Naked Allen Ginsberg
[In the following essay, Reilly explores Ginsberg's status as an outsider and its impact on his work.]
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude …
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America
I want to be the spectacle of Poesy triumphant over trickery of the world
—All empty all for show, all for the sake of Poesy
to set surpassing example of sanity as measure for late generations
—Allen Ginsberg, “Ego Confession”
1
Oh, Allen … ! What is that special sigh we reserve for Allen Ginsberg? Who is this man who has moved among us with such public intimacy for the last four decades arousing so much admiration, embarrassment, irritation, and affection? As I weigh five-hundred-plus pages of his “life” in my mind and hand, I wonder, do we need a biography at all? For what other poet has offered him or herself to us so undisguisedly and, yes, even, confessionally, for so long? What more can there be to know than, say, what is contained in a poem like “Ego Confession,” which, in its self-deprecation, its only half-ironic messianic claims, its humor and sanity, sums up that special unrestrained, uncensored (and unedited, one too often feels) poetic persona that is so distinctively Allen Ginsberg:
the gushing adolescent—
his many young lovers with astonishing faces and
iron breasts
gnostic apparatus and magical observation of
rainbow-lit spiderwebs
the facile sentimentalist—
Who sang a blues made rock stars weep and moved an old black guitarist to laughter in Memphis—
the concatenator of pseudo-profound effects—
who fucked a rose-lipped rock star in a tiny bedroom slum watched by a statue of Vajrasattva—
the visionary bard—
Who saw Blake and abandoned God
the dissenting citizen—
who called the Justice department & threaten'd to Blow the Whistle
the self-knowing man—
accepting his own lie & the gaps between lies with equal good humor
and the lyric poet—
—who had no subject but himself in many disguises
some outside his own body including empty air-filled space forests & cities—
Even climbed mountains to create his mountain, with ice ax & crampons & ropes, over Glaciers—
Indeed, the man brought to us via Ginsberg: A Biography by Barry Miles is, it seems, little different from the person speaking from the pages of the big brick-red tome of Collected Poems and its most recent addendum (one feels certain there will be more), White Shroud. Although it is as laced with blow-by-blow accounts of sexual escapades and drug experiences as are so many recent literary biographies, Ginsberg: A Biography may be the only one of the genre that does not have the effect of reducing yet another of our literary figures to a pathetic, but incongruously productive, heap. For just beneath the patter of this breathless and often silly account—the pulse of the prose quickens whenever rock musicians enter the scene, and drug trips are recounted in hyperbolic banalities—one can detect the voice of the poet himself (Mr. Miles drew on countless pages of journals and hours of taped interviews and conversations made available to him by Ginsberg), and it is the voice of a happy, sane, and productive man.
So why this biography, marred as it is by such cliché-ridden writing as “Manhattan looked surreal, its sidewalks cracked and deserted at that silent hour, traffic signals clicking on and off for nonexistent taxis and trucks,” or “As the stresses of the Vietnam War tore deeper into the fabric of American life …” or “It was all a great contrast to the actual human tragedy and confusion of the event itself and the youthful desire to rid the world of hypocrisy by revealing the tearful sensitivity and awareness that Allen and Jack recognized in themselves and their friends?” Why a biography of Allen Ginsberg at all? It certainly can't be said that the details of Miles's portrait clarify lines that have been up to now misunderstood. And it isn't very enlightening to read about the origins of “Howl” and “Kaddish,” since the life events from which they are drawn are so exhaustively recounted within the poems themselves. In retelling these events, the biography only serves to establish how relatively untransformed the poems have tumbled out of the lived life.
But putting aside these literary qualms, there are always the pleasures of biography for its own sake and the special pleasures of literary biographies, with all those stories of self-invention and survival and failure that are so compelling. And this one even has a happy ending.
2
… what America did you have … ?
(from “A Supermarket in California”)
That Allen Ginsberg should have become America's most famous living poet, not to mention one best known for his longest poems, is a fairly remarkable feat considering the obstacle course life set before him in the form of family madness, homosexuality, the pieties and prejudices of the forties, the addictions and instabilities of so many of his peers, and the utter lack of an audience for poetry in America in the first place. That he found a way to embrace each of these facts of life without being destroyed (the madness of friends and family through writing, his sexuality by refusing shame, drugs by managing to avoid addiction, lack of audience by creating a new one) or managed to evade them entirely (the poetry establishment, in particular), without ever denying who he was (even as a Buddhist, he always insisted he was a “Jewish Buddhist”), certainly buttresses his claim to have set an example of some kind of sanity for future generations.
Perhaps the key here is that faced with the afflictions of personality and situation, he neither reinvented himself nor left town, but instead reinvented an America that could contain himself less bruisingly than it had many other sensitive, talented youths. This may seem paradoxical, for what was “Howl” if not a howl for the battering inflicted by America upon a whole slew of sensitive young American boys? Yet by the time Ginsberg was completing that poem in his Berkeley cottage—and perhaps part of the reason he was able to accomplish it—he was already well ensconced among the insulating sweetnesses of bohemia.
A lifetime of kicking against the pricks can be avoided by simply selecting another society, and Ginsberg had an instict for this tactic from the start. As a method of artistic survival, however, embracing bohemia has its pitfalls as well as its blessings. In joining in the creation of Beat culture, Ginsberg certainly liberated himself from Ivy League sneerers, from “establishment” poetry circles, and from conventional sexual and social fetters. Perhaps even more importantly, he was also free of undue worship of his chosen authority figures (at least in his youth—his weakness for authority figures in the guise of spiritual “teachers” later in life is an all-too-common side effect of excess rebellion), even one as formidable and encouraging as William Carlos Williams. (How puritanical Williams's American “measure” sounds in comparison to the garrulous, American “breath” of a typical Ginsberg line!)
Furthermore, if one's talent tends toward the iconoclastic, a support group may be a useful thing to have while one is busy chucking mentors. It is hard working alone and unclear how much artistic invention is ever really accomplished in isolation anyway. It may well be that certain greater talents require incubation within a group of lesser ones. For talent doesn't always out, however discomfiting this may be to the “genius” concept. Whatever Ginsberg might have become without the other Beats is moot, but it is hard to imagine how, without the idealized poetic world he populated with his “saintly” friends, he could have written so successfully out of love, rather than out of wounded self-love, at such a young age.
But the same naïve and bittersweet characteristics of the bohemia that made it possible for Ginsberg to flourish also bred the insularity and preciousness that are partly responsible for why we read Ginsberg and the Beats mainly when we are young. When Ginsberg, with Blake, “abandoned God,” it was, one presumes, because of His cruelty to innocents. The wounded innocents stacked up like a pile of corpses in “Howl” are in some sense his version of Blake's “Babes reduc'd to misery” in “a rich and fruitful land,” and the Moloch-infested city is cousin to the London full of voices that speak with “mind-forg'd manacles.” In general, however, the battered innocence of the childlike “angelheaded” hipsters of the Beat generation has always suffered from a certain moral weightlessness. There is something too much of the eternal American boyishness about them (apart from his mother, women and girls are a bit tangential to the Ginsberg ethos) and their sufferings, like the dramatics of overgrown children, are somehow unconvincing. Perhaps this is because, except in true saints, a prolonged childlike innocence tends to cloy.
As much as this is the weakness of the Beats, it was probably also an important component of their success. For the desire of Americans to see themselves as tormented innocents may be insatiable, especially during some of our least innocent eras. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the Beats were first assimilated into American cultural life during the height of the cold war, at the same time that icon of fastidious horror of the ambiguities of experience, The Catcher in the Rye, was published.) When a second drug-“enlightened” version of this “innocent” bohemia was later propounded by Ginsberg and Leary and taken up by the hippie movement of the sixties, it took on a far less personally tormented tone, perhaps because all the anguish was directed against the Vietnam War.
Whether America will ever turn its attention from songs of astonished or hurt innocence to those of experience remains an open question. One of the most telling moments of this biography in this respect occurs in an account of Ginsberg “turning on” Robert Lowell. As Miles tells it, on the way to Lowell's Riverside Drive apartment, Ginsberg informed two companions that “We're not dealing here with a Dionysian fun lover. He's a good guy with a psycho streak. We should be cautious about the dose.” When asked why then they were bringing him psilocybin, Ginsberg replied, “We hope to loosen him up, make him happier, and on the political front, if Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Lowell has a great session, his product endorsement will influence lots of intellectuals.” Mission accomplished with no untoward events, Lowell saw them to the door. Here Ginsberg turned and said happily, “Amor vincit omnes,” [sic] to which Lowell replied, “I'm not sure.” Such doubt, one feels certain, arose not out of the “psycho streak,” but from a world of experience too rarely countenanced by Ginsberg and his cohorts.
Some of the most fascinating, poignant, and problematic material in this biography is drawn from Ginsberg's encounters with other prominent poets and foreign leaders. There is Ginsberg in Cuba insisting on discussing what we would now call “gay rights” and the legalization of marijuana with the Minister of Culture, and receiving, not surprisingly, only steely lectures on revolutionary “priorities” in response. There is also this account of a similar conversation with Yevtushenko:
“Please, Allen, I like you. I like you as a poet, but these are your personal problems. … Please don't talk about these two matters.”
“I feel rejected,” said Allen.
“I have problems more important than these,” said Yevtushenko.
“Okay,” said Allen, “Tell me all your problems, and tell me the problems of Russia.”
Yevtushenko told him of the twenty million people who had been arrested during the era of Stalin. …
And then there is the famous expression of regret extracted from Ezra Pound over “the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” It is hard to imagine anyone else on earth who would have gone to Rapallo, chanted, and played Beatles and Donovan songs to the silent poet. It is also hard not to find Ginsberg's statement to Pound that “unless you want to be a Messiah, then you'll have to be a Buddhist” bizarrely appropriate.
There is something of the wise fool in all these incidents. In retrospect, for example, one must wonder if Ginsberg, in his response to the events at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, wasn't a paragon of wisdom:
[S]o Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden began courses in karate and other forms of self-defense for their people. … Allen went to them to advocate that they teach meditation and chanting instead. In Allen's view, “It was an invitation to violence. … My role was of chanting ‘Om’ and I thought the chanting of ‘Pigs’ was the wrong mantra.”
However naïve or futile it might have been to discuss the legalization of narcotics or homosexual rights inside the Communist bloc countries at any time during the last half century, Ginsberg's refusal to be anything but entirely open about his sexuality for nearly forty years has been a courageous and admirable contribution to society.
3
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
(William Blake, “The Divine Image”)
Yet there is more to Allen Ginsberg than the bohemian romanticist and social gadfly. A knowing, humorous, compassionate man willing to take his own person as a prototype for the human experience in all its glories and shabbinesses speaks out of many of the best poems. This is the tender and devoted son of Louis and Naomi. This is the middle-aged man with his fly open. This is the aging poet, longing for love, confessing all the time, yet with none of the edgy hysteria of the so-called confessional poets, including Robert Lowell. This is perhaps the most consistently appealing Allen Ginsberg, and may be the most enduring poet.
who cut their wrists three times successively
unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open
antique stores where they thought they were growing old
and cried …
(from “Howl”)
I'm falling asleep
safe in your thoughtful arms.
Someone uncontrolled by History would have to own Heaven,
on earth as it is.
(from “City Midnight Junk Strains”)
Too tired to save body
too tired to be heroic
The real close at hand as the stomach
liver pancreas rib
Coughing up gastric saliva
Marriages vanished in a cough
I read my father Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality
“… trailing clouds of glory do we come
from God, who is our home …”
“That's beautiful,” he said, “but it's not true.”
(from “Don't Grow Old”)
After 53 years
I still cry tears
I still fall in love
I still improve.
Rarer and rarer
Boys give me favor
Older and older
Love grows bolder
Sweeter and sweeter
Wrinkled like water
My skin still trembles
My fingers nimble
(from “Some Love”)
What is remarkable about this Allen Ginsberg is that he's present in the poems from very early on—in the fourteen-year-old boy who accompanied his mother on a three-hour bus ride from Port Authority to Lakewood, New Jersey, to help her escape the wires attached to her head that were reporting everything she said to President Roosevelt. This Ginsberg was able to render the continuing story of his mother's mental deterioration without distancing himself from it, even though horrified by her exhibitionism and physical decline—a testament to his love of her and a sign of how deeply he was able to come to grips with this tragedy through poetry.
For all that Ginsberg may have acquired from his father (who published several books of poetry and had a minor but respectable literary career), his sanity and his vocation, it was the experience of living with the passionate, deranged Naomi that seems to have inspired the humanity and compassion of his best poems:
O glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck
first mystic life & taught me talk and music, from whose
pained head I first took Vision—
(from “Kaddish”)
This is a supremely nonjudgmental muse. Speaking out of the true innocence of the mentally ill, it tends to find sickness and human frailty where others might find evil. It can even be tolerant of a poet's anti-Semitic rantings, of a friend's alcoholic decline into right-wing paranoia, of another friend's misogynistic cant, of so many incidents and opinions that give one pause when reading this biography. But it is also a muse that looks suffering in the eye and gains, not loses, humanity in the process:
She had tooth troubles, teeth too old, ground down like horse molars—
she opened her mouth to display her gorge—how can she live with that, how eat I thought, mushroom-like gray-white horseshoe of incisors she chomped with, hard flat flowers ranged around her gums.
Then I recognized she was my mother, Naomi, habiting this old city-edge corner, older than I knew her before
she needed my middle aged strength and worldly money knowledge, housekeeping art. I can cook and write books for a living. …
(from “White Shroud”)
This species of compassion does not come easily, as many Americans stepping over the homeless on their doorsteps each morning might testify. May it continue to inspire this energetic citizen and abundant poet, and may a more thoughtful biographer some day contemplate how far Allen Ginsberg achieved his goal of embodying “the spectacle of Poesy triumphant over trickery of the world.”
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