Howl at 50

So yesterday I recorded my pilgrammage to City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Street in San Francisco, walking from the Embarcadero BART to North Beach with my Handycam, occasionally pointing it at myself like some not-so-handsome, not-so-Byronic Anderson Cooper. I'd put the video up but I got all the way out here before I realized I'd never installed the Sony software on this laptop.

Anyway, City Lights isn't where the Beats got started, but it is, in a sense, the physical location where the Beats became the Beats. It was their ground, a safe haven carved out on the "other" edge of the continent by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

But if what I expected to find was communion with the spirit of Jack Kerouac, what I found instead was a new rapport with Ginsberg.

Here's my story: I was raised hippie, spent my teenage years on a commune, grew up around people who had been inspired by the Beats. But I didn't come to Beat lit through them -- I discovered it at 16, while waiting in a library for a bus, in an anthology of short stories: "A Mexican Girl," which isn't even a short story, but an excerpt from On The Road. And that was that.

So when I tell you that my Beat generation was straight and romantic and macho, you will perhaps understand why. Because I was a hetero jock kid growing up in rural North Carolina dreaming of the road and sex and all-night conversations. The fact that Kerouac played halfback for Columbia was a big part of the draw. By action and word and image, Kerouac was a post-WWII update of the post-WWI Hemmingway, a handsome artist who was "safe" for guys who worried about artistic impulses degrading their manliness.

The fact that Kerouac had good friends who were gay didn't bother me, but gay characters made me uneasy. I skimmed them. The spirit of Allen Ginsberg haunted On The Road for me, a central character but never the focus of my interest. His mystical, doe-eyed queerness was beyond my abilities of teenage comprehension.

Eventually I figured out that practically everybody along that New York-Denver-San Francisco axis was fucking everybody else. Neal Cassady, the Adonis of Denver, was Ginsberg's lover. This is in the novel, rather obliquely, but if you wondered about Cassady's sexual identity, Kerouac's butchness seemed to redeem it.

Yet Kerouac was no simple hetereosexual, and it clearly shamed him. Here was a guy who wrote about practically everything else in his life, but kept his own bisexuality quiet. It turned out that the only guy who was really telling it true was Ginsberg.

Only I didn't want Ginsberg to be the hero. I wanted the adventureous straight guy to win. Such is the calculus of the adolescent.

But yesterday, reading HOWL: Fifty Years Later as I rode the BART back to Berkeley, I finally made my peace with Allen Ginsberg.

I had not read the poem in at least 20 years, and in my Beat fanatic days I read everything with hyped-up scholarly intent, trying to extract every meaning. This I blame on the fact that I was an English major at one time, and English as a discipline is all about destroying the village in order to save it. Anyway, when I was young and everything meant something, HOWL didn't make that big of an impression on me. But I'm not a kid anymore.

And to just read HOWL -- to remove your ego and your insecurities and your moralizing NO-NO-NO voice -- ah, now that is a joy. I laughed out loud. I found myself nodding to his silent cadences. I got his jokes. I felt his joy and his freedom and his fierociousness. I didn't worry whether liking Ginsberg would make other people question my macho manliness.

It was like shrugging off the last of my childish fears.

Where would I be if I'd only done that sooner?

Comments

[GMLc]

Xarker, I don't think Neal Cassady was Ginsberg's lover. I think Ginsberg's lover in that crowd was Gregory Corso, n'est-ce pas? I thought Neal was married to a woman named Caroline and was a heterosexual speed freak. But I have a vague memory of that from reading Cassady's autobiographical "The First Third" (in which he probably lied a lot) a long time ago, so don't set your watch by me. P.S. Those of us on the Far Right Coast are jealous of your being in San Francisco.

[Ben]

I know this is blasphemy, especially since I'm basically a travel writer, but I never finished On the Road. I honestly found it a bit boring - lots of field notes, not much of a narrative arc.

Hunter S. Thompson makes me want to go on every sort of binge. Great travel writers like Tim Cahill and Ian Frazier tell me what makes a place tick in a way that news stories don't - and they make me laugh. Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, two of my generation's top writers, have written fictionalized travelogues that are almost spiritual.

But for some reason, Kerouac kind of bored me. I admire his spirit but don't really dig the writing.

Ginsberg, what little I've read, captures more of the wild love of life.

[GMLc]

Ben, You are right. I appreciated the speed-fueled, more-adjectives-for-your-book-buying-dollar sort of writing that Kerouac did. It was sort of a poke in the eye to American icons like Hemingway. But as Truman Capote said of "On the Road": "That's not writing. That's typing."

I'll tell you a story about Ginsberg. At Spoleto (Festival USA, here in Charleston, S.C.) about 10 years ago, my mother and I went to a performance by Martha Graham Dance Co.

Graham, who came out onstage grandly in a turban to take applause at the end, was about 96 then.

Anyway, Mama and I sat down and I looked left and Allen Ginsberg was sitting next to me. He was here to do some sort of poetry/opera/performance/multimedia thing called "The Hydrogen Jukebox." I saw it. I think I fell asleep.

Anyway, I said Hi Mr. Ginsberg, I know you won't remember me, but I interviewed you once in Charlottesville, Va. He said no, he didn't remember me.

I introduced him to my mother, who was I guess 80 at the time. He and my mother started talking about Martha Graham dancers and the old days of the company and the dancers they both remembered and saw in New York in the 1950s and the dancer from Florence, S.C., who was a friend of my mother's and also a friend of Ginsberg's. My mother had no idea who Allen Ginsberg was otherwise, but they just yakked and yakked and it was truly bizarre.

[Ben]

That sounds quite surreal. My only similar brush with fame was when I sat directly in front of Magic Johnson at a UNC basketball game. I'll spare you the details of how this came to pass, but I listened to him and Dean Smith's wife chatter for the whole game about "Michael and Juanita."

Yes, that would be the Jordans.

By the way, to move slightly closer to the subject, I recommed that everyone read Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated." Phenomenal.