For one thing, people of all description, outside ‘respectable’ circles, were forced then to live under colossal constraints in innumerable ways. There were significant differences, of course, with the Beat poet Gregory Corso later pointing out, “In the 50s, if you were male, you could be a rebel, but if you were female, your families had you locked up.” This was true – Cowen would be institutionalised and, after she died, her parents would arrange for her writings to be disposed of, in order to erase the truth and pain of who she had been – but it was not the whole truth. They were similar in ways, Cowen and Reed – young, hungry intellectuals from well-off Jewish backgrounds, socially awkward, bisexual, adventurous in terms of hedonistic pleasures and transgressive culture, and both facing immense familial and societal pressure to conform. She would also go on to throw herself through the seventh-floor window of her parents’ high-rise apartment at the age of 28.Īround the time Cowen was being driven out of New York, across the city on Long Island, a teenage Lou Reed was seeking refuge (“despite all the computations…”) in the doo-wop, R&B and rock & roll he heard on the radio, singing and playing along on a cheap guitar he’d had since he was nine.
Elise would go on to become one of the most intriguing and forgotten of the Beat Generation poets. Shaken, she phoned her father who replied, “This will kill your mother.” In her memoir Minor Characters, her friend Joyce Johnson recalled Cowen leaving for San Francisco not long after the conversation. When she asked why, a colleague advised her: “Why don’t you leave like a good girl?” Cowen persisted, demanding an explanation, before the cops arrived and manhandled her off the premises, punching her in the stomach on the way out.
In 1956, Elise Cowen turned up for her job as a typist at a New York broadcaster, only to be told she’d been sacked.
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