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a lawyer. Her politics were anarchist and
shaped by her maternal grandfather,
Domenico Mallozzi, a radical who gave
her Dante to read as a child. She was
educated at Hunter College High, a
school in Manhattan for academically
bright girls, and studied physics at
Swarthmore College for one year
before dropping out.
In 1954, aged 19, she moved to a small
flat in East Village determined to write
and was quickly caught up in the neigh-
bourhood’s bohemian scene. To cover
her rent she did an assortment of odd
jobs, including spells as an office clerk
and a nude model for a pornographer
and a group of émigré artists. Once she
was paid $100 to pretend she was
having an affair by a couple who could
not terminate their marriage on any
other grounds. For a time she
corresponded with Ezra Pound, whom
she visited at St Elizabeths psychiatric
hospital in Washington.
Early on she gave regular readings of
her work at the Gaslight Café in
Greenwich Village and published her
first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird
Flies Backwards, in 1958. It caught the
attention of Ginsberg and Kerouac,
who became lifelong friends. In 1961
she co-founded the New York Poets
Theatre, which staged experimental
plays, and for ten years she published a
mimeographed literary newsletter, The
Floating Bear, with LeRoi Jones (later
known as Amiri Baraka), one of her
lovers. The pair were arrested for
obscenity by the FBI in 1961 after
publishing two poems with homoerotic
themes, including one by William S
Burroughs.
“There was no night when you
weren’t at a movie or seeing someone’s
new dance or going to a rehearsal of a
dance you were in,” she later said of the
time. “The amount of output was huge.”
Whereas contemporary American
culture extolled the virtues of the
suburban housewife, Di Prima spurned
conventional relationships, which she
found “claustrophobic and deadening”.
She preferred the ambiguity of having
many sexual partners and had affairs
with both men and women. The availa-
bility of birth control was limited and atthe time it was not uncommon for
women who slept with women to be
lobotomised or sterilised.
Di Prima wrote: “Every chance
encounter was weighed: was it worth,
ultimately, dying for, if it came to that?
And the answer was usually yes... It was
not that I held my life so cheap, but held
experience, the savouring of life, so dear.”
In 1969 she published a graphic ac-
count of her time in New York, Memoirs
of a Beatnik. It famously depicts an orgyWhile Goujon went off to open
restaurants, Van Gelder and Dellal
(obituary, November 3, 2012) returned
to making deals. In 1972 they sold
Dalton to a bigger bank, Keyser Ullman,
for £58 million. When Opec (the
Organisation of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries) cranked up the
oil price the following year, interest
rates rocketed and property prices
crashed, leaving Keyser mired in debt.Diane di Prima once left a party at Allen
Ginsberg’s flat in New York’s East Village
early because she had promised her
babysitter that she would be home
before midnight. Jack Kerouac, who
was lying drunk on the kitchen floor,
responded to the news of her departure
by bellowing: “Di Prima, unless you
forget about your babysitter, you’re
never going to be a writer!”
Di Prima, then a poet in her early
twenties, belonged to the Beat
Generation of writers who valued
“experience” above all else. Usually
it came in the form of parties filled
with drugs, jazz and sex, and a part of
Di Prima thought Kerouac was right.
Bound to her babysitter, she was
dogged by the question: “Can I be a
single mother and be a poet?”
At first she juggled motherhood and
writing by taking amphetamines, and
would wake up early to bash out her
verses before her daughter woke up.
She went on to publish more than 40
volumes of verse and prose, which
helped to give direction to the Amer-
ican counterculture of the 1960s and
1970s and established her as one of the
few female voices to emerge from the
male-dominated Beat scene. She wrote
frankly about sex at a time when the
merest allusion to the subject was
considered taboo, and much of her
work drew on being a mother. Her
masterpiece, the epic poem Loba, is a
celebration of “sacred” female energy
and is often hailed as the feminist
counterpart to Ginsberg’s Howl.
“I never stopped writing because of
having kids around,” she told the Chicago
Tribune in 2000. “They were just an
inspiration. Men are more of a problem.”
Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn,
New York, in 1934, to an Italian-
American family. Her mother, Emma,
was a teacher whose “determined
cheerfulness” and “neatness” Di Prima
bridled against. Her father, Francis, was
She juggled motherhood
and writing at first by
taking amphetamines
Diane di Prima
Rare female voice of the Beat Generation who partied with Ginsberg and Kerouac and broke taboos with her poetry
FRED W. MCDARRAH/GETTY IMAGESStanley van Gelder
Flamboyant entrepreneur and developer who made his first million from ‘paper pants’ and built up a property empire in London
In 1967 a 21-year-old French fashion
designer, Ivan Goujon, had a brainwave
while washing his underwear in a
London bedsitter. “I’m lazy by nature,”
he said, “and I thought how boring and
ridiculous washing was. It struck me
what a good idea it would be to wear
disposable pants.”
Without the money to turn his plan
into a business, he approached Stanley
van Gelder who, with his partner Jack
“Black Jack” Dellal, ran Dalton Barton,
a Victorian textile merchant that they
had turned into a mini-investment
bank. They had spun off the yarn side
into a separate firm, Bolton Textile
Mills, which took a 51 per cent stake in
the newly formed Goujon (Paper Togs).
Van Gelder, who came from the East
End of London, set up a secret factory
there to make pants from bonded fibre
that could be washed four or five times
before being thrown away. At nearly
20p for a pack of six, equal to £3 in
today’s money, Bolton could not make
enough of them, and rushed to strike
joint ventures and licensing deals
around the world to cope with demand.
At one stage they were selling a million
pairs a week, but the bubble soon burst
as the novelty wore off and bigger
manufacturers muscled in.
The Bank of England would not
rescue Keyser until the flamboyant
Dellal and Van Gelder had left. They
had already started a property com-
pany, Allied Commercial, and poured
money into that to take advantage of
the flattened values.
They were best known for making
£75 million in the late Eighties from
flipping — buying and quickly selling
— Bush House at the southern end of
Kingsway, one of Britain’s biggest office
complexes and the most expensive
when it was built in 1929. That windfall,
so dramatic that it led to a government
investigation, was the exception.
They owned many buildings for
years at a time, mainly in London,
managing and improving them and
using the rising rents to buy more.
While Dellal captured the headlines
with his colourful nickname, the
shrewd, pugnacious Van Gelder shared
his partner’s fondness for big cigars,
days at Ascot and nights in the casino.
Stanley Malcolm van Gelder was
born in east London in 1933, son of
Bernard, a Dutch patterned-tray maker,
and Rachel, née Trotsky, a hatter from
Russia. He grew up in a modest house in
Stamford Hill, north London, with an
outside lavatory and a bomb shelter atthe bottom of the garden. Stanley
collected shrapnel after air raids. He
went to the now-vanished Tottenham
Grammar School, which survived a
bomb landing in the playground.
Van Gelder did National Service in
the RAF. He trained as an accountant
with Price Waterhouse, now PwC,
qualifying in 1954. His first job after
qualifying was with Goodman Jones, a
small accountancy firm in Fitzroy
Square, central London. Dellal was a
client, which became the basis of a 40-
year partnership.
At a tea dance on holiday with his
parents at the Green Park Hotel, a
kosher establishment in Bournemouth,
Van Gelder met Lilian Peltz. On dates
he noticed she sometimes looked
slightly different, discovering only
later that she had a twin, Helen, who
occasionally took her place as a prank.
They married in 1957 and she died of
heart failure in 1966, leaving Van Gelder
with three young children, Karen,
Jonathan and Lizbeth. Money was so
tight that Van Gelder’s parents used to
bring them food parcels.
Karen became a merchandiser with
the Reject Shop, then an estate agent.
Jonathan worked for Allied Commercial.
Lizbeth trained as a gemologist atChristie’s and owned a jewellery shop in
Paris. She now makes corporate videos.
In 1970 Van Gelder married Beverley
Clint, whom he had met through
mutual friends. They had two sons.
Daniel owns Exemplar, a property firm,
and was chairman of Westminster
Property Association. Nicholas joined
the Metropolitan Police.
Van Gelder loved dogs, feeding
pigeons, handing out Kit-Kats to family
and friends, sailing and playing bridge.
In 1963 he was a founder member of
Dyrham Park golf club in Hertfordshire.
He was also a decent enough tennis
player to partner one of the Gullikson
brothers in a pro-am competition.
Van Gelder’s passion was Frank
Sinatra. Appropriately, his favourite
song was My Way. When his children
were adults, he would drive them
around central London and show them
how he had done it his way, pointing out
landmarks. “We used to own that,” he
said, “and that, and that.”Stanley van Gelder, businessman, was
born on June 16, 1933. He died on
October 25, 2020, aged 87Van Gelder would hand out Kit-Kats
Di Prima reading her work at the Gaslight Café in 1959; right, in 1960
involving Di Prima,
Kerouac, Ginsberg and
two others. Later she said
she invented the sex scenes
to satisfy her publisher, who would
return her drafts with “MORE SEX”
scrawled across the top. Her actual
memoir, Recollections of My Life as a
Woman, was published in 2001.
She left New York City in 1966
and spent time living in Timothy
Leary’s psychedelic commune. Shesubsequently spent a year travelling
America in a Volkswagen campervan,
doing readings at bars and galleries,
before settling in San Francisco. She
stayed there for the rest of her life and
became the city’s poet laureate in 2009.
A journalist from The Washington Post
who visited her book-filled flat in 2017
said that the experience felt “like
meeting the Oracle in The Matrix”.
She became involved in a community
called the Diggers, which fed homeless
people in San Francisco. This experi-
ence inspired her poetry collection
Revolutionary Letters. She also devoted
much of her time to studying Buddhism
and taught poetry at various colleges.
Although she found critical acclaim,
she did not seek commercial success
and when money got tight she sold
some of her manuscripts to university
libraries to pay her rent.
Di Prima had two short-lived
marriages to “guys who were not going
to try to run my life” and five children
from various fathers. For four decades
she lived with her partner, Sheppard
Powell, a writer and spiritual healer.
Later in life she suffered from arthritis
and Parkinson’s disease. Nonetheless
she continued to
write and fol-
lowed the Black
Lives Matter pro-
tests and the
evolving LGBT
movement.
“I love how the
various lines
between women
and men are
fading,” she said. “I
think we’re all nat-
urally bisexual and
the world should
just relax and not
put labels on every-
thing. We don’t
know who we are or where we’re going.
Just like I don’t know what the poem is
going to say until it writes itself.”Diane di Prima, poet, was born on
August 6, 1934. She died after a long
period of illness on October 25, 2020,
aged 86s
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