My mom, the Beatniks, and Anthropology

One of the reasons I wanted to study anthropology, a discipline that investigates all aspects of what it means to be human, was to understand the human condition in all its similarities and differences. Although I didn't know it in the beginning what I really wanted to find out was how social and biological processes contributed to or constrained human agency. My mom was always searching for spiritual truth.  While this can be a great thing, as a child growing up it seemed like it consumed our lives; as if I didn't have any agency or direction that was my own (the age old battle- I don't want to be like my mother- one reason it took me so long to get into Aikido!).  My childhood had been one long exercise in participant observation relating to my mother's quest for self knowledge that encompassed numerous spiritual teachers, different religious and cultural practices, ashrams, churches, monasteries, and self help groups. So its not really a surprise that I would turn to anthropology to make sense of it all.  My mother was an idealist at heart where I was much more of a materialist - far more interested in keeping the lights on than I was with meeting the Karmapa. While my mom grew up with money, we didn't exactly have a lot of it when I was a kid.  The spiritual was always far more important than the material, regardless of the consequences. When I used to object to having to go to yet another spiritual retreat, my mom would remind me of a Zen parable that said: if Buddha himself were to stand in your way barring your path to enlightenment then you had to strike him down. I didn't want to be the Buddha that barred her from enlightenment so I settled for being along for the ride. While it bothered me at the time, I now realize that all of this, the good and the bad, defined who I am today.  Even though I may not want to admit it sometimes, I have ended up following much of my mom's journey from the bohemian, to anthropology and now to Aikido.

While I started this blog to understand my mother's fascination with Aikido, an equally important artistic and literary social movement that had a profound effect on Virginia was the Beat movement that characterized Greenwich Village, New York in the 1940's and 50's. It was what eventually lead her to Japan to study with O-Sensei. My mom met the Beat Generation's most influential authors such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs who were friends with her boyfriend who was studying to become an anthropologist. Campbell (2003) has written about some of the parallels between Bohemia and anthropology. He notes that although normally treated separately, Bohemia (defined as a largely artistic, literary and social movement against mainstream society) and anthropology (a social science and academic field of study) were both very similar cultural projects that endeavored to transcend the restrictions of western culture through travel and writing about non-western peoples.

Ginger (a nickname used by her family and friends) grew up in both New York City and Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard in a farm house known as Ravenhurst - one of the older Mayhew family homesteads. She was the youngest of three children each born 5 years apart to musician parents. Her father, Charles Bailey taught voice for the New York Metropolitan Opera and her mother, Ida Mayhew, taught piano.  Her older sister was the pride of the Bailey family because she had finished high school at 16 and received a scholarship from the Gould Foundation to study ancient Greek literature at Barnard College, Columbia University from which she graduated two years later. Although her sister wanted her to attend Barnard, that was not in the cards.  Ginger dropped out of high school at the age of 14 to fulfill her patriotic duty by entering the workforce. It was 1942 in the midst of World War II and a media campaign was underway at home asking middle and upper class white women to enter the workforce to make up for the shortages of the men away at war. On top of that the atmosphere at home and at school was depressing. The older boys she knew had been killed in the war and Ravenhurst seemed especially empty being just her, the farm animals and her mother. The final years of the 1930's had been rough on her family, ending with her father running off with a young soprano, her brother being institutionalized for contracting tuberculosis, and her older sister Frannie, the shining star, dying of pneumonia (Harriet Frances Bailey's Book of Poems). And to top it all off Ginger had developed an erratic heartbeat, after being struck by lightening the previous winter.

A friend of the family was a general contractor in Fairhaven, Massachusetts and he hired my mom in 1942 to help him repair and paint houses.  He later used a photo of her painting a house and tacked on the popular wartime slogan We Can Do It! to advertise his business.

Virginia "Ginger" Bailey 1943

A New York based photographer saw the ad and convinced his friend the ex MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian to hire her as the model for his Saint and Sinner perfume line ad campaign which ran in Vogue and Town and Country magazines from 1944-46.

My mom said the best part of this job was getting to keep Adrian's dresses!!!.  

She was also the model for the Charbert Breathless...Fabulous perfume line.

My mom loved the freedom that earning her own money gave her and moved back to New York. This time she lived in Greenwich Village where she played the guitar and performed folk songs at various local night clubs. It was there that she met and starting dating an archaeologist by the name of Haldon Chase.  Hal was a member of the original Beat circle that first congregated at Columbia University during the early 1940's.  He once shared an apartment with Jack Karouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs and was responsible for introducing Neal Cassady to the rest of the Beat gang. (An act immortalized in Karouac's On the Road when Chad King introduces Sal to Dean.)

From left to right: Hal Chase, Jack Karouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs (from Marler 2004)

Chase grew up in Denver, Colorado and received his B.A. from Columbia University and later entered their graduate program.  He was interested in the work of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict but was mostly influenced by his academic adviser, Julian Steward, and Alfred Kroeber who had delivered a series of lectures on campus.  Although considered a serious scholar by the rest of the Beats, Chase took part in all aspects of the early New York Beat scene (e.g. sex, drugs, music, and poetry!!!!)(Campbell 2003).

Hal Chase and William Burroughs (from: http://fuckyeahbeatgeneration.tumblr.com/post/1679063529/hal-chase-and-william-burroughs-1944-45-photo-by) 

Ginger was 17 when she became Chase's girlfriend and was introduced to his circle of literary friends. My mom used to tell me she had met these people.  Of course I didn't really believe her.  As I got older I began to realize my mom did have this extraordinary past, so it seemed possible.  But when I asked her for details, she was very evasive and vague, especially about Kerouac.  Apparently there was a reason for that! As I have just found out (and sometimes I wish I could forget!) from Joyce Johnson's recent biography on Kerouac, my mom knew Jack well before she was introduced to him by Hal. Kerouac wrote about his first encounter with Ginger in his journal. He called her "Dark Eyes" and said he was "in love."  They spent a romantic night in his home in Ozone Park dancing and singing to tunes on the Victrola (Johnson 2012: 236-37).  In a letter to his sister, Jack wrote that Ginger "was the kind of girl who liked to put on her ballet shorts and dance all around the room." That sounds exactly like my mother.  It was pretty common when I was growing up for my mom to spontaneously break out into a Dervish dance...just because.

When Jack passed through Denver the summer of 1945 he learned that Ginger was seeing Hal (261-262).  Yet that wasn't a factor that kept either Jack or Ginger from continuing their affair when everyone returned to New York in the fall.  They spent the night together on two occasions.  In fact, Jack's mother found them one morning looking like "innocent children who had just stayed up all night to sing each other every song they knew" (271).  Jack was worried about Hal finding out about the affair, telling Neal he was sure that Hal's soul would "shrivel... right down to the roots."  Even so, Hal, Jack, and Ginger spent a lot of time together. Hal had bought a car and they would drive out to Ozone Park, go to the movies or on small road trips usually including Jack's mother (according to Joyce Johnson she was the only women he could commit to).  At the end of the school year after Hal returned to Denver, Jack tried to hook up with Ginger again but she refused.  She told him that her relationship with Hal had become more serious (276). Later in the fall, it seemed to him that Hal went out of his way to avoid him.  Jack later learned that Ginger had confessed the affair to Hal (286): "Hal, who would marry her the following summer, continued to take measures to cut Jack out of his life.  Jack was genuinely stunned by this outcome.  It was very difficult for him to accept that a trifling thing like a little fling with Hal's girl could possibly cause a breach in their friendship, when the whole melodrama, as he wrote Ed White, was 'nothing but Pepsi-Cola'.  He went on leaving messages for Hal, and roaming the Columbia campus in the hope of running into him.  The prospect of losing someone he'd loved like a brother saddened and bewildered him, and he blamed Ginger for scheming against him until he realized he missed her as well." (Johnson 2012: 286).  My mom always had the ability to captivate anyone she met!

After the war there was great deal of pressure from Ginger's family for her to leave her modeling and singing career behind in order to be married.   Her father and brother had come to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to sell the Ravenhurst farm so her brother could go to college, buy a house, and support a family.  (Her mother would still have her residence in Manhattan).  If Ginger married Hal then they wouldn't have to worry about her means of support. She and Hal married after his graduation from Columbia and moved to his family's home in Denver, Colorado.

Hal and Ginger at an archaeological field site in southeastern Colorado, 1949

According to my mom she helped out on all of Hal's field investigations including his work at the Denver Art Museum.  She loved the work but Hal felt that she was coming across as too brash and that her place was in the home. What did he expect? Her time in New York only solidified my mother's desire for independence and her strong will.  In 1951, Hal received a grant to study the Zapotec language at Mexico City College and took Ginger with him.  While Hal was working Ginger spent her time collecting Mexican folk songs.  She always thought that the best way to connect to a stranger was through a song.  When I asked my Mom about her time in Mexico, like her history with Jack, she avoided the subject saying it was too sad.  While they were down there, William Burroughs and his wife Joan Vollmer were also in Mexico City. At some point, Burroughs accidentally killed his wife by shooting her in the head during a drunken game of William Tell.  For my mom, this event is where her marriage to Hal fell apart. Maybe Joan's death was the final straw but she finally admitted to Hal that she wasn't mother material and would never be content keeping house.  Soon after, Hal hooked up with a local woman he had met at a bar (funny how field work doesn't change much). Ginger who was now on her own could only think to call her mother who immediately sent money so she could return home.

When she returned to New York she got a gig singing at the Village Vanguard and later ran into Jack on Forty-second street.  According to Johnson (2012: 434), "After discovering they no longer felt any rancor and were simply very glad to see each other again, they'd spent the night talking and singing to each other, just as they'd done the summer they fell in love, before Hal took over and everything got complicated.  No longer married to Hal, who'd left her for a woman he met in Mexico, Ginger had limped back to New York as confused and sad as everyone else Jack knew. Hal felt lost now too, she'd told him."  My mom was lost, Hal was lost, and so was Jack.  Jack and Ginger;s renewed romance was short-lived.  One night at a party, Jack left with another woman.  Needing a new perspective and direction she reinvented herself. That year my mother changed her professional name from Ginger Bailey to Ginny Mayhew and spent the next two years living in the Caribbean performing songs that made her happy (in five different languages) at nightclubs in Haiti, Santa Domingo, and the U.S Virgin Islands.

(Useful take-away for anyone having a tryst: If you don't want your daughter to know about your affair - make sure your lover doesn't keep a journal!)

The early women contemporaries of the Beat generation have often gotten a bad rap and their contributions to Beat philosophy and culture largely ignored. This was in part because the main Beat writers employed the sexist stereotypes of the time to describe the women in their life.  While the Beat culture offered men liberation from social norms, it had the real world effect of further marginalizing women of this era since the repercussions of a Bohemian lifestyle were much harsher for them (institutionalization, electro-shock therapy for example) (Knight 1996, Skerl 2004, Wills 2008). Compared to some of these women, my mom was lucky. For her, the Beat circle and Greenwich Village represented a wonderful creative outlet and helped her realize that self actualization was possible. Her poems were her songs and her literary record - the ephemeral moment of a night's entertainment.

Ginny Mayhew 1953

References:

Campbell, Howard
  2003 Beat Mexico: Bohemia, Anthropology and the Other.  Critique of Anthropology 23: 209-230.

Johnson, Joyce
  2012 The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac.  Viking Press.

Knight, Brenda
  1996 Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution.      Conari Press. 

Marler, Regina
   2004 Queer Beats: How the Beats turned America on to Sex. Cleis Press.

Skerl, Jennie
  2004 Reconstructing the Beats.  Pallgrave MacMillan.

Wills, David

  2008 The Women of the Beat Generation.  In Wills, D. (ed.): Beatdom, Vol 2.  Mauling Press