When Allen Ginsberg last gave a reading in Princeton, in February 1996, the year before he died, McCosh 50 was packed, and the only way to get in was by watching on closed-circuit TV. I wanted my son to be there, but because I thought that Ginsberg would not draw the crowds he did when he was in his prime, we didn't line up early. Of course I was wrong. We couldn't get in and closed-circuit television wasn't good enough, as anyone who has experienced a Ginsberg reading first-hand will know. From what I've heard about the McCosh event, and his appearance at the Dodge Festival later that year, Ginsberg was always in his prime, no matter how he might be ailing or aging.
Ginsberg's readings, like his poetry, seemed to be open to everything. You never knew what might blow through his Aeolian harp. One evening at Douglass College, he offered a recipe for salad dressing ("the secret is the honey!"), and in the course of a poetry reading some years ago in Princeton it somehow made perfect sense that when he mentioned Edgar Allan Poe, a bat appeared and did a turn around the upper reaches of Richardson Auditorium only to disappear back into (it seemed) the poet's magic portmanteau.
This being the end of National Poetry Month, and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Howl, what better occasion for another look at this formidable little book. Over a million copies of the City Lights Pocket Poets edition are now in print. On the literary stock market, Howl is equally impressive. According to www.abebooks.com the four available copies of the first edition are listed in the $4,000 to $6,000 range. You can get the 4th printing of the first edition for as little as $250.
But then Howl is something more than a book of poems. Just look at the cover. That familiar, perfectly simple black-and-white design with the one-word title has become an essential American image, at once a literary icon and as pure a piece of Pop Art as anything by Andy Warhol. If there were a national museum of cultural imagery, the cover of this seemingly humble little volume would rate a place in it.
And Allen Ginsberg is something more than a poet. He's up there in the cultural firmament: he's a star. His soulmates Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs occasionally played the circuit, so to speak, and both are literary legends in their own right, but neither one had it in him to be the force that Ginsberg was. Look in dorm rooms at most American universities between 1965 and 1980 and you'd find him beaming at you up on the wall along with posters of Marlon Brando in biker leather from The Wild One, Clint Eastwood in his Sergio Leone poncho, Janis Joplin with her Southern Comfort eyes, and the Grateful Dead, not to mention Jimi Hendrix. Bob Dylan, and the Beatles.
Next month City Lights will be issuing a special edition of Howl and Other Poems, the original facsimile edited by the poet's biographer, Barry Miles. Howl may have started it all, but it was Ginsberg's power as a performer, his enthusiasm, his outgoingness, his charm, his rapport with audiences, his devotion to the courage of his convictions, and his willingness to push headlong into the major issues of his time, that made him a star.
Looking Inside
The book opens with an uncredited epigraph from Walt Whitman — "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" It's interesting that Ginsberg chose not to mention Whitman by name, the way he does William Carlos Williams, who appears on the cover as the author of the introduction. Whitman does turn up later in "A Supermarket in California," one of the Other Poems, "poking about among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys." "Where are we going, Walt Whitman?" the poem asks. "Which way does your beard point tonight?" To New Jersey, where else? One thing is sure: three Jersey towns have a place in this piece of American literary history: Whitman's Camden, Ginsberg's Paterson, and Williams's Rutherford.
That said, it's only fair to mention that the actions, events, and dreams alluded to in the poem mainly occur in Manhattan. Williams's introduction makes the connection right away with its reference to Ginsberg as a youth "mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him &in and about New York City." Of course San Francisco is also very much a part of the Howl mystique; it's right there on the title page under "City Lights Books." (The first edition was actually printed in London and shipped to the States, as was the second printing, which was seized by U.S. Customs for "obscenity" but that's another story.) Also it was at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that Ginsberg read Howl aloud for the first time.
Having brought Whitman and Williams along for the ride, Ginsberg uses his dedication to pick up three other friends. First, Kerouac, "the new Buddha of American prose…creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature." Then Burroughs: "author of The Naked Lunch, an endless novel that will drive everybody mad." (And not published until 1960 though some excerpts appeared in the late 1950s.) Then, finally Neal Cassady, "author of an autobiography which enlightened Buddha." The dedication closes with a typical Ginsbergian flourish: "All these books are published in heaven."
A Bizarre Introduction
William Carlos Williams's introduction has to be one of the strangest things he ever wrote. While he's cast in the elder poet role, giving the weight of his name to this then-unknown work, much as Emerson did to Leaves of Grass, he really doesn't seem to know what to make of Howl. It's clear that he's reacting more to an experience than to a text. After mentioning how "disturbed" young Ginsberg was when he knew him, he says it over again: "he disturbed me. I never thought he'd live to grow up and write a book of poems." He speaks of being astonished and amazed that Ginsberg had managed to survive and had "gone on developing and perfecting his art." Then: "Literally, he has, from all the evidence, been through hell." He reminds us of this with the closing sentence: "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell."
Maybe so, but on the way to that irresistibly quotable send-off, Williams goes from calling the poem "a howl of defeat," to saying in the next sentence: "Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience." Williams also seems uneasy with the homoerotic element when he rather stiffly suggests that the poet "has found a fellow whom he can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside, " and, again, that the poet "has the time and affrontery [sic] to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem."
A fellow! It sounds so genteel, so old school.
The best of Howl, for me, is in Part 1. When I first read the poem, I had trouble taking Part II, with its "Moloch! Moloch!" chant, seriously. Although it might make great poetical theatre, it's hard to imagine anyone other than Ginsberg reading it in public with a straight face. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to read Part 1 without wanting to stand up and read it out loud because it's no more a trip through hell than Leaves of Grass is, in spite of Williams's warning. True, the "howl" is for Carl Solomon, who is in the hell of a madhouse, but Ginsberg is soaring with "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" or "floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz" or "passing through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkanasas," baring "brains to Heaven under the El" and seeing "Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated."
The movement of the poem is free-flying and heaven-directed even when the subject is "eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars." And, like a Ginsberg reading, the lines seem to have room for everything.
A Humbling Encounter
I have to admit that a callow youth bearing my name once performed a heavy-handed parody of Allen Ginsberg (as "Alexander Grubb") in his first novel. The scene was a poetry reading at the Beard and Sandal Club and the poetry was based mainly on the author's reaction to the "Moloch! Moloch!" business as well as the "Holy! Holy! Holy!" stanzas in the "Footnote to Howl." This 19-year-old hayseed had also been turned off by what he (in the spirit of his alter ego Holden Caulfield) perceived as the phoney atmosphere at poetry readings at the Gaslight Cafe in the Village. A year or two after his book was published, the author was at work one winter night on the charge accounts at the Eighth Street Bookshop in New York (sending bills to the likes of e.e. cummings) when the owner, Ted Wilentz, came upstairs accompanied by a man wearing glasses with dark frames and bundled up in a black overcoat. The creator of "Alexander Grubb" was completely disarmed. Here he was shaking hands with the real Allen Ginsberg and liking him immediately, as you rarely like most people in the first moment of meeting. I was ready to go burn my own book. Maybe Ginsberg sensed this. He told me he liked my parody.