Whitman’s wild child

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Collected Poems

1947-1997

Allen Ginsberg

HarperCollins: 1,190 pp., $39.95

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I Celebrate Myself

The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg

Bill Morgan

Viking: 702 pp., $29.95

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The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice

First Journals and Poems: 1937-1952

Allen Ginsberg

Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan

Da Capo Press: 524 pp., $27.50

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Howl on Trial

The Battle for Free Expression

Edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters

City Lights: 224 pp., $14.95 paper

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Illuminated Poems

Allen Ginsberg

Art by Eric Drooker

Thunder’s Mouth Press: 142 pp., $19.95 paper

THE death of Allen Ginsberg in April 1997 was front-page news. I remember feeling dazed, lost. For my friend, poet Larry Fagin, it was as if suddenly “the doorknobs had come off all the doors,” so long had Ginsberg dominated our world. “Of all nations,” Walt Whitman wrote in his preface to the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” “the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most needs poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest.” If any poet ever answered Whitman’s challenge, it was Ginsberg.

Nov. 1 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ginsberg’s epochal poem “Howl,” and the American publishing industry is celebrating with at least five books. The impetus for this blitz is longtime Ginsberg colleague Bill Morgan, who has co-edited two of these new works -- “The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice,” a collection of Ginsberg’s earliest journals; and “Howl on Trial,” a report on the 1957 “Howl” obscenity trial that struck a major blow for free speech -- and authored another, “I Celebrate Myself,” the third Ginsberg biography yet published and the first since the poet’s death.

Morgan met Ginsberg through Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose writings he catalogued in San Francisco in the late 1960s. When Morgan moved to New York in 1978, Ginsberg gave him a job. Over the next 20 years he became Ginsberg’s archivist, bibliographer and a close enough friend to be among the dozen or so people with him when he died.

Ginsberg’s story is well-known: He grew up in Paterson, N.J., the son of Louis Ginsberg, a minor poet and high school teacher, and Naomi, also a teacher, both children of left-wing Russian Jewish immigrants. He had an older brother named Eugene. His childhood was irrevocably scarred by the descent of his mother into madness and complicated by the dawning realization that he was homosexual. Ambitious intellectually and socially, starved for sex and fame, Ginsberg vowed on the ferry taking him to Manhattan for his Columbia University entrance exam that if he were admitted, he would become a saintly revolutionary labor leader.

His planned exaltation, however, was soon derailed by friends such as Jack Kerouac, who’d arrived at Columbia from the mill town of Lowell, Mass., to play football; William S. Burroughs, who, 10 years Kerouac and Ginsberg’s senior, became their mentor; and Neal Cassady, a yea-saying con man and car thief from Denver who came to New York to visit a hometown friend, Ginsberg’s fellow Columbia student Hal Chase.

Though World War II was raging, Ginsberg and his friends were way too alienated to find a place in that effort. Instead, they crowded into the West 115th Street apartment of Joan Vollmer -- later, she’d become Mrs. William Burroughs -- seeking a new vision. Add poet Gregory Corso, who, fresh from prison, met Ginsberg a few years later in Greenwich Village, and you have the molten core of what a decade later would be called the Beat Generation.

When Ginsberg was 11, he got a small diary into which he poured his innermost thoughts. It was the start of a lifelong habit; he would ultimately fill more than 300 journals. “The Book of Martydom and Artifice” follows him to age 26. (The title derives from Ginsberg’s name for the notebook from which the work is taken, “The Book of Martifice.” When Morgan asked the poet what he’d meant, Ginsberg explained that it was a combination of “martyrdom” and “artifice.”) Much of the material here deals with the six fitful years Ginsberg spent at Columbia. His mother’s mental and physical state was deteriorating. He too spent eight months in the bughouse, where he met Carl Solomon, to whom he would dedicate “Howl.” “If some future historian or biographer wants to know what the genius thought and did in his tender years,” Ginsberg wrote just before his 15th birthday, “here it is.”

Most of the best stories in these diaries have been plundered already, not just by biographers but by Ginsberg and Kerouac, who used their lives to fuel their work. I was struck, though, by Ginsberg’s intellectual ambition. A March 1947 reading list includes Ezra Pound, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Daniel Defoe and Christopher Marlowe. A similar list for the following month features Shakespeare’s sonnets, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Fielding, Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden.

There is a piece of an unfinished novel about Ginsberg’s classmate Lucien Carr, who killed his creepy former Boy Scout troop leader, David Kammerer. (Ginsberg abandoned the project because his writing tutor thought it would bring more unwelcome attention to Columbia.) There are many dreams, many lists of jazz 78s, many letters to Ginsberg’s distinguished English professor Lionel Trilling. There’s an appendix full of earnest and inflated early poetry. Reading “The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice,” it’s impossible to see the Beat Generation as other than the poet’s exquisite socio-literary construct pressed upon his more-or-less reluctant friends.

After leaving Columbia, Ginsberg traveled. In 1954, he arrived in Northern California to visit Cassady and his new wife, Carolyn. Unable to take Cassady to bed without Carolyn knowing it, bored by the couple’s constant prattle about psychic Edgar Cayce, Ginsberg moved on to San Francisco, where he soon met the poets of what would be called the San Francisco Renaissance. It was Ginsberg who organized the 1955 reading with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia that ushered in the Beat Generation, the night he first read “Howl.”

The publication of “Howl” a year later by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books launched Ginsberg’s career. In March 1957, the San Francisco collector of customs seized 520 copies of the book, part of a shipment from its English printer, on the grounds that it was obscene. Working closely with Ferlinghetti, the American Civil Liberties Union defused the situation but three months later, undercover San Francisco cops bought copies of “Howl” at City Lights Bookstore and charged Ferlinghetti with selling obscene literature.

The resulting court case is the subject of “Howl on Trial,” which Morgan co-edited with City Lights editorial director Nancy J. Peters. Featuring extensive trial transcripts, letters between Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and clips from the San Francisco Chronicle -- whose columnists strongly supported Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and “Howl” -- the book offers a broad perspective. After a brief trial, federal Judge Clayton Horne ruled that “Howl” wasn’t obscene because it had not been written with lewd intent and had “redeeming social importance.” This set a landmark precedent, enabling the publication of books by, among others, Burroughs, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov.

Interestingly, the “Howl” trial doesn’t make a big splash in “I Celebrate Myself” -- perhaps because Ginsberg was out of the country at the time. Far more central is the poet’s relationship with Peter Orlovsky, whom he met in San Francisco in 1954, inaugurating a tortured love affair that lasted until Ginsberg’s death.

Brooding and handsome, from a family of desperately poor and mentally unstable White Russian emigres, Orlovsky basically liked women. Ginsberg, Morgan explains, was drawn to heterosexual men, which essentially condemned him to brief trysts and often furtive one-night stands. Orlovsky, however, was something else. Supported by Ginsberg, he was basically incapable of living on his own and his combination of resentment and need, fueled by his addictions and mental problems, made him increasingly dangerous, to himself and others. In Robert Frank’s author photo for Ginsberg’s “Collected Poems 1947-1980,” Orlovsky stands with a reassuring hand on the poet’s shoulder. Tellingly, his head is cut off.

“I Celebrate Myself” is carefully researched, but even at 702 pages, it feels thin. Themes arise: Ginsberg was capable of titanic angers followed by guilt and self-abnegation. Often, this was brought on by his need to answer each of the thousands of letters he received. Patiently, he tried to rebut every criticism ever leveled at him because he believed reasoned argument was capable of changing minds. In New York, it could take hours to go anywhere with him because he acknowledged every person who approached him on the street.

YET for all the dramatic potential of this material, Morgan tells Ginsberg’s story in a dispassionate tone. We never hear from the victims of his anger, and only infrequently from Ginsberg himself. We don’t get the multiplicity of voices that Ginsberg and his work encompassed in an extraordinarily public lifetime. This book will not, for instance, help you understand its subject’s relationship with Corso, who, Ginsberg often testified, was “a real poet,” better than him.

Morgan is emphatic that Ginsberg wanted to be a rock star, seeking associations with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and later with the Clash and Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys and Beck. Ginsberg’s hunger for glory was indisputable. Only a few days before his death, Morgan notes, he wrote then-President Clinton a letter saying he had only a short while to live, and “[i]f you have some sort of award or medal for service in art or poetry, please send one along.” (Later that night, Ginsberg looked in his hospital bathroom mirror and said, “Stop scheming Ginsberg,” then had his request mailed the next morning.) What drove him so relentlessly? Morgan rarely offers a surmise. This is by far the best researched and most thorough of the three major Ginsberg biographies, but it often feels like “The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice” turned inside out.

In the end, what’s most important is the poetry, which is where Ginsberg’s legacy resides. In “Illuminated Poems” -- originally published in 1996 and newly reissued -- New York graphic artist Eric Drooker illustrates about 30 Ginsberg works, including “Howl.” But the book also features several idiosyncratic choices, illustrating pieces like “Punk Rock, Your My Big Crybaby” and the heavily Blakean early effort “The Altering Eye Alters All.” That’s fitting, since the book is inspired by Blake’s illuminated poetry. Ultimately, though (and despite the strength of Drooker’s drawings, which are reminiscent of Lynd Ward woodcuts), the illustrations seem like beautiful impositions, arising less from the poems than from the artist’s points of view.

Of course, if you want to read Ginsberg’s poetry, you should go straight to the source. “Collected Poems 1947-1997” gathers everything, from the early work of “Empty Mirror” to the last pieces he completed before his death. The book is not so much new as it is an update, augmenting the original “Collected Poems 1947-1980,” published in 1984, with the contents of Ginsberg’s last three books: “White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985,” “Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992” and the posthumous “Death & Fame: Poems 1993-1997.”

It’s been several years since I last descended into Ginsberg’s verse, and “Howl” and “Kaddish” still retain the mysterious grandeur of the pyramids. One is continually blown away by Ginsberg’s poetic structures. Can a human being really have written this? I reread “The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express” and “September on Jessore Road,” two mighty landscapes of human suffering and breakthrough now decades old. I was inspired again by the poems Ginsberg wrote during the Vietnam War, most of them published in “The Fall of America,” and particularly by “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” with its command to “Let the States tremble, / let the Nation weep, / let Congress legislate its own delight.”

That said, the poems that sound most true to me are simple, almost reportage, like “Wales Visitation” (1967), with its line “I lay down mixing my beard with the wet hair of the mountainside,” or the exultant “Kral Majales,” which tells the story of being expelled first from Cuba and then Czechoslovakia after being elected “King of May.” Might I also recommend “City Midnight Junk Strains (for Frank O’Hara)” and the 19-word “Milarepa Taste”?

Only Ginsberg’s sung works seem problematic here. So many poems from his last quarter century were squeezed out of his harmonium and sung, and these look flat on the page. Perhaps, the next edition of “Collected Poems” could be enhanced by a CD with songs like “Father Death” and “Don’t Smoke” and “Airplane Blues” (“The Sun’s not eternal / That’s why there’s the blues”).

In “A Supermarket in California,” written in 1955, Ginsberg, then 29, imagined himself following Whitman through the grocery aisles. “Ah, dear father,” he addressed his predecessor, “graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher.” Ginsberg would become a similar figure in his own time: poet, professor, vision seeker, inspiration, even prophet. Whoever would follow his example would do well to begin with these books. *