“Words blank out of my mind, I go into a trance of pure joy, do I have to explain again…
Our philosophy? Love is something you can depend on. It is more worthy than other kinds of security. It can be a way out of yourself and the counterbalance to a hundred ills. It can be the reason to overcome hardship. It can make things easy… No time to explain, a consciousness change, drop the materialism and get right to it.”
When I found out that Brenda Frazer’s My True Stories collection was getting published for the first time in 2023, I was immediately intrigued. Thanks to the efforts of a few highly dedicated people (Brenda Frazer herself and Lucy Wilkinson, the founder of death of workers whilst building skyscrapers) a memoir was brought to light about events that took place about six decades earlier. Brenda’s memoir offers a rare female outlook on a literary movement which, as charming as it was, is also famous for being predominantly male: the Beat Generation.
Poets and Odd Fellows is the first of four books comprising Brenda’s My True Stories collection. The events described in this book take place in the years 1959-1961 and are therefore chronologically antecedent to the facts recounted in the author’s most famous work, Troia: Mexican Memoirs (first published in 1969 under the name Bonnie Bremser, Brenda’s married name). While the four books are linked to each other and to Troia by virtue of recounting different periods of the same life story, each of them is a self-sufficient segment that can be read and appreciated independently.
In this first book, Brenda recounts how she met her future husband Ray Bremser at a poetry reading at Odd Fellows Hall. During this event, Ray, fresh out of jail, was introduced as a “jailhouse poet”. Brenda and Ray got married only three weeks after their first meeting: she was 19, he was 25. Poets and Odd Fellows narrates the first three years of Brenda and Ray’s marriage, a marriage which was anything but conventional, for it was characterised by a constant tension between their need for domestic stability and the absolute freedom preached by the Beat movement.
It is rare to find a book that captures the atmosphere and themes of its contents as accurately as Poets and Odd Fellows does. When I first received this book, I was struck by the beautiful simplicity of its cardstock cover: nothing but the title floating in the middle of it and the author’s name towards the bottom, both handwritten in black ink.
One dominant theme throughout is the rejection of all material possessions in favour of other “more worthy” kinds of security, such as love and poetry. As Brenda puts it, when describing their lifestyle, “just barely enough would be fine”. Brenda and Ray truly did get by with the bare minimum. Lacking any kind of rented property to stay in, their ability to have a night’s rest depended on one of their friends hosting them for the night, and they also had to rely upon their friends for food, cigarettes, and drugs. Brenda explains that “Ray’s gentle philosophy was that many people would give up their money just because they had it”. In a time where we are constantly encouraged to prioritise material possessions above all else, I found Brenda and Ray’s set of values immensely refreshing, albeit extreme and at times constellated by contradictions.
That is why the cover of this book perfectly matches the Beat mindset: no superfluous images, no decorations of any kind, nothing but words on an empty page. Just barely enough seems, indeed, to be fine.
Brenda’s writing style is equally emblematic of the Beat philosophy. Aside from a few poetic embellishments, she gives us the bare truth, exposing every side of her story so earnestly that the reader cannot help but feel extremely close to her. I found this aspect to be special, since it’s rare to feel this close to another human soul, both in literature and in life. Brenda depicts all events of her life with the same unsettling honesty, no matter how traumatising, humiliating, or personal they might be. The truth is so powerful that it needs no embellishment. From Poets and Odd Fellows: “The drummer skipped a beat and Coltrane came on as big as life. Making love to beautiful music. Words of any kind are superfluous.” (My italics.) The Beat ideals are therefore embroidered into every part of this book, even down to the simplicity of its syntactic structures.
While material possessions are unnecessary and even undesirable, poetry, music, literature, and love offer a deeper, worthier kind of security that money alone could never grant. After illustrating the ways in which her life with Ray lacked material security – to the point of her having toothaches because she didn’t own a toothbrush – Brenda shows us how she found security in poetry instead. She recounts how Ray once dedicated a poem to her, describing their deep love and connection. At this point Brenda explains “the security I’d been missing was right there in the poem, along with a reshaped understanding”. I found this to be the most touching message in the book: in our 21st century society, the idea that one could find security in poetry rather than money or material possessions is both a revolutionary and reassuring notion.
Poets and Odd Fellows is valuable in many regards, but what renders it special is the fact that it tells a strictly female experience, at a time when female voices were seldom heard. Indeed, while the Beat movement preached sensory liberation and sexual revolution, female members of this subculture were still expected to conform to restrictive gender norms and to sustain ordinary domestic life.
Brenda was no exception in this regard: Ray expected her to get a job and provide for them both, while he was the one who had access to their possessions, albeit usually consisting only of a few dollars and some cigarettes. Brenda was therefore caught in a bind, expected to embrace the freedom preached by the Beat movement without rejecting the gender norms that limited women’s freedom to exist and to create. This makes it all the more impressive that, within the constraints of a sexist movement, Brenda managed to create the beautiful memoir that is My True Stories.
Despite the limitations delineated by the sexist values of the Beat movement, Brenda rejects female passivity in her writing through openess about her sexual experiences, no matter how transgressive. When Ray goes to prison for parole violation, Brenda gets close to a group of musicians who live in a bachelor commune environment. Brenda recalls that she “slept with all of them eventually” with the same openness that male authors from the Beat generation would have in writing about sex.
When Brenda finds out that she’s pregnant, she’s the one expected to care for their new-born child, Rachel. Still, Brenda needs to navigate the experience of pregnancy and motherhood in the state of complete poverty preached by the Beats, which proves extremely challenging. Unable to afford any other option, she has her baby in a charity hospital in Jersey City, where she is treated horrendously. When she cries of pain, a doctor punches her in the face to make her shut up. She contracts a terrible post-partum infection due to the doctors not removing her placenta properly. Once again, Brenda is expected to somehow reconcile the Beat philosophy of freedom from all material security with her new role as mother of young Rachel. Brenda narrates all of this the same way she narrates the rest of her story, by giving us the naked truth: no embellishments necessary.
Another aspect of the book that I found significant is what Brenda accurately refers to as “the futility of trying to be good”. Indeed, Brenda and Ray are perpetually in trouble with the law, to the point that it doesn’t matter whether they have actually broken it. Their innocence is irrelevant; they will still be persecuted. The justice system is the perpetual antagonist in Brenda and Ray’s life, landing them in trouble simply for the way they look. As Brenda puts it, “Ray’s soft poet beard does not interfere even if they’d like to arrest us for it”.
While Ray and Brenda do break the law various times, like when Ray violates parole to travel to San Francisco by hitchhiking along Route 66 in the typical Beatnik fashion, or when they buy and consume various illegal drugs, what often gets them in trouble are the traits that set them apart as different – their Beat philosophy and Ray’s “soft poet beard”.
Poets and Odd Fellows is the stirring recollection of an existence completely devoted to love, music, and poetry, but tragically antagonised by the justice system and conventional values of society. Brenda’s story distinguishes itself from more well-known works from the Beat movement because she doesn’t just break free from materialism, from the establishment, and from the expectations of society, but she also learns how to create and exist as a woman within a movement that retained conservative gender norms. Brenda had to reconcile the Beat philosophy with the values of motherhood, submission, and domesticity that women were still expected to live by.
I’ve experienced this book the way one would experience the finding of a rare and precious gem, and I think everyone deserves to spend some time immersed in the touching philosophy of Brenda Frazer and her Ray Bremser.
Viola Ragonese is a philosopher, writer, and voracious reader who was born in Italy and is based in Dublin, but who still calls Glasgow home. Her previous work has been published in From Glasgow to Saturn, Papers Publishing, and the Journal of Applied Philosophy. You can find her on Instagram at @violarago.
My True Stories: Poets and Odd Fellows by Brenda Frazer is published by death of workers whilst building skyscrapers.
Special thanks to Rowan Groat and Jess Smith for editing this blog.