Missing Men

Joyce Johnson pays an eloquent tribute to the two men she married in the fifties and early sixties. Both men, Jim Johnson (who died in a motorcycle crash and left Joyce a widow at 27) and Peter Pinchback were, in a sense, "failed" abstract expressionists whose work never was commercially successful. And both were temperamental men who frankly, sounded impossible to live with. Joyce gave her husbands both financial and emotional support, in addition to working full time as an editor and raising a son alone after her marriage with Pinchback ended. Johnson describes a rich artistic life in what now is a lost and faraway world--a grubby, but affordable Manhattan where even impoverished artists could casually move from the Bowery to the East Village or Soho in search of the perfect space. "In those days it was still possible to be gracefully poor in New York," she writes. From what's been written about the lives of artists like Pollack and deKooning, we know what it was like to be a successful painter in New York in the fifties. Johnson's book is valuable in another way; she chronicles what it was like to be part of the second wave of abstract expressionists. These artists were, by and large, ignored by dealers and critics and their fragile careers were dealt a final blow by the conceptual and Pop art movements. Johnson writes that she was raised in a family of women, mostly without men, and that the emotional absence she experienced in both of her difficult marriages replicated the male absences of her childhood. Ironically, it's Joyce Johnson herself who has achieved the fame and recognition that so eluded both of her husbands. But the loving (and exasperated) portraits she paints of them here show that she is a powerful artist in her own right.

If you read "Missing Men", no doubt you'll be drawn to Joyce Johnson's other two memoirs, "Minor Characters" and "Door Wide Open". All three books are wonderfully intimate sketches of people and places. Whereas "Minor Characters" and "Door Wide Open" focus on Joyce's friendships with notable personalities within the "Beat Movement"(especially her romantic involvement with Jack Kerouac), "Missing Men" addresses her relationships to her father and her two husbands, artists James Johnson and Peter Pinchbeck. "Missing Men" is beautifully written. Johnson's economy with language is always worth savoring, tracing scenes which stay with the reader forever--be it gathering apples for a pie with her friends, Jack Kerouac in a sleeping bag in your spare room, or (in this volume) the haunting trip to her deceased husband Peter's pitifully small, loudly-colored house in the country. Joyce Johnson is simply too good of a writer to miss. Do yourself a favor and go quickly to the nearest bookstore or library to find out for yourself (...or just use that friendly little clicker in your hand.)

It's 2am and I meant to be in bed by 10 tonight but couldn't put Missing Men down until it was done. And now it is done, and I'm sad that it is. Like Minor Characters and In the Night Cafe, two other truly wonderful books, Joyce Johnson writes so personally that the book's end feels like the end of a visit with a dear friend, a friend you see much too rarely. She captures so well that hunger to replay life's moments -- painful and joyous both, over and over like a song, as she put it -- to feel what they have meant, to hear them right, to savor and take them inside you and somehow keep living them long after they're gone. And she shares the scary lack of fulfilling resolution when the little enlightenments don't simply add up to resolution and love. She doesn't hide her fear of dying alone, and the three books of hers that I have read all bring me home to my own fear of this too. And that's something so few writers have the courage or ability to really share. And that's very honest. And that's something very dear.

"Missing Men" is a terrific memoir, tender and tough. Johnson writes with honesty and great precision about fear and foreboding, about peach brandy, about grief, and downtown New York and especially about art. While many reviewers praise the first part of the book (Joyce-and-mama, Joyce-and-I-Remember-Mama), absorbing as it is, it's the end of the book I like best: her descriptions of artist Peter Pinchbeck's life and work. Lucid writing about art and artists is rare. Honesty about living a woman's life is too. "Missing Men" gives you both. It's moving, serious stuff.

Once again Joyce Johnson speaks for legions of women who have made their lives around men and then learned other ways to live. Her writing is utterly unpretentious and perfectly precise. She captures emotions, people, and places with telling details and a straight face. This book proves that you don't have to live a lurid or strange life to write a great memoir. It also has one of the best jackets I have ever seen.