Night Beat (69 page)

But the budding movement also could lead to costly excesses. In August 1944, Lucien Carr stabbed to death a friend of his, David Kammerer, after a night of drinking and arguing. Carr was a beautiful young man, and Kammerer, who had been obsessed with him, had relentlessly pursued and pushed Carr. After the stabbing, Carr went directly to Burroughs’ apartment and admitted what he had done. Burroughs advised Carr to turn himself in to the police. Carr then went and awakened Kerouac and repeated his confession. Kerouac helped Carr get rid of the knife. In a few days, Carr turned himself in to the police, and Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as accessories after the fact. Ginsberg as well was castigated for being part of such a dangerous crowd. In truth, though, Ginsberg felt that in some way the group’s “libertine” attitudes had helped make the tragedy possible—and that understanding made Allen much more careful, in years to come, about any excesses that might lead to violence. Eventually, Carr was sent to prison (he served two years), and for a short time, the old crowd dispersed. A few months later, Ginsberg was found in his Columbia dormitory in bed with Kerouac; for that infraction—and for having written offensive graffiti in the dust of a windowsill—Allen was suspended from the university for a year. Things went up and down for the group for a few years. People drifted in and out of New York, and then in 1949, Ginsberg got involved in the life of Herbert Huncke, drug addict and thief. That association resulted later in Ginsberg’s arrest and his being committed to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute—a turn of events that would in time have great effect on his poetry writing.

Prior to that, though, in late 1946, a new figure showed up in the Beat circle—and his involvement with the crowd had a seismic impact on both Ginsberg and Kerouac. Neal Cassady was a sharp-featured, handsome, fast-talking, brilliant natural prodigy. He didn’t so much write (in fact, he wrote very little), but he did live his life as if it were a novel. He drove across America relentlessly, loved to masturbate frequently each day, and also fucked a good number of the beautiful women (and some of the men) he met along the way. He became involved with Carolyn Robinson, and the couple eventually settled down in Denver for a time. Kerouac was taken by Cassady’s intense, fast-clip language—like a spoken version of bebop—and with Cassady’s willingness to go as far as he could with the sensual experience and sensory rush of life. Ginsberg was impressed by the same traits, but he was also entranced by Cassady’s beauty. One night, following a party, Ginsberg and Cassady found themselves sharing the same bed. Ginsberg was scared of his own desires, he later admitted, but Cassady put his arm around Allen and pulled him close, in a gentle motion. It was the first time in his life that Ginsberg felt truly loved, and it was also his first passionate sexual experience.

Ginsberg fell in love with Cassady, and his pursuit of that love—and the intensity of how wrong it all went—proved a key episode in leading to his development as an artist. Cassady, in the meantime, started to discourage the attraction. Ginsberg was undaunted and followed Neal to Colorado. Though he and Neal still had occasional sex, he knew it meant little to Cassady. He returned to New York, devastated, and later went on to fall into trouble with Huncke.

BY THE EARLY 1950s, Ginsberg had gone through severe pain over his loss of Cassady and had also gone through psychiatric treatment. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and was working in an advertising agency in Manhattan. One day, discussing this matter, Ginsberg’s therapist asked him what he
really
wanted to do with his life. Ginsberg replied: Quit his job and write poetry. The therapist said: “Well, why don’t you?” Then, in 1954, the old crowd started to reassemble in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Cassadys had moved to San Jose, and Kerouac settled in for a visit. In San Francisco itself, a poetry movement was beginning to burgeon, inspired in part by the success of local poets Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—the latter who had just opened the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights, and who had started to publish local poets. Allen headed for San Jose. He was thinking about poetry, but he was also still thinking about Neal. One afternoon, Carolyn walked into her home to see Neal and Allen in bed, Ginsberg sucking Cassady’s penis. She ordered Ginsberg from their home, drove him to San Francisco, gave him $20, and left him there.

It was the best thing that ever happened to Ginsberg. He soon fell in with the poet crowd in San Francisco’s North Beach area, and he met a man that he would stay involved with for decades, Peter Orlovsky. All the hopes and visions that had formed years before in New York were starting to come to fruition for some of the old crowd—especially for Kerouac, who had finished two novels, and for Ginsberg, who was ready for something to break loose in his poetry. One afternoon in August 1955, Ginsberg sat down at a typewriter in his tiny apartment and attempted to write a poem for his own ear, but also a poem that would catch the free-flowing style that he had seen Kerouac hit upon in his own recent writing. Ginsberg wrote the whole day, thinking about many things: his lost loves, his found loves, the discarded people of America, the discarded promises of America, the fear that was just behind him, the fear that lay ahead for all.

Two months later, in October, Ginsberg—with help from Kenneth Rexroth—organized a poetry reading, to be given at a cooperative art gallery, the Six Gallery, to showcase a handful of the scene’s poets. Six poets read that evening—including Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia—to a crowd of maybe fifty to one hundred people, with Kerouac sitting on the gallery’s floor, drinking and tapping out rhythms on a wine jug, urging “Go! Go!” to the cadences of the poets’ words. Ginsberg was the last to read, and as he began “Howl”—the poem he had written in one sitting two months earlier—the crowd was transfixed from the first lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

Ginsberg went on to describe the fearsome evil that he saw America becoming—”Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!”—and when he finished, the crowd exploded in applause. “All of a sudden,” Rexroth later said, “Ginsberg read this thing that he had been keeping to himself all this while, and it just blew things up completely. Things would never be quite the same again.”

“Howl” was one of the most incandescent events in post-World War II literary history or popular culture, and its arrival later ensured the Beats their place on the map of modern time. Also, because “Howl” was a poem that had such force when read aloud by Ginsberg, it marked a return of poetry to the art of vocalization. But most important, “Howl” was the first major American work of the era that spoke for the outcasts, for the mad and the lost, and about what would soon happen in the nation’s soul. In the context of those times, in the midst of a frightened new patriotism that was being defined by fears of socialism and communism and a desperate need to believe in the assurance of the family structure and traditional mores, “Howl” battered at the heart of the American ideal of civilization. It was a heroic work, on many levels. America was hardly prepared to admit that homosexuality might be anything other than a form of madness; for a poet—for anybody—to declare pride or pleasure to be queer was to run a monumental risk. To talk about—to cherish those who “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy”—was no small matter. In effect, it meant aligning oneself with madness, with inexpressible values. To find grace and worthy companionship and celebration in the company of junkies, prostitutes, and black jazz revolutionaries only pushed the ante more. Something opened up in America’s culture and in its future the day that Ginsberg gave utterance to these thoughts with “Howl.” The following year, working from quite different quarters, Elvis Presley in his own way helped push the gates open as well. “We liked Elvis,” poet Gregory Corso later said of the night he and Kerouac watched Presley on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” We identified with the sexual wiggling of his body.”

“Howl” and Presley. Nothing would ever be the same after that. America’s libido, America’s likelihood, had been ripped wide open.

THIS ISN’T TO SAY that “Howl” was immediately or widely read or praised. Quite the contrary: The reaction of some people was that “Howl” should
never
be widely read. In 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who published the first editions of “Howl”) and a City Lights Bookstore employee were arrested for knowingly selling obscenity and put on trial. The prosecutor was a Bay Area district attorney, Ralph McIntosh, bent on closing down porn shops and prohibiting the sale of magazines with nudity. The ACLU, Grove Press,
Evergreen Review,
and poet Kenneth Patchen, among others, offered their support to Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and “Howl.” Among those testifying on behalf of the poem’s serious merits were Rexroth and author Walter Van Tilburg Clark. In his final argument, McIntosh asked Judge Clayton W. Horn: “Your Honor, how far are we going to license the use of filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language? How far can we go?”

Horn ruled that “Howl” was not lacking in social relevance and therefore could not be ruled obscene. In delivering his decision, Horn also offered what may be the single best succinct review that “Howl” received: “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 in a plea for holy living.”

Though Ginsberg was vindicated and suddenly famous, he was determined not to arrive as the Beats’ sole writer-hero. Over the years, he helped Jack Kerouac in his long quest to publish
On the Road—
a book about Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady (who was called Dean Moriarty in the published text)—which had been turned down by numerous major publishers since 1951. The book was finally published by Viking, in 1957, as a result of Ginsberg’s efforts, and went on to both good commercial and critical reception, and is now recognized as a milestone novel in modern literature. Ginsberg also championed the cause of William S. Burroughs—a much tougher sell, because Burroughs was a drug user who wrote radical prose (such as
Junky
), and because he had killed his wife in a shooting accident in Mexico in 1951. Ginsberg understood that his old friend felt a tremendous guilt and Ginsberg also believed Burroughs might never redeem himself unless he could concentrate his soul and mind on his writing. Ginsberg later helped Burroughs assemble the final draft of
Naked Lunch
and worked tirelessly until the book was published in the United States. (Which resulted in
Naked Lunch’
s own obscenity trial and another ruling that the book could not be held to be called obscene.)

The Beats were—at least for a brief time—a force in American arts and letters, but there remained many who were incensed by their words and beliefs. In 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stood before the Republican Convention and declared that “Beatniks” were among America’s major menaces. In addition, Norman Podhoretz—an old classmate of Ginsberg’s at Columbia and by 1958 the editor of
Commentary
magazine—asserted that the Beats were an affront to the nation’s central ideals. By the end of the decade, the Beats had been sidelined, declared a silly aberration by moralist critics on both the right and left. But despite all the resistance and disdain, Ginsberg continued to grow and thrive as a poet—and to remain undaunted. At the conclusion of one of his most defiant works, “America,” he wrote: “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”