by Rick Gekoski
But there were two things I failed to learn from him. First, was how to keep my mouth shut, though that didn’t matter much. But second, and significantly, was how to fail. Holden will not do what he doesn’t believe in, study what doesn’t interest him, take advice where it doesn’t resonate with what he needs. If this means that he drops out of one school after another, he feels no shame. His father, kid sister Phoebe says, will ‘kill’ him for his latest failure, but he fails nonetheless. There is some integrity in this: the more good-willed educators praise the value of what he is being offered, the more he rejects it. In his inchoate way he knows that it is a characteristic of narcissistic forms of life that they generate lashings of self-praise. Phoneys, this is what Holden means by phoniness. But what is not phoney? He doesn’t know yet, save for the clear knowledge that he isn’t. And his unwillingness to play the proffered game confirms something intransigent and authentic in him.
The psychotherapist Alice Miller observes that for children who are being pressured by ambitious parents, failure may be the only way to assert independence: ‘it may come about that something inside refuses to produce good grades. They are unwilling to take part in a cover-up of a lack of love, and they use their bad grades to protest hypocrisy and to defend the truth.’
Holden chooses to fail, and it provokes no anxiety in him, though he has some (admittedly mild) regret at the distress it causes others. He doesn’t fear failure, he does it, chooses it. Failure is a confirmation of his integrity.
But Holden Caulfield was in a situation radically different from my own. We may both have been surly high school kids, but Holden had adequate reason for his disaffection, what Eliot calls an ‘objective correlative’. He is profoundly and admittedly depressed, his only attachments being to his younger sister Phoebe, and to the memory of Allie, his adored kid brother who died when Holden was thirteen. The day that Allie died, Holden broke his hand smashing windows in the garage. Three years later his hand still hurts, and he is still angry, but the anger has twisted and turned inward. At the end of the book Holden is an in-patient in a psychiatric institution, and has written this account of himself as a kind of therapeutic self-explanation.
He is grieving, still. What had I experienced that I should have found his situation so sympathetic? If I had a sense of loss it was only obscurely: a product of a child-centred environment, I had fallen from an egocentric state of innocence into a world that expected me to centre on it. Yet if my reasons for grief, if you can call it that, bore little comparison to those of Holden Caulfield, they certainly produced similar symptoms.
Catcher is a protracted moan, but what Holden really needs to do is to howl. His sense of loss – so unlike my own – is sympathetic, conscious and overwhelming. He is filled with numb rage and unshed tears. No one seems to have helped him properly: in the course of the narrative not one of his many well-wishing adults, no teacher, no parent, no friend, sees fit to mention Allie’s death. (Only Phoebe does that.) Holden needed better, wiser, more psychologically and culturally radical counsel.
Perhaps he needed Allen Ginsberg? Holden couldn’t have read Howl (which was published five years after Catcher in the Rye) but I was lucky enough, in 1960, to read both books, and in the right order. Howl begins where Catcher ends: in a mental hospital, where a tormented and intensely bright inmate is trying and failing to make peace in and with the world. Though it is often referred to as Howl, Ginsberg’s book was originally titled Howl for Carl Solomon. A lament for his mad friend, it begins:
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 . . .
and continues:
. . . who were expelled from academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear . . .
Who was this stylistic hooligan? I’d never read anything like this before, words stomping about the page without discernible rhythms, much less rhymes, lawless and free. It was strident, repetitious, shockingly outspoken. (It was also bombastic and not entirely accurate: Carl Solomon later claimed to be mystified by the whole business: ‘Why he wrote the poem, I don’t understand. I was seeking only a rest and attempting to give up smoking. I don’t understand all this grand opera.’)
Whatever this was, it certainly wasn’t poetry. It was better than poetry. Poetry was the clanking Mr Lindsay (student of the Negro Race) and the homespun Mr Frost. Poetry was as fluent and as memorable as that contemporary hit by the Shirelles: ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ But no one could feel cosy with this Mr Ginsberg, or quote more than a couple of lines without starting to hem and haw, eventually grinding to a mid-line halt.
If Ginsberg’s verse calls Holden Caulfield to mind – leaving school, drunk in a seedy New York hotel room, angry and desperate, dreaming of an escape to the lonely outreaches of the West – they also transcend him entirely. You could relate to Holden, internalize him as a friend. Even his creator did that. According to his girlfriend at the time, when Salinger was writing the novel he used to quote Holden Caulfield enthusiastically and extensively. I did too. ‘What would Holden have thought about this bullshit?’ I would think, as I sat, superior, in judgement on the inadequacy of my teachers. And my friend Holden would tell me, at length.
But Allen Ginsberg? No, he was neither a friend, nor someone inwardly to consult, and his voice wasn’t so easily introjected. If Holden was a comfortable companion, Ginsberg made me both excited and anxious. It was his aim to provoke, and what he provoked in me was a fierce desire for escape, and a reflexive rejection of that impulse so quick that I could hardly remember having felt it. Talk about having a vigilant system of defences. He made me feel both trapped and pathetic, yet the net effect was curiously exhilarating.
Ginsberg and his beat friends – Howl is dedicated to Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady – were, of course, in a long American tradition, exploring the wilderness within and without. We remember Huck Finn, fleeing the forces of convention in the form of his Aunt Sally (who wants ‘to adopt me and sivilize me’), getting ready to light out for the territory. It is clear to Huck that there is something preferable and unconstrained in this metaphorical, pre-lapsarian terrain. It was clear to Allen Ginsberg as well, though the nature of the freedoms he envisaged might have surprised even the liberal-minded Huck. They surprised the hell out of me. Ginsberg was omnivorously, rapaciously sexy, hetero- and what we called, with anxious fastidiousness, ‘homo’: happy it seemed to be on the giving or receiving end of whatever was coming or going. William Carlos Williams, speaking of Howl, put this perfectly: ‘He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own – and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.’
The major antecedents of Howl, which seems a quintessentially modern poem, lie in the nineteenth century: in James Fenimore Cooper and Huckleberry Finn, and particularly in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which Ginsberg had read while at high school in New Jersey. Walt’s dictum: ‘I am huge I contain multitudes,’ became the young Ginsberg’s mantra. The panoptically loving Howl embraces (takes in) the outlawed and outcast, the rejected, the poor, the black, the downtrodden. More than accepts but embraces (celebrates) that which tests boundaries, attacks prejudices, transgresses. In those great words of Whitman’s:
‘love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches . . . stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people . . . re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.’
I wasn’t sure, contemplating this lofty sentiment at the age of seventeen, quite what insulting one’s ‘soul’ might consist of, as compared to, say, insulting one’s self. I had certainly heard of
souls, but was unsure whether I had, or indeed, whether I wanted one. They sounded pesky things, these souls, a bit like puppies: endlessly importuning, hungry for sustenance, altogether too demanding.
Soul or no soul, the arrival of Allen signalled the end of my identification with Holden. He and I had not yet got past a negative version of ‘dismissing’, were ruthlessly without charity. Ginsberg pointed the way to something larger, more generous and more dangerous. That’s what happens when you wish to say YES, unconditionally, to the world, which is what Ginsberg recommended and exemplified.
Having been so moved by Whitman in his teens, Ginsberg was simply waiting for Blake to happen. In 1948, he did. In a vision that was to shape his life, the poet Blake appeared before the twenty-six-year-old Ginsberg, who, transported, emerged from the experience clear that he had been visited by God. Much later, I was lucky enough to hear him singing, with his partner Peter Orlovsky, from his settings of Songs of Innocence and Experience. I had always been sceptical about the idea of the poet as bard, or (worse) shaman. Those are easy cloaks to put on, easy to abuse, altogether too self-aggrandizing. Yet Ginsberg was wholly convincing, his audience rapt. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. I’d never understood or appreciated Blake properly before, or Ginsberg, or (I supposed) myself.
It made me wish I had made more of myself. I was at the time teaching English at the University of Warwick, at which Ginsberg’s reading took place. After the reading, still deeply moved, I found myself standing next to him as we peed at the urinals. It was my chance, my only chance, to acknowledge what I owed him. What words would be adequate?
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said, smiling.
I felt blessed, and went home glowing to tell Barbara about the experience. She immediately sensed something dangerous in my response: she had once observed that it wouldn’t have surprised her entirely, if one day she found a note from me saying that I was off. Not off as in off with another woman, or to a different flat, but really off. Not off somewhere, but to nowhere, to anywhere. And that she might not then hear from me for a very long time. It was an acute reading of a fantasy of mine – not to abandon her, but in some unexamined way to find myself – but she knew, as I knew even better, that I was far too dutiful, too conventional, finally too frightened, to do more than contemplate such a thing. I had an inner lexicon of sad and attenuated fantasies of life on the road, which involved moving from one stereotype to another: open-topped cars on endless roads to nowhere, vast Western landscapes with critters and varmints howling in the night, bars with drunken and available women, lonely motels . . . All the stale tropes of noir fiction. Nothing too difficult, highly charged, or genuinely imagined. Nothing exotic, nothing foreign. It was a by-product of the genius of Allen Ginsberg that, in reanimating these clichés, he made me feel more alive.
Allen and Holden had become guides, though eventually their voices merged with whatever was developing as my own. They engendered loyalty, and that kind of naive identification where we find ourselves unconsciously mimicking not merely our friends’ attitudes, but also their habits, likes and dislikes, voices and postures. For a time I could recognize an inner Holden and an inner Allen Ginsberg, but eventually they got assimilated, increasingly mixed up with the myriad other voices I was to make my own, to make myself.
Philip Roth’s protagonist Nathan Zuckerman puts this perfectly, in the novel Exit Ghost: ‘All I can tell you with certainty is that I . . . have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do . . .’
So Zuckerman, ironically, while disallowing the very concept of the self, also uses it, because he has to: it is built into the psycholinguistic structures we are stuck with: ‘I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.’ There’s no way round it – a process that Jacques Derrida calls using concepts ‘under erasure’ – at the very moment at which we disallow a concept we may be obliged to employ it.
Charles Lamb, in a much quoted phrase, claimed that he loved to ‘lose himself in other men’s minds’, and that is what I did, though not in the sense that Lamb intended. He thinks there is something comfortable about the process, something seamlessly enhancing. But my assimilation of the Caulfield and Ginsberg voices had something spurious about it – I didn’t simply learn from them, I appropriated a whole series of attitudes and beliefs which were neither warranted nor engendered by my own experience: I despised phonies! I wanted to be lawless and to embrace all!
Perhaps, though, that is the point, and what poor frustrated Miss Wyeth was trying to teach us. That literature offers us foreign voices, and enables, even urges, us to assimilate them. How we do that, of course, is up to us. You have to be careful whose company you keep, and how. Matthew Arnold recommended ‘the best that has been known and thought’ as internal models, without remarking, too, the concomitant danger of what Jung calls psychic inflation. I suspect that he thought the process would make one humble, but identifying with and appropriating views of the world that one might not have come to on one’s own does not necessarily lead to humility.
Therein lies the paradox: we cannot form our views of the world without exposure to ‘other men’s minds’, yet in doing so we risk something second-hand, inauthentic. Literature becomes both our experience and our substitute for experience. There is, after all, a crucial distinction between actually being on the road, being Kerouac and Cassady, and reading about it, identifying with them, and regarding oneself as, similarly, an outlaw. To be outside the law you must be as honest as Jack or Neal, and not like their many admirers and wannabes.
Allen Ginsberg’s valuation of spontaneity, his desire for sexual freedom and loathing of the conventions of the political process and of petit bourgeois life, moved and convinced me, and I have never entirely freed myself of these attitudes, nor entirely wished to. But they have left me with a lifetime disposition to seem to be, to pretend to be larger, more interesting and important than I really am. Like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, without a self that is anything more than a vast echo chamber, with resonating voices, intertwined, from any variety of sources. Is this why we sense, in people who are steeped in literature, a kind of intractable pomposity, as if they are swollen by voices not legitimately their own? ‘As Charles Lamb was fond of remarking,’ they say, remarking it themselves. Charles Lamb, c’est moi.
I cite therefore I am? There is something compellingly ridiculous about the process. Even in its most distinguished examples, compulsive quoting always suggests something second-hand to me. Take Joan Didion’s moving account of her response to the sudden death of her adored husband, John Gregory Dunne, The Year of Magical Thinking. The text is littered with references to those writers Didion most admires, and who may be able to offer insight or consolation. And, reading, I was irritated by this: can’t she grieve, even, without this plethora of literary citation? But there is nothing second-hand about the process, not to Joan Didion: these voices, these authorities, these friends are part of what and who she is. What is this, this chamber of citations, but the self?
Whatever self I was beginning to form in high school sought eagerly, if not for a genuine escape, at least for some radical way of marking my difference and disaffection. It would have to be subtle, this protest, no failing, no dropping out, no confrontations beyond the normal wise-crackery, no locks flowing over the collar. At last I found an ideal gesture: every day during my senior year I would wear a sports jacket and a tie! Unlike the other boys in their chinos, checked shirts and v-necked sweaters, I would set myself apart, formal and superior, and never indicate why I was doing so.
It wasn’t easy. I only had the one (green and gold threaded) jacket, a couple of white button-down cotton shirts, and three thin ties, each with bright horizontal stripes. But I persevered. My fellow students were puzzled, but my teachers thought I looked nice. They didn’t realize that I was dressing ironically, but A
llen Ginsberg would have. I liked to think he would have been proud of me.
In the summer after I graduated, I got to do a different sort of dressing up, while employed as a campus guard by Burns Detective Agency, stationed at the local C.W. Post College, at the time a deeply undistinguished campus largely for the graduates of the local high schools. I was issued with a peaked cap, and a badge that I pinned on my khaki shirt. My role was to make sure that nobody except the administration officers parked in the car parks outside the administration offices. This entailed standing on the broiling tarmac from 7.30 in the morning until 3.30 in the afternoon, with half an hour for lunch at midday. It was exhausting, and the sun gave me headaches until I bought a pair of aviator sun glasses.
I have never been so bored. I would check my watch every few minutes, certain that an hour had passed. It was intolerable, and I took to bringing a novel with me, from the suggested reading list that the University of Pennsylvania had sent prior to my matriculating in the autumn. I found I could read a book a day, and was beginning to rather enjoy it, wishing only that they had issued me with a chair, when the President of the College approached me sternly.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Guarding the car park, sir.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re reading!’
‘Believe it or not, sir, I can do both at the same time.’
‘It doesn’t make the right impression. I want you to stop this reading immediately!’
I put my copy of On The Road into my pocket wearily.
‘If I might say so, sir, it seems to me I am the only person on this campus who actually reads books. Could you not regard me as setting a good example?’
He couldn’t, and wasn’t amused. I spent the rest of the summer standing at my post, broiling in the sun, guarding my little heart out, turning away the occasional student brave or stupid enough to try to swipe one of the prohibited places.