and then again inPartisan Review.By the time
these pieces were being written,On the Roadhad
been published, as well asNaked Lunch,and for
Podhoretz the American sky was falling. The
Beats, he said, were the barbarians at the gate,
rabble-rousers who ‘‘embraced homosexuality,
jazz, dope-addiction and vagrancy’’ (he got that
part right), at one with ‘‘the young savages in
leather jackets who have been running amuck in
the last few years with their switch-blades and
zip guns.’’ Jack Kerouac was cut to the quick and
wrote to complain that the Beats were about
beatitude,not criminalism; they were here to
rescue America (from corporate death and
atomic bomb politics), not destroy her.
In the summer of 1957, ‘‘Howl’’ was brought
to trial in San Francisco on charges of obscenity,
with a wealth of writers testifying on behalf of
the poem’s literary value. In retrospect, the trial
can be seen as an opening shot in a culture war
destined to throw long shadows across Ameri-
can life. And indeed, throughout the sixties, both
the poem and its author were celebrated, the
former as a manifesto of the counterculture, the
latter as one of its emblematic figures.
Today, nearly fifty years after it was written,
‘‘Howl’’ is never out of print, is read all over the
world (it’s been translated into more than two
dozen languages), and by most standards is con-
sidered a literary classic. LikeLeaves of Grass,it
is an ingenious experiment with the American
language that did what Ezra Pound said a great
poem should do: make the language new. Its
staccato phrasing, its mad juxtapositions and
compacted images, its remarkable combining
of the vernacular with the formal—obscene,
slangy, religious, transcendent, speaking now in
the voice of the poet, now in that of the hipster—
is simply an astonishment. The effect of all this
on the reader? ‘‘Even today,’’ as Jonah Raskin,
one of Ginsberg’s biographers, says, ‘‘reading
the poem yields a feeling of intoxication. The
words produce an electrical charge that is
exhilarating.’’
That charge is actually thedischarge of a
man and a time well met. There is a feverish
hunger for poetry and glory in Ginsberg as he
moves through the late forties that is absolutely
at one with his political and cultural moment.
Prowling the streets of New York as if it were
Dostoevsky’s Petersburg; rising in an English
class at Columbia to terrify students and teach-
ers alike with some brilliant, unpunctuated rant;
looking for sex in Times Square; seeing Blake in
a vision in his own kitchen; nodding wordlessly
when the cops ask him if he is a homosexual—we
have a vivid figure standing squarely in the fore-
ground of significant disconnect.
Yet, we also see why Ginsberg could survive
his own youth to become an emblematic figure
of growth and change while Kerouac and Cas-
sady could not. Neal Cassady was a drifter
through and through. To read his letters—
although the ones to his writer friends are richly
literate—is to see a man perpetually on the run
from himself. It was all drugs, drink, women,
and motion without a stop. He is forever in the
car hurtling toward New York, Denver, or Cal-
ifornia. If he stops, it’s to get one woman preg-
nant, marry a second, start an affair with a third,
all in what feels like the space of a month; then
it’s back in the car, writing to each one, ‘‘I’ll be
home in a week, babe, ten days at the latest.’’
Kerouac, except for the books, was not so very
different. Neither of these men could inhabit the
space he actually occupied at any given moment.
Each had a leak somewhere in the middle of
himself that made experience drain exhaustingly
away (both were dead in their forties).
Ginsberg, by contrast, was remarkably
heart-whole: it made all the difference. His expe-
rience nourished him, gave him the strength to
complete the self-transformation he had been
bent on from the beginning. I don’t think it an
exaggeration to say that when he died at seventy
his life had given new meaning to the word ‘‘self-
created.’’ For the formal poets and critics of his
own generation, Ginsberg would remain only an
original: the gifted, problematic amateur (in
1963 Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop
‘‘the beats have blown away, the professionals
have returned’’). For the American culture, how-
ever, Ginsberg (indeed, like Walt Whitman) had
become an inspirited incarnation: the authentic
made-in-America holy fool.
Source:Vivian Gornick, ‘‘Wild at Heart,’’ inAmerican
Poetry Review, Vol. 35, No. 2, March–April 2006,
pp. 4–6.David E. Pozen
In the following critique, Pozen examines the sig-
nificance of Ping-Pong in ‘‘Howl.’’
Though typically linked with such benign
associations as rec-room leisure and adolescent
camaraderie, the game of Ping-Pong takes on
much deeper and darker meanings in AllenHowl