Allen Ginsberg: the Origins of "Howl" and "Kaddish" James Breslin
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Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 8 Article 33 Issue 2 Spring 1977 Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of "Howl" and "Kaddish" James Breslin Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Breslin, James. "Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of "Howl" and "Kaddish"." The Iowa Review 8.2 (1977): 82-108. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.2207 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. more water of fresh ground rye, knead for about 20 minutes with and 3 small handfuls of salt. Flour hands and board and shape loaves. This should one make 6 loaves of 4-5 pounds. Bake at about 275? for to one-and-a-half hours. Appendix II CHARLOTTE'S WAG ? Sid Blum CRITICISM / JAMES BRESLIN Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of "Howl" and "Kaddish" become aware of Allen Most literary people have probably first Ginsberg in self-elected and controversial role as through the media, his public figure a new has over and prophet of age. Ginsberg's public personality changed defiant and histrionic man of the fifties to the years?from the angry young activist of the sixties and the bearded and benign patriarch and political remained one that most seventies?but the personality has literary people of find hard to take seriously. Compare Ginsberg's reception with that 82 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org is a one Norman Mailer, another writer who also public figure and who, as like Ginsberg, wants to replace rational with magical thinking the mode of public discourse. Mailer's public appearances and his confessional writ ings characteristically begin by humiliating but end by promoting himself, and they have been enormously successful: Mailer's talents have been widely exaggerated, especially by academic critics, who already have pro duced several studies of his work. Mailer has succeeded because his theoriz on matters to no matter ing all from the digestive the political system, how or are a bizarre brutal the content, developed by kind of intellectualizing most even it is in literary people respect, when adopted (as Mailer) half as a in the spirit of the put-on. Ginsberg is at least intelligent, lot less brutal, and often a lot more self-aware, but the man who took off his clothes at a in Los Angeles poetry reading, who chanted "Om" during the gassings Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and who has a experimented with wide variety of drugs, strikes those manning the liter as a more a to ary armchairs at best figure of fun or, likely, threat western as a his civilization. Ginsberg's role public figure has been part of attempt to reassert romantic as one it the role of the poet prophet; but result of has more been that his genuine literary talents and admirable personal quali ties have been obscured. It is true so the of has been too incon that, far, quality Ginsberg's writing as a sistent for him to rank major poet. Ginsberg writes often, quickly, and, as career too much his his has advanced, apparently without revision; cult some of spontaneity results in unevenness, but it also generates of the real a ex strengths of his writing. A poet like Eliot, carefully turning lifetime's a finished to create the perience into single volume of highly work, helped to write myth (dominant when Ginsberg began ) of the modern artist who, a in a literary revolutionary spite of himself, remained hard-working, disci an plined craftsman. Like many contemporary poets, Ginsberg, avowed seems more even revolutionary, much willing to risk imperfection, failure; an what he hopes to gain is honesty and immediacy of feeling, rather than a the finish of well-wrought work of art. When he is least successful, Gins as berg has drifted into the solipsism of purely private associations, he does or in the drug poems in Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches, he has fallen into of and characteristic of a the predictable patterns thought feeling polemi mo cist, as he does in much of his political poetry. But the really exciting come when he breaks to new orders in ments in reading Ginsberg through the poem and in self-understanding. "Howl" (1956), "Kaddish" (1959), and "Wales "The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express" (1963), Visitation" (1967) some from of some ?all poems of length, all evolving the pressures personal seem me main moments crisis?these poems to to be the such in Ginsberg's career. 83 most to Of these the powerful?and influential?appear be "Howl" and "Kaddish." Several poets have testified to the importance of Ginsberg's early an to poetry in establishing alternative the well-made symbolist poem that was fashionable in the fifties, and his early work does fuse two modes?the were confessional and the visionary?that to become important in the six a case can on ties.1 Not that for Ginsberg only be made historical grounds; both poems, given the intense and concentrated energy of their surrealistic creation a terrors language, their vivid of world of primitive and hallucinatory voice mer brilliance, their striking shifts of and mood, have genuine literary it. For a long time, their explosive poetic energy has been missed, partly a matter because of the distractions of "shocking" language and (drugs, madness, suicide, homosexuality, incest), but mainly because many readers, not ac still sympathetic to the kind of form found in these poems, have cused them of an absence of form. while Moreover, they achieve literary attain a form and public impact, these poems derive from deep, long-stand in stem ing private conflicts Ginsberg?conflicts that ultimately from his a ambivalent attachment to his mother, his difficulties in asserting separate, While is a independent personality. there progression of self-awareness from "Howl" (1956) to "Kaddish" (1959), both works seem to me to ex to pose rather than resolve these conflicts, though they make valiant efforts at such it is to areas resolution. Nevertheless, Ginsberg's ability probe these that of conflict largely explains their innovative energy and powerful ap peal. * <* * sl messianic intense Allen Ginsberg is mystical and poet with suicidal a would-be artist whose most wishes and persistent self-doubts, spontaneous turn toward of sti spontaneous thoughts characteristically feelings being fled and inhibited?walled and bounded in?and thus toward longings for some death itself. To read the painful, apocalyptic deliverance?ultimately adolescence notebooks and journals that Ginsberg has kept from onwards a man with for but one who re is to encounter grandiose hopes himself, himself for his failures and who tends to assume that lentlessly flaggelates as in all his undertakings will end, just they have ended, disaster.2 Just the Indian reveal how this out published Journals (kept during 1962-63) amply serene is of wardly bard intrigued with failure and death, spending much are his time contemplating the ghats where the Indian dead cremated. and Lawrence Of the Ginsberg of the late fifties early sixties, Ferlinghetti he the word he remembers, "he is the flippy flesh made word / and speaks hears in his flesh / and the word is Death."3 To say all this is not to say manner is on it has that Ginsberg's public false but that, the contrary, been a hard-won. And poems like "Howl" and "Kaddish" have key place in the out of a time in his life when his evolution of his personality, developing 84 creative came into a impulses something like balance with his propensities for self-destruction. As Ginsberg himself tells it?a version of his life we should his career a approach skeptically?the story of literary and in way the real his life story of begin with his removal from New York to San Francisco in 1953. an "Howl" is not?contrary to popular impression?the work of angry man. wrote was young When he the poem, Ginsberg 30; in 1953, when he left family, friends and the established literary culture behind him in the was a East, he 27?being, like his friend Jack Kerouac, romantic wanderer it to sever ties. sees who found difficult family Ginsberg himself the 1953 west as a and of act: "It was like a journey crucial symbolic kind big proph Like I one season ecy, taking off for California. had passed of my life and was start over It was not as it time to all again."4 quite this easy and final, we shall west was a dramatic to loosen the see; but moving attempt parental from his grip?to free himself pressures created by mother's long history of illness as well as his acrimonious psychotic frequently relation with his west in a turn father. Going was, short, away from the threatening images of failure, disintegration, suffocation he associated with home?a gesture to an ward the future, toward life, attempt to start all over again as his own man. it is true that made Yet also Ginsberg this journey half looking back over as in return to his shoulder?just "Howl" he would the experience and emotions of his life in New York in the late forties and in Part III of the I'm with in ever poem ("Carl Solomon, you Rockland.") deny that he had is mistaken to a recreated left.