Allen Ginsberg

We sat upstairs in the CRIMSON, talking--Allen Ginsberg, two other Harvard students, a Radcliffe senior, Peter Orlovsky, and myself--I feeling so out of it that I might have taken Barry Goldwater for Kerouac himself, when Allen, to illustrate a point about the simplicity of self-exposure, took off all his clothes.

"Now," he implored, "D'ya dig?" I guess I didn't. A draft was blowing in from the window. There was nothing erotic in the moment. "Why don't you take off your clothes?" Allen asked me. It was no overture; merely a challenge and a joke. I felt no closer to the naked Ginsberg; he might as well have put on a winter overcoat. It wasn't a big deal to him, one way or the other. He had almost twenty years on me. A free man, he'd been through psychoanalysis, Buddhism, hallucinogens, and come to terms with himself. I felt stupid.

I thought of a scene in The Connection where a hopelessly square photographer asks the addict hipsters "D'ya got any Pot??" and, to his anguish and humiliation, they mimic him. There was none of that exclusive cruelty in Allen, a sweet, sensitive man who was, as they say of Lassie when she barks and wags her tail furiously at the sheriff's men, only trying to tell me something.

Orlovsky was squatting like a yogi on the floor, typing out snatches of our conversation, misspelling every third word, but hanging in there as if without the typewriter he might just float off through the ceiling. I wondered what had held Allen Peter together for so many years and realized that, apart from sex, their communication must be not verbal, or visual like Allen's disrobing, but telepathic--in the spirit of the wordless interplay between members of a highly coordinated jazz combo.

But to get that ol' ultimate message through to me would be like adequately describing one's sensations when high on drugs to someone who's straight. When Allens tells you of his visitation from Blake, or proclaims, "I have seen God; I saw him in a room in Harlem," he is high on his own soul. You, you passionless bourgeois, you're straight. Can you think of a better place in this shell-shocked age to see Him?

If this makes Allen out to be a little cracked, it gives a false impression. He is a most honest, articulate, rational fellow who loves the Beatles (he once turned on with their manager, in fact), Robert Kennedy (whom he voted for), Bob Dylan, and the Marx Brothers. C. Day Lewis, in some banter about the French Symbolists, was astounded at his erudition. Some preppies at the Signet, expecting perhaps to lunch wit some raving faggot, were amazed to find him "such a nice Jewish man". His much misrepresented poetry, while usually phantasmagoric and undisciplined, it powerful and genuinely serious.

Ginsberg is terribly tired and afraid of being lumped with the stereotype of the unwashed beat. And very justly so.

Dean Moriarty, the holy hero of On the Road and personification of "Hot Beat," careens about the country with man-eating ants in his pants, shirking every obligation, going to wild parties in Denver, New York, San Francisco, having uninhibited sex with beautiful girls, drinking in jazz in crowded joints, getting high on pot, engaging in intense discussions about God, about Love, about Salvation, all in a mad, passionate grab to dig everything and everybody. If Moriarty goes fast enough (and here's Kerouac's big clue-in coming up), if Moriarty's experiences are plentiful and violent enough, "the great ultimate secret will be laid bare to him."

The real secret is just that a long and frenzied bath in sensation is a simple escape from reality and hence from anxiety. Movement, activity, "go", is always preferred to sitting around; the most desirable of human conditions is to be hopped up as much of the time as possible. Through experience (i.e. kicks) one transcends the nagged and nagging self to get out of one's own skin into that airy realm where no questions are asked, where, for that matter, there is no longer any articulate speech in which to ask them.

Conversely, to violate the limits of the ordinary Babbit, to act and react uniquely, is evidence of the uniqueness of self. An act to prove you are there, not logged in the monolithic square morass. In On the Road, incidents and factual details are piled on top of one another in the desperate insistence that something happened. In company the hot beats are forever retelling and reminiscing: "Member that time back in . . .?" The most insignificant tripe is described as "crazy," "exciting," "the greatest."

Or maybe experience is only a search itself. (Reason, a failure both empirically and in the reversed eyes of Zen Buddhism, may never unearth those "great ultimate" answers to the problem of existence.) Square claims to have the answer--hip has only a question.

In addition, experience serves as a frenzied bond to other human beings with whom it is shared. The wilder, the more outrageous the experience, the tighter the bond it Knits. Thus Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty become closer, we know, than any 9-5 office colleagues could dream.

It is this sharing of the experience that unites the wild lovers of Bohemian sex or homo-sex--that lends the illusion of union with brother race as white hipster makes Negro chick. The sharing is built to its very foundation on the in versus the out; on the exclusion of squares; on the treasured mutuality of isolation.

I go into these possibilities at such length only to say that as far as I can tell, they are not Allen Ginsberg. Well, possibly the last, in part, for Allen apparently feels twice as large because he may and does experience consumate love with both men and women. (Redemption through friendship in a world of enemies is what he hinted at in Howl III.)

But primarily Allen is a poet and all his life bears relevance to his work. He has been the Moriarty circuit; that is the fodder of his art.

Allen's method of writing is directly experiential: he tries to graph the movements of the mind during the act of composition. To revise becomes an act of dishonesty. Poetry is then one person talking intimately to another. He believes in the common humanity of his listeners and, a little ingenuously, trusts them.

Here, of course, Allen lays himself open to the charge that he intends mainly to shock. (I"II admit it took a few minutes' chat with the naked Ginsberg to realize shock was hardly his goal.) Actually he finds it far more beautiful to sympathize--and this is how he treats most of what is ugly: the junkie, the leper, the whore, the queer.

By the time this goes to press, Ginsberg will have read and sung again to Harvard students. I don't have much idea what he'II be like. I've seen a lot of different Ginsbergs during his week in Cambridge--from an extravagant bohemian ranting about schemers in Washington and Moscow, to a mellow gentleman inquiring after a blonde Cliffie's major, to a concerned New Yorker remonstrating with the Mayor's son, to a relaxed and gentle nudist in the CRIMSON sanctum. He is, I think, a surprisingly loving man; one who knows well the hell of rejection and longs for a place where everyone might find himself accepted.

Allen never quite found that place in the "emotional blackout" of Harvard, but Cambridge is a little happier after a week of his Whitmanic tenderness. The University would do well to allow its guests to set more ample, variable standards of behavior, rather than to insist upon the sometimes artificial protocol of "normal society."

"Unscrew the locks from the doors!" Walt Whitman cried out to Americans a century ago. "Unscrew the doors themselves from the jambs!" The dirty old man.