The Poet Who Became a Climate of Opinion : GINSBERG: A Biography <i> by Barry Miles (Simon & Schuster: $24.95; 520 pp.) </i>

Allen Ginsberg’s life is the stuff of saga. Indeed, Ginsberg has written that saga himself: His thousands of poems and songs, his published letters and journals amount to a voluminous record of a great, improbable, wholly American picaresque life, full of exuberance and rebellion, weirdness and gayness, political and philosophical witness. Since 1955, when he burst into public view reading “Howl” in San Francisco (as Jack Kerouac passed around jugs of wine and chanted “Go!”), Ginsberg has made himself up as he’s gone along, hurled himself into grand adventures and thought seriously about them, created and promoted his own myth. One of the essential poets of our time, and more--a star-poet, a minstrel--he became, as Auden wrote about Freud, “a whole climate of opinion.”

From the “Howl” reading on, Ginsberg has been celebrated, and execrated, for representing something beyond himself: the uncontrollable, declaimer of poems, lover of men and boys, promoter of beat writers, apostle of psychedelics, defier of cops, public nuisance and public Buddhist. He has made (and I mean created) scene after scene; he has been a dervish of energy and a moral force. In his blunt, bearlike, Jewish-uncle form, he was “the return of the repressed” in person. As the poet with the marvelous combination of shaggy beard and open stare, he personified the subterranean Beat counterculture of the ‘50s; wearing his American flag top hat, depicted in a poster sitting on the toilet, or on the evening news chanting OM to the camera or the police, Ginsberg the LSD guru and cooler-out of Hell’s Angels--love him or leave him--was a major personification of the spirit of the ‘60s.

That a poet should have played such a part in the public life of postwar America seems nothing short of miraculous. Though celebrity cheapens any artist’s achievements, one never should lose sight of Ginsberg’s poetry--and indeed, the poems have been far from a minor ingredient in the public persona. The fitful, sketchy, matter-of-fact style he arrived at in “Howl”--long breath units, rhythmic accumulations, poker-faced references to sex and drugs, lists and riffs--he put to work tracking his personal odyssey in public. Many of his poems have come out as transcriptions of intimate experience--facts of his mother’s insanity and death, confessions of sexual anguish and pride, tales of love-making and many a spiritual pilgrimage on American and other back highways. Again and again, Ginsberg has done it in the road, in public--not only in his own writings in voluminous interviews in print and films, on posters and video, and then as a presence in other people’s books: as Carlo Marx, in the novelistic renditions of Jack Kerouac; as himself in Jane Kramer’s evocative 1969 book, “Allen Ginsberg in America,” in Don McNeill’s “Moving Through Here,” Joyce Johnson’s “Minor Characters,” and many others. If you read him seriously, or hear him read, you may think you already know all you need to know about Allen Ginsberg.

Which poses a considerable challenge for any biographer. What can you say about a life that has been, for more than three decades, lived in public, with so many revelations and such gusto, such style? One might have thought there was nothing more to say about the life of Allen Ginsberg--a man already so well known that the name “Ginsberg” seems to make “Allen” unnecessary as “Rushmore” does for “Mount” or “Reagan” does “Ronald.”

Not so. Barry Miles, an Englishman who has known Ginsberg for 20 years, has plenty to add. Miles had access to Ginsberg’s vast archives of correspondence and prior interviews; he conducted voluminous interviews on his own. With Boswellian ambitions, he doesn’t tell all, but he tells much. Ginsberg was forthcoming to Miles about his childhood--much of it already much raked over (most beautifully, of course, in Ginsberg’s heartbreaking “Kaddish”) but a good deal hitherto unknown, at least to this reviewer. Ginsberg told Miles about committing his mother to a mental hospital, about giving permission to have her lobotomized, about early sex play. Some of this is heartbreaking, some explanatory (one understands why he is forever sheltering unstable people). Ginsberg often has talked about his early vision of William Blake, for example, his attempt to hold onto it and extrude it into poems, but in Miles’ book he talks about the influence of Cezanne’s brush strokes on his style--his way of building up impressions through omission as well as commission.

But Miles’ success in rendering Ginsberg is only mixed. He transcribes and collects indefatigably but the materials often remain raw, a sequence of index cards. Especially in contrast to Ginsberg’s vivid sentences, Miles writes indifferently, often blandly (“Allen felt distanced from conventional society”) or in unself-conscious, blank-eyed soap opera (“ ‘You haven’t heard the news from the West? Neal Cassady is dead.’ Peter, on the other line, gasped, ‘Oh!’ ”). He accumulates trivia, frequently losing the spiritual and emotional thread. Often the book degenerates into travel notes and lit’ry chat--a record of who Ginsberg saw, what they ate, what drugs they took, but without emotional temperature, texture, or critical distance.

Miles at times has Ginsberg reporting a story but doesn’t push him past the surface. Instead, for long stretches, we get jottings and teases, who did it with whom--a chain of gossip columns glued together with flimsy, hackneyed dabs of “historical context.” Plenty of questions don’t get asked. In 1958, Ginsberg and William Burroughs visit the great, dementedly anti-Semitic writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who explains that he takes his ferocious dogs to the village “because of the Jews .” What did Ginsberg say? What does he think now? Miles doesn’t tell us. Granted that Ginsberg the adventurer has seen a lot of interesting places and met a lot of interesting people; the poet gets relatively short shrift.

When Ginsberg attends a reading by T. S. Eliot in 1959, we learn that “Eliot was heavier, fatter, and older than Allen had expected. He spoke hypnotically into the silent hall. Allen fixed his eyes on him, staring so hard that the air

around him seemed to vibrate with moving colors.” But we don’t learn what Ginsberg thought, or thinks, of Eliot’s poems. (If Ginsberg had nothing to say, that would also be interesting.) In 1965, Ginsberg gave two Cuban reporters “a long literary interview about exploring consciousness by association rather than by metaphor”--a basic choice in Ginsberg’s work. But whiz, bang, in the next sentence we’re off to the next subject (“He told them that he was gay but liked girls and that he smoked pot . . .”), and we are not brought into Ginsberg’s thinking about his work. Nor is Miles curious enough about Ginsberg’s strengths and weaknesses as poet and public figure.

Still, even the raw material on Ginsberg is worth having. Ginsberg is a man of many aphorisms and many of them are wonderful: “All the capitalist lies about Communism are true and all the Communist lies about capitalism are true”; “. . . maybe (Norman Podhoretz is) more honest than I am because he attacks me openly. So I should really respect him as one of the sacred personae in the drama of my own transitory existence.” Large Ginsberg contains multitudes, and contradicts himself in the most interesting ways: generosity and vanity, rambunctiousness and obsequiousness, skepticism and credulity. At his best, Miles places before us piles of facts that provoke thought that Miles himself falls short of--for example, with a lengthy discussion of Ginsberg’s apologias for his drunken and, by many accounts, violent and authoritarian Tibetan guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Where Ginsberg does the evoking from letters and memories, there are amazing tales: Ginsberg living among low-caste Indians; Ginsberg, expelled from Cuba, flies to Prague, where he is chosen King of May, only to be expelled from Prague. There is a nice moment (cited from a Playboy interview) where Ginsberg describes how he felt chanting OM for hours in front of Chicago police in August, 1968; here the Ginsberg of Miles’ narrative inhabits the experience--something too often missing from Miles’ other pages.

Miles’ sketch is enthralling--Ginsberg himself sees to that, leaving traces of humor and vehemence everywhere, continuing his life in the open. The faithful Miles is devoted and dogged, and deserves credit for facts; but Ginsberg deserves better.