New York in the '50s (29 page)

My own antipathy to the poem, when I read it in December 1957 (after hearing Jack Kerouac declaim Ginsberg's work as well as his own at the Village Vanguard), began with the very first line, where the poet states he has seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Another blow to our much-maligned generation! First we were “silent,” and now we were not only “beat” but crazy!

My friend George P. Elliot, whose novel
Parktilden Village
skewered the middle-class mores of the time with the irony I admired, wrote an article in
The Nation
called “Who Is We?” complaining of Ginsberg's famous generalization in “Howl.” Elliot noted with tongue in cheek that one of the best minds of
his
generation (the
same as Ginsberg's) was a scientist friend who had not gone mad at all but was working in Toledo, Ohio.

But it was more than the matter of our generation's image that troubled my Village friends and me about “Howl” when it first came out. We shared an outlook I can best explain by conjuring up a particular evening in the spring of 1958, a year after I first read the poem. It was May 21, my birthday. The next day was the birthday of my fabulous new girlfriend Sharon, a sparkling, dark-eyed exile from Kansas City by way of Vassar. In the pale yellow light of a booth at the Cedar Tavern we exchanged presents.

I hardly ever went to the Cedar because it was a hangout for painters, not writers, but Sharon was a painter and she gravitated there in the way I was drawn to the White Horse. Being fellow refugees from the Midwest, liberated by eastern colleges, gave us a common bond, and sometimes it seemed we were male-female manifestations of the same spirit of rebellion and searching. When each of us drew from our laps the gifts we passed across the table at the same time, we started to laugh because both packages were the same shape and size. We tore open the separate wrappings to find inside each one the same slim volume with a gold jacket that said in plain black letters:
CEREMONY. A BOOK OF POEMS BY RICHARD WILBUR
.

The title poem of Wilbur's collection told us that when things looked orderly on the surface, “I think there are most tigers in the wood.” Didn't we know this from our own experience? Isn't this what we had learned growing up in those orderly houses behind the deceptively neat white picket fences where our own families wept secret tears and tried to hide their pain? Wasn't the deepest anguish, the hardest truth, portrayed most convincingly in poems with form, like those of Yeats and Wilbur, and in traditional novels that provided a shape to hold our experience and understanding of coming of age, books like Styron's
Lie Down in Darkness
, Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye
, and Baldwin's
Go Tell It on the Mountain?

What I couldn't see back in the fifties but now seems clear is that a major shift had taken place in the order of the world since World War II, and that out of it a new kind of shattered experience had been born—a rootless, drug-stoked, existential, kaleidoscopic assault on the soul by modern technology and its weapons. From it arose that rough beast of Yeats's poem “The Second Coming,”
which my friends and I quoted as a kind of testament—the rough beast was rising out of the desert of the pyramids and the Sphinx to be born in “The Second Coming” (no accident that Joan Didion used a line from that poem in the title of her first book of essays,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
.)

Though the writers I admired were able to portray that “beast” within the boundaries of the literary forms that were handed down to us, it was also inevitable that writers would come along who found they needed to break the old forms to express themselves. I can see now that Kerouac's
On the Road
served as such a landmark, though I still don't get its artistic merits. It's easier for me to appreciate the rhythm and anger and pain poured out in Ginsberg's authentic “Howl”—and see, with the wisdom of hindsight, that nothing less than a howl would have done.

The defensive reactions of our fifties generation did not, of course, trouble the seething, rebellious hippies of the sixties, the flower children who rightly saw in Ginsberg a natural ally. He became their guru, and was so familiar a part of our cultural scene (posters of Ginsberg, with his black beard and glasses, decorated the walls of college dorms and coffeehouses across America) that by 1969 he was grudgingly acknowledged by his old adversary
Time
magazine as “a peculiar national treasure of sorts.”

The literary establishment that once scorned Ginsberg's work enshrined him in the eighties as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and he has won the National Book Award and the National Arts Club gold medal. According to a solid 1989 biography by Barry Miles, he is “the most famous living poet on earth.” (At first the claim seems extravagant, but I wonder who else can rival it, except perhaps Russia's Yevtushenko, a rebel of his own society's status quo and an innovator of its language.)

“The most famous living poet” is as unassuming and hospitable when he shows me in to his apartment in 1991 as he had been during his days as a beat rebel. The bushy black beard of the sixties posters is neatly trimmed now and mostly turned to gray, the black-rimmed glasses replaced with a pair of bifocals whose plastic frames are gray too. He wears a blue button-down shirt open at the neck, with a pair of khaki pants. He seems trim and as brisk in his movements as he had been thirty years before.

Ginsberg puts on a pot of water for tea. He points out, above the
stove, a photograph of his poetic patron saint, Walt Whitman (“I Love Old Whitman So” he called an affectionate poem he wrote in 1984), and takes me on a quick tour of his apartment. He moved here in 1975 and gradually made it more of a permanent base than the places he had occupied on East 2nd Street, East 5th Street (where the water and heat were shut off and each tenant was given $100 to relocate), and East 10th Street (where junkies broke in and stole his typewriter). There are six small, neat rooms with white walls. Ginsberg stops to point out a reproduction of his favorite painting, Bellini's
Saint Francis in Ecstasy
.

“I love it because not only Saint Francis but also the animals and even the
trees
seem to be in this moment of ecstasy,” Allen says. “But the ecstasy isn't some otherworldly experience, it's more like being awake, like the condition Zen calls ‘ordinary mind.'”

We move on to his study, a room with bookshelves running from floor to ceiling along two walls. Several shelves are filled with his own books, including the many foreign editions “from Czech to Yugoslavian” (his poems have been translated into most languages, including Chinese and Serbo-Croatian). One section contains contemporary poetry, “from Auden to Zukovsky,” and another section is all books of or about William Blake: “I decided to buy anything of Blake that became available that was under $100.” (Allen's first vision, or “awakening,” occurred when he was a student at Columbia, reading Blake's poem “Ah! Sun-Flower!”)

There's a photograph in his study of the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, his Tibetan meditation teacher, which reminds Allen he's going next weekend to give a benefit reading in Ann Arbor to help raise money for a new Buddhist center there, which some friends of his are starting. On the door of the study is a leaflet that says “Stop the War,” which at first I think is a souvenir from the Vietnam era but turns out to be a reference to the Persian Gulf War that ended only the previous month. Decades seem to mix and meld this morning in Ginsberg's apartment.

Against a wall in the study, the big file cabinet, from which he had drawn the documents about marijuana when I interviewed him thirty years ago, is the only piece of furniture I remember from the past.

In his bedroom there's a real bed instead of the mattresses strewn
about the floor in his place I first visited on East 2nd Street. There had been a starkness to that flat, with peeling paint the only wall decoration, as opposed to the prints and photographs that give his current apartment a homey feeling, though hardly an air of luxury. The modesty of Ginsberg's lifestyle can be measured by the teasing of a friend who accused him of becoming a yuppie when, in the mid-1980s, he got a dish rack and an electric clock for the kitchen.

When we finish the apartment tour and sit at the kitchen table with tea and instant decaf coffee, Allen says he'd been going over some of his journals from the fifties, and I ask what he thinks the significance of that era is now.

“In the fifties, Kerouac and Burroughs and I saw that society had to change,” he says. “There had to be a new vision, as in Yeats's ‘A Vision,' in which there's a cyclical integration of history, what Yeats called an ‘interchange of tinctures,' and the objective becomes subjective. It's like in Einstein's work, where the appearance of the universe depends on the observer, or when Blake says, ‘The eye altering alters all.' We were on to that back then. None of us were Marxists—we'd already smoked a little tea, and in '51 we took some peyote. I'd had a visionary experience in '47, but it had nothing to do with drugs. It was a small
satori
, an experience of what Zen calls ‘ordinary mind.' In the Zen Buddhist view there is a nontheistic awareness of that kind that in those days was excluded from conversation.

“Back in the forties that kind of spiritual liberation began, then in the fifties there was the ‘liberation of the word' against censorship, ending with Henry Miller's books and Burroughs's
Naked Lunch
winning obscenity trials and not being banned anymore. Then in the sixties all this we had fought for became all-American and was influencing new generations.”

When Ginsberg speaks of the fifties, during which he played such a major role, he speaks not of his own exploits or accomplishments but those of his friends, whom he sees as his mentors. “I'm basically a student of Kerouac. He and Burroughs were my teachers. I felt dumb compared to them. I was always a good student—I check out the wisdom of my elders.”

Kerouac was only four years older than Ginsberg, but Allen regarded him as a literary and philosophical guide, and still defends
him at every opportunity. He says when
On the Road
was published and its author branded a “know-nothing” by Norman Podhoretz, “Jack was seventeen years into Buddhist literature by then. He knew the Diamond Sutra, understood a great deal, and had written a six-hundred-page manuscript that still has never been published of his notes on reading the sutras. According to Gary Snyder [poet and student of Zen], who locked eyebrows with him on the subject in the fifties, Jack was sharp and spiritually well developed. He was no barbarian.”

To try to persuade Podhoretz that he was wrong in his harsh and angry assessment of their work, Jack and Allen invited him to the Village after his article “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” appeared in
Partisan Review
.

As Norman Podhoretz remembers the event, it was Kerouac's girlfriend at the time, Joyce Glassman, who actually invited him to come to her place and have a drink with Jack and Allen. Podhoretz talked to me recently about the events of that evening. “When I got a call from Joyce Glassman, I thought it was a put-on. Then Allen got on the phone and said, ‘Jack and I are just sitting around here. Why don't you come and see us?' It was on a Saturday night, and I was recently married and had two stepchildren, and lived on the Upper West Side. I decided, with misgivings, to go down to the Village and see them. I shaved and put on a jacket and tie. I got there around eight or nine o'clock. They were sitting around in this rather bleak apartment of Joyce's—Allen, Peter Orlovsky [Ginsberg's special friend in that era], and Kerouac. I'd hardly known Jack at Columbia. I'm not sure I even met him then.

“I felt that the whole point of the evening was to argue with me—they acted like writers who were hurt by a critic who'd been unfair. They made the point later, which Herb Gold also made to me, that the literary critics of the twenties
liked
writers, that those critics explained and defended the writers of their day, and now critics like me were attacking them. The other side of all this was they were trying to put me down—it felt like spiritual bullying. They talked about all kinds of glorious adventures I was deprived of, from sexual to chemical, by not seeing things their way.”

Allen remembers it differently: “We were just trying to find out what was going on with him. We were trying to make friends. Podhoretz
had never met Jack, and didn't know what a gentle manner he had.”

That evening Podhoretz did, in fact, alter his view of Kerouac the man, if not the writer: “I finally said I had to split, and Jack walked with me to the subway. He was very cheery, very handsome in those days. To my surprise, I liked him.”

There were, however, no further get-togethers between the beat writers and their most persistent and harshest critic, despite some later efforts by Ginsberg. “I write to Podhoretz every once in a while,” Allen said. “In '82 I invited him to the Nairopa Institute in Denver. I thought he'd feel safe there. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of
On the Road
, and we were going to have a symposium on the book and its impact. I thought, Why not invite Norman? Why not cover the spectrum of opinion? He didn't come, though. He was afraid of being attacked. I told him, ‘No, it's a Buddhist scene,' but he wasn't persuaded.”

The conflict between the two old Columbia literary men that began in the fifties continues through the years, a kind of literary-political version of the Muhammad Ali—Joe Frazier rivalry. I happen to like them both, perhaps because if they represent opposite ends of a spectrum, I find myself in the middle of it, with elements of each (and like each, a Columbia alum!).

I don't share the neo-conservative political views Norman has come to espouse in the past few decades, but part of me is at home in the suit and tie of tradition he wears, and respects his no-nonsense honesty in intellectual and personal matters. (When I saw him for the first time in twenty-five years, he seemed only slightly stockier and balder than he had been before, so I diplomatically said, “You look just the same.” Without missing a beat, Norman said, “You look older.”) I don't share Allen's appreciation of hallucinatory and other recreational drugs, yet I've given up the booze I once believed was part of my literary and personal identity and taken up meditational prayer and yoga, which I once dismissed as the kooky stuff that only beats and hippies—people like Allen Ginsberg—would indulge in.