A couple of months ago, we profiled Allen’s biographer, Barry Miles. Today we profile another of Allen’s biographers and a dedicated and prolific editor of his work, Michael Schumacher.
Michael’s biography of Allen, Dharma Lion came out in 1992 (with a revised edition in 2016). He also (with Allen’s blessing) published Family Business: Selected Letters between a Father and Son – Allen and Louis Ginsberg (2001), as well as editing three volumes of journals, South American Journal, January-July 1960 , Iron Curtain Journals, January-May 1967 and The Fall of America Journals (1965-1971), a collection of interviews, First Thought Best Thought, and a select anthology The Essential Ginsberg
Outside of Allen’s life, Michael has shown himself to be (had showed himself to be) an accomplished biographer, biographies of Eric Clapton (1995), Phil Ochs 1996), and Francis Ford Coppola (1999).
An early interview with Allen is the source of the oft-quoted meme – “Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
Carl Porter at Weber State University in 2003 conducted an extensive interview with him, where he speaks at length on Allen and Dharma Lion, indeed all his (up until then) writing projects
” I met Allen Ginsberg in 1981 in connection with a magazine article that I was writing.The interview went well, and he was happy with it. I was always interested in the Beat Generation writers, and so meeting Allen was very positive for me. It was something that I was glad about, and he was happy with some of the things I had written, not only about him but about other members of the Beat Generation.”
and, as to the genesis of the biography:
“Now, this is going to seem like something that is almost myth-like, but the idea of doing a biography of Allen Ginsberg was quite accidental. I was reading one of his books of poems that had come out, and I was sitting in a little drive-in restaurant and was looking for a book project. I wanted to move up from writing magazine articles to book projects. Here I was sitting in this little drive-in restaurant in the middle of a tremendous, tremendous storm one night. There is thunder and lightning, and everything is going on around me and I didn’t have the nerve to ask this car hop to come out in the middle of that to get my tray. So I was eating burgers and doodling, and I was thinking what to do about Allen Ginsberg. I started writing and literally and truthfully that became the outline of my book. I knew enough at that point about Allen that I could actually map out his life in an outline, and I thought, “Well, why not try that?” Now, having stated that, you have to have a certain amount of hope to even think that here you are in the Midwest, you’ve met Allen Ginsberg, and now you can actually do a book about him—that you could actually approach him about it. It took a lot of nerve, and when I look back on it, and all my other biographies, I find myself asking what I was doing writing these books. I’m always amazed by this. Here I am, just an ordinary Joe, and all of a sudden I’m meeting people who were and are heroes of mine from since I was young—and they trust me.”
“A lot of biographers come to really dislike the subject of their biographies as they are going through it. That was not the case with Allen. I can say, I think, truthfully, that I stayed objective throughout the writing of this book; however, I will also say that I do admire this man a great deal. I grew to understand his work better and admire him as a human being in the process of writing this book, and now that he is no longer here, if I have an opportunity to keep people interested in his work or shed any kind of light whatsoever on his work or him as a person, I’m happy to do that. I’ve never thought as a biographer; some biographers are very territorial about their work; I’ve never felt that. I don’t stake a claim on the people that I write about. It’s a wonderful thing if people respect you as an authority on, say, Allen Ginsberg. That’s quite a compliment to me. But I don’t make any claim to being anything other than somebody who was fortunate enough to have known Allen and to have been able to write his life story..”
More recently (2020) Michael Limnios interviewed him for Blues.Gr.
from 2015:
ML: How would you describe and characterize Allen’s philosophy?
MS: Allen believed in the Self, in the Whitmanic sense. He embodied many voices. He felt that others shared even his most private thoughts. When he was attending Columbia University in New York and spending a lot of time with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, he was please to discover that they shared some of these ideas—particularly Kerouac. They believed that their lives could be the basis of literature. That came through in the early works of the Beat Generation, in On the Road, “Howl,” John Clellon Holmes’s Go, and others.
ML: What touched you emotionally in the life of Allen Ginsberg?
MS: I was very moved by his relationship with his mother. It was a very complex relationship, and I’m not sure he ever resolved it. Naomi Ginsberg’s mental disorders gave Allen great empathy and compassion for others like her. When you read “Kaddish,” you’re reading an account of Allen’s youth, or the difficulties he and his family had in caring for a woman who created all types of difficulties. When I saw the original manuscript of “Kaddish,” I was touched – Ginsberg had used onion-skin typing paper, on which he wrote in ink. There were tear stains on the paper. When I looked at the letters his mother sent him from Pilgrim State Hospital, where she spent a lot of time in a mental disorders unit, I was taken by the voice in her letters. More often than not, she sounded reasonable. She was a mother begging her son to remove her from the hospital. In some letters, she made very little sense, but I was always struck by the humanity in her. I remember asking Allen about all this. He was very matter-of-fact in his answers (as was Allen’s older brother Eugene), as if it was perfect normal for a young teenage kid to be taking her mother to a rest home for help. I realized the horrible responsibility that had been laid on him. Then, some years later, after his parents had been divorced, Allen signed papers allowing doctors to perform a lobotomy on his mother. This weighed on him very heavily. In his poems, “White Shroud” and “Black Shroud,” he tries to resolve the guilt he felt in “killing” his mother’s mind. He never did. When I was reading those letters that I mentioned, I had to take a break and walk around outside, just to clear my head. It was heartbreaking.
from 2020:
ML: How has Ginsberg, the Beats and Counterculture influenced your views of the world and the journeys you’ve taken?
MS: I was a rebellious kid, so I was prepared to read the Beats when I first saw their books. The Beats were reassuring, in their own way: it was okay to be different or rebellious. My reading of Ginsberg was an act of rebellion. My English teacher told the class that his writing was unacceptable because of content and the words he used; I went to the bookstore after school and bought Howl and Other poems. Things were never the same. It’s also noteworthy that I was heavily into the blues and folk music at the time, these singers and songwriters were going against the grain. So, to speak, and I was happy to listen.
ML: What would you say characterizes Allen Ginsberg in comparison to other Beat writers and poets?
MS: First of all, Ginsberg was an exceptional poet. His father was a published poet, and Allen grew up in a house where poetry was always being read out loud. Allen was aware of the great poets of the past, and he could recite their work from memory. In my opinion, Ginsberg was the best poet of the Beat Generation writers. Ginsberg’s work as a critic and agent was crucial. It’s possible that a number of the Beats, including Burroughs and Kerouac, might not have been published—or at least not so much—if Allen hadn’t worked tirelessly in promoting their work to publishers and the public. Kerouac has often been portrayed as the “King of the Beats” and while I’m not disputing his position as a/the figurehead, Ginsberg’s work behind the scenes was essential in promoting the books of his Beat Generation friends.
ML: What are some of the most important lessons you have learned from your experience with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat literature?
MS: I loved Ginsberg’s saying, “Notice what you notice”—an expression I’m acutely aware of in my life and work. Kerouac certainly understood this dictum, as did Burroughs, Corso, Snyder, Creeley, McClure, di Prima, Waldman, and many others. Blake talked of the “minute particulars.” Ginsberg’s Buddhist meditation practices helped him stay focused. All of this taught me important lessons.
and the following year (2021) by John Aiello for the Electric Review:
JA: You’ve edited several volumes of Ginsberg’s journals. Can you outline some particular challenges you encountered in doing this kind of intimate project?
MS: I can use something that happened once with Allen Ginsberg as a good example. Once I was working with his journals in his office in New York. At one point, Allen came into the room and said: “You’ve been reading my journals. And there’s stuff in there that could invade people’s privacy. You need to really watch that.” (When he told me this) I believed he was speaking to aspects of his sex life. He wanted to make sure that part of himself was protected. And I made sure to respect that at all times. Those journals are as close to Allen’s mind as you are going to get, they’re as close to his raw thinking process as you are going to get. He really laid himself on the line in those books. Talk about courage. Ginsberg kept going back to those dark visions no matter how scary it all got…
JA: You allude to courage in your response. Can you expand on what you mean by that?
MS: It’s about being able to soldier on when you know things aren’t necessarily going to go so well for you. I have always been amazed by that about Allen. People don’t really understand what Allen was all about. He was about generosity. He truly gave of himself. He was also tremendously patient. And he had the courage to keep working to get his point across…
JA: Tell me something about Allen you won’t forget.
MS: Well Allen and Michael McClure are part of one of the most moving things that ever happened to me. Back in the 90s, we were together at a conference in San Jose (California). One day, the three of us were eating lunch together and McClure and I were involved in some spirited impassioned discussion. At one point Michael asked to borrow my Magic Marker to make some notes. When he returned the pen to me he didn’t cap it, and I just stuck it back in my pocket. When I did, it bled all over my shirt. Ginsberg always carried that pesky camera with him and he snapped a photo of me right at that moment. (Years later) After Allen got seriously sick and found out that he had terminal cancer, (he) held a press conference to make his diagnosis public. A few days later, he had a seizure and fell into a coma and died. When he died, his office asked me to come to New York to help with media requests. When I returned home after the funeral I had an Express Mail package waiting for me. Allen had had copies of those pictures he snapped in San Jose made on special paper and he sent them to me. He knew I always loved those pictures, but I never had copies.
That was Allen.
For more Michael Schumacher – Michael Schumacher in conversation with Brad Listi on the podcast, Otherppl. – see also here
miscellaneous Schumacher reviews:
on Dharma Lion
The man, the poet visionary who created the beat generation single-mindedly out of the whole cloth of his dharma brothers is here embodied whole.”- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“… a brilliant study of the poet, his work, and his times. Clear, candid, cogent, and complete, Schumacher has produced a marvelously balanced portrait, accessible to all lovers of American poetry.” – Ann Charters,
“Dharma Lion is a thorough, detailed, painstaking, monumental, comprehensive, encyclopedic account of the life of our Poet Laureate, Allen Ginsberg.” – Timothy Leary
Kirkus, Publishers Weekly
Gerard Nicosia 1992 in the LA Times
Troy Pozirekides (on the revised 2016 edition) on The Art Fuse
on Fall of America Journals: – John Aiello, David Wills, Billy Mills, local paper (Shepherd Express), Allen Ginsberg Project
on First Thought – Marc Olmsted, David Wills – Patrick James Dunagan & Phil Gambone
choose to review it alongside Bill Morgan’s Best Minds of My Generation, Allen Ginsberg Project
on South American Journals – Marc Olmsted again – and The Allen Ginsberg Project
