Edmund White’s Intro to Allen Ginsberg’s Selected Interviews

Edmund White – The Poetics of Breath 

For Allen Ginsberg, granting an interview was a creative act.  He came up with new thoughts on the wing and made new combinations of feelings and concepts to suit the occasion.  As anyone knows who has ever been in a political campaign – or on a book tour – most interviewers ask the same three questions and most interviewees have memorized the same three sound bites.  Indeed, mastering those sound bits and selling points is even called being “media –trained.”

But Ginsberg chewed over his thoughts and more often than not was listening to his own mind at work. We overhear him actually thinking, which is rare enough, and he wanted to preserve the integrity of his complete thought.  He relished rather than dreaded long interviews and once reprimanded an interviewer for cutting his answers.  He didn’t mind eliminating whole responses, but within a given answer he didn’t want any editing.

He decided that giving an interview was a way of teaching and he was grateful to journalists for disseminating his ideas.  Even hostility could serve his purposes. One of his best interviews in this collection is a dramatic confrontation with a born again Christian named John Lofton.   Ginsberg is patient and mannerly but also quite firm about not answering tendentious questions.  He is equally supple and true to himself in his courtroom testimony at the “Chicago Seven” trial  in December 1969 during which he was constantly harrassed by the prosecutor Thomas Foran, whose objections were constantly sustained by judge Julius Hoffman.

His mannerliness even in adversity can be ascribed to one of his religious beliefs.  As he wrote in 1978, “An early impulse to treat scholars, newsmen, agents, reporters, interviewers and inquirers as sentient beings equal in Buddha-nature to fellow poets turned me on to answer questions as frankly as possible,” though he also admitted he came to understand that such openness might “lead to a hell of media self-hood…”

Quite obviously Ginsberg patterned his responses to the expectations and experience of his interlocutors.  In this collection, for instance, he can be observed patiently starting at the beginning in order to explain the fundamentals of American literary life to a Czech interviewer, or citing the familiar names of Céline, Henri Barbusse, Rimbaud and Artaud and to a French interviewer and giving as reassuring examples Ungaretti and Marinetti to an Italian woman, Fernanda Pivano.

Not that Ginsberg ever betrayed his ideas in order to flatter his listener’s preconceptions.  He routinely pointed out in interviews that “Beat” was a facile label invented by journalists.  With Ms. Pivano, for instance, he was building on her own literary references in order to bridge into a demanding technical discussion of American prosody in the work of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams among others.

I knew Ginsberg only slightly, but cant attest that his essential qualities come through in these transcribed interviews: his great personal sweetness and charm; his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity; his teacher-like clarity and patience, always devoid of pedantry; his utter lack of pretension, which permitted him to make his point with the simple words and humble examples at hand; his almost technological fascination with spiritual techniques;  and his frank eroticism, free from boasting and the exploitation of others.

I had met him socially over the years in the 1970s and 80s, but always in large crowds.  I was initially surprised to see him in a coat and tie on these occasions, usually sporting the gold and purple rosette of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in his lapel – hardly the image of the Wild Man of American Poetry.  In the 1970s I had a casual sexual friendship with a handsome Native American from Colorado, a wrestler and writer, who’d run away from home at age 16 and been taken in by Allen Ginsberg.  Although the guy was badly crippled by an unusually fertile and impervious form of paranoia, Ginsberg was always kind to him and always gave him a place to crash.  Other drifters I met over the years had made pit stops at the Ginsberg Home for Wayward Boys in the East Village.

When I was researching my biography of Jean Genet I phoned Ginsberg from Paris sometime in 1991.  Ginsberg and Genet had spent time together at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, and I wanted to know what had transpired between them.  After all, as several references in the interviews that follow reveal, Genet had been an essential part  of Ginsberg’s prose pantheon, along with Dostoyevsky, Céline, Henry Miller, Artaud, Huxley and Kerouac.

When I phoned, Ginsberg had only recently had a bout of congestive heart failure and had been instructed by his doctor to rest and refuse all demands on his time – but his life-loving and knowledge – fostering generosity got the better of him.  He talked to me for an hour.  He quoted verses by heart from Genet’s “The Man Sentenced to Death” as well as prose passages from the opening pages of Our Lady of the Flowers. After giving me all the political details of the tumultuous events in Chicago, Ginsberg mentioned that he and Genet had gone to bed. As I wrote in my biography, “One night Genet invited Ginsberg to his room and got in bed with him.  Ginsberg was offering warmth and affection that might possibly lead to sex, but Genet matter-of-factly felt for his crotch and when he found out that Ginsberg didn’t even have an erection, he briskly got out of bed and went about his business.” The contrast between Genet’s unsentimental, Gallic realism and Ginsberg’s Whitmanian adhesiveness could not be more telling.

Ginsberg’s ceremonial sense of sex turns up several times in these interviews. For instance, as Ginsberg points out to Allen Young, he had slept with Neal Cassady (the model for Kerouac’s “Dean Moriarty”), who’d slept with Gavin Arthur (President Chester Arthur’s Grandson), who’d slept with Edward Carpenter (the English Victorian champion of homosexual love), who’d slept with Walt Whitman, from whom he “received the Whispered Transmission, capital W, capital T. of the love.”

Two or three years after the phone interview about Genet, Ginsberg called me in Paris and asked if he could drop in on me right away.  I said sure, though I was surprised: why would he want to see me?

He showed up with an attractive young man.  Soon I put it together – the young man was a fan of mine and had asked Ginsberg to arrange to meet me.  Apparently this guy, a budding American writer living in Paris, had attended Allen’s reading at Shakespeare and Company and slipped Allen a nude photo of himself with his phone number scrawled on the back.  Allen called him, naturally, and they’d spent the week together.

When I said earlier that Allen didn’t exploit these guys, I might have added that at this time in his life he was virtually impotent, due to diabetes, and that his sexual attention was almost a form of courtesy extended to all these runaways, layabouts and unpublished poets, as if he were reassuring them that they did, after all, have something to offer him in exchange for the advice, help, introductions, pocket money and shelter he gave them.

A handsome straight poet once told me that the only  man he’s ever slept with was Allen Ginsberg.  “Why him?” I asked.  The poet looked astonished, as if the answer was self evident: “Because he was fuckin’ Allen Ginsberg, man.”

Now, with me, Allen talked in a precise, melodious, well-modulated voice about his works, his travels, his health, Genet, William Burroughs (whom I knew slightly)…The young man fell asleep, perhaps because our attention wasn’t focussed on him. The tea turned cold in our cups and night fell, but I didn’t turn on the lamps.  Allen recited part of the Diamond Sutra from memory.  It was the sort of unfettered talk that busy grown–ups seldom have a chance to enjoy.  Later I heard someone complain of Ginsberg’s “egotism.” True, he spoke only of his own interests and activities but he shared those with such generosity and spontaneity that only a cold heart could label such artesian kindness “egotism.”

When the young man was aroused to leave, he asked me if he could come later in the week to lunch, after Allen’s departure.  On the appointed day he rang the bell and was standing there in the hallway completely nude (he’s hidden his clothes in the corner).  I felt my life was being touched just this once by the sort of lyrical good luck that Ginsberg must have enjoyed every day.

These interviews, which cover a forty-year period from the 1950s to the 1990s, show the evolution of Ginsberg’s mind from a be-bop talking excitement to a calm connoisseurship of world culture of all sorts form all periods.  In an early interview Ginsberg refers to “jazz prayer” and tells us that kids today “have a sexual awareness, openness and tolerance and compassionate tenderness that is absolutely ravishing.”  He was soon to abandon this sort of naïve counterculture utopianism in favor of a sober skepticism about drugs, the New Left and the avant-garde. In 1978 he admitted:

“Certain errors of judgement emerge by hindsight: advocacy of LSD legislation would now be accompanied by prescription for meditation practice to qualify its use.  I would extend my self-hood less widely in sympathy with “movement” contemporaries whose subconscious belief in confrontation, conflict or violence encouraged public confusion and enabled police agents to infiltrate and provoke further violence and greater confusion.  We were finding “new reasons for spitefulness,” Kerouac explained.”

But Ginsberg kept certain enthusiasms all his life – for Jack Kerouac as an artist, a poet, even a thinker, for instance.  Again and again Ginsberg insists on Kerouac’s position as the prime mover and chief inspiration to the entire Beat movement.  Nor does he permit other people to condescend to Kerouac’s late writing or political conservatism.  He always finds a justification for remarks that seem indefensible, so great was Ginsberg’s unswerving loyalty to his friends.  (He proposed William Burroughs for the Nobel Prize, incidentally).

Throughout these interviews Ginsberg returns to his high praise of William Blake and Walt Whitman.  Ginsberg obviously loves Blake the visionary and Whitman the democratic sensualist, and indeed Ginsberg’s own literary personality can be construed as a union of these two forces.  Even the idea of being a legendary poet, of having “a large persona,” is something he admitted he got from Whitman

Ginsberg’s intense relationship  to Blake can be traced back to a seemingly mystical experience he had during the summer of 1948.  The 22-year-old Ginsberg was working a desultory job as a filing clerk and living in a stifling sublet in Harlem.  He’d recently been rejected by Neal Cassady as a lover, who had just gotten married.  Ginsberg had few opportunities to see Jack Kerouac, who was obsessed with his own writing and who’d just completed a 1000-page manuscript.  Ginsberg was lonely and frustrated, artistically and sexually.   He had yet to find his own distinctive style as a poet.  His mother, Naomi Ginsberg, had recently gone mad and been confined to Pilgrim State Hospital in New Jersey.  She wrote Allen constantly, begging him to help her get out of the asylum, but in fact it was Allen who eventually signed papers permitting the hospital to perform a prefrontal lobotomy on her.

In the midst of so much unhappiness, as Ginsberg recounts in his Paris Review interview, he was reading Blake and masturbating one evening.  After his orgasm he heard a deep voice, which he described as “a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.”   This auditory hallucination (if that’s what it was) changed Ginsberg entirely.

“Anyway, my first thought was this was what I was born for, and second thought, never forget – never forget, never renege, never deny.  Never deny the voice – no, never forget it, don’t get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds.  But the spirit of the universe was what I was born to realize….”

If a commitment to poetic mysticism remains central to Ginsberg’s thought, other recurring themes in the interviews (and in his life) are ecology (Ginsberg warned of global warming two decades before a general alarm was sounded), mind-expansion through drugs and later yoga, a commitment to pacifism and interpersonal kindness, homosexuality, and the key role of spontaneity in making art.  Each of these themes, however, received a special twist in Ginsberg’s hands.

Take homosexuality.  Ginsberg admitted that he was more attracted to young heterosexual men than to homosexuals, and homosexuals themselves he divided into those he liked
(”heartfelt, populist, humanist, quasi heterosexual, Whitmanic, bohemian, free-love”) and the sort he avoided (“the privileged, exaggeratedly effeminate, gossipy, moneyed, money-style-clothing-conscious, near hysterical”)  Basically, what people in the sixties called Downtown guys and pissy East Side Queens.

True to his cult of Whitmanic democracy and frankness, Ginsberg solicited honesty and openness among homosexuals; he deplored the fearful, closed atmosphere of the usual uptight gay bar.  Characteristically, when he met the bisexual Peter Orlovsky in 1954, the man with whom he would spend most of his life, they made a pledge of mutual “ownership” to each other, as if only such extreme terms of possession, such a violent commitment, might allay their deep insecurities.

“We made a vow to each other to each other that he could own me, my mind and everything I knew, and my body, and I could own him and all the knew and all his body; and that we would give each other ourselves, so that we possessed each other as property, to do everything we wanted to, sexually or intellectually, and in a sense explore each other until we reached the mystical “X” together, emerging two merged souls.”

Probably no couple ever swore such desperate, literal marriage vows.

Ginsberg bore the traces of the general homosexual oppression of his epoch, but he did more than anyone else of his generation to overcome his gay self-hatred and to take a pro-gay militant stand.  He was an apostle of tenderness among men.  He never allowed his political and spiritual energies, however, to confine themselves to a gay ghetto.  Like other big spirits of his time – Pasolini, Juan Goytisolo, Genet – Ginsberg was interested in the fate on the oppressed everywhere.

In 1965, four years before the beginning of gay liberation, Ginsberg visited Cuba and almost instantly became aware that Castro was consigning homosexuals to work camps, denouncing and outlawing homosexuality and censoring pro-gay statements in the press.  Ginsberg responded fearlessly by criticizing the policy – and was hustled out of Havana on a plane bound to Prague.  There he was crowned King of the May by Czech students, and again forced by worried authorities to leave the country.  By staying true to his personal values of sexual and artistic freedom, Ginsberg confronted Communist authoritarianism a full decade before most other intellectuals in the west.

Ginsberg did not believe in revision.  On the contrary, he’d learned from his guru the slogan, “first thought, best thought.” No wonder he was attracted to the Chinese and Japanese arts of calligraphy, ink-and-brush painting and the composition of Haiku, all of which require years of preparation but only seconds to execute.  He proclaimed the “bardic function” to be a form of meditation.  He called for the “frank revelation of the heart.” Writing, for him, was not a slow, agonizing process but rather a “natural expressive function” as automatic as breathing.  He refused to censor his thoughts in order to isolate those suitable for poetry; no, he declared the whole spectrum of feeling to be the proper subject matter of art.  He said that knowing how to walk across the street was the same thing  as learning how to write.  And he believed that if one wrote directly from personal experience one did not need to fear a loss of poetic power;  as he put it, “any point on an autobiographical curve is interesting.”

More than many American writers, Ginsberg had a sense of history – and the grace to see his cohorts as instant historical personages.  His attitude reminds me of someone entirely different in a different country.  Boris Kochno, Diaghilev’s last secretary, once told me at the end of his life that he could still vividly recall a moment in the 1920s when Picasso had just left a café on the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées where he’d spent a moment with Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Kochno.  Diaghilev had suddenly said to the others, “Look hard at Picasso – it’s as if you were seeing Da Vinci on the streets of Florence.”

Ginsberg had the same precocious awareness of the significance of his fellow Beats and of himself.  In one interview he said that for Columbia to have expelled Kerouac was as absurd as if Socrates had banned Alcibiades from the Symposium.  Always the grandiose comparison.  By the same token Ginsberg saw himself as a direct heir to Whitman and knew how important it was to pay a pilgrimage visit to Céline in France and Pound in Venice.   Good Career move?  No, the forging of a lasting link to the artistic past.

Ginsberg possessed in abundance the gift of appreciation.  He was a powerful admirer and in his interviews he summons up the names of those past artists he honored and those contemporaries he championed.  In the following pages the reader will come across the names of Blake and Whitman but also of Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting (who taught Pound – and Ginsberg – that poetry is the same this as condensation), John Wieners (the great gay bard of The Hotel Wentley Poems), Kenneth Rexroth (the elder statesman of San Francisco poetry who embraced and condemned the Beats in fits and starts), Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Herbert Huncke (the junky ur-figure of the Beat movement), Kerouac, “William S. Burroughs and many others.  The reader will also find appreciations of Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary, Carl Solomon and Chögyam Trungpa.  Thoughts about music and photography, war protest and rock music, drugs and meditation technique – it’s all here, in a profusion as generous as the spirit of Ginsberg himself.