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The Awakener: A Memoir of Jack Kerouac and the Fifties
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 Scarsdale and an early divorce to land in Greenwich Village just in time for the birth of rock 'n' roll-and the counterculture movement known as the Beat Generation. Shortly after her arrival Kerouac, Ginsberg, and company-old friends of her roommate-arrive on their doorstep after a non-stop drive from Mexico. Weaver and Kerouac fall in love on sight, 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 'You in this is your soul.' Kerouac's soul lives on through many people-Joyce Johnson, for one-but 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 narcissism-the 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 to-how 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 up-along with her-from 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 Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux ) was a Finalist for the National Book Award in translation in 1976.
" … 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 'You in this is your soul.' Kerouac's soul lives on through many people-Joyce Johnson, for one-but 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 narcissism-the 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 to-how 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 up-along with her-from 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 Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux ) was a Finalist for the National Book Award in translation in 1976.
266 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 2009
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March 13, 2023
Helen Weaver And Jack Kerouac
A good deal of the extensive writing on Jack Kerouac (1922 -- 1969) has been done by the women in his life. In 1983, Joyce Johnson published a famous memoir, "Minor Characters" centering upon her relationship (as Joyce Glassman) with Kerouac from 1957- 1959, the years of his notoriety surrounding the publication of "On the Road". Johnson has recently published a biography of Kerouac's early life,"The Voice is All" which covers the years up to 1951.
After reading Johnson's books, I discovered Helen Weaver's "The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties" (2007). Weaver, (b. 1931) had a relationship with Kerouac just before Johnson, in late 1956 -- 1957. Weaver's memoir discusses her understandably icy early relationship with Johnson, which slowly turned to friendship late in the lives of both women. Weaver has had an eventful life in her own right. She became a translator of many important works in French, the best-known of which is her translation of Antoine Artaud, with Susan Sontag, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Weaver is also something of a famous writer on astrology, an interest she developed late in life. She discusses, but for good reasons does not emphasize, her astrological endeavors in her Kerouac memoir, which remains the book for which she will probably be best remembered.
In "The Awakener", Weaver offers a reflective look at her life and of Kerouac's place in it. Although much of the book takes place later, it centers upon, as the subtitle indicates, a portrayal of bohemian life in the Greenwich Village of the 1950's with its music, art, cold-water flats, and young people trying to escape convention. Weaver herself was the product of educated, upper-middle class American life. Her family lived in Scarsdale, and her father was for many years the Director of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. (Weaver's father was at first shocked by his grown daughter's interest in astrology before becoming against his better judgment intrigued.) She was a precocious child who spent much time alone. Weaver portrays herself as rebelling against her family's conformity, 9 to 5 work ethic mentality, and especially sexual repression. After an unsuccessful short marriage following college, she settled in Greenwich Village, sexually experimented with both women and men, and worked for various publishing houses. She met a young woman named Helen Elliott who became her roommate and, interrupted by long quarrels and silences, life-long friend.
The two Helens were interested in rock and roll and psychoanalysis, both of which receive much attention in Weaver's memoir. In 1956, Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and the two Orlovsky brothers arrived at the Helens' door after a trip to Mexico looking for a place to crash.The young men had earlier been friends with Helen Elliott. Kerouac and Weaver quickly developed a relationship. Although she loved Kerouac, Weaver soon developed doubts about him due to what she understood of his Buddhism and his alcoholism, among other things. When a drunken Kerouac stormed into the apartment late one night with a friend, Weaver physically attacked him and ordered him to leave. That was essentially the end of the relationship. About a week after the breakup, Allen Ginsberg set up a blind date for Kerouac with Glassman. Kerouac avoided Weaver thereafter, although the two had lunch together and a reconciliation as friends in the early 1960's. When Kerouac tried to contact Weaver over the phone in the last sad years of his life, Weaver avoided him.
Looking back at the relationship from the passage of many years, Weaver tries to make amends. She writes:
"I asked Jack to leave not because my analyst told me to and not because of some proto-feminist declaration of independence on my part. 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."
Weaver ultimately comes to see Kerouac as her "Awakener" from her early life of conformity, denying and avoiding what she wanted from life, and sexual unresponsiveness. (She says she was unable to respond fully to a man until the mid 1960's.) In the years following her relationship with Kerouac, Weaver became involved briefly with Lenny Bruce and worked to assist Bruce's defense in the obscenity trial which left him broken and poor. She traveled to Europe before settling into her own path as a translator and a writer.
The latter chapters of her memoir describe her reconciliation with Kerouac after his death, as Weaver travels to Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, becomes involved in many scholarly and popular tributes to his memory, and rereads his books. Weaver describes the gradual rise in Kerouac's literary reputation, and she writes perceptively about his books, including "Dr. Sax", "Visions of Cody", and Kerouac's own biography of the Buddha, "Wake Up!". Late in her life, Weaver became highly sympathetic to Buddhism and the the understanding of it which Kerouac tried to express when they were together. She writes insightfully about Kerouac's and her own relationship to Buddhism:
"In his early enthusiasm for Buddhism and his eloquent transmission of its teachings he showed us a path he couldn't take himself. The bridge doesn't get to the other side: it remains suspended, a bridge for others to pass over."
Weaver has written a thoughtful portrayal of Kerouac for the many readers who remain interested in his writings and his times. The book is also an engaging autobiography, as Weaver comes to understand her life, her friends, her relationship with Kerouac, and to find a degree of peace with herself.
Robin Friedman
A good deal of the extensive writing on Jack Kerouac (1922 -- 1969) has been done by the women in his life. In 1983, Joyce Johnson published a famous memoir, "Minor Characters" centering upon her relationship (as Joyce Glassman) with Kerouac from 1957- 1959, the years of his notoriety surrounding the publication of "On the Road". Johnson has recently published a biography of Kerouac's early life,"The Voice is All" which covers the years up to 1951.
After reading Johnson's books, I discovered Helen Weaver's "The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties" (2007). Weaver, (b. 1931) had a relationship with Kerouac just before Johnson, in late 1956 -- 1957. Weaver's memoir discusses her understandably icy early relationship with Johnson, which slowly turned to friendship late in the lives of both women. Weaver has had an eventful life in her own right. She became a translator of many important works in French, the best-known of which is her translation of Antoine Artaud, with Susan Sontag, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Weaver is also something of a famous writer on astrology, an interest she developed late in life. She discusses, but for good reasons does not emphasize, her astrological endeavors in her Kerouac memoir, which remains the book for which she will probably be best remembered.
In "The Awakener", Weaver offers a reflective look at her life and of Kerouac's place in it. Although much of the book takes place later, it centers upon, as the subtitle indicates, a portrayal of bohemian life in the Greenwich Village of the 1950's with its music, art, cold-water flats, and young people trying to escape convention. Weaver herself was the product of educated, upper-middle class American life. Her family lived in Scarsdale, and her father was for many years the Director of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. (Weaver's father was at first shocked by his grown daughter's interest in astrology before becoming against his better judgment intrigued.) She was a precocious child who spent much time alone. Weaver portrays herself as rebelling against her family's conformity, 9 to 5 work ethic mentality, and especially sexual repression. After an unsuccessful short marriage following college, she settled in Greenwich Village, sexually experimented with both women and men, and worked for various publishing houses. She met a young woman named Helen Elliott who became her roommate and, interrupted by long quarrels and silences, life-long friend.
The two Helens were interested in rock and roll and psychoanalysis, both of which receive much attention in Weaver's memoir. In 1956, Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and the two Orlovsky brothers arrived at the Helens' door after a trip to Mexico looking for a place to crash.The young men had earlier been friends with Helen Elliott. Kerouac and Weaver quickly developed a relationship. Although she loved Kerouac, Weaver soon developed doubts about him due to what she understood of his Buddhism and his alcoholism, among other things. When a drunken Kerouac stormed into the apartment late one night with a friend, Weaver physically attacked him and ordered him to leave. That was essentially the end of the relationship. About a week after the breakup, Allen Ginsberg set up a blind date for Kerouac with Glassman. Kerouac avoided Weaver thereafter, although the two had lunch together and a reconciliation as friends in the early 1960's. When Kerouac tried to contact Weaver over the phone in the last sad years of his life, Weaver avoided him.
Looking back at the relationship from the passage of many years, Weaver tries to make amends. She writes:
"I asked Jack to leave not because my analyst told me to and not because of some proto-feminist declaration of independence on my part. 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."
Weaver ultimately comes to see Kerouac as her "Awakener" from her early life of conformity, denying and avoiding what she wanted from life, and sexual unresponsiveness. (She says she was unable to respond fully to a man until the mid 1960's.) In the years following her relationship with Kerouac, Weaver became involved briefly with Lenny Bruce and worked to assist Bruce's defense in the obscenity trial which left him broken and poor. She traveled to Europe before settling into her own path as a translator and a writer.
The latter chapters of her memoir describe her reconciliation with Kerouac after his death, as Weaver travels to Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, becomes involved in many scholarly and popular tributes to his memory, and rereads his books. Weaver describes the gradual rise in Kerouac's literary reputation, and she writes perceptively about his books, including "Dr. Sax", "Visions of Cody", and Kerouac's own biography of the Buddha, "Wake Up!". Late in her life, Weaver became highly sympathetic to Buddhism and the the understanding of it which Kerouac tried to express when they were together. She writes insightfully about Kerouac's and her own relationship to Buddhism:
"In his early enthusiasm for Buddhism and his eloquent transmission of its teachings he showed us a path he couldn't take himself. The bridge doesn't get to the other side: it remains suspended, a bridge for others to pass over."
Weaver has written a thoughtful portrayal of Kerouac for the many readers who remain interested in his writings and his times. The book is also an engaging autobiography, as Weaver comes to understand her life, her friends, her relationship with Kerouac, and to find a degree of peace with herself.
Robin Friedman
August 1, 2016
"In her book 'The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties', the translator and writer Helen Weaver provides a lush picture of her short, turbulent affair with the Beat writer that changed her life. In Weaver’s swirling memoir, readers will get a fresh perspective on Jack Kerouac and his magnetism as a man and writer."
-The Star-Ledger
"Through her insightful prose and piercing honesty, she manages to paint a universal face with this book, telling the story of many-a-man living at an invisible edge. If anything, Helen Weaver wrote this book for all these human shadows who hunger to be held (but who always come to break the embrace before it becomes another cage)."
—John Aiello, The Electric Review
"You won't read these stories anywhere else, and definitely not from someone with such an authentic voice....I am absolutely convinced that anyone with an interest in the beat generation or even the 50s and 60s in general will fall in love with The Awakener, and with Helen Weaver."
—Rick Dale, The Daily Beat
"The most recent book to join the body of literature by women who lived with and among the famous Beat writers is Helen Weaver’s The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties. . . . While Kerouac and the 1950s are a part of this book, they are not the entire book, or even its most riveting sections. . . . Parts of the book are indeed about Kerouac’s power and influence. However, there are significant, insightful portraits of other men, including Richard Howard, one of the most important translators of the past 60 or so years, who has brought Stendhal, Baudelaire, de Beauvoir, and Camus into English. Weaver also writes evocatively about Lenny Bruce, the comedian and social critic who was tried for obscenity—and convicted of obscenity, unlike Ginsberg and Burroughs. . . .
Her style in The Awakener is distinctly her own, as for example when she borrows from both Yiddish and the Beat argot and describes herself as 'a little shiksa chick.' She has a wry, deadpan sense of humor and sometimes sounds tongue-in-cheek. Candidly, she describes her physical ailments, her love affairs in New York and in Europe—including her orgasms—and her therapy in Freudian analysis. Her strength is in psychology: understanding her own motives and the motivations and the motives of Kerouac and Ginsberg."
—Jonah Raskin, The Beat Studies Association
"Firsthand witness to the beat literary movement, Weaver 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."
—Publishers Weekly
"Weaver discovered herself in the 1950s, with Kerouac and other artists like Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce, and although most Americans don't have an impressive list of famous friends, her story is our story; every twenty-something college graduate experiences the ecstasy of new ideas and profound perception that comes with real life. Whether our is in New York City or Nowhere, USA, Weaver's experience is comparable to all our experiences in this country--this is what makes The Awakener so readable and touching; these characters appear in every American's past."
—Meredith Boe, World Literature Today
-The Star-Ledger
"Through her insightful prose and piercing honesty, she manages to paint a universal face with this book, telling the story of many-a-man living at an invisible edge. If anything, Helen Weaver wrote this book for all these human shadows who hunger to be held (but who always come to break the embrace before it becomes another cage)."
—John Aiello, The Electric Review
"You won't read these stories anywhere else, and definitely not from someone with such an authentic voice....I am absolutely convinced that anyone with an interest in the beat generation or even the 50s and 60s in general will fall in love with The Awakener, and with Helen Weaver."
—Rick Dale, The Daily Beat
"The most recent book to join the body of literature by women who lived with and among the famous Beat writers is Helen Weaver’s The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties. . . . While Kerouac and the 1950s are a part of this book, they are not the entire book, or even its most riveting sections. . . . Parts of the book are indeed about Kerouac’s power and influence. However, there are significant, insightful portraits of other men, including Richard Howard, one of the most important translators of the past 60 or so years, who has brought Stendhal, Baudelaire, de Beauvoir, and Camus into English. Weaver also writes evocatively about Lenny Bruce, the comedian and social critic who was tried for obscenity—and convicted of obscenity, unlike Ginsberg and Burroughs. . . .
Her style in The Awakener is distinctly her own, as for example when she borrows from both Yiddish and the Beat argot and describes herself as 'a little shiksa chick.' She has a wry, deadpan sense of humor and sometimes sounds tongue-in-cheek. Candidly, she describes her physical ailments, her love affairs in New York and in Europe—including her orgasms—and her therapy in Freudian analysis. Her strength is in psychology: understanding her own motives and the motivations and the motives of Kerouac and Ginsberg."
—Jonah Raskin, The Beat Studies Association
"Firsthand witness to the beat literary movement, Weaver 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."
—Publishers Weekly
"Weaver discovered herself in the 1950s, with Kerouac and other artists like Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce, and although most Americans don't have an impressive list of famous friends, her story is our story; every twenty-something college graduate experiences the ecstasy of new ideas and profound perception that comes with real life. Whether our is in New York City or Nowhere, USA, Weaver's experience is comparable to all our experiences in this country--this is what makes The Awakener so readable and touching; these characters appear in every American's past."
—Meredith Boe, World Literature Today
January 20, 2012
Endearing and sort of pointless. Weaver had a love affair with Kerouac that lasted less than two months. She also slept with Lenny Bruce once. Boom! Memoir.
Okay, that's pretty harsh. She does a nice job of reflecting Greenwich Village in the fifties and early sixties through the eyes not of a famous writer or musician but a normal, social young person. She and her roommate, also named Helen, "hated nine-to-five jobs [she had one], bourgeois morality, the phone company, and most politicians." They were thrilled partakers of a cultural movement, but always struggling to keep in step, as evidenced by their attempted "Dictionary of Hip," itself a painfully unhip idea. Weaver's now an astrologer, and one gets the sense, reading [skimming] the Asrological Appendix that she attaches, including charts for her, the other Helen, Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, that this is what she REALLY wanted to write about, had she not needed to make concessions to her non-batshit readers.
Okay, that's pretty harsh. She does a nice job of reflecting Greenwich Village in the fifties and early sixties through the eyes not of a famous writer or musician but a normal, social young person. She and her roommate, also named Helen, "hated nine-to-five jobs [she had one], bourgeois morality, the phone company, and most politicians." They were thrilled partakers of a cultural movement, but always struggling to keep in step, as evidenced by their attempted "Dictionary of Hip," itself a painfully unhip idea. Weaver's now an astrologer, and one gets the sense, reading [skimming] the Asrological Appendix that she attaches, including charts for her, the other Helen, Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, that this is what she REALLY wanted to write about, had she not needed to make concessions to her non-batshit readers.
December 1, 2011
For a book about Kerouac, there was disappointingly little Kerouac. I finished the book, and didn't wholly dislike it, but I certainly don't recommend it. Very misleading.
June 22, 2010
I very much enjoyed this book (make it a 3.5), which is mainly an autobiography, about 1/2 or more concentrating on Kerouac whom she admits she underestimated at the time of her intimacy with him,
and then regretted for the rest of her life. She writes in very clear elegant prose and gives insight into Jack's character. I was amused by her detailed astrology charts of Kerouac, Ginsberg and herself in an appendix at the end.
and then regretted for the rest of her life. She writes in very clear elegant prose and gives insight into Jack's character. I was amused by her detailed astrology charts of Kerouac, Ginsberg and herself in an appendix at the end.
May 30, 2022
Η Έλεν Γουίβερ υπήρξε μεταφράστρια, επιμελήτρια εκδόσεων και συγγραφέας, αλλά και η σύντροφος του Τζακ Κέρουακ για λίγους μήνες. Τον γνώρισε την δεκαετία του 1950 μαζί με τον Άλεν Γκίνσμπεργκ μέσω της συγκατοίκου της. Αμέσως ενθουσιάστηκε από την ομορφιά του και το πνεύμα του, αλλά από την άλλη- όπως ομολογεί και η ίδια -ήταν αρκετά πουριτανή για να αντέξει τον αλκοολισμό του και την μποέμ ζωή του. Επίσης όπως ομολογεί και η ίδια πάλι, δεν ενθουσιάστηκε τότε με τη γραφή του και χρειάστηκε να περάσουν πολλά χρόνια για να αναγνωρίσει και αυτή αλλά και η πλειονότητα των αναγνωστών, την αξία του ῾Στο δρόμο¨και των ¨Αλητών του Ντάρμα¨. Η Έλεν Γουίβερ ήταν αρκετά τυχερή γιατί εκτός του Κέρουακ, γνώρισε και έκανε φιλίες με τον Γκρέγκορι Κόρσο, τον Άλεν Γκίνσμπεργκ, τον Λένι Μπρους και άλλες μεγάλες προσωπικότητες των δεκαετιών του 1950 και του 1960 στις ΗΠΑ. Χρειάστηκε πολλά χρόνια για να αποφασίσει να περιγράψει όλες αυτές τις γνωριμίες της και να μας δώσει μια ιδέα για τη ζωή αυτών των αξεπέραστων και παρεξηγημένων προσωπικοτήτων των γραμμάτων και της τέχνης.
Το βιβλίο της διαβάζεται ευχάριστα, σαν ένα εφηβικό ημερολόγιο μιας κοπέλας μικροαστής που προσπαθεί να κατανοήσει τη χιονοστιβάδα της μπητ και αργότερα των χίπις.
Το βιβλίο της διαβάζεται ευχάριστα, σαν ένα εφηβικό ημερολόγιο μιας κοπέλας μικροαστής που προσπαθεί να κατανοήσει τη χιονοστιβάδα της μπητ και αργότερα των χίπις.
November 3, 2020
3 1/2 stars
April 11, 2023
I enjoyed this memoir more than most about this era. Weaver's voice is so plain, yet insightful. She presents her time with Kerouac, Bruce, Ginsburg without pretentiousness , yet knowing that she was a part of something special. A literary, political, culture shift was happening and she just wanted to escape her restrictive, puritanical upbringing, to be herself, let loose with her friends, and have an orgasm. She is frank, yet is never brusque, she remembers fondly, yet is never nostalgic.
December 4, 2009
In The Awakener Helen Weaver details her relationships in the 50’s, after she moved from her parent’s suburban New York home to Greenwich Village. Through her roommate, Helen Elliott (the were known as the two Helen’s), she gets to know Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lucien Carr. Weaver gives a very intimate portrait of Kerouac through her writing. I got a sense of what it was like to know Kerouac, and see what a different individual he was. I don‘t think I‘ve ever seen Kerouac portrayed in any other book so clearly as a person before.
In the 60’s she works on the defense of Lenny Bruce during his obscenity trial and she delves into that relationship as well. Since she knew Bruce for so short a time, only a small portion of the book is dedicated to their relationship.
Throughout the book she mixes just the right amount of hindsight with contemporaneous remembrances. Shes honest about her reactions and feelings at the times of the events and how she’s come to terms with the events that so changed her life. And includes one of the most astute observations I've read in a while "When civilizations are young, they value their cities. When they become decadent, they value nature."
The Awakener isn’t just a memoir about the events of her affairs with Kerouac and Bruce. It’s more her relationships with them were brief. Most of the book is a meditation on how Kerouac and Elliott changed her life for the better, the worse and how she’s come to terms with them and made her peace with them and the events of her earlier life in later years. The memoir is seamless from the meditations and Weaver’s writing is never dull when the main characters recede from her life. They may have physically been gone but they’re with her still and she translates this well to the reader.
In the 60’s she works on the defense of Lenny Bruce during his obscenity trial and she delves into that relationship as well. Since she knew Bruce for so short a time, only a small portion of the book is dedicated to their relationship.
Throughout the book she mixes just the right amount of hindsight with contemporaneous remembrances. Shes honest about her reactions and feelings at the times of the events and how she’s come to terms with the events that so changed her life. And includes one of the most astute observations I've read in a while "When civilizations are young, they value their cities. When they become decadent, they value nature."
The Awakener isn’t just a memoir about the events of her affairs with Kerouac and Bruce. It’s more her relationships with them were brief. Most of the book is a meditation on how Kerouac and Elliott changed her life for the better, the worse and how she’s come to terms with them and made her peace with them and the events of her earlier life in later years. The memoir is seamless from the meditations and Weaver’s writing is never dull when the main characters recede from her life. They may have physically been gone but they’re with her still and she translates this well to the reader.
February 3, 2010
I received my copy of this book, written by a friend of mine, who happened to know all (and love!) many of the beat poets back in the 50s, and intended to just thumb through it and then set it aside until I was ready to read it. I have a book ethic I rarely break - finish one book before picking up the next. Well, just as with the Daisy Sutra, The Awakener forced me to break my own rules. Helen Weaver is an accomplished story teller, and hers is a story worth telling. The combination of those two elements was simply too much. This is a quick and engaging read, and a compelling account of the roots of the beat generation, told by someone who lived it.
November 24, 2009
Helen Weaver's candid memoir of life in Greenwich Village in the 1950's is a compelling read and an inside view into some of the major Beat Generation writers and artists. I had the opportunity to read a pre-publication copy and I couldn't put it down.
January 7, 2010
A- Surprisingly good. I wasn't expecting this - a memoir about a woman who tried to be oh-so-daring, a Bohemian…but you know, Kerouac interfered with her sleep. Really interesting; not just another boring Beat memoir. Yay!
May 17, 2010
I loved this book and would highly recommend it to anyone that is a fan of Kerouac, the Beat generation and/or the 1950s. Well written and so good I couldn't put it down.
November 22, 2021
Weaver was in a relationship with Kerouac from November 1956 to January 1957 and made an impact: she is Ruth Heaper in Desolation Angels. Wow, is she honest. She’s very forthcoming about her sexuality, and the honesty helps make sense of the decisions she made. It also built trust with me as a reader: if she’s willing to be this honest about herself, then what she says about others must be true. It’s some of the things she says about others that I question, not whether they’re true, but whether they needed to be said. She can be hard on her friends, Helen Elliott and Allen Ginsberg.
The book’s title is unusual and can be interpreted in a number of ways. Weaver’s speaks of it as a reference to Kerouac introducing Buddhism to America.
Weaver’s descriptions of New York in the fifties and sixties, and the people she meets, are exciting, as if we are discovering these wonderful new experiences as she did in her twenties. Though it loses momentum near the end, it’s a lovely read.
The book’s title is unusual and can be interpreted in a number of ways. Weaver’s speaks of it as a reference to Kerouac introducing Buddhism to America.
Weaver’s descriptions of New York in the fifties and sixties, and the people she meets, are exciting, as if we are discovering these wonderful new experiences as she did in her twenties. Though it loses momentum near the end, it’s a lovely read.
November 1, 2021
This memoir of the author's evolution as a writer and her life and various relationships in Greenwich Village of the 50s, including her brief and tempestuous relationship to writer Kerouac, is an interesting, if at times sketchy look into her past and falls into the category of writing by women of that period who were largely discounted by the precious club of male Beats. Weaver, who spent much of her professional life as a translator, struggles to resolve feelings about her relationship to key figures from her past, which results in this reader's failing to see her as little more than an ambivalent narrator. Joyce Johnson's memoir, Minor Characters, about her relationship to Kerouac, was the first book this reader encountered in this league and it remains the best.
May 9, 2021
I stumbled across this memoir through Weavers obituary in the NYT and having long ago read The Beats and in particular Kerouac, I looked forward to going back there and reading about that time and scene. I liked the book and enjoyed the first part focused on her time with Jack; I wasn’t as excited once it traveled past that to her dalliance with Lenny Bruce and her bored self-destructive time in Italy/Greece. In the end though Weaver lived an interesting and fearless life.
July 25, 2021
Interesting for the writer’s personal account of living in Greenwich Village as a young woman n the 1950s and for her personal relationship with Kerouac and other Beats, but not nearly as good as Joyce Johnson’s “Minor Characters.”
June 29, 2021
This woman slept around. She was a groupie before it was a thing. Helen is pretty selfish. The descriptions of the village in the 50s and 60s was very interesting.
July 12, 2021
An excellent read, enlightening and entertaining, as long as it sticks to narrative, which it mostly does. The literary analysis and Buddhism sections "are a bore," as Jack would say.
November 10, 2024
kerouac parts are good because they’re real. precious data.
August 30, 2025
something of a relief from reading Desolation Angles, way more context from the 50s - early 2000s
June 19, 2021
Weaver's book is a bit sleight, but it's still revealing and entertaining. It adds a few ounces to the weight of the Kerouac legend. Well written.
November 27, 2016
Overall, I thought this book was just okay. It was interesting to see Kerouac from the "other side", but I didn't feel like I actually learned anything new. The author is Ruth Harper in "Desolation Angels " and Virginia in "Minor Characters ", so her perspective did hold some interest for me. I really felt like this suffered from the lack of Jack's letters to her NOT being included. THAT would have been pretty cool! As is, she gives us the summaries of those letters, which is far from the same thing. Still, I'm not disappointed that I read it, and the following quote about Kerouac really resonated with me:
"I was beginning to feel that his Buddhism was just one big philosophical rationalization for doing whatever he wanted."
I too have felt about him, and many other people I've known. I think Ms. Weaver hit the nail right on the head!
"I was beginning to feel that his Buddhism was just one big philosophical rationalization for doing whatever he wanted."
I too have felt about him, and many other people I've known. I think Ms. Weaver hit the nail right on the head!
January 31, 2010
I need to go back and re-read this. I unfortunately got caught up in how mundane and suburban my life was, compared to Helen's in the same time period. I almost think my daughters could identify more closely to the lifestyle Helen chose.
The book was written in a clear, concise manner. Its transitions were seamless.
She is a capable writer, for sure.
I'll check in again after the re-read...
The book was written in a clear, concise manner. Its transitions were seamless.
She is a capable writer, for sure.
I'll check in again after the re-read...
August 17, 2012
Fun, easy read. Weaver captures her experience among and beyond the Beats with a grace and passion that is enlightening. I feel she has an honest message of life, love, and individuality that exudes through her writing. She is calling all of us to, not only indulge in her life, but to experience our own along side her... To connect.
September 12, 2010
very personal autobio of Helen Weaver, girlfriend of Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce and others. insights and annecdotes. good stuff.
May 27, 2011
This book is inverted narcissism and proof of her worth as a muse. Weaver has the untalented writer's tendency to create associations with great talent.
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