36 The New York Review
From Hell and Back
Caroline Fraser
My First Thirty Years
by Gertrude Beasley,
with a foreword by Nina Bennett.
Sourcebooks, 320 pp., $16.99 (paper)
Pity the Beast
by Robin McLean.
And Other Stories, 377 pp., $25.95
Larry McMurtry, our principal critic of
Texas, once described the condition of
women there:
Years ago someone pointed out
that Texas is hell on women and
horses. He was wrong about
horses, for most horses are consid-
ered to be valuable, and are treated
well. He was absolutely right about
women though, the country was
simply hell on them, and remained
so until fairly recently.We could quibble with that last point,
but overall it’s still a pretty solid judg-
ment. Texas is currently intensifying
the suffering of women, particularly
poor women and women of color, with
its notorious law placing a vigilante-
style bounty on abortion providers and
those aiding women who seek to have
the procedure. The law has no excep-
tion for rape victims or survivors of in-
cest. What won’t Texas do to humiliate
and subjugate women? Very little, it
appears.
McMurtry had an unerring eye for
the casual cruelty and endemic social
hypocrisy that made his state a pit of
sexual viciousness, long chronicling
the local appetite for behavior ranging
from bestiality to incest between sib-
lings. In a 1968 essay, “Eros in Archer
County,” he revisited a passage in his
novel The Last Picture Show (1966),
the scene in which rural youth copu-
late with a blind heifer, a practice rep-
resented as traditional, cows not being
the half of it. “Farm kids did it with
cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever
else they could catch,” he wrote, call-
ing the scene “sober realism.” Indeed,
Texas was keeping its options open on
that front even lately. Bestiality did not
become illegal there until 2017, when
the state legislature made it a felony.
A scholar of state history and a book-
seller, as well as a writer devoted to
demythologizing the West, McMurtry
was always gratified to discover “sober
realism” wherever he could find it,
often in rare or out- of- print sources
that addressed life on the frontier as it
actually was. Thus he came to admire,
and eventually republish, Gertrude
Beasley’s breathtakingly frank mem-
oir, My First Thirty Years, which origi-
nally appeared in 1925.
Born in 1892 in Cross Plains, a stage-
coach crossroads in central Texas, Edna
Gertrude Beasley was the ninth child of
William Isaac Beasley and Lucy Bea-
sley, and grew up dirt poor in a state
specializing in dirt. Her account openly
acknowledges bodily functions and
features sketches of domestic violence,
rape, incest, molestation, bestiality, bul-
lying, prostitution, and abortion. To call
her memoir unflinching is an under-
statement: it’s a virtual encyclopedia of
misogyny. For its time and place—and
even now—it’s unprecedented.
This scandalous book was published
in Paris in 1925 by Robert McAlmon’s
Contact Editions, famous for bring-
ing out works of the Lost Generation,
including those by Hemingway, Ger-
trude Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, and oth-
ers. Beasley and her book would be lost
too, albeit literally. After the United
States’ 1921 ban on Joyce’s Ulysses for
obscenity (following publication of a
chapter in The Little Review), Beas-
ley’s work was vigorously suppressed,
but unlike Joyce she found few defend-
ers, although Bertrand Russell, whom
she met on her travels, tried to help her,
sending money and recommending a
lawyer.
So far as we know, the only public
comment she made on this suppression
occurred in the January 1926 issue of
Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan,
which featured a sanitized version of her
experience titled “I Was One of Thirteen
Poor White Trash.” Packaged as one of
the sensational first- person accounts for
which the magazine was known, it ap-
peared alongside contributions by The-
odore Roosevelt, Ring Lardner, and
W. Somerset Maugham. Beasley was
clearly trying to promote her work.
Yet the existence of the memoir was
mentioned only in the caption beneath
her author photo. She referred to the
censorship of the book obliquely in her
melancholy conclusion:Those who have been through
my long road of poverty, familysorrows, and social discrimina-
tions, recognize the scars which
such a struggle leaves. They are
mostly distrust, hysteria, suspicion
and fear—the results of an over-
wrought body and soul.
There are many women who like
myself have hacked their way out
of the labyrinth of superstitions,
lies, ignorance, unfair advantage
and poverty, who have been great
warriors in a mighty battle, in a
battle so horrible that if they told
the truth about life it would take
away the last breath of the censors
of Anglo- Saxondom.Two years after this was published,
Beas ley was silenced forever. Ten days
after her return to the US from En-
gland in 1928, she was committed to
an asylum, the Central Islip Psychiat-
ric Center on Long Island, where she
remained until her death in 1955. Her
diagnosis and the circumstances of her
committal remain unknown.
In an afterword to the limited edi-
tion of My First Thirty Years published
by the Book Club of Texas in 1989, Mc-
Murtry speculated about the book’s
fate, saying that “three hundred copies
were lost in America, presumably to
Customs,” a hunch later confirmed. As
a result, McMurtry writes, the memoir
became “to an unusual degree a book
known only to...antiquarian book-
sellers.” Although reprints appeared
once or twice, the memoir has nowbeen released by a trade publisher,
making it widely available for the first
time. The timing could not be more
fortuitous: My First Thirty Years
provides a foundational exploration
of the Lone Star State’s treatment of
women, which, if not uniquely bru-
tal, shows real ambition in a crowded
field.McMurtry called the opening of My
Fi rst Thirty Years “as violently indig-
nant as any in literature,” but it’s not
merely the aggrieved tone that sets it
apart. Beasley is attacking every mawk-
ish preconception about the sanctity of
life:Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb
of a woman, conceived in a sexual
act of rape, being carried during
the pre- natal period by an unwill-
ing and rebellious mother, finally
bursting from the womb only to
be tormented in a family whose
members I despised or pitied, and
brought into association with peo-
ple whom I should never have cho-
sen. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay
in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I
had somehow thought, breathed or
moved and wrought destruction to
the woman who bore me, and her
eight miserable children who pre-
ceded me, and the four round- faced
mediocrities who came after me,
and her husband, a monstrously
cruel, Christlike, and handsome
man with an animal’s appetite for
begetting children.A photo of the entire Beasley clan
posted on the genealogical website
Ancestry.com roughly confirms her de-
scription of her father, if Christ sported
a handlebar mustache, wore suspend-
ers, and looked mean. In the image all
seven Beasley boys, with the exception
of the youngest, seated on his mother’s
lap, are together on the left side of the
image, the six girls on the right, the
sexes divided by their mother’s heavy
presence, seated in the middle, scowl-
ing and squinting in the sunlight.
The division was only too appropri-
ate, for Gertrude’s first memory is of
her older brothers trying to rape her:I was lying on my back on the
hard, dirt floor of the stalls in my
father’s horse lot. My hands were
being held by my older brothers
and my feet also, I think, and the
great weight on my body seemed
about to crush me. God, what an
awful thing! Would the conscious-
ness, the struggle for breath, which
seemed about to be pressed out in
case my frame broke in, my ribs
stuck into my entrails and heart,
ever return! Thus was I first made
conscious. The rest was only a
dark whirl; perhaps the wind was
blowing, and it seems to me now
there was laughter. My oldest
brother, then about sixteen years
old, though he was very small for
his age, was trying to have sexual
intercourse with me, although I
was only about four years old at
the time.Gertrude Beasley, circa 1920sUS Department of State