Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2000/09/18/learning_to_like_allen_ginsberg.php
Monday, September 18, 2000
To the astonishment of everyone present, Allen Ginsberg showed up at a book party for my When the Going was Good! (1982), a celebration of the 1950s and a refutation of the claim that they were boring. Given this context, Ginsberg's sudden appearance was perfect, as if arranged by Central Casting. The party was going on at the office of National Review, then on 35th Street, and centered in the conference room where the hors d'oeuvres and the bar were active, but the guests circulated through the hallways and the rabbit warren of small offices, one of which had belonged to Whittaker Chambers and now was mine.
Into the conference room festivities marched Ginsberg, his balding dome rising above remaining long black hair and ample beard, the whole giving the impression that all of this foliage was in the process of sliding downward. With him was Peter Orlovsky, a soft looking blonde with a pony tail, whom we might as well call his wife, except, judging by some of Ginsberg's poems, on the point of sexual fidelity.
Among the many guests were several Dartmouth students, including Dinesh D'Souza, then the editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, and soon to write the important books Illiberal Education and The End of Racism. When I introduced Ginsberg to D'Souza the poet appeared to be genuinely frightened. At first I thought he was kidding, but apparently not, because afterwards he spoke of 'the D'Souza forces,' as if imagining an invisible panzer division.
It turned out that Ginsberg had somehow heard about the book party and had come with specific things in mind. He cornered me and did all the talking, while Orlovsky nodded but spoke not a word.
First on his agenda was flag burning. In When the Going was Good! I had quoted Jack Kerouac as saying that Ginsberg was a flag-burner, my source being a biography of Kerouac. Now Ginsberg and Kerouac are often linked as 'Beat' pioneers, but they were different in important respects. For Ginsberg, America—or 'Amerika'—is Moloch, and the only appropriate response to it is pariah status through insanity, drugs, crime, sexual depravity, and song. Kerouac was a patriot. Columbia legend has it that he quit football and left school out of alienation in order to be a writer. No. We were in World War II, and he wanted to join up. He went to Boston, got drunk, and enlisted in the Army, the Navy, and the Merchant Marine. Somehow these federal offenses were straightened out and he served in the Merchant Marine. When Kerouac called Ginsberg a flag-burner, he meant it contemptuously. On the Road is really a bohemian valentine to America.
Ginsberg was adamant. Kerouac had lied. He had never, but never, burned an American flag. Ludicrously, he began to sound like an American Legionnaire, even though his poems amount to metaphorical flag burning.
I did not get it. Perhaps, given his second item of business, his denial was intended to please me. Anyway, I was perfectly willing to accept his denial that he had ever burned a flag, and to regard Kerouac's statement as a factoid and perhaps a metaphorical statement.
So we moved on. Ginsberg knew that I had just been appointed by President Reagan to a second six-year term on the National Council of the Endowment for the Humanities which was in the business of giving away about $100 million per year. He wanted a grant from the Endowment for Peter Orlovsky, who nodded. As I understood it, the grant was to subsidize the publication of a volume of poems by Orlovsky entitled Clean Asshole Poems.
The easy way out for me was to point out to Ginsberg the difference between the Humanities Endowment and its twin the Arts Endowment. The latter supported original creative work. The Humanities Endowment supported, broadly speaking, 'comment,' as in history, biography, analysis, education, research. We did not touch new poems.
Ginsberg was far from dense, but this distinction seemed to elude him completely. The Clean Asshole Poems were well outside our congressional mandate, and they certainly were unlikely to appeal to our chairman, William Bennett. I added the opinion that even the Arts Endowment, after all a federal agency, would be very unlikely to subsidize the Clean Asshole Poems. On that point it was I, and not Ginsberg, who was seriously mistaken. But he was concealing from me some pertinent facts.
Much later I discovered that in 1978, four years earlier—and during the Carter administration, if that is relevant—the National Endowment for the Arts had awarded Orlovsky $10,000, which subsidized the publication by City Lights Books in San Francisco those same Clean Asshole Poems, a nice touch for this couple, since City Lights had published Ginsberg's own first volume, Howl. Out of curiosity, I perused a copy of Clean Asshole Poems to see what had impressed the Arts Endowment:
I rubbed two comes all over my cat
& now she has something to do
under the belly, on the paw,
behind the ear
near the tail
I dipped into the volume elsewhere.
My mother's very funny sometimes,
when I was 17teen she told me
she sucked my gigger when I was 3 months old
& sucked my dildo in front of my father
& he got jealous she said & told her to quit having fun
I always loved that story & tell it whenever I can
to sweet friendly girls.
Well, all the time I had been trying to explain to Ginsberg the difference between the two Endowments, he knew very well that Orlovsky already had received a grant from the Arts and had in fact published Clean Asshole Poems. Evidently what Ginsberg had wanted from me was another grant from Humanities, conceived, I suppose, as an honor for Orlovsky and perhaps encouragement to produce more Clean Asshole Poems. Fabulous.
What came of all this was not a grant, of course, but acquaintance with Ginsberg and the surprising discovery that I enjoyed his admittedly rather strange company. As he and Orlovsky left the book party, Ginsberg gave me a ticket to a show he was putting on evenings in a church basement down in the East Village. A couple of days later I made my way down there, and found him to be a compelling public performer. The basement was packed. Ginsberg stood on a circular stage with a sort of small accordion or concertina in his hands. With him was an angelic-looking blonde adolescent who sat at a small organ, about the size of a schoolroom desk, which made a high sound like a violin. Ginsberg recited his poems, which I had not admired on the printed page, and accompanied himself on his instrument while the blonde played his organ, if that is what it was. The effect was by no means negligible. Much of the audience seemed mesmerized, on the edge of a swoon. I found Ginsberg compelling as theater. I would not have been surprised if he had levitated himself a couple of feet toward the ceiling. The climax of the show, however, was not a Ginsberg poem but a chant, if you can call it that. Allen simply stood there on the stage and pronounced the syllable OM over and over again: OM OM OM OM OM OM OM... This communicated, or enacted, the annihilation of mind, of intellect, which is the heart of his Buddhism and the central meaning of his poetry. To my surprise, I thought his performance a weird success.
To my further surprise, I found that Allen was actually good company and that I rather liked him. We took to having lunch once in a while, favoring Paone's Italian restaurant, a sort of National Review hangout. The rather macho waiters had to get used to Allen bringing some food of his own, several kinds of rice, some dry fish and so on. He told me he had to be careful because of diabetes, and lined up a row of pills on the table. His blood pressure was bad, too. You just had to accept the fact that with Allen things were always going to be a bit out of the ordinary.
His manner was very sweet and paternal. He disapproved of martinis, of meat, of cholesterol. Norman Podhoretz has testified that his sweetness came with his Buddhism, and that as a younger man he was a shouter and an angry abuser, enrage. I saw nothing like this.
We had Columbia in common, Trilling, Van Doren, Barzun, all of whom he claimed to like, but in an oblique way of his own, and I knew some of the poets of his generation at Columbia, such as Richard Howard and Louis Simpson. Allen turned out to be very literary, extremely well read. Podhoretz recalls that as an undergraduate he had 'an amazing virtuosity that enabled him to turn out polished verses in virtually any style: love lyrics with an Elizabethan flavor, heroic couplets in the manner of Dryden or Pope, sonnets or rhymed stanzas in the manner of Keats or Shelly.' This, to be sure, had given way to the style that emerged with Howl.
'Ginsberg,' wrote Helen Vendler, 'is responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry at mid-century,' and she assigned him 'a memorable place in American poetry.' There she seems by allusion to associate him with Whitman, who invited us 'to loose the stop from your throat,' but if so this is an error. Allen's verse does not attempt the richness of texture we find in Whitman or the variety of prosodic techniques that produce it. As he insisted to me at one of our lunches, his model was not Whitman but 'the long line,' as he called it, of Christopher Smart, the Smart, that is, of Jubilato Agno. Here Smart's poetic consists almost entirely of repetition and enumeration strung on loose rhythms that appear to derive from the responses in the liturgy.
That Smart had written Jubilato Agno while confined in Bedlam lunatic asylum doubtless appealed to Allen, for he too had the epiphany that led to Howl while similarly confined. At Columbia he had been constantly in trouble, been suspended, readmitted and so on, and eventually had run seriously afoul of the law, marginally involved with Kerouac in a homicide, arrested in a car carrying stolen goods. Exasperated, Mark Van Doren told him that he needed 'to hear the clang of iron behind him,' but then Trilling and Van Doren managed to have him sent to a psychiatric institution instead.
It seems that there he crystallized his vision that American society is so poisonous that the only appropriate response to it is radical alienation and indeed madness. As he wrote in Howl:
I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to starry dynamo in the machinery of
night...
Allen of course was aware of 'best minds' in the ordinary sense of those words, the intelligence exhibited by, for example, Trilling, Van Doren, Barzun. That is not what 'best minds' means in Howl. They are best minds here because they possess the Insight—that madness is the right response to this society—madness, drugs, degradation, 'howling.' Allen's verse, like that of the mad Smart, makes use of very few of the resources available to English poetry. It is largely, as I say, enumeration and often hysterical asservation.
Whitman's verse, very differently, is immensely rich in a technical sense, full of biblical rhythms and echoes of Homeric epics, and indeed of a great many and varied tunes, using assonance and dissonance, devices such as anaphora, epistrophe, apostrophe, extended metaphor, doubling, and so on.
And whereas Allen's 'vision' is really a simple thing, an endlessly repeated negation along with assorted escapes from thought and consciousness, Whitman's poetry is energized by his heroic efforts to reconcile the immense polarities of experience: democrat and spiritual aristocrat, male and female, haughty and affectionate, one and many, particularity and transcendent unity. Whitman is not a philosopher, but he is a thinker. If you asked Nietzsche 'What is truth?' he would probably say with Yeats, 'I dance.' If you asked Whitman, he would say, 'I sing.'
Allen's verse does not struggle with experience in this way and certainly lacks tension. He endlessly inverts normal experience, the blasphemer rigidly dependent on the sacred, hating it but unable to escape it, mechanically programmed. His homosexuality is not Greek and athletic but literally dirty, in the poems anyway, welcoming its association with excrement, savoring the stink. He despised 'gay rights,' which asserts the normality of homosexuality, even seeks bourgeois marriage. Allen flees and despises the bourgeois and all traces of the normal. Normality is spiritual betrayal. To the ordinary gaze, mental illness is a miserable condition. In Allen's poetry it is holy. Soon one sees how predictable all this is. With a great outlaw poet, Baudelaire, the situation is saved by what he is able to do with language, hexameters as good as Racine's.
But, and I am sorry to disagree with Helen Vendler, I have to say that I judge Allen's body of work to be very weak, both as 'vision' and as writing, weak to the point of nullity.
Allen's father was a school teacher who published poems in the local newspaper. His mother was in and out of asylums and died insane. He memorialized her in Kaddish, and she is a presence in his emotional structure. Perhaps 'society' was responsible for her madness. Perhaps her madness was really sanity. Then, she was holy. Amid these paradoxes and rejections, Allen's Buddhism, with its negation of the world and pursuit of nirvana seems to have eased Allen's suffering.
To me he was affectionate. The last time we had lunch he brought for me a copy of his big new Collected Poems, published by the eminently respectable Harper and Row. He had come a long way from City Lights Books. Stanford had bought his papers for more than $1 million. He also had with him a wooden box containing a set of wooden blocks which turned out to be stamps or dies. With these he inscribed the poems to me in Chinese characters which he said translated as esteem, affection, hope and so on. He also drew a complicated fish symbol, carefully drawing the scales, which, he said, represented 'rebirth.'
When I retired from teaching at Dartmouth, I presented the College with this book at the English Department banquet. Of course this was shocking. That I had known Allen was difficult to handle, but that he evidently had liked me was completely inassimilable, off the charts. Today the book is in Dartmouth's Special Collections. (Perhaps I had better have someone translate those Chinese ideograms for me.)
As Nick Carraway said, 'The poor son of a bitch.'