Ginsberg: A Biography
By Barry Miles
Virgin, 2000
627 pp., $24.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
He "ruined a great many young people" with his 1956 poem, "Howl", with its "glorification of madness, drugs and homosexuality, and its contempt and hatred for anything and everything generally deemed healthy, normal or decent". So wrote the conservative critic Norman Podhoretz in 1988, working himself into a fine old lather over Allen Ginsberg, the gay, anti-war Beat poet, mystic and political activist.
Of course, the "healthy, normal and decent" universe of the right-wing commentators is the homophobic, militarist, repressive world of industrial capitalism, and if a great many young people have been "ruined" for their allotted role in this world, then Ginsberg deserves some of the credit and much acclaim.
Ginsberg's story is engagingly told by Barry Miles in his newly updated biography which takes us up to Ginsberg's recent death in 1997.
Born in 1926 to socialist and communist parents in New Jersey, Ginsberg set off to Columbia University to become a labour lawyer, vowing to devote his life to helping the working class. Kicked out of university for homosexuality (sleeping with fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac), Ginsberg's socialist vows soon became diverted by the bohemian sub-culture with its delights of late night carousing, drugs, poetry, jazz and free-wheeling sex.
Rejecting but not rebelling against all that was stale and grey about the post-war United States, Ginsberg and the other Beats sought personal rather than political liberation. In 1948, Ginsberg, while reading the poetry of William Blake, had a vision of cosmic consciousness ("I've seen God" he bawled at his startled neighbours) and spent the next 15 years of his life trying to recreate this personal mystical vision through the use of amphetamines, morphine, marijuana, heroin and LSD, amongst a cornucopia of mind-altering drugs.
He also, fortunately, wrote poetry. Whilst at the University of California in Berkeley in 1956, in the chilly Cold War climate, Ginsberg began writing "Howl", a long autobiographical poem whose verbal energy raged against the forces of institutional power that had driven his friends, family and lovers to madness, prison or death: "I saw the best minds of my generation/destroyed by madness/starving, hysterical, naked" in the famous opening lines of the poem spoke to all who had been frustrated or screwed over by an impersonal society.
The emotional intensity and sheer vitality of "Howl" gathered to it the disaffected and rebellious. Its powerfully rhythmic denunciation of the evils of the time (Moloch! this and Moloch! that, in line after relentless line) protested against a society which was destructive of the best qualities of human nature. Ginsberg's exuberant readings of "Howl" in San Francisco, including one memorable occasion whilst naked, were legendary. The ecstatic audiences may not have seen god but they had heard Ginsberg, and were transformed.
"Howl" also roused some enemies, as police and censors sensed a threat. They soon had the poem's publisher, the left-anarchist poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, up on obscenity charges. The defence, however, not only won their case that the poem had "redeeming social importance", but the "Howl" trial of 1957 boosted Ginsberg's fame. His readings of "Howl" began pulling crowds in the thousands.
Ginsberg trotted the globe helping to open up literary-political fissures in the Cold War consensus. With his Beat totems of drugs and spiritualism, however, Ginsberg could be an awkward guest. Although "pro-Fidel" (Ginsberg and Castro shared "outsider status" as well as "luxuriant beards"), Ginsberg was unprepared politically for Cuba. His obsession with the Cuban government's policy on marijuana (Ginsberg thought pot was revolutionary) was matched by his lack of interest in the pressures and achievements of a revolution under siege by the US.
Ginsberg also continued his spiritual quest around the world. He was politically savvy enough to retain some scepticism. In India, where he drank from the holy Ganges River and had dysentery for a month afterwards, he was unimpressed by some gurus, who were "charlatans of the mass production international nirvana racket". Back in the United States in 1968, he baled up the "dim-witted" Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who flourished briefly as guru to the Beatles, grilling him on his support for the Vietnam War and his apologetics for the conservative status quo ("poverty is laziness", "communism is weakness" were part of the Maharishi's proffered "wisdom").
Although Ginsberg discarded some spiritual quacks, however, he still craved the medicine of mysticism. Oriental religion, meditation, Zen Buddhism, finger cymbals and hippie dreams were in his psychic baggage, which he always checked in, with questionable efficacy, at political demonstrations. Ginsberg declared that war would be over if we all learn to love one another, including cops and presidents (a sentiment which has never yet dented state power). At one press conference about the viciously repressed demonstration against the Vietnam War at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968, Ginsberg chanted the Hare Krishna mantra for 10 minutes, and at the demonstration itself launched into a seven-hour marathon chanting "Om".
The cops, however, showed as little respect for the positive vibrations of Ginsberg's Zen karma as for the democratic right to protest, and he was often amongst those arrested and tear-gassed.
Ginsberg's political activism, as quirky as it was, was indefatigable. While Kerouac was degenerating into a paranoid anti-communist alcoholic, Ginsberg put his poems and body on the line against the corporate state. He campaigned against the Vietnam War, the nuclear industry, censorship, the CIA, the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, and gay persecution.
Looking for ways to reach more people with a political message through music, Ginsberg contributed to the songs and performances of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, the Velvet Underground, the Clash and Philip Glass. "Howl" was far from Ginsberg's sole artistic achievement.
Miles' biography is good at mapping the richness and diversity of Ginsberg's poetry and, as a Ginsberg circle insider, he is good at describing the intensity of the homosexual relations of Ginsberg and the Beats. Miles is, however, over-informative on Ginsberg's meditation and mantra techniques and under-informative on Ginsberg's anarcho-pacifist-spiritual political balance sheet.
Ginsberg had a foot in the two camps of left-wing activism and hippie mysticism, which put strains on both his political and poetical effectiveness. Nevertheless, although his tools of choice (drugs, mysticism, "love conquers all") were not suited to the job of radical social transformation, it can be said of Ginsberg that his poetry, with its imaginative power and its full-throated challenge to conservative institutions and culture, "broke open the fantastic solidity in America, that turned out not to be solid at all". Ginsberg made his own unique cracks in the ideological facade of corporate-state power and many have since poured through those cracks to take up the struggle for a society which nurtures, not destroys, minds, bodies and the human spirit.