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American Scream JONAH RASKIN American Scream Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London All quotations from Collected Poems: 1947–1980, White Shroud: Poems, 1980–1985, and Journals: Mid-Fifties, 1954– 1958 in chapters 1 to 11 of American Scream are reproduced by permission. Specified excerpts from Journals: Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958, by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by Gordon Ball. Copyright © 1995 by Allen Ginsberg. Introductory material copyright © by Gordon Ball. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., and Penguin Books Ltd. Specified excerpts from thirty-one poems from Collected Poems: 1947–1980, by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., and Penguin Books Ltd. Specified excerpts from “I’m a Prisoner of Allen Ginsberg” from White Shroud: Poems, 1980–1985, by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1986 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., and Penguin Books Ltd. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raskin, Jonah, 1942–. American scream : Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the making of the Beat Generation / Jonah Raskin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 0-520-24015-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ginsberg, Allen, 1926– Howl. 2. Literature and mental illness—United States—History—2oth century. 3. Ginsberg, Allen, 1926—Knowledge—Psychology. 4. Ginsberg, Allen, 1926—Psychology. 5. Poetry— Psychological aspects. 6. Mental illness in literature. 7. Beat generation. I. Title. ps3513.i74h636 2004 811Ј.54 —dc22 2003059527 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10987654 321 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ANSI /NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). ᭺ϱ For R.F. Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface: Allen Ginsberg’s Genius xi 1 Poetickall Bomshell 1 2 Family Business 25 3 Trilling-esque Sense of “Civilization” 44 4 Juvenescent Savagery 65 5 Just like Russia 81 6 Ladies, We Are Going through Hell 104 7 Another Coast’s Apple for the Eye 121 8 Mythological References 143 9 Famous Authorhood 158 10 This Fiction Named Allen Ginsberg 189 11 Best Minds 209 Notes and Sources 231 Index 263 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Bob Rosenthal and the Allen Ginsberg Trust for permission to quote from unpublished Ginsberg mate- rial at libraries across the United States. I also want to thank the Trust for permission to quote from the Annotated Howl, as well as from psychiatric reports obtained from the New York State Psy- chiatric Institute in Manhattan and from Langley Porter in San Francisco. I would like to thank the libraries themselves for permission to quote from Ginsberg’s letters, manuscripts, and journals. Un- published material appears here courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Fales Library, New York University; Bancroft Library, the University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin; and the Berg Collection of En- glish and American Literature, The New York Public Library Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. ix x / Acknowledgments I have quoted widely from Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and wish to thank HarperCollins for permission to do so. I also want to thank Northern Lights for permission to quote from Louis Ginsberg’s poetry. In researching and writing this book I have had valuable commentary and help from Don Em- blen, Robert Friedman, Bill Barich, Bob Coleman, Julie Allen, Tim Wandling, John Kunat, J. J. Wilson, Jack Ritchie, Allen To- bias, Nina Willdorf, Michael Covino, Bob Holman, David Bromige, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy J. Peters, Adam Raskin, Polly Armstrong, Aram Saroyan, Ilka Hartman, Paul Cohen, Chris Felver, Lee Perron, Louise Yelin, Gerald Nicosia, Peter Hale, Michael Schumacher, Bill Morgan, Dr. Philip Hicks, and Dr. Frederick Quitkin. At the University of California Press I want to thank Naomi Schneider; Sierra Filucci; Marilyn Schwartz; Nola Burger; Nancy Evans; Barbara Roos; and my copyeditor, Sue Carter, in Austin, Texas. At the proverbial last minute, several people came through brilliantly—John Natsou- las, Michael McClure, Pierrette Montroy, and Mike Morey. Allen Ginsberg’s genius for public life should not obscure his genius as an artist or his study of his art. —ROBERT PINSKY, 1997 U.S. POET LAUREATE Allen Ginsberg’s PREFACE Genius The Secret or Hermetic Tradition In 1957, at the age of fifteen, I bought for seventy-five cents a copy of the City Lights paperback edition of Howl and Other Po- ems with the trademark black-and-white cover. It was the first book of poetry I ever bought, and it made me feel as cool as any- one in my high school. Howl was underground poetry, outlawed poetry. Ginsberg made it seem as though it was cool to be a teen and that teens, not adults, knew what was cool. To those of us— I wasn’t the only teenage beatnik in suburbia—who owned a copy, Howl conferred a strange power. Reading it brought initi- ation into a secret society. It bound us together and gave us a sense of identity as members of a new generation that had come of age in the wake of World War II and the atomic bomb, a gen- eration that lived in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. There was something wonderfully subversive about Howl, something the poet had hidden in the body of the poem because it was too dan- gerous to say openly, something we had to uncover and decode. xi xii / Preface Ginsberg didn’t want to be too easily understood. As he himself would explain, Howl was meant to appeal “to the secret or her- metic tradition of art.” Of course, as a teenager I didn’t know there was a secret tradition of art. It was Ginsberg who intro- duced me to it and prompted me to pursue it. The Cold War and Literary Creativity Years later, I met Ginsberg in Manhattan, along with his long- time lover and fellow poet, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso, the author of Gasoline. In the 1980s and 1990s, I interviewed Ginsberg several times in New York and in California. In 1985, after having listened to him on record albums for years, I first heard him read his poetry live. It was at College of Marin, just north of San Francisco. After the reading, we talked about the Cold War and American culture, a subject with which he had been preoccupied ever since the mid-1940s—and a subject that had more than academic interest now that Ronald Reagan was president. Indeed, he had been writing new, angry political po- ems, like “Birdbrain!” and “Capitol Air,” that were inspired by the global crisis between East and West, communism and capi- talism. “Oh, yes, the Cold War has returned with Reagan,” Gins- berg said. “But it’s not like the Cold War of the 1940s and 1950s. The CIA doesn’t do the dirty work anymore, the corporations do.” He complained—as he had complained many times be- fore—about the role of the CIA in creating “a middle stratum of intellectuals and writers to be anti-Communist, to keep a lid on genuine creativity.” “Kerouac was a writer of genius,” he said. “For years, he was prevented from being published by the middle-brow intellectu- xiii / Allen Ginsberg’s Genius als that the CIA had created. They had already rejected William Carlos Williams and they rejected Kerouac, too.” Perhaps no major twentieth-century American poet had a more conspira- torial frame of mind than Ginsberg did; and arguably his sense of conspiracy inspired him to write some of his best poetry, in- cluding Howl, in which scholars support wars, radios read minds, and America has turned into a fascist state. There was often more than a grain of truth in Ginsberg’s conspiratorial vision. Granted, there is no evidence that the CIA was directly or indi- rectly responsible for Kerouac’s rejections by American publish- ers for half a decade. But as Frances Stonor Saunders shows in The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999), the CIA did engage in covert operations with American writers and intellectuals to win the hearts and minds of people all over the world, much as Ginsberg claimed. The CIA funded magazines such as Encounter and established organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom to combat radicalism, sub- vert dissent, and make America seem like the only friend to free- dom. The agency sent American writers and teachers to confer- ences to confront intellectuals and artists from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries. Who were the CIA-sponsored intellectuals? I asked Ginsberg when we talked in Marin in 1985. Lionel Trilling, Norman Pod- horetz, and Mary McCarthy, he replied. In his eyes they con- tributed to the unhealthy climate of the Cold War as much as the cultural commissars behind the Iron Curtain did. There were few American intellectuals he did admire. At Columbia in the 1940s, he insisted, Raymond Weaver—the man who discovered the manuscript of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Billy Budd—was the only professor who had integrity. Ginsberg said that he and xiv / Preface Kerouac, who was briefly a student there, had received their real education from men like Herbert Huncke, a hustler and drug ad- dict they’d met in Times Square.