[In the following review of Journals Mid-Fifties, Theroux argues that the journals are often dull and reveal little of Ginsberg's life.]

A pile of pages, scribbled odds and ends, Allen Ginsberg's Journals Mid-Fifties (1954–1958), the thoughts and observations of a young would-be poet between ages 28 and 32, are nothing like the polished records of Virginia Woolf, James Boswell or Anais Nin, certainly nothing like the studied and deliberate journals of Hawthorne or Henry James.

"The instigation for getting things together, finding all these old notebooks," writes Ginsberg, who back in the early '50s "thought it would be a good idea to keep track of it all"—the social foment, new consciousness and hip restlessness of the "Beat" movement—"was the advantage of having apprentices at Naropa during the mid-seventies, late seventies, and early eighties, who were beginning to type the whole mass of material up." Forgive me if I find it difficult to picture a Beat poet with typing "apprentice," never mind that being the occasion, formally stated, of publishing a book. In any case, Ginsberg had his pages. He had his typists. And he had his editor. He had his ducks in a row.

Gordon Ball has spent 12 years unearthing, sorting through, Ginsberg's breast-pocket spirals, manuscripts, letters, visual sketches, photographs and materials relating to this period in the poet's life. The third collection of Ginsberg's journals, following Journals Early Fifties Early Sixties (1977) and the earlier Indian Journals (1962), this new volume represents the period from his entering the Bay Area, where he would write "Howl," through his first trip through the Arctic and to North Africa and Europe, where he made notes that would lead to "Kaddish" several years later.

This is a true potpourri, an agglomeration of personal notes, booklists, dreams—he dreamt a good deal about Kerouac, Brando, Truman, his mother Naomi, fumbling young men and fellatio—reveries of childhood, pages of porno, fragments of poems, fantasies, stories of pickups and the general complications of love and friendship.

It is in places desperately confessional ("I'm consumed with envy of Jack's holiness & devotion to single-minded expression in writing") and at times monstrously self-deluded ("I'm the greatest poet in America I know it and others know it too") and almost always utterly humorless.

Ginsberg writes in one entry, "I myself write nothing and am sick of fragment sketching. The poems I build out of them are fragmentary, slight." In another "Tiring of the Journal—no writing in it—promotes slop—an egocentric method."

What we do find to a degree in these pages is passion. Ginsberg develops intense feeling—often, it seems, born of insecurity and the need to belong—in the case of both friends and lovers. An intense yearning for an erotic encounter with Neal Cassady—the prototype for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road—at last comes true, and when he is discovered in bed with Neal, Carolyn, Neal's wife, boots him out.

Ginsberg's expectations are always huge. In 1955 he meets Peter Orlovsky, 21 years old and recently discharged from the Army, and his journal entries are aflame—not only with considerable pangs of love for Orlovsky but also with his own trip through the "karma" of the whole complex situation.

He has a constant admiration for, competition with and jealousy of Kerouac, Lenin to his Trotsky. ("The droppings of the mind on the page," he grumpily writes of Kerouac's poems at one point. And later, "I didn't realize that Jack's self-pity was so akin—so imitative—of Wolfe's … Even to the very language of brooding, mysterious swirls and red October afternoons.")

A considerable passion in Ginsberg's life was his mother, Naomi. When she died, on June 9, 1956, he wrote: "Tenderness and a tomb—the world is a tomb of tenderness. Life is a short flicker of love. Went out into the grass knelt down and cried a little to heaven for her. Otherwise nothing."

It is Ginsberg's feeling that his childhood disappeared when she died—and his memory. The intermittent entries on Naomi constitute perhaps the most "felt" and sincerely committed motif in these pages and serve as first drafts towards the elegy that he eventually wrote, "Kaddish."

What sort of personality emerges in Journals Mid-Fifties? A tourist, an observer, a lonely gay man who is steeped in poetry and who loves poetry and who in studying past models, especially Christopher Smart, William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, is himself trying to grow.

Ginsberg's search for guidance takes its cue, on several levels, especially from Whitman. "I Allen Ginsberg Bard out of New Jersey take up the laurel tree cudgel from Whitman." And all the rant and cant and chanting of the Square Deific we've come to know Ginsberg by—"America, when will you be angelic? / America when will you take off your clothes and be human? / America when will you give me back my mother? / America when will you give me back my love?" etc.—owes a lot to his immersion in the Good Gray Poet. He trembles with the same ecstasy—one of Ginsberg's favorite words—raids the same vocabulary and, with the same insistence on taking a national overview, ransacks the same chaos.

Sadly these pages are often remarkably dull and rarely original and insightful. Readers seeking more, and wider details of Ginsberg's life at his period are better referred to the biographies by Barry Miles and Michael Schumacher and to the forthcoming edition of Ginsberg's selected letters edited by Miles. When midway through the pages of Journals Mid-Fifties 1954–1958 you come across these lines. "The notebook is holy the poem is holy. The voice is holy the audience is holy the typewriter is holy,"—my advice is, don't believe it.