this is thinking.) I have a fair degree of confi-
dence in myself. Either I’m a genius, I’m egocen-
tric, or I’m slightly schizophrenic. Probably the
first two.’’
Not surprisingly, this and similar entries
embarrassed the adult Ginsberg to such a degree
that he refused to allow his youthful journals to
be published until after his death. Bill Morgan
and Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton started compil-
ing and editing Ginsberg’sThe Book of Martyr-
dom and Artificenearly two decades ago, and
these journals, along with Morgan’s excellent
new biography,I Celebrate Myself: The Some-
what Private Life of Allen Ginsberg,ultimately
serve as guides to the long, painstaking, and
often painful journey leading to the composition
of ‘‘Howl.’’
Ginsberg’s childhood and adolescence,
recalled in excruciating detail inKaddishother
later poems, and recounted in Morgan’s biogra-
phy, caused William Carlos Williams to marvel
that Ginsberg had survived long enough to write
‘‘Howl.’’ As a boy, Ginsberg watched his mother,
Naomi, a Russian immigrant, drop deeper and
deeper into an abyss of paranoid schizophrenia;
she would be in and out of mental institutions for
much of her adult life, and even today it’s hard to
tell which was more difficult on her youngest son.
His father, Louis Ginsberg, a teacher and mod-
erately successful poet, labored to raise a family
on a modest salary while trying to fulfill his own
poetic aspirations. It wasn’t easy, to say the least.
It grew even more difficult for the young Allen
Ginsberg when he became aware of his homo-
sexuality and suffered the psychological penalties
for trying to hide it from an intolerant society.
When he enrolled at Columbia, Ginsberg had
just turned seventeen, and while he might have
been intellectually capable of taking on formal
university studies, he was emotionally lagging
behind his peers. He desperately needed love,
but he didn’t dare pursue it. He wanted to write
poetry, but he couldn’t even discuss it with his
own father, since Louis Ginsberg had always
joked that poets weren’t normal.
Three Columbia professors—Lionel Trilling,
Mark Van Doren, and Raymond Weaver—
recognized Ginsberg’s potential and offered
encouragement, albeit in the traditional academic
sense. More important, Ginsberg met Lucien
Carr, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs,
each bright but unconventional thinkers, each
filling his head with attitudes and ideas
completely alien to anything he had witnessed
or experienced while growing up in Paterson,
New Jersey.
Ginsberg’s formal and informal educations
clashed. He didn’t dress (or care to dress) like his
well-outfitted Ivy League classmates; he hung
out with all the wrong people. Kerouac was
persona non grata at Columbia, and when Gins-
berg was caught housing him overnight in his
dorm room, Columbia officials suspected the
worst and drummed him off the campus. Gins-
berg and Carr had tried to come up with what
they called a ‘‘new vision’’ for literature—a form
that, in an apocalyptic world, addressed real
people in real situations in real language, literary
models of the day be damned—but all Ginsberg
knew, from his father and his studies, were exist-
ing literary models. His early poems, now pub-
lished for the first time in Martyrdom and
Artifice, indicated an undeveloped poet with
great command of form, but with only the
vaguest clue as to how to marry it to content.
Ginsberg loved Whitman, but since Whitman
was out of favor in the poetry establishment, he
chose to imitate Marvell and Donne. It didn’t
work.
His life became still more complicated
when he met Neal Cassady, the street-smart,
self-educated, hyperkinetic, sexually supercharged
‘‘Western hero’’ who so enthralled Kerouac that
he eventually devoted two major novels to him.
Ginsberg saw him in a different light. He fell in
love with the man first and the mind later, and, as
would be the case throughout Ginsberg’s sexually
confused life, the man he was intensely drawn to
happened to be (mostly) heterosexual.
Ginsberg’s pursuit of Cassady, presented at
great length inMartyrdom and Artifice,was both
pathethic and heartbreaking. Here was a young
man, pining like a teenage kid over his newfound
love, hoping against all that he knew to be true
that he would actually be able to find some
miraculous solution to his homosexual yearn-
ings. After arranging meetings under the guise
of writing lessons, Ginsberg would sit alone in
his room waiting for Cassady to arrive, only to
learn that Cassady was jumping from woman to
woman while he was keeping his lonely vigil. By
the time Ginsberg was capable of accepting the
truth, he was so psychologically and emotionally
depleted that he had lost almost all of his self-
respect—and he wasn’t all that far from losing
his mind as well.Howl