The Memory of the Bastard Angel

The Beats’ unabashed championing of personal experience, set at the core of Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1955), led to an aesthetic intimately concerned with the representation of “the unspeakable visions of the individual” (in Charters, 1996:487). Yet, far from “unspeakable”, Beat poets and writers quite often used their writing to give particularization to their personal stories. Dubbed as “A fifty-year literary and erotic odyssey”, Harold Norse’s Memoirs of a Bastard Angel (1989) joins the Beat memoirist boom by providing a first-hand account of the poet’s life and work. This chapter investigates the ways in which Norse uses and misuses the memoir genre to not only provide an autobiographical and socio-political context for his poetry, but also delineate the development of his poetics. The first section establishes links between Norse’s depiction of sexuality in the memoir and the thematic centrality of erotism and homosexual desire in his poetics. The second section surveys Norse’s use of relational stories – the stories of others – to analyze the strategies through which the poet manages to redirect the attention towards his own participation in the literary world and towards his own poetry.