Allen Ginsberg

Kaddish
Howl
The Family Business

All I have to say about Kaddish and Howl is that I so agree with Allen's dad: Allen should have done away with the graphic obscenities... but I do conceed that had he done so the poems would probably not be famous nor would he. If these were the only two things I'd ever read in relation to Ginsberg, I probably would not have been able to relate to or feel for this man on any level. But Allen Ginsberg is thankfully so much more than Kaddish and Howl. Probably the best thing he ever was... was someone's beloved son.

The Family Business
This book was tremendously long, not only because it was roughly 400 pages, but because many of those pages had to do with era politics. As Louis said in a letter to Allen, "...we corresponded often in long, three-page letters on the meaning of life, on Communism, on world events, and poetry and so forth." At length I found this excruciating. However, unlike Lewis' Screwtape Letters, this was a very easy read. Interesting not only as a human study on the private relationship between father and son but also on a historical (and yes, political) level as it moves through, in my humble opinion, one of the most in-flux periods of American history.

Louis Ginsberg is to be loved! I identify with much of his moral/social conviction. His intelligence makes his scathing criticisms an absolute hoot. I giggled my way through his delicious correspondence.

Although horrified by much of Allen's individual truths and passions, still I could relate to his emotional extremes. Not particularly wanting to see any deep identifications with Allen, it frightened me at first, but I suppose people are people and certainly Allen wasn't all bad. I'd simply like to be better than I am. However, I'm as neurotically fragile as Allen on some counts, and could empathize with his tragic obsessions and ensuing disappointments.

An example of Allen's correspondence from pg. 21, regarding perverted characters in a novel he was writing yet never completed:

"...I do not hesitate to pervert my characters
(and I paint them worse than they are in real life)...you are horrified by their emotional unbalance. You shrink from it, half in fear. This to me is a symptom of the smug normalcy of the bourgeois intellectual attitude. You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious..."

What I find interesting about this excerpt, aside from the fact that I think Allen is right, is that as he charges his father of being afraid of society's dereliction, Allen is afraid of society's normality. I think Louis was right about finding a balance to life, centering onesself, in spite of his obvious personal propensity toward such ground due to the seriously complete mental breakdown of his first wife, Naomi, Allen's mother... who, incidentally, Allen perhaps inherited some semblance of mental illness from, as, in addition to other things, Allen claimed to hear the audible voice of "William Blake speaking to him through the ages."

On the out, one may get the idea, as Allen seemed to, that Louis rejected the ugliness of truth, wanting it replaced with something aesthetically pleasing. While there may be something to that, due again in part to the heartbreak he went through with Naomi, I think the criticism may be a little inaccurate and partly a symptom of Allen's suceptibility to extremes. A combination of both perhaps. It is so interesting to watch from afar.

Louis took issue with Allen's use of vulgarities. He encouraged Allen to lose them saying that they would "entangle [Allen] in trouble" and that they were unnecessary. While Louis was right in his advice, in 1956 young American people were just chomping at the bit for this type of wild abandon (read: smut). What is mere standard in today's Jerry Springer world was something altogether novel midcentury. This may have flown back then, but today the odd thing is that Louis' point becomes more valid: the vulgarities are distracting, and the bare-naked truth, being in a state of surpluss, makes parts of Allen's poetry a little obsolete, imho.

Louis dazzled me with beautiful phrases such as:
"Any sirens try to loop a curl of their hair about you?" He was asking after his son's romantic life... before understanding that Allen was gay.

Allen's concept of creativity I think was pure enough. I only contend that he took it too far. Still, one has to admire this excerpt from an Allen letter:

"Official literature, the foundations, the colleges, is run by people like him who have no interest in life except what they can get out of it through acceptable channels and all their work is one big psychic as*licking operation. I mean dominated by a desire for respectability and acceptance rather than the bitter gaiety of their own souls."

I think that some of the success of Kaddish, written about his mother's death, is explained by the fact that Allen combined his poetry with the rhythms of the Hebrew prayer. Kind of a Kaddish Remix.

Back to the letters... there was a lot of formality in them. Not one is addressed to "Dad". These are those Yankees who call their folks by their proper names. It sort of freaks us southerners out, but I think it was just some sort of standard with them. Obviously, there was a lot of love between these two fellows, so I try not to read much into the lack of "Mom" and "Dad".

One thing that sort of disappoints me is that Allen chose art and personal expression over honoring his father who shared with Allen that he was embarrassed by many of the things Allen insisted upon including in his poetry, such as talk of Naomi's "beard" (around her vagina). I know many will wave my perspective away as immature or unevolved. They will think that I don't understand purity of craft. I do. Even so, as I've aged, I really do see that what our lot could use more than "liberation" is a bit of personal sacrifice for the benefit of others, particularly our parents...

Louis was extraordinarily well-read as was his son who also traveled the world like a fiend. Aside from the mind-numbing politics, they spoke often existentially, rolling around the universe, energy, creation, life, death, etc. until I felt like a dust mote under the wide open sky of the entire universe. They'd go off like this so often I began to call them "MoonPie moments". (When they'd start up, it was a good time to leave the room and eat a MoonPie until they finished.)

One thing I noted was that Louis subscribed to the idea of nature's indifference like most poets. He often says nature is all bosom but no heart, and he uses this indifference to disprove the existence of God on page 162:

"Then down to earth, a mindless force seems oblivious of man; nature, like a mother, is all bosom but no heart; cancers, malformations, still-births, monstrosities, wars, volcanic eruptions, natural and various kinds of catastrophes all attest to disprove that 'God watches the fall of every sparrow.'" Louis did not, however, describe himself as an atheist but as an "ardent agnostic".

In a letter to Allen, Louis references Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" when speaking about Louis' mother's death:

"As the pallbearers carried the coffin to the grave, dug out beside my father's, I fancied I heard the faint echo of the hoofs of Emily's horses as "their heads were toward Eternity."

Allen responds:
"Yes Emily Dickinson's horses are amazing Prophesy, that is at moments the Symbol of their destiantion takes on a cosmic inevitability and a strain of unforeseen light enters the mind."

Without knowing, these two wrote beautiful poetry when they conversed. Here is a long paragraph taken from one of Louis' letters to Allen. I've chopped it up and given it a different form:

"At the burial
as the casket was toiling its way slowly down
into the impartial hospitality of the open grave,
there flashed through my mind,
like a rapidly running movie,
some incidents in her life:
her coming to America,
her marriage,
my childhood and its scenes in Newark,
my starting to write on 15 Ave.
(Often she insisted,
though tired,
in wrapping the laundry bundles,
because, she told my father,
I was too busy upstairs writiting poetry),
her efforts at consoling you and Eugene
at the various summers in Belmar
while Naomi was away,
etc. etc.
All in a flash,
as the coffin slowly sank,
her body emptied of her countless errands,
dust to dust,
bestowing her immortality
to her children and grandchildren."
8-13-62

And here's a paragraph from one of Allen's letters. Like the above writing, it's verbatim, just chopped up and reformed to look like a poem:

"Have been spending a lot of time
in the burning ghats
(where Hindus dispose of bodies in small wood fires)
on Ganges bank,
sitting at night and talking
and smoking ganja
(same as marijuana)
with holymen.
It's the custom here,
sort of Tantrik discipline -
to see and familiarize self
with dissolution of the body
and be at home with corpses
and hair burning
and eyeballs sizzling
etc.
Amazing how after a few visits
one realizes
nothing is happening
except a lot of old
sofas and pillows of meat
are being disposed of.
12-7-62

This is the way my mind works when I read a lot of their letters. They're poets unaware. It really was in them. Louis explains in an article he wrote about Allen for the Chicago Sun-Times:

"...we would live bad if we didn't write. And we'd write bad if we didn't live."

One of the things I adore about Louis is that he was a very punny man. Two examples:

"Such things should be obscene but not heard."
"...the hippies want pot in every chicken."

An aging Louis says:

"Meanwhile, my burial plot near the Newark-Elizabeth line waits very patiently while I am writing new poems to badger Death and bait oblivion. Maybe I'll rescue something of myself from the flow of Time."

He often talked of death this way, of being surprised and glad for each new day of life in his later years, and of trying to write something that would fix his moments eternally.

On pg. 295 Louis mentions a poem he wrote called "A Quiet Street After Rain" which includes these lines:

"Nearby a spider has begun
Upon a fence to thread the sun."

He provides the requisite spider, thus cementing his good poet status.

In a letter to Allen, wisely, Louis speaks of the "violence of the fanatics who mistake themselves for saints," and quotes Nietzsche:

"Those who set out to kill monsters should take care not to turn themselves into monsters."

This is very relevant today.

The book ends with the deaths of Louis and ultimately Allen several years later. I found myself all welled up with tears. I cared.

I'm glad I read the book because it made me feel for Allen as a person, something I didn't do after reading his poetry prior to reading Family Business. The book shows you the sweet Allen, the idealist, the troubled Allen... but it gives you insight as to why there's the troubled aspect. Partly, he was an idealist, yes, but he did have mental illness in the family, and he did witness if not inherit it. There is a letter that talks about Naomi, his mother, coming out of the bathroom with superficially slit wrists, prior to her institutionalization. The children were there. They saw their frantic father threatening to beat the bathroom door down one minute and then their mother exiting with bloody wrists the next minute. They saw their father's heartbreak; they all felt their own. They all lost Naomi, and that took chunks out of them. Allen never really forgave himself, I don't think, for authorizing Naomi's frontal labotomy in the institution. I think it tortured him in some deep place, while his father tried to chase the ghosts away. Very sad. I think you probably get on with it, but you never really get over it. Allen was a survivor. They all were. The heartbreak was tremendous. It evoked pity and concern in me. It evoked empathy and understanding.

Allen was wrong about a lot of things, and while Louis is more the speed of this "square", the surprising thing is that I really did come to care for Allen as a person. And his poetry... well, I still hate that!

Visit Allen's grave.