1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  On March 24, while sit-ins were spreading to every university in Poland and more and more “Zionist conspirators” were being removed from office, a letter was released from the bishops of the Polish Catholic Church saying that the student movement was “striving for truth and freedom, which is the natural right of each human being. . . .” The bishops went on to say that the “brutal use of force disgraces human dignity.” This letter was the beginning of a new alliance in Poland. Never before had the Catholic Church and the leftist intelligentsia fought on the same side. According to Michnik, this letter caused a radical change in thinking. “Traditionally the Left in Poland is anticleric,” said Michnik. “I was too until 1968. When the Church issued a letter supporting the students, for the first time I thought maybe the Church is not an enemy. Maybe it could be a partner in dialogue.”

  On March 28 three thousand students in Warsaw demonstrated, demanding an end to censorship, free trade unions, and a youth movement independent of the Communist Party. It was to be the last demonstration. Eight university departments were closed and one thousand of the University of Warsaw’s seven thousand students were left without a curriculum and told they would have to reapply for entry. Another thirty-four were expelled. “All of us have had enough of mass meetings. There will be and can be no tolerance of trouble-mongers and people of ill will,” the Trybuna Ludu announced.

  With almost a thousand students in prison, the student movement was shut down. The government continued to find Zionist ringleaders to be removed from their posts.

  The universities were irreparably damaged as many of the best faculty members fled to escape anti-Semitism and were replaced by party hacks. A Pole had only to express desire to move to Israel and show proof of Jewish origin to leave. One man was stopped because he could not show that he was Jewish. His only proof was a paper from the government denouncing him as a Zionist. All but about one thousand Jews left the country, essentially ending Judaism in Poland.

  But Eugeniusz and Nina Smolar stayed. “March 1968 was the last time anyone believed the system could evolve,” said Eugeniusz. “People used to join the Communist Party to change it. To do anything, to be a player, you had to be in the Party. After March 1968 people who joined were much more cynical, using the Party as a vehicle for personal advancement.”

  Michnik was another Jew who stayed. But he stayed in prison. He was later asked if when sitting in prison, with the university destroyed and its intellectual life silenced, he had thought he’d made a huge mistake. Without hesitation, this small, energetic man jutted out his jaw and said, “I never thought that. Part of my education was the silence of my parents during the trials of 1935. You must always protest against dictatorship. It is what Immanuel Kant called a categorical imperative.”

  Smolar said, “The 1968 generation was born of fire. They learned from experience and were active in all the movements that followed.” They did learn to join with both the church and the workers, or, as a writer put it in Trybuna Ludu in unwittingly prophetic language, “The events at the University pointed out that apart from the prevailing naïveté and credulity some students had great potential, were ideologically committed and willing to change the country for the better. We now wait for this capital to bear fruit.”

  Joanna Szcesna was only nineteen the first time she went to prison. She amused the other prisoners by reciting Gone With the Wind and the Galsworthy novels. In 1981, when the movement had grown, joined by workers and clergy, to such size that the government declared martial law in an attempt to contain it, Joanna’s mother, Jadwiga, was the oldest woman interned. Joanna said, “I think I was a bad influence on her.”

  CHAPTER 8

  POETRY, POLITICS, AND

  A TOUGH SECOND ACT

  I have left Act I for involution

  and Act II. There mired in complexity

  I cannot write Act III

  —EUGENE MCCARTHY, “Lament of an Aging Politician,” 1968

  1968 WAS ONE OF THOSE rare times in America when poetry seemed to matter. Telephone service in New York City in 1968 offered a “dial-a-poem.” A government pilot program that year sent poets around the country to public high schools to give readings and discussions. The response was wildly enthusiastic. In Detroit, poet Donald Hall was trapped in a hallway at Amelia Earhart Junior High School by excited students shouting, “Say us a poem!” Obligingly he shouted one, but then the crowd had doubled with new arrivals and he had to read it again.

  Robert Lowell, born to a patrician Boston family in 1917, the year of John Kennedy’s birth, seemed a poet for the sixties. Like the Mobe’s David Dellinger, who was from a similar background, Lowell was a pacifist who had served a prison term rather than fight in World War II. In the sixties, he was a frequent fixture at antiwar rallies. By 1968 he was the most visible American poet, because he campaigned with Eugene McCarthy.

  Allen Ginsberg, born in 1926, was closer in age to Lowell than he was to the students of 1968. But Ginsberg, even in his forties, balding and a bit paunchy, with his thick beard and wreath of wild dark hair, had both the personal spirit and literary style that characterized the sixties. He was really a fifties figure, a central figure of the beat generation. But by 1968 many of the beats had faded. Jack Kerouac was dissipated from alcohol and did not approve of the antiwar movement. He accused his old friend Ginsberg of being unpatriotic. Neal Cassady died in Mexico in early 1968 while undertaking a fifteen-mile hike following a railroad line. He said he would pass the time counting railroad ties. But along the way he managed to get himself invited to a wedding party, where he spent hours drinking and taking Seconal. He was found the next day along the railroad tracks where he had spent the rainy night. Suffering from overexposure, he soon died, exiting in that free and offbeat style that had made his group famous. According to legend, his last words were, “Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight.”

  Despite losing many friends to alcohol and drugs, Ginsberg was a passionate believer in certain drugs, especially marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD. In fact, although he was a determined adversary of the Vietnam War and the American military and industrial war machine, there were three other topics that he seemed to bring up on most occasions. One was fair treatment for homosexuals. Always extremely candid in his poetry, some said graphic, about his own sexual preference, he was a gay rights activist before the term was invented. And he always championed his theories on the beneficial uses of narcotics as well as the unfair persecution of users. He was also a persistent believer in the value of Buddhist chants. By 1968, when Eastern religion had become a trend, it was easy to forget that Ginsberg had been very serious about his Buddhism for a number of years. Hinduism was also in vogue, especially having a guru, a new enough word in 1968 for the press to usually offer the pronunciation (goo-roo).

  Mahesh Yogi, who gave himself the title Maharishi—“great sage”—had found a formula for instant meditation, which he promised would deliver samadhi, a holy state of expanded consciousness, without going to all the trouble of fasting and endless prayer. He converted Europeans by the thousands to “Transcendental Meditation” before arriving in the United States in 1968, bringing with him a fad for Indian clothes and Indian music. Many celebrities, including the Beatles and the Beach Boys, followed the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. But when the Beatles went to India to spend three months studying under the Maharishi, Ringo Starr, always said to be the least reflective of the quartet, returned with his wife, Maureen, to his suburban London mansion after ten days, unhappy with the great sage’s accommodations. “Maureen and I are a bit funny about our food, and we don’t like spicy things,” Ringo explained.

  The Maharishi was of limited appeal to poet and seasoned chanter Ginsberg because he opposed LSD and urged young people to accept the draft. Ginsberg continued to chant, oppose the war, and champion the rights of homosexuals and the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

  By the 1960s Ginsberg had become one of the most venerated living poets and was invited to speak around
the world, though in many of these countries, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and Italy, he found himself in legal difficulties for the things he said.

  Known for his kindness, he is still remembered in his East Village, New York, neighborhood as a soft-spoken gentleman. His free-form passionate verse was from its first publication both controversial and widely recognized as brilliant. He sometimes gave readings with his father, Louis, who was also a poet. Louis, a New Jersey schoolteacher, could not resist the more than occasional pun in his comments and wrote well-constructed, lyric poetry, often in rhymed couplets. The relationship was one of love and mutual respect, though Louis thought his son should be a little less free-form. He also thought his son should not use scatological words that embarrassed people and wished he would be a little less forthcoming about his homosexuality. But that was the way Allen was. He talked publicly about whom he loved, whom he lusted after, and how. Once he went too far and referred to an extramarital dalliance of his father’s, and Louis got him to remove the lines. Their readings together, in the age of “the generation gap,” were considered a great show—Louis in his tweeds and Allen in his beads.

  In 1966 they had appeared together in the Ginsberg hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Louis read to his many local fans, and the more famous son read political poems but also his poem about Paterson. They talked about how father and son had visited Passaic Falls the day before, Louis calling it an intimate moment shared. Then Allen, who always volunteered the unrequested detail, said that while at the falls he had smoked marijuana, which had added greatly to the experience. The next day Paterson mayor Frank X. Graves, contending that he had received numerous calls about the drug confession, got a bench warrant for the younger Ginsberg’s arrest, whereupon the police found and detained a man with a beard and glasses, mistaking him for the wanted poet, who was by then safely back in the East Village.

  By 1968, when they appeared together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a bearded, pot-smoking hippie was more commonplace, though it was still curious to see the two together. Louis began by punning and Allen began by chanting a mantra that The New York Times reviewer said was longer than any of his poems. They ended the evening with a family squabble about LeRoi Jones’s recent illegal firearms possession conviction. To the son it was clear the black playwright had been framed—to the father it wasn’t. The audience was also divided, and each Ginsberg had his cheerers.

  LeRoi Jones was also one of the popular poets of the 1968 generation. His most famous line was fast becoming “Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick-up.” A 1967 East Village “affinity group” named themselves “the Motherfuckers” after the Jones poem. An affinity group used intense intellectual debates as an underpinning for carrying out the kind of media-grabbing street theater that Abbie Hoffman could do so well. During the New York City garbage strike, the Motherfuckers hauled garbage by subway from the redolent mountains of it left on the sidewalks to the newly opened Lincoln Center.

  The bestselling poet of 1968 was Rod McKuen, who penned rhythmic little bon mots that he read in a raspy voice suggestive either of emotion or bronchitis. A Hollywood songwriter, clean-shaven with V-neck sweaters, McKuen was a long way from the beats. But by early 1968 he had already sold 250,000 volumes of his unabashedly sentimental verse. His two books, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows and Listen to the Warm, were selling more than any book on The New York Times fiction bestseller list, although they were not listed, because poetry was not included on bestseller lists. With characteristic self-effacing candor, he said in a 1968 interview, “I’m not a poet; I’m a stringer of words.” When he came down with hepatitis, fans by the hundreds sent him stuffed animals. To many, he and his fans seemed unbearable.

  If a songwriter is a poet, stronger candidates were available in 1968 than McKuen. Bob Dylan had made his position clear by choosing the stage name Dylan. There was a distant relation between his richly worded lyricism and that of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The Doors named their group from a line of William Blake’s poetry: “the doors of perception.” In Life magazine, Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, was called “a very good actor and a very good poet,” in fact “an amplified poet in black leather pants.” It did not matter that the words at times would not have conveyed the point without the embellishment of Morrison’s shrill screams. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, whose ballads featured lyrics full of metaphor and imagery, were to many fans poets. But the songwriter of the pair, Paul Simon, dismissed the idea. “I’ve tried poetry, but it has nothing to do with my songs. . . . But the lyrics of pop songs are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence, they call you a poet. And if you say you’re not a poet, then people think you’re putting yourself down. But the people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan. They never read, say, Wallace Stevens. That’s poetry.”

  On the other hand, few doubted that Ginsberg was a poet and no one that Ezra Pound was one, the octogenarian artifact of the birth of twentieth-century poetry, now sitting out his days in Italy. Despite Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism, he and his politically conservative protégé T. S. Eliot remained on the cultural list of the 1968 generation. Even without studying poetry, the lineage was clear. If there had been no Pound, there would have been no Eliot and there would have been no Dylan Thomas, no Lawrence Ferlinghetti, no Allen Ginsberg. Or they would have written very differently.

  Ginsberg acknowledged his debt to Pound, so the Jewish poet or, as he liked to say, Jewish Buddhist poet wanted to visit Pound. When he did in 1967 in Venice, he did not recite his own poetry. Instead, after dinner he rolled marijuana in cigarette paper and, without comment, smoked it. Then he played records for the elderly poet—the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and “Eleanor Rigby,” Bob Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and “Gates of Eden,” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.” Pound smiled as he listened, seemed particularly to enjoy certain lines, tapped his ivory-handled cane to the music, but never said a word. Ginsberg was later assured by the elderly poet’s longtime partner, Olga Rudge, that if he had not appreciated the offering, he would have walked out of the room.

  Just who was and wasn’t a poet was becoming an issue.

  Politics had much to do with tastes in poetry. Russian poets, especially if they were politically outspoken, were garnering huge followings among college students in the West. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having a big year in 1968, both in political controversy at home and in artistic recognition abroad. Born in 1933, he belonged to a new school of Russian lyric poetry. Critics frequently suggested that others from the new school, such as Boris Pasternak’s protégé Andrey Voznesensky, also born in 1933, were better poets. But in the 1960s Yevtushenko was the most famous working Russian poet in the world. In 1962 he published four poems highly critical of the Soviet Union, including “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews unsuccessfully covered up by the Soviets.

  In 1965, when Ginsberg was in Russia, in between being thrown out of Cuba and being thrown out of Czechoslovakia, he met with his famous Russian colleague. Yevtushenko told Ginsberg that he had heard many scandalous things about him but did not believe them. Ginsberg assured him that they were probably true. He explained that since he was a homosexual and that was the reality he lived in, the scandals came from his willingness to speak openly about his experiences.

  The Russian grew visibly uncomfortable as he said, “I know nothing of such matters.” Ginsberg quickly changed the subject to another favorite, drug use. Yevtushenko said, “These two subjects—homosexuality and narcotics—are not known to me, and I feel they are juvenile preoccupations. They have no importance here in Russia to us.”

  In 1962, when British composer Benjamin Britten wrote War Requiem, he was not thinking about Vietnam. He was commemorating the reopening of Coventry Cathedral, bombed during World War II. The text came from Wilfred Owen’s poems about World War I. But by
1968 War Requiem was considered to be “antiwar,” and anything that was antiwar had a following. Wilfred Owen’s nearly forgotten poems were being read again, not only because they expressed a hatred of war, but because of his sad life story. Owen had been a company commander in World War I who discovered his poetic talent while venting about his war experiences. He almost went on to a brilliant literary career, but a week before the war ended he was killed in combat at the age of twenty-five and most of his work was published posthumously. In 1968 not only was the poetry of Owen becoming popular again, but also that of Rupert Brooke, another young poet who died in World War I. The poet-victim of war seemed to be an irresistible setting for literature in 1968. Even Guillaume Apollinaire, the French writer who died the day before World War I ended from a shrapnel wound to the head months earlier, was attaining cult status in 1968. Better known in the art world as the critic who promoted Picasso, Braque, Derain, his own mistress, Marie Laurencin, and many others—the inventor of the word surreal—he was also a poet. In 1968, when a new English translation of The Poet Assassinated was published, Richard Freedman, reviewing it for Life, said, “A half-century after his death Apollinaire is more than ever a big man on campus.”

  It seemed the literary capital of writers who had opposed wars, any wars, was on the rise. Hermann Hesse, the German pacifist who moved to Switzerland to evade military service in World War I, was enjoying a popularity among youth greater than he had known during most of his life. Although he died in 1962, his novels, with an almost Marcusian sense of the alienating quality of modern society and a fascination with Asian mysticism, were perfectly suited to the youth of the late sixties. He might have been amazed to discover that in October 1967 a hard-driving electric rock band would name itself after his novel Steppenwolf. According to the twenty-four-year-old Canadian lead singer, guitar and harmonica player, John Kay, the group, best known in 1968 for “Born to Be Wild,” had a philosophy similar to that of the hero of the Hesse novel. “He rejects middle-class standards,” Kay explained, “and yet he wants to find happiness within or alongside them. So do we.”