the January of ’57, he had absolutely no idea what awaited him,” she says. “Because he’d suffered – he’d had a novel published in ’49, The Town and the City, and he’d written several other novels, including On the Road, and none of them had been published. And he’d lived an impoverished life, essentially the life of a homeless person. It’s all very romantic to go on the road, but it’s also rather terrible not to have a place of your own. And he was always sort of searching for a place he could be, but because of the way he was, he could never find that. He’d set off for a new destination imagining it was gonna be great, and then he’d get there and bad vibes would come, and the bad vibes were inside him, of course …”
Kerouac took, it seems, a similar attitude towards relationships. “Yes,” she nods, “I think he had a grass-is-greener idea about women. I also think he was very messed up about women because of his overly intense relationship with his mother. And in a way, I think, flitting from woman to woman was his way of staying faithful to his mother – no one was ever going to supplant her as the fixed figure in his life.” When Johnson and Kerouac finally split for good, it was after he had spent an evening drunkenly flirting with another woman right in front of her. “Choked with pain, I searched for the worst words I could think of. ‘You’re nothing but a big bag of wind!'” she writes in Minor Characters. “‘Unrequited love’s a bore!’ he shouted back. Enraged, we stared at each other, half-weeping, half-laughing. I rushed away, hoping he’d follow. But he didn’t.”
“You know,” she says now, “I always felt that, in his own way, flawed as it might have been, Jack loved me as much as he could. And I think our relationship was one of the best relationships that he had. But he couldn’t sustain a relationship, and I think I realised that even then. I had this sort of double-vision, even though I was quite young; if Jack had said, ‘Let’s get married!’, I definitely would have done it, but I also knew, deep down, this wasn’t for ever.”
In a funny way, though, it has been for ever. Johnson would go on to marry the artist Jim Johnson, who died in a motorcycle accident in the early 60s, and later another artist, Peter Pinchbeck, from whom she is divorced, and with whom she had a son, Daniel, also a writer. But it is still to Kerouac that the conversation always returns. “There are a lot of misconceptions about Jack floating around and I keep trying, trying to keep the record straight,” she says. “And then a new generation of people comes along and I find myself repeating myself.”
As much as Johnson’s story is one of the artistic advancements made by the beats, it is also a tale of emancipation. “In the late 1950s, young women – not very many at first – left home rather violently,” she writes in Minor Characters. “They too came from nice families, and their parents could never understand why the daughters they had raised so carefully suddenly chose precarious lives.” Johnson herself came from a nice New York family. She took piano lessons and went to stage school, later attending the prestigious Barnard College. Her parents despaired of how she chose to live her life, causing a rift that would never be healed. When her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, was published, she admits they found its contents “very painful” to read. “I wanted to write the real way that the girls I knew were living. And it was at a time that there was all this incredible anxiety about having sex, that was the great breakthrough and adventure for a girl – if you could dare to have sex outside your marriage. And so it was about a girl who was in her last week in college and feels that nothing real has ever happened to her, and she decides to lose her virginity. In the 1950s, young women did not write those books.” Even when it was published in 1962, there were “very peculiar reactions” from reviewers: “‘To think [that] a girl with a good college education at a fine institution like Barnard College would write a book like this … What is happening to our young people?'”
She draws her face into a look of soft resignaton. “There was this prudishness about women,” she continues. “In my day, if you went to college, that was considered good; you acquired some culture that would make you a more interesting and valuable wife. But the idea was that you would marry rather quickly.” Johnson herself pursued a career in publishing, its perceived gentility counterbalanced not only by her “unacceptable” beatnik lifestyle, but also by her own writing.
Sex, she repeats, was for her generation of young women “the great mysterious, important real experience, the turning point”. As adventures went, it was more readily accessible than travelling, for example. “Jack would talk to me about ‘Oh, the experience! You should go on the road like me.’ I couldn’t do that.” What would have happened if she had? “With a knapsack on the road? Nothing good. I mean, I was adventurous, yet kind of cautious and pragmatic, and I knew that I never wanted to find myself in a situation without money. I always knew I had to earn my way and not be at the mercy of other people because I had no money.” It was different for people such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, who were able to free-fall. “They were men! They didn’t have to worry about having sexually exploitative encounters.”
On a couple of occasions she almost joined Kerouac on his travels – in San Francisco and Mexico City – but those plans were thwarted when, inevitably, he moved on to the next destination. “So my adventure was staying here and being with Jack through this process [of On the Road’s success], but also being in New York – it was an incredible moment in New York, there were so many talented people, and everybody knew each other, everybody converged in a few blocks downtown, went to the same drinking places and the same parties. It was an amazingly rich period in New York.”
One of the constant strains in her relationship with Kerouac was his devotion to his mother, Gabrielle L’Evesque Kerouac. “He had this fantasy that he was going to withdraw from the world and be a hermit,” she says at one point, “but his hermitage was his home with his mother. Which was terrible for him in many ways, and she was very suspicious of all his friends, really isolated him from his most important relationships. And she certainly didn’t want any competition from other women.” Having fled the constraining influence of her own domineering mother, this puzzled Johnson. “Yes,” she says, “here I had broken away, and he was tied to her apron strings.”
When Johnson is writing memoirs – she has written a further book of memoirs named Missing Men, she relies on her tendency to regard herself as an observer more than a participator; even in the thick of the beat heyday, on the arm of Kerouac, in the kitchen of William Burroughs’ apartment, she always felt on the periphery. “It’s in my nature to be a watcher,” she says. “That was something I shared with Jack … [And in memoir] I’m looking for the truth of what happened – I don’t want to fictionalise it. I want to find out, what was it really? That’s what I get out of it. I make discoveries about the meaning of things that happened to me in the process of writing.” For the past 20 years, she has taught creative writing (though she bemoans the “professionalisation of writing” such courses can encourage), including a class on memoir, a genre that has become increasingly popular in recent years. “I think the stories told by memoirs are often very surprising, and shaggy, you know? Whereas stories told by novels, fictional stories, are often very predictable and conventional,” she says. “My own aim in writing a novel is to have some of that shagginess and memoir in it.”
Johnson’s style of writing differs greatly from that of Kerouac and the majority of beat writers, more in structure than in theme, and it took her many years to view herself as one of them. “Jack was always telling me, ‘First thought, best thought. Don’t revise!’ But I’m a big reviser. And at the time that I wrote that [first] novel, my big influence was Henry James. I liked the way that he got under the surface of things that people said and people did, that the real action was going on inside people’s heads. That taught me a lot.”
But unlike On the Road and the rest of Kerouac’s canon, unlike the work of Ginsberg and Burroughs and Gary Snyder, Johnson’s novels are now out of print – a situation that seems strangely to echo a passage from Minor Characters in which she recalls herself at 22, sitting black-clad in a beatnik bar in Greenwich Village: “The table in the exact centre of the universe, that midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in America that’s alive … As a female, she’s not quite a part of this convergence. A fact she ignores, sitting by in her excitement as the voices of the men, always the men, passionately rise and fall.”
“What has been frustrating to me is that the people who know my work seem to remember it only in the context of my writing about Jack,” she says today with a flicker of that same fierce independence that first led the young Joyce Glassman to head down to the Village all those years ago, that took her to that restaurant counter in her red dress, and that let her walk away from the man she loved that night in 1958. “But I have other books,” she says defiantly. “And all of my books have been very well reviewed. I’d like to establish my reputation as a writer, apart from all that …” she smiles sweetly. “It’s getting a little late. But I’d like it to happen at some point.”
- Laura Barton
- The Guardian, Friday 12 October 2007
- Article history
It began at a restaurant counter on Eighth Avenue, on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg, he in a checked shirt, she in a red coat and lots of eyeshadow. Two years later, in 1958, it ended drunkenly, tearfully, outside a restaurant on a New York street corner. What happened in between, in the time that Joyce Johnson spent with Jack Kerouac, has come if not to dominate then certainly to colour Johnson’s life.
Fifty years after the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road, Johnson’s role as the author’s former girlfriend has almost overshadowed her own work. She is herself an accomplished writer who has published three novels: Come and Join the Dance, In the Night Cafe and Bad Connections; two memoirs: Minor Characters and Missing Men; and a collection of her letters to and from Kerouac: Door Wide Open. Her fiction and articles have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine. She has won the National Book Critics award and the O Henry award. And yet her work, like that of many other female artists and writers, has been ushered to the sidelines of the beat movement.
“I’m a 47-year-old woman with a permanent sense of impermanence,” Johnson writes on the final page of Minor Characters, and there is something about her today, now aged 72 and sitting in the pale light of her New York apartment, that is gauzy and impalpable, like a bathroom curtain. Minor Characters is the story of how the young Joyce Glassman (as Johnson was then known) turned her back on her safe, middle-class upbringing, embracing the bohemian culture of New York’s Greenwich Village; it is a story of an extraordinary period in cultural history, and also of friendships, untimely deaths, and illegal abortions in a small white room in Brooklyn. “Being in the middle of this new beat movement, it was the beginning of a big cultural shift,” she says, in a voice that is unexpectedly strong, “and being right there, that was an incredible experience. And Jack was an amazing person. Never met anyone like him.” Whether out of habit, or perhaps out of generosity to the listener, Johnson readily anchors much of her conversation with references to Kerouac.
The day in September 1957 that On the Road was published, Kerouac was staying with Johnson in her narrow-windowed apartment off 68th Street. At midnight, they headed to a newsstand at 66th Street and Broadway, to collect the first copy of the New York Times review, in which the critic Gilbert Millstein would proclaim it “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’, and whose principal avatar he is”.
As much as the review made Kerouac’s reputation as a writer, it also encouraged in him a degree of self-destructive behaviour as he attempted to live up to that role as “principal avatar” of the beats. “Following that [review] most of the attention he got was hostile, humiliating,” Johnson recalls. “It’s very hard to stand up to a barrage like that. Suddenly you become not only famous but notorious. And then to have all these people who expected a much more extroverted character as their leader, than Jack was.”
Kerouac relied increasingly on alcohol to fire him up; the problem was that neither the success nor the liquor helped his writing. He was attempting to write an account of his childhood, entitled Memory Babe. “But he was too demoralised by his experiences following the publication of On the Road, and by the increasing alcohol, to ever complete it,” Johnson says. “It was the first time that it happened to him, that he had to abandon a project. It was very upsetting to him.”
At the time of On the Road’s publication, Johnson had herself just received a handsome advance of $500 for her first novel, Come and Join the Dance. She had resigned from her job at a publishing house to concentrate on her writing, aiming to have the book completed in six months. “As a writer, I would live life to the hilt as my unacceptable self, just as Jack and Allen [Ginsberg] had done,” she had daydreamed while still in her office job. “I would make it my business to write about young women quite different from the ones portrayed on the pages of the New Yorker. I would write about furnished rooms and sex.” However, the sequence of events that followed the publication of On the Road stalled her progress. “It took me several years to finish the novel,” she says, “much longer than anticipated because my life was chaotic, and interrupted by people like Jack.”
For the time they were together, it seems Kerouac leaned heavily on Johnson; both before and after the hurly-burly that proceeded On the Road’s publication, she represented a rare fixed point in his life. “When I met him in the January of ’57, he had absolutely no idea what awaited him,” she says. “Because he’d suffered – he’d had a novel published in ’49, The Town and the City, and he’d written several other novels, including On the Road, and none of them had been published. And he’d lived an impoverished life, essentially the life of a homeless person. It’s all very romantic to go on the road, but it’s also rather terrible not to have a place of your own. And he was always sort of searching for a place he could be, but because of the way he was, he could never find that. He’d set off for a new destination imagining it was gonna be great, and then he’d get there and bad vibes would come, and the bad vibes were inside him, of course …”
Kerouac took, it seems, a similar attitude towards relationships. “Yes,” she nods, “I think he had a grass-is-greener idea about women. I also think he was very messed up about women because of his overly intense relationship with his mother. And in a way, I think, flitting from woman to woman was his way of staying faithful to his mother – no one was ever going to supplant her as the fixed figure in his life.” When Johnson and Kerouac finally split for good, it was after he had spent an evening drunkenly flirting with another woman right in front of her. “Choked with pain, I searched for the worst words I could think of. ‘You’re nothing but a big bag of wind!'” she writes in Minor Characters. “‘Unrequited love’s a bore!’ he shouted back. Enraged, we stared at each other, half-weeping, half-laughing. I rushed away, hoping he’d follow. But he didn’t.”
“You know,” she says now, “I always felt that, in his own way, flawed as it might have been, Jack loved me as much as he could. And I think our relationship was one of the best relationships that he had. But he couldn’t sustain a relationship, and I think I realised that even then. I had this sort of double-vision, even though I was quite young; if Jack had said, ‘Let’s get married!’, I definitely would have done it, but I also knew, deep down, this wasn’t for ever.”
In a funny way, though, it has been for ever. Johnson would go on to marry the artist Jim Johnson, who died in a motorcycle accident in the early 60s, and later another artist, Peter Pinchbeck, from whom she is divorced, and with whom she had a son, Daniel, also a writer. But it is still to Kerouac that the conversation always returns. “There are a lot of misconceptions about Jack floating around and I keep trying, trying to keep the record straight,” she says. “And then a new generation of people comes along and I find myself repeating myself.”
As much as Johnson’s story is one of the artistic advancements made by the beats, it is also a tale of emancipation. “In the late 1950s, young women – not very many at first – left home rather violently,” she writes in Minor Characters. “They too came from nice families, and their parents could never understand why the daughters they had raised so carefully suddenly chose precarious lives.” Johnson herself came from a nice New York family. She took piano lessons and went to stage school, later attending the prestigious Barnard College. Her parents despaired of how she chose to live her life, causing a rift that would never be healed. When her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, was published, she admits they found its contents “very painful” to read. “I wanted to write the real way that the girls I knew were living. And it was at a time that there was all this incredible anxiety about having sex, that was the great breakthrough and adventure for a girl – if you could dare to have sex outside your marriage. And so it was about a girl who was in her last week in college and feels that nothing real has ever happened to her, and she decides to lose her virginity. In the 1950s, young women did not write those books.” Even when it was published in 1962, there were “very peculiar reactions” from reviewers: “‘To think [that] a girl with a good college education at a fine institution like Barnard College would write a book like this … What is happening to our young people?'”
She draws her face into a look of soft resignaton. “There was this prudishness about women,” she continues. “In my day, if you went to college, that was considered good; you acquired some culture that would make you a more interesting and valuable wife. But the idea was that you would marry rather quickly.” Johnson herself pursued a career in publishing, its perceived gentility counterbalanced not only by her “unacceptable” beatnik lifestyle, but also by her own writing.
Sex, she repeats, was for her generation of young women “the great mysterious, important real experience, the turning point”. As adventures went, it was more readily accessible than travelling, for example. “Jack would talk to me about ‘Oh, the experience! You should go on the road like me.’ I couldn’t do that.” What would have happened if she had? “With a knapsack on the road? Nothing good. I mean, I was adventurous, yet kind of cautious and pragmatic, and I knew that I never wanted to find myself in a situation without money. I always knew I had to earn my way and not be at the mercy of other people because I had no money.” It was different for people such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, who were able to free-fall. “They were men! They didn’t have to worry about having sexually exploitative encounters.”
On a couple of occasions she almost joined Kerouac on his travels – in San Francisco and Mexico City – but those plans were thwarted when, inevitably, he moved on to the next destination. “So my adventure was staying here and being with Jack through this process [of On the Road’s success], but also being in New York – it was an incredible moment in New York, there were so many talented people, and everybody knew each other, everybody converged in a few blocks downtown, went to the same drinking places and the same parties. It was an amazingly rich period in New York.”
One of the constant strains in her relationship with Kerouac was his devotion to his mother, Gabrielle L’Evesque Kerouac. “He had this fantasy that he was going to withdraw from the world and be a hermit,” she says at one point, “but his hermitage was his home with his mother. Which was terrible for him in many ways, and she was very suspicious of all his friends, really isolated him from his most important relationships. And she certainly didn’t want any competition from other women.” Having fled the constraining influence of her own domineering mother, this puzzled Johnson. “Yes,” she says, “here I had broken away, and he was tied to her apron strings.”
When Johnson is writing memoirs – she has written a further book of memoirs named Missing Men, she relies on her tendency to regard herself as an observer more than a participator; even in the thick of the beat heyday, on the arm of Kerouac, in the kitchen of William Burroughs’ apartment, she always felt on the periphery. “It’s in my nature to be a watcher,” she says. “That was something I shared with Jack … [And in memoir] I’m looking for the truth of what happened – I don’t want to fictionalise it. I want to find out, what was it really? That’s what I get out of it. I make discoveries about the meaning of things that happened to me in the process of writing.” For the past 20 years, she has taught creative writing (though she bemoans the “professionalisation of writing” such courses can encourage), including a class on memoir, a genre that has become increasingly popular in recent years. “I think the stories told by memoirs are often very surprising, and shaggy, you know? Whereas stories told by novels, fictional stories, are often very predictable and conventional,” she says. “My own aim in writing a novel is to have some of that shagginess and memoir in it.”
Johnson’s style of writing differs greatly from that of Kerouac and the majority of beat writers, more in structure than in theme, and it took her many years to view herself as one of them. “Jack was always telling me, ‘First thought, best thought. Don’t revise!’ But I’m a big reviser. And at the time that I wrote that [first] novel, my big influence was Henry James. I liked the way that he got under the surface of things that people said and people did, that the real action was going on inside people’s heads. That taught me a lot.”
But unlike On the Road and the rest of Kerouac’s canon, unlike the work of Ginsberg and Burroughs and Gary Snyder, Johnson’s novels are now out of print – a situation that seems strangely to echo a passage from Minor Characters in which she recalls herself at 22, sitting black-clad in a beatnik bar in Greenwich Village: “The table in the exact centre of the universe, that midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in America that’s alive … As a female, she’s not quite a part of this convergence. A fact she ignores, sitting by in her excitement as the voices of the men, always the men, passionately rise and fall.”
“What has been frustrating to me is that the people who know my work seem to remember it only in the context of my writing about Jack,” she says today with a flicker of that same fierce independence that first led the young Joyce Glassman to head down to the Village all those years ago, that took her to that restaurant counter in her red dress, and that let her walk away from the man she loved that night in 1958. “But I have other books,” she says defiantly. “And all of my books have been very well reviewed. I’d like to establish my reputation as a writer, apart from all that …” she smiles sweetly. “It’s getting a little late. But I’d like it to happen at some point.”
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