Allen Ginsberg’s 'Howl’ from my real mind’ Howl, the film, brilliantly brings alive the story of the poem, mixing a dramatisation of the trial with reflections from Ginsberg (superbly played by Franco) and hallucinatory animations by the graphic-artist Eric Drooker, who collaborated with Ginsberg on a collection of illustrated poems in 1995.
The theme of “Howl” is the struggle of the individual in the face of the crushing conformity of Eisenhower’s United States. But its references are very personal – incidents drawn from Ginsberg’s life as a student and penurious poet, and the lives of his friends and acquaintances, the “angel-headed hipsters” of the poem. These included Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Herbert Huncke – all of whom would assume a kind of mythical status in Beat history. But the poem’s central characters were less well-known. There was Bill Cannastra, a member of the early Beat scene in New York, who “…finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet”, and who later “fell out of the subway window” – a reference to the fatal accident where Cannastra playfully made as if to throw himself from the window of a moving subway train, and was unable to clamber back in. There was Ruth Goldenberg, “who talked continuously 70 hours from park to pad to bar” and who ended up incarcerated in Manhattan’s Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital. Louis Simpson, a classmate of Ginsberg at Columbia University, is identified in “Howl” as one of those “who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot with eternity outside of time …” – and ended up in a mental hospital. You will notice the pattern here… Madness was close to Ginsberg’s heart – or should that be head? His mother, Naomi, was institutionalised (in the notorious Rockland State Hospital, among other places) for schizophrenia; and in 1949, at the age of 23, Ginsberg would spend eight months in the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. It was there that he met Carl Solomon – the inspiration and abiding spirit of “Howl”. “Who are you?” Solomon asked at their first meeting. Ginsberg replied “I’m Prince Myshkin” – the holy fool of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. “Who are you?”. “I’m Kirillov,” said Solomon, invoking the nihilistic character in The Idiot who declares “I will assert my will” – and then kills himself. Solomon was a disciple of the French dramatist Antonin Artaud, who himself spent many years in psychiatric institutions, and who argued that madness was the honourable choice in a society devoid of principle, and psychiatry the invention of a sick society “to defend itself against the investigations of certain visionaries whose faculties of divination disturbed it”. After encountering Artaud in France, Solomon decided that he too should “give up the flesh” and follow the path of the “professional-lunatic saint”. It was a vocation that would eventually lead, as Ginsberg recounted in “Howl”, to Solomon presenting himself “on the granite steps of the madhouse with the […] harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy”. For Ginsberg, Solomon’s journey through madness was a matter of both personal identification and a metaphor for a generation of free spirits crushed by the forces of Moloch, the sun god of the Canaanites to whom firstborn children were sacrificed, “the heavy judger of men”, as “Howl” has it. “Carl Solomon!” Ginsberg lamented. “I’m with you in Rockland, where you’re madder than I am … where 50 more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void.” The first public performance of “Howl” was on October 13 1955, at a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco featuring a cast of West Coast poets (and seminal Beat figures) including Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. (“Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot”, as the flyers that Ginsberg prepared for the event put it.) Kerouac, who had also been invited to read but demurred on the grounds of being “bashful”, roused the audience by passing around jugs of California burgundy while shouting “Go, go, go!”. The next day, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and owner of City Lights, sent Ginsberg a telegram echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s salutation to Walt Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” – adding, “When do I get the manuscript?” Howl and Other Poems was published by City Lights Books the following year. Ginsberg immediately sent copies to T S Eliot and Ezra Pound. Eliot didn’t reply. Pound, himself incarcerated in a mental hospital, forwarded his copy to the poet William Carlos Williams with the message “You got more room in yr/house than I hv/in my cubicle.” Solomon’s response was more positive. “An excellent piece of writing,” he opined, “and just to my taste,” although he would later change his opinion, chastising Ginsberg and complaining to City Lights that “ ’All rights reserved’ is on a page of the book. Does this mean I can’t use my name anymore?” But the most important judgment on the poem came not from a poet or a literary critic, but from the presiding judge at the obscenity trial, Clayton Horn, who made the determination that “Howl” had “redeeming social importance” and should not be categorised as obscene. Epstein and Friedman – whose previous works include The Celluloid Closet, about Hollywood attitudes to homosexuality, and The Times of Harvey Milk – contextualise the writing of “Howl” in Ginsberg’s struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality: his early infatuation with Kerouac, his obsession with Neal Cassady and his eventual meeting with Peter Orlovsky, who would be Ginsberg’s life-partner until the poet’s death in 1997 (and whose two brothers, Nicholas and Julius, were also institutionalised). But while it was the explicit descriptions of the activities of “saintly motorcyclists” that led to the obscenity case, Ginsberg himself argued that rather than being “a depiction of homosexuality”, “Howl” was “a promotion of frankness, about any subject”. “Only if you are thinking an outmoded dualistic puritanical academic theory ridden world of values,” he wrote, “can you fail to see I am talking about realisation of love. LOVE.” Nowhere is this more vividly expressed than in the rhapsodic footnote on which the poem, and the film, closes. “Holy, Holy, Holy … Everything is holy! Everybody’s holy! Everywhere is holy! The madman is holy as you my soul are holy … Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady … Holy my mother in the insane asylum … Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” The inspiration, of course, is William Blake, “for everything that lives is holy, life delights in life”. Ginsberg knew Blake well. In 1948, a year before his admission to mental hospital, sitting in his apartment in East Harlem, reading Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and idly masturbating, Ginsberg heard a voice that he immediately recognised as Blake’s, and that then transformed into the voice of God himself, resounding “with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son”. Overcome by an urge to share the good news, Ginsberg crawled out of the window onto the fire-escape and tapped on the window of the neighbouring apartment, which was occupied by two girls. The window opened. “I’ve seen God!” Ginsberg told them. The window slammed shut. “Oh,” Ginsberg later lamented, “what tales I could have told them if they’d let me in!” Howl (15) is released on Friday Listen to Allen Ginsberg read ‘Howl’ on YouTube -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8333075/Allen-Ginsbergs-Howl-I-scribbled-magiclines-from-my-real-mind.html Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
