Subject: Holden Caulfield & Allen Ginsberg
From: Malcolm Lawrence (Malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Date: Fri Apr 11 1997 - 01:26:34 GMT
BARD OF 'COFFEEHOUSE RADICALISM'
by George Will (voice of RIGHT or RIGHT FIGHTS BACK)
WASHINGTON POST
4/09/97
WASHINGTON - Allen Ginsberg, symptomatic symbol of the "beat generation"
and other intellectual fads, died last Saturday at age 70. He once
wrote, "I'm so lucky to be nutty." Actually, his pose of paranoia was
not luck, it was a sound career move.
It became big box office with his famous declamation of his poem
"Howl" in San Francisco in 1955. That was the year "Rock Around the
Clock," in the soundtrack to the movie "The Blackboard Jungle," helped
launch what was to become the third element in the trinity of Sixties
ecstasies - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Ginsberg made the first two
his projects. He composed "Howl" with the help of a cocktail of peyote,
amphetamines and Dexedrine.
Thirty years later his reward for a career of execrating American
values and works was a six-figure contract for a volume of his collected
poetry. It is a distinctive American genius, this ability to transmute
attempted subversion into a marketable commodity.
The adjective "beat" was appropriated by Jack Kerouac from a
drug-addicted Times Square thief and male prostitute, who meant by it
the condition of being exhausted by existence. "That man's existence
must have been wearying.) Kerouac attached the adjective to the noun
"generation," emulating Gertrude Stein's identification of the "lost
generation" of the 1920s. Soon LIFE magazine, happy to find some
titillating unhappiness in a decade defined by President Dwight D.
Eisenhower's smile, was writing about the beats as "The Only Revolution
Around." That's entertainment.
Back then, poetry commanded crowds. In his book WHEN THE GOING WAS
GOOD: AMERICAN LIFE IN THE 1950s, Jeffrey Hart, now a professor of
English at Dartmouth College, wrote:
"Robert Frost strode onto the stage at Carnegie Hall to a standing
ovation from an overflow house. ... One night in 1957, T.S. Eliot was
reading his poems to an overflow audience in (Columbia University's)
McMillin Theater. Even faculty members had difficulty getting tickets,
and people were crowded into the windows and doors, and listening
outside to Eliot over loudspeakers. ... Dylan Thomas stood at the podium
... his third American tour in two years."
When Ginsberg came to Columbia, "there was a vast throng that had
been unable to get in. They pounded on the doors and milled around.
Ticket-holders entered between lines of police."
Today no poet could cause such excitement on any campus, or any other
American venue, so complete has been the supplanting of words, written
spoken, by music and movies as preferred modes of communication. One of
Ginsberg's young acolytes, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., put the
dissenting impulse to music as Bob Dylan.
Some beats wrote the way some jazz musicians made music, in the head
of chemically assisted improvisation. Truman Capote's famous dismissal
of Kerouac's work - "That isn't writing at all, it's typing" - had a
point. Granted, Kerouac revised ON THE ROAD for six years before it was
published in 1957. However, fueled by Benzedrine, he wrote the first
draft of that novel in 1951 in less than three weeks, as one long
single-spaced paragraph - 120 feet long on 12-foot strips of tracing
paper taped together. Here is its beginning:
"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just
gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except
that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my
feeling that everything was dead."
Does that tone of voice seem familiar? Here is the beginning of a
novel published in 1951, the year of Kerouac's typing frenzy:
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably
want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like,
and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all
that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into
it, if you want to know the truth."
Yes, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Holden Caulfield, adolescent scold,
strong in disapproving "phonies," was a precursor of the beats with
their passion for "authenticity," which to Ginsberg meant howling echoes
of whatever constituted coffeehouse radicalism of the moment. ""Slaves
of Plastic! ... Striped tie addicts! ... Whiskey freaks bombed out on
530 billion cigarettes a year...Steak swallowers zonked on Television!")
With a talent that rarely rose to mediocrity, but with a flair for
vulgar exhibitionism, Ginsberg shrewdly advertised his persona as a
symptom of a dysfunctional society. He died full of honors, including a
front page (and a full page inside) obituary in THE NEW YORK TIMES, a
symptom to the end.
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