“Everyman’s an angel!”

A Personal Exploration of Ginsberg’s

Eva Dunsky

Senior Thesis in English Literature

Poets in Correspondence

Professor Saskia Hamilton

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the English Major and the Degree of Bachelor of the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University. December 2016. Dunsky 2

Introduction

When I was thirteen, I received my first copy of ’s Howl: a thin, black and white volume belonging to the Pocket Poets series from City Lights Bookstore in San

Francisco. “You might like this,” said my dad nonchalantly. He had found it lying around while cleaning out his bookshelf. You could say that I liked it. In fact, you could even say that it consumed the greater part of my adolescence, enveloping me in its eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry. It’s rollicking rhythms and lofty incantations which in the morning were stanzas of gibberish matched the rhythm of my own inner turmoil; the syncopated beats lining up perfectly. When I was sixteen and my first boyfriend broke up with me (I genuinely and honestly thought we would spend the rest of our lives together), and the devastation felt so completely heavy and all-encompassing, like an electric blanket except with none of the warmth, my parents asked me if there was anything they could do to alleviate that pain (and perhaps cut down on some of the crying jags). A week later, I walked out of the tattoo parlor around the corner from my house with my first tattoo— howl written in loopy cursive, the script of a teenage girl, on my foot.

Adolescence is hard and I’m starting to realize that rarely does the post-adolescent time frame offer much reprieve, especially if you have the nervous Jewish constitution that

Mr. Ginsberg and I so reluctantly share. And yet in the middle of a tumultuous life,

Ginsberg was able to provide us with this epic poem—an ultimately jubilant ode to humanity. I think says it best in his introduction to Howl:

“Say what you will, [Ginsberg] proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art! to persist” (Howl, 8).

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Ginsberg’s early life

“I haven’t told you much about myself. I am [the] smallest boy in class. Hobbies – stamps, coins, minerals, chemistry and most of all (at present) movies. They afford me great pleasure and they are about the only relief from boredom which seems to hang around me like a shadow.” – Journal Entry, 1938

Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey to parents Louis and Naomi

Ginsberg. His father was a schoolteacher and a poet and his mother, an immigrant from

Russia, suffered from various mental illnesses. Throughout his childhood, Ginsberg saw his mother interned in a psychiatric hospital several times. His mother’s mental illness deeply affected him during his formative years and became a major theme in his later poetry—he would go on to become a mouthpiece for the experiences of the mentally-ill, as well as dedicate a poem to his late mother entitled “Kaddish” (widely considered to be one of his master works). Ginsberg, a small, slight-of-build child with deep affectations and a childhood made difficult by his mother’s illness, fostered his poetic talents from an early age by keeping a journal and studying the poetry of Walt Whitman in High School

(Charters, “Allen Ginsberg’s Life”). After a successful High School career, Ginsberg left the suburbs of New Jersey for New York when he was eighteen years old.

After High School, he attended Columbia University on a scholarship. Though he cites his ‘Great Books’ class with Professor Lionel Trilling as having had a major influence on his life, Ginsberg’s primary source of Columbia education came from outside of the classroom. It was at Columbia that Ginsberg met fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr, who introduced him to William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassidy, amongst others.

These creatives and subversives went on to form the “”—a term coined by

Kerouac in the fall of 1948 to define their shared sense of spiritual exhaustion, as well as

Dunsky 4 their desire to rebel against the conformity, hypocrisy, and materialism that they saw manifest in American society (Charters, “Allen Ginsberg’s Life”).

Following a vision he had after hearing William Black recite “Ah, Sunflower,”

Ginsberg devoted his artistic energies to the pursuit of truth through poetry. He was dissatisfied with the poetry he had been writing at the time—poetry modeled on the lessons he had learned in his Columbia classes. In order to blow open his mind and his writing, Ginsberg turned to drugs, experiencing Marijuana, Peyote, and Benzedrine with his fellow Beats, holed up in Jack Kerouac’s Harlem apartment.

However, Ginsberg soon found himself implicated in a crime committed by Herbert

Huncke. Huncke and a few of his friends had stored stolen goods in Ginsberg’s apartment, and Ginsberg was charged with larceny. In lieu of arrest, the Columbia dean allowed him to plead insanity and instead of being thrown in prison, Ginsberg was interned in the

Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute for eight months. It was here that he met Carl

Solomon—another young writer who was being treated for depression with insulin shock therapy. Ginsberg, who was already familiar with the pitfalls of mental health care due to his mother’s travails, formed a strong and lasting friendship with Solomon, to whom he would later dedicate Howl.

“Eternity outside of Time”: Ginsberg’s 1950s Journals

“Today a holiday. I don’t know which. A dream and its associated fragments. Last night I dreamed—I am up, it is morning retracing my steps in the mind, several thoughts several discoveries. The symbolic connection between things…”

A journal entry of Ginsberg’s from May of 1955—when he was in the thick of writing

Howl. His mother had died a few months before, and already he was mulling over what would later become Kaddish. His journals use the same prose style as Howl itself, and many

Dunsky 5 entries read as though they could be part of the first section of the poem. The journals include extremely personal fragments of prose, as well as the roots of several ideas that would later be developed further in his poetry. At this moment in 1955, he is struggling with his sexuality and with the unrequited love he felt for fellow beat Neal Cassady, all the while reeling from the loss of his mother. He is trying to expand on his own personal style of poetry while coming to terms with a massive personal era of transition. In the journals that I chose to look at, dated from 1954-1958, Ginsberg is at a crossroads in his career, and is on the road to developing his Beat style persona.

As evidenced by the excerpt at the beginning of the section, Ginsberg’s notion of time is spotty and nonlinear—and at this junction in his life, time is a great concern, as he has not yet found Buddhism and is struggling with the finality of his mother’s death. With little to tie him to a specific location, especially after the death of his mother and the untimely end of his Columbia career, he was able to wander freely. And wander he does: from to New York to Los Angeles to Tangiers, collecting scraps of poetry in his notebook as he alighted from place to place. Some of his journals are populated by dreams and drug-induced visions—or as he writes on the opening section of Howl, “with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares…” (Howl, 10). These three conditions—the dream state, the drug trip, and what I argue is the unmitigated sober reality (i.e., the waking nightmare), cease to be distinct from each other. The journals intimate that

Ginsberg himself has been removed from time.

For instance, in the following excerpt dated December 21st 1956, it seems as though

Ginsberg is setting up a portrait of his fellow subwaygoers that exists outside of time— almost as though in his journal, he is immortalizing them as his own personal artistic

Dunsky 6 fodder rather than placing them within the context of their own lives, say, completing their morning commute or picking their kids up from school. Ginsberg writes, “Strange faced in the subway—the minute I sat down I realized I had power to see them straight in the eye and dig the eternal moment’s mask—as they ride by dreaming rocked in the dark with neon on their faces.” (Journals Mid-fifties 1954-1958, 321).

Time is a complicated subject for Ginsberg, as evidenced by the following excerpt from Howl: “who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of

Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique shops where they thought they were growing old and cried…” (Howl, 16). This is indicative of his own personal horror and anxiety, his fear of times’ ravaging potential, his firsthand knowledge of its devastating effects on his mother, and later on his friend Carl Solomon. In the third part of Howl, Ginsberg writes “Ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time” (Howl, 19).

However, some journal entries, in typical Ginsberg fashion, take a more personal approach and comment on his own anxieties—about time, material possessions, love, and countless other things that plagued him. For instance, take this journal entry from August

21st, 1956 simply entitled Dream: “I opened a letter from Burroughs—describing a new project—a cave—the cave of religious mysteries, a tourist attraction in Venice of Rome— gonna make showbiz history and religious history—gotta die holy—anyone enters cave never comes out alive, the final thrill real death leave your possessions at the door with the attendant—(higher turnover in attendance, hard to keep them from rushing screaming into the cave)—Only the gimmick is nobody dies without making it—The Illumination, Ecstasy,

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See God and Die—only problem get the right drug—or witch doctor” (Journals Mid-fifties

1954-1958, 309). Joan Didion once said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” (Didion,

“Why I Write”). This feels especially applicable to Ginsberg’s journals, as he uses his unique humor and wit to give voice to his inner anxieties, many of which appear in his later poetry.

Howl Part I: “A lost battalion of platonic conversationalists”

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…”

Howl challenged conceptions of what a poem should be, both by manipulating the poetic form and by including content that wasn’t seen as appropriate for poetry. His impetus for departing from more typical methods of poetry is most clearly seen in his relationship with Lionel Trilling, the professor with whom he took the Great Books class at

Columbia. Though mutual respect was high, Ginsberg felt caged in by the methods of literary analysis and writing that pervaded the core curriculum. One article described the relationship between Trilling and Ginsberg as “a lifelong friendship that was also a mortal combat—over literature and politics, morality and maturity, liberalism and radicalism.”

(Kirsch, “Liberal Father Radical Son”). The more Ginsberg learned about literature, the more he began delving into his own unique style of poetics. Though they disagreed on almost everything, Ginsberg found an ally in Trilling, perhaps because they were both

Jewish (Trilling was Columbia’s first tenured Jewish professor—no small feat). Ginsberg is quoted as saying “I was probably closest to Trilling because we were both Jewish and he sort of empathized with me.” (Kirsch, “Liberal Father Radical Son”). This empathy ran

Dunsky 8 deep, and though his time at Columbia was largely unhappy, Ginsberg found solace in his relationship with Trilling.

Once he left Columbia, however, Ginsberg’s poetry went in a direction that Trilling couldn’t stand—he famously hated Howl and much of Ginsberg’s other work from this period. It is possible that Trilling felt attacked by the flagrant anti-Columbia sentiments in the beginning of the poem. Ginsberg criticized intellectual culture, which he found to be shallow and empty—Trilling, however, was highly invested in the culture of academia.

Ginsberg writes “who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating

Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war…who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull.” (Howl, 9).

Interestingly, some versions of Howl have this line written as “the scholars of love and war”, rather than just war—perhaps an allusion to the complicated and sometimes contradictory feelings Ginsberg held for Trilling. Either way, I believe that Ginsberg owes

Trilling for providing him with the impetus and the knowledge to branch out. Ginsberg found his point of departure from other types of poetry—his fork in the road—under

Trilling’s mentorship.

Howl was so different from the poetry of the era that it would even come under scrutiny as to whether or not the poem could even be considered literature due to its obscene content (but more on that later). In terms of form, Part I harkens back to King

James’ Bible and the poetry of Walt Whitman—it’s comprised of long, sparsely punctuated bursts of thought that serve as vignettes of Ginsberg’s fellow angelheaded hipsters and closest friends. Howl is an ode, a diatribe, a stream-of-consciousness-driven string of associative leaps that Ginsberg makes in an attempt to “[put] down here what may be left

Dunsky 9 to say in time come after death” (Howl, 20). It is a desolate cry against repression and madness, and yet its pulse is defiantly joyous. It is full of contradictions. It takes permission from Whitman’s “It is large; it contains multitudes.”

Ginsberg begins by addressing the poem’s subjects—the so-called “angelheaded hipsters.” It harkens back to Aquinas’ question: “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” How many angels can inhabit a small space—a dingy one-room apartment, a broken-down van, a cold water flat—and fill it with their explosive art? Where did these angels come from, and where are they going? Ginsberg’s contemporaries dwelled in the space between angels and hipsters—these slouching artists who lived door to door and dose to dose were also churning out some of the most influential art of their generation.

Therefore, the regality of the term ‘angels’ feels perfectly at home with the colloquial

‘hipster’—Ginsberg breaks down the alleged division between the two, thus expanding on the destruction of the sacred/profane dichotomy that continues as a thread throughout the poem.

When he refers to his “angelheaded hipsters,” he is no doubt referring to Carl

Solomon and his fellow beats, though on a larger scale, he is appealing to all of the artists and madmen of the 1950s who did not fit society’s mold. While the first part of this section serves as a portrait of the lives of his fellow artists, the second part functions as a way for

Ginsberg to delve into his own consciousness.

In the first part of this section, Ginsberg looks at “the best minds of his generation”—who they were, what they did, where they hung out, and the overall lives they led. He hints at the multitudes of aspects of American society that have destroyed them, though he goes more in depth with this thought in the second section of the poem.

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He paints a portrait of his peers both in form and content—most lines begin with the word

“who” which is followed by a long rolling thought that tumbles into the next line. It is apparent that Ginsberg’s best minds were not the celebrated ones—the doctors and lawyers—the people that most of America held up as a shining example. Instead, they are dropouts, bums, travelers, dissidents, artists, and writers—they do not settle in a place, but rather move frantically forward, much like the rhythm of Howl itself. In the first few lines,

Ginsberg writes: “who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…” (Howl, 9). These fellow artists were wanderers moving from place to place— removed completely from the production line of American society.

In the second half of the section, Ginsberg uses anaphora to create a parallel syntax structure at the beginning of each line. He fixates on his own artistic and sexual frustrations until they come to a head towards the end. This catalyst in the poem is marked by a switch from the repetition of “who” at the beginning of each line to a line beginning in

“with”, and later, a direct address to Carl Solomon, the man to whom the poem is dedicated.

Ginsberg follows a section that addresses deteriorating mental health in wild stanzas imbued with increasingly savage imagery with the following phrase: “with mother finally

******, and the last fantastic book flung out the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination” (Howl, 19). This catalyst lends the section a sense of finality, and at various points throughout the poem, Ginsberg’s angelheaded hipsters pause in despair as though

Dunsky 11 they can’t go on. This idea of brokenness, of the final straw, of man’s inability to go on, comes up again and again throughout the poem—however, somewhere in the depths of the human spirit, Ginsberg’s protagonists muster their strength and forge inevitably forward.

They go on, time and time again, in pursuit of some ineffable thing, or as Ginsberg writes,

“to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out eternity.”

(Howl, 17). And yet, though the previous passage is full of finality and desolation, Ginsberg leaves us with an image of hope—a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in a closet.

A burst of color in an otherwise gray landscape. And yet, even this little burst of hope, this flicker of potential redemption, is imaginary.

“With mother finally ******”—finally, after a lifetime of agony and inadequate care.

Finally, after a protracted battle with undiagnosed schizophrenia and depression. Finally, after her own sons were made to watch her disintegrate. It is easy to read the letters replaced by asterisks as f-u-c-k-e-d, and it very well might be what Ginsberg had in mind.

Certainly, the reading fits—after receiving a lobotomy, Naomi Ginsberg could very well be described as having been fucked—fucked by the medical profession that posited lobotomies as treatment and fucked by the country that was meant to take her in.

However, the missing letters could also be read as f-u-z-z-e-d. Ginsberg, a 21-year-old at the time, was asked to authorize his mother’s treatment, and not knowing any better, he did so. After her lobotomy, his mother’s once agile mind—a mind heavily invested in the worker’s cause, who used to take the young Ginsberg to IWW rallies—was in tatters.

Though she lived another fifteen years, his mother’s mind was dulled static, like the grey fuzz of a television screen. Finally—her life’s path leading up to her lobotomy was not easy, and neither was her life after the surgery. Ginsberg was plagued with guilt for having

Dunsky 12 played a role in his mother’s demise, and her life and death were prevalent topics in much of his poetry. Or perhaps, a final reading of “with mother finally ******” has the asterisks signifying nothing—as though there is no way to describe Naomi Ginsberg’s trials through writing. Her unimaginable suffering can’t be set forth using words, even by her own son, who watched her daily struggle. Two days before she died in the hospital in 1956, these were Naomi’s final words to her son: “The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window—I have the key—get married Allen don’t take drugs. …Love, your mother.”

(Ward).

Howl Part II: “Angel in Moloch”

“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!”

Moloch the metaphor for capitalism! Moloch the personification of anxiety! Moloch the workingman’s battle! In modern literature, including Howl, the term ‘Moloch’ has came to represent something or someone requiring a great sacrifice. For Ginsberg, Moloch incarnates the capitalist society that he found so taxing. It is a living, breathing thing, made terrifying by its lust, its greed, and the enormous scale on which it operates in American society.

Moloch has a body of its own throughout the poem, which mirrors its portrayal in

Rabbinical tradition as the Canaanite god of sacrifice—a statue of a horned figure, half man half goat, heated with fire into which sacrificial victims could be thrown. Moloch, specifically, is the god to whom children were sacrificed—a theme that resurfaces for many

Beat authors. Faulkner once said that “in writing, you must kill all your darlings”, and this idea comes up for Ginsberg’s angelheaded hipsters again and again as we watch forces

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beyond their control demand intolerable human sacrifice. This section expands on the

horrors that they faced. Moloch is a destructive force, and the nature of its destruction is

the very engine that drives it—the capitalist mindset, which limits man in one way, and the

repressive political atmosphere, which limits man in another.

Section II of the poem functions as a direct appeal to Moloch, “the heavy judger of

men” (Howl, 21), begging for lenience and a more expansive notion of how one should be

able to live in American society. It’s an appeal against a rigid conception of manhood that

Ginsberg and the Beat Poets constantly fought against. It’s an acknowledgement of the

difficulty of the life of an artist. More than the other sections, it reads with a defeatist

pallor. And yet, finally, like the poem itself, the tone is ultimately redemptive. William

Carlos Williams sums up the paradox of Howl in his introduction to the poem—how can the

work as a whole be an acknowledgement of incomparable loss, a rallying cry, and a song of

redemption? Williams writes, “It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone

through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this

life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.” (Howl, 7). And indeed, though the

section details unimaginable sacrifice, like the poem itself, it ends on a redemptive note:

“Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs!

Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad

generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the

wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!

carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!” (Howl, 23). These final lines

foreshadow the tone and form of the poem’s footnote—crazy jubilance.

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McCarthyism and 1950s society

“Business men are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.” – Ginsberg’s “America”

The 1950s was not a good time to be a gay, radically left-leaning communist

Buddhist poet in America. Ginsberg found himself transgressing against societal norms such as capitalism and homosexuality through both his personal life choices and his poetry.

Along with his fellow Beats, Ginsberg created a counterculture that was extremely active, pulsing beneath the conformist façade of America in the 1950s.

Understanding the underlying tenants of McCarthyism helps to contextualize both the canon of Beat poetry and Howl itself. Harold Brodkey—one of the greatest short story writers to have lived—describes the era as such: “Moral cowardice and personal safety and corruption and self-doubt and unlimited greed became national characteristics and virtues.

No one knew how to act. It felt as if this were a country consisting entirely of recent converts, and everyone went on tiptoe.” (Horowitz, “Culture, Politics, and McCarthyism”, p.

102). Corruption, terror, an emphasis on the material as a way of staving off the void—fear of Russia, of China; of all things foreign, of difference, of the ‘other’ that we believed had managed to infiltrate American society.

Though it was difficult to publish revolutionary material during an era when the dominant discourse had Americans prioritizing traditional (one might even say regressive) moral and religious values (just look at the Howl obscenity trial), this counterculture managed to flourish. It is difficult and perhaps not fruitful to study this counterculture as an isolated phenomenon—after all, a counterculture must be countering something. The

Beat Generation, and Ginsberg in particular, were very much products of an age—they created art, in conversation with jazz musicians and other post WWII authors, as a reaction

Dunsky 15 against a dominant narrative that the government was force-feeding the nation. In his article entitled “Culture, Politics, and McCarthyism,” Irving Louis Horowitz argues that “the

American soil was hospitable to a creative cultural outburst in the McCarthyist period, and a strong element of liberalism, indeed radicalism, was perhaps more typical of the age than one had a right to expect given the public sentiments of the times.” (104). I disagree with

Horowitz here—I think it was in fact the public sentiment of the times that gave rise to the

Beat Generation. It follows that the Beat writers would write as they did—including the very topics that the dominant discourse deemed not only inappropriate, but also un-

American. Theirs was a very deliberate project—to give voice to the voiceless, and to provide a narrative that ran contrary to the one on the surface. To this day, Beat Literature continues to signify rebellion against the status quo—after all, why else would Howl be the number one choice of book to carry around for the kids who smoke weed behind the lockers during lunch period? It will be interesting to see how Beat literature ages as we move forward and the last of the great Beats pass away. Though I believe that as long as society continues to oppress marginalized groups (and let’s face it—we aren’t on track to stop these destructive practices anytime soon), Beat Literature will continue to occupy its rightful spot in the revolutionist canon of American literature.

Howl Part III: “I’m with you in Rockland”

“I’m with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss”

Section III directly addresses Carl Solomon, a man whom Ginsberg met during his stay at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute in 1949. Ginsberg refers to this institution as “Rockland” in the poem, repeating the phrase “I’m with you in Rockland!” at the beginning of each line. In this section, Ginsberg shows us Carl Solomon’s descent into

Dunsky 16 madness as he experiences it as a fellow patient. Their friendship was predicated on mutual feelings of agony and despair, and while Ginsberg finds similarities between his own experience and Solomon’s, he makes a point of distinguishing between the two by manipulating the structure of this section.

In the first line of the stanza, he addresses Solomon’s mental condition directly: “I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am” (Howl, 24). Ginsberg creates a distance between his own lamentations and those of Carl Solomon, further alluding to the isolation inherent in struggles with mental health. Though they are in the same place at the same time, their experiences are distinct.

Later in this section, however, Ginsberg briefly switches to the pronoun “we”, bringing the two men back together again in something of a fever dream: “I’m with you in

Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma…they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free” (Howl, 26). While the two men are united briefly in these stanzas, Ginsberg abruptly switches back to using “you” in the ending line of this section: “I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the

Western night” (Howl, 26). This final dream image serves as a reminder that Ginsberg and

Solomon have been irrevocably separated by fate and circumstance.

Footnote to Howl: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!”

“Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & dreams!”

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In this section, unlike in the rest of the poem, Ginsberg uses short bursts of phrases punctuated by the word “Holy!” The footnote acts as a counterpart to Part II, which

Ginsberg populates with exclamations of Moloch! rather than Holy!, though he uses anaphora in both sections to create the rhythm. Together, these two sections represent the sacred and the profane, but the fact that Ginsberg chooses to end Howl on a joyous note leaves no doubt in our minds that the tone of this poem is ultimately redemptive: “Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” (Howl, 28) Where Moloch

(society) has the power to destroy; man and the art that he creates (two earthly yet holy forces) have the power to redeem.

Ginsberg contradicts the desolation of the artist’s life that’s apparent in part one and the destructive power of society and madness apparent in parts two and three with the sole thing offering the artist salvation—an ability to experience the world to a hilt.

However, according to Ginsberg, though they see with blinders off, even artists are unable to experience the world in the entirety of its “supernatural ecstasy” (Howl, 12). William

Carlos Williams writes the following: “Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels” (Howl, 8). According to Ginsberg, this heightened perception, though it makes life difficult, is something to be celebrated.

And celebrate he does—though the artistic gift can feel like a burden, as evidenced in Part I, it is, in essence, a cause for celebration. If one writes poetry, then one experiences the world to a hilt—both sadness and joy. In this section, Ginsberg makes holy both the things we hold in the highest esteem and the things that we tend to look on as profane or cast aside: “The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and asshole holy!” (Howl, 27).

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His phrase “holy the bop apocalypse” (Howl, 27) harkens back to the first section of the poem, where he writes of an “eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry” (Howl,

20). Translated literally, eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani means “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” (biblestudy.org). He is forsaken; defeated even, in the midst of the apocalypse—but bop, jazz, and peyote still exist. These are the themes lending this section its holy vibes. In forsakenness, there is company—there is the possibility of redemption.

Howl on Trial: What is ‘obscenity’ anyway?

“, San Francisco bookseller, poet and publisher, was the central figure in the recent action by the local Collector of Customs who seized 520 copies of the paper-bound volume “,” by Allen Ginsberg. The books, seized last March 22, were being shipped to Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Book Ship by the British printer, Villiers. A first edition passed through U.S. Customs in October 1956 and was released without incident by Ferlinghetti. The March shipment was halted by Chester McPhee, Collector of Customs for San Francisco…”

That is an excerpt from the San Francisco chronicle, dated May of 1956. What followed was a maelstrom of activity culminating in a trial to determine whether or not

Howl was obscene. People defended the collection and attacked it, publishing their views in the local papers—like this lady, who has clearly never had an orgasm: “As a parent of teen-age children, I wish to support Mr. MacPhee in his attempt to keep dirty books out of this country. If the people who oppose this filth sit quietly by while a minority of liberalities shout to open the gates to obscene books and poems it may well be that this minority will soon swamp the country with the filth and dirty they love so well.” – J. Leslie

Jensen (Howl on Trial, 104). Countless letters of this sort poured in—people wishing to keep the bookshelves free of obscene material, for the good of the country, for the upkeep of the literary tradition, and of course, for the innocent eyes of children. On the other side of the argument, people pointed out the problem with censoring all literature deemed unfit

Dunsky 19 for children. They compared the practices of the San Francisco Customs office to the

Orwellian character ‘Big Brother’ and lamented the state of free expression in America.

The following is an excerpt from a newspaper article written by William Hogan under the byline ‘A Stupid Precedent’: “The point is that cops are raiding the bookstores and presumably, with this precedent set, the literary part can march into any store in town and arrest the personnel at will. Not for selling ‘Howl and Other Poems,’ but for selling anything members of this Orwell ‘Big Brother’ agency doesn’t like.” (Howl on Trial, 113).

Clearly, this wouldn’t do. There needed to be a discussion of what constitutes literature in order to set a precedent going forth that wasn’t, well, stupid. Howl became a catalyst for a discussion about obscenity and what constitutes a worthwhile literary piece—in short, whether or not something with overt references to deviant sex and psychedelic drugs could possibly have literary merit.

Gay Rights Movement

“Who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love”

Howl was extremely influential for the gay rights movement—it served as a call to arms; an injunction for queer people to take up space and propel themselves into the common vernacular during a period of history when the government had deemed them mentally-ill and wanted to see them erased completely from the American narrative.

Ginsberg is resolute in his notion that queer people should demand to be seen—a notion that would later culminate in the Gay Pride movement. Van Engen describes Ginsberg’s mobilizing strategy as such: “Bursting from walls, screaming on their knees in subways, balling in parks, waving genitals on roofs, finding pleasure in the nightmare of the

Dunsky 20 psychiatric wards, the characters in Howl…catalyzed American gay pride movements in the later twentieth century through their openness in the midst of punishing violence towards gay men.” (Van Engen, “Howling Masculinity”). He wanted to celebrate queer identity in a time when not only was being gay condemned, but queerness literally connoted insanity:

“In Howl, the scene set in the psychiatric hospital doesn’t specifically mention queers, but its creative citations of psychiatric patients refer to contemporary gay male identity, if we take into account that, in the 1950s, insane connoted homosexual and vice versa.” (Van

Engen, “Howling Masculinity”). His celebration of queer identity is inextricably entwined with his celebration of insanity—in essence, he is calling attention to and celebrating

(much like Whitman did) the myriad ways there are to be a person in the world.

13 year old Ginsberg fanatic—the first read through

“I thought you might like this. He’s truly one of the greatest writers ever to have lived.” My dad withdrew, unwilling to be sucked into my festering teenage moroseness. I remember sitting on our faded green couch flipping through DVR recordings, looking for something to watch. Restless, bored, mopey for some indefinable reason. I turned the TV off and sat in the crackling silence. Then, out of sheer necessity for an activity, I peeked at the first page of the book my dad had dropped in my lap—

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

I read through the entire poem unpausing, and then I read through it again. Twilight came and went—I didn’t notice. Eventually, after several hours and a third read through, it got too dark to read—so I flipped on the light and began to memorize.

When I went to sleep that night, the air in my room had shifted. I didn’t have the language yet to define it, but something was different. When I woke up the next morning,

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Howl was my first thought—I lay in bed silently reciting the passages I had memorized before I started my day.

I ordered several more copies. I brought them to school. I showed my middle school friends, breathless and giddy and afraid for their reactions (fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists??). My U.S. History teacher caught me reading it under the table and confiscated it—twice (sorry Mr. Greenfield; nothing like the hubris of a middle schooler who thinks she’s found a new and better curriculum than the one you’re teaching).

I started high school. My desire to memorize Howl continued to consume me—each day I’d add another stanza to my repertoire. Whenever I had a spare moment, I would jump to a page and start reciting in my head. I couldn’t fall asleep without completing a full run-through, lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling with the Pocket Poets edition on my pillow for reference. Some nights I slept better than others.

When I had finally memorized the whole thing, I kept it to myself. I knew that Howl didn’t need me to protect it, and yet that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to keep it safe and not have to articulate what it was that had enraptured me, because articulating things is scary and hard and what if I fail? I wanted to be a teacher, a publicist, later a lawyer for a brief second—I didn’t want to be a writer. I didn’t want the crushing pressure of articulation on my shoulders. Instead, I wanted to keep Howl close to my breast like a personal secret.

“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman”: Ginsberg’s Influences

“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.” – Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in ”

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Influence is tricky. I love reading through Ginsberg’s early work and then flipping to the writing he did in his final days (some of which was published posthumously). As an intensely personal poet, Ginsberg’s Collected Poems reads like a journal of self-discovery—a kunstlerroman of a lost, neurotic boy finding peace in a community of similarly chaotic minds. As Ginsberg strays away from convention in his personal life, so does his poetry, and with that, form follows content. Ginsberg’s poetry grows less structured and branches out from its tight verses. If you look closely, you can pinpoint the moment when he discovered Whitman and Lorca and began expanding his own conception of poetic form.

From there, he went on to develop a style of poetry that was uniquely his own—the style in which Howl is written.

Walt Whitman’s poetry heavily influenced that of Allen Ginsberg, both in terms of content and poetic form. Firstly, Ginsberg followed in Whitman’s footsteps in terms of glorifying and celebrating gay sex and the male body in general—topics that had previously been considered taboo. Whereas before the female body was the main site of sexuality in literature and art, Whitman expanded this concept to include males as well. As Selby states, “For both Whitman and Ginsberg this process by which poets become popular heroes and America a poetic text relies upon discourses of sex and sexuality, especially gay sexuality” (63). Read in the context of the gay rights movement of the 1960s, the poetry of

Whitman (and later Ginsberg) serves as a rallying cry for not only normalizing gay relationships, but celebrating them as well.

Howl and Virginity (my own)

Howl was always a personal thing. Like I mentioned before, I wanted to keep it as something that I did uniquely for me. Explaining its meaning was a task that I didn’t feel up

Dunsky 23 to, like I didn’t have the authority to explain using words something that I felt so viscerally.

At the same time though, I wanted the chance to recite it while someone checked me for errors or missed lines—so I asked my boyfriend to be that person. No interruptions, no comments, no opinions—I wanted him to sit quietly and listen to me (something that he had grown accustomed to doing) and take notes so that I could correct my mistakes.

The first time I recited Howl to someone else in its entirety was a prolific night of firsts—it was also the night I lost my virginity. We lay there afterwards, feeling gypped.

The whole thing was, in a word, unpleasant. In another word—uncomfortable. The body did not find itself sung electric. Instead, we found ourselves at something of an impasse.

“You finished memorizing, right?” he asked. I had finished the week before, instead of studying for my ACT exam.

“Yeah, but…” I fiddled with the edge of my pillowcase.

“No ‘buts.’ We’re trying new things tonight. I think you should recite it to me.” So I did—I handed him one of my worn-weary Pocket Poets edition and guided him to the first page. I gave him a pencil and asked him to circle my mistakes.

“Ready?”

“I saw the best minds of my generation…”

Howl is a celebration of the body in all its beaten-down glory. It is a celebration of what the body is capable of. It is an ode to pleasure, to pain, and to their intersection. On the night that I first recited Howl out loud to another person, these themes became abundantly clear in a way that they hadn’t been before. How Ginsberg inhabited the body so fully, seeking pleasure and embracing pain, in the same way that Howl itself celebrates these two poles. For me, this is the beauty of Howl and Ginsberg’s poetry as a whole—the

Dunsky 24 more I grew and the more I experienced, the more I understood. Howl has unfolded for me like a continuous scroll, much like the scroll on which Kerouac wrote On the Road—themes became apparent, and as I began to experience more of life’s offerings, Howl has been along for the ride.

Conclusion

It is hard to write about Allen Ginsberg. Not because I haven’t been studying the minutiae of his life from an early age, or because I don’t know what I want to say about

Howl. It is hard to write about Allen Ginsberg, especially in an academic context, because at this point, it is difficult to view his poetry as something other than an extension of myself and my adolescence. As a college writer, I have always strayed away from using Ginsberg in my academic essays—ever since an English professor told me that it was not appropriate to cite Howl in the title of every single essay; especially those on 19th century American

Women writers (she was totally right, and I was totally resentful of that fact). There was a whole wide world of literature to discover over the course of my college career, and with this in mind, I branched out and away from Beat poetry. Coming back to Howl now, in my senior thesis, is my way of coming full circle. I’ve decided that maybe being a writer wouldn’t be the worst thing. I’ve figured out that you don’t have to articulate everything perfectly—that sometimes just putting pen to paper is enough. In studying the roots of

Ginsberg’s work, it’s become apparent that even Ginsberg was not always Ginsberg—his style has evolved and changed in countless ways, and as life happened to him, he was able to develop a personal style amidst the chaos. Perhaps this is the answer to the fundamental contradiction of Howl—that it is both a cry of defeat and a redemptive celebration. Though life happens to Ginsberg, and often it defeats him, the very act of turning it into art is where

Dunsky 25 the redemption comes in. His style was not born in a vacuum—rather, it developed from a life lived fully. I’d like to quote one of his earlier works here, titled “An Eastern Ballad”:

I speak of love that comes to mind: The moon is faithful, although blind; She moves in thought she cannot speak. Perfect care has made her bleak.

I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep. I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.

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Van Engen, Dagmar. “Howling Masculinity: Queer Social Change in Allen Ginsberg’s

Poetry.” Boston College, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2016.