m.guardian.co.uk
Allen Ginsberg, who set out to change the world so that he could fit
into it, was admitted to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, in upper
Manhattan, in 1949. He was 23. On his first day there, he met Carl
Solomon, two years younger but already bearing a history of mental
imbalance. Solomon was well-read, with a special interest in the French
symbolist writer Antonin Artaud, who had died in a lunatic asylum the
previous year, and who Solomon believed had appointed him his
representative in America.
The two psychiatric cases sized each other up. "I'm Prince Myshkin",
Ginsberg said, alluding to the gentle anti-hero of Dostoevsky's novel
The Idiot. The reference would have escaped most inmates, but Solomon
got it. "And I'm Kirilov", he replied (from The Possessed). A friendship
had begun, which would be immortalised in a declamatory, verbose,
obscene, occasionally impenetrable, half-surreal but above all
unprecedented poem – probably the most famous long poem in English since
The Waste Land. Its full title is often given as "Howl for Carl
Solomon".
Ginsberg was already acquainted with Jack Kerouac, who had been
discharged from the Merchant Marine (On the Road could easily have been
Life on the Ocean Wave) with a diagnosis of "dementia praecox", now
commonly called schizophrenia. In addition to other acts of
insubordination, Kerouac had replied, when asked for his name and rank,
"I'm only old Samuel Johnson." After a spell in the asylum, he was out –
as he had planned.
Both men were close to William Burroughs, a drug addict with an
old-fashioned American passion for guns and the citizen's right to use
them. Like his two younger friends, Burroughs had been in a mental
institution, in his case for the Van Gogh-like gesture of cutting off
the little finger of his left hand with the intention of sending it to a
neglectful lover. Instead, he presented it to his analyst, who
recommended a month in the "psychopathic" ward of New York's Bellevue
hospital. The magnetic centre of the clique was Neal Cassady, a
sociopathic car thief (500 was the estimate) who married his first wife
when she was underage, and tied the knot with a third while still
legally bound to the second. Those were the founder members, and the
formative experiences, of what later became known as the Beat
Generation.
Ginsberg's poetry evolved through many phases of development before he
was capable of writing Howl. At the end of the 1940s, when he submitted
to what the poem calls "hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy
pingpong & amnesia", he was still attempting formal verse. In a blind
test, few readers would identify Ginsberg as the author of lines such
as:
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
The clue is in the final line. A wild world was the only kind in which
Ginsberg saw any hope of a wakeful life for himself. Many of his early
poems are shrouded in desolation and fear: "The air is dark, the night
is sad, / I live sleepless and I groan. / Nobody cares when a man goes
mad." In the wild, on the other hand, where the laws of nature prevail,
a man could be free of society's restraining morals. There is no
"madness" among beasts. They simply . . . howl.
The new biopic, Howl, which focuses on the author, the first public
reading of the poem in San Francisco and the subsequent trial of the
publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti on a charge of obscenity, is tame about
its uncontrollable subject. James Franco delivers a decent performance
as Ginsberg, but in the fictionalised interview which frames the film,
dated 1957, he can't help being a cool New York dude of a modern
vintage. Ginsberg was slightly goofy. The film states early on that he
was "unpublished" at the time of the poem's first public performance,
which is not true, though he was unknown outside the literary circles of
San Francisco. Even there, in the salons of Kenneth Rexroth and Robert
Duncan, Ginsberg was seen less as a poet than a "character", one who
could "talk continuously seventy hours from park to pad, bar to
Bellevue" (again from Howl). Such people are not always welcome, but
then the older generation – even a generation as avant-garde as that
which Rexroth and Duncan headed – seldom cheers the next, inevitably
more wild one.
Mental hospitals were not the only places of confinement known to the
Beats – or "the libertine circle", as Ginsberg called their group.
Lucien Carr, a fellow student of Ginsberg and Kerouac at Columbia
College, was sent to prison for three years in the late 40s for killing
an older man who made sexual advances towards him. The sentence would
undoubtedly have been heavier if Carr's defence had not emphasised the
homosexual harassment. Kerouac was detained as a material witness.
Burroughs could have landed a much longer stretch for accidentally
shooting his wife in the head in Mexico in 1951, but was freed after two
weeks with the help of lawyers paid for by his father. (The death of
Joan Burroughs, in a game of "William Tell", haunted his conscience for
the rest of his life.)
There is just as much death as madness in the history of the Beat
Generation. The woman seen necking with Cassady in the film is unnamed,
but is based on Natalie Jackson who killed herself by jumping off a roof
in Franklin Street, San Francisco. She had forged Carolyn Cassady's
signature on some papers, to help Neal gain access to the family
savings, all of which he lost at the racetrack. Cassady was familiar
with many prisons, including San Quentin.
The most burdensome guilt for Ginsberg derived from his homosexuality.
As well as making him vulnerable to the law, his irrepressible dreams of
"one I loved / . . . sperm / saliva all one" forced a weighty taboo on
to his soul. Through the 50s and beyond, Ginsberg had female lovers, and
women continued to be attracted to him all his life. But his principal
desire was for another man – usually a man whose principal desire was
for a woman. Eventually, he found a kind of fulfilment with Peter
Orlovsky, but Orlovsky, who died in 2010, continued to have heterosexual
partnerships. Ginsberg was also intermittently stark, raving mad.
The compound heaviness of all this – insanity, death, crime,
self-loathing, literary failure – lifted one day in August 1955, when
Ginsberg sat at his desk in Montgomery Street, in the North Beach area
of San Francisco, a stone's throw from City Lights bookstore, and typed
this line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving, mystical, naked . . ."
Later, he would change "mystical" to "hysterical", but the first line of
Howl remains much as it was written. In what follows, the reader gains
glimpses of the Ginsberg circle ("the best minds") on the east and west
coasts: Herbert Huncke – "dragging themselves through the negro streets
at dawn, looking for an angry fix"; Philip Lamantia – "who bared their
brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenement roofs"; Cassady – "who sweetened the snatches of a million
girls"; Tuli Kupferberg, later of the rock group The Fugs – "who jumped
off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked unknown and
forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown". William Cannastra, lover
of the woman who became the first Mrs Kerouac, "fell out of the subway
window" – in other words was decapitated while leaning from a moving
train.
Just when you think you know how to tackle this awe-inspiring monster,
it comes at you with one of those wallops that readers would come to
associate with Ginsberg's style over the 40 years of his career:
"angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night".
As the philistine prosecutor says to the literary critic in the trial
scene of the film: "Could you paraphrase that, please?" Reading Howl in
1955 must have been like looking at Georges Braque's cubist tableaux 40
years earlier. The pictures subsequently taught us how to look at them,
just as Howl, a different kind of poem from any that had gone before,
has demanded we learn to read it. It would be silly to insist that every
line of Howl should submit itself to common-sense scrutiny (Ginsberg
himself admitted to being baffled by certain of his lines). Rather, it
is a great big shocking event of a poem. And it was as an event, not as
a printed object, that it was first introduced to the world. The reading
took place in October 1955 at the Six Gallery, Fillmore Street, San
Francisco, now an antique shop, specialising in carpets and Indian
temple artifacts. Ginsberg typed out the invitations, which were posted
up in North Beach bars:
6 Poets at 6 Gallery
Philip Lamantia reading mss of late John Hoffman, Mike McClure, Allen
Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Philip Whalen – all sharp new straightforward
writing. No charge. Charming event.
That "charming event" is characteristic Ginsberg. Not transforming or
revolutionary, purgative or "libertine" – just charming. Of the
participants, McClure and Snyder are still alive, but neither is
mentioned in a consultative capacity in the credits for the film Howl,
which is a pity. Attempts have been made to recreate the atmosphere of
the evening, at which Kerouac and Cassady were also present, by
wreathing smoke in the air and giving the lens a sepia tint, but the
faces are implausibly scrubbed, the expressions reverent and
well-behaved. Witness accounts tell us that a constant hubbub rose from
the audience, and that Kerouac's contribution was to drink from a flagon
of burgundy, "repeating lines and singing snatches of scat in between
the lines". Later, he insulted Rexroth, who has claims to being the
"father of the Beat Generation", and who had acted as MC for the
evening.
The film's treatment of the relationship between Ginsberg and Solomon is
rhapsodic – "Ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe" – whereas
in reality Solomon disliked the poem, and drew back from his status as a
patron saint of the Beat Generation. He called the poem which has
immortalised his name "for the most [part] raving self-justification,
crypto-bohemian boasting à la Rimbaud, effeminite prancing and esoteric
aphorisms plagiarised from Kierkegaard and others".
The trial scene in the film shows repressed prosecution witnesses being
outflanked and humiliated by Ferlinghetti's counsel, Jack Erlich.
Breasts heave with American pride in the poet's freedom to write lines
such as "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy". Eyes close in relief as Judge
Clayton Horn, a Sunday-school teacher, delivers the verdict in favour of
the publisher and the poem. If it all seems like an episode of Perry
Mason, it may be because Erlich is said to have been the model for the
fictional lawyer. Cut to Ginsberg, nervously pacing his New York
apartment, awaiting news. In reality, he was in Paris, soon to be
helping Burroughs sort through the mass of notes that would go to make
Naked Lunch, mentioned in the dedication to Howl as "an endless novel
which will drive everybody mad". As for Howl the movie, although it will
be enjoyed by many people previously unexposed to the idiotic genius of
Ginsberg – "I'm Prince Myshkin" – it is in the end far too sane.
Howl is in cinemas from February 25.
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http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/12/howl-trial-allen-ginsberg-film?cat=books&type=article
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