Although we shared some of the same casual boyfriends, lovers and friends, I didn’t know Kathy Acker during her lifetime. Our two brief social meetings were tinged with antipathy. Still, her work and example were important to me. Arriving in the East Village from New Zealand in the late 1970s, I read Acker’s books as if a bolder and more intelligent part of myself had written them: a broke straight girl alone in New York, confused by the mores of “the great sexual revolution” and trying to find a language that would contain all of life’s contradictions. Or, as William Burroughs put it more elegantly: “Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader’s soul.” How does she do this? Like so many others at that place and time, I observed Acker’s ascendance to notoriety during the 1980s with a mixture of admiration, distaste and envy. She’d become famous by projecting the highly sexualised image craved by male readers; she’d fought for the right to speak to the culture by any means necessary.
I observed Acker’s ascendance to notoriety during the 1980s with a mixture of admiration, distaste and envy
But within a few years of Acker’s death from breast cancer in 1997, her literary executor Matias Viegener noticed a diminishing interest in her work. “Suddenly,” he recalled, “people were asking who she was.”
Acker was just 50 when she died, but over the course of her 27-year-long career, she’d been extremely prolific, producing a substantial and often misread body of work. Born into an upper middle class New York Jewish family, she attended an academically mediocre private girls’ school on the Upper East Side but spent her mid-teens immersed in downtown avant-garde culture with her then boyfriend. A student of the poet David Antin at University of California San Diego in the late 1960s, she caught the art world’s attention with a series of brazen and brilliant self-published chapbooks, mailed to a list of 600 people. She became famous in London in the mid-1980s as a post-punk countercultural figure, but her writing – aggressive and gossipy, wildly vernacular, but composed within rigorous formalist strategies – had been widely known and respected within international avant-garde circles for many years before that.
In the 70s Acker became the chamber novelist of downtown New York, reporting on sexual misadventures with real-life art world protagonists who were, when not named outright, recognisable to anyone who knew the cast of characters. Her art was grounded in the phenomenological experiments of the old-guard minimalist and conceptual artists, but the content of her writings – extreme pornography, diatribe, parody, politics, gossip and trash – reflected the aesthetic of her East Village peers. Acker enjoyed the support of writers and artists such as Burroughs, Sol LeWitt, Paul Buck and Rudy Wurlitzer. Her work circulated feverishly in self-published or small-press editions throughout the US and Canada, and was admired in London, Paris and beyond. On 1 April, 1984, South Bank Show host Melvyn Bragg introduced her to a much larger television audience: “What we want to look at is the hard edge of a tough, fashionable, self-conscious group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world. Kathy Acker and the group around her are at present leading the pack.”
Acker had moved to London a few months before in anticipation of her commercial debut with Picador, which packaged three of her earlier works – Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, and My Death My Life by Piero Paolo Pasolini – in a single volume that sold out in three weeks. Her writing spoke powerfully to a disillusioned post-punk generation in Thatcher’s Britain. Writing in the NME, Don Watson succinctly summed up her appeal in the UK: “Eyes bulging from a head framed by tufts of newly bleached hair, dressed in pure white, Acker looks frail and very vulnerable standing on the ICA stage …. What she presents her audience with is in fact only herself, the rest is a jumble of vague forms, derived from the language of the official … Where Burroughs, old enough to remember before the video age, is able to analyse it, Acker … is able to only reflect it. Her wisdom is the wisdom of uncertainty. She is not the writer of the future, but one of the writers of the present.”
Or, as critic Michael Bracewell later reflected: “Suddenly, here is this astonishing American woman, incredibly glamorous and punky, kind of street. But obviously at the same time, talking an intellectual language that in London at that time was like being from another planet … She did an enormous thing, which was that she single-handedly in London connected people who bought records to people who bought books. There had not been a writer, a contemporary writer living in our midst, who united the world of pop culture and music and post-punk to the world of literature, let alone to the world of critical theory.” Writing for the Face, Rosemary Bailey was more interested in the writer’s sartorial tastes: “wide, wide boiler suits over zipped and frilly nylon blouses, t-shirts exquisitely slashed, sinister silver jewellery …”
Acker was hardly a victim of her own fame. She’d been publicly craving it for more than a decade. As she wrote in her self-published serial novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula in 1973, “I was interested in ‘fame’ as one end: (1) people whose work I want to find out about would talk to me, (2) I would somehow be able to pay for food rent etc. doing something connected, (3) artists I fall in love with would fuck me.” An inheritance received from her grandmother in 1981 allowed her to enter London in style, with an apartment and wardrobe extravagant beyond the means of her writing income.
I’m very well known in England and I get tons of work. But to say they like what I do? No, they fetishise what I do
Kathy Acker
Moving between high culture and low, she performed with singer-songwriter Genesis P-Orridge and played chess with Salman Rushdie. She’d become indisputably famous in London … but for what? Her 1986 novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, composed in New York three years earlier, prompted the NME’s Duncan Webster to observe: “Acker seems most daring in her unique combination of an overblown and embarrassing romanticism (the tortured, alienated mad artist) with a reduction of culture (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Oedipus, Jane Eyre) to banality. It’s like reading some lecture notes … written by a bored student, with genitalia and ‘I love Peter’ doodled in the margins.” Robin Chapman described it in the London Review of Books as “a dead-eyed romance, indebted to Burroughs rather than Cervantes … There is plenty of sado-masochism, bags of centrist anarchism, and built into the text as well as the title, the enervating get-out clause that what we are reading is really just a dream for author and reader alike.”
Slams from the literary establishment only helped to enhance Acker’s renegade reputation. In London, she pursued interests in bodybuilding, BDSM, motorbiking and tattooing. Moving further to the margins of literary culture, she became an underground idol, performing with bands and aligning herself with cyberpunk and “transgressive” artists and writers. Still, she found London lonely and isolating. As she later told French literary theorist Sylvère Lotringer, “In England, the media had made this huge image of Kathy Acker. But this media image is so much this kind of sexual image. I’m very well known there and I get tons of work. But to say they like what I do? No, I wouldn’t say that. They fetishise what I do.”
In 1989, Pandora republished three of Acker’s early works from the 1970s. Like all of her books, they were textual collages. When an enterprising freelancer for Publishing News sourced a 2,000-word section to Harold Robbins’s 1974 bestseller The Pirate, he reported the “plagiarism” to Acker’s editor. A minor scandal erupted, and she was asked to sign a public apology to Robbins. Meanwhile, her New York editor contacted Burroughs, who called Harold Robbins, who told Pandora that she had his “entire permission” to use the excerpt, and that he was “shocked [that] anyone would be so ill-informed as to accuse her of plagiarism”.
Acker in 1985 … in London, she pursued interests in bodybuilding, BDSM, motorbiking and tattooing.
Acker in 1985 … in London she pursued interests in bodybuilding, BDSM, motorbiking and tattooing. Photograph: ANL/REX/Shutterstock
To Acker, this swift resolution mattered much less than the initial betrayal. In her long essay Dead Doll Humility, she wrote that she “understood that she had lost. Lost more than a struggle about the appropriation of four pages … Lost her belief that there can be art in this culture … Most of the literati … were upper middle class and detested the writer and her work … All that matters is work and work must be created and can’t be created in isolation.”
That December, she moved back to New York and then on to San Francisco where she would remain until after her cancer diagnosis in 1996, when she moved back to London to live with the music critic Charles Shaar Murray.
…
When she returned to California seeking refuge toward the end of her illness, I was living in LA. Our mutual friend, the artist and writer Viegener, took charge of her care, fulfilling her wishes to receive alternative cancer treatment in Tijuana. I accompanied Sylvère, my then husband and Semiotexte collaborator, when he visited her. Sylvère and Acker had been lovers and friends in New York in the late 70s. Although I steered clear of her bedside, the image of Acker alone, without her entourage or illustrious peers, shocked me. I’d just published my first book, I Love Dick. Is this how it all ends?, I wondered. A benefit fund for her treatment raised less than $2,500. Later, Matias would tell me a story of how Acker had been reading my novel when Dick _, the book’s addressee and a former associate of Acker’s walked into her room to pay his respects, and they scrambled to hide the book under the covers. If nothing else became of the novel, I thought, this would be enough for me.
When Acker died on 30 November, I was shattered. Even though I was sceptical about some of her later work and career choices, I’d always admired her, and felt a strong sense of crossed destinies. Almost immediately, I decided to write her biography. I went to New York, San Francisco and San Diego to interview some of her earliest friends and associates. But the timing was wrong. The few essays I published were too empathic, too sentimental. I identified with Acker in ways I had no business doing. Meanwhile, the critical response to I Love Dick became more personal than I’d ever imagined. “Is this a book review, or the concierge report?” I recall Sylvère scoffing. Given our many mutual partners and friendships, to write Acker’s biography would only reinforce these perceptions. It all seemed too incestuous. Or as Acker once wrote in another context, “endless meshes incest”. I put the interview tapes in the closet.
In 2014 I picked up the project again. This time, it was our shared cultural histories, not boyfriends, that seemed most striking. Strands of French modernist literature, Zurich Dadaism, phenomenology and performance ran through both of our writings. Our artistic histories both traced a history of western culture in the 20th century. One of Acker’s greatest achievements was her discovery of a process and language that fuse emotion and thought and that is transmitted directly to readers. The Burroughs quote haunted me. How does she do this? It became apparent that any biography of Acker must include very close readings of her work.
It’s always surprised me that I Love Dick has come to be read as a foundational text in the supposedly new genre called “auto-fiction”. My strategies in writing the novel owed a great deal to Acker; her strategies borrowed from modernist fiction of all kinds, from Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras to Beat writers such as Alexander Trocchi and Jack Kerouac. Why wasn’t her influence cited more widely? At what point had the novel become such a small thing that it dwelt on the domestic problems of fictionalised characters?
Something about Acker’s work still communicates deeply, even to those who aren’t aware of her intelligence, humour and compositional approach. Her achievements were singular, but they were not hers alone. She attained them within a larger community of writers and artists, many of whom, such as the choreographer Pooh Kaye, the musicians Jill Kroesen and Peter Gordon, the artist and publisher Leandro Katz and countless others, haven’t been given their rightful place in art history. Acker’s life can’t be described without a description of the collective soul her work emerged from.
