Allen Ginsberg & Howl by Adam Worsley

Allen Ginsberg � Howl

BY ADAM WORSLEY ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLOTTE MCGLINCHEY

How does Allen Ginsberg’s Howl illuminate the principle themes and stylistic concerns of the Beat movement?

Ginsberg described how his long-time friend and fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac would drink heavily, lose his mind, and find himself thrown out of bars and beaten up in their alleyways; Ginsberg admitted that, stylistically at least, he “very definitely” owed a lot to Kerouac’s On The Road while he wrote Howl. Beat came to mean many different things to many different people. Kerouac understood the grand orchestra of universal reality as music; “everything is going to the beat – It’s the beat generation, it’s beat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like old-time low-down.” He coined the name ‘The Beat Generation’ after meeting Hunke, who simply told Kerouac he was feeling “beat”.

The bloodshed caused by the world wars had beaten down world consciousness, and it struggled to understand the horrors which had taken place; the full impact of the German-ordered Holocaust and the American atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities Nagasaki and Hiroshima reached the limits of imagination. The Beat Generation wasn’t “a political or social rebellion” at its inception, but it certainly grew that way as the poets matured. Over the course of Ginsberg’s poem Howl, beat changes meaning from being beaten down to feeling beatific.

Ginsberg and Kerouac studied at Columbia University. They met through Kerouac’s girlfriend, Edie, and bonded over “the tearfulness of [their] ghost presence,” while they walked through the campus; Ginsberg did not expect “a big jock” to be so “sensitive and intelligent about poetry.” Encouraged by Ginsberg along with Carr and Burroughs, Kerouac began to write. Ginsberg was a massive promoter of Kerouac’s work. He would take Kerouac’s manuscripts and try to get them published wherever he could; The Town and The City was published in February 1950 and Kerouac received a thousand dollar advance for the manuscript.

Kerouac spent three weeks and three nights typing the first manuscript of what became his second published novel, On The Road. Stylistically, the prose reads as rushed as the composition was; Kerouac’s continuous stream of consciousness style was fuelled by amphetamine and hundreds of miles worth of unrestricted awareness into the American psyche. Kerouac had an admiration for jazz music, which he emulated in his prose style. He wanted to be considered “a jazz poet blowing long blues in an afternoon jazz session on a Sunday.” Fellow beatnik William Burroughs described how Kerouac would believe the first draft of a text was the best. Kerouac would take up “sketching with words” which allowed his innermost thoughts pour out of him. Ginsberg set out to “build a modern contemporary metaphorical yak poem using the… weaving rhythm that Jack [Kerouac] does in his prose”. The United States was alive with the music of syncopated rhythms in downtown dives as jazz swept across the nation during the 40s and 50s. In 1944 Kerouac introduced Ginsberg to the sound, and Ginsberg discovered that Kerouac’s literary style was based on the jazz played by Charlie Parker. Kerouac improvised haikus which were translated into music by freestyle musicians. The beat writers had found a “new consciousness,” founded on a rejection of “dominant spiritual norms and established religious institutions.” The writers believed in their “new vision” which spread beyond the confines of the United States, reaching Europe, and through the tenacity of characters like Gary Snyder, the Far East.

Satori is a “non-dualistic state of mind outside the parameters of language.” Ginsberg considered himself a spoken word poet, influenced by Buddhist mantras written to capture the spiritual power present in sound. Although Ginsberg and Kerouac both vowed to undertake Eastern philosophy and spirituality, they traversed very different paths. Kerouac practiced celibacy and viewed nakedness as a sin through a combina-

tion of his Catholic upbringing and Hinayana Buddhist studies, while Ginsberg practised yabyum, an Eastern sex tantra, and was renowned for his participation in orgies. After consuming various narcotics at parties, Ginsberg would remove his clothes and suggest everyone “get naked”.

Ginsberg’s sexuality is a dominant theme in his writing, particularly in Howl. He had homosexual fantasies at a young age and these developed into humiliation and master/slave fantasies as he grew up. Although his poem Howl was taken to court over obscenity charges, Howl is tamer than some of his other poems in terms of sexual imagery and desire; because Howl was never banned, Ginsberg was free to explore his more intimate perversions present in Please Master, which he wrote in 1968. Howl does make reference to his sexual desire; he has drugged dreams of “alcohol and cock and endless balls.” The sexual liberation apparent in Ginsberg’s life is reflected in his poetry; free from sexual norms, Ginsberg understood himself to move freely between homosexuality and heterosexuality as his mood took him. A revered psychologist named Timothy Leary publicly claimed to have challenged Ginsberg’s sexuality during a psychedelic session he hosted, leaving Ginsberg to describe how he would “have babies instead of jacking off into limbo”.

Ginsberg met William Carlos Williams’ work while he was studying at Columbia University, and although his professors dismissed Williams’ work as “immature,” Ginsberg was inspired enough to pen him a letter after watching Williams perform in New York. Williams had met Ezra Pound at the University of Pennsylvania which began a stylistic harmony with the European imagists; whenever Pound thought that Williams’ work was out of touch, he would provide Williams with reading lists. The imagists dealt with “direct treatment of the thing” and Williams made sure to convert Ginsberg to this way of thinking about poetry. Ginsberg was preoccupied with tight rhymes and classical language, which Williams believed to be slightly artificial. Ginsberg acted upon this advice as he grew as an artist in the build-up to writing Howl. Williams also practiced spontaneous writing in an attempt to free his poetry and he discovered “more flexible, jagged, patterns of form and syntax”.

Walt Whitman’s long line captured his “expansive freedom of poetic style and vision of an expansive American culture.” Although Whitman was taught during Ginsberg’s college course, Ginsberg believed his teachers to disrespect Whitman, putting him

down as “a negativist crude yea-sayer who probably had a frustrated homosexual libido.” A pioneer of free verse, Whitman’s long lines include repetition and parallel syntax. Ginsberg would frequently use anaphora throughout Howl. He begins the majority of lines by returning to the pronoun ‘who’ in Part I, ‘Moloch’ in Part II, ‘I’m with you in Rockland/Where’ in Part III, and ‘Holy!’ in Footnote To Howl. The incantatory syntax produces cumulative episodes of speech that “simply exist, next to each other, without conflict and without hierarchy of greater and lesser, and they are unified not by complex relations among the parts, but by a simple and all-embracing relation between any part and the whole.” Influenced by Whitman, Ginsberg employed a ‘Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,’ where he would reel off long lines in one breath, returning to the anaphora after exhaling. Ginsberg explained that often “the page determines the length of the line,” and that generally shorter lines, for example those which might be written on a pocket notebook, “could be extended out on the page to be like a long line, or strophe.” These poetic long lines are “all held together in the elastic of the breath, through varying lengths”.

Ginsberg received a vision upon reading William Blake’s poem Ah! Sun-flower! “It was like God had a human voice” and the tender and prophetic voice read the poem back to Ginsberg in such a manner that made Ginsberg reinterpret the poem until he understood it from the perspective of the sunflower. The sky became “ancient, the gateway to infinity,” and Ginsberg began to look upon his surroundings anew; he marvelled at the ornamental rooftops and “this consciousness of being alive unto [himself].” Ginsberg experienced Blake’s voice reading two other poems in his room, The Sick Rose and The Little Girl Lost. These hallucinations brought with them a “rhyme and rhythm, that if properly heard in the inner inner ear, would deliver you beyond the universe;” it was as if “Blake had penetrated the very secret core of the entire universe.” Ginsberg referenced this experience in Howl: “who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under a tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology”.

Blake was privy to his own mystic visionary experience and obsessed with plotting the path to spiritual cognition within his works. Ginsberg searched through Blake’s published poems, looking for a method to regain the vision that Blake’s poetry had offered him. Ginsberg began to see “all types of divine significance” in the texts he read, and “supra-consciousness” returned to him as he read from Blake’s The

Human Abstract. The faces in the shop around Ginsberg turned “wild” as he once more entered “the eternal place.” Influenced by Blake’s poetry, he thought his mission was to “annihilate ordinary consciousness and expand mystic consciousness,” which he believed to be possible through consuming “every powerful hallucinogen [he] could find”.

Ginsberg became a public advocate for psychedelic drugs, including cannabis, over the course of his life. “Everywhere he went, he spoke of legalising pot and the benefits of LSD,” although he was careful to discuss the drug’s effects without withholding the hell narrative potent narcotics can unravel in one’s mind. He became a public voice for drug legalisation movements, speaking on the podium and to news crews at a pro-cannabis rally in Hyde Park, London. Speaking to a crowd gathered at the Arlington Street Church in Boston, Ginsberg suggested that “everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, should try the chemical LSD at least once; every man, woman, and child in good health over the age of fourteen.” Ginsberg’s “visions! Omens! Hallucinations! Miracles! Ecstasies!” are brought on by a counter-culture desire to explore an unknown internal reality; the revolution of the self proceeded the ‘peacenik’ revolution Ginsberg fathered during the 60s and 70s. Blake wore a red bonnet symbolic of his support for French Revolutionaries, and wrote fervently about rebellion; Ginsberg proudly toted his own anti-establishment views openly in his mannerisms, advocation, and poetry.

Blake was born to a family of religious dissenters. His parents did not follow the conformist Christian church, and neither did Blake; he saw religion as something still being discovered, and set out to try and capture the wonder and horror of God in his poetry. Ginsberg described the “sphinx of cement and aluminium” he named Moloch, the demonic power behind civilisation. Partly modelled on Blake’s Urizen, pure reason and abstract form, Moloch is manifest in man-made objects from skyscrapers to bombs, “a vast, all-encompassing social reality.” The urban apocalypse outlined in Part II of Howl is produced by Moloch, who “like Blake’s Urizenic God… reigns over a world cast in the image of his own singularity;” Moloch is alone in the material and the physical realms and as he consumes both worlds he is swept up by the rivers of time. Ginsberg stated that “Blake really is the great source of radiant awareness”.

Ginsberg was notoriously politically active. He protested Madame Nhu, the First Lady of South Vietnam, who had famously mocked Thích Quang Đuc after he had set himself on fire, calling it a “barbeque”. Ginsberg would appeal to the crowd using “pure hippy rhetoric, enunciated for the first time”. His first march was in Paterson, New Jersey, protesting Mayor Hague. Ginsberg was still a child, handing out leaflets. He referenced these activist ideals in Howl; “who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism/who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square”. Aghast at anti-communism military intervention by the United States in Vietnam, but powerless to stop them with his method of peaceful protest, Ginsberg began tracking the source of the opioid drugs he had found on American streets; he boldly claimed that the CIA was involved with trafficking opium from South East Asia. He calculated that 80% of American street heroin was imported from South East Asia, claiming that with the help of the CIA, Madame Nhu and Nguyen Van Thieu, who was head of the US-backed “puppet government” in south Vietnam, were behind the influx in order to get the support of poppy farmers in countries where they were fighting their ideological war.

Ginsberg became fascinated with the atomic bomb and the devastating mushroom cloud it left in its wake. During a psychedelic session with Leary, he worked up the energy to propose a phone-tree system, whereby he would make calls to his contacts, and demanding that they do the same, speak about “peace and love… and settle all this about the Bomb once and for all”. Ginsberg accepted an award for literature from the French government while they were undertaking nuclear tests on some Pacific islands; he told the culture secretary who handed him his award that he did not agree with their nuclear tests, although he was grateful for the recognition.

Although Howl was successful as a printed book, the real poetic experience was invoked by his live performances. Inspired by vocal Eastern mantras, Ginsberg believed in the spiritual power of specific words and repetition. “The poem’s chanting rhythms, iconoclastic language, and accumulating energy had the audience weeping and cheering.” Ginsberg was not shy of accumulating fame; he “wanted big mass distribution”. Politically and spiritually, Ginsberg viewed his work at a crossroads in consciousness, straying away from war and heterosexual male-dominated narrative to produce poetry reminiscent of Blake, Whitman, and Williams. “Ginsberg’s particular success has been to become the truly popular poet that Whitman only imagined himself to be”.

The movement the Beat Generation developed, temporally linked with Leary’s mind-expansion psychology, was rooted in the sound the Beats had discovered in New York dive bars in the 40s and 50s. “If there had not been a Gallery Six Reading, there would not have been an ongoing Beat Generation.” Kerouac was excitable during the Gallery Six Reading, even though he did not perform himself; he would shout “Go!” at the end of each of Ginsberg’s Whitmanic lines, in order to further mesmerise the crowd. When describing his influences, Ginsberg stated that “I was conscious of Blake’s prophetic books, and Whitman… Kerouac, most of all, was the biggest influence”.

In the Beat movement, Ginsberg’s Howl especially, was somehow attempted to be portrayed in a way that was understood on an everyday level for the time. Yet, it was still considered controversial after its publication due to references to Ginberg’s life that included a lot of obscenity. However, even though it being controversial, Howl was eventually ruled to be not obscene. This implies that Ginsberg’s lifestyle would go on to have an impact on how the Beat generation’s poetry would therefore be popularised ever since.