Wilborn Hampton (obituary date 6 April 1997)

SOURCE: An obituary for Allen Ginsberg, in New York Times, April 6, 1997, pp. A1, A42.

[In the following obituary, Hampton eulogizes Ginsberg, providing a review of his life and work.]

Allen Ginsberg, the poet laureate of the Beat Generation whose "Howl!" became a manifesto for the sexual revolution and a cause célèbre for free speech in the 1950's, eventually earning its author a place in America's literary pantheon, died early yesterday. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan.

He died of liver cancer, Bill Morgan, a friend and the poet's archivist, said.

Mr. Morgan said that Mr. Ginsberg wrote right to the end. "He's working on a lot of poems, talking to old friends," Mr. Morgan said on Friday. "He's in very good spirits. He wants to write poetry and finish his life's work."

William S. Burroughs, one of Mr. Ginsberg's lifelong friends and a fellow Beat, said that Mr. Ginsberg's death was "a great loss to me and to everybody."

"We were friends for more than 50 years," Mr. Burroughs said. "Allen was a great person with worldwide influence. He was a pioneer of openness and a lifelong model of candor. He stood for freedom of expression and for coming out of all the closets long before others did. He has influence because he said what he believed. I will miss him."

As much through the strength of his own irrepressible personality as through his poetry, Mr. Ginsberg provided a bridge between the Underground and the Transcendental. He was as comfortable in the ashrams of Indian gurus in the 1960's as he had been in the Beat coffeehouses of the preceding decade.

A ubiquitous presence at the love-ins and be-ins that marked the drug-oriented counterculture of the Flower Children years, Mr. Ginsberg was also in the vanguard of the political protest movements they helped spawn. He marched against the war in Vietnam, the C.I.A. and the Shah of Iran, among other causes.

If his early verse shocked Eisenhower's America with its celebration of homosexuality and drugs, his involvement in protests kept him in the public eye and fed ammunition to his critics. But through it all, Mr. Ginsberg maintained a sort of teddy bear quality that deflected much of the indignation he inspired.

He was known around the world as a master of the outrageous. He read his poetry and played finger cymbals at the Albert Hall in London; he was expelled from Cuba after saying he found Che Guevara "cute"; he sang duets with Bob Dylan, and he chanted "Hare Krishna" on William F. Buckley Jr.'s television program. As the critic John Leonard observed in a 1988 appreciation: "He is of course a social bandit. But he is a nonviolent social bandit."

Or as the narrator in Saul Bellow's "Him With His Foot in His Mouth" said of Mr. Ginsberg: "Under all this self-revealing candor is purity of heart. And the only authentic living representative of American Transcendentalism is that fat-breasted, bald, bearded homosexual in smeared goggles, innocent in his uncleanness."

J. D. McClatchy, a poet and the editor of The Yale Review said yesterday: "Ginsberg was the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon.

"Like Whitman, he was a bard in the old manner—outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant. His work is finally a history of our era's psyche, with all its contradictory urges."

Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in Newark and grew up in Paterson, N.J., the second son of Louis Ginsberg, a school-teacher and sometime poet, and the former Naomi Levy, a Russian émigrée and fervent Marxist. His brother, Eugene, named for Eugene V. Debs, also wrote poetry, under the name Eugene Brooks. Eugene, a lawyer, survives.

Recalling his parents in a 1985 interview, Mr. Ginsberg said:

"They were old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers. My father would go around the house either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or attacking T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.' My mother made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.' I grew suspicious of both sides."

Allen Ginsberg's mother later suffered from paranoia and was in and out of mental hospitals; Mr. Ginsberg signed an authorization for a lobotomy. Two days after she died in 1956 in Pilgrim State Mental Hospital on Long Island, he received a letter from her that said: "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window—I have the key—get married Allen don't take drugs…. Love, your mother."

Three years after her death, Mr. Ginsberg wrote "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)" an elegy that many consider his finest poem.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village, downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph the rhythm, the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after

"Kaddish" burnished a reputation that had been forged with the publication of "Howl!" three years earlier. The two works established Mr. Ginsberg as a major voice in what came to be known as the Beat Generation of writers.

Mr. Ginsberg's journey to his place as one of America's most celebrated poets began during his college days. He first attended Montclair State College. But in 1943, he received a small scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson and enrolled at Columbia University. He considered becoming a lawyer like his brother, but was soon attracted to the literary courses offered by Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling, and switched his major from pre-law to literature.

At Columbia he fell in with a crowd that included Jack Kerouac, a former student four years his senior, Lucien Carr and William Burroughs, and later, Neal Cassady, a railway worker who had literary aspirations. Together they formed the nucleus of what would become the Beats.

Kerouac and Carr became the poet's mentors, and Kerouac and Cassady became his lovers. It was also at Columbia that Mr. Ginsberg began to experiment with mind-altering drugs like LSD, which would gain widespread use in the decade to follow and which Mr. Ginsberg would celebrate in his verse along with his homosexuality and his immersion in Eastern transcendental religions.

But if the Beats were creating literary history around Columbia and the West End Cafe, there was a dangerous undercurrent to their activities. Mr. Carr spent a brief time in jail for manslaughter, and Mr. Ginsberg, because he had associated with Mr. Carr, was suspended from Columbia for a year.

In 1949, after Mr. Ginsberg had received his bachelor's degree, Herbert Huncke, a writer and hustler, moved into his apartment and stored stolen goods there. Mr. Huncke was eventually jailed, and Mr. Ginsberg, pleading psychological disability, was sent to a psychiatric institution for eight months. At the institution, he met another patient, Carl Solomon, whom Mr. Ginsberg credited with deepening his understanding of poetry and its power as a weapon of political dissent.

Returning home to Paterson, Mr. Ginsberg became a protégé of William Carlos Williams, the physician and poet, who lived nearby. Williams's use of colloquial American language in his poetry was a major influence on the young Mr. Ginsberg.

After leaving Columbia, Mr. Ginsberg first went to work for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. After five years, he once recalled, he found himself taking part in a consumer-research project trying to determine whether Americans preferred the word "sparkling" or "glamorous" to describe ideal teeth. "We already knew people associate diamonds with 'sparkling' and furs with 'glamorous,'" he said "We spent $150,000 to learn most people didn't want furry teeth."

The poet said he decided to give up the corporate world "when my shrink asked me what would make me happy." He hung his gray flannel suit in the closet and went to San Francisco with six months of unemployment insurance in his pocket. San Francisco was then the center of considerable literary energy. He took a room around the corner from City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore and underground publishing house, and began to write.

During this period, Mr. Ginsberg, also became part of the San Francisco literary circle that included Kenneth Rexroth—an author, critic and painter—Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan and Philip Lamantia. He also met Peter Orlovsky, who would be his companion for the next 30 years.

His first major work from San Francisco was Howl! The long-running poem expressed the anxieties and ideals of a generation alienated from mainstream society. Howl! which was to become Mr. Ginsberg's most famous poem, was dedicated to Carl Solomon, and begins:

      I saw 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 the
         starry dynamo in the machinery of night….

Mr. Ginsberg read the poem to a gathering arranged by Mr. Rexroth, and those present never forgot the poem, its author and the occasion.

Mr. Rexroth's wife privately distributed a mimeographed 50-copy edition of "Howl!" and in 1956, Mr. Ferlinghetti published "Howl!" and Other Poems in what he called his "pocket poets series."

With its open and often vivid celebration of homosexuality and eroticism, "Howl!" was impounded by United States Customs agents and Mr. Ginsberg was tried on obscenity charges.

After a long trial, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not without "redeeming social importance."

The result was to make "Howl!" immensely popular and establish it as à landmark against censorship. The outrage and furor did not stop with the sexual revolution. As late as 1988, the radio station WBAI refused to allow "Howl!" to be read on the air during a week long series about censorship in America.

There were almost as many definitions of Beatniks and the Beat movement as there were writers who claimed to be part of it. As John Clellan Holmes described it, "To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality looking up." But if the movement grew out of disillusionment, it was disillusionment with a conscience.

Mr. Ginsberg tried to explain the aims of the Beats in a letter to his father in 1957: "Whitman long ago complained that unless the material power of America were leavened by some kind of spiritual infusion, we would wind up among the 'fabled damned.' We're approaching that state as far as I can see. Only way out is individuals taking responsibility and saying what they actually feel. That's what we as a group have been trying to do."

On another occasion, he described the literary rules more succinctly: "You don't have to be right. All you have to do is be candid." Mr. Ginsberg was nothing if not candid.

As he wrote in "America," another 1956 poem, which took aim at Eisenhower's post-McCarthy era:

      America I've given you all and now I'm nothing
      America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956
 
      America this is quite serious
      America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set
      America is this correct?

Mr. Ginsberg claimed that the poets who formed the prime influence on his own work were William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. He declared he had found a new method of poetry. "All you have to do," he said, "is think of anything that comes into your head, then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each."

His disdain for poetry's traditional rules only gave ammunition to his critics. James Dickey once complained that the "problem" with Allen Ginsberg was that he made it seem as if anybody could write poetry.

Mr. Ginsberg used the celebrity he gained with Howl! to travel widely during the next two decades. He went to China and India to study with gurus and Zen masters and to Venice to see Pound. On his way home, he was crowned King of the May by dissident university students in Prague, only to be expelled by the Communist Government. He read his poetry wherever they would let him, from concert stages to off-campus coffeehouses.

He was in the forefront of whatever movement was in fashion: the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960's, the anti-Vietnam war and anti-C.I.A. demonstrations of the 1970's, the anti-Shah and anti-Reagan protests of the 1980's. In 1967 he was arrested in an antiwar protest in New York City, and he was arrested again, for the same reason, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven,

Through it all, he kept writing. After Kaddish in 1959, major works included TV Baby in 1960, Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966), Wales Visitation (1967), Don't Grow Old (1976) and White Shroud (1983).

In a celebrated career, Mr. Ginsberg received many awards, including the National Book Award (1973), the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement (1986), and an American Book Award for contributions to literary excellence (1990).

In 1968, Neal Cassady died of a drug overdose. Kerouac died of alcoholism the next year. By the mid-1970's, Mr. Ginsberg had helped start the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., a Buddhist university where he taught summer courses in poetry and in Buddhist meditation. He also was becoming one of the last living voices of the Beat generation and the keeper of the flame.

In 1985, Harper & Row published Mr. Ginsberg's Collected Poems, an anthology of his work in one volume that firmly established the poet in the mainstream of American literature. The poet again made tours, showing up on television shows, but this time he was in suit and tie offering a sort of explanation of his work.

"People ask me if I've gone respectable now," he said to one interviewer. "I tell them I've always been respectable."

During another interview, he confessed: "My intention was to make a picture of the mind, mistakes and all. Of course I learned I'm an idiot, a complete idiot who wasn't as prophetic as I thought I was. The crazy, angry Philippic sometimes got in the way of clear perception.

"I thought the North Vietnamese would be a lot better than they turned out to be. I shouldn't have been marching against the Shah of Iran because the mullahs have turned out to be a lot worse."

But despite his suit and tie, the censors continued to look over Mr. Ginsberg's shoulder. During the interviews, David Remnick, then of The Washington Post, accompanied him to CBS's "Nightwatch." A producer, unfamiliar with the poet's work, asked if he would read something on the show.

"How about reading that poem about your mother?" she suggested.

"'Kaddish,' yes. Time magazine calls it my masterpiece," Ginsberg replied. "But I don't know…."

The poet pointed to a word in the poem he doubted would make prime time. As Mr. Remnick reported, the producer's eyes glazed over and there was a long silence.

"Your mother's …?" the producer said in horror.

"Couldn't we just bleep that part out?" the poet offered, always helpful.

"No," the producer said.

"It's O.K.," the poet replied. "I've got other poems."

London Times (obituary date 7 April 1997)

SOURCE: "Allen Ginsberg," in London Times, April 7, 1997, p. 23.

[In the following obituary, the critic discusses Ginsberg's role as a voice of protest and his contribution to the Beat movement.]

Whether as a prophetic bard or a pretentious beatnik, Allen Ginsberg has survived for four decades as an icon of American counterculture. He was one of the last survivors of the Beats, a cool cabal of mid-Fifties writers who, centering on Jack Kerouac, sought to rebel against staid, middle-class convention.

"Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going though hell," wrote William Carlos Williams in his introduction to Ginsberg's 1956 poem Howl. A court case ensued in which the publisher was, unsuccessfully, prosecuted for obscenity. Howl at once became one of the most widely circulated books of the time; a bible for a beatnik youth. Its opening lines remain one of the most notorious passages in postwar American poetry. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked, / Dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn / looking for an active fix".

It was never quite clear what exactly the Beats stood for. Jack Kerouac had coined the name, playing with its punning overtones of "beaten down" and "beatified". But broadly speaking, its key writers—Kerouac and Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso—aimed to cast aside the proprieties of English prosody and to play with the rhythms and improvisations of American jazz, instead. Their work had a dramatic immediacy.

To his admirers Ginsberg was seen to have liberated American poetry, in the same way as John Osborne revitalized English theater with Look Back in Anger. He recorded the rhythms of voices around him and conveyed his most vivid feelings in the long tumbling lines which became his trademark style. His work has now become mainstream. It is found on university syllabuses all over the world.

Yet Ginsberg never won a major literary prize. And there is another school of thought which finds his work freewheeling and shallow—the rantings of a drug-befuddled mind. Ginsberg did, indeed, experiment with a bewildering array of narcotics from mescaline to morphine, from dope to LSD. Bob Dylan, with whom he collaborated for some time, once described him as a "con man extraordinaire"; while John Giorno, the poet and former lover of Andy Warhol, described him as "the founding father of bullshit liberals".

But, whatever the criticisms, Ginsberg was, as one of his biographers put it, "the most practically effective drop-out around". He was the model non-conformist, the archetypal gay rights activist, the classic campaigner against censorship. And in later age he would hold forth on any of these subjects in lengthily repetitive monologues. He virtually invented "flower power" and the fashion for bald, bearded men in home-stitched sandals.

He became something of an institution, renowned for such declarations as "poetry is best read naked" and such outlandish feats, as the time he removed all his clothing at a party, except for his underpants which he balanced on his head. A "please do not disturb sign" was suspended from his penis. At one point he spent some time learning to dance like a kangaroo from an aboriginal instructor.

Yet if his exploits sometimes appeared ludicrous, Ginsberg proved an adroit survivor. He outlived most of his enemies including J. Edgar Hoover, who declared covert war on the Beats, and McCarthy and his witch-hunters. And if he saw one generation grow out of his work, a new one arose to show themselves interested. In later years he collaborated with such bands as The Clash, Sonic Youth and, most recently, Bono of U2.

Allen Ginsberg was born in New Jersey, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, Louis, was a schoolteacher, and a poet of modest repute. He and his wife Naomi—in her youth an articulate and idealistic Marxist—were enthusiasts of naturism. But as a boy Allen led a disturbed life. Few visitors came to the house for, as his mother's periodic bouts of schizophrenia intensified, she routinely walked about naked crying out that her mother-in-law was trying to kill her with poison gas.

At the age of five Ginsberg watched from his cot as his mother set fire to the house and when he was nine he was standing outside the bathroom door while she, locked inside, slashed her wrists with a knife. His second major poem Kaddish (1960) was inspired by a memory of his mother cooking him supper while she told him of her meeting with God: "the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her." In 1947—long after the divorce of their parents—Allen Ginsberg and his elder brother Gene were finally to sign consent for their mother to be lobotomized.

Ginsberg was educated in Paterson, New Jersey, and went on to Columbia University intending to become a lawyer. Although he proved himself extremely bright, he was suspended for writing obscene graffiti on the dirty windows of his dormitory. Eventually allowed to resume his studies, he graduated in 1948.

In the interim, however, Ginsberg had already started on his unofficial education. He had worked several short stints as a messman in the Merchant Navy and had his first homosexual encounter with a middle-aged sailor. He had fallen under the influence of William Burroughs who, 12 years his senior, had a flat nearby. Burroughs had not yet written a book; it was to be Ginsberg who eventually persuaded him to do so. He had also been in trouble with the police after his flat was used as a base for a robbery. "Genius Columbia Student, Master of Crime Ring," read the headlines of the local paper.

To avoid prosecution as an accomplice, Ginsberg pleaded insanity and spent eight months in a mental hospital. But perhaps he was not altogether unsuited for the place. He had been using hallucinogens heavily-God had spoken to him while he was reading Blake, he said. He met Carl Solomon in the asylum, to whom he later dedicated Howl.

On his discharge Ginsberg found desultory employment: on a magazine, in a ribbon factory in New Jersey and as a market research consultant in San Francisco. But then in 1954 he met Peter Orlovsky who was to remain his lifelong companion. And in that year he finally decided to dedicate himself to "Blake, smoking pot, and doing whatever I wanted to do". He never looked back.

Drawn to San Francisco by what he called "its long tradition of Bohemia", he met and mixed with such San Francisco poets as Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was the last who, in 1956, published the poem Howl. Ferlinghetti was charged with obscenity and Ginsberg's reputation was made.

He went on to publish some ten more volumes of poetry as well as copious journals. He also made a number of "spontaneous films". During the 1960s he traveled extensively, including to India to study Buddhism, to Cuba where he publicly attacked the Castro Government for its repression of homosexuals, and to England where he accompanied Bob Dylan on his Don't Look Back tour. In London he performed at the Royal Albert Hall, accompanying himself on the harmonium. He and his friend, Gregory Corso, took the opportunity to visit W.H. Auden in Oxford. Corso attempted to kiss the turn ups of Auden's trousers. During another encounter with a famous poet, the 82-year-old Ezra Pound, Ginsberg played him the Beatles Yellow Submarine. "He seemed to like it," he said. "He tapped his stick."

All over America, Ginsberg gave countless poetry readings and held "office hours" at universities. He was a presence at everything from "be-ins"—mass outdoor festivals of chanting costumes and music—to anti-war protests. He spoke out at first, for the legalization of drugs, although gradually he came to regret his involvement in the drugs scene and toured universities instead preaching the superiority of yoga and meditation over narcotic abuse—although he still claimed that LSD had enabled him to pray for President Lyndon Johnson instead of hating him.

For the last 20 years of his life Ginsberg devoted much of his time to a Buddhist college, the Naropa Institute in Colorado, where he taught poetry. His principal guru Chögyam Trungpa, whose nirvanic state never quite overcame his earthly passions for women, cars and cannabis, died in 1987. But Ginsberg continued to defend him and his somewhat unconvincing habits—which included staffing his house with devotees rigged out as English butlers and teaching his students Oxonian English "so that they would be conscious of speech as a formulated aesthetic act like flower arranging".

Ginsberg suffered from diabetes and in later years from heart problems and hepatitis. In 1970 he contracted Bell's Palsy. The disease affected his eyes which were left, as Time magazine unkindly put it, "one wide and innocent, gazing at eternity; the other narrow and scrutinising, looking for its market share". Perhaps this was unfair. Ginsberg gave large proportions of his money to a charity he set up in aid of struggling poets. He lived in a run down-flat on New York's Lower East Side where he ate macrobiotically and meditated daily. He always resisted being lionized as poet. Yet today his work sells more copies than it did even in the Sixties.

He leaves no survivors.