Arts and Letters

That I should have the sad task of recalling Allen Ginsberg here has been occasioned by the recent death last August, following Allen's by just four months, of William Burroughs, the member of the Academy who knew him a year or two longer than I. Burroughs's own last published words included those of Allen to him: "Last words 'Two to five months the doctors said,' Allen said, 'but I think much less.' Then he said to me, 'I thought I would be terrified, but I am exhilarated.'”

But an exhilaration, so Protean in its occasions and its expression, was no stranger to Allen throughout his life. I encountered it at our first meeting over fifty years ago, during the 1946-47 college year. We were students at Columbia then, he an upperclassman, I a sophomore. He had returned to Columbia, after having been suspended for a non-violent prank; in the intervening time he had served on a merchant ship sailing between Galveston and Dakar. It is hard to forget the voice of the dark, spectacled, bookish young poet—just back from Dakar after a year at sea—as he read each newly completed work quietly and earnestly aloud. This was just before his poems began manifestly to maintain their allegiances to Blake (whose rhetoric—if not whose dialectical thought—is apparent in poems like the one that ends "I have become another child / I wake to see the world go wild") and Yeats. Some of the first lines of his he read to me were from a moving blank-verse tribute to Hart Crane that we published in the undergraduate magazine Columbia Review (never, I believe, reprinted) that began "He cringed, beholding their great dignity, / The sane prophetic ghosts of future seasons."

The semester before we actually met, he had published some poems—including one that thrilled me with its pure mode of the poète maudit ["I cry 'Jadis!’ but the wind thieves my cry / And, mocking returns it to me as a sigh!"] but most particularly, three pieces of prose—a brief review of Karl Shapiro's book of war poetry, a much longer discussion of Auden's The Sea and the Mirror, and, most remarkably, what he called an "impression"—of Pavel Tchelitchev's Hide and Seek—a sensational painting that had been a cynosure at MOMA for high school students like myself (I recently reread this piece from 1946, and found the prose to be extraordinarily elegant for a piece of undergraduate writing, and the interpretation rather more impressive to me now than the painting itself.)

We finally met face to face some months later, on the occasion of his entering the offices of the Columbia undergraduate literary magazine through a window opening onto an exterior terrace. Just back from working as an ordinary seaman on the merchant ship, he had returned and been readmitted to Columbia. For the next few years he was my poetic mentor as well as friend; I showed him everything I wrote, and I can still hear his cheerful and serious tone of voice as he would read aloud—whether his own new poem, or something of mine I'd shown him, or something he'd recently read and admired, his head often nodding in acknowledgment of a cadence of a rhetorical pattern. In the summer of 1947 at the age of 17, I hitchhiked/bussed/trained across the country and in Denver, where I had stopped for a day, I literally ran into Allen on a street corner; he and Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac were spending part of the summer there, living with some nurses from a local hospital, and I spent a few days. Auden's The Age of Anxiety, had just been published, and we sat on the grass and read aloud from it responsively. That same afternoon he also read, from an old Muses' Library edition, Andrew Marvell's lovely "The Bermudas." Allen had recently won a prize at Columbia for his elegant pastiche of Marvell's celebrated "The Garden" that began

How vainly lovers labor, all
To win a body, mind and soul,
Who, winning one white night of grace
Will weep and rage a year of days…

and included couplets such as "The arguments our minds create / We do, abed, substantiate"—as correctly playful with scholastic philosophy as it was erotically hopeful.

It will be heard from this, by the way, that, even at the age of 20 or 21, his ear was as attentive to the measures of seventeenth-century verse as it would thereafter become to those taught to members of his generation by William Carlos Williams (to be seen best perhaps in poems like "The Green Automobile" and the fine "Siesta in Xbalba") and, eventually, to his own incantatory line in "Howl" and ''America" which became so widely popular.

In thinking of those years, it is that quiet, reasonably toned voice I keep hearing: reading aloud from S. J. Perelman's hilarious improvisatory scenarios; showing me his early correspondence with William Carlos Williams; calling me on the phone one afternoon to announce that "I've discovered the new Rimbaud" (in the person of Gregory Corso; when I visited him shortly thereafter he was indeed, as Allen had promised, possessed of a "trunk full of poems").

Allen knew then the burden of Wordsworth's lines about how "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness" and it is as if he sought somehow to reverse this trajectory, and surely did. He spoke often of his mother Naomi, the sad circumstances of whose insanity he would later so literally chronicle in the text entitled "Kaddish." But he was always a counselor of sanity and health to the insecure eighteen-year-old I was then. I recall a wide range of occasions-selling blood, when we were broke, at St. Luke's Hospital, and discovering two of Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life series, uncleaned, dimly lit in an alcove near the blood bank (not that we knew of Cole at that point); his first correspondence with William Carlos Williams, his telling me in 1952 of prose poems being solicited by the New Directions annual for an anthology and suggesting that I take some verse and type it out as prose (as he did for that occasion)—“How much will they pay?" I asked; I can still hear his shrugging voice: “A nickel." I remember being his laboratory partner in a dogmatically Skinnerian behavioral psychology course in which we ran meticulously observed rats running complex reinforcement schedules and in which not one dreaded anthropomorphic syllable was allowed to infect our reports—Allen didn't like that very much.

We both left New York in the early fifties, and I saw him occasionally and infrequently thereafter, but we continued to correspond and, more and more, disagree on many questions—my over-rhetorical review of the rhetoric of his 1955 volume Howl and Other Poems led to his thirty-page letter reproaching me for my judgments. But we remained always affectionate. I can't serve as a memorialist of his West Coast life. But his friend, fellow poet and fellow member of the Academy, Gary Snyder, who could not be here for this occasion, when I asked him to add to this memorial tribute he generously supplied the following, which I will read from:

Contribution to John Hollander's tribute to Allen Ginsberg for the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual memorial meeting held November 5, 1997:

John Hollander has asked if—as a close long time friend of Allen's—I might contribute a few memories and reflections regarding him. I'm sorry I cannot attend tonight's meeting, but I'm very glad that John asked me to write a few words from the west coast side.

In 1955 I was a graduate student in Far Eastern Languages at UC Berkeley living in a tiny cottage. My connection to other writers was across the Bay in San Francisco—an occasional visit to Kenneth Rexroth's Friday evenings, or a meeting with Jack Spicer in some North Beach bar. It was a quiet, almost solitary life. All that was changed one October afternoon when Allen Ginsberg turned up at my little house to quiz me about who I was, who I knew, what I wrote—my politics, preferences, drugs—I was swept along by his warmth and relentless curiosity. Kenneth Rexroth had told him to look me up.

Allen was dressed like a fifties professor, and seemed ready to get a university career and go straight. Even as he tried to do a graduate semester at Berkeley he was pulled—partly by events of the fall—into the writing of "Howl." Our whole Bay Area music and literature world began to change after the night he read that poem aloud in public. We had no sense then of how far those ripples might reach; it was enough that the semi-underground black and white hipster, gay and lesbian, anarchist poets, nascent wilderness philosophers and pacifist communards wound in "Howl" and in Allen's person some linking story, and an intense, intelligent critical, warmly sexual, Whitmanly comradely style. Allen suddenly gave us all cheer, and out of that came a much greater spirit of community.

Six years later I was travelling all over India with Allen—dirt road busses, sleeping in train stations, tenting up with Tibetans. His patience and compassion and concern and total freedom from [serious] whining made him a lovely, instructive companion. We took to the Buddhism and Hinduism of some of those we met because of their personal clarity and warmth, not for ideology or from some spiritual neediness. He stayed on in Benares but came to join me back in Japan a year later. As usual, always ready to try something, he trooped along with me to a Kyoto Zen Meditation Hall, and liked the cool rigour. He was comfortable with Asia and as attuned to its manners as anyone I've seen.

Yakkety yak talking, hot dreams, and visions—yes—but also a lot of surprisingly quiet and contemplative days together. Allen in those days was physically strong. In 1965 we roped up and climbed a ten thousand foot snowpeak in the North Cascades of Washington, Glacier Peak, chopping steps and threading between the crevasses. This was part of a seven-day high country backpack. In 1975 he was my land partner in the Sierra Nevada, and he spent a good part of the summer carrying lumber and pounding nails as a worker on his own little cabin job. He is still remembered as a person of great availability and sweetness by working people here in the Yuba country, some of whom never knew him as a literary figure at all.

Allen was a comrade, a partner, a teacher in urban smarts, a role-model, and also a caution. Me, I'm not gay. But I loved him.

Allen's personal turn toward Hindu and then Buddhist views of life in the world, of fate and time, knowledge and vanity, occurred over a period of time, but a crucial moment for him was acknowledged in 1963 in a poem called The Change, recording a consuming vision on a train from Kyoto to Tokyo. That "sweetness" Gary mentions, the personal generosity, I will always remember.

Two concluding observations: Allen was deeply devoted to the ecstatic, the beatific, the antinomian; what was particularly prophetic was his making homosexuality a kind of religious matter, well before the public institutionalization of gay sectarian identity in the seventies. He also spoke for many with a generally conspiratorial attitude towards knowledge as well as towards political institutions. Emerson's Ode inscribed to his friend Channing starts out by refusing Channing's request to write a poem against the Mexican war, but ends up not only by having done so, but with a final recognition that "The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side." Allen, whose audience extended far beyond a literary one, found millions.

In his National Book Award acceptance speech in 1974, he declared that "there is no longer any hope for the salvation of America." This might be seen as prophetic, perhaps, in that—whatever precisely "salvation" means here—the subsequent decades have not revealed any more likely candidate for salvation on the planet; it is at any rate hyperbolic, the mode which Whitman called his "promotions" rather than his "transfers" or metaphors. Some of us may have preferred Allen in his more pointedly ironic and metaphoric dimension. In this regard I should perhaps want to end by thinking of his life, his work, his performance of himself, by recalling the splendid last line of what for me remains one of his very best poems, "America." Transcending sarcasm and even some of the higher forms of irony, he concludes a comic and serious catalogue of invocations with the summary announcement that "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." And that is, of course, what he did and continued to do, trying to help it—us—out of, yet, one more rut.