by Ann Wroe
“Coming out”, green politics, feminism, trash fashion and much else that today hardly raises an eyebrow, made its bow in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mr Ginsberg and his friends, among them Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, would not claim to have begotten all these innovations, but they were a catalyst. Although the Eisenhower presidency (1953−61) is thought of as a stodgy period, the civil rights movement was growing and in 1961 America sent its first soldiers to Vietnam. Civil rights and draft dodging were oxygen to the beats.
Allen Ginsberg, though, grew up in a nine-to-five world. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia determined to make good. His father was a teacher, and wrote poetry of a traditionalist style. Young Allen went to university and was expected to become a lawyer. This ordered life came apart. His mother, who for years had had bouts of schizophrenia, was confined to a mental home. Mr Ginsberg dropped out and had a series of jobs, including a spell writing copy for advertisements. He settled in San Francisco because of its “tradition of Bohemia” and wrote “Howl”, the poem that made him famous.
Just as an earlier generation first heard of Ulysses when it was banned, “Howl” became famous by being prosecuted for obscenity. In the course of a long and widely-publicised trial its opening lines were read by millions who would not normally pick up a book of poetry. Unlike Ulysses, with James Joyce’s peculiar syntax, “Howl”, whatever its merits as poetry, is a pretty straightforward read: “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.”
Even better for a public avid for novelty, Allen Ginsberg turned out to be a character, a bald-headed bearded lump in sandals, never short of a lively opinion and, if there was a photographer around, happy to play the buffoon. He travelled across America reading his poems to large, mainly young audiences who seemed not to mind that he was often incomprehensible, perhaps because his admirers were themselves blotto on drugs.
Even during his travels abroad he was often in the headlines. He was expelled from Cuba and Czechoslovakia for advocating homosexuality, and from India, where he sought “eastern mysticism” and was accused of being an American spy, and from various countries in Latin America where he said he was looking for new drugs. At a party in London he took off his clothes and hung a hotel notice, “Do not disturb”, on his penis. “Poetry is best read naked,” he said. John Lennon, not a man usually offended, shielded his wife and walked out in disgust. Back home, Mr Ginsberg practised yoga and other forms of meditation, declaring them to be superior to drugs, and became a devotee of a guru who dressed his staff as English butlers. He once bemused police at a civil rights demo in Chicago by chanting the mantra “om” for seven hours.
The New Yorker published a sly version of “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation / Reading their poems to Vassar girls / Being interviewed by Mademoiselle / Having their publicity handled by professionals.”Nevertheless, Allen Ginsberg was said to be a generous man, giving support to less famous poets and other writers. He pioneered poetry designed to be read aloud. He turned down offers from big publishing houses and stuck with the small firm that first put him in print. He produced a mountain of work published in some 40 books. On one day just before he died he was said to have written a dozen poems.
Will his poetry endure? Some of his poems are now in anthologies. “Kaddish”, about his mother’s death, is well regarded. But while every poet may hope to outlive fashion and be read for ever, there are not many Shelleys. The judge who heard the “Howl” case decided that the poem had “social importance”. That, anyway, was true enough.
Françoise Giroud
Françoise Giroud, a French writer and politician, died on January 19th 2003, aged 86
The brave ambition of Françoise Giroud was, as she put it, “to move France out of its rut”. Americans, she thought, had the right idea. They never seemed to get into a rut. On her first visit to New York soon after the end of the second world war she had been struck by “the degree of optimism, the exhilaration” she had found there. That view stayed with her: “There is a strength in the United States that we in Europe constantly tend to underestimate.” Miss Giroud’s views were not always well received by the French, who do not consider themselves in any way inferior to the Americans, or indeed to anyone else. They denied they were in a rut, but even if they were it was one of elegant and enviable proportions.
Miss Giroud’s weapon to give more pace to French life was language. During her long life she worked in films, was a journalist and a government minister. The thread that linked these jobs was a way with words. For many French people she became an addiction, whether they agreed with her or not. She edited two magazines entirely new to France, Elle and L’Express. Elle aimed to be provocative. An article Miss Giroud wrote in 1951 was entitled “Is the Frenchwoman clean?” A woman would buy a new dress because she wanted to look good, she wrote. “But under the dress, what are you wearing? A garter-belt that has not been washed in two years. That is the national average.” The indignation Miss Giroud aroused by discussing personal hygiene quickly became of lesser importance amid a national debate that ensued over whether La France herself was clean. In the years after the second world war many French people were feeling that the stain of the German occupation, and its accompanying collaboration by the Vichy government, had not been cleansed. Others argued passionately that France had to give up Vietnam and Algeria and abandon the dirty ways of colonialism. Elle offered Frenchwomen a view of the world beyond the home.
L’Express, France’s first weekly news magazine, was a challenge to xenophobic French. The French, Miss Giroud said, were among those westerners “most ill-informed about themselves”. News magazines keep Americans informed. Try ours. The French did and they liked it. Perhaps they were moving out of their rut.
In 1974 Jacques Chirac, the then prime minister, created for Françoise Giroud the new job of minister of women’s affairs. She was later made culture minister. But although she came to be described as a feminist, she was never a campaigning American-style sister. Nor was she in the philosophical mould of Simone de Beauvoir. More practically, she sought to help French women find their way through what she called “the fog” of a male-run world. Women bought most of the products consumed in the home, but were ignorant of how they were made or the economics of their marketing. In politics, especially, the fog was thick, and remains so. In the lower house of the present French parliament fewer than 11% of its members are women, one of the lowest proportions in Europe. Three women are in the cabinet but, said Miss Giroud, “we have had women ministers for decades”. Nor did she approve of the jobs they were often
given. A ministry for women was “a shallow answer to a non-existent problem”.
As Miss Giroud became well known she was pressed for details of her own life, and obligingly offered some colourful stories, such as when she was an aide to Jean Renoir in 1937 while he was making La Grande Illusion, regarded as one of the greatest of anti-war films. “You have gifts,” he told her.
In her book I Give You My Word she tells of being arrested towards the end of the war by the Gestapo on suspicion of helping the resistance. She was released and her confiscated watch was returned to her by a helpful German. “A complete German absurdity,” she writes. Miss Giroud shared the shame of those French who believed the government should have fought on in 1940, but she had been sure that the Germans would be defeated. “I never for a minute doubted the moralsuperiority of England, and for me that explained how it was able to hold out.”
She had little education to speak of. She left school at 14 and worked first in a shop, then as a typist, after her father, a journalist, died and her mother had no money. Or, it could be said, she gradually acquired a broad education through reading. Two of her heroines were Marie Curie, a pioneer in the study of radioactivity, and Alma Mahler, who gained rather more notorious fame as a result of her love affairs. Miss Giro
ud was to write biographies of both women. She preferred to say little about her own love life. She was married briefly and had two children, a son who died in a skiing accident, and a daughter who survives her. She said, “The men who helped me, and they are legion, were my friends, not my lovers.”
She was writing a regular column, for a news magazine, up to a few days before her death. A recent article was about the conflict in Israel. She chides both sides, but characteristically avoids a rush to judgment. She once said, “Off the rack solutions, like bargain basement dresses, never fit anyone.”
Elizabeth Gordon
Elizabeth Gordon, defender of American “style”, died on September 3rd 2000, aged 94
In an essay entitled “The threat to the next America” Elizabeth Gordon sought to show that some modern architects, mainly from Europe, were undermining traditional American values. Their buildings, she told a reporter, were an expression of communism. Communism? Wasn’t that a bit hard on buildings that did not happen to be to your taste? Miss Gordon stood her ground. The buildings we lived in reflected our view of society. There was the rich, earthy American style, which had evolved alongside a desire for liberty and space. And there was the rigid “international” style, of steel and concrete, which was being urged on Americans by a sinister cultural elite.
Miss Gordon was involved in what might be called the politics of architecture. A debate between supporters of the old and the new had been going on for much of the 20th century and continues today. But until her essay in 1953 the debate had been largely confined to specialist publications. Miss Gordon opened it up to a wide audience. She was editor of a popular magazine called House Beautiful, and told her readers there was more to design than matching the carpets with the curtains. Beware the austere “less is more” look, she said.
Equating modernism with communism helped Miss Gordon’s cause at a time when America was being told by Joe McCarthy that the government was full of reds. The pioneers of the international style were indeed mostly socialist: it went with being members of the avant garde. The Bauhaus, a group of architects and artists founded in Germany after the first world war, was a big influence. It was closed down after Hitler came to power in 1933. The Bauhaus was led for a time by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who coined the phrase “less is more”, hated by Miss Gordon. He later moved to the United States, where his ideas were enthusiastically received by his disciples. But for Miss Gordon an even worse influence than Mies van der Rohe was Le Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect famous for the Unité d’Habitation, a vast block of flats in Marseilles. He confirmed her fears about the inhumanity of the new architecture by observing on a visit to New York that its skyscrapers were far too small.
So who did get Miss Gordon’s approval? That’s easy. Frank Lloyd Wright. She called him her god. For her, he was America’s greatest artist. He, modestly, was content to call himself her godfather. It is unclear whether he wrote any of her 1953 essay, but it was certainly written under his influence. After it was published he sent a note to her, “Am at your service from here on. Godfather.” Wright was then 87, the most famous architect in America and still working, but in the eyes of younger architects, especially those dazzled by the international style, a bit old-fashioned.
Miss Gordon was flattered by her attention from Wright. She had had no training in architecture. After university she had first got a job writing advertising copy and had then taken up journalism. What Elizabeth Gordon had to offer Wright was a sharp pen and her magazine to use as a “propaganda tool”. She set out to make him the symbol of all that was worthwhile in design. On three occasions, she devoted an entire issue of her magazine to his work.
Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Miss Gordon was born in the wide open spaces of the northern midwest. She instinctively liked his rambling “prairie style” houses, as he called them. Wright was, in his time, as much a revolutionary as Mies van der Rohe. Among other things he invented open-plan, and many millions of interior walls have been demolished in traditional homes as a result. Just as Britain pioneered suburbia with its cosy mock Tudor, Wright created a new vernacular for American architecture, which can be seen in homes throughout the country in some degree. He designed hundreds of buildings but was fastidious about which should be built. He once said, “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”
The Wright/Gordon relationship was much admired in architectural exhibitions where Wright designed the house and Miss Gordon furnished it. She put together a collection of about a thousand photographs of Wright buildings, which is now in a museum. Wright was grateful to his most loyal fan, and designed a bed for her and her husband, Carl Norcross, an authority on town planning. “Frank was fun to be with,” she said. He loved to talk “and he always liked my hats.”
In the heated arguments about the progress, or non-progress, of architecture, Elizabeth Gordon was sometimes accused of being xenophobic. It was probably unfair. She did take the view that, as a world power, America should be confident about
its native artistry. But during her 25 years as editor of her magazine she, as much as anyone, introduced Japanese furnishing design to Americans. She visited Japan half a dozen times and wrote about shibui, which translates roughly as serene good taste. For publicising Scandinavian design, Finland made her a knight and awarded her a medal. There cannot be many editors of furnishing mags who have the Finnish Order of the Lion, first class.
Robert Graham
Robert Graham, who probed the secrets of the Vatican, died on February 10th 1997, aged 84
The Roman Catholic church is not easily rattled. It seeks to rise above what it regards as petty attacks. “Confident in its destiny,” Robert Graham wrote in his book Vatican Diplomacy, the church “does not reckon in terms of years but of centuries”. All the same, in the 1960s Catholic leaders became worried by persistent stories that Pope Pius XII, the church’s head during the second world war, had chosen to ignore German atrocities against the Jews and others.
The crisis facing the Vatican had something in common with the claims now being made by a new generation that Switzerland was Germany’s willing banker during the Nazi period. Both Switzerland and the Vatican, tiny in area but a sovereign state nevertheless, claimed neutrality in a Europe mainly under fascist rule. Did their accommodation with Europe’s masters extend to the unspeakable: to condoning the Holocaust, the name Jews give to the mass killing of their people?
Mr Graham was a clever choice by the Vatican to probe the career of Pope Pius. He was an American, so was distanced, at least geographically, from the Vatican cabal. He had a mildly colourful background. His father, Charlie Graham, had played professional baseball for the Boston Red Sox. But Robert Graham was, as he put it, “batting for God”. He belonged to the Jesuits, a Catholic order noted for its rigorous discipline and scholarship.
His Vatican Diplomacy was not only a first-rate piece of scholarship, it was elegantly written. Mr Graham’s skill as a communicator had been honed while working for America, a Jesuit magazine with a reputation for tackling controversial subjects and reporting them with a pithiness unusual in religious publications. Clearly the place to start the most important investigation of his career was in the archives of the Vatican. Mr Graham packed his bag and his typewriter and headed for Rome. He stayed there for most of the rest of his life.
Whatever pithiness Mr Graham had acquired in America was abandoned when he immersed himself in the archives of the Vatican. His report on Pope Pius runs to a dozen volumes. Those interested in exploring the thinking of a pope under extreme worldly pressures can find details of many of the documents unearthed by Mr Graham in the library of Georgetown University, which has thoughtfully put them on the internet. Although any summary stands the risk of seeming a distortion, it is fair to say that Mr Graham emerged at the end of his inquiries as a strong defender of Pope Pius.
The main complaint of the pope’s critics was that he did not make a public statement c
ondemning the murder of Jews when the extermination camps first came to the knowledge of the Vatican. Such a statement, it was argued, might have halted the massacre. At least, a pastoral letter stating that killing Jews was a sin might have deterred collaborators from delivering them to the Germans.
Mr Graham said that Pope Pius, working quietly behind the scenes, helped the underground to rescue more than 800,000 Jews from the gas chambers, hiding them in churches and in the Vatican itself.
Speaking in public against the oppressors would, the pope believed, have made matters worse for Jews and Catholics. In Dachau, a concentration camp, 2,000 Catholic priests were held. A speech against the Germans would have invited reprisals.
Pope Pius has also been accused of favouring Germany’s attack on the godless Soviet Union. Mr Graham noted that Germany tried to get the pope to give his approval to the Russian campaign, and even to declare it a crusade. But, to Germany’s disappointment, he said nothing about the invasion. This time the papal silence was more conspicuous.
However, despite Mr Graham’s efforts, it is unlikely that many critics of Pope Pius changed their minds, just as Switzerland’sname will remain besmirched for many people even if every Swiss banker turns out to have been a secret resistance leader. The Deputy, a play by Rolf Hochhuth, a German, which first caused a stir in the 1960s by depicting Pope Pius as a German collaborator, is still being performed in various places. The Statement, a novel by Brian Moore and currently selling well, is about an elderly French war criminal sheltered by the Catholic church. Mr Graham, though, believed that the future would provide a less prejudiced audience for his work; that history had a more open mind.