What saved Beasley is what has saved many a miserable boy and girl living in poverty: education. Born into the trashiest family west of the Mississippi, Beasley grew up in West Texas-mostly near the thumpingly Christian burg of Abilene-and she was the ninth child, succeeded by “four round-faced mediocrities.” After the birth of her thirteenth child, “Ma” Beasley tells her husband, whom she despises, that “this is the last one” and eventually divorces him. The other was also named Gertrude, as in Stein.įrom its first paragraph, Beasley’s book establishes itself as a provocative and highly subversive text: She recounts her birth as the violent outcome of marital rape by her father, whom she describes as a “monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children.” Things go downhill from there. Contact’s prime mover, Robert McAlmon, remembered Beasley in his own memoir of that era, Being Geniuses Together, as one of only two “temperamental” writers he had to deal with in those banquet years. For one thing, it was published in Paris in 1925 by the avant-garde press Contact Editions, which included among its authors Ernest Hemingway, H.D., and Ezra Pound. No other book in Texas literature is quite like Gertrude Beasley’s little-known memoir, My First Thirty Years.
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