I listened about a year ago, on the British Broadcasting Corporation's Third Programme, to a dialogue between either [Allen] Ginsberg or [Gregory] Corso, I forget which, and an old acquaintance of mine, now in the United States, Donald Carne-Ross. Carne-Ross looks rather like Sherlock Holmes, and has a gimlet-like intelligence; on this occasion, he was using it to bore holes in the sea. Carne-Ross is not what I would call a kindly man, but in England the tender side of his nature used to come out in keeping, in his rather shabby rooms in Earl's Court, a pet rat. His crisp, brisk, biscuity English voice offered, however, no crumbs of comfort to Ginsberg or Corso. The Beatnik soliloquy just went on and on, throbbing with a growing admiration and pity and love of itself, and when Carne-Ross did, once in five minutes, manage to break the flow with, “It does, rather, seem to me that …” the terrible flux would drown the dependent-noun clause, the relentless voice of Ginsberg or Corso would cry: “Don't break into what I'm saying.”

It was not an interview, in other words, it was abreaction: Carne-Ross ought not to have been the critic, “the questioner who sits so sly,” but the psychiatrist lying as exhausted on his companion couch (the flow of abreactive words was very exhausting) as his patient. The effect of exposing yourself full, bang on, to Ginsberg or Corso is in fact like the effect (which I have suffered) of letting a manic-depressive friend slowly exhaust all your constructive and helpful responses in the depressive phase. You reach a point where you scream, “All right, why don't you go and kill yourself?” and the friend, having secured a temporary breakdown of your bourgeois smugness, feels a little better. Corso's verse seems to me to show more talent than Ginsberg's, and he conducts his war against adjustment, moderation, the objective view, and what have you, with a passionate single-mindedness that is in some ways admirable. He is very cruelly whipping the same set of obsessions round and round the same ring, but the words do prance sometimes, and he cracks the whip stylishly. It is difficult, however, to criticize the poems as poems, in any old-fashioned sense. The long poem, “Bomb,” is shock-tactics, reminding one of Marinetti (the bombs in Ethiopia, flowering on the ground like great red roses, brown bodies frizzling at the edge of the petals) and partly of very smart advertisement copy writing; plug, project, repeat are, I would say, Corso's aesthetic rules. The deep psychological technique of adjustment is the White Queen's: scream all the time before it happens, and then what happens will be an anticlimax, which you can take quite calmly. I think it was the White Queen who also told Alice that you have to run very hard to stay in one place, and this I think Corso is doing. The revealing bits are where some “poetry” in an old sense creeps in, and seems often touchingly soft-centered:

Often, in some steep ancestral book,
when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples and torched mushrooms,
my cypressean skin outreaches the recorded age
and I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk,
pour secrecy upon the dying page.

Some ear there, some sense of the shaping of a stanza: or. …

Men! let's bypass the city let us fly let us go jet
until we crash safely into snow from huge pink foundations—
gentle children await us.

The troubling thing with Mr. Corso is that he is such a Charles Addams character one doesn't quite know what he is going to do with these gentle children when he meets them. Rescue them, nourish them, comfort them? Boil them in a cannibal stew? The powerful, wobbly, eructative emotions of a volume like this seem above all eminently exploitable by men with harder heads, worse hearts and sharper purposes than Mr. Corso. Richards thought what a good reading of a good poem should do is leave you more open and alert for what happens next; I feel that full surrender to Mr. Corso (which I admit I have avoided, however) would leave you flat on your back waiting for elephants to trample on you. But I would by no means say there is no talent here, or that the individual has not a right to organize his suffering as a machine of self-projection and symbolic psychic aggression. One says, “Good, he is getting it out of his system!” And one's own system, as the defenses are one by one torn away, must take its chances.