Ginsberg fell in love with Cassady, and his pursuit of that love—and the intensity of how wrong it all went—proved a key episode in leading to his development as an artist. Cassady, in the meantime, started to discourage the attraction. Ginsberg was undaunted and followed Neal to Colorado. Though he and Neal still had occasional sex, he knew it meant little to Cassady. He returned to New York, devastated, and later went on to fall into trouble with Huncke.
BY THE EARLY 1950s, Ginsberg had gone through severe pain over his loss of Cassady and had also gone through psychiatric treatment. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and was working in an advertising agency in Manhattan. One day, discussing this matter, Ginsberg’s therapist asked him what he really wanted to do with his life. Ginsberg replied: Quit his job and write poetry. The therapist said: “Well, why don’t you?” Then, in 1954, the old crowd started to reassemble in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Cassadys had moved to San Jose, and Kerouac settled in for a visit. In San Francisco itself, a poetry movement was beginning to burgeon, inspired in part by the success of local poets Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—the latter who had just opened the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights, and who had started to publish local poets. Allen headed for San Jose. He was thinking about poetry, but he was also still thinking about Neal. One afternoon, Carolyn walked into her home to see Neal and Allen in bed, Ginsberg sucking Cassady’s penis. She ordered Ginsberg from their home, drove him to San Francisco, gave him $20, and left him there.
It was the best thing that ever happened to Ginsberg. He soon fell in with the poet crowd in San Francisco’s North Beach area, and he met a man that he would stay involved with for decades, Peter Orlovsky. All the hopes and visions that had formed years before in New York were starting to come to fruition for some of the old crowd—especially for Kerouac, who had finished two novels, and for Ginsberg, who was ready for something to break loose in his poetry. One afternoon in August 1955, Ginsberg sat down at a typewriter in his tiny apartment and attempted to write a poem for his own ear, but also a poem that would catch the free-flowing style that he had seen Kerouac hit upon in his own recent writing. Ginsberg wrote the whole day, thinking about many things: his lost loves, his found loves, the discarded people of America, the discarded promises of America, the fear that was just behind him, the fear that lay ahead for all.
Two months later, in October, Ginsberg—with help from Kenneth Rexroth—organized a poetry reading, to be given at a cooperative art gallery, the Six Gallery, to showcase a handful of the scene’s poets. Six poets read that evening—including Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia—to a crowd of maybe fifty to one hundred people, with Kerouac sitting on the gallery’s floor, drinking and tapping out rhythms on a wine jug, urging “Go! Go!” to the cadences of the poets’ words. Ginsberg was the last to read, and as he began “Howl”—the poem he had written in one sitting two months earlier—the crowd was transfixed from the first lines:
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 the night.
Ginsberg went on to describe the fearsome evil that he saw America becoming—”Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!”—and when he finished, the crowd exploded in applause. “All of a sudden,” Rexroth later said, “Ginsberg read this thing that he had been keeping to himself all this while, and it just blew things up completely. Things would never be quite the same again.”
“Howl” was one of the most incandescent events in post-World War II literary history or popular culture, and its arrival later ensured the Beats their place on the map of modern time. Also, because “Howl” was a poem that had such force when read aloud by Ginsberg, it marked a return of poetry to the art of vocalization. But most important, “Howl” was the first major American work of the era that spoke for the outcasts, for the mad and the lost, and about what would soon happen in the nation’s soul. In the context of those times, in the midst of a frightened new patriotism that was being defined by fears of socialism and communism and a desperate need to believe in the assurance of the family structure and traditional mores, “Howl” battered at the heart of the American ideal of civilization. It was a heroic work, on many levels. America was hardly prepared to admit that homosexuality might be anything other than a form of madness; for a poet—for anybody—to declare pride or pleasure to be queer was to run a monumental risk. To talk about—to cherish those who “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy”—was no small matter. In effect, it meant aligning oneself with madness, with inexpressible values. To find grace and worthy companionship and celebration in the company of junkies, prostitutes, and black jazz revolutionaries only pushed the ante more. Something opened up in America’s culture and in its future the day that Ginsberg gave utterance to these thoughts with “Howl.” The following year, working from quite different quarters, Elvis Presley in his own way helped push the gates open as well. “We liked Elvis,” poet Gregory Corso later said of the night he and Kerouac watched Presley on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” We identified with the sexual wiggling of his body.”
“Howl” and Presley. Nothing would ever be the same after that. America’s libido, America’s likelihood, had been ripped wide open.
THIS ISN’T TO SAY that “Howl” was immediately or widely read or praised. Quite the contrary: The reaction of some people was that “Howl” should never be widely read. In 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who published the first editions of “Howl”) and a City Lights Bookstore employee were arrested for knowingly selling obscenity and put on trial. The prosecutor was a Bay Area district attorney, Ralph McIntosh, bent on closing down porn shops and prohibiting the sale of magazines with nudity. The ACLU, Grove Press, Evergreen Review, and poet Kenneth Patchen, among others, offered their support to Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and “Howl.” Among those testifying on behalf of the poem’s serious merits were Rexroth and author Walter Van Tilburg Clark. In his final argument, McIntosh asked Judge Clayton W. Horn: “Your Honor, how far are we going to license the use of filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language? How far can we go?”
Horn ruled that “Howl” was not lacking in social relevance and therefore could not be ruled obscene. In delivering his decision, Horn also offered what may be the single best succinct review that “Howl” received: “The first part of “Howl’ presents a picture of a nightmare world, the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of what the author conceives as a general condition. . . . ’Footnote to “Howl” ’ seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including parts of the body by name. It ends in a plea for holy living.”
Though Ginsberg was vindicated and suddenly famous, he was determined not to arrive as the Beats’ sole writer-hero. Over the years, he helped Jack Kerouac in his long quest to publish On the Road—a book about Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady (who was called Dean Moriarty in the published text)—which had been turned down by numerous major publishers since 1951. The book was finally published by Viking, in 1957, as a result of Ginsberg’s efforts, and went on to both good commercial and critical reception, and is now recognized as a milestone novel in modern literature. Ginsberg also championed the cause of William S. Burroughs—a much tougher sell, because Burroughs was a drug user who wrote radical prose (such as Junky), and because he had killed his wife in a shooting accident in Mexico in 1951. Ginsberg understood that his old friend felt a tremendous guilt and Ginsberg also believed Burroughs might never redeem himself un
less he could concentrate his soul and mind on his writing. Ginsberg later helped Burroughs assemble the final draft of Naked Lunch and worked tirelessly until the book was published in the United States. (Which resulted in Naked Lunch’s own obscenity trial and another ruling that the book could not be held to be called obscene.)
The Beats were—at least for a brief time—a force in American arts and letters, but there remained many who were incensed by their words and beliefs. In 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stood before the Republican Convention and declared that “Beatniks” were among America’s major menaces. In addition, Norman Podhoretz—an old classmate of Ginsberg’s at Columbia and by 1958 the editor of Commentary magazine—asserted that the Beats were an affront to the nation’s central ideals. By the end of the decade, the Beats had been sidelined, declared a silly aberration by moralist critics on both the right and left. But despite all the resistance and disdain, Ginsberg continued to grow and thrive as a poet—and to remain undaunted. At the conclusion of one of his most defiant works, “America,” he wrote: “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
Then, in 1959, after a night of taking Benzedrine, listening to the rhythm & blues of Ray Charles, and walking New York’s streets, Ginsberg sat down to write “Kaddish.” It was his tribute to his mother, Naomi, whose mental pain had grown so horrifying that, in the late 1950s, Ginsberg signed papers allowing doctors to perform a lobotomy on her. Ginsberg never truly got over the guilt of that decision, and he would never enjoy the union and relationship with his mother that he’d longed for his entire life. In 1956, Allen sent Naomi a published copy of “Howl.” Naomi died shortly thereafter. A few days after learning of her death, he received her last letter: “I received your poetry,” she wrote. “I’d like to send it to Louis for criticism. . . . As for myself, I still have the wire on my head. The doctors know about it. They are cutting the flesh and bone. . . . I do wish you were back east so I could see you. . . . I wish I were out of here and home at the same time you were young; then I would be young.”
In “Kaddish,” Ginsberg remembered everything about his mother—tender things, scary things, the amazing perceptions that sometimes blazed through her madness—and with enormous love and compassion, he finally found her place in his heart (and recognized his in hers) and let her go to her death. It was most likely Ginsberg’s finest moment as a poet, and it is impossible to hear any of his readings of that work and not be moved by how profoundly “Kaddish” measures just how much that people, families, and nations can lose as their hopes and fates unwind.
FOR THE NEXT three decades, Allen Ginsberg would remain an important artist and active force. Indeed, more than any other figure from the Beat era, he made the transition from the styles and concerns of the 1950s to those of the decades that followed. Jack Kerouac died in 1968, after living an embittered and alcoholic final few years at his mother’s home in New Jersey (his mother hated Ginsberg and came between the two men’s friendship whenever possible). Neal Cassady went on to become a popular figure in San Francisco’s mid- and late-1960s Haight-Ashbury scene; he became the driver for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ legendary cross-country bus trek, and he also became a driver and companion to the Grateful Dead. But perhaps Cassady pushed his spirited self a bit hard. One day in 1968, after leaving a wedding in a small Mexican town, Cassady collapsed while walking alongside some railroad tracks. He died the next day, just short of his forty-second birthday.
Ginsberg not only survived, but kept pace with the spirit and needs of the times, with the permutations of youth culture; also, he kept faith with the humane and impassioned ideals that had made “Howl” so powerful in the first place. In 1964, he became friendly with the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Ginsberg’s and the Beats’ work already had meaning and effect for these artists. Dylan recalled that after reading Kerouac and Ginsberg, he realized that there were people like himself somewhere in the land—and indeed, when the singer made his startling transition to the electric, free-association style of music found in Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (and again later with Blood on the Tracks), Dylan was taking the language, cadences, and imagery of the Beats and applying it to a new form. The impact of this melding on 1960s music—like the effect of Ginsberg’s “Howl” on the 1950s—was colossal. (In fact, one of the early proposed cover photos for Blonde on Blonde showed Dylan standing with Ginsberg and poet-playwright Michael McClure.) In addition, John Lennon had read the Beats in his years as an art student in Liverpool and changed his spelling of the group’s name, Beetles, to Beatles, in part as tribute to the spirit of that inspired artistry. Dylan and the Beatles changed not just a specific art form—that is, rock & roll—but also transformed the perceptions and aspirations of youth and popular culture at large. But without the earlier work of Ginsberg and Kerouac, it is possible that these 1960s artists might not have hit upon quite the same path of creativity—or at least might not have been able to work in the same atmosphere of permission and invention.
Ginsberg also became increasingly involved and influential in the political concerns of the 1960s and thereafter—though he did so in a way that made plain his own conviction in a politics of nonviolence and joy, rather than of destruction and hatred. In some ways, in fact, the 1960s culture of the hippies and radicals amounted to the realization of what the Beats began to envision and prophesy in the late 1940s (interestingly, “hippie” was a term first coined by the Beats, meaning “half-hip,” and the phrase “flower power” was first verbalized by Allen Ginsberg). In the summer of 1968, Ginsberg helped organize Chicago’s Festival of Life (along with the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and members of the Black Panthers), in protest to the Democratic Party’s promotion of the Vietnam War and as a rebuke to Hubert Humphrey’s capitulation to the party’s hawkish elements. But when the events of those few days turned suddenly brutal and bloody—with policemen clubbing young people, old people, anything in their path, and demonstrators tossing bricks at, and taunting, the already enraged cops—Ginsberg turned sickened and horrified. On one occasion, as police raged through a crowd bashing protesters, a policeman came upon Ginsberg, seated in the lotus position, softly chanting. The policeman raised his club to crash it down on Ginsberg’s head. The poet looked up at the officer, smiled, and said: “Go in peace, brother.” The cop lowered his club. “Fucking hippie,” he declared, then moved on. In 1970, when several of the key Chicago activists—known as the Chicago Seven, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale—were brought up on federal charges of conspiring to riot, defense attorney William Kunstler called Ginsberg to the witness stand. At Kunstler’s request, Ginsberg recited parts of “Howl.” When he reached the poem’s climax—”Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!”—he turned in his chair and pointed at the judge who had been so hostile to the defendants, Julius Hoffman (ironically, the same judge who years earlier declared Naked Lunch not obscene).
In addition, Ginsberg became a key player in the 1960s argument over psychedelic drugs, such as LSD. He had, of course, taken several drugs in his days with the Beats, and already had some psychedelic experience. But in the early 1960s, Ginsberg heard about a Harvard professor, Dr. Timothy Leary, who was conducting authorized research at the university, and was sharing the drug psilocybin with his project’s volunteers. Ginsberg contacted Leary and arranged for a visit to experiment with the drug. Leary and Ginsberg struck up an immediate friendship and had considerable influence on each other’s thinking. Ginsberg believed strongly (in contrast to most of Leary’s cohorts) that it was a good idea to move psychedelics from the domain of a small elitist group and share them with artists, writers, poets, and musicians—and as a result, hallucinogenic drugs and their visions made inroads into the arts, and later helped transmute the aesthetics and ideals of late twentieth century music, literature, painting, film and video. Ginsberg also convinced Leary that psychedelics could be a way of enabling people to examine and tra
nsform their own minds, and that it would be the young who would prove most receptive to such possibilities.
Ginsberg later forswore psychedelics, but his friendship with Leary continued off and on for more than thirty-five years. During the last few weeks of Leary’s life, in the spring of 1996, the two men spoke often. Leary knew that Ginsberg had planned a trip to Los Angeles, in July, to attend an art show featuring Burroughs’ work. Though Leary’s health was daily diminishing as his body succumbed to prostate cancer, he hoped to live until Ginsberg’s visit and made the date the last mark on his calendar. Leary would die without seeing his friend one last time. But in the hours preceding his death, Ginsberg’s Buddhist teacher, Gelek Rinpoche, managed to reach Leary, uttering a final prayer for his passage into death.
GINSBERG STAYED active in politics, arts, and popular and renegade culture for the remainder of his life. In the mid-1970s, he toured with Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue, singing and reading poetry. A few years later, he released his own sets of songs and collaborations with such artists as Dylan and the Clash—and it proved as exhilarating as his best poetry had a generation earlier. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Ginsberg befriended and encouraged many other poets, punk, and rap artists.
Of course, as time went along, the role of the renegade has grown more acceptable, more assimilated to some degree in mainstream culture. What was shocking in the 1950s was less shocking in the 1970s; what was disruptive in the 1970s was commonplace and profitable by the 1990s. Ginsberg understood this inevitable progression of how radical works and impulses are first resisted, then gradually diffused, and in his own way he had fun with that fact and mocked it a bit. He took to wearing suits and ties as he grew older—in part, it gave his pronouncements more authority, more respectability for some critics, but the other thing was: Ginsberg looked great in suits and ties. But for all his venerability and respectability, there was a part of Ginsberg that would never be domesticated much less silenced. In 1979, the National Arts Club awarded him a gold medal for literary merit. At the awards dinner, according to Burroughs’ biographer Ted Morgan, Ginsberg bemusedly read a poem called “Cocksucker Blues,” to the genuine consternation of his audience. He also remained a relentless supporter of author Burroughs. In the late 1970s, after his own 1973 induction into the rarefied ranks of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Ginsberg began a campaign to have Burroughs inducted as well. Ginsberg met with a great deal of refusal—Burroughs was not a writer that several of the other fine authors wanted in their company—but the poet persisted. It took six years, but Ginsberg won Burroughs’ entry into the institute, in 1983. Also, Ginsberg remained a fierce advocate of free speech. In recent years, he even took up a defense of NAMBLA—an organization dedicated to lowering the age of consensual sex between men and boys. Ginsberg’s involvement with the outfit outraged many of his long-standing admirers, but Ginsberg would not be cowed. “It’s a free speech issue,” he said repeatedly, pointing out that to stifle the ability to discuss such a matter in a free society was perhaps its own kind of outrage. Also, apparently, he stayed as sexually active as he could. In “Death & Fame” in The New Yorker, Ginsberg boasted about the many men he had seduced throughout his lifetime, and he detailed what it was he liked about his sexual intimacy with these partners. But for all that Ginsberg did or attempted to do, to this day “Howl” still cannot be played over America’s airwaves during the day, due to the efforts of Jesse Helms and the Federal Communications Commission.
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