From Minor Characters
A Beat Memoir
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, 1983
There was a newsstand at Sixty-sixth Street and Broadway right at the entrance
to the subway. Just before midnight we woke up and threw on our clothes in the
dark and walked down there still groggy with the heaviness, the blacked-out sleep, that comes after making love. According to Viking there was going to be a review
of On the Road. “Maybe it’ll be terrific. Who knows?” I said. Jack said he was
doubtful. Still, we could stop at Donnelly’s on the way back and have a beer.
We saw the papers come off the truck. The old man at the stand cut the
brown cord with a knife and we bought the one on top of the pile, and stood
under a street lamp turning pages until we found “Books of the Times.” I felt
dizzy reading Millstein’s first paragraph—like going up on a Ferris wheel too
quickly and dangling over space, laughing and gasping at the same time. Jack
was silent. After he’d read the whole thing, he said, “It’s good, isn’t it?” Yes,” I said. “It’s very, very
good… We walked to Donnelly’s and spread the paper out on the bar and read the review together,
line by line, two of three more times, like students poring over a difficult text for which they sense
they’re going to be held responsible.
“This is the muse’s side of the story. It turns out the muse could write as well as anybody.”
–Angela Carter
“Johnson has brought to life what history may ultimately judge to have been minor characters, but
who were to her own generation major enough to shape its consciousness.”
–Christopher Lehman-Haupt, The New York Times
“Joyce Johnson hands over to us the safe-deposit box thst contains the lost, precious
scrolls of the New York ‘50’s.”
–Seymour Krim, The Washington Post
“Rich and beautifully written, full of vivid portraits and evocations…of the major Beat voices and the
minor characters, their women.”
–Anne LaMott, San Francisco Chronicle
“In Johnson’s memoir, the self encounters itself as other, the dead are brought back to life
by the delicate rigor of human understanding, yielding empathy and fascination rather than
complete catharsis.”
–Ann Douglas