The Beat of His Own Drummer : DHARMA LION: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg <i> By Michael Schumacher</i> , <i> (St. Martin’s Press: $35; 769 pp.) </i>

The most famous living poet in America, if not the world, Allen Ginsberg is a walking, talking, and sometimes singing political showboat, with causes--everything from free speech to gay liberation, from the legalization of marijuana to world peace--jingling, jangling, and dropping from his coat like Harpo Marx’s purloined silverware. But one of the things “Dharma Lion” makes clear is that Ginsberg cannot be pigeonholed as just a spokesman for outcasts and radicals, for the down-and-out and oppressed. Though he certainly is that, Schumacher shows him to be, above all, a poet and teacher of the highest seriousness, whose thoughts, theories, and practice have never ceased to evolve in response to the needs of his society and his time.

That such a literary giant--a man who performs his works to standing-room-only crowds on every continent, and whose work has influenced other writers in almost every language--should have grown from the boy Allen Ginsberg in Paterson, New Jersey, is surely one of the more astounding feats of our century. A more troubled, traumatized, and emotionally disturbed young man would be hard to imagine. Born in 1926, Ginsberg was only four when his mother Naomi had her first major schizophrenic breakdown, and throughout his youth she was in and out of sanitariums and mental hospitals. When she was absent from the family, he experienced all the terrors of loneliness and abandonment--imagining a “shrouded stranger” bogeyman hiding in the neighbor’s hedges, a sense of ghostly presence that would haunt him all his life--but when she was home, his anguish and shame over his mother’s insanity made him suffer even more.

One of the worst experiences of his life took place when he was 14. He had already witnessed his mother’s attempted suicide a few years before, as well as numerous hysterical fits when she would scream that the doctors had implanted wires in her head and sticks in her back with which to control her. One afternoon during his second year of high school, his father asked him to stay home and watch over her. Allen was severely frightened to see her beginning to succumb to paranoia again--rambling on about how her husband Louis and her mother-in-law had conspired with Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt to murder her. He felt that he must do anything he could to calm her, and so he ended up riding the bus with her to a rest home in the country, where she assured him she would be welcomed. All along the way she raved about secret agents who planned to kidnap them or spray them with “poison germs”; and once at the rest home, she began to have a full-blown psychotic episode, demanding someone give her a blood transfusion. Panicked, Allen paid a week’s rent and hurried to get a bus home. On the way back, he could not help wishing his mother was dead; and when he got home, his father lashed out at him for the irresponsibility of leaving his mother unattended in a strange place.

What happened was just what Louis feared--Naomi had terrified everyone in the place with her mad acting out. He had to go and get her the next day, dragging her out as she screamed that he had come to kill her. Within a week she was back in Greystone, the mental hospital she hated worst of all. Recalling the episode years later in his poem “Kaddish,” Ginsberg wrote that he had experienced “no greater depression since then,” but he would never be entirely free of the guilt he felt at having contributed (at least in his own eyes) to his mother’s loss of freedom. He would feel even greater guilt when, at the age of 21, he signed the papers authorizing another mental hospital, Pilgrim State, to perform a lobotomy on his mother. Once again his motives had been good--he had wished to prevent her from harming herself any further, since the director of Pilgrim State had reported her banging her head against the wall and working herself into hysterical states that might lead to a stroke. But once the deed was done, Allen could not help wondering if it would not have been kinder to let his mother die a whole human being, rather than live as only part of one.

In many ways, “Dharma Lion” chronicles the development of Ginsberg the moral philosopher as much as Ginsberg the poet. As a Jew growing up during the time of the Holocaust, and as a homosexual in an era when anything but the traditional sexual orientation was both a family disgrace and a personal tragedy, Ginsberg got a series of painful lessons about the price of not fitting in. Even more formative were the lessons he learned when he tried to deny his individuality and follow the so-called “normal path” in life: instead of bringing him happiness, it drove him to the very brink of madness and self-destruction.

Feeling stifled and scorned at Columbia University, he wrote several obscenities in the grime of his dorm window and was promptly kicked out; a couple of years later, finishing his degree at Columbia, he was shaken by a series of mystical visions of William Blake, which terrified him with their suggestion of a cosmic consciousness that seemed to make ordinary life unlivable. But when he desperately tried again to return to that ordinary life, getting a job as copy boy at the Associated Press after receiving his degree, he once again found himself in trouble because of his concern to help a group of junkies and small-time thieves. For allowing this “gang” to use his apartment as a place to sleep and store their stolen goods, Ginsberg was arrested and, in lieu of prison, committed for eight months to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute.

No wonder that William Carlos Williams, who served as a kind of father figure and mentor to Ginsberg, wrote of him in the introduction to “Howl”: “I never thought he’d live to grow up and write a book of poems.”

The conflict in Ginsberg between trying to live by the rules and being true to his own identity finally came to a head in San Francisco in late 1954. Allen had gotten a respectable job in market research and even found an interesting woman to live with, but he was growing more miserable every day, having little time to devote to his poetry and feeling erotically unfulfilled. When he and his girlfriend split up, he began seeing a psychiatrist, ostensibly to help him find out what was keeping him from leading a normal life. But he found out quickly enough on his own: He immediately fell in love with a handsome young man named Peter Orlovsky, with whom he shared not only tender and intelligent conversation (since Peter had come from an equally troubled family), but also the first satisfying sexual relationship of his life.

“One day in mid-January,” according to Schumacher, “Allen told Hicks (his psychiatrist) that he was hesitant to become too involved with Peter, since it was possible that Peter would not love him when he grew old. He concluded that maybe it would be better if he tried to live as a heterosexual. When Hicks asked him what he really wanted to do, Allen replied that he would like to find an apartment, live with Peter, and write poems.

“So why don’t you do that?” Hicks challenged, In response, Allen again mentioned that he was afraid of growing old. “Oh, you’re a nice person,” Hicks said; “there’s always people who will like you.”’

Allen was astonished by the psychiatrist’s advice, but he decided to follow it; and within a few months, he would write his most famous poem, “Howl”--having broken through to a vein of intensely honest and powerfully raw autobiographical material, which he would mine in hundreds more poems in the years to come.

Ginsberg, of course, eventually came to fame--after “Howl” was seized by customs authorities in San Francisco, triggering one of the most sensational obscenity trials in American history--as a leader of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But “Dharma Lion” shows that the literary influence of these other writers, though they all helped point Ginsberg in the direction of a new kind of personal poetry, absolutely naked in its private revelations and articulated in a spoken language that could be understood on the street, was less important, ultimately, than the friendship and understanding they brought to his painfully lonely and alienated life. Like the love he found with Peter Orlovsky, the Beat circle of writers allowed Ginsberg to begin to feel comfortable with himself just as he was, and in that self-acceptance he found the key to speaking a truth that millions of others around the world, equally misunderstood and malcontent, could identify with.

Ginsberg and his work never ceased to provoke the authorities. Feeling that American capitalism and its military-industrial complex were responsible for most of the world’s wars and crimes against humanity, Ginsberg naturally turned to explore the Communist countries, supposedly America’s antithesis. But to his surprise he found even less tolerance there for the kind of outspoken social and political criticism, as well as the frank sexual descriptions, that were the trademark of his poetry. In the 1960s he was deported from both Cuba and Czechoslovakia. In America, drug agents attempted to entrap him, and in Italy he was arrested for obscenity for reading one of his milder poems, “Who Be Kind To.” However beloved he was of the throngs that came to hear him read his work, it seemed there was no country in the world where Ginsberg was completely safe from censorship and hassles with the law. As recently as 1988, “Howl” ran afoul of the FCC, when KPFA in Berkeley attempted to broadcast it during daytime hours.

Yet nothing--incarceration, censorship, even some outraged listener in Kansas trying to beat him up--ever kept Ginsberg from taking part in virtually every major countercultural or radical movement of his era. Along with poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, he spoke out for ecological concerns even in the ‘50s; and in the ‘60s, he crusaded tirelessly for an end to the Vietnam War. In the ‘70s, he attempted to expose U.S. government involvement in dope-smuggling; and in the ‘80s, he dealt with our government’s support of dictatorships in Central America and elsewhere.

While Michael Schumacher explores Ginsberg’s activism and polemics at great length, and criticizes his work with fine, telling detail, his style tends toward the academic, sometimes merging with Ginsberg’s own often wordy and fuzzy conceptions to leave the reader wishing for just a few simple sentences that cut to the heart of what is going on. In this regard, Barry Miles’ earlier biography, “Ginsberg, is at times superior as a straightforward account of the man’s life.

The biggest problem in writing the biography of any self-mythologizer is that the biographer falls under the spell of his subject, fact and myth begin to blur, and his own language begins to sound like the official versions his subject has created. While Schumacher often avoids this pitfall simply by the enormous volume of factual data he provides, he sometimes gets so carried away by his admiration that he misses his subject’s own manipulations. A case in point is the long section devoted to Ginsberg’s meetings with Ezra Pound in Italy, shortly before Pound’s death. While there are many touching scenes--such as Ginsberg assuring the frail old man, who is now full of self-doubt about his work, that he holds an indelible place in modern poetry--there are also many instances of Ginsberg trying to gain Pound’s approval for his own poetry and to rope the fading master poet, without his knowing, into the corral of the Beat movement. Not content to force Pound to accept his “blessing,” Ginsberg then “took Pound gently by the shoulders and looked him in the eye.

“ ‘I have told you what I came here to tell you,’ he said. ‘I also came here for your blessing. And now, may I have it, sir?’

“ ‘Yes,’ Pound said, nodding, ‘for whatever it’s worth.”

Although Schumacher is not afraid to get into the matter of Ginsberg’s oversized ego at other places in the book, he is curiously silent here, as though Ginsberg’s insistence on his reverence for Pound has blinded the biographer to the dynamics of one man using another in a not altogether admirable way.

The title of the book--”Lion of the Dharma” was an epithet bestowed on Ginsberg by his controversial guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche--and the jacket cover, a Svengali-like portrait of Ginsberg with golden light radiating from his head and lower chakras, bear witness to this ongoing problem. The world of Ginsberg and his Beat friends has not been all good fellowship and divine illuminations, as anyone who has been around them very long (including myself) can attest. There is often more balance in Ginsberg’s own journal entries, as for example where he writes of a typical day on his Cherry Valley farm: “Gregory (Corso) here, one day drinking by roadside with Ray (Bremser)--beer cans found on the pond, and their smiling faces turned snarling and screaming at each other at dusk--Peter (Orlovsky) drunk also screaming in the garage. Second day, all calm and a wave of happiness passed through tranquil grassy yard--yesterday more vodka’d swearing and threats of death.”

One cannot ultimately fault Schumacher for preferring the happy prophetic Ginsberg, or the warrior with words, to the anxiety-ridden, and at times plainly mixed-up private man. It is a choice that leaves room for further studies, but in the meantime it has given us the literary re-creation of a poet who, in the words of Michael McClure, took us “beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void--to the land without poetry--to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”

There is plenty of both in Ginsberg’s work, and in this comprehensive biography as well.