Читать книгу The Beat Hotel - Barry Miles - Страница 11
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My hand writes now in a room in Paris Git-le-Coeur
Allen Ginsberg, “At Apollinaire’s Grave”
On October 15, 1957, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso arrived in Paris where Madame Rachou had a room waiting for them at the Beat Hotel. They had been in Paris earlier in the summer but the hotel was full; none of the other available hotels allowed cooking so they had decided to go to Amsterdam until a room became free. The day they returned, there was a power strike. There was no gas or electricity and the Metro was not running. Candles were selling on the street for 35¢ each. Nonetheless they were happy to be back and to settle at last at a fixed address after months of traveling. Allen, Peter, and Gregory’ squeezed into room 32 on the top floor under the roof, which leaked when it rained. They unpacked their knapsacks and stowed their things in the armoire, which had two large drawers beneath its ornate mirrored door. They washed their nylon shirts and woollen socks in the streaked sink, and Allen scrubbed his corduroy jacket, stained from traveling. They hung the washing on the filthy black window frame. There was a romantic view of medieval roofs and chimneys of the rue Git-le-Coeur, and five buildings down, at the end of the street, they could see the Seine with the row of booksellers along the quai and, in the middle of the river, on the Ile de la Cité, the solid towers of the Palais de Justice. A large gray bird “with rat’s eyes” stared in at them from the eaves. The poets were finally in a Paris artist’s garret. The bed had two mattresses, piled one atop the other, and it sagged in the middle. There was a two-burner gas stove and a small round table covered with oilcloth by the window. The discolored plaster walls were very thin and they had to be quiet after ten o’clock because the couple next door had to rise early and get to work.
Allen wrote, “Peter needs a shave. I need a bath. Gregory needs a new personality. The room needs a thicker wall—so we could yell at night and eat green butter on the wall. Is that a spider on the ceiling? A snail? A snail that leaves a silver track behind. Peter looks like a great lousy bum. But dont make great monstrous noise eating those snails lest the neighbors who work all morning wake and gnash thru the paper thin wall.” Someone’s radio could be heard playing from the plug-hole in the sink. Madame Rachou told Peter that when he boiled water he must open the window, otherwise the walls would get wet from the steam and fall in. She promised them a cheaper room in a week or so where they could make as much noise as they wanted. They bought cooking pots and pans and soon found the daily open-air market on the rue de Buci, a few streets away, with its inviting displays of seafood, fresh fruit, and meticulously arranged vegetables. Allen was the chef and made beef stew, beans, big pots of spaghetti, lentil soup, and steamed mussels. He claimed French mussels did not need cleaning. At night, the three slept together in the big groaning iron bed.
Within three days of getting back to Paris, Gregory had acquired an eighteen-year-old girlfriend and a long black cloak with a royal blue silk lining, which he wore when he went to meet her. Gregory had a talent for finding wealthy young women who were prepared to give him money, or at least enough to buy the groceries, so they never starved. With his Italian good looks he rather resembled a young Sinatra, and with his vehement proclamations of himself as a poet, young women found him an immensely attractive and romantic figure.
Gregory Corso had been the first among the Beats to reach Paris and he had had a fine time there. He left New York on February 24, 1957, on the S.S. America. One of his girlfriends, already in Paris, had discovered the great-grandson of Shelley (one assumes a number of “great”s were left out of this appellation), and Gregory hoped to meet him. In Paris Gregory quickly found where the writers and artists liked to meet and introduced himself. He met both Marlon Brando and Jean Genet this way. He and Genet had both been in jail as adolescents and had enough in common to develop a rapport, albeit a stormy one based largely on trading insults: Gregory would accuse Genet and the French in general of decadence and Genet would expiate his dislike of Americans and their inability to speak French. Genet enjoyed the friendly banter well enough to arrange for Gregory to stay in a friend’s apartment for the summer, but when the friend returned he found that Gregory had painted pictures on the living room walls and threw” him out. Allen wrote about the episode to Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “[Corso] says he sees Genet & had big argument with him about Gregory painting in oils on some friends apartment walls—so Genet insulted American boors & Gregory called him a frog creep, or some such Gregorian scene.”
Despite being broke Gregory had made a number of trips out of town, including one to Nice, where he saw Picasso at the opening of an exhibition of Joan Miro’s paintings. Gregory yelled at the artist in French, “I’m starving, I’m starving . . .” and got into a garbled conversation before being dragged away by Picasso’s minders. He continued around the coast to Barcelona, where he somehow got a hold of a pistol. On his return to Paris he began waving his gun at the Americans sitting outside the Café aux Deux Magots, screaming, “Why did you all let me starve, you bastards?” The police arrested him as drunk and disorderly—which he was—and let him go the next morning.
Gregory was impetuous and gregarious, unimpressed by fame and status, and he had a forthright manner that people often found rude and intrusive. He saw poetry as his vocation, saving him from a life of crime. Gregory was a true New Yorker. He was born in 1930 in the heart of Greenwich Village above a funeral parlor at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, which was then a part of Little Italy. He had no memory of his sixteen-year-old mother, who had abandoned him when he was a baby and was thought to have returned to the mountains of her native Lombardy. (They were finally reunited sixty years later.) His seventeen-year-old father felt unable to bring him up and Gregory was placed with a series of eight different foster parents, all over the city. When he was eleven years old his father remarried and took him back, but when the United States joined the war his father was drafted into the Navy. Gregory ran away from home a year later and lived on the streets. At one point in 1942 he was so hungry that he smashed the window of a restaurant and broke in, looking for food. He was caught on the way out, convicted of robbery, and sent to the notorious Tombs prison on Foley Square, a place with a terrifying reputation that was closed in 1947. Gregory later recalled, “I went there because I stole a radio . . . to TOMBS at the age of 12! For five months I stayed there, no air, no milk, and the majority were black and they hated the white and they abused me terribly, and I was indeed like an angel then because when they stole my food and beat me up and threw pee in my cell, I, the next day would come out and tell them my beautiful dream about a floating girl who landed before a deep pit and just stared.”
When he was released, he still had nowhere to go. Cold and hungry, he broke into a youth center to sleep but was caught by the night watchman and sent straight back to the Tombs. Prison life was hard on the child and he fell ill. All the social services were stretched to the breaking point during the war, and the Tombs infirmary couldn’t cope, so Gregory was sent to Bellevue Hospital to recover. Bellevue was overcrowded and understaffed. In the canteen one day Gregory flicked a piece of bread across the room, accidentally hitting a patient in the eye. In the uproar that followed, Gregory was placed in a straitjacket and held on the fourth floor for three months, among the seriously ill mental patients, until his health had recovered enough for him to be returned to the Tombs. When he was released he was fifteen years old, streetwise, tough, rebellious, and alone on the streets. “I lived with Irish on 99th and Lex, with Italians on 105th and 3rd, with two runaway Texans on 43rd etc,” he later wrote, “until 17th year when did steal and get three years in Clinton prison.”
He was smart and one day he realized that walkie-talkies could be used to great advantage in robberies. He planned a heist and got away with it until one of the gang began spending too much money. Gregory was traced to Florida and, in 1947, he was given three years in the Clinton state prison in Dannemora, New York, up by the Canadian border. It was at Clinton that he discovered poetry and classical culture. He read voraciously, determined to educate himself. He started at the beginning with the classical era of the Greeks and Romans, which was to remain a significant influence upon his poetry. In fact, he later dedicated his book of poems Gasoline “to the angels of Clinton Prison who, in my 17th year, handed me, from all the cells surrounding me, books of illumination.”
Gregory told biographer Neeli Cherkovski, “I had the best teachers. There were some guys in prison. I was seventeen when I went in and I was nineteen when I got out. You dig it? Those are big years. I was a problem in society. So you know what I got in Dannemora? Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and my Shelley. That’s a good thing in life to find Shelley when you’re a kid, when they got you locked away for being a menace. . . . You make the time your own. I used it to get the literary gems. I even read the dictionary in jail and learned all the words.” Using an enormous, turn-of-the-century dictionary, Gregory started at A and methodically learned all the words, even those described as archaic.
Gregory was released in 1950, just before his twentieth birthday, and he now regarded himself as a poet. He later reported, “Went home, stayed two days, left family forever, but returned at night to beg their forgiveness and retrieve my stamp collection.” He got a job in the Garment District and shortly afterward he met Allen Ginsberg. A friend of Gregory’s was working as an artist, drawing portraits for the customers in a lesbian bar called the Pony Stable on Third Street at Sixth Avenue in the Village. Gregory was visiting him there when Allen stopped by. Gregory had a big sheaf of poems with him and was telling everyone who would listen that he was a poet. This was a common occurrence in the Village at the time, but Ginsberg noticed that the poems were all professionally typed, which was unusual, and, since he was also sexually attracted to the young man with tousled hair and flashing black eyes, he went over and introduced himself.
Ginsberg was surprised to find that the poems were good. There was one—now lost—that contained a line that Allen always remembered: “The stone world came to me, and said Flesh gives you an hour’s life.” Allen was impressed and began talking excitedly about his friends, who were also writers. They exchanged life stories and Allen asked him about his sex life. Gregory told him of a fantasy he had about one of his neighbors. He was living in a small furnished attic room on West 12th Street off Sixth Avenue and from his vantage point he was able to see everything that went on in the apartment of a young woman on the fourth floor of an apartment building opposite. He would masturbate as he watched her undress in front of her mirror, take a bath, use the toilet, and make love to her boyfriend, who visited every night. Gregory fantasized about crossing the street, knocking on her door, and introducing himself.
Allen was astonished because, as he heard the details of Gregory’s story, he realized that it was his girlfriend, Dusty Moreland, that he was describing and that the boyfriend was himself. “You want me to introduce you?” Allen asked, mysteriously. “I have magical powers.” The next day he took Gregory to meet her. Gregory later commented, “My first lay when I got out of prison.”
Allen took him to meet Jack Kerouac and introduced him as a poet. “What’s poetry?” asked Kerouac. “Everything,” Gregory replied. Allen also took him to visit Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prize–winning English professor with whom he’d studied at Columbia University, whom Allen still regarded as a sage and referred to as “The Chinaman.” Gregory was overjoyed to be taken seriously as a poet and basked in the attention Allen was giving him. Gregory later wrote, “Through him I first learned about contemporary poesy, and how to handle myself in an uninstitutional society, as I was very much the institutional being. Beyond the great excited new joyous talks we had about poetry, he was the first gentle person and dear friend to me.”
In 1952 Gregory struck out by himself and went to Los Angeles, where he landed a job with the Los Angeles Examiner, cub reporting once a week and working in the file morgue the rest of the time. Seven months later, perhaps inspired by stories told by Kerouac and Ginsberg, who had both served time in the Merchant Marine, Gregory shipped out on the Norwegian Line to South America and Africa. When he returned to Greenwich Village he stayed on and off in Ginsberg’s Lower East Side apartment; by this time Corso had become a core member of the Beat Generation. In 1954, with Ginsberg away in Mexico, Gregory’s girlfriend, Violet Lang, took him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where fifty students from Harvard and Radcliffe clubbed together to raise the money to publish his first book of poems, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, in 1955. In addition he continued to build a name for himself as a poet by publishing in literary magazines such as the Harvard Advocate and the Cambridge Review.
Gregory was twenty-seven when he arrived in Paris for the summer of 1957. He had gone from Cambridge to San Francisco where Ginsberg was having great success with his poem “Howl,” and went with him and Orlovsky to Mexico City to join Kerouac for the summer of 1956. When he got to Paris he was working on the final selection of poems for a new book called Gasoline to be published by Ferlinghetti in the same City Lights Books Pocket Poets series as Ginsberg’s Howl and other Poems. Although he was constantly broke and living off his various girlfriends, Corso’s years at the Beat Hotel would prove a very creative period, during which he would write much of his best work.
Gregory was followed to Europe by lack Kerouac. Jack had left New York before him, on February 15, but had gone first to Tangier to meet up with William Burroughs. Jack was not very good out of America. By 1957 he was an alcoholic and spent his time living in the outer suburbs of New York with his mother. He had already written most of the books upon which his fame would rest—On the Road; The Subterraneans; Doctor Sax; Visions of Cody; Visions of Gerard; Mexico City Blues—but had yet to find a publisher for them. Though he was convinced of his own genius, he was growing progressively more disillusioned as the years passed and his talent remained unrecognized. The furor surrounding Ginsberg’s “Howl” had encouraged Jack into thinking that their group might finally be discovered and also made him jealous of Allen’s success. He did not have long to wait before On the Road was published, bringing him both fame and unwelcome notoriety.
Jack, Allen, Peter, and Gregory had planned to go first to Tangier to help Bill organize and type the manuscript of The Naked Lunch (published in the United States as Naked Lunch and forthwith referred to without the article), and then the four of them, excluding Burroughs, would spend the summer exploring Europe just as they had spent the previous summer together in Mexico City. Burroughs himself had no interest in exploring Europe, He had been living in Tangier since 1953, and had in any case traveled widely in Europe before the war, first visiting France in 1929 with his family and later studying medicine in Vienna. For the others it was their first time and they were anxious to see everything.
Jack had disliked the primitive sanitary arrangements and the foreign food in Mexico City and it had taken a lot of persuading to get him to make the trip to Morocco. He disliked Tangier for the same reasons and complained bitterly when he found that Arab whores cost $3 when he had been used to paying only 10¢ in Mexico. He was frightened of the Arabs, despite Burroughs’s assurances that no one had run amok for months. Jack experienced a sudden homesickness for America, for Wheaties at breakfast and a kitchen smelling of pine cleaner. Most of all he wanted to see his mother. He abandoned his plan to explore Europe with the others and made a perfunctory trip to Paris and London before sailing back to the United States with the intention of getting a small house in the Bay Area, somewhere close to San Francisco, and living there with his mother.
During his few nights in Paris, Jack met up with Gregory, who was then living with a French girl named Nicole. Jack spent one night in their room, unable to sleep for the sound of their lovemaking, but the next night Nicole’s concierge refused to allow Jack to stay. The Beats had not yet discovered the Beat Hotel and Jack never did stay there, despite reports to the contrary in various Kerouac biographies. Gregory, as usual, was starving and made the notoriously parsimonious Jack pay for drinks and food, something Jack complained of bitterly to his friends afterward. Gregory later wrote Jack, contesting his allegations: “I dint get you drunk and make you spend 5 thousand francs because when I first met you you were drunk sitting at Bonaparte in fact whenever I met you you were drunk, yes, drunk, and now you are trying to blame your drunkenness on me! Why must everybody blame everything on me? But I will announce to the world of dream that you lied when you said that I made you drunk! I did not make you drunk! You made yourself drunk! True, I did encourage you to spend a lot of money on food for me, but why not? I deserve to eat! Have I not devoted my entire life to beauty? Thus should I not eat? Should I not at least on straw sleep?”
Meanwhile, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky made their departure from Manhattan on March 8, like Jack on a Yugoslavian freighter, going first to Tangier via Casablanca to see Burroughs. But already the plan to recreate Mexico City was not working out. Jack returned to America shortly after Allen and Peter arrived in Tangier and Gregory was already in Paris. So Allen and Peter left Burroughs in Tangier and made their way to Venice, where they stayed with poet Alan Ansen, an old friend from New York. Ansen was a tall, heavy man with a manic laugh and effeminate mannerisms. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, an astonishingly erudite classics scholar, quoting Herodotus in Greek, Tacitus in Latin, and referring familiarly to Goethe. He had been W. H. Auden’s secretary and had known Ginsberg since 1948 when he was a part of the San Remo bar crowd in the Village. He moved to Venice in 1953 in search of the cheapest European country with the most available boys. Ansen was to become a Beat supporter in the wings: offering accommodation, secretarial help, occasional financial assistance, and writing laudatory reviews of their work (his essay “Anyone Who Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death” in the first issue of Big Table in 1959 was not only the first on Burroughs’s work but remains one of the best).
Ansen would recall Ginsberg and Orlovsky’s stay with some amusement: “Peter and Allen drove Peggy Guggenheim from the flat by tossing a dirty towel, which hit her by mistake, and almost did the same with a young Dutch painter, Guy Harloff, by showing off with Paul Goodman in manic mood expatiating on the joys of the Lido dunes. It was Harloff who introduced them to 9, rue Git-le-Coeur, later famous as the Paris Beat Hotel.” Harloff was already living at the Beat Hotel and recommended it to Allen as somewhere cheap and perfectly located in the Latin Quarter, where they could cook in their room and where the landlady turned a blind eye to drugs and unusual sexual behavior.
Allen immediately wrote to Gregory, asking him to reserve a room for them. But the hotel was full of Americans visiting Europe for the summer and he was told that he could come back in a month when something would be available. Since Gregory could not afford a regular hotel, and had managed to antagonize a fair number of people by bouncing checks and owing back rent, he set off for Amsterdam, leaving a letter at the American Express office for Allen and Peter, who were arriving in Paris shortly, explaining that the room would not be available until October 15, and that in the meantime they should join him in Holland.
On September 16, 1957, Ginsberg and Orlovsky arrived in Paris from Italy. There was little in their outward appearance to indicate that here were two notorious members of the Beat Generation. Unlike the weekend beatniks wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in goatees and sandals, carrying a pair of bongos in one hand and Howl in the other, Allen and Peter looked like the thousands of other young people who were then roaming across Europe with rucksacks. Their hair was a little long by the standards of the time in that it nearly reached their collars, but they were clean-shaven and, though not wearing ties, wore perfectly normal hard-wearing work clothing. It was Allen’s eyes that set him apart; people often comment on how intense Ginsberg’s stare was in those days, his large brown eyes absorbing everything. Allen and Peter were gregarious, always talking to strangers, asking questions, inquisitive, anxious to hear someone’s life story or the history of an old building. People sometimes found the intensity of Allen’s inquiries a little off-putting, but Peter’s friendly good nature, with his high Russian cheekbones, big smile, and quirky sense of humor, usually relaxed them and they were welcomed by most of the people they met.
Allen had always wanted to see Paris and it lived up to his expectations. He wrote his father, “Just got here—greatest scene in Europe for sure. May take short trip a few days to Amsterdam and return—places to live hard to find here, I’m not settled yet, sleeping in RR stations and hotels.” Allen and Peter spent their first night on a bench in the Gare de l’Est. Allen slept fitfully and woke to scribble a few lines: “Waking all night / I wrote out these doublets / Six o’clock six o’clock / the RR station gets noisy.”
They eventually located a hotel room for 700 francs ($1.75) a night for them both near the Place Pigalle—more than they were hoping to pay but they made up the difference by finding cheap restaurants. After two nights they found another hotel at the same price on the Left Rank overlooking the great façade of Notre Dame and the bookstalls along the Seine. In the meantime, Allen saw as much of Paris as he could on limited funds. He spent several days in the Louvre and took in all the tourist sites, writing to Keronac, “We went up Eiffel Tower, beautiful dream machine in sky—greater than I imagined. In his role as literary agent for his friends, he also ran a few errands. One of these was to deliver the manuscript of Burroughs’s Interzone to the Olympia Press. This was the working title of the book we now know as Naked Lunch, but when Maurice Girodias saw the condition of the manuscript he was not impressed. Girodias stated, “It was such a mess that manuscript! You couldn't physically read the stuff, but whatever caught the eye was extraordinary and dazzling. So I returned it to Allen saying, ‘Listen, the whole thing has to be reshaped.’ The ends of the pages were all eaten away by the rats or something . . . Allen was very angry at me.”
Allen also contacted Bernard Frechtman, the translator of Jean Genet’s books and Genet’s onetime literary agent, who had been given a copy of the Interzone manuscript by Kerouac when he’d passed through Paris a few months earlier. Frechtman had translated the work of Antonin Artaud and other Surrealist work and later got to know Burroughs, but he had not been very impressed by Kerouac, who was probably drunk when he went to see him. Jack was irritated at Frechtman’s response, partly because he had carried the heavy manuscript all the way to Paris from Tangier. He wrote to his friend John Clellon Holmes, “NO ONE wants anything to do with it not even Bernard Frechtman (translator of Genet) to whom I took it in my rucksack in Paris.” Frechtman received Allen cordially enough, but despite having had possession of Bill’s manuscript for more than three months, the only part he had read was “The Word” chapter, which he had not liked. Allen was disgusted and took the manuscript back, yet Frechtman later became a friend and often dropped by the hotel. He was living in Genet’s old apartment, and during their meeting Allen looked around with ill-disguised curiosity.
Allen and Peter visited Guy Harloff at the Beat Hotel and it looked absolutely ideal. Harloff arranged for them to meet Madame Rachou and she confirmed that a room with a stove would be free on October 15, which was a month from then. Since none of the other hotels with vacancies would allow them to cook, they decided to visit Gregory in Amsterdam, and return when their room was ready.
Kerouac’s On the Road was published on September 5, 1957; someone showed Allen Gilbert Millstein’s review in the New York Times, which heaped extravagant praise upon the book and was to make Kerouac famous. Previously Jack had been grumbling to Allen that people kept introducing him as “the guy that Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ is dedicated to,” but now he had fame of his own to contend with. Allen wrote him, “We saw Times Sept 5 review, I almost cried, so fine & true—well now you don’t have to worry about existing only in my dedication & I will have to weep in your great shadow—what is happening in N.Y.—are you being pursued—is there a great mad wave of Fame crashing over your ears?”
Kerouac was being pursued mercilessly and the hangers-on and groupies accelerated his alcoholic decline. The problem was that people expected him to be like Dean Moriarty, the book’s hero, a pool-hall hustler, womanizer, and car thief who could charm the pants off anyone and often did. But the Moriarty character was not Kerouac, of course, but a portrait of his friend Neal Cassady, with whom Kerouac was obsessed. Jack envied his easy way with women, his wide-eyed cowboy good looks, and his superb handling of an automobile. Though he bore a striking resemblance to Cassady and was handsome in the classic brooding manner of the era’s film stars, Kerouac held an unfavorable view of himself as a short, stocky, hairy, thick peasant. His strict Catholic upbringing had made him ashamed of his body and shy and uneasy with women. While Jack attempted to deal with his newfound fame by drinking and carousing, Allen and Peter were preparing to join Gregory in Amsterdam.
The poets spent their last night in Paris, until 7 A.M., wandering around Les Halles, looking at the meat market, astonished by the indifference with which butchers in bloodstained aprons carried huge trays of livers or staggered by with half-carcasses of beef on their backs, the whole noisy nighttime spectacle watched over by the Gothic magnificence of the church of St. Eustache. Allen wrote a long description of the scene in his journals, which he called “Apocalypse at Les Halles”: “Carts full of lungs carts full of liver carts full of hearts / Carts full of heads / The lungs shaking and quivering . . .”
They took the first train of the day to the Netherlands to join Gregory, going first to Rotterdam, where they explored and went to museums before continuing on to Amsterdam. There they slept on a huge carpet on Gregory’s floor on Reijnier Vinkeleskade, on the Amstel Canal in the southern part of the city. He had a large steam-heated room so they were very comfortable. It was another city for Allen and Peter to explore and they rushed from the Rembrandthuis to the Rijksmuseum to the Stedelijk Museum, admiring the northern Renaissance visions of Vermeer and Rembrandt and the blazing light and energy in the art of van Gogh; by Peter’s count, they saw 105 van Goghs. They walked the humpback bridges and quiet canals lined with weeping willows and seventeenth-century houses. Food was cheap; a large roast beef sandwich, cheese, and beer totaled 12 cents. Virtually everyone spoke English and Gregory had already made contact with the art and literary scenes. They spent long nights talking and smoking pot in the student bars and bohemian cafés with poets and editors of literary magazines.
Allen, Peter, and Gregory met the poet Simon Vinkenoog in the Bohemia jazz club after a friend of Vinkenoog’s told him that he must go and meet these American poets. Simon became a lifelong friend of Ginsberg, and in 1965 translated “Howl” into Dutch while in the Utrecht House of Detention for six weeks on a marijuana charge. He was the editor of Podium magazine and was a friend of Jackson Pollock and Robert Lowell. Now he wanted to publish the Beats. Simon, tall and thin, with striking blond hair and boundless energy, strode the streets looking like the character Victor Lazio from Casablanca. In the course of the day, he would buy all the quality daily papers from France, Germany, Britain, and Holland, and, like a true European, sit faultlessly translating from Dutch or German to English, exclaiming and denouncing, buying another paper to see what the French thought about it.
It didn’t take Allen and Peter long to find the red-light district in Amsterdam Centrum. Allen had a very rosy view of it when he described it to Kerouac: “Huge red light district neat & clean & quiet—girls sit like mannequins in windows, like Dutch dolls in dollhouses, on ground floor, windows bright & clean, they sit in chairs & cross legs & knit quietly waiting for customers on quiet streets—whole blocks & blocks of girls in bright ground floor windows—like a heaven—and they don’t yell at you or grab your arm—just go on with knitting—Neal would go mad.” Prostitution was legal in Holland, and conditions in the Amsterdam red-light district were better than most, but many of the girls were still controlled by pimps and their lives were often desperately sad.
Peter was pleased to see these women in windows because he was beginning to think there was no sex in Europe. He had been unable to pick up a girl in any of the cities they had visited so far; however, he and Allen did go to a whorehouse in Venice and he and Jack went with some whores in Tangier. Peter couldn’t wait to settle in Paris and concentrate on finding a girlfriend. Though Peter was Allen’s “wife,” as Ginsberg sometimes called him, his preference was for women. His fantasies were always of women, even when he was in bed with Allen, and throughout his and Allen’s long relationship, Peter usually had a girlfriend who lived with them. They both felt that sex was a way of spreading love and believed in having as many sex partners as possible, often by organizing orgies. This was an aspect of the Beat Generation philosophy that was picked up later by the hippies in their quest for sexual freedom.
As Ginsberg traveled Europe, back in San Francisco Howl and Other Poems had been seized May 21, 1957 by the police as obscene, and his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, taken to court. The American Civil Liberties Union took up the case and there seemed little doubt as to a favorable outcome. The case hinged on whether or not the poem was protected by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech despite its containing a few so-called obscene words. All literary San Francisco was buzzing.
At first Allen had written to Ferlinghetti with lots of suggestions for publicity and support for the trial, but everyone in San Francisco was so excited and busy that they neglected to keep him informed and he never knew if his suggestions had been taken up, to whom he should write, or what articles had appeared in the press. At first he went daily to the American Express office in Paris to look for news, and pored over Time and Newsweek for reports, but he was too far away to play any kind of active role, and the trial became very unreal for him. Ferlinghetti did write him from time to time, and his old girlfriend Sheila Boucher sent him information. Meanwhile, all the press attention caused Howl to sell and sell and, by the end of the trial, Ferlinghetti had gone back to press three times and had over 10,000 copies in print.
Mail took some time to reach him from California but Allen assumed that all was well and wrote his father, Louis, “I haven’t heard news of the Trial recently, perhaps it’s over now. Time is supposed to have a story soon.” He was pleased to be distanced from the affair, knowing that had he been there it would have taken up every waking hour of his day. City Lights’s lawyer Jake Ehrlich had decided to use local expert testimony and brought forward a succession of literary figures to testify to the literary merit of the work. He presented Mark Schorer and Leo Lowenthal from the University of California at Berkeley; Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Herbert Blau, and Arthur Foff, all from San Francisco State College, as well as poet Kenneth Rexroth, novelist Vincent McHugh, San Francisco Examiner book editor Luther Nichols, even a literary adviser to the U.S. Army.
There had been some concern when Judge W. J. Clayton Horn was appointed to preside because he had recently achieved a certain notoriety by sentencing five women shoplifters to watch the movie The Ten Commandments and requiring them to write him an essay on what they had learned from the film. But Judge Horn’s handling of the case was exemplary; he read all the relevant case histories, including the trial of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and identified the constitutional aspects of the case, namely that to be considered obscene the book had to be shown to have no redeeming social importance whatsoever.
It was in Amsterdam that Allen heard Judge Horn’s verdict. On October 4 the judge had pronounced Howl to be not obscene. Judge Horn said, “I do not believe that ‘Howl is without redeeming social importance. The first part of ‘Howl’ presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war. The third part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of what the author conceives as a general condition. ‘Footnote to Howl’ seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including parts of the body by name. It ends with a plea for holy living. . . . The theme of ‘Howl’ presents ‘unorthodox and controversial ideas.’ Coarse and vulgar language is used in treatment and sex acts are mentioned but unless the book is entirely lacking in ‘social importance’ it cannot be held obscene.” He concluded, “In considering material claimed to be obscene it is well to remember the motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense, ” and found the defendants not guilty.
Allen was naturally delighted with the decision, though it was not unexpected, and wrote to Ferlinghetti asking if there was anyone he should write thank-you letters to, and thanking him for all his trouble. Allen enclosed a huge list of people who would run articles on the decision and who could be prevailed upon to review City Lights’s books, since it was now a famous publisher.
Whenever he settled anywhere for more than a few days, Ginsberg was immediately busy, writing and receiving dozens of letters each week. One of his tasks in Amsterdam was dealing with Evergreen Review. Evergreen was about to publish his long poem about Mexico, “Siesta in Xbalba,” and had also released a spoken-word album on its Evergreen Records label, containing an extract from “Howl.” read by Allen. It was a poor reading and Allen was ashamed of it. Ferlinghetti did a deal with Fantasy Records in Berkeley to release an entire album of Allen reading his poems and had made arrangements for him to record it in a studio in Paris. While in Holland, Allen also continued in his role of literary agent. In the past he had been responsible for the publication of Kerouac’s first book, The Town and the City, and for getting Burroughs’s first book. Junkie, published. He had a great belief in the genius of his friends and was indefatigable in his promotion of their work.
In Amsterdam he dealt with Ferlinghetti and City Fights on the matter of proofs, cover copy, and the selection of poems for Gregory’s second book of poems, Gasoline. As soon as he arrived in Amsterdam he wrote asking Ferlinghetti for a list of the poems to be included so that he could write an introduction, and asked for all unused poems to be returned to him. He praised Ferlinghetti for publishing the book in the face of opposition from many of the San Francisco poets who disliked Gregory’s manner: “I know everybody puts Gregory down there and am glad you dont, I am amazed by his genuine genius & originality. . . . Gregory says right color for Gasoline cover is bright solid red letters on white background. Have you used this already? (Red border?, white label like mine, red letters on label) Is it possible to get a red explosive 8c solid like an Esso sign?”
Allen wrote to Kerouac for a cover note for Corso to accompany his introduction, saying, “We unite & give him send off—for he is sure to be generally put down unless people are made to dig him. Everybody in S.F. according to Ferl puts him down as a ‘showman’ & for that reason Ferl won’t even publish Power.”’ The poem “Power was a matter of some contention between Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg regarded it as Corso’s greatest poem. Ferlinghetti, however, thought that it could be construed as fascist, particularly by the San Francisco literati, and refused to include it in the book. Allen was convinced that Ferlinghetti was wrong and cunningly got around Ferlinghetti’s prohibition by quoting extensively from “Power” in his introduction, pointedly describing it as “unpublished.” (It was subsequently published by New Directions in Corso’s next book, The Happy Birthday of Death.)
Kerouac responded positively with a blurb, saying Gregory “rose like an angel over the rooftops and sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra, but in words. ‘Sweet Milanese hills’ brood in his Renaissance soul, evening is coming on the hills.”
Autumn was closing in and, after two weeks in Benelux, Allen, Peter, and Gregory boarded a train at Amsterdam Central Station; soon the canals and old houses gave way to low green fields, drainage ditches, and cows under the huge sky of south Holland, where everything was still and green except the windmills turning furiously in the breeze.
Once they were settled in the Beat Hotel they began to explore Paris. They took the funicular railway up to Sacre Coeur at dusk and looked out over Paris from the terrace as the lights blinked on all over the city, then wandered back down through the narrow streets of Montmartre, past its tiny vineyard on the rue St. Vincent and its cafés and squares. They often visited nearby Notre Dame just across the Seine to marvel over the rose windows. They found that smoking pot gave an increased intensity to the color of the north rose, which is mostly of blue stained glass dating from 1270, and depicts the Virgin surrounded by concentric circles of Prophets, Kings, Judges, and Patriarchs. They walked beneath the flying buttresses, squatting like spider’s legs around the nave, and paid the old lady in the ticket office a few francs to climb the tower to see Viollet-le-Duc’s gargoyles. Gregory wrote a poem about them: “. . . It’s the way they’re placed / Outstretched gargy necks / screammouthed haunched pensivity . . .”
They went to Sainte-Chapelle to see the shocking brilliance of the blue stained glass. They visited the Rodin Museum and returned repeatedly to the Louvre but, before they could embark on serious museum-going, Allen came down with Asian flu and spent almost two weeks in bed with a bad cough, taking sleeping pills to try and rest. They ran out of money but were saved by a check for ten dollars sent by Allen’s father and a loan from Gregory’s girlfriend. Eventually Peter’s monthly Veterans Administration pension money came through and they were able to pay the rent. Peter had been discharged from the army for mental instabilility; he called his pension his “mad money.”
Peter’s enjoyment of exploring Paris with Allen was marred by disturbing news from his mother concerning his brother Lafcadio. His family had a history of mental illness and his elder brother, Julius, was in a mental hospital. Lafcadio, his younger brother, often behaved very strangely but Peter was determined that he should not be confined to a hospital. Allen and Peter had looked after Lafcadio in San Francisco and had taken him with them to Mexico City the previous summer, though whether he was aware that he had even left the States is debatable. When Allen and Peter left New York for Tangier, Lafcadio went back to Northport, Long Island, to live with his mother and twin sister, Marie. He made one attempt to live independently, in July, when he moved back to the city to live with Allen’s ex-girlfriend Elise Cowen at her apartment on East 4th Street, but that didn't work out, and Elise, who was herself mentally unstable, left for the West Coast.
Lafcadio moved back home to the converted chicken-coop where the Orlovsky family lived, but Katherine, his mother, found it increasingly difficult to cope with him. During one argument he hit her and she retaliated by throwing a large metal bottle opener at him, which cut his arm almost to the bone. Peter worried that Lafcadio was going to end up in the mental hospital with Julius and decided that he had to return and look after his mad family: protect his mother and sister, be the older brother that Lafcadio needed, and try to get Julius out of Central Islip Hospital where he had lived for six years. Allen remembered Peter’s waking up one morning in late November, weeping and saying, “Julius is in the hospital and I can’t just leave him there and enjoy myself here, stay around the world enjoying myself. I’ve been away a year already.”
Neither Allen nor Peter had enough money for Peter’s boat fare, but Allen was owed $225 by Kerouac, who had borrowed Allen’s merchant seaman savings in order to get to Tangier. Now that On the Road was a best-seller, Jack was due to receive a big royalty check, yet though he knew of Peter’s dilemma he was loath to send any money to Allen before it arrived in case he ran short himself. To Allen’s irritation he kept mentioning the money in his letters but never sending it. His latest letter told Allen that he would pay him in January when his next royalties came through. Peter went to the U.S. Embassy to apply for a Veterans Administration loan. They forwarded the paperwork to the appropriate people, but warned him that it might take several months to complete the process.
The summer visitors had left and, as promised, Madame Rachou moved Allen and Peter to a better room. They were given room 25, on the third floor, next door to Guy Harloff, the painter who was responsible for getting them into the hotel. A Dutchman who held an American passport, Harloff was over six feet tall with long black hair slicked back with hair cream. If he was not painting, he read Henry Miller and had loud drunken arguments with his girlfriend, Sharon Walsh, sometimes breaking the furniture. But he was kind to Allen and Peter and often gave them food; on the day they arrived he presented them with a pound of English bacon and a packet of English butter. Peter was impressed with his style, writing to the poet Ron Loewinsohn that Harloff “always has girls at candlelight night in bed and cooks good food.” Harloff came from a well-off Dutch family who provided him with a generous allowance, which was why Madam Rachou was prepared to give him credit at the bar and allow him to owe back rent.
When Burroughs arrived in 1958, Harloff spent a lot of time trying to convince him of the virtues of Communism with little discernible effect. Burroughs said of Harloff, “He was always putting on this proletariat act, ‘We impoverished artists,’ and all this crap. I noticed he had credit all around the quarter. His parents turned out to be very wealthy. He was well provided for. So that was just an act. The French people don’t extend credit unless you have the means. His paintings looked like cigar bands. People used to collect cigar bands, oh yes, they’re quite pretty, with all that gilt. Well that’s exactly what they looked like. Some of them were huge.”
The new room was a great improvement. It appeared to have changed little since the nineteenth century, though the walls were considerably older than that. To reach it, they first took a gas-lit staircase, which in turn led to an eighteenth-century staircase, and finally reached a set of rooms that were probably originally used by well-to-do people who lived far from Paris and who would take them for a few months at a time when they visited the capital. Room 25 was in the front of the hotel and had two windows with long drapes overlooking the street. The walls were whitewashed. There was a big bed, a large wardrobe with a built-in mirror, a sink, and a worktable. It was one of the few rooms in the hotel to have a gas range. They stowed away their knapsacks and unpacked their clothes; Allen took his red portable Royal typewriter from its carrying case, arranged his piles of notebooks and manuscripts on the worktable, and, tacking his portrait of Rimbaud to the wall, he made himself at home.
The coverage of the Howl trial in Life magazine stimulated a great deal of journalistic interest in the Beat Generation but it was the publication of Jack’s On the Road in September that really caused the press furor over the Beats. In addition to the attacks from the literary establishment and articles in the popular press equating them with juvenile delinquents, there was great interest in the writing they were producing. Allen got the first inkling that he might be able to not only get by but actually make a living as a writer. That summer in Venice there had been a check for $100 from City Lights, his first royalty payment on Howl. Because of the trial, the third edition of 2,500 had sold out and Ferlinghetti had ordered a fourth printing, which meant that Allen could expect a further royalty check of between $100 and $200. He was also receiving money from Evergreen Review, Partisan Review had paid him for two poems, and Citadel Press wanted to include “Howl” in an anthology of Beat writing. His brother, Eugene, and his father sent him small sums to tide him over until his next royalty check, and Bill Burroughs promised to send him something. Allen thought that he could survive in Paris until Christmas at that rate, which was when Kerouac, in theory, was to pay back the $225. Meanwhile, Peter had his regular $50 a month from the V.A.
Jack wrote from New York to say that both Viking Press and Grove Press wanted to publish Howl and Other Poems in hardback. In Jack’s opinion Howl needed proper distribution because “It had not even begun to be read.” Even though City Lights could not afford to capitalize on the trial or place ads to tell people where they could get the book, Allen decided to stay with the small press that had taken the risk to publish him in the first place. All the publicity over Howl and the Beats led to a huge volume of mail, so that at the beginning of September, before the trial was even over, Allen complained to his father, “Correspondence mounts and is being a bad problem now. Too much publicity at this point. I’m beginning to think ‘Howl’ too slight to support so great a weight of bull.” In the same letter he sent his father the clover leaf he had picked at Shelley’s grave in Rome, “Just like any clover anywhere I guess—I cried when I saw Keats’ stone tho . . .”
Ginsberg’s correspondence with his father, Louis, ranged over a wide variety of issues, and always included long descriptions of the places he visited as well as comments on political issues of the day. His views on the launch of the Russian Sputnik on October 4, 1957, for example, were interpreted by Louis as being pro-Russian. Allen wrote, “Sputnik I & II greatest story since discovery of fire has everybody here delighted. The side issue of America taking the Fall finally is too bad but seems inevitable, like the future is not ours, American, any more, as we used to think.” And in his journals Allen wrote, “It seems unimportant that it be America to surpass the earth, to moon, now that Russia has begun—As if America already had betrayed its promise of great spiritual victory—so now already’s beggared materialistically. What promise? To lead world to Fraternal Freedom full of comradely hip judgement. With this we surpass in poetry, to enrich world.” But as a socialist who firmly rejected Communism, Louis felt that Allen should be upset that Russia was leading the space race. As Louis got older, he became more conservative politically, and their correspondence was often heated. However, much of it was good-natured argument concerning poetry, line length, Williams, and Whitman.
In September, Louis asked Allen about his identity as a Jew, pointing out that Allen had investigated virtually every religion except the one that was his cultural heritage. Allen replied that he did not like being regarded as a “Jewish” poet. In later years, he would avoid, whenever possible, being interviewed by Jewish magazines or appearing in anthologies of Jewish poets. In answer to Louis’s letter he said, “I tend not to want to identify myself with Judaism (I mean, nor with Buddhism either). This because it gives me a theoretical abstract identity, other than the actual self, or no-self, that I am. In other words, I’m not really a Jew any more than I am a Poet. Sure I’m both. But there is a nameless wildness—life itself—which is deeper. I dig Buddha doctrinally (and some Hassidistic sayings which are similar to Zen sayings) because he realizes, says, all conceptions of the self which limit the self to a fixed identity are obviously arbitrary—and lead to illusory conflict. . . . But as with Buddhism, Judaism also seems bound & fixed to old institutional anachronisms, which have become rule and organisation, to which I feel unsympathetic. Dietary restrictions, some conceptions of eye for eye justice, Grandma pinching Eugene, a closing down of selfhood into doctrinal Judaism rather than an opening of self into nameless wildness—soul is soul, neither Jewish nor Buddhist. So finally it even begins dawning on me to stop thinking of myself as an American. And often in the dead of night I wonder who this fiction named Allen Ginsberg is—it certainly isn’t me.” Ginsberg was later to revise this opinion and, from the early 1970s, he declared himself a Buddhist.
Allen began to investigate French poetry and found that his command of French had improved considerably in the short time they had been in the country. At the Gallerie La Hune bookshop on Blvd. St. Germain he discovered works by poets associated with the Cubist and Surrealist movements: Max Jacob, Robert Desnos, Pierre Reverdy, Henri Pichette, Léon-Paul Fargue, Blaise Cendrars, and Jacques Prévert. He told Kerouac, “All personal and alive . . . I want to improve French & dig them, none translated, and all fine fellows, I can see from the pages of loose sprawled longlined scribblings they’ve published for 50 years.” He was amazed to find that there were books and pamphlets by Vladimir Mayakovski and Sergei Essenin translated into French that were as yet unknown in English, and believed the former was a particularly great writer. He wrote to Louis recommending him as “a major world poet like Lorca or Eliot—first great voice of the new Oriental age to come.”
Allen ran a few errands for Ferlinghetti, who wanted to publish a book of poems by Jacques Prévert in translation but had been unable to get permission. Allen offered to visit Prévert’s representative and was astonished at the difference between Prévert’s agent and the literary agents he knew in New York. The office was on the Ile Saint Louis in a sixteenth-century hotel privée. A maid in a black dress showed him into the book-lined study of the respectable elderly lady in charge, who was playing with her poodle. Allen made four visits, and though the lady was charming and courteous, nothing ever seemed to get done and Ferlinghetti still did not receive the letters he was expecting. Eventually the matter was sorted out and Paroles by Jacques Prévert was published as number nine in the Pocket Poets series, the volume following Gregory’s Gasoline.
It did not take long for Allen, Peter, and Gregory to discover that the heroin in Paris was better than what they could get in Mexico or with Bill Burroughs in New York. The main connection in the hotel was a man called Hadj, a name that meant that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was popular because he offered a very good deal. Allen told Jack, “So pure horse we sniff it, simply sniff, no ugly vaginal needles, & get as good almost a bang as main line, but longer lasting and stronger in long run.” Pot was easy to get and very cheap—”for Louvre visits.”
Every building and street was a delight to Allen, who was an inveterate museum-goer and sightseer. He loved the shabby sixteenth-century buildings in his quartier, the unexpected little squares, the busy market streets, and the water running in the gutters twice a day to clean them. He examined the wonderful scrolly detail of Hector Guimard’s Métro entrances, designed in 1900 in the purest Art Nouveau style. Paris was the perfect city for walking but Allen often got no farther than the Tabac St. Michel, a favorite with Beat Hotel regulars, or one of the nearby outdoor cafés on Blvd St. Germain, which was then still cobbled and looked much as it did when Baron Haussmann built it a century before. Allen was often accompanied by Peter on his walks but Gregory, who had already explored the city on his own that summer, was usually out with one of his various girlfriends, often returning to their room at the hotel early in the morning.
Allen enjoyed walking to the middle of Pont des Arts, the spindly iron bridge spanning the Seine from the Louvre to the Institut de France, built originally only for pedestrians, who could sit in chairs among boxed orange trees. It was a quiet haven from which to contemplate the fishermen on the Ile de la Cité and the fabulous Paris skyline. Another favorite place to sit and look at life was the Luxembourg Gardens, laid out in formal Italian style but peculiarly French in atmosphere, filled with students from the nearby University of Paris reading or sunning themselves on the benches. People gathered in clusters, perched on the heavy iron park chairs, while children enjoyed donkey rides or sailed their yachts on the round pond. There were marionettes and band concerts, old men playing cards and games of boule, and the thwack of a tennis ball could occasionally be heard on the nearby courts.
Allen was always keen to see literary sites, and made a point of visiting all the literary cafés: the Dôme, Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp, Flore, Rotonde, Closerie des Lilas, and La Coupole. He particularly liked Le Select on Blvd Montparnasse with its huge awning and scrolled neon sign, once home to Radclyffe Hall and Lady Una Troubridge, Picasso, Kiki de Montparnasse, André Gide, and Max Jacob. Whenever he could afford it he would sit outside and nurse a coffee, observing the passing sights. During his time at the Beat Hotel, Chester Himes wrote several of his books sitting outside the Select, cutting an impressive figure in his gabardine raincoat, crew cut, and little mustache. He looked as if he were impersonating one of the detectives he was writing about. Many of the hotel residents used to gather there during the day to plan their evenings. On November 13, Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac, “I sat weeping in Cafe Select . . . last week writing first lines of great formal elegy for my mother—
Farewell
with long black shoe
Farewell
smoking corsets & ribs of steel
Farewell
communist party & broken stocking
. . .
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy
with your eyes of stroke
with your eyes of divorce
with your eyes alone
with your eyes
with your eyes
with your death full of flowers
with your death of the golden windows of sunlight.
I write best when I weep, I wrote a lot of that weeping anyway and got idea for huge expandable form of such a poem, will finish later and make a big elegy, perhaps less repetitious in parts, but I gotta get a rhythm up to cry.”
The fifty-six lines he wrote in the Select were to become “Kaddish Part IV,” where they appeared with very few changes: a few repetitions eliminated and some images combined to give a tighter rhythm. Most of “Kaddish” was written in one very long session on his return to New York, but the idea for the poem had its origin in Paris. Though not as famous as “Howl,” it is widely regarded as Ginsberg’s best poem.
Allen had been reading the work of André Breton and this section of “Kaddish” is clearly influenced structurally by Breton’s poem “L’Union libre” (“Free Union”), first published in June 1931:
My wife with a belly like a giant claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
. . .
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweets
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
“Kaddish is the biography of Naomi Ginsberg, Allen's mother. Naomi had a severe case of schizophrenia, or dementia praecox, as it was then known. When he was a child Allen often had to stay home from school to look after her while she heard voices and prowled furtively around the apartment, convinced that Allen's grandmother was plotting to kill her. Naomi’s madness was the dominant theme of Ginsberg’s childhood and had a profound effect on him. In a poem in his Beat Hotel journals is the line “[I] realize, walking in reverie downstreet / that I love my mother, and she put me down / all thru my childhood, with her paranoia . . .”
Naomi was a member of the Communist Party and on her good days sometimes took Allen and his brother, Eugene, to cell meetings in Paterson, New Jersey, where they lived. Allen grew up in an atmosphere of political activism—of marches, rallies, pamphleteering, and letter-writing campaigns. His father was a schoolteacher and a published poet, with two books to his name. He was a Socialist, and he and Naomi had frequent quarrels over political issues. Naomi was a practicing naturist and often walked around the apartment naked. She was not attractive: she was overweight and her belly was scarred from operations. Allen maintained it was the sight of his mother that made him a homosexual, and complained that it was usually women who looked like her who were attracted to him.
When Naomi’s illness got too bad, she would go away, first to a private nursing home and then, later, to the big state mental hospitals of New Jersey and New York, where she was given insulin shock treatment and finally a lobotomy. In “Kaddish” Ginsberg tells the entire harrowing tale, sparing no details. Naomi and Louis had divorced, so when it came time for the family to authorize her lobotomy, this painful task lay with Allen; his elder brother was away by this time. Naomi died in 1955 in Pilgrim State Hospital in Long Island, New York. The last time Allen visited her there she did not recognize him.
Allen had been planning an elegy for his mother for several months. Her death, shortly after he had written “Howl,” which in some ways was also addressed to her, had so affected him that it was the obvious subject for his next major work. One of his Paris journals opens on page one with the heading “Elegy for Mama,” and the journals contain long passages, filling many pages, that did not make it into the final version of the poem: “. . . I have no mother’s belly left to crawl back to under the covers she’s in the grave, she’s a void—a longing for what was once not void but trembling weepy insane flesh . . .”
These sections prefigure the exceptionally long extended lines that make up most of “Kaddish,” but other early notations for the poem use the shorter line of the section Allen sent to Kerouac:
Mother, what should I have done to save you
Should I have put out the sun?
Should I have not called the police
Should I have been your lover
Should I have held your hands and walked in the park
at midnight for 60 years?
I am a poet, I will put out the sun
The madness of his mother was the great tragedy of Ginsberg’s life, and it shaped and formed his ideas and attitudes. It gave him a certain fatalism, an awareness of the transitory nature of things. This, possibly combined with the influence of his parents’ left-leaning idealism, meant that Allen never became materialistic; for instance, he read voraciously but gave books away and never kept first editions—books were to be read and not collected. Fashion, gourmet food, fine wines, antiques, furniture design, cars, all the boiugeois pleasures failed to provoke his interest. He was fascinated by madness and extremes of feeling and self-expression. Given a choice of which letters to read first, he would put aside correspondence from friends and begin with a ten-page letter written on lined paper in smudged colored chalks sent by an unknown fan.
Dealing with his mother’s madness had left Allen with an enormous reservoir of tolerance for antisocial behavior and craziness to the extent that he rarely ever noticed abnormal behavior unless it was extreme. He felt an empathy with disturbed people, the muttering drunks on the Bowery, the old lady talking loudly to herself, people who heard voices, the downtrodden and the homeless, and he was attracted to them. His association with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs when he was at college in the early ’40s introduced him to a bohemian world of drug dealers and petty thieves. At that time he had befriended a small-time thief and male hustler named Herbert Huncke, whose behavior was so “heinous” that the cops on Times Square called him The Creep and sometimes threw him off the Square in disgust. Huncke would steal from anyone, no matter how down-and-out they were, and invariably took advantage of friendship. Allen allowed Huncke to move in on him, steal his belongings, and eventually, in 1947, get him busted for possession of stolen goods. As a result Allen spent nine months in the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute while Huncke went to jail. Huncke was to spend a total of eleven years of his life in jail, but he eventually became something of a Beat Generation legend, and, encouraged by Allen, he wrote a series of short stories, published as his autobiography and titled Guilty of Everything.
Allen himself had heard voices. One afternoon, when he was a student at Columbia, in a top-floor apartment looking out over the rooftops of Harlem, he experienced an auditory hallucination of William Blake’s ancient voice reading poetry to him across the vault of time. For several days afterward, he saw reality with a shuddering intensity, observed the armoring that people surround themselves with, witnessed their sadness and fear, their crushed hopes and expectations. He felt such powerful waves of compassion and understanding for the human condition that it made him fear he was going mad like his mother. This vision, or perhaps partial nervous breakdown, was to dominate his life for many years, strengthening his attachment to those outside society, the insane, the criminal, the rejected. For him junkies and thieves were saints and angels—”angelheaded hipsters”—and they became the subject matter of “Howl” as well as other poems. Allen’s own lifestyle also placed him outside normal society: he was homosexual, he used heroin and marijuana, and he was regarded by the authorities as a threat to the American Way of Life. For Allen Ginsberg, the Beat lifestyle was not a pose; for him it was the only life that made any sense, it was the only life possible.
